Ms. Hempel Chronicles

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  Then, as if in disgust, the house shuddered. It was barely perceptible, no more than a mild spasm, because the house was so large and the walls so thick. Workmanship, she had heard repeated. Houses weren’t made that way anymore. When someone slammed the back door, you hardly felt it.

  There was the sound of metal scraping across the driveway, and then her father’s voice, clear and deep and appalling: “I’m doing it!” he bellowed.

  The person on the other end of the phone let out another moan.

  “I don’t get it,” he muttered. “I don’t get it at all.”

  How to explain?

  “We have a lot in common,” Beatrice said, and strangely, here in the hubbub of her inventions, was something true. Her father relished the tricky fugues she played for him. They both found the back of Calvin’s neck irresistible to touch. And there was an abundance about him, an over-exuberance, that she unhappily beginning to see in herself. When he hugged for instance, you could feel the springy growth beneath h- shirt, and on the one hand it was revolting; on the other, it s like resting your cheek against moss.

  "A lot in common,” the person echoed, an idea that seemed at last to dishearten him, when obstacles such as the band, and the apartment, had allowed him hope. Maybe he felt, in all of Lis dullness, a knuckle of truth. He began to cough again in Lis childlike, enfeebled way.

  But then he stopped coughing so abruptly that it made it seem as if he had been pretending all along. He spoke in L calm voice not unlike the one she used with him. He said, “What would you do if one day he just never came home?” "Excuse me?”

  “You’d be all alone. You’d want someone to hold you.” "I’m sorry?” she asked, as though his cough had prevented her from hearing him correctly. She decided that this cough made it impossible for her to hear much of what he said. His dry little cough was, she decided, settling farther into his chest; it was indicating quite ominous things about his health.

  “You should take lozenges," she said briskly, suddenly ready to get off the telephone. Lozenges was a word she had acquired a year ago, during her book-reading era, before she had discovered the Rock Hotel, in the days when she was still planning to emigrate to England and become a historical novelist. How bizarre. That person, and the person she was now? They wouldn’t even be friends.

  The telephone wasn't always in her room when she needed it. According to Calvin, he had calls to make. When she saw

  the long gray cord snaking out of her room and under door, she would succumb, briefly, to bloodthirsty feelings, jfe had no one to talk to. Not at this hour. But she could hear him speaking in his bell-like voice, speaking slowly and precisely like a person giving instructions to someone less intelligent The conversations were always short. And always obviously pretend. She knew because she had done it herself, in the past talk to the dial tone as though it were her closest friend.

  It was all just an elaborate ruse to further him in his nosy pursuits. He always wanted to know whom Beatrice was speaking to. Whenever the telephone rang, he would dart into her room. “Is it for me?” he’d ask, though it never was. He simply needed an excuse to see who was calling.

  Every one of Beatrice’s answers he found unsatisfactory.

  "Which guy?”

  “Do I know him?”

  "Does he go to your school?”

  As for Beatrice, she couldn't decide which was harder: evading Calvin, or resisting the urge to tell him everything. She was frequently overwhelmed by a desire to flatten him with some shocking announcement. The sight of him checking for plaque, or sliding his trading cards into their plastic sleeves, or bobbing up and down to the Rock Hotel, filled her with a sort of mean-spirited abandon.

  What would she tell him first?

  Why 69 was a disgusting number. About a girl at her school who had slapped her own mother and knocked her glasses off. About girls who tortured other girls by cutting up magazines and sending them serial-killer letters. That Big Black’s new record would be called Songs About Fucking. That she now knew what landscaping was. What DIY was; and PCP; and DOA.

  Sometimes she wanted to descend on her brother like a devastating angel and tell him every interesting thing she knew. But as it turned out, she didn’t have to.

  “A man called," Calvin said, holding the telephone. He stood in the doorway of Beatrice's bedroom. "Looking for you. I told him you weren’t home.”

  "Why did you do that?” Beatrice asked, as she tugged the telephone away from him.

  “He sounded funny,” Calvin said. “He sounded like a creep."

  “He’s a friend,” Beatrice said.

  “That man?”

  “We talk a lot on the phone ”

  “You do?” Calvin stared at her. “You talk to that man?’’ “Stop saying that word!”

  “What word?” he asked.

  In her arms the telephone rang. She flinched, and put it down on her bed.

  “Don't answer it,” Calvin said.

  "Of course I’m going to answer it. He’s my friend, he’s trying to reach me.”

  “Don’t answer it. Don't talk to that—” But he wasn’t allowed to say it.

  The telephone kept ringing. She curled her fingers around the receiver.

  “No!” Calvin said.

  “There's nothing to worry about,” Beatrice said, as she felt herself beginning to worry. "He’s not at the front door. It's just the telephone.”

  "I know," Calvin said. "But please, don't answer it. I think it would be a bad idea.”

  He took her hands into his. They were hot and slightly sticky. Together she and Calvin sat on her bed, watchin telephone ring. By the time it stopped, Beatrice felt afraid.

  “Do you think ...” she began, and then couldn't JfojjT the question.

  If he appeared at their front door, she would not kjw him. Shred, she would know right away, by his beautiful W fingers and uncombed hair, the skeptical arch of his eyebrow the leather cord he wore around his neck. But the person ojj the telephone had no face. He was neither straight nor stooped His breath was not foul; his T-shirt was not clean or dirty and had no birthmarks. He was neither nineteen nor forty-one Without a harelip, a pierced ear; without a nose or a chin or a body. She did not wonder. She said only, “Hello.” She said “Tell me something interesting.” He had a cough.

  Her brother was looking at her in a peculiar way. His eyes moved over her face like it was a landscape and he was up in an airplane. His eyes said, I am not coming down there. But still they kept looking for a place to arrive.

  Beatrice said, “He’s not very smart.”

  “How do you know?”

  “His job is mowing lawns,” she said. “He didn’t know what lozenges were. He believed it when I said I played guitar.” Calvin’s eyes stood still.

  “You believed he mows lawns.”

  She twitched.

  Then she covered her ears and squeezed her lids shut. “Stop staring at me,” she hissed. “Stop talking to me.” “Sorry,” Calvin said, patting her arm. “Sorry.”

  Soft, tiny blows fell on her arms and her shoulders. “Turn off all the lights,” she told him. “Turn up the radio.”

  In the darkness, she opened her eyes. The radio was Rowing- And Shred was sti11 talkin& announcing songs, disparag-ing requests, saying, "This one goes out to... "

  "Maglite,” Calvin whispered.

  It was the most bludgeonlike thing either of them owned. The kind of flashlight that police officers and night watchmen used, the kind that required six enormous batteries, sliding down its cylinder with the cool weight of cannonballs. The Maglite lived inside Calvin’s room, a universe she was no longer so familiar with. She bumped into the umbrella stand that held his historic swords.

  “Where are you, Calvin?"

  He was crouching underneath the window. She reached out and touched his arm, and felt how he was cradling the flashlight. She acted like a blind person and touched him all over. He was still a citizen in that other country to which she had once
belonged: all of a piece, flawless and moist, his chest lightly heaving like a hare's. From the other room the telephone rang once, and stopped.

  “Oh god,” Beatrice said. “Do you think they answered itf" “I really hope not," her brother said, and from all around her, she felt the faintest draft seep in, as faint as someone blowing out a candle.

  She thought of warning them. But here, on the very top floor of her house, there were no buttons embedded in the walls. Those buttons existed downstairs, in the rooms with the long windows, where her mother and her father lived. From here it was impossible to give warning, to say important things, to speak of danger; it was possible only to be summoned.

  They would pick up the phone. They would answer the I door.

  "Oh god,” she said.

  Outside, something stirred. Something rustled through the trees and then stepped out onto the snow.

  “Raccoon,” Calvin whispered.

  But it didn’t sound like a raccoon, or a wild and ^ cat. It didn’t sound like a hawk alighting on the lawn c had once believed that she lived among the fir trees and th night-roaming animals, but now she remembered the that wrapped around one side of their house, the scream
  Then Calvin shot up. He was too fast. He threw open the window, and the cold air came tumbling in on them.

  “Stop! Don’t move!” he cried.

  “No!” Beatrice said, pulling on his leg. “Get down!” r

  “Kids?" a voice asked from below.

  Beatrice stood up in surprise. Pressed against her brother, she peered out into the darkness. Calvin pushed the Maglite’s tender black button, and a beam of light fell into the yard.

  A man looked back up at them. He was protecting his eyes with one hand. In the other he held a bright blue duffel bag. He wore a long dress coat, pinned to the lapel of which was the unwieldy fir tree that Beatrice had made in her ceramics class a year before. She could see it even from here.

  “Papa?” she said.

  “What are you kids doing up?” their father asked, trying to sound mad and quiet at the same time.

  “We heard something,” Beatrice whispered back.

  “What are you doing up?” Calvin wanted to know.

  This question seemed to puzzle him. He dropped htt hand to his side and lifted his duffel bag. “1 was getting this from the car.”

  Calvin kept the beam of light trained on their father. “It's late!” Calvin said.

  The light fell in a circle around him. Beyond that, Beatrice could make out the shape of trees rising up, and the untidy bushes, and the lopsided skeleton of the gazebo that he had begun building in the fall, but didn’t have time to finish. She thought she spied something rotund in the darkness, loping toward the trash cans. She saw the marks her father’s feet had left in the snow and the sharp shadow that his body threw onto the lawn. It was only her father. But something inside of her still clenched. It was only her father creeping about in the dark, and now he was standing there, holding his duffel bag, wearing her fir tree, his footsteps heading in one direction.

  Tonight, she knew, he would go back inside. He would raise his voice, move furniture across the floor, and in the morning, around the table, the four of them would look into each other’s tired faces. But one night, another night—soon, she thought—there would be an apartment.

  And suddenly it was no longer her word, her idea.

  “Calvin," she said. “Turn it off”

  Without the flashlight, her brother wouldn’t be able to see. She wrapped her hands around the cold cylinder and pulled.

  But he did not let go. “No.” He said fiercely, “It’s late."

  From behind her came the sound of the radio, speaking into the emptiness of her bedroom. The voice said, “This kid who keeps calling me, he wants to hear the Clash. Now normally, I would never play the Clash. Yes, I know, we wouldn’t have punk rock without them, but I mean, you can hear the

  Clash on other radio stations. You can hear the Clash on oldies stations. We just don’t play the Clash here on the Rock Hotel, "-Shred explained. "But this kid who called, he got me thinking about when I was his age, when I heard the Clash for the first time. I had never heard anything like them. London Callings, that record changed me. I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you if it wasn’t for that record. So I’m going to play that song, for that kid who called. What can I say? It’s a song of my youth."

  Crossing

  Mr. Meacham, the department chair, offered to buy Ms. Hempel a lemonade after school. If you are a person of passion and curiosity and ferocious intellect, he told her, you are a born history teacher.

  “I teach English,” Ms. Hempel said.

  “You don’t teach English,’’ Mr. Meacham corrected her. “You teach reading, and writing, and critical thinking!”

  It seemed, to Ms. Hempel, a grand way of putting it. Through the wide cafe windows, she watched her students come barreling out of the school’s front gates. Did she really teach them anything? Or was she, as she often suspected, just another line of defense in the daily eight-hour effort to contain them.

  “What’s wrong with the way history is taught in this school?” Mr. Meacham asked.

  “Not relevant to the kids?” Ms. Hempel ventured.

  “Relevant!” he cried. “Whoever said history had to be relevant?”

  He then spoke in a pinched, miserable voice that Ms. Hempel had never heard before. "Look, kids, the ancient Egyptians aren’t so different from us after all! Look, kids,

  when we study the ancient Egyptians, we’re studying a reflection of ourselves!

  "All this fuss about relevance,” he said, restored to nor mal, “is a process of erosion. There won’t be any history ^ by the time they’re through. Just social studies!’ And Mr. Mea. cham leaned back on his stool, nervously, as if he were History and Ms. Hempel were Relevance.

  “When students look at history,” he said, “they shouldn’t see their own faces; they should see something unfamiliar star-ing back at them. They should see something utterly strange,”

  But that’s what they do see when they look in the mirror, Ms. Hempel thought. Something strange.

  “So, no, that’s not what I had in mind,” Mr. Meacham continued, somewhat more cheerfully. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the way history is taught in this school: not enough writing. A lot of reading, a lot of talking, but not much Writing; And that”—Mr. Meacham smiled at Ms. Hempel—-“is where you can help.”

  “Me?” Ms. Hempel asked.

  “You can teach them. Not only how to think about history, but how to write about it.”

  Ms. Hempel saw that Mr. Meacham was mistaken. He had confused her with someone who liked teaching seventh graders how to write, who felt happiest and most useful when diagramming a sentence or mapping an idea or brightly suggesting another draft. This was not the case. The thought of increased exposure to seventh-grade writing made Ms. Hempel worry. What happened when one read too many Topic Sentences? Already she could feel how her imagination had begun to thicken and stink, like a scummy pond.

  If only she could develop for her subject the same dogged affection that Mr. Meacham felt for his. People approached her,

  possessed by their enthusiasms, and Ms. Hempel would think, How beautiful! She loved enthusiasm, in nearly all its forms. For this reason she found herself scorekeeper for the volleyball team, facilitator for the girls-only book group, faculty adviser to the Upper School multicultural organization, Umoja. a nd now, teacher of seventh-grade United States history.

  Mr. Meacham handed her a book that weighed approximately ten pounds. Its title, she noted, was full of enthusiasm

  (America! America!).

  First Assignment. Choose three people, of different ages (in other words, don’t grab the three seventh
graders sitting closest to you), and ask them, the following question: Why is it important to learn about American history? Record your findings. Include the name, age, and occupation of your interview subjects. Bring in your results and share them with the class.

  '“To help us better understand ourselves,”’ Tim read from his binder. “Alice Appold. Forty-two. Chiropractor.”

  “I didn’t know your mom was older than mine,” Daniel said.

  “My mom is fifty-three!” Rachel announced with dismay.

  “Ms. Cruz said that the reason it’s important to know about American history is because if we don’t know our past, then we don't know our future.” That was Stevie.

  “My father said he won’t answer the question because it’s leading,” Kirsten said.

  ‘“It’s our responsibility as citizens,”’ Tim read, again from his binder. "James Appold. Forty-three. Restaurateur."

  “My mother said that if we don't understand the struggles our ancestors went through, we won’t appreciate the nice life that we have now,” said Chloe, staring at Tim, who hadn’t raised his hand.

  Julia Rizzo spoke next. ‘“Those who don’t remember th past are condemned to repeat it.’”

  Six students looked up in territorial surprise.

  “That’s what my mother said!”

  "So did mine!”

  “I was just about to say that.”

  “My sister,” said the other Julia, who would never have the same answer as anyone else, “told me that not knowing y0Ur history is like being a person who’s lost their memory.”

  “An amnesiac,” Kirsten said bossily.

  Amnesiac, Ms. Hempel wrote on the board, and then experienced an instance of it herself. It was a condition that sometimes afflicted her. She would turn her back to the class; she would forget everything. What is a noun? Who were the Pilgrims? And, more troubling, What was I saying? Or: How did I get here? The tether would snap, and she would be set adrift, the sleek green board stretching out all around her. She would feel, against her back, the warmth of eighteen faces. She would feel she might do anything in this moment, like sing a song from My Fair Lady. But then a pigeon departs from the windowsill, Stevie lets out a hiccup, a telephone, somewhere in the building, rings; and she recovers. Oh yes. I am Ms. Hempel. It is second period. A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea.