Ms. Hempel Chronicles

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  Her friends collapsed on each other, shrieking. She let out her breath and folded her arms around him.

  “Are your eyes closed?” Maggie asked. “Are you relaxed?"

  "Yes,” Beatrice said. She felt everything inside her slowly coming loose.

  Her hands joined her sister’s on the contraption. The candle was making the whole room smell like cake. How good it felt to rest her eyes, to rest her fingers on the plastic, to let

  unseen forces take over for a little while. She tried to conjure up a picture of the universe and saw styrofoam balls of varying sizes gently bobbing in the breeze. No. That was the solar system, abandoned weeks ago in her homeroom after the science fair. The universe was bigger, much bigger. She

  would have to try harder.

  “I’m asking my question now,” Maggie whispered.

  “Go for it”

  “I’m asking it silently, actually. I’m asking it in my head." “Then what am I supposed to do?" Beatrice opened her eyes a crack. “The whole point is to be collaborative.”

  Maggie sighed, her eyes still closed. “Well. Just think of Mama. Think of Mama and me on a beach in the Caribbean.” “Doing tai chi?”

  “Okay. If you want.” She paused. “Think Aruba.”

  That was easy. She could handle Aruba. White sand. Turquoise water. A scattering of cabanas. Beatrice squeezed her eyes shut and drifted over the island. She saw two little figures standing in the surf. Above her the black wind of the galaxies swept by. A passing comet showered her in sparkles. To her surprise, she was turning. And somewhere far away, her hands began to move. She tumbled through the ether like a satellite, keeping one eye fixed on the island below. White sand. Blue-green water. Her hands slid away from her. Which way was Yes? Which way was No? She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember if the board was upside-down or not. All she could do was watch the two people circling in slow motion at the edge of the sea. What was it that her sister wanted? An offshore bank account. A Princess cruise. Waves crashed, moons pulled, planets spun. Black holes swallowed everything in sight. The beautiful universe went on and on. I

  don’t care what she wants, Beatrice thought as her hand

  travelled below her and she, slowly tumbling, beamed her message into space:

  Marilyn?

  Papa?

  Say yes.

  Bump

  Many years later, she was on her way to see some trees. A magnificent London plane tree, more than sixty-three inches in diameter, and an allee of horse chestnuts, somewhat sickly and tattered but still of interest. Of interest to her, who now spent her days thinking about such things. Gradation, drainage, compacted soil. Canopy coverage. The secret lives of city trees. They grew shadily at the perimeters of her imagination, and along the blocks she now walked to the park entrance from the station. Beautiful and various and unavoidable, trees: and yet working in the urban forest she still found great wide-open spaces in her mind where no trees grew at all. On this day, for instance, as she walked from the station to the park in a neighborhood she had no reason to visit, except for the horse chestnuts, she was thinking about something else entirely.

  A girl with a wonderful butt was walking a few feet ahead of her. She didn’t even know how to assemble the phrase in her head—ass? bottom? There was no comfortable way of describing it. But seeing the girl from behind made her happy. She had first noticed her climbing the stairs from the station—her white flip-flops looking improbably clean against the grimy, gummed-up steps. Neat little ankles, lean calves. A

  cheap silky skirt—also white, with orange swirls—that ended just at the back of her knee. All of this moving crisply up the dirty stairs, as deliciously as a new pair of scissors biting into a sheet of paper. At the top the girl turned left and crossed over to the bright side of the street. In a stroke of fortune, she was headed toward the park. There were four whole blocks in which to wonder at her high, brisk bottom and the charming way it undulated beneath the thin material of her skirt.

  UndulateP Oh help us. The word was practically dripping with oily intent. It really was impossible to walk behind a girl with a pretty butt—in objective appreciation—and not sound hopelessly slimy, even to oneself.

  But a pregnant woman couldn't be slimy. She might be constipated or gassy or luminous, but not slimy. And in her case, she was pregnant, objectively pregnant. If she found herself studying girls on the subway and the street, her gaze was not envious—she had never had neat ankles to begin with— but acquisitive. Collecting traits for the small body she was, to her deep bemusement, cultivating. She wanted nail beds that were long and narrow, shoulder blades that flared like wings. She liked freckles, thick eyelashes, feet with strong arches. On her way to see some significant trees, she was walking behind a girl and thinking, I hope its butt will look just like that.

  The girl turned around.

  “Ms. Hempel?”

  It had been ages since anyone called her that.

  "Sophie?” she asked, shocked that the person she’d been following was in fact a familiar one. Hard to imagine that this blithe creature was once stuck in the seventh grade. Sophie Lohmann. She would never forget their names, even years and years later; they were carved roughly and indelibly somewhere. “Oh, Sophie! Look at you.”

  The young woman—she was not a girl anymore—smiled and retraced her steps. She held out her lovely arms for a hug. "How are you? What’s going on? Tell me everything!” aid Ms- Hempel, laughing joyfully and nervously, awash in Sophie’s lollipop perfume, surprised that even as grown-ups her girls still offered the same diffident, bony embraces as they did when they were children.

  And how unexpected that Sophie Lohmann, of all those girls, should excite in her this rush of affection! Sophie with her unsettling doll-tiny features and huge kewpie eyes, now smoky with makeup. Not a soul that Ms. Hempel thought about much anymore, though at the time she had made enough of an impression. Sophie was new to the school, a new girl then. In the first few days she gave an elaborate performance of shyness and hesitancy that was later revealed to be purely perfunctory. She knew she’d be fine. How could she not be? She was cute and thin and blond and clever. Universal currency, accepted everywhere. But there was something in the pertness of her looks, or maybe it was her manner, that struck Ms. Hempel as uncanny, antiquated, as if Sophie were a resuscitated bobby-soxer with a little bit of freezer burn around the edges. On some days she would even take a curling iron to her ponytail. “Good morning, Ms. Hempel!” she'd say with a surplus of sweetness that made her blond ringlets bounce crazily about.

  All that simpering—she never faltered. And she never once let her spine droop; she never slouched. Having abandoned her ballet career, she still kept a strict eye on her posture. During all-school assemblies, Ms. Hempel always knew where Sophie was sitting: the one child perfectly erect among the bodies hunched on the gymnasium floor. What else? What else came floating up out of the strange, drifting sediment? The sugary

  perfume made her dizzy. She couldn’t remember a lick of Sophie’s schoolwork—though maybe she did fancy covers for her book reports. There was a younger brother, in the fifth grade who had starred in a peanut-butter commercial. A free trip to Hawaii, thanks to a magazine contest the mother had won with a photo essay about her kitchen renovation. Ms. Hempel couldn’t remember ever meeting this mother, or the father for that matter; she had no recollection of them at all. Which only heightened her sense of Sophie’s slightly concocted quality. What else. What else? Nothing more came to mind, except of course the fear.- the embarrassing feeling of fear this girl had kindled in her.

  “It's so weird,” Sophie was saying. “I was just talking about that Constitution thing we did. Remember? When we went to that big courthouse downtown and everybody dressed up in jackets and ties? And we pretended to be lawyers in the Supreme Court? I was a justice; I wore a choir robe you got from Mrs. Willoughby. I think you gave me a B on the decision I wrote, which I didn’t quite understand, seeing that I worked real
ly hard on it. But this is the important part: the whole case was about anthrax! Do remember that?"

  “I do,” said Ms. Hempel, nodding rapidly, already marshaling silent arguments in defense of the ancient B. “I remember all of it.”

  “So don’t you think that’s weird? Here we were, talking theoretically about anthrax. I didn’t even know what it was before then—”

  To be honest, neither had Ms. Hempel. She thought Anthrax was a band who played their guitars demonically fast. But thankfully the Constitution unit came equipped with an instructor’s guide, which out of vanity she kept hidden inside a bland and unincriminating notebook.

  “But we became experts on it! We spent a month talking about nothing but anthrax. That little island they infected during World War Two, and then in Russia when it got out by accident and killed so many people and they covered it up."

  “We also talked about the Pentagon Papers. We talked a lot about those,” Ms. Hempel pointed out, as if for the benefit of a parent standing nearby. "And other relevant cases. Precedents ....” She couldn’t summon up any of them by name, the teacher’s guide long lost by now. But look what surfaced from the murky depths! The red plastic binding, the jaunty little logo with the flag. Sophie’s appearance had really set things astir. “National security versus freedom of speech,” Ms. Hempel said triumphantly, reading the heavy block letters on the title page. “That’s what we were talking about."

  “I guess so. But what I remember most was the anthrax,” Sophie said, and glanced down at her opalescent toenails, which wiggled back at her from the flawless white flip-flops. “And that’s why I completely freaked out You know, when it really happened. The letters with the spores, and people dying. I knew everything already, everything they were talking about on the news.” She lifted her huge smoky eyes to Ms. Hempel. “And I know this sounds crazy, but the whole thing felt psychic. Or maybe prophetic. I had this feeling that we had made it happen somehow, by getting dressed up and taking it so seriously, going to that courtroom and pretending like it was real. Not like it was our fault, exactly, but more like it was something we had brought into the world by talking about it so much.”

  She laughed suddenly, a pretty sound.

  “So I was telling this to my friend the other night, and he says that either I’m paranoid or a total narcissist. He’s still trying to figure it out.”

  Sophie couldn’t help smiling slightly to herself at the mention of this unnamed friend, this friend who was contemplating her personality disorders. Ms. Hempel knew that happy, inward look. That buzzy feeling. And she knew that if Sophie was gazing so softly and fondly at her now, on this sunny, dirty block lined with its malodorous ginkgo trees, it was only because Sophie had spoken of her to this friend, and that she and anthrax and the United States Constitution had all been graced, made golden, by his skeptical attention.

  "But seriously,” said Sophie. Didnt that freak you out?”

  Well, yes, it freaked her out. Sure it did. It freaked her out to remember that the most terrible things in the world had once been her handy tools for the sharpening of critical-thinking skills, the assigning of argumentative essays, the fostering of middle school debate. Frequent visitors in her classroom, the theoretical terrorists—they dropped in all the time. Her innocence (stupidity?) was astounding. About everything— dangers outside and in. To think that she once found Travis Bent’s misanthropy endearing! His gloomy looks, his jittering leg, his bloody works of fiction. Now she’d have to report him. When he was put on medication, he took to signing his name as “Travis Bent, 50 mg”—and she thought it droll. But everything had changed. A kid couldn’t be left to his own odd and unsociable ways; a teacher couldn’t call upon the phantom terrorists to illustrate a point. The delicate, treacherous scrim was torn. Three parents from her school had been lost. And what an oblivious twit she’d been for all those years, leading her little ducks on picnic outings along the brink of the abyss. From the great distance of her thirties, she peered down and saw the tiny figures playing kickball while behind them opened up an immense and roiling pit of darkness. It made

  eat that picture in her head. Then again, a certain well-*iel kbed sort of blue autumn morning gave her pause, too.

  What was she doing, procreating? Looking at trees? What in the world was she doing....

  Before her stood Sophie Lohmann, survivor, of the seventh rade of Ms. Hempel’s innocence, of the hazardous times that had befallen everyone since then. Sophie, searching through a dainty handbag for her phone. Standing there pristinely on the sidewalk, she looked indestructible and full of secrets. The phone kept humming, humming, humming until she pinched it savagely and it stopped. The little strap was hoisted back up onto her shoulder, the purse tucked beneath her armpit like a football. Its color was pale orange, like the swirling patterns in her skirt.

  “Sorry about that," said Sophie, frowning. It wasn’t her friend who had called; someone else. She swept back her hair, shaking off an invisible dusting of filth. “So, Ms. Hempel,” she said seriously. “You’re done with graduate school? You’re teaching college now?”

  Ms. Hempel hesitated, half pleased and half chagrined. For how kind it was of them, her former students, to remember these things, to keep track of her muddled goals and aspirations! “No, no. Not at all. I sort of changed direction.” And how complicated it was for her to explain where she happened to find herself now. “The program wasn’t really what I’d expected. We didn’t spend a lot of time reading actual novels.” Just slim little volumes of theory—and not of the congenial French variety—as well as religious pamphlets, etiquette manuals, ship manifests, broadsides, classified advertisements. Who knew that the definition of literary text had become quite so all-encompassing? It was her own fault.

  When Mr. Polidori left the science department to earn his master’s in—of all beautiful thing’s—music composition, she had thought, Aha! School would save her. A noble exit, provided by her lifelong commitment to learning. She made a dash for the escape hatch. "And I was a redundancy. Nobody wants to see another dissertation about the Brontg sisters or the Shakespeare romance plays or Tess of the D’Urbervilles "That's terrible!" cried Sophie. "I love Shakespeare."

  “I’m a dropout!” Ms. Hempel announced good-naturedly. Sophie found this perturbing. Her eyebrows twitched. "Do you think they'll let you back in?"

  “I found something else to do,” said Ms. Hempel hazily, reluctant to trudge up her unlikely path again: the temporary job that turned without warning into a real job, the classes at night, the slow acquiring of a new vocabulary, not to mention an entirely new way of seeing. "I don’t want to go back. You shouldn’t look so worried. It's something I like.” She then said the words that usually cheered people up: Planning. Conservation. Design. But Sophie's tiny eyebrows refused to relax. “Good for you,” she said finally.

  "I'm on my way to the park. Isn't that where you’re heading?”

  “I live here, Ms. Hempel,” said Sophie with dignity, nodding at the long glowing row of brick fronts and brownstones, worn and well loved, in uneven states of repair. "I’m just coming home." Oh yes; Ms. Hempel remembered. A flushed, tearful discussion in English class—what were they reading, The House on Mango Street?—about good neighborhoods and bad. But Sophie had nothing to be ashamed of now: There was a wine shop! And a sushi place. A store devoted to baby clothes made of organic cotton. Her maligned corner of the world— just look at it now. And Sophie herself had been the harbinger of all this.

  "So it's your park! How lucky you are," Ms. Hempel said. “You must know it inside and out.”

  “I don’t think I’d be much help,’’ Sophie said, misunderstanding. “It's not like I hang out there. I don't have a dog or anything. I mean, we go there sometimes, but only when .. ” She trailed off suggestively, then offered a little grin.

  “Oh please,” Ms. Hempel said. “I’m not your teacher anymore." And the two of them tried to laugh.

  But herein lay their problem, preci
sely—if she wasn't Sophie’s teacher, then who was she? And who was Sophie now, if not a bright-eyed seventh grader? A girl in too much makeup, a girl with a perfect behind. A girl who was taking an undetermined amount of time off from college and manning the front desk of a health club, where she offered up towels to busy people in ties (and the teacher felt a sure prick of disappointment upon hearing this). But they couldn’t let each other go; they couldn’t pass with just a startled wave and a smile. Though that would have been the gentler way! Instead of all the anxious pawing, the sniffing around, as each tried to dig up what was dearly buried in the other.

  Ms. Hempel wished she could summon up the old, fearful, Sophie feeling. That slight tightening in her stomach, as if at the sound of a distant alarm, an invisible trip wire set off by the batting of Sophie’s eyelashes or the rolling of her enormous eyes. The fluttering eyelashes were on display all the time; but the eye-rolling she would catch only fleetingly, on rare occasions, just as she was turning back to the blackboard or ushering her class out the door. Those tricky looks! They made Ms. Hempel afraid. As if Sophie’s coyness and fawning were merely her flimsy disguise for a violent, barely controlled contempt. At any moment this derision might be unleashed-— and her teacher would be dead meat. Her drooping tights; her hysterical hand gestures; her insistence that everyone, everyone, finish their outlines by Friday! In other words, Ms. Hempel was just begging to be laid out, flattened—no, obliterated—by Sophie’s rolling eyeballs. Remember you’re the grown-up, Ms. Hempel would reason. All the power is yours. You give out detention, you give out grades, bathroom passes, chocolate bars—you’re in charge! While she, she’s only a child.

  Monologues that were of little help or solace.

  True, Sophie was a child; but she was also a person, a young one but a definite person nonetheless. This was the feeling that Ms. Hempel couldn’t shake: a conviction that she spent her days among people at the age when they were most purely themselves. How could she not be depleted when she came home, having been exposed for hours, without protection, to all of those thrumming, radiant selves? Here they were, just old enough to have discovered their souls, but not yet dulled by the ordinary act of survival, not yet practiced at dissembling. Even Sophie, consummate performer, was as transparent as glass. The terror, the thrill, of encountering such superiority in its undiluted form! Those baby-doll eyes just shimmering with scorn. Ms. Hempel was regularly undone. But any other encounter proved no less shattering: in Cilia Matsui, with sympathy; in Emily Radinsky, with genius; in Jonathan Hamish, with wildness and beauty and torment.