This didn’t seem to call for an answer. I met her gaze though, and realized she was watching me closely.
“We’ve had to be very vigilant with our students the last few years,” she said. “Drugs and alcohol you know.”
I nodded as though I did know, but again said nothing. I’d smoked a lot of dope and knew I might very soon have to lie.
“Our students must keep journals in English class. Do you mind having them do that?”
“No.”
“And they must be told that if they fold a page over in their journals, no one will read what they’ve written there.”
“Certainly.”
“But you must read everything they write on those folded pages. You think you can do that?”
“Well … I guess if …”
“Mrs. Gallant couldn’t do it. She refused, she said, on moral grounds.”
“I could do it,” I said. “It’s not a question of morals, really.” I would have said anything just then. I knew I was very close to getting the job. I did not know or consider the consequences of such a breach of faith. My main worry was that she would not believe me. “I see nothing wrong with being vigilant,” I said.
“Children in school have no rights we need worry about. I want to get that issue settled right away. There are drugs, and very bad things in schools these days and we can’t afford not to pay attention to everything. That is the first thing I want you to agree to.”
“Oh, I agree. Yes.” I think I smiled. Inside I was fairly singing, I got the job. I got the job.
“You also will have a bus route to follow in the morning.”
“Bus route?”
“If you teach here, you will also be assigned a bus route. You will drive one of the school buses to pick up students in the morning and take them home in the afternoon. The school day begins at eight sharp, and your bus route has to start at 6:15. You would have to take over Mrs. Gallant’s route—which looks like the perfect match for you, since it begins only a few blocks from where you live.”
I tried to smile, to cover the shock that must have blanched my face.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “The buses are all automatic transmission and very manageable. You’ll drive one to and from work. Keep it at home.”
“I’ve never driven a bus.” I didn’t want to think about where I’d park one.
“It’s not hard.” She hummed a little to herself, then she said, “Well, there’s a text you can use if you want. It’s a few years old.” She pushed her chair back and leaned over to a bookcase behind her. She came up with a book called Adventures in Literature. It was old, with threadbare binding and a torn spine. “The ones in the English room are in much better shape than this,” she said, almost to herself, looking at the book in her hands as if she just discovered its condition. She put the book down on the desk and looked at me. “Well I just love literature so much, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s just grand to teach it, isn’t it?”
“Yes ma …” I caught myself. “Yes it is.”
“Well,” she waved her hand toward the big room we’d just passed through. “That’s the English room. There’s lots of books in there so you’ll have others to decide about—if you don’t want to use this one. Just pick one that you know there’ll be enough of them for your classes.”
We fell quiet for a while again. I was afraid to ask about it, but I wondered what my salary would be. As if she could read my thoughts, Mrs. Creighton said, “We are a private school, Mr. Jameson. So you know we can’t pay you what the county …”
“Oh, I understand.”
“… would pay.” She looked at me. “The starting salary is $15,500 for the nine months. The gas for your bus will be paid too, of course.”
“That’s fine.” I had been making less than $10,000 driving a cab part-time, so I was very happy about the salary.
She invited me to a faculty meeting that afternoon. “I think we’re going to get along just fine,” she said. “Yes, we are going to have a high old time.”
That’s exactly what she said: “A high old time.” I get tears in my eyes now just remembering it.
2
The Best Possible Education
Mrs. Creighton was married to an accomplished, unsuccessful guitarist. He sold furniture on the side in one of the more prominent discount furniture houses—a place called Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. He was a man who tended to the heavy side, balding down the middle of his head, but with enough hair still in front to comb it straight back so that the top of his head looked as though it was lined for sheet music. He was slightly round-faced, with prominent jowls, and a very thin, almost invisible black mustache that he kept clipped at just the exact width of his mouth. He always wore dark suits, a white shirt, and a tie. He did not ever look like a guitarist, but he could do things up and down the neck of one of those things other musicians only dreamed of doing. He could play any kind of guitar—electric, flat box, twelve-string, bass. He had a collection of them in his basement—something I would learn later that year.
Mr. Creighton was also the recruiter for the school. It was he who got people to sign all the papers and who worked to keep enrollments healthy and growing. In other words—and this is how he looked at it—he was the salesman. Outside and inside. He attended juvenile court almost every morning, and that’s where he got a lot of his recruits, but he also knocked on doors, and called people on the phone to ask if their children were happy in school. In the afternoons, he was working at Maxwell’s selling furniture, but he often asked his clients in that venue if they were interested in providing the best possible education for their young teens. Mr. Creighton believed in the school, and in his wife, but he didn’t know a thing about education and he was not very well educated. Gradually I came to notice that Mrs. Creighton frequently made allowances for him in polite conversation, but he was talented, and funny and charming and anyone could see that she loved him totally and without reservation.
Each day before school, the two of them pulled into the parking lot before dawn. Mr. Creighton drove a dark burgundy Cadillac, with a tan leather top. A beautiful car, to people nearing their fifties—or, truth be known in Mr. Creighton’s case—their sixties. Sometimes Mrs. Creighton would drive her big, silver Oldsmobile, which was not a bad looking car either. When they rode together, Mrs. Creighton would emerge from the car and step jauntily to the back door of the school. Mr. Creighton always lurked a bit by the car—as if he were waiting for someone else to emerge. Mrs. Creighton would open the door and say, “Oh my.” Or “Whew!” in a high-pitched but routine sort of exclamation that let her husband know he should linger by the car a little longer. On warm days he’d go down the walk and retrieve the Washington Post, then stand at the back of his Cadillac reading the front page and the sports section, while Mrs. Creighton cleaned up after North. When she was done, he’d go inside with her and they’d sit in her office and have coffee together, chatting about the school, the day’s business, prospective students, or the Washington Redskins. At around two, just before the first buses started filling up to take everybody home, Mr. Creighton would get back in his car and drive to Maxwell’s.
On my first day I was a little late, maybe five minutes. Not enough for me to worry about it much, I thought. The air was humid and hotly damp—the kind of day that promised unreasonable heat in the early morning, and dangerous pollution levels by noon. It was not yet full sunrise and the sky had a pale luster to it—as though it were lit by kerosene somewhere beyond the horizon. Tree frogs and crickets began their pianissimo finale and millions of stars, little by little, dissolved into the blue. The sky was darkening in the west, and cold-looking, but it was already eighty degrees.
Mrs. Creighton waited for me at the door. On this morning, her husband had taken my bus and gone to pick up my little gang of students.
“Looks like it’s going to rain,” I said.
“You’re late.” She was not smiling. It was a
lmost as if she were announcing something awful about the way I looked—she might have said I was bleeding out of my ears in the same tone of voice.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Traffic.”
“You have a responsibility to drive your bus and you were to be here at 6:00 A.M. sharp.” She told me what Mr. Creighton was doing and I was of course properly horrified. “Now he’ll miss his morning coffee, because he’s taking care of your business.”
“He didn’t have to do that,” I said. “I’m only a few minutes late.”
“You must be on time. We’ve got children standing on street corners at specific times, and you can’t make them wait.”
“I’m sorry.” I felt awful.
She handed me a map that showed my route. “I should have given this to you yesterday.”
I sat down on a picnic bench just outside the door and began studying my bus route. Students began arriving around seven fifteen; most of them gathered under the great oak on the other side of the building—just outside the English room—smoking cigarettes, talking and laughing. The sound of their youthful clamor, the freewheeling uncluttered voices, frightened me a little. Mr. Creighton arrived with my crew around 7:30. He let them all pile out, then drove the bus around to the back of the school. I waved to him as he passed and he smiled, but I don’t think he was pleased. Apparently, he didn’t like traffic any more than I did.
It started raining just before classes began. I stood behind my desk in front of the room, my books arranged neatly, a notepad resting prominently and at just the right angle on a lectern that was situated just to the right of my desk. Outside, rain poured softly down; a steady enduring shower. I had made some class notes about what I would say. I held the roster in my hand. I could hear the noise outside my room, but I waited patiently for my students to wander in. What came first was North. The great, sad-faced animal came loping in, slowly, from the hallway and stopped in back of the room with a puzzled look—as though he wasn’t sure where he was supposed to invade next. His purple tongue lolled to the side of the black lips, and his nose was angled slightly upward, as though he were in a car and had stuck his head out the window to get air.
He was not used to me. I thought he might start growling.
“Hello,” I said. “You’re not going to leave another deposit in here are you?” I chuckled at myself, still slightly amazed at how nervous I was. I’d worn a gray sports jacket and black loafers with gray socks and black trousers. My shirt was light blue, button-down collar. My girlfriend had sent me out with an admiring smile and a black umbrella. “You look very much like a professor,” she said.
“I’m not a professor, Annie. I’m just a high school teacher.”
“Just? Isn’t a high school teacher just as good as a professor?”
“Well they certainly work harder.”
“Have a beautiful day, sweetheart.” She smiled, as if she knew something I didn’t, and closed the door.
Now, I looked in the eyes of North. I saw a shadow come into view, back beyond the door—a lithe figure that paused and seemed to listen for me. I couldn’t make out a face, but I noticed she had her hands up around her chin or her neck, and she seemed to be paralyzed there momentarily, as if my presence in front of the room must have been a shock to her too.
“Hello?” I said.
She stood there for a moment, then moved to her left, stopped, whirled around, and went back out of sight to her right. All I noticed was that she had long, stringy hair that hung in front of her like a bright red waterfall, and she never took her eyes off the floor in front of her. She was bent over at the waist and stayed that way.
The dog walked begrudgingly and warily toward the hallway to his left—the one that led to the Math room. “Good,” I said. “Go in there and haunt those folks.” Students began filing into the door beyond the Math room and dispersing to the other rooms, dripping water everywhere. My group and a good many sophomores and seniors came barging through the door to my right—what was probably, at one time, the front door of the building. Smoke, and the smell of cigarettes and the warm rain, came in with them. They clamored through to the Math and the History rooms. My students stopped and found seats in front of me.
Even at twenty-five I already knew that really young people—early teens who have just begun to discover their bodies, sex, and the fabulous “other” of their friends—are as self-conscious as human beings ever get. They are not only excruciatingly aware of themselves—of every single smallest flaw in their physical appearance, their voice, their eyes, their carriage and the way they walk, sit, stand, or lean on the wall—they are also certain that no one fails to notice these flaws. They are sure that all people are as conscious of them as they are of themselves, and usually they are so worried about what others may see that they do not notice very much about each other. This is one of the most generous and equitable of all ironies: one has to point out the flaw in somebody before they all latch onto it and begin the torture process of the poor devil whose defect has been singled out.
On my very first day, to prove this point about how little they noticed about each other—and I hoped perhaps to mitigate the potential for viciousness in my first class (the juniors)—immediately after I called the roll, I sent one student (his name was Timothy Bell, but everybody called him “Happy”) to Mrs. Creighton’s office. Then I told everyone to get out a sheet of paper and write down what Happy was wearing this morning. Almost all of them had difficulty doing that. They did not know. Most of them guessed and of course they guessed wrong. Then I went and got Happy out of the office and told him to have a seat. The entire class was amazed when they saw what he was wearing. “See?” I said. “We don’t really observe as we think we are being observed.” I have to admit that I got a sense of power to see them looking at me with such awe. I had actually taught them something. I admit it was thrilling to realize the influence I might have. Influence is a kind of power, I suppose; but I was not, nor have I ever been, particularly enthralled by it. I was always proud of the fact that my students learned something valuable beyond participles and prepositions from me. From the beginning I liked how that felt; these young kids sitting in rows, fidgeting and talking in front of me, had so much to learn. Can it be characterized as “power” if one is totally unconscious of it? And can a person be accused of “abusing” his power if he is totally unconscious of it? I mean if you don’t really know, if you can’t really know that you’re exerting any sort of influence, how can you be accused of abusing it?
I’ve always liked how my students gradually became people to me, even if I couldn’t memorize all their names. This was something I was aware of from the beginning, but it always surprised me how normal most people, even very young people, turned out to be once you got to know them a little. I’ve told people that those two years of teaching were a kind of blur, but that is not entirely true. My memory of it kind of merges and extends—it was a lot of people and a lot of classes and a lot of days and papers and meetings and just going on with my job but it was memorable.
When I had the classroom settled again that first day, and the noise began to subside, I wrote my name on the board. “I want you to call me Ben,” I said. “That’s who I am. And I’ll call you by your name. We are going to get to know each other.”
They sat quietly, waiting for me to say something else.
“So, I will only use this class roll until I know you.”
Mrs. Creighton came around the corner. “Don’t forget to call the roll, Professor Jameson.”
“Yes,” I said.
She addressed the class, moving in between two rows and toward the exit to the Math room. “Class, this is your new English Professor. Mr. Jameson. He’s a recent graduate of George Mason University.”
Some of them nodded. I wasn’t much older than they were and I was embarrassed to be so new, standing in front of them. I realized I was afraid somebody would notice a flaw in me and point it out to the others and then I would be at their mer
cy. I did not like the way they looked at Mrs. Creighton. They had this expression of fright, and impatience. As if they knew something bad was going to happen and they just wished it would be now so they could be done with it. One of them, a black student named Daphne, raised her hand.
“Mrs. Creighton? Does we have to call him Mr. Jameson?”
“Do we. And yes, you do.”
Somebody else said, “He just said he wants us to call him Ben.”
Mrs. Creighton regarded me, and I shrugged. It had stopped raining and the world outside now blossomed with light. “It’s Mr. Jameson,” she said, sternly. Then she smiled, said more gently, “Or Professor Jameson.”
“Ben is all right,” I said. “I really prefer it.”
“You do.” She did not look away from me.
“If you don’t mind,” I said. “I mean …”
She smiled, and turned to the class. “You and Professor Jameson will work these kinds of things out.” She let her glasses fall from her nose and dangle on the gold chain at her breast. She walked slowly—it almost looked painful—to the front of the room. She approached me, and I noticed the slight odor of jasmine. Her hair was bright in the freshly washed sunlight that now beamed through the window, and I realized she was trying to get close enough to me to whisper. I kept my eyes on the class but leaned toward her.
“Why did you want me to see Happy?” she said under her breath. She did not let her lips move much at all.
“Oh, that was just an experiment. I’m sorry. I should have told you I was going to do that, but I didn’t know I would until just now.”
“He’s not misbehaving?”
“No. Not at all.”
“He was very flummoxed,” she said. “And so was I.”
I wasn’t sure what “flummoxed” meant. “What did he say to you?”
“He just said you told him to come to the office.” She was still speaking through her teeth. “Don’t send them to me if you can help it. I want my teachers to handle things themselves, okay?” Though she had whispered this, and I’m pretty sure nobody but me heard it, I still felt the blood rush to my face. The class began to squirm a bit and sniff. (I would come to see that somebody always had the sniffles, in every class.)
In the Fall They Come Back Page 2
