Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules

by David Sedaris

  “Fine,” Miss Ferenczi said. “Well now. That was very good.”

  “Miss Ferenczi!” One of the Eddy twins was waving her hand desperately in the air. “Miss Ferenczi! Miss Ferenczi!”

  “Yes?”

  “John said that six times eleven is sixty-eight and you said he was right!”

  “Did I?” She gazed at the class with a jolly look breaking across her marionette’s face. “Did I say that? Well, what is six times eleven?”

  “It’s sixty-six!”

  She nodded. “Yes. So it is. But, and I know some people will not entirely agree with me, at some times it is sixty-eight.”

  “When? When is it sixty-eight?”

  We were all waiting.

  “In higher mathematics, which you children do not yet understand, six times eleven can be considered to be sixty-eight.” She laughed through her nose. “In higher mathematics numbers are…more fluid. The only thing a number does is contain a certain amount of something. Think of water. A cup is not the only way to measure a certain amount of water, is it?” We were staring, shaking our heads. “You could use saucepans or thimbles. In either case, the water would be the same. Perhaps,” she started again, “it would be better for you to think that six times eleven is sixty-eight only when I am in the room.”

  “Why is it sixty-eight,” Mark Poole asked, “when you’re in the room?”

  “Because it’s more interesting that way,” she said, smiling very rapidly behind her blue-tinted glasses. “Besides, I’m your substitute teacher, am I not?” We all nodded. “Well, then, think of six times eleven equals sixty-eight as a substitute fact.”

  “A substitute fact?”

  “Yes.” Then she looked at us carefully. “Do you think,” she asked, “that anyone is going to be hurt by a substitute fact?”

  We looked back at her.

  “Will the plants on the windowsill be hurt?” We glanced at them. There were sensitive plants thriving in a green plastic tray, and several wilted ferns in small clay pots. “Your dogs and cats, or your moms and dads?” She waited. “So,” she concluded, “what’s the problem?”

  “But it’s wrong,” Janice Weber said, “isn’t it?”

  “What’s your name, young lady?”

  “Janice Weber.”

  “And you think it’s wrong, Janice?”

  “I was just asking.”

  “Well, all right. You were just asking. I think we’ve spent enough time on this matter by now, don’t you, class? You are free to think what you like. When your teacher, Mr. Hibler, returns, six times eleven will be sixty-six again, you can rest assured. And it will be that for the rest of your lives in Five Oaks. Too bad, eh?” She raised her eyebrows and glinted herself at us. “But for now, it wasn’t. So much for that. Let us go on to your assigned problems for today, as painstakingly outlined, I see, in Mr. Hibler’s lesson plan. Take out a sheet of paper and write your names on the upper left-hand corner.”

  For the next half hour we did the rest of our arithmetic problems. We handed them in and then went on to spelling, my worst subject. Spelling always came before lunch. We were taking spelling dictation and looking at the clock. “Thorough,” Miss Ferenczi said. “Boundary.” She walked in the aisles between the desks, holding the spelling book open and looking down at our papers. “Balcony.” I clutched my pencil. Somehow, the way she said those words, they seemed foreign, misvoweled and misconsonanted. I stared down at what I had spelled. Balconie. I turned the pencil upside down and erased my mistake. Balconey. That looked better, but still incorrect. I cursed the world of spelling and tried erasing it again and saw the paper beginning to wear away. Balkony. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “I don’t like that word either,” Miss Ferenczi whispered, bent over, her mouth near my ear. “It’s ugly. My feeling is, if you don’t like a word, you don’t have to use it.” She straightened up, leaving behind a slight odor of Clorets.

  At lunchtime we went out to get our trays of sloppy joes, peaches in heavy syrup, coconut cookies, and milk, and brought them back to the classroom, where Miss Ferenczi was sitting at the desk, eating a brown sticky thing she had unwrapped from tightly rubber-banded waxed paper. “Miss Ferenczi,” I said, raising my hand. “You don’t have to eat with us. You can eat with the other teachers. There’s a teacher’s lounge,” I ended up, “next to the principal’s office.”

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I prefer it here.”

  “We’ve got a room monitor,” I said. “Mrs. Eddy.” I pointed to where Mrs. Eddy, Joyce and Judy’s mother, sat silently at the back of the room, doing her knitting.

  “That’s fine,” Miss Ferenczi said. “But I shall continue to eat here, with you children. I prefer it,” she repeated.

  “How come?” Wayne Razmer asked without raising his hand.

  “I talked to the other teachers before class this morning,” Miss Ferenczi said, biting into her brown food. “There was a great rattling of the words for the fewness of the ideas. I didn’t care for their brand of hilarity. I don’t like ditto-machine jokes.”

  “Oh,” Wayne said.

  “What’s that you’re eating?” Maxine Sylvester asked, twitching her nose. “Is it food?”

  “It most certainly is food. It’s a stuffed fig. I had to drive almost down to Detroit to get it. I also brought some smoked sturgeon. And this,” she said, lifting some green leaves out of her lunchbox, “is raw spinach, cleaned this morning.”

  “Why’re you eating raw spinach?” Maxine asked.

  “It’s good for you,” Miss Ferenczi said. “More stimulating than soda pop or smelling salts.” I bit into my sloppy joe and stared blankly out the window. An almost invisible moon was faintly silvered in the daytime autumn sky. “As far as food is concerned,” Miss Ferenczi was saying, “you have to shuffle the pack. Mix it up. Too many people eat…well, never mind.”

  “Miss Ferenczi,” Carol Peterson said, “what are we going to do this afternoon?”

  “Well,” she said, looking down at Mr. Hibler’s lesson plan, “I see that your teacher, Mr. Hibler, has you scheduled for a unit on the Egyptians.” Carol groaned. “Yessss,” Miss Ferenczi continued, “that is what we will do: the Egyptians. A remarkable people. Almost as remarkable as the Americans. But not quite.” She lowered her head, did her quick smile, and went back to eating her spinach.

  After noon recess we came back into the classroom and saw that Miss Ferenczi had drawn a pyramid on the blackboard close to her oak tree. Some of us who had been playing baseball were messing around in the back of the room, dropping the bats and gloves into the playground box, and Ray Schontzeler had just slugged me when I heard Miss Ferenczi’s high-pitched voice, quavering with emotions. “Boys,” she said, “come to order right this minute and take your seats. I do not wish to waste a minute of class time. Take out your geography books.” We trudged to our desks and, still sweating, pulled out Distant Lands and Their People. “Turn to page forty-two.” She waited for thirty seconds, then looked over at Kelly Munger. “Young man,” she said, “why are you still fossicking in your desk?”

  Kelly looked as if his foot had been stepped on. “Why am I what?”

  “Why are you…burrowing in your desk like that?”

  “I’m lookin’ for the book, Miss Ferenczi.”

  Bobby Kryzanowicz, the faultless brown-noser who sat in the first row by choice, softly said, “His name is Kelly Munger. He can’t ever find his stuff. He always does that.”

  “I don’t care what his name is, especially after lunch,” Miss Ferenczi said. “Where is your book?”

  “I just found it.” Kelly was peering into his desk and with both hands pulled at the book, shoveling along in front of it several pencils and crayons, which fell into his lap and then to the floor.

  “I hate a mess,” Miss Ferenczi said. “I hate a mess in a desk or a mind. It’s…unsanitary. You wouldn’t want your house at home to look like your desk at school, now, would you?” She didn’t wait for an a
nswer. “I should think not. A house at home should be as neat as human hands can make it. What were we talking about? Egypt. Page forty-two. I note from Mr. Hibler’s lesson plan that you have been discussing the modes of Egyptian irrigation. Interesting, in my view, but not so interesting as what we are about to cover. The pyramids, and Egyptian slave labor. A plus on one side, a minus on the other.” We had our books open to page forty-two, where there was a picture of a pyramid, but Miss Ferenczi wasn’t looking at the book. Instead, she was staring at some object just outside the window.

  “Pyramids,” Miss Ferenczi said, still looking past the window. “I want you to think about pyramids. And what was inside. The bodies of the pharaohs, of course, and their attendant treasures. Scrolls. Perhaps,” Miss Ferenczi said, her face gleeful but unsmiling, “these scrolls were novels for the pharaohs, helping them to pass the time in their long voyage through the centuries. But then, I am joking.” I was looking at the lines on Miss Ferenczi’s skin. “Pyramids,” Miss Ferenczi went on, “were the repositories of special cosmic powers. The nature of a pyramid is to guide cosmic energy forces into a concentrated point. The Egyptians knew that; we have generally forgotten it. Did you know,” she asked, walking to the side of the room so that she was standing by the coat closet, “that George Washington had Egyptian blood, from his grandmother? Certain features of the Constitution of the United States are notable for their Egyptian ideas.”

  Without glancing down at the book, she began to talk about the movement of souls in Egyptian religion. She said that when people die, their souls return to earth in the form of carpenter ants or walnut trees, depending on how they behaved—“well or ill”—in life. She said that the Egyptians believed that people act the way they do because of magnetism produced by tidal forces in the solar system, forces produced by the sun and by its “planetary ally,” Jupiter. Jupiter, she said, was a planet, as we had been told, but had “certain properties of stars.” She was speaking very fast. She said that the Egyptians were great explorers and conquerors. She said that the greatest of all the conquerors, Genghis Khan, had had forty horses and forty young women killed on the site of his grave. We listened. No one tried to stop her. “I myself have been in Egypt,” she said, “and have witnessed much dust and many brutalities.” She said that an old man in Egypt who worked for a circus had personally shown her an animal in a cage, a monster, half bird and half lion. She said that this monster was called a gryphon and that she had heard about them but never seen them until she traveled to the outskirts of Cairo. She wrote the word out on the blackboard in large capital letters: GRYPHON. She said that Egyptian astronomers had discovered the planet Saturn but had not seen its rings. She said that the Egyptians were the first to discover that dogs, when they are ill, will not drink from rivers, but wait for rain, and hold their jaws open to catch it.

  “She lies.”

  We were on the school bus home. I was sitting next to Carl Whiteside, who had bad breath and a huge collection of marbles. We were arguing. Carl thought she was lying. I said she wasn’t, probably.

  “I didn’t believe that stuff about the bird,” Carl said, “and what she told us about the pyramids? I didn’t believe that, either. She didn’t know what she was talking about.”

  “Oh yeah?” I had liked her. She was strange. I thought I could nail him. “If she was lying,” I said, “what’d she say that was a lie?”

  “Six times eleven isn’t sixty-eight. It isn’t ever. It’s sixty-six, I know for a fact.”

  “She said so. She admitted it. What else did she lie about?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Well.” He swung his legs back and forth. “You ever see an animal that was half lion and half bird?” He crossed his arms. “It sounded real fakey to me.”

  “It could happen,” I said. I had to improvise, to outrage him. “I read in this newspaper my mom bought in the IGA about this scientist, this mad scientist in the Swiss Alps, and he’s been putting genes and chromosomes and stuff together in test tubes, and he combined a human being and a hamster.” I waited, for effect. “It’s called a humster.”

  “You never.” Carl was staring at me, his mouth open, his terrible bad breath making its way toward me. “What newspaper was it?”

  “The National Enquirer,” I said, “that they sell next to the cash registers.” When I saw his look of recognition, I knew I had him. “And this mad scientist,” I said, “his name was, um, Dr. Frankenbush.” I realized belatedly that this name was a mistake and waited for Carl to notice its resemblance to the name of the other famous mad master of permutations, but he only sat there.

  “A man and a hamster?” He was staring at me, squinting, his mouth opening in distaste. “Jeez. What’d it look like?”

  When the bus reached my stop, I took off down our dirt road and ran up through the backyard, kicking the tire swing for good luck. I dropped my books on the back steps so I could hug and kiss our dog, Mr. Selby. Then I hurried inside. I could smell brussels sprouts cooking, my unfavorite vegetable. My mother was washing other vegetables in the kitchen sink, and my baby brother was hollering in his yellow playpen on the kitchen floor.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, hopping around the playpen to kiss her. “Guess what?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “We had this substitute today, Miss Ferenczi, and I’d never seen her before, and she had all these stories and ideas and stuff.”

  “Well. That’s good.” My mother looked out the window in front of the sink, her eyes on the pine woods west of our house. That time of the afternoon her skin always looked so white to me. Strangers always said my mother looked like Betty Crocker, framed by the giant spoon on the side of the Bisquick box. “Listen, Tommy,” she said. “Would you please go upstairs and pick your clothes off the floor in the bathroom, and then go outside to the shed and put the shovel and ax away that your father left outside this morning?”

  “She said that six times eleven was sometimes sixty-eight!” I said. “And she said she once saw a monster that was half lion and half bird.” I waited. “In Egypt.”

  “Did you hear me?” my mother asked, raising her arm to wipe her forehead with the back of her hand. “You have chores to do.”

  “I know,” I said. “I was just telling you about the substitute.”

  “It’s very interesting,” my mother said, quickly glancing down at me, “and we can talk about it later when your father gets home. But right now you have some work to do.”

  “Okay, Mom.” I took a cookie out of the jar on the counter and was about to go outside when I had a thought. I ran into the living room, pulled out a dictionary next to the TV stand, and opened it to the Gs. After five minutes I found it. Gryphon: variant of griffin. Griffin: “a fabulous beast with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion.” Fabulous was right. I shouted with triumph and ran outside to put my father’s tools in their proper places.

  Miss Ferenczi was back the next day, slightly altered. She had pulled her hair down and twisted it into pigtails, with red rubber bands holding them tight one inch from the ends. She was wearing a green blouse and pink scarf, making her difficult to look at for a full class day. This time there was no pretense of doing a reading lesson or moving on to arithmetic. As soon as the bell rang, she simply began to talk.

  She talked for forty minutes straight. There seemed to be less connection between her ideas, but the ideas themselves were, as the dictionary would say, fabulous. She said she had heard of a huge jewel, in what she called the antipodes, that was so brilliant that when light shone into it at a certain angle it would blind whoever was looking at its center. She said the biggest diamond in the world was cursed and had killed everyone who owned it, and that by a trick of fate it was called the Hope Diamond. Diamonds are magic, she said, and this is why women wear them on their fingers, as a sign of the magic of womanhood. Men have strength, Miss Ferenczi said, but no true magic. That is why men fall
in love with women but women do not fall in love with men: they just love being loved. George Washington had died because of a mistake he made about a diamond. Washington was not the first true President, but she didn’t say who was. In some places in the world, she said, men and women still live in the trees and eat monkeys for breakfast. Their doctors are magicians. At the bottom of the sea are creatures thin as pancakes who have never been studied by scientists because when you take them up to air, the fish explode.

  There was not a sound in the classroom, except for Miss Ferenczi’s voice, and Donna DeShano’s coughing. No one even went to the bathroom.

  Beethoven, she said, had not been deaf; it was a trick to make himself famous, and it worked. As she talked, Miss Ferenczi’s pigtails swung back and forth. There are trees in the world, she said, that eat meat: their leaves are sticky and close up on bugs like hands. She lifted her hands and brought them together, palm to palm. Venus, which most people think is the next closest planet to the sun, is not always closer, and, besides, it is the planet of greatest mystery because of its thick cloud cover. “I know what lies underneath those clouds,” Miss Ferenczi said, and waited. After the silence, she said, “Angels. Angels live under those clouds.” She said that angels were not invisible to everyone and were in fact smarter than most people. They did not dress in robes as was often claimed but instead wore formal evening clothes, as if they were about to attend a concert. Often angels do attend concerts and sit in the aisles, where, she said, most people pay no attention to them. She said the most terrible angel had the shape of the Sphinx. “There is no running away from that one,” she said. She said that unquenchable fires burn just under the surface of the earth in Ohio, and that the baby Mozart fainted dead away in his cradle when he first heard the sound of a trumpet. She said that someone named Narzim al Harrardim was the greatest writer who ever lived. She said that planets control behavior, and anyone conceived during a solar eclipse would be born with webbed feet.