Ms. Hempel Chronicles (16 page)

“You didn’t know about me and Phil?” asked Ms. Cruz, phil Macrae taught life science to the sixth grade. Beardless and cow-licked, he looked as if he had completed the sixth grade only recently himself. She had also had sex with Mr. Rahitni, the computer teacher, and Jim, who ran the after-school program.

“It got a little weird,” she said.

Things also got weird for Mrs. Bell and Mr. Blanco; so weird, in fact, that he had to go teach at another school for a few years until the conflagration finally died out.

“Julia?” Ms. Hempel cried in dismay. She loved Julia Bell. “This was ages ago. Long before you came to us,” Mrs. Willoughby said.

“But Daniel?” Ms. Hempel cried. “I thought maybe he was gay?"

“Oh no. No. Whatever gave you that idea? He’s just Spanish.”

And, incredibly, the former lover of Mrs. Bell. With his

pointed goatee and his funny little vests? It was very hard to picture. Perhaps, in a younger version, what Ms. Hempel found vague about his sexuality was actually dashing, irresistible. So much so that Julia Bell—a teacher blessed with pluck and humor and sense—risked everything to be with him.

"This was before the boys were born?” Ms. Hempel asked.

"Wally was two, I think, and not yet in school. But Nathan had already started kindergarten.” Mrs. Willoughby raised her eyebrows. “It could have been a real mess.”

Unthinkable, Julia making a mess. Which was exactly why Ms. Hempel adored her: the serene, amused, and capable air-the way she kept an easy sense of order among even the most fractious children; the affection that her sons heaped upon her, tackling her in the middle of the hallway. She also had a plume of pure white hair growing from her right temple, like Susan Son tag if she had gone into eighth-grade algebra. Her husband taught math, too, at the state university; they had fallen in love during graduate school. And all this—her world of boys and equations and good cheer—had been hazarded. And then recovered.

Now she could sit in faculty meetings with Daniel Blanco and not show the slightest sign that he was in any way different to her from all the other staff members assembled around the room. If it weren't for the older teachers like Mrs. Willoughby, who remembered, there wouldn’t be a trace left Of that strange and perilous affair. Ms. Hempel couldn’t decide which amazed her more: the sight of Mrs. Bell and Mr. Blanco talking amiably by the coffee urn, or the thought of them locked in an ancient, urgent, hopeless embrace.

Leaving the library, Ms. Hempel was surprised to see Ms. Duffy standing alone in the vestibule, her hands resting ligMy atop her belly. She seemed to have lost her entourage somewhere along the way. She was looking at the enormous bulletin boards that lined the walls and displayed the latest projects generated by the younger grades. Only a year ago she had been responsible for filling such a board, which required judiciousness (for not every child’s hieroglyph could be hung) and a protracted wrestle with crepe paper and a staple gun. But now she was freed of that. What an escape! She gazed at the artwork with the cool eye of an outsider.

“Beatrice,” Ms. Duffy said, and Ms. Hempel gave her a hug. The belly turned out to be as hard as it appeared.

“Have you seen this?” Ms. Duffy asked. She was studying one particular display. “They’re overlapping. You can’t read them. And he put a staple right through that kid’s name."

He being Mr. Chapman, Wall Street trader turned teacher, called in to replace Ms. Duffy for the year, and now, it seemed, quite possibly for good.

“How are we supposed to know who drew the Minotaur?" She pointed at the bulletin board. “A child spent hours— hours!—working on this, and you can’t even read her name.”

“I hadn't noticed,” Ms. Hempel said, peering. “But you’re right. The name is kind of obscured.”

“My god,” Ms. Duffy muttered. “This isn’t rocket science.”

She reached up and pinched the staple between her thumb and forefinger. With a worrying motion of her hand she extracted it, and then flicked it to the ground like a cigarette butt.

“There,” she said.

The child’s name was Lucien Nguyen.

“Much better,” Ms. Hempel said, and smiled. She wanted

to leave, her curiosity deadened; now that she knew Ms. Duff wasn’t harboring a little half-Yemenese baby, she no longer felt a strong need to talk with her. But she didn’t like the way Ms. Duffy was still eyeing the display And Ms. Hempel’s tendency to suggest precisely the opposite of what she actually wished, in the vague and automatic hope of pleasing someone asserted itself.

“Do you want to walk to Izzy’s and get a bubble tea? My treat?”

For a moment it looked as if Ms. Duffy was about to agree. But just as she was turning away from the displays, she inhaled sharply and wheeled back around to stare at the bulletin board.

Her finger landed on a pink piece of paper and circled a single word with baleful vigor. “Did you see this?”

Ms. Hempel stepped closer to read the text, printed in a computers version of girlish handwriting: Persephone picked up the pomegranate and atefour of its’ seeds. She winced.

“Oooph. Not good.”

Ms. Duffy held the word pinned beneath her finger. Or could it even be called a word? It didn’t rightfully exist outside of the grammatical underworld, but Ms. Hempel knew from her own observations (in newspaper headlines! on twenty-foot billboards!) that these crimes were spreading. Rapidly. And evidently unchecked.

“They're kids,” Ms. Duffy said. “They’re learning, they make mistakes. But how are they going to know that they’re mistakes if their teacher hangs them up on the fucking wall? I mean, does he make them do drafts? Does he correct anything?"

Ms. Hempel shrugged weakly Her own alertness to error had wavered over the years. But maybe all it took was some time away, some time abroad, for one’s acuity to be restored, because now, by simply standing beside Ms. Duffy, she could feel her powers beginning to return, she could see the mistakes leaping out at her, the bulletin board lighting up with offenses like the big maps she imagined they used at the FBI.

“Upper right-hand corner,” she reported. "Completely random capitalization. Since when is swan a proper noun? Or rape, for that matter?”

Though she had to admit, both choices had their own logic.

She also spotted Aries, alter in the place of altar, and— there it was again—that old devil, its’. The real wonder of it all was how these mistakes managed to survive under the pitiless eye of spell-checking. You had to kind of love them for enduring.

But Ms. Duffy felt no such affection. She was pulling Persephone right off the wall. “Where's Leda?” she demanded.

Ms. Hempel pointed reluctantly at the display. There was now a naked, pockmarked hole on the board. “Up there,” she said, and stole a look down the hallway. Maybe Mr. Mumford or, even better, Mr. Peele would make a sudden and sobering appearance.

Ms. Duffy had risen up onto the very tips of her clogs, as if they were toe shoes and she a young dancer. Her belly didn’t throw off her balance at all. Up, up, her puffy fingers reached, quivering with purpose. “Got it,” she gasped. Down came Leda. Down, too, came Hera and the peacock, Echo and a weedy-looking Narcissus, Danae dripping wet in her shower of gold. Down came the Minotaur and Medusa, Hermes, Neptune, Athena leaping bloodily from her father s splitting head. Neptune? Wasn’t that the name the Romans used?

Exactly, said Ms. Duffy’s scrabbling hands.

She thrust the rustling pile at Ms. Hempel. "Can you hold this for me?” she asked, out of breath, then rose up again on her toes.

Ms. Hempel gazed at the pillaged display, felt afraid, and looked frankly down the hallway, in the direction of help. But it didn’t appear as if the authorities would be arriving anytime soon. She wondered briefly why she, of all the young teachers who drank too much at Mooney's, had been chosen by Ms. Duffy for this particular mission. Perhaps it was simply chance. The end of the day, an empty vestibule, a surge of nameless emotion—and then someone emerges, making you not alone anymore. So it had happened, a year ago, with Mr. Polidori. “Out of the blue?” Ms. Hempel had asked Ms. Duffy. "The two of you just—” She could not believe it then; she had wanted more—but now, holding the plundered goods against her chest, it made a sort of sense to her. It was possible to find oneself, without warning or prelude, involved. So she crouched down and tapped the papers against the floor, neatening the pile, making a crisp little sound, wanting above all to avoid the appearance of untowardness, wanting the whole operation to feel as tidy, as considered, as possible.

They agreed, finally, that the best thing to do would be to return the projects to Mr. Chapman’s classroom, with a carefully worded note attached. My room was how Ms. Duffy referred to it, and then she alarmed Ms. Hempel by asking, “You’re going to sign it, too?” No, she was not; but she didn’t have the heart to say so yet, especially now that Ms. Duffy was being seized by some fresh distress. As the fluorescent lights flickered on in the classroom, she looked about her wildly Things were not as she had left them.

There were still the purple beanbags in the reading cor
_ner
the jade plants were thriving, having been faithfully watered by Ms. Cruz. The record player was still there, too, although buried under stacks of handouts, and the Calder mobile still dangled from the ceiling. But the Indonesian shadow puppets were gone, and so were the poems.

“He took down my poems?” Ms. Duffy’s voice was small. She had gone to great lengths to procure them, risking arrest. A few years earlier, the poems began appearing on subways and buses, in the place where advertisements for credit repair and dermatologists had once hung. And as soon as a new poem was posted, Ms. Duffy would devise a plan for obtaining it: scouting out empty subway cars, climbing up onto the scarred seats, easing the poem from its curved plastic sheath, secreting it away beneath her long winter coat. All for the sake of her fifth graders! Every day they could gaze up and contemplate the words. Or not, and therein lay the beauty of osmosis. They passed the year in the company of Whitman and Dickinson, Mark Strand and May Swenson; some of it would penetrate even the most obdurate souls.

Which was probably the thinking of the transit authorities, as well; but the fact that her fifth grades edification came at the expense of the citizenry’s did not seem to give Ms. Duffy pause. And then it became possible to acquire the poems lawfully by sending off a simple request on school letterhead— but Ms. Duffy, like all true teachers, had a renegade spirit, and continued to haunt the buses late at night.

Now, in the place of her stolen poems were boldly colored posters urging the class to read! Also pointing out that reading is fun! That people everywhere should celebrate reading! Additionally, there was a poster commemorating

the Super Bowl win of the Green Bay Packers. All of which it was obvious, had been obtained through official channels.

Ms. Duffy sank down onto one of the many little tables arranged throughout the room. The fifth graders didn’t yet know the isolation of desk-chairs; they still worked company ionably at these low shiny tables. She covered her face with her hands and sighed, her elbows digging into the high mound of her stomach.

“I hope he put them somewhere safe,” she said.

“You want me to send them to you?” Ms. Hempel asked. “No, there’s no room. I just meant in case he changes his mind.”

She glanced over at what had once been her desk, at the piles she was no longer accountable for.

“He has them doing those dumb workbooks?” she asked, but all of her fire from the vestibule was now extinguished.

“Its his first year,” Ms. Hempel said, and laid the ransacked myths on Mr. Chapman’s desk. “He should take whatever shortcuts he can find.”

Ms. Duffy didn't answer. She was still looking around the classroom, at the small ways it was now strange, at the names taped onto the backs of the chairs, names that had no meaning to her.

She said, “I lost Theo McKibben at the Metropolitan Museum. My first year.”

“Theo?” Ms. Hempel laughed. “That’s easy to do.”

“It was a nightmare. My first waking nightmare.”

"The first of many,” said Ms. Hempel. “But just think: You’ll never have to go on a field trip again.”

Ms. Duffy smiled slightly. “Never again.”

And then Ms. Hempel realized with a sickened feeling

that she had forgotten to distribute the permission slips for next week’s outing to the planetarium. Only three days left: not a problem for the organized ones, but it didn’t allow much leeway with the children you always had to hound for everythin g She would have to resort to an incentive plan: Early dismissal? Ice cream?

She paced around the desk mindlessly and saw it as both hopeful and doomed: the careful stacks beginning to slip, colored pens littered everywhere, memos from Mr. Mum-ford protruding at odd angles, the plastic in-box taken over by trading cards, half-eaten candy bars, extra-credit assignments on the verge of being lost.

“You’re brilliant.” She turned to Ms. DufFy. “You are. Because we can't leave to make more money; that’s despicable. And we can’t leave to do something easier, some nice quiet job in an office; that would be so embarrassing! Am I supposed to tell my kids, ‘Okay, I’m off to answer phones at an insurance company’? It’s impossible. So what can we do? We can always ..Ms. Hempel gestured helplessly at Ms. Duffy’s belly. “Why didn't I think of that?”

She had imagined a body cast instead.

Again Ms. DufFy gave a thin smile. It wasn’t clear whether she took Ms. Hempel’s compliment as such.

“So what’s stopping you?” she asked idly. She plucked a long, loose hair from the sleeve of her sweater and dropped it onto Mr. Chapman’s floor. Then suddenly she seemed to remember that she was herself pregnant, and undergoing a remarkable experience. She lit up. “You should do it!" she said with abrupt conviction. “You'll love it. You will.” She stood from the little table and moved warmly toward Ms. Hempel. “We think we have all the time in the world, but in reality we

don’t. And when you find the right person, you just have to go for it. There’s never a good time; it’s never convenient; don’t fool yourself into waiting for the perfect time—”