Ms. Hempel Chronicles (2 page)

My milky thigh curves up to meet my cheek. That was what he had written. The assignment? A Description of Me. And whenever she saw Edward, that epithet sprang immediately to mind. As he toted his didgeridoo off the stage, she imagined the gluteal muscles contracting beneath his jeans. Ms. Hempel

wiggled in her seat; her tights were easing their way off her hips, and she longed to yank them back up. But there was Mr. Roth, his nubby jacket scratching against her arm, and there was Mrs. Pierpont, who would turn to her and grin conspira-torially whenever the kid onstage did something clumsy and childlike. Ms. Hempel’s tights slid farther and farther.

The audience greeted the next performer with shrieks and whistles. It was Mr. Polidori, whom the yearbook had voted the sexiest teacher for three years in a row. This was especially impressive because he taught physics, which was generally considered an unsexy subject, and because he had a reputation for being an inflexible grader. But he wore large collars and shirts made out of synthetic fabrics; his glasses were small and quirky; he grew sideburns. And he also played guitar, a sleek black one, which he now settled into his lap. The shrieking continued. Mr. Polidori raised his eyebrows in mock surprise; he bent down to examine the tuning pegs.

Ms. Hempel did not think that she approved of him. Once, in the faculty lunchroom, he observed that Mr. Peele, their principal, resembled an enormous walking penis. Why become a teacher, she wondered, if you had difficulty with authority figures? Or maybe, it occurred to her, that’s why you did become a teacher. Mr. Polidori went out of his way to test the rules: he wore jeans and Converse sneakers, sauntered in late to faculty meetings. He freely confessed to having cheated a number of times when he was still in high school. Many of her colleagues, in fact, had cheated. Whenever the issue of ethics arose, someone would inevitably ask, “Well, we’ve all done it, haven’t we? Taken a peek at a neighbor’s test? Copied a passage out of an encyclopedia? Borrowed an older brother’s term paper?” But, no, Ms. Hempel had not. Even as a second or third grader, she’d had a keen awareness of intellectual

property. Her sense of herself as a thinker would never have allowed her to pass off someone else’s work as her own; from her first days at school, she felt the importance of her mental endeavors. Her father was the one who had impressed upon her that intellectual labor is the most essential, the most valuable kind of work.

That was what was so sad and difficult about teaching. Taking attendance, enforcing detention, making them love you, always seemed to come first. Often the period would end before any knowledge could be pursued, and as for her own commitment to intellectual inquiry? She was just too tired, most of the time. Mr. Polidori, despite his inappropriateness, stayed until six or seven at night, preparing labs and dreaming up new ways of demonstrating the laws of gravity and motion. By that hour she was sitting before the television, numbly shuffling through her piles of pop quizzes. And besides, he was not wrong about Mr. Peele: his height, his probity, his crest of springy hair.

Mr. Polidori played an introverted style of acoustic guitar with discordant tunings and dense flurries of fingerpicking. Ms. Hempel could feel the admiration in the audience radiating toward him, the girls’ delight at discovering that beneath his sometimes caustic exterior, Mr. Polidori was an accomplished and sensitive musician. And Ms. Hempel admired him as well; he was up there on the stage, and she was sitting on a folding chair in the darkened auditorium.

Dear Cilia Mitsui, who rubbed antibacterial gel on her hands at the beginning and end of every class, had asked that morning, “Why aren’t you performing, Ms. Hempel?” Ms. Hempel was copying a list of transitional adverbs onto the chalkboard. “Me?” she said. “Oh, I couldn’t, Cilia! I no longer have any talents!” And it was true. This time, she wasn’t casting about for compliments. That is what is marvelous about school, she realized: when you are in school, your talents are without number, and your promise is boundless. You ace a math test: you will one day work for NASA. The choir director asks you to sing a solo at the holiday concert: you are the next Mariah Carey. You score a goal, you win a poetry contest, you act in a play. And you are everything at once: actor, astronomer, gymnast, star. But at a certain point, you begin to feel your talents dropping away, like feathers from a molting bird. Cello lessons conflict with soccer practice. There aren’t enough spots on the debating team. Calculus remains elusive. Until one day you realize that you cannot think of a single thing you are wonderful at. “You have talents,” Cilia Mitsui protested, and then paused, considering. "You are an affable teacher!”

Ms. Hempel was moved, but knew that affable, although a vocabulary word, was not synonymous with good. She was not a good teacher, yet teaching had rendered her unfit for everything else: She was not a good friend (she didn’t return phone calls), nor a good lover (a student’s smiling face would suddenly materialize before her, mid-coitus), nor a good citizen (she didn’t have time to read up on the propositions before she went to vote). She had chosen teaching because it seemed to offer both tremendous opportunities for leisure and the satisfaction of doing something generous and worthwhile. Too late she realized her mistake; teaching had invaded her like a mild but inexorable infection; her students now inhabited her dreams, her privacy, her language. She found herself speaking as they did; anything cheap or worn or disappointing was ghetto: I’m so sick of this ghetto answering machine! she would exclaim to her empty apartment. Anything extreme was mad: The food here is mad expensive! she would say,

examining a menu. No doubt she used liberally to indicate her emphatic agreement. Her one comfort was the mutuality of the exchange, for they, without realizing it, had adopted her mannerisms as well. Once she overheard Michael Reggiani refer fondly to Julius Garcia Jonson as irredeemable. Or when Kia Brown was sent back to the end of the lunch line, she said, I’m so cross! But really, victory was theirs; they had taken the castle and hung their flag from the turret; they had corrupted even her impeccable spelling. Ms. Hempel, crowned Grammar Queen of her junior high, now found herself confusing there and their,; and inserting apostrophes where they didn’t belong. It was a war of attrition; even the most egregious mistakes, seen over and over again, can begin to assume the appearance of correctness.

She put e before i. She bought blue nail polish; she felt tenderly toward the same boys whom her girls singled out as crush-worthy. Earlier that day, during after-school detention, Jonathan Hamish had reached out and grabbed her hand. She was teasing him; he wanted to make her stop. Briefly, stickily, his fingers closed over hers, and her heart jumped.

She had given him and Theo McKibben detention because they had traded punches during class; affectionate punches, not malicious ones, but she had already warned them. So she said, amiably, as she always did, “I’ll see you guys after school.” But it turned out that Jonathan and Theo were in far deeper trouble; only the day before they had had an encounter with the police. Joined by some other unmanageable boys, they had harassed the pizza-parlor owner on Seventh Avenue, rattling his garbage cans and pressing their faces against his windows. It was an act of vengeance; he had banished them after they’d showered a booth with Parmesan cheese. But he telephoned the police, and when the cruiser pulled up to the

curb, the boys had already fled, with the exception of Theo, who was trusting and moonfaced and slow.

“Is this true what I hear?” Ms. Hempel asked when the boys showed up to serve their detention, and at first reluctantly, then with increasing gusto, they told her the story, interrupting themselves to insist upon their blamelessness: “We just spilled a little cheese—” “Maybe I bumped into one of the trash cans on the way out—” "Everybody knows that he hates kids—” And they looked so earnest, so indignant, that she couldn’t help but tease them. Ms. Hempel frowned; she pursed her eyebrows; she rolled her eyes. “Sure, sure,” she said. “Wrongfully accused. The two of you would never dream of doing something like that.” It was at that moment Jonathan’s hand shot out and landed upon her own, resting on the desk. “It’s true!” he said, and immediately it disappeared again; the protestations continued. He thought nothing of it, she was sure; it was just another one of those bodily convulsions she so often witnessed—an impulse, a thoughtless intimacy, as when her students, lost in concentration during a test, confused by a question, needing help, would raise their hands and ask her, “Mom?”

Jonathan Hamish was not at the talent show; he wouldn’t be caught dead. He was the toughest, craziest kid in the eighth grade. He would have been expelled already if his mother hadn’t been the French teacher, with dark rings beneath her beautiful eyes and fluffy hair pinned up with a pencil. Ms. Hempel knew a lot about Jonathan even before he became one of her students: his unpredictable violence, his cruelty to the weak and maladjusted. “You can see it in his eyes,” said Mr. Radovich, the sixth-grade math teacher. “He’s not the same as other bad kids.” Jonathan’s eyes were pale blue, with the same charcoal smudges beneath them: he had difficulty sleeping

at night and would gallop up and down the apartment hallways, slapping his palms against the walls. His father played the romantic leads in Noel Coward comedies and was gay. According to his mother, Jonathan was terrified lest anyone should know; he played four different sports and said faggot regularly. But he loved his father and would run up to him proudly, and shyly, whenever Mr. Hamish found time to sit in the bleachers and watch his games.

Jonathan took two different medications three times a day. It was easy to tell when he had missed a dose. His eyes would glitter; he would tip his chair until the front legs rose six inches into the air; his pencil would erupt out of his hand. Ms. Hempel learned that unless she kept him busy at all times, he would needle his neighbors, shout out Homer Simpson impressions, eat sugar packets stolen from the lunchroom, fall back in his chair and crack his skull open. So her questions were frequently directed at him, and she always gave him parts to read in class. It was unfair, she knew; she saw the hands frantically quivering in the air, the look of constipation on her students’ faces. But they understood, and she loved them for it. They confirmed her hunch that children, despite their reputation to the contrary, had great powers of sympathy.

Powers that Jonathan, too, possessed. His heart went out to the characters in the books they read. He loved Lennie, the lumbering and deadly giant, and would flare up whenever a classmate referred to the character as retarded. He also loved Mercutio. “He’s a wiseass, but he’s a good friend,” Jonathan said, and when they watched the movie, he murmured, “Mercutio’s the man" He had no patience, however, for Holden Caulfield. "He’s just a mess,” Jonathan said. “I’m sick of him messing up everything he does. He needs to get his act together.” Jonathan's disgust was such that he made it difficult to continue the discussion. He snorted and interrupted: “He’s a loser! When are we going to be done talking about this stupid book and this stupid guy?” Ms. Hempel was surprised; she had hoped Jonathan would like Holden, might see in him a kindred spirit. How stupid, she realized later, bent over in the faculty bathroom, sobbing, the faucet turned as far as it could go: that is precisely the reason he hates Holden Caulfield.

All the girls loved Jonathan Hamish. They sidled up to Ms. Hempel and whispered, “You know his dad’s gay, right? It’s so sad; he can’t deal with it.” Even at the age of thirteen, they gravitated, these tenderhearted vultures, to the tortured, the afflicted, the misbehaved. They circled around him, wary but ravenous, each hoping that she would be the one who could render him gentle, that he would nuzzle softly in her palm. He was compelling to them in a way that the class jokers and malcontents and spastics could never be; he was bad in some permanent and profound way. What set him apart was his shame; he took no pleasure in his bad behavior. When his classmates gleefully recounted his misdeeds—Jonathan chucked a blueberry bagel at Mr. Kenney’s head! Jonathan got sent out of theater class for the sixteenth week in a row!—he would retract into himself, refusing to look at Ms. Hempel, his face darkening. He never felt the triumph that the other kids believed was his due. Instead, Jonathan seemed wearied by his bad behavior; the struggle that took place within him was daily and exhausting: she could see it, wracking his slight frame, leaving those ashy moons beneath his eyes. Some days he would grip the edge of his desk, his knuckles blanching, as if a fierce and implacable storm were threatening to tear him

away. Ms. Hempel found herself touching his shoulder during class for fear of losing him, and in the hope that the weight of her hand might somehow serve as anchor.

But he was not here at the show. Ms. Hempel’s eyes combed through the rows of faces, though she knew she would not find him.

Harriet now took the stage. Her cape wafted behind her as she guided her little card table into the spotlight. Harriet Reznik, precious artifact of another age! Her thick, swingy helmet of hair, the bangs that looked as if they had been cut with the help of a ruler. Her clanging lunch box. Her indifference to television. Her adventure books, whose child heroes discovered buried treasure and tumbled down waterfalls and toppled tyrannical governments. Her stories of Christmases in Canada, the tangerine peels burning in the fireplace, the giant footprints she left in the field: an experiment with a pair of ancient snowshoes. Her cousin Wilfred, with whom she made trouble and renovated a tree house and took swimming lessons in a very cold lake. Her guinea pigs, her magic tricks. She filled Ms. Hempel with wonder.

Harriet shrugged back the satin folds of her cape and plucked from the front pocket of her jeans a coin, which she held up for the audience to see: “Here before you now is a quarter. A regular, normal, twenty-five-cent quarter.” Ms. Hempel smiled; Harriet Reznik—exuberant soul, mischief maker, jumper up and down—did not like speaking in front of crowds. She kept her eyes fastened on the quarter; she spoke in the breathless, uninflected rush of small children reciting poetry. “Before your very eyes, I will make this quarter disappear." She waved the coin mechanically above her head, as if spraying a room with insect repellent. “Disappear into thin air,” she repeated, and gulped. Her wrist flicked; her hand