Ms. Hempel Chronicles (21 page)

eat that picture in her head. Then again, a certain well-*
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d 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, precisely—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.

"Does this mean I can call you Beatrice now?” Sophie asked, and Beatrice said yes, thus ending the search. The dimpling and disdainful child—the person—was nowhere to be found. This clean young woman was standing in her place.

“Finally! Beatrice. It’s funny, because I always kind of thought we should call you that, and now that I can, it sounds completely strange.”

"You thought of me as a kid?” Beatrice asked, brushing off some bagel crumbs that had found their way to the front of her shirt. "Inexperienced, maybe? Or just lacking authority?"

And as much as it might have sounded like a question she would have asked in her past—-a question frankly in search of assurances or compliments—she was asking it now because she was simply interested, and felt nothing but a cool curiosity, as if she were inquiring about a person quite separate from herself.

“No," said Sophie, "you were like a real teacher. That wasn't why.” She paused to think. °I guess I felt that way because we were close to you.”

Beatrice looked up, stunned by this kindness, but Sophie appeared to have taken no notice of it.

“I don’t know why I even asked. As if I could ever get used to calling you anything but Ms. Hempel. That’s ironic, isn't it? We still think of you as Ms. Hempel and we're almost the same age you were when you started teaching us.”

Could that be possible? Was she really that young? Of course, at the time she had felt washed up, nearly ruined. Her first birthday in the faculty lunchroom: staring dolefully at a little tub of rice pudding and sighing, “I can't believe I’m turning the big two-four,” and Mrs. Willoughby, upon hearing this, hooting with laughter.

“Not quite the same age,” Beatrice said. “In a few more years.”

“Well, close enough. We’ll be there soon. The point is I was over at Jonathan’s and we were all sitting around talking—"

"Jonathan?” Beatrice said. “Jonathan Hamish?”

“I know. Weird. There’s sort of a group of us—Elias, Roderick, Julia Rizzo—how random is that? And Robert Levy. Cohen. He goes by Bob now. Remember how quiet he used to be all the time? Well, it turns out he’s crazy. Completely hilarious...” Sophie smiled to herself, and began drifting once again toward that dark, blank space that Beatrice realized she did not in any way wish to see further illuminated. Whatever they were up to in their newfound adulthood, she did not want to know. The dusky parks, the shifting neighborhoods, the old bedrooms and kitchens, emptied of parents____

She found herself wrapping her cardigan more tightly around her in some sort of feeble precautionary measure. Meanwhile, Sophie made her way back to the bright sidewalk. “You know, when everyone graduated, it was like we couldn't wait to get out of there, to meet actual new people. But then after the first year or so, the first few years, we all started coming home and hanging out again. It's not as pathetic as it sounds. Did you know that his mom got remarried? Jonathan’s. Their place is huge."

When was the last time she had laid eyes on Jonathan Hamish? Years and years ago, as he was being carted away by the police. No, she shouldn’t even think that, not even jokingly. But that was the look he had about him—slouching, defiant, richly amused—as Mr. Peele escorted him back inside the school building. He’d been causing trouble in the courtyard.

Eighth period, American history. Whap! Whap! The sharp sound of cracking, of something possibly being broken. Ms. Hempel wheeled around from the blackboard and glared. “Brad .. she said ominously, and the boy held up his hands with the indignation of someone who for the first time in his life has been wrongly accused. The class was gazing at the window, the one next to the dusty air conditioner, and Lila put down her pencil and pointed. “It’s coining from out there."

Ms. Hempel went to investigate. Whap! She flinched. The window shuddered. Down in the courtyard, the varsity track team were milling about as they waited to board the school bus, fuming at the curb, that would deliver them to some faraway campus for their meet. Draped in their glossy warm-up suits, the boys loped elegantly about the yard, their long bodies leaning to one side, weighted down by their voluminous gym bags. Some were pulling cans from the soda machine, others stretching themselves across the steps. Occupied and blameless, as far as she could tell. Then, whap! A face squinted up at her from below. A hand hung suspended in the air.

She slid the glass open. “Jonathan?”

He gave her a lopsided smile. “Hi.”

“Enough with the window-breaking," she said. “We’re trying to do manifest destiny up here."

He looked at her blankly, iff “Cut it out, okay? It’s dangerous." She was too far away to see what was happening in his eyes. “Okay?”

She drew back into the room and tugged down the sash. No sooner had she closed it: Whap! The class, hunched forward in their desk-chairs, ecstatic with the distraction, let out a breathless little laugh. Whap!

“Jonathan,” she sighed, and reopened the window.

She saw that he had an endless supply: the pool of gray pebbles out of which a sad, spindly tree had been trying for ages to grow. Jonathan’s one hand was cupped, heavy with ammunition, while his other hand had found the deep pocket of his tracksuit. *

She gazed down at him. “What.”

“Is it true that you’re leaving?”

“Are you serious?”

He shrugged. "I was wondering. I just wanted to know.”

“And it couldn’t wait."

“So it’s true, then. You’re leaving.” With a softly spilling sound, he released his handful of pebbles back into their small enclosure. Then he glanced up, as if struck by a sudden thought. “You shouldn’t leave, he said.

“I’m going back to school.”

“School?” he asked, incredulous. “What for?"

“I’m not going to yell it out the window!” She could hear the happiness in her own voice. “Couldn’t you have asked me in the hallway? Or some other place where people have

conversations?”

But he wasn’t even looking at her anymore. His attention had already roamed elsewhere, and here she was leaning halfway out the window, hollering. She straightened at once, hands back on the sash, and as she declared, “I’m trying to teach right now,” she saw the mass of bodies in the courtyard part neatly along the middle, and Mr. Peele come bearing down on him.

He would be missing his meet that afternoon. And if he was still anything like he used to be in the eighth grade, she knew this was the one punishment that devastated him. Absurdly, she felt the fault was hers. And though she was certain there must have been other sightings before the year ended, this was the last time she could actually remember seeing him—his brave, shuffling walk up the steps in the shadow of tall Mr. Peele.

“So the man his mom married,” Sophie continued, “makes bank. He started a company and then he sold it. Technically I should call him Jonathan's stepdad, but seeing that he came kind of late into the picture, it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of parenting left to be done. So we just call him Jeff. Or sometimes Jrfe, but really only Bob calls him that." Beatrice felt grateful as she half listened to Sophie’s sweet and inscrutable chatter, grateful that Sophie was the stranger she happened to be following from the station, and not another child, not Jonathan. “Jeffs very interested in technology," said Sophie, “and he subscribes to all of those magazines, and they’ve turned the whole garden level into—his word—a media center. It’s completely gorgeous. It’s like being inside a movie theater. But he won’t let you go down there holding even so much as a soda. Can you believe that? It’s criminal: an entire media center gone to waste. So we’re stuck up in Jonathans room, everybody trying to fit on his bed, and there’s nothing to do except watch the guys play Grand Theft Auto on the little beat-up TV that used to be in his old house."