This Place Has No Atmosphere (15 page)

Text copyright © 1974 by Paula Danziger

I
hate my father. I hate school. I hate being fat. I hate the principal because he wanted to fire Ms. Finney, my English teacher.

My name is Marcy Lewis. I’m thirteen years old and in the ninth grade at Dwight D. Eisenhower Junior High.

All my life I’ve thought that I looked like a baby blimp with wire-frame glasses and mousy brown hair. Everyone always said that I’d grow out of it,
but I was convinced that I’d become an adolescent blimp with wire-frame glasses, mousy brown hair, and acne.

My life is not easy. I know I’m not poor. Nobody beats me. I have clothes to wear, my own room, a stereo, a TV, and a push-button phone. Sometimes I feel guilty being so miserable, but middle-class kids have problems too.

Mom always made me go to tap and ballet lessons. She said that they’d make me more graceful. When it came time for the recital, I accidentally sat on the record that I was supposed to dance to, and broke it. I had to hum along with the tap dancing. I sing as badly as I dance. It was a disaster.

Father says that girl children should be born at the age of eighteen and married off immediately.

Stuart, my four-year-old brother, wants to be my best friend so that I can help him put orange pits in a hole in his teddy bear’s head.

I’m flat-chested. I used to buy training bras and put tucks in them.

I never had any friends, except Nancy Sheridan. She’s very popular, but her mother and mine are PTA officers and old friends, so I always figured that
Mrs. Sheridan made her talk to me—Beauty and the Blimp.

School is a bummer. The only creative writing I could do was anonymous letters to the Student Council suggestion box. Lunches are lousy. We never get past the First World War in history class. We never learned anything good, at least not till Ms. Finney came along.

So my life is not easy.

The thing with Ms. Finney is what I want to talk about. She took over for Mr. Edwards, our first English teacher. He left after the first month. One rumor is that he had a nervous breakdown in the faculty lounge while correcting a test on noun clauses. Another is that he had to go to a home for unwed fathers in Secaucus, New Jersey. I personally think that he realized that he was a horrible teacher, so he took a job somewhere as a principal or a guidance counselor.

When Mr. Edwards left, we got a whole bunch of substitutes. None of them lasted more than two days. That’ll teach the school to group all the smart kids in one class. We were indestructible.

The entire class dropped books, pencils, and pens
at an assigned time. Someone put bubble gum in the pencil sharpener. Nancy pulled her fainting act. We made up names and wrote them on the attendance list. All the desks got turned around. Mr. Stone, the principal, kept coming in and yelling.

And then Ms. Finney came.

C
eleste Sanders was the first to spread the news.

“Hey, we got a new English teacher. A real one, not a sub. First-period class says she looks like a kid.”

“A new one. Let’s walk in backwards.”

“Everyone give a wrong name.”

“Let’s show her who’s boss.”

Everybody rushed down the halls and into class. Some of the guys started to make and throw paper airplanes. Alan Smith played “Clementine” on his
harmonica. He’d learned it from the instructions on a Good and Plenty box. Jim Heston played the Good and Plenty box, and Ted Martin played a comb. There was applause and cheering after the performance. At 1:15 the coughing started. A few kids didn’t do anything, but I did. I really didn’t like what was happening, but if you’re a blimp with fears of impending acne, you go along with the crowd.

Ms. Finney just sat there. She was young and wore a long denim skirt, a turtleneck jersey and had on weird jewelry—giant earrings that hung down to her shoulders, and a macrame necklace. She didn’t smile or yell or cry or read a paper or do any of the things that teachers normally do when a class gets out of hand. She just sat there and looked at everybody.

Finally it got quiet. Everyone started to squirm. It was really creepy after a while.

“O.K. Give her a chance,” someone muttered.

We all looked around to see who was talking. It was Joel Anderson, the smartest kid in the class. When almost everybody else would be fooling around, he would sit there reading a book. Some of the kids thought he was a little weird, but everybody usually listened to him.

He put his book down, looked at Ms. Finney, and said, “Are you going to teach us anything?”

Somebody giggled.

The class got very quiet.

I looked at Joel and thought how brave and smart and cute he was. We’d been in the same classes since kindergarten, but I hadn’t said more to him than “Hi” and “What’s the homework assignment?” I didn’t like to embarrass anyone by having them be seen talking to me.

Ms. Finney stood up, looked at the class, smiled, turned to the blackboard, picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote:

“Ms. Barbara Finney.”

Turning around again, she smiled and said, “That’s my name. I’m your new English teacher, and I hope this year is going to be a good one for all of us.”

I thought about that. First of all, she’d written “Ms.” Was she just trying to be sharp, or was she really into it? And she’d written her first name. Teachers never do that. They never admit to having first names. They’re always Miss or Mr. or Mrs., hardly ever Ms., and never with first names. It’s supposed to be a big mystery, like do teachers really
have to go to the bathroom or do anything but teach and go to meetings?

She spoke again.

“I decided to be an English teacher because I care about people communicating with people. That’s why I’m here. I want to do it and help you all to do it too, as effectively as possible. A poet named Theodore Roethke once said, ‘Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.’ Please, let’s try to move among mysteries together.”

The class looked at her and at one another.

Alan Smith laughed and said, “What is this gonna be, a class of detectives?”

Ms. Finney looked at him without smiling. But she didn’t yell, either.

“I know that this may all seem a little strange to you now. Maybe it won’t work, but let’s try. Take out a piece of paper, and for the rest of the period think about communication and write about what it means to you.”

We all took out paper. I stared at mine and then snuck looks at Ms. Finney. She was young and pretty and seemed nice. She sounded smart. She was different, but I wasn’t sure how, and I didn’t know if I could trust her. I mean, she was a teacher, and an adult.

During one of my looks, she stared right at me and smiled. I lowered my head and pretended to be writing. Dumb teacher. Who did she think she was? What does a blimp know about communication? How could she know what it feels like to be so fat and ugly that you’re ashamed to get into a gymsuit or talk to skinny people? Who wants to say, “This is my friend, the Blimp”?

Class was almost over, and I still hadn’t written anything. I stared at my paper again and began:

The bell rang. Grabbing my books, I rushed up to the front and put my paper face down on the desk. No one else was going to see what I wrote or drew.

Going to gym class, I overheard some of the kids talking about Ms. Finney.

“She seems O.K.”

“Weird.”

“I like her.”

“She’s a creep, like the rest of ’em.”

In the locker room all the girls rushed to get dressed, except for me. I sat on a bench.

Nancy came over and said, “Marcy, not again! You’ll flunk.”

I just sat there. Trying to change into a gymsuit while hiding my mini bra and fat body would have been a gymnastic feat in itself.

Once the class started, I walked up to the gym teacher, Schmidt.

“All right, Lewis. What is it this time?”

“The cat ate my gymsuit.”

She shook her head, frowned, and wrote another zero in her marking book.

I sat down to watch my eighty-millionth volleyball game.