by Peggy Rowe
I had blown my big opportunity to impress Miss Blevins the day she sent me on an errand outside of the school. I had never before been singled out for such an honor and felt dizzy at the prospect of escaping the smothering classroom. The kind of attention I usually received was for daydreaming and not finishing my classwork.
“Peggy,” she said, “how would you like to run an important errand for me? There’s a mailbox down on the corner outside of the post office. You can buy me a stamp, then mail this letter.”
A half-hour later, mission accomplished, I returned to the school. “Here you are,” I said, handing my teacher the stamp she had asked me to buy. “And I mailed your letter.”
In my defense, she never actually told me to put the stamp on the envelope. “What!?” she yelled, looking at me like I was something she had scraped off her shoe. That was my first and last errand for her.
By the end of October, it was painfully evident that Miss Blevins was no Miss Milton, and it was a cruel twist of fate that had landed me in her class. Not only did she give just as much work as other teachers, her methods bordered on sadistic. When she spoke, every eye had better be focused on her action-packed face, or else. If there was a joke, it was always at the expense of one of her subjects, usually some clueless boy. Old Twitchy Bat (my affectionate name for her, though I never voiced it aloud, especially at home) had no use for boys. If someone didn’t complete a homework assignment, for instance, she would place him in front of the class and perform a stand-up routine for her captive audience.
“And just how did you spend your time last night, instead of doing homework, Mr. Dunce? Judging from the dirt behind your ears, I’d say you weren’t taking a bath. Judging from the wrinkles in your shirt, I doubt that you were ironing.”
Two girls in our class enjoyed most favored students status. “Teacher’s pets,” we called them. They had the privilege of grading papers and running errands while the rest of us were chained to our desks. From time to time, Miss Blevins would exchange looks with the girls as though they were privy to some inside joke.
Ruthie and Gloria were on duty whenever Old Twitchy Bat took a break, presumably to hang by her heels in a darkened cloakroom. With an excess of self-confidence, they stood at the front of the room rolling chalk between their palms while their beady eyes darted around the room in search of some minor rule infraction—like breathing or blinking. If your name appeared in the dreaded box in the corner of the blackboard, you could kiss recess goodbye. I had to be extra careful, as the two toadies were my favorite targets in Greek dodgeball and delighted in keeping my wicked arm off the playground.
At the other end of the spectrum were the unfortunate victims Miss Blevins tortured for amusement. When she blinked her eyes rapidly while jutting her jaw forward and pressing her lips together in a cruel grin, some poor sucker was headed for the trash can for sure. Once wedged inside, he sat bent like a pretzel with his feet dangling over the side, and his knees poking his chin. The trash can was Miss Blevins’s version of the stocks I had seen on a family visit to Williamsburg, Virginia, the previous summer. (One of the educational vacations my mother preferred over a trip to the ocean or an amusement park.) Lawbreaking colonists who were put into the stocks were subjected to ridicule and abuse from the decent, law-abiding citizens. The trash can punishment was rarely meted out in anger, more so for its entertainment value. If the can was already occupied when you misbehaved, or if you were too chubby, you were relegated to solitary beneath the tyrant’s desk beside her chunky calves until you learned your lesson.
I had stupidly complained about her brutal tactics at dinner one evening. Big mistake!
“I didn’t have Miss Blevins,” said Janet, now a sophisticated high-school freshman, “but I heard stories about her.” Dad gave me a sympathetic look, but naturally, my mother missed the point entirely, and treated me to a flash of anger.
“I’d better never hear that your behavior resulted in a trip to that trash can, young lady!”
Of course, I joined my classmates in laughing at our teacher’s shenanigans, relieved not to be the one in her crosshairs. It was a diversion from classwork, after all. Until that fateful Friday afternoon in late April when I became her target.
I was sitting in class, scarcely breathing and avoiding eye contact with the snitch du jour, when Miss Blevins appeared in the doorway with the teacher from next door.
She was itching for a fight, and seeing that the box in the corner of the blackboard was empty, unleashed her fury.
“This class has been a colossal disappointment this year!” she told the other teacher.
Without warning, she picked up a blackboard eraser and hurled it with uncanny accuracy at Teddy Zimmer’s head. As the laughter subsided, she turned her piercing gaze on me, the way lions at the zoo stare at a piece of meat at feeding time. I expected an eraser to come hurling through the air at any minute and was toying with the idea of throwing it back at her—until I envisioned my disapproving mother coming into the office for a conference. Suddenly I heard my name.
“Take Peggy Knobel, for example. She used to be a nice little girl. Stand up, Peggy, so Miss Price can see what a lazy student looks like.”
“I taught her sister. She was a model scholar,” said the teacher from next door, making little tsk, tsk sounds and shaking her head as though I had set fire to the flag in the corner of the classroom.
The tyrant’s face was twitching at warp speed like jet engines revving up before takeoff. Tears stung my eyes as classmates stared. Gloria leaned across the aisle and whispered loudly, “Miss Blevins told you to stand up!”
There was a red mark on her upper arm from my accurate throw in Greek Dodge at recess, and, if my situation hadn’t been so dire, I might have pointed it out to her.
“Yeah!” Ruthie chimed in.
That’s when something snapped, and my inner rebel exploded big time. Clenching my fists and gritting my teeth, I jumped up and raced for the door, wondering briefly if my dormant potential had awakened. Probably not what my mother had in mind.
Just like the Red Sea had parted before Moses, the two educators jumped aside as I flew through the doorway and down the steps. The tyrant’s furious voice echoed in the stairwell.
“Peggy Knobel, where do you think you’re going? You come back here, young lady! Did you hear?” The heavy door slammed behind me.
I dashed blindly across the playground and through the Greek dodgeball court where I had been the hero at recess. At the end of the driveway, I slowed down and summoned the courage to look back, fearful of seeing big blue-gray hair and a purple dress in hot pursuit, her thick thighs rubbing together like a cricket’s legs. The coast was clear, and my adrenaline was still pumping when I turned onto Fullerton Avenue and proceeded to the corner of Linhigh Avenue.
I jumped the white picket fence beside the store owned by the Bakers and came to a screeching halt. What in the world was I doing?! I was taking my usual route home. The home where my mother was ironing and listening to her favorite radio show, Life Can Be Beautiful. What would I tell her? “The teacher goddess called me lazy!?” I looked back towards the school, then towards Leslie Avenue, trying to think. I could say that I was sick. But eventually, the phone would ring.
To my right, at the end of the block, was our church. Huh!
Where was God now? Religion was so overrated!
Shoulders slumped, I turned around and retraced my steps, wondering if the day would ever come when I didn’t care about my mother’s disapproval.
Minutes later I entered the side door of Fullerton School praying that the call had not been made. I took the longer route to my room, down the first-floor hallway past the library.
Miss Milton smiled at me and waved through the open door, unaware that she was giving comfort to a fugitive. The cheerful afternoon sunlight poured through the long windows behind her, making a halo around her head and shining onto a pot of yellow spring daisies on her desk.
I tore myself
away from the peaceful scene and crept down the dark, dismal hallway, tiptoeing past the faculty room. At that very moment, the door to the principal’s office swung wide, and I stood face to face with none other than Old Twitchy Bat.
She looked at me for a second, then called over her shoulder, “She’s back!” Her eyes were little slits when she turned back to me. “Mr. Rush wants to see you—now!” Her words were spewed with enough venom to wither an entire field of yellow spring daisies. Her expression hinted that if I survived my visit with the principal, she would see to it that I’d be bypassing the trash can and proceeding directly to the incinerator.
I’d never met our principal personally, but his crewcut and bow tie made him seem less menacing than he probably would have liked. I can picture it like a photograph, frozen in time and, seventy years later, still in focus. I see that aggrieved tyrant perched stiffly on the edge of her chair as though rigor mortis had set in and the boy-principal leaning against the corner of his desk. The thought of my mother walking through the office door was enough to give me the dry heaves, and I slapped my hand over my mouth.
“Your teacher tells me you left school without permission, Peggy. We were worried. Where have you been?”
The smell of coffee filled the small room and, while that might not sound like a good thing for the dry heaves, it reminded me of my father—my kind, nonjudgmental father. Compared to his own exploits at this very school, my discretion was akin to burping aloud during the Sunday sermon. When he was my age, Dad had been suspended for smoking in the outhouse. Instead of giving his parents the principal’s note, he’d hidden out at a nearby stream for three days during school, uncovering a clandestine moonshine operation in the woods. I treasured his Tom Sawyer like adventures and begged to hear them over and over when we were alone. Tales of disobedience were not the sort of stories my mother enjoyed.
“Well?” the boy-principal asked, folding his arms and trying to look intimidating. He could have taken lessons from my mother.
“I went home,” I said, looking up at him. “That is, I started for home.”
They were hanging on my every word, as though I were a famous orator and they’d bought a ticket to my performance.
“I came back because . . .” I shrugged. Miss Blevins blew her nose, putting on a show of concern for me, and in a stroke of genius I blurted, “because I knew you’d be worried.”
Mr. Rush’s face softened as he placed his hand on a folder on his desk. “I took a few minutes to look over your records. You’ve never done anything like this before. What happened today, Peggy?” He sounded like my father, and I sensed an ally—as though Miss Blevins was the one in trouble.
The sound of clicking typewriter keys came from the adjoining office, filling the silence.
“Your teacher and I are waiting. What happened today?”
Taking a page from my teacher’s playbook, I sniffed and blinked and my voice might have quivered the tiniest bit. “M-miss Blevins knows why I left.”
Playing her part to the hilt, the old bat looked at me, bewildered and innocent, and shook her head. I was rotten to the core, of course, but Miss Blevins was no teacher of the year herself. I had no choice but to throw her under the school bus.
“You told Miss Price I was lazy and not nice and ordered me to stand up so everybody could make fun of me.” I shrugged. “I-I didn’t want to sit in the trash can . . . or . . . or on the floor under your desk.”
My teacher seemed to shrink in size, pressed her lips together, and reached for another tissue.
“What you did was dangerous, Peggy, and against school rules!” said Mr. Rush. “You are never to leave this school again without permission! Is that understood?”
“Yes sir.”
“Ordinarily, I would invite your parents in for a conference, but if you give me your word that this will never happen again, that won’t be necessary.”
“Yes sir. Uh, no sir.”
“We’ll just keep this between us then.” He looked at the clock and jotted a message on a notepad the way a doctor does when he’s finished with you.
“Dismissal is in an hour. You can help Miss Milton in the library while I have a chat with your teacher. Give her this note, and we’ll all have a fresh start on Monday morning. I’m sure you’ve learned a valuable lesson today.”
I headed for my punishment, being careful not to skip until the door closed behind me. I had learned a lesson that day—teachers weren’t perfect. Not that I could tell that to my mother.
I suspected that I wasn’t the only one to learn a lesson, as trash cans were used solely for trash after that day, and the space beneath Miss Blevins’s desk was reserved for her pudgy legs alone. I became the invisible student, all-but-ignored by my teacher, who was busy checking off the days until her retirement.
Ahead of Her Time
When I was a little girl, most of my friends’ mothers didn’t even know how to drive a car. And those who did drove only as far as the grocery store or to church. Sometimes on a rainy day, my friend Laverne’s mother would take “the machine,” as she called it, out of the garage and drive us the half-mile to Fullerton School. It was a big deal! That’s what made a trip I took with my mom in 1948 so remarkable.
Grandma could cry at the drop of a hat, as Dad once put it. She would have made a wonderful actress, as they have to cry a lot. Grandma could even cry when she was laughing—kind of a half-cry, half-laugh. And “cry” is exactly what she did whenever the topic of Aunt Cornelia in far-off Nebraska came up.
It made my mother sad, too, so when I was ten years old, she did something unheard of for a woman of that time.
She put my grandmother, my sister, and me in our old jalopy and drove 1,000 miles—halfway across the country to Omaha, Nebraska—without a man.
Before we left, my father went over our car, Old Bessie, with a fine-tooth comb and pronounced her roadworthy. Mom left Dad enough meals to feed “our whole congregation” while we were gone.
Janet sat on the front seat beside our mother with a big map spread across her lap, while I sat on the backseat beside Grandma Daisy. I kept my eyes peeled for cowboys and wild horses as we crept westward through dozens of small towns that all looked the same. There were no golden arches or smartphones in 1948. We shopped at grocery stores and treated ourselves to the occasional gourmet meal at Woolworth lunch counters. After lunch we gave Mom back massages, and sometimes she took a short nap. We stopped driving well before dark and spent nights in tourist homes where I saw endless fields of corn and wheat in my sleep. Mom called Dad every night on pay phones.
Seatbelts, like efficient interstate highways and budget motels, were things of the future. The afternoon Mom drove onto a deeply rutted shoulder, my head hit the roof and Grandma bounced off the back seat onto the floor. When the car came to a stop, we all giggled, and my grandmother launched into a story about the day her father’s horse bolted and she and her brother, Malcolm, were thrown to the carriage floor.
On the fourth day, we arrived in Omaha. Grandma, Mom, and Aunt Cornelia—Aunt Nealie to us—talked and laughed nonstop while Janet and I got acquainted with our two-year-old cousin. There were games and puzzles and drives to my uncle’s family farm, which had corn and wheat and big farm machinery, but not a single horse. As planned, a week into our visit, my father took a train to Omaha to reclaim his family. My mother was so giddy you’d have thought she was sixteen and getting ready for her first date. As we left the house for the train station to pick Dad up, she paused at the door, looked in the mirror, and shook her head.
“Carl has seen me in this old thing a hundred times.”
Aunt Nealie laughed.
“Thelma, Carl would think you were beautiful if you were wearing a burlap bag.” She took Mom into her bedroom and gave her a brand-new blouse that she had never worn. Imagine, an old woman of thirty-five caring how she looked to the man she’d been married to for fifteen years.
On the way home, Grandma sat on the back seat b
etween Janet and me while Dad and Mom sat close together up front and talked and giggled all flirty-like. Friends couldn’t believe that my mother had driven halfway across the United States without a man. Her family wasn’t surprised at all.
I couldn’t believe that we had driven halfway across the United States without seeing one horse.
The Christmas Conspiracy
In our house, Christmas revolved around three people: Jesus, Santa Claus, and my mother—not necessarily in that order. Mom loved Christmas. All of it. At no other season of the year were her micro-managing skills more in evidence. She presided over Christmas the way a teacher presides over her classroom—planning, giving assignments, and supervising.
“Now, girls, remember, we place one icicle at a time very carefully over the branch, like this! Not two, not three, but one.”
“We’ll never finish that way!” we protested. “Look, it says there are one thousand icicles in the box. Why can’t we just throw a handful?” I asked that question every year, even though I knew the answer.
“Absolutely not! One at a time, just so. It looks neater that way.”
“Christmas morning will be here, and we’ll still be hanging icicles!” I complained to no avail.
Dad strung the outdoor lights—under supervision, of course. Mom wasn’t about to leave anything to chance.