Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  “Oh my gosh, yes!” I said. “Next sentence. A person who bleeps from one place to another is called a bloop.” I wrote migrant and showed them how to tack on the prefix by doubling the m, for immigrant. “Okay, number seven! A city or town is sometimes called a blooping area.”

  “Rural area!”

  “Urban area!”

  “Urban area,” I said. “A less populated village is sometimes called a—?”

  “Rural?” said Jack.

  “Rural area.” I read the next question. “Uh-oh,” I said, “here’s one I don’t know the answer to. I’m panicking, I’m panicking. Many people move—”

  Two chair legs crashed together. I stopped.

  “I didn’t do that,” said Dennis.

  “You know, sudden loud noises are so unhappy-making, don’t you think?”

  Dennis made a fake sad face, and I had to laugh. Sixth-graders were great. Nobody was beating anybody up. Nobody was going to juvie. Male hormones were only just barely beginning to do their nefarious work. I went back to the question, misreading it. “Many small people. No, many big people. Many people move from small towns to cities. This movement is called—”

  “My—gray—tion,” said Missy in a bored singsong voice.

  “Urbanization,” said Amelia.

  I pointed to her. “You got it. It’s called urbanization!”

  “No way!” said Dennis.

  “Yep, urbanization,” I said. “Have you discovered the secret about school?”

  “You learn?” said Jack.

  “They want you to learn big abstract words, like urbanization.”

  “I don’t want to learn big words,” said Missy.

  “What do we do when we’re done?” said Lexie. “I wish we had a class where we learned everything about an animal.”

  “That’s a nice idea,” I said. “All right, in the last five minutes of intense and focused effort, you have to fill in words in column one and column two, one of these worksheety things that drive us all nuts. Column one. A person who moves to a new country in order to settle there is—? Is he an urban area? No. Is he an immigrant?” I made a bugle sound.

  Pencils waggling, writing down immigrant.

  I circulated, checking answers. “I see words forming on the page,” I said.

  Gus was having trouble with question 6. Stepping backward to get to the front of the room, I kicked Marisa in the ankle by mistake. “Oh, gosh darn it, what happened? Sudden catastrophe. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” said Marisa.

  “A question HAS BEEN RAISED,” I said. “In the final seconds of our time together, a question has been raised about question six. Which of the following is an economic reason why people migrate? Tricky! Economic has to do with money. The answers are They don’t like the government, they can’t find work, they’re fleeing a war, they’re persecuted for their religion. Which one has to do with how much money they make?”

  “B!”

  “B. Does everyone agree? B?”

  Question 9, about migration to Southern and Southwestern states, also confused people. I said, “Number nine, question about number nye-hyne!” Did they go to the South and Southwest to find better transportation, to find better schools, or was it C, to find better jobs and a warmer climate?

  “I think it’s C,” said Dennis.

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “The South is generally warmer. Of course, in Florida you have flying cockroaches, so that’s not so good. Seriously. They’re big.”

  Lexie raised her hand. “I went on a sleepover at my friend’s, and it was her birthday, and we were outside—and there was this cockroach that was in their trunk, that they had transported from Florida? It jumped on me, and I screamed and I broke it in half, and the bottom half was walking this way, and the other half was walking this way. After that, a moose came over.”

  “And that is life in Maine,” I said. Everyone launched at once into their own moose-encounter stories.

  “OKAY, FRIENDLY PEOPLE. Pass in your textbooks, pass in your worksheets.” It was time for them to go. Or no, it wasn’t. Class ended at 8:35, said Amelia, not 8:30.

  “Shhhhhhh!” said Gus.

  “What should we do?” I asked.

  “Maybe we can share something we did on the weekend,” Lexie suggested.

  “Ah!” I clapped once. “We’re going to do an interesting unit right now on what I did over the weekend.”

  “I don’t want to talk about food,” said Amelia.

  Rafe was up and thrashing. “GUYS! NO! SIT! SIT IN THE CHAIR! IN THE CHAIR. Physically in the chair. Physically in the chair. Physically in the chair. Very good. You are going to lead off with what you did this weekend. Listen.”

  “Uh,” said Rafe. “I had my friends over.”

  “Wooo,” said several girls.

  “For a rave party,” said Rafe.

  “Okay, he had a rave party this weekend.” I pointed to Shawn, in a blue polo shirt.

  “I went fishing,” said Shawn, “caught nothing, and lost my favorite lure.”

  Brady’s hand. “I went to my little cousin’s birthday, and they got him a dirt bike, and I was jealous, but I got to ride it.”

  Livia said, “Yesterday I went to the fairgrounds, and they were doing ATV racing. There were four-year-olds racing, and my grandfather raced.”

  Marisa said, “I had a dance competition and I won first prize.”

  “Congratulations!”

  Missy said, “Okay! Outside I did twelve hours of softball. I did two games, three practices, and then I had a softball reunion. And my friend Sally slept over that day, too.”

  Lexie’s hand went up, and she told the class the story of her dog’s tongue freezing to the doorstep. “We had to kind of pull her off of it, and it was bleeding, and we got it wrapped up. That was like five in the morning. I went back to bed and I woke up at nine, and I worked at my riding place till twelve.”

  “Good. The tongue is okay, the dog is okay, guys, you’ve got to go, thank you all!”

  Lexie continued her story as everyone left. “We call her Munch but her name is Tara. We call her Munch because she’ll eat everything. She had a pyometra, an infection in the uterus, because she never had babies and we never got it removed, and even though she had an infection and couldn’t eat, she still wanted everything. Everything, she’d eat.” She walked to the door. “She even ate a stick!” She was gone.

  —

  WHEN I EMERGED FROM the teachers’ bathroom, Mrs. Ricker stopped to say that there were some snack options in the teachers’ lunchroom. “We have leftover chips and water bottles. Help yourself.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Absolutely,” said Mrs. Ricker. “We just ask that you eat it in the lunchroom because of the kids who have allergies.”

  Several cartons of snack-sized bags of potato chips sat on a side table in the lunchroom. There was nobody there. The copier was busily copying and stapling an assessment packet all by itself. The phone rang. I answered it. Nobody there. I hung up. Nothing like potato chips in the morning. I read an ad from Progressions Behavioral Health Services tacked to the corkboard: tutors were needed to help kids with developmental problems for twenty hours a week. The pay was ten to twelve dollars an hour. “We will train the right person,” it said. A high school diploma or GED was required. I called my wife and told her about the push-pull theory of immigration, and then I went out to the drinking fountain and had a long drink of cold water. “Oh, yeah,” I said. Back in class, I read more of the textbook. Many minutes passed. Eventually I heard lockers banging in the hall.

  Roxanne came in with a boy. “That’s Mr. Baker, our substitute teacher,” she said.

  “Hi,” said the boy, whose name was Lester.

  “We had a very lovely conversation with him this morning,” said
Roxanne.

  I said to Lester, “Are you good at passing out textbooks?” Turned out he was. I took attendance. Hattie, here, Noelle, here, Jarrett, here, Cathleen, here, Foster, here, Jake, here, Sandy, here, Margo, here, Brett, here, Marylou. Marylou?

  “I like to be called Lou.”

  “Lou. Are you here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Roxanne, here. Kimbra, here. Jarrod, here. Haskel, here. Noah, here. Trent, here. Dean, here. Robert, here. Barbara, here. Andre, here. Lisa, here. Jerald. Jerald?

  “He’s absent.”

  “Oh, no, and I made a checkmark,” I said. “What am I going to do?” I signed the form. “Anyone want to take this—”

  Five hands up.

  “I’m just going to go to the one closest.”

  “Aw, you walked past some people,” said Sandy.

  “Well, they weren’t in front of me,” I said, “but they were very well-intentioned people, and I really appreciate the enthusiasm. MIGRATION!”

  “Vibration,” said Noelle.

  “That’s what butterflies do,” said Estelle.

  I gave a little speech about how I liked talking and conversation, but not all at once, and loud sudden noises and explosions of merriment weren’t allowed. “Everybody’s got to get frowning and serious,” I said. “Page sixty-four. Six four! Sixty-four. What is migration?”

  Barbara, in a sweatshirt that said “Established 1987,” said, “I don’t know the exact definition, but when it’s cold in one area, they move to a warm area.”

  “That’s exactly right,” I said. “Birds migrate. Butterflies migrate. Every year. When people migrate, it’s a different thing. Say you were in a country that was ravaged by war. There’s mud, broken vehicles everywhere, little fires. And you said, This is ridiculous. I don’t want to have my family here anymore. You get on a boat, or you hike across a mountain, and you migrate somewhere. To escape something. And you might not do that every year, because you wouldn’t want to go back. So let’s read this chapter. Is that what you guys do sometimes? You sit and read it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you sing it?”

  “No.”

  “We do not sing it!” said Cathleen.

  “Do you chant it?” I read the first line of the chapter in a hip-hop rhythm. Silence. “Okay, I’ll start it off and then we can see how it goes,” I said. “Roberto Goizueta was the former head of Coca-Cola, one of the largest companies in the world. Yet when he came to the United States from Cuba, in 1960, he had nothing. This is how he described his escape from Cuba. ‘When my family and I came to this country, we had to leave everything behind. Our photographs hung on the wall. Our wedding gifts sat on the shelves.’ Was anyone born in a different country?”

  No hands.

  “Was anyone born in Massachusetts?”

  “I was born in Boston,” said Jarrett.

  Lester raised his hand.

  “Where were you born?”

  “Boston.”

  “Anybody else born in another state than Maine?”

  Andre said, “Philadelphia.”

  “So why did your parents decide, ‘We’re done with Philadelphia, we want to migrate to Maine’?”

  “They were sick of the crime,” said Andre.

  “They were sick of the crime! We’re going to learn about something called ‘push-pull migration.’ Some people are pushed away from a place because they’re sick to death of, say, the crime, or the hunger, whatever it is. Some people are pulled to a place. Okay, who wants to read? Who’s got a large melodic speaking voice?”

  Sandy read: “From 1881 to 1920, almost twenty-three point five million Europeans moved to the United States. Since 1971, nearly seven thousand people migrated here from the country of—Vitnim.”

  “Vietnam.”

  “Vietnam,” said Sandy. “Over nine hundred ninety-five thousand came from Central America. And over four point two million came from Mexico. More than two point four million immigrants came from the Caribbean Islands.”

  “Great,” I said. “So we’ve got this globe, and it’s sort of like waves are flowing over the planet. Why would four point two million people—that’s a lot of people—leave Mexico and come to the United States?”

  Sandy said, “I went to Mexico. It’s because the water in Mexico is not very good. They don’t filter their water. So you have to buy bottled water.”

  “Well, okay, when Americans go down to Mexico they get what’s called Montezuma’s Revenge. Serious digestive troubles. I mean serious troubles. So that’s one thing. But what’s happening in Mexico is it’s poor, and people have no way to make money. So they sneak across the border, and they come to the United States and they work, say, at a hotel, cleaning hotel rooms. Or maybe they drive a cab. Gradually things go better for them, and they find a new life. There are huge forces that are pushing great masses of humanity all over the planet. Say in ancient Rome. Suddenly the barbarians come down from Northern Europe and take over Rome. That’s a migration—and it’s been happening for tens of thousands of years. Next paragraph, push-pull migration!”

  Barbara read the first push-pull paragraph. Lisa, with long thin arms and a shy voice, read another paragraph. I told them about Fidel Castro, and the mobsters, and the wealthy Cubans who fled to the United States. “If you left a country because it was poor, and you went to another country, say Japan, or the United States, because it was rich, you’re both being pulled and pushed. This is what they want you to learn. Push-pull migration. PUSH-PULL. If you know that, you’re going to do swimmingly well on the worksheet. And that’s the aim of life, isn’t it? Anyone interested in the Irish Potato Famine?”

  “I’m Irish,” said Jarrod.

  “Why don’t you read that paragraph, then.”

  Jarrod read about the famine. I suddenly realized that the class had been quiet for a long time.

  “So they came here and became Irish Americans,” I said. “They enormously enriched our country. The great thing about America, for a while, was the Statue of Liberty. She said, Come on over! We’ll take care of you. Doesn’t matter where you came from. We had an open-door policy.”

  Next was more about Vietnam. I didn’t want to read the paragraph, so I paraphrased it, and asked again if anybody had eaten at a Vietnamese restaurant. No. Chinese, yes. Thai, no. “Do people like sushi here?”

  “Blech,” said Robert.

  “Caesar salad’s my favorite,” said Noelle.

  Brett read from the number-filled paragraph about urbanization. “In 1978, about four point five million people lived in the capital of Jakarta,” he read. “By 2000, its population was about eleven million. And demographers estimated that by 2015, the population will have risen to about twenty-one million.”

  “So those are just big tiresome numbers that people are saying to you,” I said, “but all of those numbers represent individual people who had to think about their tiny lives, and say, ‘Where would my children be happier? Where would my aged father want to go? Let’s figure out what we can do.’ And sometimes the best thing for them to do is not to stay put, but to go somewhere. They do it by the millions, if things are really bad. So we go to this graph now.”

  “I’m not done reading,” said Brett.

  “Well, I think it was darn good. Darn good. And Jakarta is a beautiful name for a city. Jakarta!”

  Lou said, “You should sing it.”

  Jarrett said, “Don’t give him ideas.”

  We got to the orange and purple chart. The word for city in Latin was urbs, I said, which was pronounced “erps.” We talked about people crowding toward the city of São Paulo. Worksheet time. Groans and chattering as the worksheet floated around the room.

  “Can we work in groups of two?” asked Lou.

  “Yes.”

  “Can we wor
k in a groups of three?” asked Foster.

  “Yes.”

  Trent, who was a tiny mischief-maker, started squirming.

  “He’s allergic to himself,” said Foster.

  “You guys are evil,” said Trent.

  “I’m a unicorn, but I lost my horn,” said Roxanne.

  Estelle shushed the class. Everyone went still. I sang the first few bars of the Pink Panther song. “Just try to keep the chat way down, or I’ll have to say everybody work on their own, and that wouldn’t be good.”

  “Rox, you’re supposed to write down the meaning,” said Noelle.

  I went around nudging, prompting, giving examples, pointing to bolded words in the textbook. You might move to LA because you want to make video games. You might move out of New York because rents are too expensive. You might move to Nashville because you want to be a country singer. It has to be a powerful force, pulling or pushing, because it’s a lot of work to migrate. Somebody who migrates is an immigrant, and you double the m.

  Haskel told me about Skyrim, a video game. “Once you kill a dragon for the first time, you literally just absorb its soul.”

  I gave a three-minute warning for the first page. “Just scribble something down!” I said.

  We slashed and hacked through the questions on the reverse side. Question 8 again gave problems. “Many people move from small towns to cities,” I read. “This movement is called FUNKADELIC. No, what is it called?”

  “Migration!”

  “Immigration!”

  “Urbanization!”

  “You’re moving from small towns to cities,” I said. “You’re urbanizing.”

  I collected a few finished sheets. Jarrod found an inflatable world globe and threw it to Jarrett, over Robert’s head.

  “This is our planet,” I said, catching it.

  “Jarrod and Jarrett are torturing me,” said Robert.

  “Ask Robert where anything is, he knows it,” said Roxanne. Where was Cuba? Robert knew. Where was Siberia? He pointed to Serbia, then found Siberia. Where were the Rocky Mountains? He found them. Where’s the moon? Robert pointed to the air.

  “This is Dubai,” he said.