Substitute

by Nicholson Baker

  A four-note bell came on the PA system. We listened quietly to the faint announcements coming from two first-graders. “The weather today will be partly sunny, with highs around seventy,” said a boy. Lunch was pizza bagels or cheeseburger, green beans, applesauce, and milk. A secretary announced two birthdays. And then we lustily pledged allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

  I said, “When there’s a substitute, the temptation is for the noise to get too loud. Have you had substitutes before?”

  Yes!

  “What happens when a substitute comes?”

  “We listen!” said Madeline.

  “Nice! If we’re having a discussion, it’s better if one person talks at a time.”

  “There’s another word for it,” said Ava. “Polite.”

  “Polite is a good word. I’ve already met almost all of you, and you seem like really polite kids. That’s a nice thing to see. Makes me proud to be a citizen of the State of Maine.”

  I pulled out the attendance sheet. Angel, uncertain and plump-fingered, found her name on it.

  “Mr. Baker?” said Madeline. “My body is feeling out of shape.”

  I called out names and signed the sheet. “All right, guys, gather around,” I said. “We’re going to be going to an art exhibit. So what do we do when we go to an art exhibit?”

  To my startlement, the class began reciting the class rules in unison. “FOLLOW DIRECTIONS QUICKLY, RAISE YOUR HAND FOR PERMISSION TO SPEAK, BE A BUCKET FILLER, MAKE SMART CHOICES, AND KEEP YOUR DEAR TEACHER HAPPY.”

  “And I am happy,” I said.

  “Whoo-hoo!” said Abby.

  “My dad is bald,” said Angel.

  “It’s what happens sometimes to men,” I said. “The hair just comes off their head.”

  Noah wanted to know what a pizza bagel was. I said that it was a little round bagel, circular, with a hole in the middle, and it had pizza topping on it. “It’s quite delicious,” I said.

  “Mm, I want to have it,” said Noah.

  January said, “Mr. Baker, smile! Click!”

  “Okay, line up, line up, line up,” I said.

  “Westin was a superstar yesterday, so today he has to go in the back,” said Abby.

  I said, “Guys, dear children, in line please, and quiet. And remember, we’re going to go and see art that’s done by some of the older kids, so we’re going to be very respectful, and ask them questions about how they did stuff. Right? It might be a little loud in the cafeteria, but the key is not to add to the noise.”

  We turned several corners and plunged through the wall of sound into the cafeteria, which was lined with large drawings, in front of which children stood. A second-grade teacher said, “It’s kind of like a museum. They’re just going to walk around and visit the animals, and the rangers will have information for them.”

  We made a tour of the walls and saw two red squirrels, a fisher cat, a mountain lion, a bobcat, another bobcat with crazy eyes, a gray fox, and a black bear. Each drawing was mounted on a large sheet of red or brown construction paper, with a page of facts next to it. We came to an opossum, and a three-foot-high exuberantly crayoned moose. We saw beavers, raccoons, and an ermine. “Owls and martens eat ermines,” said the fact sheet. “They are ferocious hunters.” There was a skunk, another red fox, two gray squirrels, a lynx with very good eyesight, a porcupine with thirty thousand quills, a white-tailed deer, and a woodchuck. “A woodchuck is also called a whistlepig,” explained a second-grader. “They use a high-pitched whistle to warn members of their colony.” I didn’t know that. I loved these crazy animal-happy kids.

  We paused to get our breath when we were out of the cafeteria. Ava said, “I can’t believe I actually saw my sister!”

  “I saw my sister, too!” said Madeline.

  “I saw my daycare teacher!” said Jaydon.

  “One voice at a time,” I said. “I want to tell you that you were very good. We stopped at each person’s art. We didn’t hurt anybody’s feelings, and we listened to what they had to say. They really worked hard. That huge white-tailed deer, that enormous moose! You did a great job of admiring the work that they did, so thank you.”

  Ava said, “My sister was the last one, and I hugged her, and she hugged me back and picked me up, and she was the white-tailed deer.”

  Madeline said, “I saw my sister, and she got tackled by a little midget. And the little midget was me. She’s nine and I’m six.”

  Westin said, “I saw my friend Jason from my old school. He was gone and I never saw him again. And now I saw him.”

  During snack and book-reading time, Noah ate Yum Yums, January ate carrot sticks, and Garrett stood on one foot. A boy named Rick arrived late. I asked how many wanted pizza bagels. “I know what a bagel is, and I know what a pizza is, but I just don’t know what they look like together,” said Jaydon.

  I said, “Imagine you had magical powers, and there was a pizza over here, and a little bagel over there, and you could go shwish, and put them together. You’d get a little round bite-sized bagel with pizza sauce and cheese deliciously sprinkled on top. It’s hot. It’s good.”

  “Oh!”

  Four people wanted pizza bagels, two wanted cheeseburgers, and three wanted SunButter and jelly. The rest had home lunch.

  “I have a whole lot of dandelions and we’re planting a whole bunch of things in my garden,” said January. “Orange and pink flowers. I got a pretty purple one, and it’s really pretty. It’s going to be a bush.”

  I opened a container of applesauce for Abby and said, “I talked to a guy last night who had planted one thousand five hundred strawberry plants.”

  “Whoo,” said Abby.

  “He’s a strawberry farmer,” I said. “He said they have a special machine to put the strawberry plants in the soil.”

  “I have a blueberry plant,” said Hazel.

  “I’m going to bring a robot to school,” said Jaydon. “I’m going to ask it to make flowers and strawberries everywhere.”

  Angel showed me a book of minerals that she’d gotten at the book fair. The book had plastic pouches inside that held several minerals, including a speckled wishing rock of Dalmatian jasper. Angel held it up for the class, but nobody was looking.

  “Time out for a second,” I said. “Angel’s got an amazing book. Instead of being filled with pages, it’s filled with . . .”

  “Rocks,” said Angel. She held out her book so that people could see.

  “These rocks are from all parts of the world,” I said. “These rocks, when you pull them out of the ground, they don’t look good. They look kind of jagged. Then they put them in a special machine, which is called a tumbler. It’s like a giant dryer, and it goes around and around, with all the other rocks, and all the rocks tumble and tumble, and they start to get smoother and smoother, and shinier and shinier, until finally they’re smooth and shiny like this one here, the crystal quartz.”

  I asked the class if they knew where rocks came from. Many hands went up.

  From the ground! From the dirt! From the mountain!

  “How would they get down in the ground and in the dirt and in the mountain?” I asked.

  Abby said, “There’s little ant holes, and they put the rocks in the holes.”

  Angel said, “I’m hoping a moon rock can fall from the moon, or I can go up there, with my family one time, and try to get a moon rock.”

  Madeline raised her hand and said that rocks come from grass. She’d seem them in the grass at her daycare.

  “That’s true,” I said. “You think, How could a rock come from grass? Millions of years ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth, and they had big tall fields of grass, and no people were around, well, the grass would die in a marsh, and maybe the water would come. The grass would start to rot and go bad, and squish down, and then more grass would grow on to
p of that, and that would squish down. After a while you’ve got maybe two hundred feet of old rotting roots and grass, and it’s getting very dark and squishy and marshy. All the water goes out, and it gets harder and harder. More dirt on top of that, squishing down really hard, years and years go by. Finally you have something that’s so hard that it’s called rock. It’s called sedimentary rock.”

  “Rocks are actually kind of like a toy,” said Abby. “Because you can use them for stuff. Like hopscotch.”

  Hazel said, “There’s rocks at the beach and there’s lightning at the beach that will hit rocks and break them down into little pieces at the beach.”

  “Okay, Hazel had a good idea,” I said. “Another way that rocks can form. Some rocks are formed because they’re melted. They could be melted down by lightning, or they could be melted down when they get so deep in the earth that there’s so much pressure that they form a volcano. A volcano is when the pressure of the earth presses so hard on the rock that it melts and turns red-hot, and it forces itself up the cracks of the earth, and then squirts out the top of a mountain. That’s lava, right?”

  “And lava is so hot you can’t even touch it,” said Hartley, who was wearing a red-striped polo shirt and had a smart-kid’s lisp.

  Angel wanted to show off her book some more. “Do you guys want to have a closer look down on the carpet?”

  Hazel said, “Sometimes a volcano can stop erupting, and it never goes ever again. It gets yucky and old, and it breaks down and becomes rocks again.”

  “Did everyone get a chance to see my rocks?” Angel asked.

  Hartley said, “Mr. Baker, before even it forms into a volcano, it leaves a bigger piece of a rock with all these crystal rocks on top. It’s like a pie, kind of. There’s little rocks left on top.”

  January said, “Mr. Baker, can I share my stuffed animals?” Maybe after recess, I said, because it was book time now.

  Abby said, “Excuse me? I got an A in gymnastics.”

  Madeline said, “Mr. Baker, did you know I found a green crystal? A green one. It was all green. It was a square.”

  “That’s beautiful,” I said. “Did you look really close inside and see the secret world of the inside of the rock?”

  “I saw a little bit of white,” said Madeline. “And little moving stuff. I think I could find another crystal and maybe my mom could let me bring it in. And one of my cat teeth looks like a crystal.” She pointed to her incisor, which had silver on it. “This one, that had the surgery in it. It’s silver because I didn’t brush my teeth good. They’re going to pull it out. I’m sure the tooth fairy will give me extra money. Maybe a dollar.”

  I asked her what book she was going to look at for the next five minutes.

  “I don’t really know,” said Madeline. “I’m going to look at my library.”

  “Did you guys want to go over there with my book?” said Angel. “I’m trusting you.”

  Westin was unhappy because Angel wasn’t letting him touch the rocks. Look but don’t touch, she’d said.

  “If you see something shiny and it’s yellow, that isn’t gold, right?” said Hartley.

  “Westin, why don’t you find a book,” I said. “Find a Hop on Pop or something.”

  Madeline put on her glasses, which had cranberry-red rims. “I only need them for reading, and we’re reading right now. I can only see far words. I’m farsighted. My sister’s nearsighted. She can’t see anything that good.”

  I ate a chunk of coffee chocolate. “It helps me wake up, boyoing!”

  “Are you sleepy?” asked Abby.

  “I’m not yet sleepy, but I don’t want to become sleepy.”

  “Does your wife kick snore?” asked Abby. “I heard a thing about kick snore.”

  “You have a lot of stuff we can know,” said January. “Remember you said about the volcano and the rocks? You are amazing.”

  “You’re amazing!” I said.

  “I know how to make oak trees,” January said. “You need a nut, which is a acorn. Then you plant it in the ground, then you water it, and then it turns into a beautiful tree.”

  Madeline brought a book over to me.

  “Can you read this page?” she asked. The book was called Zendaya, and it was a biography of a teen singer, Zendaya Coleman, from a Disney TV show called Shake It Up. “In addition to Shake It Up, Zendaya also got to work on other cool projects. She sang on the three Shake It Up albums, and shot videos for several of the songs.”

  “Wow, that’s a lot,” said Madeline. “I know how to shake it up. You like shake it and shake it and shake it. The song tells you what to do to shake it up. You have to shake it up over here, shake it up over there.”

  I got her to sound out Shake It Up. “See that? Shake It Up. You read it.”

  At 10:10 it was time to get ready for recess. “If you need to use the bathroom, now’s your chance.”

  “Angel! Hazel! You don’t need to use your jackets, because it’s warm,” said Abby.

  They lined up.

  “I’m on recess duty,” I said. “GUYS, shh. I’m on recess duty. I want happy playing. I don’t want any grabbing. I like happy people who do not bump into each other, but have a good time playing. Yes, there’s a question.”

  “Hi!” said Madeline.

  “Hello,” I said. “So are we on our way?”

  Yes.

  Hazel led us out the big doors and everyone scattered. A minute later, Ava ran back. “Mr. Baker, I saw a white little baby butterfly!”

  “I watch scary movies,” said Abby. “Yesterday I found a baby inchworm.”

  “Hi, Mr. Baker,” said Hartley, from the top of the slide.

  Percy ran up, the boy who wore the special vest in Mrs. Thurston’s second-grade class. “I know you,” he said. “You were an aid when Mrs. Spahn was out.”

  A kid toppled off the tires and hit his head. “I was trying to walk across that thing and something banged,” he said.

  “Take a moment to sit and make sure it’s okay,” I said. I brushed off the sand from his eyebrow. “Sorry that happened.”

  I met two staffers, Ms. Solano and Mr. Frank, who gave me an emergency walkie-talkie. I gave it a puzzled look and spoke into it: “Roger.”

  “Just hold on to it,” said Ms. Solano. “I don’t know how to use it, either.”

  “You press the button?” I said.

  “If you need to,” Ms. Solano said, “but you never need to, so it’s okay.”

  Abby and Madeline ran up. “Mr. Baker, they said they finished their ABCs and I just got on.” The rule was, they explained, that when there was a line at the swing, the people who were waiting got a turn after they’d sung the whole ABC song. But people were rushing. I stood and listened to Abby sing, “Now I know my ABCs, next time won’t you sing with me.”

  The boy politely got off the swing and let Abby get on.

  Another kid ran up to say that Adam had gotten hit by a basketball in the middle of his face and the big kids didn’t even care. Adam was lying on the dirt, uninjured but unhappy.

  I went over to the older kids. “Dudes, time out for a sec. If a kid gets hit by a ball, and it hurts him or he’s sad, you want to take a moment to say, Are you okay?, and make him feel a little better. Got that?”

  “Yeah, sure,” said the second-grader. “Over here!” The basketball game resumed.

  Garrett asked me if he could take off his sweatshirt. “Yes, but don’t forget where you put it,” I said.

  There was another boy down on the grass. “He’s just playing dead,” said his friend. “It’s just like Over the Hedge. ‘We die to live, we live to die!’”

  Angel had found three new rocks to add to her collection. “We should call that the space rock,” she said, showing me a gray, angular fragment.

  The bell rang. “Back up, please,” said an ed
tech at the door. “QUIET, STRAIGHT LINES.” My class lined up quietly, but the ed tech picked another line to go in first: “Mrs. Harmon’s class, good job, you may go in,” she said. We were next. “Face forward, please,” said the ed tech. She spotted Angel studying her book of gems. “No reading while walking, not safe!” she said.

  Angel was happy, though. Her gem book had been a hit in class and on the playground. “A lot of people really like this book,” she said.

  “Angel, can I see your rocks again?” asked Abby.

  Hazel had a mosquito bite. Westin told me that he and Garrett had chased a girl. “She was in second grade!” he said.

  “You never know what’s going to happen on the playground,” I said.

  “A lot of people like my book,” said Angel, dancing—but there was a price. Ava, whom Angel wanted to be friends with, was tired of hearing about Angel’s gems, and she moved to a table across the room. “Ava, come back,” called Angel.

  “Have a discussion about the seasons and the senses,” Mrs. Price wrote in her sub plans. So we did. Winter seemed to be mostly about sledding wipeouts and hot cocoa, spring was about rain and butterflies. I wrote “grow” on the board, and “spinach,” and “leaf,” and then I handed Hazel a stack of worksheet packets to pass out. Garrett handed out the pencils. A reading specialist named Mrs. Willett arrived to take three children off to a remedial something-or-other. Before she left, she said, in her prison-guard baby talk, “if you are ready to do your paperwork, I need your pencils down, and both hands over your head. Now, who is ready? Caleb’s ready. Stretch your hands up high. I only see a couple people ready. I don’t see Hannah. Thank you.” She left with Garrett, Noah, and Hazel in tow.

  “All right,” I said. “Once you are lucky enough to get a pencil—and that is a lucky thing to have, believe me—you get to write your name on that first page.” The worksheet was titled “In the Spring.” Page 2 said, I can see ______. Page 3 said, I can hear ______. Page 4 said, I can smell ______. And page 5 said, I can feel ______. There were big blank boxes in which the kids were supposed to draw pictures of the words they’d filled in. “Can you smell stuff in spring?” I said. “Not if you have a clothespin on your nose.”