Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  2 October

  Sometimes I speculate on the exact nature of the conspiracy which brought me here. At times I believe it was instigated by my wife of former days, whose name was . . . I am only pretending to forget. I know her name very well, as well as I know the name of my former motor oil (Quaker State) or my old Army serial number (US 54109268). Her name was Brenda.

  7 October

  Today I tiptoed up to Miss Mandible’s desk (when there was no one else in the room) and examined its surface. Miss Mandible is a clean-desk teacher, I discovered. There was nothing except her gradebook (the one in which I exist as a sixth-grader) and a text, which was open at a page headed Making the Processes Meaningful. I read: “Many pupils enjoy working fractions when they understand what they are doing. They have confidence in their ability to take the right steps and to obtain correct answers. However, to give the subject full social significance, it is necessary that many realistic situations requiring the processes be found. Many interesting and lifelike problems involving the use of fractions should be solved . . .”

  8 October

  I am not irritated by the feeling of having been through all this before. Things are done differently now. The children, moreover, are in some ways different from those who accompanied me on my first voyage through the elementary schools: “They have confidence in their ability to take the right steps and to obtain correct answers.” This is surely true. When Bobby Vanderbilt, who sits behind me and has the great tactical advantage of being able to maneuver in my disproportionate shadow, wishes to bust a classmate in the mouth he first asks Miss Mandible to lower the blind, saying that the sun hurts his eyes. When she does so, bip! My generation would never have been able to con authority so easily.

  13 October

  I misread a clue. Do not misunderstand me: it was a tragedy only from the point of view of the authorities. I conceived that it was my duty to obtain satisfaction for the injured, for an elderly lady (not even one of our policyholders, but a claimant against Big Ben Transfer & Storage, Inc.) from the company. The settlement was $165,000; the claim, I still believe, was just. But without my encouragement Mrs. Bichek would never have had the self-love to prize her injury so highly. The company paid, but its faith in me, in my efficacy in the role, was broken. Henry Goodykind, the district manager, expressed this thought in a few not altogether unsympathetic words, and told me at the same time that I was to have a new role. The next thing I knew I was here, at Horace Greeley Elementary, under the lubricious eye of Miss Mandible.

  17 October

  Today we are to have a fire drill. I know this because I am a Fire Marshal, not only for our room but for the entire right wing of the second floor. This distinction, which was awarded shortly after my arrival, is interpreted by some as another mark of my somewhat dubious relations with our teacher. My armband, which is red and decorated with white felt letters reading fire, sits on the little shelf under my desk, next to the brown paper bag containing the lunch I carefully make for myself each morning. One of the advantages of packing my own lunch (I have no one to pack it for me) is that I am able to fill it with things I enjoy. The peanut butter sandwiches that my mother made in my former existence, many years ago, have been banished in favor of ham and cheese. I have found that my diet has mysteriously adjusted to my new situation; I no longer drink, for instance, and when I smoke, it is in the boys’ john, like everybody else. When school is out I hardly smoke at all. It is only in the matter of sex that I feel my own true age; this is apparently something that, once learned, can never be forgotten. I live in fear that Miss Mandible will one day keep me after school, and when we are alone, create a compromising situation. To avoid this I have become a model pupil: another reason for the pronounced dislike I have encountered in certain quarters. But I cannot deny that I am singed by those long glances from the vicinity of the chalkboard; Miss Mandible is in many ways, notably about the bust, a very tasty piece.

  24 October

  There are isolated challenges to my largeness, to my dimly realized position in the class as Gulliver. Most of my classmates are polite about this matter, as they would be if I had only one eye, or wasted, metal-wrapped legs. I am viewed as a mutation of some sort but essentially a peer. However Harry Broan, whose father has made himself rich manufacturing the Broan Bathroom Vent (with which Harry is frequently reproached, he is always being asked how things are in Ventsville), today inquired if I wanted to fight. An interested group of his followers had gathered to observe this suicidal undertaking. I replied that I didn’t feel quite up to it, for which he was obviously grateful. We are now friends forever. He has given me to understand privately that he can get me all the bathroom vents I will ever need, at a ridiculously modest figure.

  25 October

  “Many interesting and lifelike problems involving the use of fractions should be solved . . .” The theorists fail to realize that everything that is either interesting or lifelike in the classroom proceeds from what they would probably call interpersonal relations: Sue Ann Brownly kicking me in the ankle. How lifelike, how womanlike, is her tender solicitude after the deed! Her pride in my newly acquired limp is transparent; everyone knows that she has set her mark upon me, that it is a victory in her unequal struggle with Miss Mandible for my great, overgrown heart. Even Miss Mandible knows, and counters in perhaps the only way she can, with sarcasm. “Are you wounded, Joseph?” Conflagrations smolder behind her eyelids, yearning for the Fire Marshal clouds her eyes. I mumble that I have bumped my leg.

  30 October

  I return again and again to the problem of my future.

  4 November

  The underground circulating library has brought me a copy of Movie-TV Secrets, the multicolor cover blazoned with the headline “Debbie’s Date Insults Liz!” It is a gift from Frankie Randolph, a rather plain girl who until today has had not one word for me, passed on via Bobby Vanderbilt. I nod and smile over my shoulder in acknowledgment; Frankie hides her head under her desk. I have seen these magazines being passed around among the girls (sometimes one of the boys will condescend to inspect a particularly lurid cover). Miss Mandible confiscates them whenever she finds one. I leaf through Movie-TV Secrets and get an eyeful. “The exclusive picture on these pages isn’t what it seems. We know how it looks and we know what the gossipers will do. So in the interests of a nice guy, we’re publishing the facts first. Here’s what really happened!” The picture shows a rising young movie idol in bed, pajama-ed and bleary-eyed, while an equally blowzy young woman looks startled beside him. I am happy to know that the picture is not really what it seems; it seems to be nothing less than divorce evidence.

  What do these hipless eleven-year-olds think when they come across, in the same magazine, the full-page ad for Maurice de Paree, which features “Hip Helpers” or what appear to be padded rumps? (“A real undercover agent that adds appeal to those hips and derriere, both!”) If they cannot decipher the language the illustrations leave nothing to the imagination. “Drive him frantic . . .” the copy continues. Perhaps this explains Bobby Vanderbilt’s preoccupation with Lancias and Maseratis; it is a defense against being driven frantic.

  Sue Ann has observed Frankie Randolph’s overture, and catching my eye, she pulls from her satchel no less than seventeen of these magazines, thrusting them at me as if to prove that anything any of her rivals has to offer, she can top. I shuffle through them quickly, noting the broad editorial perspective:

  “Debbie’s Kids Are Crying”

  “Eddie Asks Debbie: Will You . . .?”

  “The Nightmares Liz Has About Eddie!”

  “The Things Debbie Can Tell About Eddie”

  “The Private Life of Eddie and Liz”

  “Debbie Gets Her Man Back?”

  “A New Life for Liz”

  “Love Is a Tricky Affair”

  “Eddie’s Taylor-Made Love Nest”

  “How Liz Made a Man of Eddie”

  “Are They Planning to Live Together?”

>   “Isn’t It Time to Stop Kicking Debbie Around?”

  “Debbie’s Dilemma”

  “Eddie Becomes a Father Again”

  “Is Debbie Planning to Re-wed?”

  “Can Liz Fulfill Herself?”

  “Why Debbie Is Sick of Hollywood”

  Who are these people, Debbie, Eddie, Liz, and how did they get themselves in such a terrible predicament? Sue Ann knows, I am sure; it is obvious that she has been studying their history as a guide to what she may expect when she is suddenly freed from this drab, flat classroom.

  I am angry and I shove the magazines back at her with not even a whisper of thanks.

  5 November

  The sixth grade at Horace Greeley Elementary is a furnace of love, love, love. Today it is raining, but inside the air is heavy and tense with passion. Sue Ann is absent; I suspect that yesterday’s exchange has driven her to her bed. Guilt hangs about me. She is not responsible, I know, for what she reads, for the models proposed to her by a venal publishing industry; I should not have been so harsh. Perhaps it is only the flu.

  Nowhere have I encountered an atmosphere as charged with aborted sexuality as this. Miss Mandible is helpless; nothing goes right today. Amos Darin has been found drawing a dirty picture in the cloakroom. Sad and inaccurate, it was offered not as a sign of something else but as an act of love in itself. It has excited even those who have not seen it, even those who saw but understood only that it was dirty. The room buzzes with imperfectly comprehended titillation. Amos stands by the door, waiting to be taken to the principal’s office. He wavers between fear and enjoyment of his temporary celebrity. From time to time Miss Mandible looks at me reproachfully, as if blaming me for the uproar. But I did not create this atmosphere, I am caught in it like all the others.

  8 November

  Everything is promised my classmates and me, most of all the future. We accept the outrageous assurances without blinking.

  9 November

  I have finally found the nerve to petition for a larger desk. At recess I can hardly walk; my legs do not wish to uncoil themselves. Miss Mandible says she will take it up with the custodian. She is worried about the excellence of my themes. Have I, she asks, been receiving help? For an instant I am on the brink of telling her my story. Something, however, warns me not to attempt it. Here I am safe, I have a place; I do not wish to entrust myself once more to the whimsy of authority. I resolve to make my themes less excellent in the future.

  11 November

  A ruined marriage, a ruined adjusting career, a grim interlude in the Army when I was almost not a person. This is the sum of my existence to dare, a dismal total. Small wonder that re-education seemed my only hope. It is clear even to me that I need reworking in some fundamental way. How efficient is the society that provides thus for the salvage of its clinkers!

  14 November

  The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.

  15 November

  The custodian has informed Miss Mandible that our desks are all the correct size for sixth-graders, as specified by the Board of Estimate and furnished the schools by the Nu-Art Educational Supply Corporation of Englewood, California. He has pointed out that if the desk size is correct, then the pupil size must be incorrect. Miss Mandible, who has already arrived at this conclusion, refuses to press the matter further. I think I know why. An appeal to the administration might result in my removal from the class, in a transfer to some sort of setup for “exceptional children.” This would be a disaster of the first magnitude. To sit in a room with child geniuses (or, more likely, children who are “retarded”) would shrivel me in a week. Let my experience here be that of the common run, I say, let me be, please God, typical.

  20 November

  We read signs as promises. Miss Mandible understands by my great height, by my resonant vowels, that I will one day carry her off to bed. Sue Ann interprets these same signs to mean that I am unique among her male acquaintances, therefore most desirable, therefore her special property as is everything that is Most Desirable. If neither of these propositions works out then life has broken faith with them.

  I myself, in my former existence, read the company motto (“Here to Help in Time of Need”) as a description of the duty of the adjuster, drastically mislocating the company’s deepest concerns. I believed that because I had obtained a wife who was made up of wife-signs (beauty, charm, softness, perfume, cookery) I had found love. Brenda, reading the same signs that have now misled Miss Mandible and Sue Ann Brownly, felt she had been promised that she would never be bored again. All of us, Miss Mandible, Sue Ann, myself, Brenda, Mr. Goodykind, still believe that the American flag betokens a kind of general righteousness.

  But I say, looking about me in this incubator of future citizens, that signs are signs, and some of them are lies.

  23 November

  It may be that my experience as a child will save me after all. If only I can remain quietly in this classroom, making my notes while Napoleon plods through Russia in the droning voice of Harry Broan, reading aloud from our History text. All of the mysteries that perplexed me as an adult have their origins here. But Miss Mandible will not permit me to remain ungrown. Her hands rest on my shoulders too warmly, and for too long.

  7 December

  It is the pledges that this place makes to me, pledges that cannot be redeemed, that will confuse me later and make me feel I am not getting anywhere. Everything is presented as the result of some knowable process; if I wish to arrive at four I get there by way of two and two. If I wish to burn Moscow the route I must travel has already been marked out by another visitor. If, like Bobby Vanderbilt, I yearn for the wheel of the Lancia 2.4-liter coupé, I have only to go through the appropriate process, that is, get the money. And if it is money itself that I desire, I have only to make it. All of these goals are equally beautiful in the sight of the Board of Estimate; the proof is all around us, in the no-nonsense ugliness of this steel and glass building, in the straightline matter-of-factness with which Miss Mandible handles some of our less reputable wars. Who points out that arrangements sometimes slip, that errors are made, that signs are misread? “They have confidence in their ability to take the right steps and to obtain correct answers.”

  8 December

  My enlightenment is proceeding wonderfully.

  9 December

  Disaster once again. Tomorrow I am to be sent to a doctor, for observation. Sue Ann Brownly caught Miss Mandible and me in the cloakroom, during recess, Miss Mandible’s naked legs in a scissors around my waist. For a moment I thought Sue Ann was going to choke. She ran out of the room weeping, straight for the principal’s office, certain now which of us was Debbie, which Eddie, which Liz. I am sorry to be the cause of her disillusionment, but I know that she will recover. Miss Mandible is ruined but fulfilled. Although she will be charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor, she seems at peace; her promise has been kept. She knows now that everything she has been told about life, about America, is true.

  I have tried to convince the school authorities that I am a minor only in a very special sense, that I am in fact mostly to blame—but it does no good. They are as dense as ever. My contemporaries are astounded that I present myself as anything other than an innocent victim. Like the Old Guard marching through the Russian drifts, the class marches to the conclusion that truth is punishment.

  Bobby Vanderbilt has given me his copy of Sounds of Sebring, in farewell.

  Richard Bausch

  UNJUST

  One sunny morning in April, less than a week after he has been falsely accused of sexual harassment, Coleman finds a yellow jacket lazily circling and colliding with the surfaces in the spare room down in his basement. He kills it with a folded newspaper—striking it several times—then wads it in a paper towel and flushes it down the toilet, feeling a measure of disgust that surprises him. Just outs
ide the door, he finds another walking up the wall, at eye level, and he kills that one, too, then checks the window that looks out on the uneven ground under the back porch, the sliding door to its right. No sign of entry. Back in the spare room, he parts the curtains over that window, and here are four others dead, lying on the sill. Looking down, he sees several on the carpet at the base of the wall. He disposes of them with another paper towel.

  Upstairs in the kitchen his wife, Peg, sits drinking black coffee and gazing out at the sunny yard. When he enters she looks at him, then looks away. He says, “I think there’s a yellow jackets’ nest somewhere around the window in the spare room.”

  She doesn’t respond for a beat, still staring off. Then: “I killed one in the downstairs hall yesterday.”

  “I hope they’re not in the wall of that room.”

  She waves this away. “A few dead bees. They get in.”

  “If they are in the wall, it’s better to know about it early rather than late. I don’t want to find out by getting stung. Right?”

  She says nothing.

  “Right?” It’s as if he’s needling her, and he doesn’t mean it that way. The gray in her hair has begun to show more lately, and it occurs to him that now they are no longer talking only about the bees. She’s slightly stooped in the chair, her legs crossed at the knee, the cup of coffee on the saucer before her. A moment later, she lifts a hand to her face and rubs her eyes.

  “Did you sleep at all?” he asks.

  “Who can sleep? Maybe I dozed a little.”

  He did sleep, but kept waking in fright, unable to recall what he had dreamed. And for a long time, just before dawn, the two of them lay awake, aware of each other being awake and not speaking.

  There isn’t really much else to say.