The Keyhole Opera
Page 18
The kind of words she was supposed to use on the children were of no use. “Bobby, we use our indoor voices in the classroom.” He’d be shrieking again in a minute, baring his teeth if he weren’t getting his way. “Jessica, what have I told you about pulling hair? Stop, do you hear me?” The girl would look at her with half-closed eyes and give a slight nod. Yes, Jessica had heard, not that hearing made a bit of difference.
So the teacher gave up on the kinds of words she was supposed to use. She couldn’t call the children by the first names that occurred to her, the words that children weren’t supposed to know, but she thought of other things to call them. Things that struck her as funny. She thought of things to say, things the children would pay attention to. The children were as loud and unruly as ever, but she could now and then distract them with the things she told them.
The principal called her into his office. He said, “Have you really called the children in your classroom ‘hatchlings’?” She admitted that she had. “And you’ve told them that their mommies and daddies are not real mommies and daddies?” That’s what she had told them. “Why would you say such things?” Because nothing else worked. Because they really were little monsters. Because she needed to get their attention, capture their imaginations somehow. “They’re children,” the principal said. She told him that she was desperate. “They’re children.” How could she keep this up, working every day with such creatures? “They’re children.”
Later, she drove away from town about as far as she ever drove. She got out of her car and stood in the hot sun. If she could just keep going, there was another life out there for her. Except there wasn’t, because she never did just keep going.
Back in the classroom, she didn’t change what she told the children. She elaborated on it. She told them that her job was to teach them to pass for human so that when they grew up and moved to the real world, no one would be able to tell that they were monsters, little flesh eating monsters. All the mommies and the daddies, the teacher, the principal, all the grownups in town were real people brainwashed into acting like mommies and daddies and teacher and principal. But the children weren’t people at all.
The children liked this story.
The principal asked to see her again. “You have to stop this,” he said, “or else measures will be taken.” She wanted to know what kind of measures. “Measures will be taken.” She dared him to fire her. Go ahead and try to find someone else who will teach these miserable creatures. “Measures will be taken,” he said.
She got in her car and drove again, farther this time. She climbed the bumper, scrambled onto the hood and then the roof of the car. She looked toward the horizon to see if she could make out imperfections, places where the sky met the ground with the artificial perspective of a diorama painting. She didn’t see any. She kept looking for a long time anyway, trying to make up her mind about which reality would be worse.
9. Mr. Tott
Biology One is being team taught this year. One teacher is Ms. Amante. The other is Mr. Tott. Mr. Tott’s skin is thin and tight against his skull. His eyes are sunken. His suit coat droops and folds from his thin frame, as if there had once been more of him. When he pauses in a lesson, his breathing whistles in his chest.
For the unit on metabolism, Mr. Tott tells the class that fermentation sets its own limit on the life of yeast. Alcohol is poison. When Lord Nelson died at Trafalgar, his body was taken back to England in a barrel of rum. Mr. Tott wheezes and laughs at his own story.
Everything is food for something else. For every act of living, something else had to die if for no other reason than to get out of the way.
The classroom air is sterile, dry as a tomb on the days when it’s Mr. Tott’s turn to teach. His chalk strikes the blackboard with sharp taps, as if he were driving nails.
For the unit on cell division, Mr. Tott explains that there are immortal cells. How many students would like their cells to live forever? When some hands are raised, Mr. Tott tells the story of Henrietta Lack. She died in 1951, but her cancer cells have stayed young and healthy, thriving in the lab, even infecting other cell cultures. Yes, she’s dead, but there are more living cells of Henrietta Lack today than there are of any other person in the world. He wheezes and laughs at that story, too.
It’s all funny to Mr. Tott: predation, infestation, infection. He seems particularly fond of parasites. There is a worm that infests a kind of snail. The larval worms migrate into the snail’s antennae, turn colors, and wriggle. The pain maddened snail climbs to the top of a stalk of grass where it waves in the breeze and the wriggling larvae in its flesh imitate a delicious caterpillar no bird can resist. When a bird eats the snail, the larvae continue to develop inside the bird, their second host. Sometimes when he laughs, Mr. Tott coughs and can’t stop.
The prettiest little octopus is the one with deadly venom. A black mamba kills with neurotoxins while the victim, wide awake, can feel it happen, can wait for the next breath that he can’t quite get his lungs to breathe. Pit viper venom digests as it kills with an efficiency that Mr. Tott calls elegant.
Evolution needs death, says Mr. Tott, every bit as much as it needs sex. What’s it to be? Youthful trauma? Greedy cancers? A heart that starves? Stroke? Or the tiny, progressive breakdowns of cells that just get tired of dividing? He says that humans like to pretend that biology somehow doesn’t apply to them.
In a whisper that everyone can hear, Mr. Tott explains his trinity: apoptosis, oncosis, and necrosis. He’s just getting started, but the students have heard enough, enough, enough.
10. Stories
It’s the end of your last day as a teacher. You have closed your office door and returned to your chair. Jerry Lavin, a junior, sits on the other side of your desk, alternately holding his breath to keep from sobbing, and sobbing anyway. His face is red and wet. On the last day of school, it’s too warm for his letter jacket, but he has worn it anyway, as if being the star defensive back could protect him from the mess he has gotten himself into. Rosie Horne is pregnant, and Jerry tells you he has to do the right thing.
Has to. That tells you something. That hints at some possible outcomes.
You teach social studies—history—but you’re also the teacher they come to with their stories, with what they think of as their happy or unhappy endings.
Jerry’s a good kid. You taught his dad. You could tell Jerry a story or two about his old man, if you wanted.
For Rosie, marrying Jerry will be a step up for her. Did she know that? Calculate it?
What happens next?
There is so much that you won’t miss about teaching. But these kids…which ones end up in college, dead, in jail, or working at the grocery? Now you’re retiring, and you’ll lose the thread of their stories. That’s the thing that makes you take a deep breath, let it out.
Jerry Lavin takes a deep breath, too. He says thank you, thank you for listening.
11. Spanish Lesson
When I put the daisies on the window sill, my father said from his bed, “Aren’t the flowers supposed to come after I’m gone?” There were already two bouquets on the dresser, another on the bed table.
“Better to get them while you’re here to smell them,” I said.
“Can’t smell anything but plastic.” He motioned toward the oxygen tube under his nose. Then he said, “Teach me Spanish.”
I thought, Why? but said, “What do you want to learn?”
“Everything.”
The doctor had said, It’s a matter of weeks or days, not months.
“Okay.” I taught him the difference between the permanent ser and the temporary estar.
Yo soy. Yo estoy.
The next day, I brought him the text that I used at school. We talked adjectives.
The day after that, the nurses told me that when he wasn’t sleeping, he was sounding out words in the book.
“It’s backwards,” he declared. “Me lo dió. Why isn’t it Dió lo me?”
“Because i
t’s Spanish.”
“And who decides what’s feminine, what’s masculine? La flor, okay. But la guerra? War is feminine?”
“Guer-r-r-r-a,” I said. “Trill the double r.” He tried.
Three days later, I watched him sleep. He woke up, squinted. I wasn’t sure, as his gaze wandered, if he knew who I was. He cleared his throat. “Estoy rodeado por flores.”
“De flores,” I corrected. “Sí, papí. Estás rodeado de flores. Flowers all around.”
“I speak Spanish!”
We laughed. And that was it, the last laugh we had together.
Other books by
Bruce Holland Rogers
Thirteen Ways to Water
Flaming Arrows
Word Work