by Lisa Alther
“Nothing much.”
“Don’t nobody grin like that without he got him some tail last night,” Bobby insisted, as he broke for a crip shot. “Ain’t that so, Tatro?” he demanded as he returned to the ground.
“Ain’t nobody’s bidness.”
“That means yes,” Bobby explained to Hank.
They were doing a rotating prayer now. Each person in turn added a sentence.
“… we want to thank you so much, Lord,” Sally was saying, “for making the Ingenue Plantation Ball such a success this past weekend …”
The next boy said, “… uh, look down, Lord, on our graduating seniors with Thy favor, and hep em all to get good jobs, or to do good work at college, or whatsoever things they may want to pursue with their lives …”
Sally was feeling let down with no Plantation Ball to work for. She’d returned the last of the punch cups yesterday. They had had enough, hadn’t had to fall back on plastic or Styrofoam. It had been such a relief. At least they could move right on into fund raising for next year’s dance.
She wished Jed would stop looking at her like that. Someone would see. And during the prayer Honestly, he was like a little boy with a new toy. Couldn’t keep his hands off her. She sort of liked knowing she could make Jed do whatever she wanted by simply giving or withholding her body. On the other hand, she couldn’t withhold too seriously because her rep was at stake. If she got him angry, he might spread it around school, and she’d be done for. Devouts would demand her resignation. She only hoped Jed knew how to be discreet. The least tell-tale sign, and you’d had it. Like the night Eddie Tabor had seen Buzz Backer and Ellen Borgard at the Busy Bee Drive-in. She was combing her hair in the rearview mirror. He got out of the car and dropped a used rubber in the garbage can. It was all over school the next day.
Mr. Fulton, grey and stooped, was sketching the battle plan of Antietam on the blackboard. He stabbed with his pointer at a rolled-down map, and the map fell on his head. The class giggled as he struggled to disentangle himself. Raymond was the only one who’d been listening to how a few hundred Georgia sharpshooters stalled General Burnside and four divisions of Yankees for several hours. Two students were sitting sideways in their desks playing Hangman on a piece of paper. A boy in ducktails was carving his girl’s initials in his arm with a switchblade, a small boy with big glasses was rolling cherry Life Savers down the aisle to a friend in the back row.
In the preceding weeks they had been lectured about the Boys in Grey wading through falling peach blossoms at Shiloh; about Jeb Stuart and his cavalry riding a circle around Yankee troops in the valley of Virginia; about Cold Harbor where Confederate troops charged twenty deep with their addresses pinned on their backs so survivors would know where to send their corpses; about General Armistead, his hat on his sabre, falling dead while reaching for the barrel of a Union cannon that terrible day at Gettysburg.
They had learned that slavery provided its beneficiaries with a better standard of living than that endured by free white factory workers in the North. That most slaves had been sold to slave traders by rival tribesmen. That many of the large houses on the Northern coasts were built by sea captains who made fortunes off the slave-rum-sugar triangle. That a couple of prominent abolitionists were descended from such captains. That many plantation owners had freed their slaves by the time of the war, and that many more wanted to if they could figure out how to keep them fed and clothed and housed. That eighty-five percent of Southern whites owned no slaves at all.
Raymond sat up straight and raised his hand. Mr. Fulton looked at him through watery blue eyes and nodded.
“Mr. Fulton, if we won all these battles, how come we lost the war?”
Mr. Fulton gazed at him with distaste. “Don’t get smart with me, son.”
“No sir, I wasn’t, sir. I was just …”
“Maybe if you stay after class and wash my blackboards, young man, you’ll learn you some manners.”
Mrs. Dingus was giving an English test. Her husband was a highway patrolman. She was noted for hating students whose fathers earned more money than her husband. Mr. Dingus patrolled the roads, Mrs. Dingus patrolled the corridors.
It upset Sally to be disliked. It was a novel experience. Yesterday she’d gone out of her way to bring Mrs. Dingus a brownie from the Ingenue lunchtime bake sale. Mrs. Dingus took it as though picking up a turd, squinting her eyes in what was supposed to pass for a smile. Then she asked, “Now Sally, do you have you a pass to be in this hall during lunch hour?” Sally did not, so Mrs. Dingus issued her a detention slip.
“Question number seven: spell shagrin,” said Mrs. Dingus.
Hands shot up. “Would you please repeat that, Mrs. Dingus?”
“Shagrin.”
Puzzled looks. “Could you define it for us, please, ma’am?”
“Shagrin. Embarrassment.”
“Would you repeat it again please?”
“Shagrin!” she shouted. “Shagrin! Can’t you people hear?”
“Could you spell it please?”
“C-H-A-G-R-I-N.”
Everyone copied it down.
“Question number eight: define ‘caricature.’”
A hand went up. “What is the choices, Mrs. Dingus?”
“What do you mean, Cyril?”
“Ain’t this multiple choice?”
“Cyril, ain’t isn’t a word.”
“Huh? Ain’t ain’t no word?”
“No. The proper word for ain’t is isn’t.”
“If ain’t ain’t no word, how come everbody I know uses hit and unnerstanđs what hit means?”
“And hit isn’t a word either. The word is it.”
“What’s his name—ole Shakespeare there uses hit”
“Don’t get smart with me, Cyril.”
“No, ma’am. I ain’t looking for no trouble. I mean, I isn’t looking for no trouble, ma’am.”
A girl in back removed her stretchy straw belt. She and a boy in the next row used it as a giant slingshot to bombard classmates with paper wads.
“Question number nine, true or false: Silas Marner was an old sailor in a poem written by Samuel Coleridge.”
A paper wad landed in Mrs. Dingus’s lap. She glared at the back of the room, wrote out hall passes for six students in the vicinity of the catapult, and sent them all to the office. “And don’t you come back without you have detention slips,” she called as they shuffled out “Question number ten, multipull choice: an albatross is (a) a ship, (b) a sailor, (c) a bird, (d) none of the above.”
A boy raised his hand. “How many of them choices is correct, Mrs. Dingus?”
“Just one this time.”
Jed was standing at a window in the rear of Mr. Boyd’s second-floor room, holding a sharpened pencil, point down, waiting to drop it on the school superintendent who was walking up the sidewalk. Jed was supposed to be dissecting a frog, but Mr. Boyd was involved in sending Hobart Sharpe to the office. Jed knew he shouldn’t be doing this, being president of the Citizenship Corps and all. But sometimes it just all built up, and he had to cut loose.
“… and I don’t want you to set foot in this classroom again, Hobart, until you have a note from the office okaying your absences this week.” He handed Hobart a hall pass.
Hobart grinned, shrugged, and ambled out, waving goodbye. Someone was watering the houseplants with formaldehyde. Jed had just inserted his pencil in the fan, and tiny pieces were flying around the room. Emily felt sorry for Mr. Boyd as she read the marked passages in Peyton Place, which she had hidden underneath her notebook. He was new this year and had been enthusiastic at first, calling them “Class” and offering to lend them books. Lately he had begun merely sitting at his desk and babbling, while brains from the Audio-Visual Club made chlorine gas in back. Emily tried to look as though she were listening to his monologues.
“Once upon a time, class, four and a half billion years ago, a swirling cloud of gases began to cool and condense into a molten sphere. In t
he hot seas that eventually covered our cooling earth, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulphur combined under the influence of lightning, or ultraviolet rays, or ionizing radiation to form amino acids, which in turn combined to form nucleic acids. For some unknown reason, bundles of a quarter of a million of these protein products began to band together inside protective membranes. They could reproduce, mutate, and get the supplies they needed from their surroundings. This is called Life. The seas became jammed with it—in the form of bacteria.
“While most bacteria were fighting over diminishing energy supplies, some discovered how to make their own energy from the sun. Algae—from which the whole plant world springs. The bacteria that weren’t so clever died off. Except for those that developed the ability to prey off their brothers. These predators gave rise to the animal kingdom, starting with worms and going through snails and sponges and corals and exotic creatures with no modern equivalent—trilobites, crinoids, nautiloids, cephalopods, ostracods, graptolites, brachiopods …”
As he wrote “ostracods” on the blackboard, the chalk broke and his fingernails skidded. Everyone shrieked and groaned and threw hands to ears. It was about the only way he could get their attention.
“Outside the seas, the cooling crust was colored black and grey and brown. Storms of dust and sand howled across the rocky surface. The sun was a smeared red glow. Green fingers began pushing out from the seas and lakes and swamps six hundred million years ago …”
Hobart was climbing through the transom above the door. “Hobart, what are you doing? Get down here right now!”
Hobart climbed down and grinned. “Well sir, there wasn’t nobody in the office to give me no excuse. So I was just trying to get back in the room without setting foot in it, like you said.” The class howled.
Mr. Boyd looked at him, then resumed his monologue.
Emily pulled out the student newspaper. She’d done a report for English class on a book by William Faulkner and had tried to imitate his style for an article commemorating the death of Nathan Hale. When it appeared, it was rewritten. She complained to the sponsor, Mrs. Dingus.
Mrs. Dingus replied, “I bet you thought that was a pretty good piece?”
Emily thought over this trick question. “I didn’t think it was bad enough to need rewriting.”
With a look of triumph, Mrs. Dingus crowed, “Why, that piece wasn’t even written in complete sentences!”
Emily stared at her. Finally gesturing at the paper, she said, “This isn’t the piece I wrote. It shouldn’t have my name on it. It should have your name on it, Mrs. Dingus.”
“Don’t you get smart with me, young lady.”
Emily knew she was making a big mistake, but she thrust out her chin and replied, “I’m not. I’m just stating facts.”
By the end of the afternoon, it was all over school that Emily Prince had gotten smart with Mrs. Dingus. That night at supper Sally asked, “Why do you want to go and be rude to Mrs. Dingus for, Emily? That’s just dumb.”
Emily looked up. “Because she wrecked my article.”
“Who cares about a silly old article?”
“I do,” growled Emily.
Mrs. Prince nodded approval as she chewed, and Mr. Prince murmured, “Good going.” Emily was flooded with gratitude.
Sally looked at them all. “But what’s good about being rude to an adult?”
“Sometimes you have to stand up for what you think is right,” said her father. “Even if nobody else does.”
Today Emily had been summoned to the office by Mrs. Musk, the guidance counselor. (Mrs. Musk’s paper boy claimed that one day when he’d been collecting at her house, he’d seen a padded bra hanging from her bedroom doorknob.) Emily studied her chest with interest.
“Mrs. Dingus tells me she thinks you may be disturbed emotionally, Emily.”
Emily looked up. “Well, yeah, I mean, yes ma’am. If she means that I was annoyed that she rewrote my article without asking me.”
“She says you were rude to her. Is this correct?”
Emily said nothing. She kept reminding herself that her parents thought she’d done right. It was the only thing that prevented her from begging for forgiveness.
“Well, I’ve spoken to Mr. Horde about it, Emily. He’d like to see you in his office.”
Mr. Horde was the principal. Emily always remembered how to spell “principal” from a jingle she’d been taught in the fourth grade: “The principal / is our pal.” This wasn’t strictly correct in Mr. Horde’s case. He had two rules. One was that students should be seen and not heard. The other was that principals should be heard and not seen. He spent most of his time locked in his office communicating over the public address system. He did have his reasons for refusing to court overexposure. When you saw him in person—short, fat, balding, and hunched over his desk like a toad—his credibility diminished.
Mrs. Musk ushered Emily into Mr. Horde’s office.
“Sit down, young lady. Now what’s this Mrs. Dingus tells me about you being smart-alecky?”
“I wasn’t, sir. I was just upset that she rewrote my article without my permission.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Your permission? Who do you think you are to give permission to Mrs. Dingus? She’s a teacher and sponsor of the paper. You’re just a student”
“But it was my article!”
He gazed at her, his jowls puffing out like a bullfrog about to croak. “Yes, I do see Mrs. Dingus’s point. You have a choice, Emily: you can be suspended for the rest of the year. Or you can apologize—first to me, then to Mrs. Dingus.”
Emily sat trembling, her eyes on the floor. “I’m sorry I was rude, Mr. Horde,” she murmured.
“All right, Emily. Now go apologize to Mrs. Dingus, and well all try to get on with our work.”
Her face bathed in tears, Emily got a bathroom pass from Mrs. Musk. The bathroom was packed with girls from third-period study hall, who were smoking and drawing on the mirrors with lipstick and discussing where to send a note claiming there was a bomb in someone’s locker …
Mr. Boyd’s drone penetrated her reverie: “… about three hundred million years ago, in tidal basins and drying-up swamps, a creature appeared called the crossopterygian. It possessed three features new in the history of life—bony fins like muscular paddles, an internal air sac in addition to gills, and tiny cerebral hemispheres. Some survived on land when the swamps dried up, while the fish who’d regarded them as oddballs starved or suffocated.” Emily wrote this down.
“Twenty-five million years later its descendants, the ichthyostega, discovered they could do without water altogether, except for being born there and taking an occasional drink, since they contained the sea within their bodies. Then came the reptiles, who laid eggs with hard shells on dry land. Some developed feathers and took to the skies as birds. The world of the reptiles was one of giants—dinosaurs with tiny instinct-driven brains, flying reptiles with a twenty-eight-foot wing span, towering Sequoia trees. And hiding out among these massive creatures were tiny mammals, warm-blooded and able to survive severe weather reversals. Flowers appeared in an explosion, relatively speaking, one hundred million years ago, a funerary offering to the dinosaurs, who died off for reasons unknown, precipitating a ferocious struggle for dominance among the remaining species. Some giant ground birds almost took over. One species after another, arising, developing, going to extinction. This has happened thousands of times, class. It’s called evolution …”
Hobart was lobbing frog parts on to squealing girls’ desks. Mr. Boyd raced to the back of the room. Hobart ducked into the supply closet. Mr. Boyd followed him. Hobart slipped back out and slammed and locked the door. The class cheered, jumped up, and streamed from the room.
Emily watched them go. Then she got up and let Mr. Boyd out.
“Thank you, Emily,” he said.
“Oh, you’re welcome. I was wondering if you could tell me about any books on what you were just talking about …”
; Delighted, he wrote down some titles and gave her a library pass. “But please, don’t tell anyone where you heard about evolution,” he whispered. “It could get me fired.”
The littered parking lot of the quick-service hamburger stand was filled with cars, most with open doors. Radios were blaring, “… I want to be Bobby’s girl …”
Emily and June sat eating their fries and watching Hobart sneak a Bud from the case in his trunk.
“Mr. Boyd said some interesting stuff today.”
“Yeah?”
“About this animal that grew in swamps and was able to crawl out on dry land.”
“Sort of like the Creature from the Black Lagoon?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Only it was three hundred million years ago.”
“How come something that long ago is interesting to you?”
“I don’t know. But it sure makes you think.”
“You maybe. Not me. Oh God, look!” June tittered. “Those football guys are making poor old Slocombe do his Elvis imitation.”
Slocombe was pasty and puffy with a brown flat top and an idiotic grin. He was slicking back imaginary hair with one hand, and thrusting an imaginary guitar with the other. He kept lurching forward on rubbery legs and wailing with what was supposed to be a sexy sneer. He was surrounded by the hulking football players, whom he served as waterboy.
Emily watched. “God, I can’t stand it. I wish they wouldn’t do that.”
“Why not? It’s a scream.”
“He doesn’t even know they’re making fun of him. He thinks he’s being cool.”
“Oh Em, honestly. You’re such a softy.”
“Come on, Slocombe! More hip action there!” Jed yelled.
“Yeah, grind it right into her, Slocombe!” Hank yelled.
Slocombe grinned, and twisted and thrust his hips with awkwardness.
“That’s it, Slocombe! Do it, baby!” Bobby called, glancing at Jed and Hank. They all shook with laughter.
“Jed, honey, your fries are getting cold,” Sally called from the Chevy. Jed sauntered over.