Ms. Hempel Chronicles

by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

  Ms. Bean, however, was tall and gaunt and harried. When Ms. Hempel saw her standing outside the school’s gates, she was swaddled in bags: one for her computer, another for her dry cleaning, for her groceries, for Will’s soccer uniform. It was strange, how clearly Ms. Hempel could picture her students' lives—Will had tae kwon do on Tuesday afternoons, and every Wednesday night he spent with his dad—and how murky their parents' lives seemed by comparison. All she could see in Ms. Bean was evidence of a job, an exhausting one.

  “Do you have a moment,” she said.

  Ms. Hempel said of course.

  "I wanted to speak with you about the assignment.”

  Would she find it deceitful, and dishonest, as Mrs. Woo did? Or maybe, like Mrs. Galvani, she had telephoned all the relatives, even the ones in California, to tell them the wonderful news. It was unlikely, though, that she loved the assignment, thought it original and brilliant and bold. Only Mr. Radinsky seemed to feel that way.

  What Ms. Bean wanted her to know was that she felt the assignment to be unkind. Or maybe not unkind. Maybe just unfair. Because she had been waiting a long time for someone else to finally notice what she had always known about Will. And then to discover that it was an assignment, merely.

  The disappointment was terrible—could she understand that?

  Mr. Dunne, her college counselor, was the one who first noticed the discrepancy. Impressive scores, mediocre grades. A specialist was consulted, a series of tests administered, and a medication prescribed. The bitter pills, her father used to call them. The prescription made her hands shake a little, but that wore off after a while. And then: a shy, newfound composure. Her mother entrusted her with the holiday newsletter. She wrote film reviews for the university paper. She had a nice way with words, a neat way of telling a story.

  To her ears, though, her stories sounded smushed, as if they had been sat upon by accident. None of the interesting parts survived. Yes, her father flashed the headlights, and yes, she waved at him before she stepped inside. Those details were resilient. Not these: how she waved glamorously, and smiled radiantly, how the headlights heralded the arrival of a star. How her shadow, projected onto the snow, looked huge.

  “That was beautiful,’ her aunt said to her when she returned to her pew. “I can see Oscar doing just that—making sure you got in safely.”

  Beautiful was not what she intended. Her story was not about safety and concern and anxious attentions. It was a tale of danger, intrigue; a story from the days before her medicine, the days of their collusion, when they communicated in code—click, click—as true accomplices do. When they were still plotting to prove everyone woefully mistaken. This was the story she wanted to tell. Then how did something altogether different emerge? Something she didn’t even recognize as her own. Even her father—her coconspirator, her fan—had been changed into someone she didn’t quite know. A kind and shadowy figure, sitting in the car. Benevolent. Thoughtful. Considerate of others.

  Sandman

  It was the Annual All-School Safety Assembly. The police officer looked short and lonely in the middle of the stage as he reeled off the possible threats: flashers in raincoats; razor blades in apples; strangers in cars.

  Ms. Hempel wanted to raise her hand. Wasn’t he forgetting something? He hadn’t even mentioned the predators she dreaded most. And wasn't it all supposed to sound more cautionary, more scary?

  The grisly details that the officer omitted, Ms. Hempel s imagination generously supplied. The black and shining van, the malevolent clowns, their wigs in sherbet colors. The dim interior, the stains on the carpet. Doors that shut with a rattling slam.

  Ms. Hempel clenched her muscles. Terror flowered darkly inside her.

  In the very back row of the auditorium, the eighth grade sat and squirmed. Zander, upon completing a drum solo, crashed an invisible cymbal. Elias drew a picture of a small, slouching boy on the back of Julianne’s binder. Jonathan, with the toe of his sneaker, battered the chair of the seventh grader sitting in front of him. Here they were, arrayed before h restless, oblivious, vulnerable, all of them.

  “Come on, guys.” Mr. Peele, microphone in hand, glow, ered at the eighth grade. “This is serious.”

  An assertion that prompted the entire back row to explode into laughter. The eighth graders were banished to their homerooms. As they exited the auditorium, banging into everything they touched, Mr. Peele, his palm clamped over the microphone, instructed the homeroom teachers to finish off the job. “And don’t forget to remind them about Safe Haven," he said, but the homeroom teachers were already walking out the door, rolling their eyes at each other. They had inherited yet another mess, like the teaching of sex education, the chaperoning of Trip Days, the organizing of canned-food drives and danceathons.

  Ms. Hempel’s class, jostling their way back into the homeroom, looked decidedly pleased with themselves. “Were missing French!” Sasha announced. Victoriously, they slammed their backpacks down onto the desk-chairs. “How many more periods until lunch?” Geoffrey asked.

  They had no idea of the danger. “Don’t you realize,” Ms. Hempel cried, shutting the door behind her, "all the terrible things that could happen to you?”

  The class regarded her coolly. The whole assembly, they explained, was not for their benefit. They weren’t small or cute enough anymore. They were too wised-up. “Want some candy, little girl?” Elias said in a cooing voice. Who would fall for such a stupid trick? Probably even the fifth and sixth graders knew better.

  “I mean,” Sasha said, “were not exactly the ones to worry about.”

  “I know!” A chorus of agreement. And then, the cherished

  complaint: no one seemed to have noticed the fact that they were, virtually, in high school and thus fully capable of handling their own affairs.

  “Haven’t you heard,” persisted Ms. Hempel, “about the clowns? Who kidnap you? Who drive around in vans!”

  “Oh, Ms. Hempel," Julianne sighed. “Were fine. Really.” “Can you imagine,” Sasha asked, "a clown taking off with Jonathan Hamish?”

  The class turned and looked at Jonathan, who had peeled the sole off his sneaker and was now trying to insert it down the back of Theo's shirt. The logic went: in the unlikely chance that Jonathan could be swayed by the promise of bottle rockets and lured into the back of a dark and fusty van, he would exhaust the clowns before anything creepy might happen. The kids chuckled at the thought: the clowns slumped over, wigs askew, wearing the same dazed, disbelieving expression they sometimes saw on the faces of Jonathan’s teachers. Meanwhile, Theo wriggled valorously.

  Ms. Hempel confiscated the sole.

  “What is Jonathan, or any of you, going to do when the clowns sneak up behind you and clobber you over the head with a tire iron?” she asked. “Or stuff a chloroform-soaked towel underneath your nose, and you pass out? Dead to the world? What are you going to do then?”

  "They do that?” Geoffrey asked.

  ; “For real?” Julianne asked.

  “Yes!” Ms. Hempel said. “I read it in the newspaper.”

  The eighth grade looked appalled. Ms. Hempel felt appalled, at the enormity of her lie. Generally speaking, her lying was of the mildest sort, only because she couldn’t do it very well. A genetic failing. Her father was a terrible liar. “Did you get in touch with the insurance man?” her mother would

  ask, and he would answer, “Yes!” in a confident way that made it quite clear he had not. Once, when he picked her up from school, more than forty-five minutes late, he had glared at the dashboard and growled, “Emergency at the hospital,” even though his damp tennis shorts in the backseat were letting off a most powerful reek.

  But he was scrupulously honest about important things. When faced with a difficult question, he never lied or dodged or even faltered. “Toxic shock syndrome,” he once explained to her, “occurs when a woman leaves a tampon or an IUD inside her vagina for too long, allowing bacteria to gather. The bacteria then causes an infection that enter
s her bloodstream and can, but not always, result in her immediate death.” Mastectomy and herpes were described just as clearly.

  It was a model she admired. “Sodomy,” Ms. Hempel now said to her class, “is what’s happening in the back of those vans. And though sodomy is a word that can be used in reference to any sort of sexual intercourse, it most commonly refers to anal sex.”

  They seemed to have a good understanding of what that was. Roderick made a joke about taking a shower and having to pick up a bar of soap off the floor. The class laughed warily. They shifted in their desk-chairs.

  “The clowns do this to you while you’re unconscious?” Theo asked.

  “Exactly,” Ms. Hempel said, and the kids fell silent. The other clowns, the ridiculous ones wearing wigs and clutching candy, had been replaced: these new ones marched through the homeroom swinging their tire irons, waving their towels, unbuckling their pants.

  “So do you see why we’re scared? Why we want you to be careful?”

  The kids nodded. They seemed to have gone suddenly limp. Ms. Hempel felt horrible.

  "But don t worry!” she said. "There are stickers everywhere. You’ve seen them. The blue ones? With the little lighthouse on them.”

  "Safe Haven,” said Sasha dully.

  “Right!” Ms. Hempel said. "If you see that sticker in a store window, you know that you can walk inside and they'll take care of you and call the police and call your parents.” “You mean if the clowns try to clobber us,” Zander clarified.

  "Or if anyone strange approaches you,” she said. “Anyone who makes you feel uncomfortable.”

  "But Safe Haven doesn’t work!” Gloria said. "When this gross guy was following me home from the bus stop, I went into Video Connection, and the girl there didn’t even know what I was talking about.”

  “A gross guy followed you home?” Ms. Hempel asked. “He kept singing, Tou are the sun, you are the rain, really quietly, just so I could hear. You know that song?”

  The other girls squealed softly in disgust.

  “When did this happen?" Ms. Hempel asked.

  "It happens all the time!” the girls cried out, and like a flock of startled pigeons they seemed to all rise up at once. Didn’t Ms. Hempel know? Weirdness was lurking everywhere: behind the bank, holding a broom; on the subway, grazing your butt; at the park, asking if he could maybe touch your hair. What book are you reading? What grade are you in? The girls bounced up and down in their chairs, seething, commiserating, trying to outdo each other. When I was walking to school. When I was visiting my cousin. No, wait! Listen: When I was, like, twelve.... ■

  Homeroom discussions always seemed to end this way The girls in a glorious fury, the boys gazing dumbly at the carpet. What would possess a clown, Ms. Hempel wondered to kidnap one of these beautiful girls? So lively, and smart and suspicious. Such strong legs, from kicking soccer balls and making jump shots. So full of outrage.

  The boys, though: brash and bewildered, oddly proportioned. Some of them were finally beginning to grow tall. They wore voluminous pants that hung precariously on their hips. They grinned readily. During the winter, when it was very cold, they refused to wear their coats in the yard: We get hot when we run around! they said. Their T-shirts flapped against their thin arms; their chests heaved. The ball rarely made it into the net, but they didn’t seem to mind. It was all about the hurling and the frenzied grasping and the thundering down to the other end of the court. And even though the girls were always plucking at Ms. Hempel’s sleeve, demanding that she listen, it was the boys who tugged at her heart, who seemed to her the ripest for abduction.

  Ms. Hempel wondered if her story of that morning could be true, or if it were, factually speaking, impossible. The detail about chloroform bothered her; it struck her as transparently dramatic, like a woman who dashes about with a long, fragile scarf fluttering behind her. It was an anachronism; something from the days of white slavery, and opium smuggling, and jewel heists. Where had she learned about chloroform, anyway? Probably Tintin.

  “If you wanted to kidnap someone, what would you use?” she asked Amit. They were lying in bed, with the lights off! “To knock them unconscious. So that you could drag them into the back of your van."

  "Chloroform, I guess.”

  "Really?” She brightened. It made her happy that the per-on she was marrying would commit crimes in the same way as she would. “There isn’t anything more modern you would se? Aren’t there all sorts of new chemicals?"

  “No, I think chloroform would do the trick,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “That’s what I thought, too.”

  “Are you planning on kidnapping anyone?” he asked.

  "Maybe.”

  Then, "Of course not!” she said, and laughed, and slapped him on the arm. They settled into each other.

  She had gone to the same high school as Amit, even graduated the same year, but they had barely spoken then. She remembered him as black-haired and elfin and somewhat aloof: in an innocent, not a superior, way. His one distinguishing trait had been his devotion to cross-country running. Sometimes her carpool passed him on the road, and she would lean her forehead against the cool glass, wondering how many miles he had already covered and feeling glad that she was splayed across the backseat of a station wagon. She never once saw him panting; it seemed as if he could bound along interminably. Both of her best friends had seen his penis. As part of a short-lived weight-loss regimen, they had joined the crosscountry team, and as they straddled the lawn, stretching their muscles, they glimpsed the head of his penis, appearing from beneath the edge of his delicate, shimmering shorts.

  When she saw him again, years later, this detail reared up before her as soon as she sat down beside him. It was an alumni event, an idea that embarrassed her, but her school had reserved seats at a French-Canadian circus that she badly wanted to see. Amit was there, he said, for exactly the same reason. They discovered many other things in common: warm

  feelings for Mrs. Kravatz, the biology teacher; a passion for the novels of Thomas Hardy; regret that they hadn't joined a circus themselves. They admitted to each other that even though, as students, they had regarded their high school as detestable and oppressive, they now sometimes caught themselves yearning for it.

  The circus, too, filled her with longing. As soon as the lights fell, and the audience hushed, and the circus master appeared barking out his welcome, and the acrobats came tumbling into the ring, and the quaint little orchestra struck up its tinkling song, and the lovely women pranced about with thin velvet ribbons tied around their necks, as soon as all this began, she felt herself missing the circus even as it unfolded before her. Folded and unfolded—this circus was famous for its contortionists. But what they did seemed like the most normal thing in the world; their bodies, glittering in the blue light, appeared enormously relieved, as if they had been permitted, finally, to relax into their most natural states. Clearly she saw how the feet longed to roost behind the ears, how the spine was as stretchy as chewing gum. It made her feel sorry for her own creaking vessel, shuffling along dimly, made to stand upright on two feet. No, not vessel—because if this circus, so full of secrets, revealed anything, it was that the body does not contain, but is contained; rather than comb through the jungles of Asia and Africa and bring back, in shackles, the wildlife found there, this circus had coaxed out of hiding a strange beast, the body.

  “Oh, those Canadians!” she murmured, and Amit nodded ardently, as if he understood precisely what she wasn’t able to say.

  It was the circus, she felt sure, that had made possible all that followed. Where else but in the company of acrobats could she imagine her own body fitting with his? Watching

  him from the station wagon, his black hair, his small frame skimming along the road, she could not have imagined it. Her imagination would have balked, recoiled: why, she wasn’t sure. But it was subdued now, compliant; she sat beside him at the circus and the unimaginable became suddenly, forcefully possible. E
verything else seemed easy: the long correspondence, the breaking off with his girlfriend, the bringing together of their two libraries.

  And his penis she forgot all about, even after she had herself encountered it. Her two best friends had to remind her of the story.

  Her best friends, Greta and Kate, had their hearts set on a bridal shower. It was held at a Victorian tearoom, with mismatched china and plates of watercress sandwiches. Only the three of them were invited.

  In a wobbly rattan chair, her legs firmly planted, sat Kate. “Don’t sit there,” she said to Greta. “Floral chintz is for Beatrice. The Angel in the House.”

  Greta tucked herself into a wing chair. With a great show of ceremony, she unclipped her beeper and stuffed it deep inside her purse. “No interruptions!” she declared. The symmetry was pleasing: a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, the professions you aspire to when you’re a child, before you learn about all the other possibilities.

  “Ooooh, look at you!” Greta said to Beatrice, who had removed her sweater.

  Beatrice looked down at her breasts. “Do you think it’s too much?”

  “No!” they said at once.

  "You wore that to school?” Greta asked, and Beatrice nodded.

  “Those poor boys," said Kate, reaching for the sugar cubes

  “Pup tent!" Greta cried, and though Beatrice tried to protest, tried to explain that her students didn’t look at her that way, that they were inflamed by other teachers like Ms Burnes, who taught science, and Madame Planchon, who wore seamed stockings, her two best friends were already slapping hands above the teapot.