“I want your resignation.” She shrugged. “As insurance.”
• • •
Slowly, he got to his feet, rubbing the small of his back. It was good to see her sitting there on the bleachers. He’d missed her since she’d been moved to district. Oh, they’d never really talked much, but he missed watching her brush that mane out of her face. Like a kid would do it. Not for show, but only to get the damned stuff out of her eyes. He liked the way she looked at people in a way that said, ready or not here I come. He liked the smell of her, for Christ’s sake—even that.
Small. Slender. He could see over the top of her head in his bare feet. Yet there was something in her eyes—a fierceness. Years ago he’d seen a cougar gone to tree with her yearling. The big cat’s eyes were like the hazel ones he saw before him now. There was something hard in them—a look that said if she were pushed, if she were made to stand and fight, she would come back with every atom of her being. It scared him—it was what he liked most about her.
“You don’t kid around, do you?” It was a barter—three days with this deadly angel for his job, straight across. A few days with a lovely stranger for what little was left of his life. He wanted her to take the deal, wanted it more than he’d wanted anything in a long time. Something told him she would.
He shook his head no. “You want my job, you can damn well try to get it. I won’t resign. You heard the deal. I’m making it easy enough.
I’m not going to hand it to you. Take it or leave it.” He went out, the locker room door swinging shut behind him.
• • •
She’d take it.
Her fingers moved quickly over the keys of her laptop. Fourth period— self-defense. Two students sent to the showers without office notification, a second violation of assertive discipline guidelines.
She slipped it back into her bag. Dh, she was good. She didn’t need his resignation. She’d just asked to see what he would say. It was a trick she’d learned at the mercados in Sao Paulo—ask for more than you need and you’ll get what you want.
Thursday night it would be over. Friday she’d be back in her office, her wonderful office, smelling of new carpet and freshly brewed chamomile tea. Her eye fell on the empty mat, moving with grim slowness about the empty wrestling room, dead silent, now.
Where did that leave Chelsea, Moses, Frank, and the others? It left them with a rookie who didn’t know a thing about teaching except the useless nonsense they taught in teacher training, and it left the district with fifteen thousand saved on his salary. Not a bad deal—for the district.
Could she do it? Could she fire a good teacher to keep her job? She went to wait for him in the hall, letting the door swing shut behind her.
She didn’t know the answer.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to.
She waited for O’Connel in the stale hall.
Through large windows she looked out over the front lawn.
The rain had let up, but the sky hung heavy still. Lightning skipped above bloated clouds, rattling the plate glass.
The last time she’d seen her father had been a day like this. He’d taken her up on the roof of their apartment, and together they watched a storm blow in from the east, stinking of the sea—of rotting kelp, crab shell, sewage.
On the roof with its forest of aerials and vent pipes, her father sat under the tin overhang of a pigeon loft holding her close in strong arms. Around them Sao Paulo stretched an endless noisy jumble to the hazy horizon.
Sipping at a bottle of beer, eyes on clouds sweeping above them, he spoke to her as he never had. Smelling of beer, of sweat, of diesel, he pressed her to him, tired eyes full of love, beard sandpaper against her face.
“Minha pequenina, what will you be, eh? A great woman? A special woman?” Tongue-tied with emotion, she could say nothing. Most nights, shuffling home coated with dust turned to black mud in the sweaty creases of arms and neck, he found little to say. The family table at dinner was a solemn and silent place, the only sound of eating, of drinking. Now, under a bloated sky, so many words at once. He had never said such things—not to her.
He took another sip of beer, sending droplets of condensation running up the neck of the bottle. With a big calloused hand, nails stained brown with hand-rolled cigarettes, he stroked her hair. “My little one, who reads so much and says so little.” He shook his head, smelling of the rich black earth of the forest. Even in the cab it reached him, the fine dust, the flesh of the earth the wind carried away from the raw-scoured wounds he left behind.
“I’m a poor man, an ignorant man. I work, I sleep, I eat. Such is my life.” He nodded, eyes on the horizon, perhaps seeing out past the smog to the forest. The forest he loved. The forest he leveled to buy their food and clothing, to buy her books.
Bone weary, he sighed, eyes barely open. “I know nothing but how to work—only to work. But you, Solange, will be much more than I. This I know.” Suddenly came a flash of blue-white and a rattling, rumbling, booming of such power that she hid herself against him, secure in the smell of his sweat.
Against the swollen bruise of dark cloud wheeled specks of dazzling white. Around and around they hurtled under the heavy ceiling of cloud.
He raised a black arm. “There, see the gulls, they’re not afraid.
You, Solange, are one of those.” So many words had tired him. He said nothing more. Solange faced the cracking sky, doing her best to be brave. She loved him that day so hard it scalded her heart.
The next day he rose in the dark and caught the bus to the forest.
He never came home.
A two hundred foot mahogany crushed the cab of his Komatsu, its two steering levers impaling him through the chest. He died quickly, they said.
After the funeral, a short service with a priest reeking of wine in a mud-stained church on the edge of the forest, Solange slipped off into the jungle, drawn to see the wrecked machine. Alone, good white shoes ruined in the sucking mud, she climbed into the mangled steel cage. There, as he lay dying, in the thick layer of dust on the diamond plate floor, her father had traced her name.
• • •
She looked up to find O’Connel beside her in the quiet hall, long hair wet from the shower. “You don’t like thunder?” She looked up, eyes narrowed, on her guard.
Just how much could he see? “I like it, why?”
“You looked a little sad for a second, that’s all. Come on, it’s lunch time.” He led the way down the hall toward the teacher’s lounge.
Dreading this, she hung back. “Oh, I didn’t know, I should have looked at the schedule. I brought my lunch, I’ll eat in my car.” He turned back, smile mocking her. “Afraid to mix with the hoi polloi?”
“No,” she said, voice rising slightly in exasperation. “I just don’t see any reason to subject them to it.” Or herself.
“To what?” She sighed. Could he be that stupid? “To having me there.”
“Why? You chew with your mouth open?”
“You know how they feel about me.” He shrugged. “You don’t seem like the type to run and hide. Are you?” Their eyes locked. He was first to look away. “I didn’t think so, come on, it might be fun.” Fun for whom, she wondered, following reluctantly. This, she was sure, was a very bad idea.
“Ms. Gonsalvas,” O’Connel said, “you remember Karl Calandra, Sid Lott, Myrtle Sparrow, Aurora Helvey.”
“Solange,” she said awkwardly. “I’m still just Solange.” Myrtle peered up through thick glasses and smiled, drawing out an arm’s length of yarn from the bag at her feet. “Well, well,” she bellowed, “what a nice surprise, we don’t see you much any more. How’s life in the big city?” Solange sat, leaning over to hug her. “Oh, Myrtle, I miss you.
You sure I can’t bribe you to come downtown?” Myrtle hugged her back, then pushed her away playfully with a big flabby arm. “Oh, stop it, now,” she said, blushing. “I wouldn’t last a week around all those bigwigs. It wouldn’t be long and I’d be telling one
of them to put his head down on his desk and shut his big fat mouth.” Solange cocked her head, smiling. “That might not be so bad.” How she’d missed this lovely old woman.
“Hey, everybody,” Myrtle said, wrinkled hand pressed over Solange’s, “I want you all to know this woman is the best damned teacher I’ve ever worked for.” Encircling Solange with a beefy arm, she pulled her close. “Honey, you get tired of being a big shot downtown, you can come back here and go to work with me, any time.” O’Connel nodded at five new teachers huddled together further down the long table. “Those are our up-and-coming rookies, true believers just passing through on their way to bigger and better things. They keep themselves apart so the cynicism won’t rub off” The big man seated with them spoke up with an apologetic shrug, “There’s only one lounge.” A woman spoke up, “Well, Solange, from what I hear, you’ve come to bring the renegade here, to heel,” Solange opened her Tupperware of sliced carrots and celery, setting it on the table in front of her. This was it—they were all listening.
“I’m here to observe Mr. O’Connel’s classes if that’s what you mean, yes.” The new teacher drew a finger across her throat with appropriate sound effects, giving O’Connel a saccharine smile.
“Now children,” O’Connel said, wagging a finger, “don’t go moving your blocks into my toy box yet.”
“Good timing,” Sid said through a mouthful of apple, running shoes propped up on the back of a chair. “You’re just in time to get your two cents in, O’Connel.” He pointed to the chalkboard on the wall. “We’re listing the fads we’ve seen go over the dam in the last thirty years.” Aurora went to the board, holding a floret of raw broccoli between her teeth as she wrote. “Open Classroom.” Karl, blowing on a cup of steaming soup, thick glasses fogged, waved his spoon in the air. “That had to be one of the biggest jokes.
I taught in an open school in L.A. in the sixties.” He shook his head, giggling. “It was a loony bin. Kids flying everywhere, everybody talking at once. All that freedom was supposed to really make them want to learn, right? Uh, uh—monkey-wrencher’s paradise.” Aurora spoke up with a vehemence that surprised Solange. “We’re still fighting it thirty years later in classrooms divided with sliding curtains. The way sound carries you might as well be in the same room. They wasted millions building the stupid things.” Sid picked a piece of apple from his jeans. “Let it all hang out.” Setting aside her broccoli, Aurora tore open a pound bag of M
M’s. “How about New Math— Remember that?”
“I did that!” Solange said. “All it ever did was confuse me.” Sid leaned over to examine Solange’s carrots and celery. “Me, too, and I had to teach it.” He squinted up at Aurora’s candy as he took another bite of apple. “I wonder, do you think there’s any relationship between the food people eat, and the way people look?” Aurora smiled, plump face reddening. “Okay, smart ass.” She sent a floret of broccoli flying past his ear. “At least I had good intentions.”
“Oh, I saw that. I saw that. You ate what? Maybe three pieces of broccoli? That balances out a bag of M
M’s. I was just asking is all.”
“What about Whole Language?” Solange said.
“Good one,” Aurora said. “We threw out phonics in favor of guessing at words. Now, ten years later, oops! A generation of kids missed out on learning to decode. And we’re still teaching it! Why?”
“Follow the money,” said Karl. “Textbook publishers. Who needs a book to learn phonics? A two dollar chart on the wall, and you’re done. No money in it, that’s why.”
“But wait a minute,” Solange said. “When I was here we taught phonics. It was coming back. I thought all the primary teachers in the district were still teaching it.”
“Wrong,” Aurora said. “I’m the only one I know of , and I can only get away with it because I’ve been here so long they leave me alone. I’m not supposed to be.” Sid covered his eyes. “What are you telling her for?” Aurora blew air through slack lips. “I’m not going to teach kids to memorize words, to look at the picture and guess. I’ve been teaching reading for thirty years. I may not have the neatest room, or the quietest room— “ Karl and Sid raised their eyes to the ceiling.
“Okay, okay! I don’t have the neatest or quietest room!”
“Got any grades in your grade book yet, Helvey?” She laughed, face coloring. “Not yet, it’s only November!” Karl moaned, covering his eyes.
“I’ll get to it. But my second graders can read! They can spell!’ She rummaged in a big purse. “Let them fire me! I got a letter from PERS right here, says I can retire right now and draw fifteen hundred a month.” Sid whistled. “Big money! Okay, grab some chalk, Helvey.
Units— Remember when they were big? if you could teach without a textbook, man, you were really teaching! “ Karl peeled open a candy bar. “And portfolios, what about them? They’re coming back around now. Just shows to go you, you wait long enough and you’re on the cutting edge again.”
“I’ve got one,” Aurora said, “Twenty-first Century Schools and Certificates of Initial Mastery.” Karl shook make-believe dice. “Stand back, baby, this one’s the one! I feel lucky this time!”
“Boy, speaking of luck,” Sid shook his gray head, “Oakland and Yoncalla have sure got it made with their four day week. What a gravy train. I’ve been suggesting we go to a four-day week for years, and they just laughed at me. We had to watch our minutes of instruction, and we didn’t even have enough to shorten the day by twenty. How come minutes aren’t important now?”
“They got a waiver,” Solange said. “They spend Fridays in meetings to get their portfolio programs and Certificate of Initial Mastery program up and running. The teachers think it’s great.” Aurora put back the chalk. “Oh, I know I would. What I don’t get is why the parents go for it. They get their kids at home one more day, and the teachers get a day with no kids. If I were a parent, I’d be yelling my head off”
“Hey, I know!” Karl said. “We could have a one day week! One, twenty-four hour day. What do you think, Solange? Will it fly?” She smiled despite herself “I’ll bounce it off Hugh and let you know.” He grabbed thinning hair with both hands. “Oh, Christ, don’t tell him, he’ll write it down in that little book of his.”
“What’s the matter?” Sid said. “don’t you want to be in his memoirs?” Karl raised a hand. “I take the fifth.” For a moment it was quiet, and Solange couldn’t stop herself “You know, what it is, is that kids fail. Nobody wants that, so we’re constantly trying to change the rules so all kids will succeed. The problem is, nothing works. No matter how low we set the requirements, kids keep failing.”
“We’ll never change that,” O’Connel said, “not if we set any standards at all.” Solange ran a piece of celery around a small container of ranch dressing with grim determination, her mood turning dark. He was right. It was as sad and as simple as that. “No. I guess we won’t, will we?” Sid reached over to grab a pamphlet off the shelf by the door.
“Okay, kids, let’s not get maudlin. Here we go. This is the one that’s going to take us over the top— The Oregon Educational Act for the 21st Century. ‘Toward New and Higher Learning Standards— ‘“
“Wait ‘till next year,” Karl said.
“I quote— ‘To attain the Certificate of Initial Mastery, a student will demonstrate the ability to think creatively and reflectively in making decisions and solving problems, direct his or her own learning, including planning and carrying out complex projects, communicate through reading, writing, speaking, and listening, and through an integrated use of visual forms such as symbols and graphic images.’” Karl snorted. “You know what that means, don’t you? It means they cut pictures out of magazines and paste them on poster board and call it a report. I kid you not.” He pointed at the rookies down the table. “They’re doing it right here.” Sid read. “’They shall use current technology, including computers, to process information and produce high quality products.’”
; “That means they can scan a picture in a magazine and then print it out to use for a report,” Karl said.
Myrtle laughed. “Don’t knock it, it beats writing.”
“’They will recognize, process, and communicate quantitative relationships.’” Aurora’s mouth gaped. “Huh? Does that mean they’re going to count? My second graders can do that.” She laughed—a wonderful, goofy laugh. “Boy, I’m doing better than I thought. Can they get a certificate?”
“Come on Helvey, I’m trying to teach you something, here!” She raised her hand. “Can I go to the bathroom?” Karl yawned wide. “I’m bored.”
“Can I sharpen my pencil?” O’Connel said.
Solange laughed, basking in the warmth of acceptance. She’d forgotten how much she missed it. Such a small thing, being accepted by the people you worked with. Absent it left such a yawning void.
Myrtle slammed her needles to the table. “Will you please shut up. Read it, Sid.”
“They’ll ‘...participate as a member of a team, including providing leadership for achieving goals and working well with others from diverse backgrounds.’”
“It’s about time they brought back the ‘plays well with others’ box on the report card,” O’Connel said.
“Fine,” Helvey said. “As long as they don’t grade us on it.” Solange nodded. “What that part means is that the bright kids will get stuck helping the not-so-bright instead of learning themselves.” The rookies looked her way, ears pricking.
Sid frowned. “You’re not sounding much like a cheerleader, Miss Assistant Superintendent.” He turned back to the pamphlet. “The student will ‘deliberate on public issues which arise in our representative democracy and in the world by applying perspectives from the social sciences…”
“I can see it now,” Karl spoke into an imaginary phone. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs. Jones, but Johnny failed the unit on deliberating and applying perspectives from the social sciences.
A Terrible Beauty: What Teachers Know but Seldom Tell outside the Staff Room Page 4