The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman

by Ben H. Winters

  At last, Bethesda turned to the Internet (“the first refuge of the lazy,” as Mr. Melville sneeringly called it), where supposedly a person could find any and all information in the entire universe. And what did she find? Nothing.

  Your search—“IDA FINKLEMAN”—did not match any results.

  At four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Bethesda blinked in the bright afternoon sun of the Wilkersholm Memorial Public Library parking lot, tugged back on her purple scarf, and wondered what to do next.

  “Bethesda! Hi!”

  Oh, perfect, Bethesda thought. “Hey, Pamela.”

  Pamela Preston, wearing an elaborate pink winter hat and high-fashion snow boots, waved merrily as she turned her bike into the parking lot and pulled up next to Bethesda. “Working on Melville, I bet,” she chirped.

  “Me, too!”

  Bethesda muttered, “Yeah,” and tried to muster a smile. She and Pamela had been close from the ages of seven to nine, when they lived near each other and were both stars of the L’il Otters swim team. They had drifted apart, however, for all the reasons that ten-year-old girls do: Pamela’s family moved to a different, bigger house, out of biking distance from Bethesda’s; Pamela had started hanging out a lot with Natasha Belinsky and Todd Spolin, neither of whom Bethesda was too crazy about; and once, during their last season together on the Otters, Suzie told Bethesda that Todd said that Pamela said the backstroke (Bethesda’s specialty) wasn’t really swimming—“it was more, like, impressive floating.”

  Anyway, since they had gotten to Mary Todd Lincoln, Bethesda and Pamela didn’t hang out so much. And Pamela was the last person Bethesda felt like running into, just as she realized the SPDSTAMF was maybe going to be harder than she’d imagined.

  “So? How’s it going with the fascinating Ms. Finkleman? ” Pamela replied, her eyes twinkling ever so slightly.

  “Oh, you know,” Bethesda replied. “Fine, I guess.”

  “Oh, great!” Pamela said warmly, as if Bethesda had said something totally different. “Well, my Special Project is going really well, too. Really, really well.” Talking very rapidly, and with a lot more hand gestures than Bethesda thought necessary, Pamela explained that she had dropped the Jesse James theme this time, and instead was studying the mystery of those weird piles of small rocks that ringed the school athletic field.

  “I mean, have you noticed those piles? ”

  “Uh, yeah, I guess so,” Bethesda said, shading her eyes against the bright white sun and Pamela’s enthusiastic smile.

  “Well. I’m still piecing together the evidence and all, but you know what I think? ” Pamela lowered her voice and leaned forward over her handlebars, giving Bethesda a rich noseful of her lilac perfume. “I think it’s aliens.”

  “Really?” Despite herself, Bethesda was intrigued. “Aliens?”

  “Yes! Not the aliens themselves, just, like, signs of them. They’re preparing to land on our athletic field.”

  “Wow.” Bethesda smiled weakly. “Aliens. Are you here to check the newspaper archives? ”

  “What? No, I don’t need to. I’ve got it all pieced together. I’m just on the way to the art store to get some pink poster board. Won’t that be cute?”

  Yeah. Cute. As she biked home, Bethesda’s mind raced with anxiety. The clock was counting down to Monday morning, when Special Projects were due, and Pamela Preston had aliens from outer space about to land on the Mary Todd Lincoln athletic field. Bethesda, on the other hand, had (drum roll, please!) the world’s most boring music teacher! Erf!

  Bethesda’s purple scarf caught in her rear wheel; she braked too hard, jerked the bike to the right, and slammed into the red-and-white striped barber pole outside Sully’s Unisex Salon.

  “Argle bargle,” Bethesda cried as she struggled to her feet and picked little bits of deicing salt out of her palms. Argle bargle was another favorite phrase of Bethesda’s father, for expressing intense emotional frustration or physical pain. When you were experiencing both, you said it twice. “Argle bargle!”

  After dinner that night, Bethesda sat at the kitchen table, a bottle of Snapple open in front of her, considering the meager data she’d collected thus far. There was the intriguing information about the tattoo. That was good. There was the intriguing clue from Ms. Finkleman’s desk drawer. That was also good. And there was—what else? The bowl of clementine oranges? No help there.

  Bethesda sighed and decided her best bet was to focus on the clue from the desk. The original, written on a scrap of yellowing copy paper, was taped to the bottom of Ms. Finkleman’s bottom drawer; but Bethesda had carefully copied the whole thing onto page three of her SPDSTAMF spiral notebook.

  It was a secret code. Obviously. But what could it mean?

  It was 8:45 p.m. Special Projects were due first thing Monday morning. Thirty-six hours of mystery-solving time left.

  AGY EGY? T M R? Maybe these were the names of Ms. Finkleman’s best friends. Aggy Eggy? Tamara?

  P … P … Y …

  PROJ!

  Was it a list of places that Ms. Finkleman had traveled? Or lived? Was there a Projistan? Bethesda, who was pretty good at geography, didn’t think so.

  Come on, Ms. Finkleman, she thought. Who are you? As Bethesda sat staring helplessly at the code, remembering her arrogant performance in the lunchroom on Friday and generally deciding the situation couldn’t get much worse, she heard a chipper voice behind her.

  “All right!” said Bethesda’s father, settling down next to her at the kitchen table with a gigantic bowl of ice cream. “What are we working on?”

  Bethesda’s father loved to help. It was kind of a problem.

  “I have a big Social Studies project, dad. And it’s really hard, so—”

  “Ooh! The notorious Mr. Melville!” said Bethesda’s father. “Social Studies! Good thing I’m so social and/or studious! So? Lay it on me! What’s the assignment?”

  Bethesda sighed. “Well—”

  “Hey, you want some ice cream? It’s scrombifulous.” (Made-up word.) “Pecan raisin pretzel.”

  “No thanks, Dad. I have to focus.”

  “Can’t focus with low blood sugar, Dr. Octagon,” he said, using one of his zillion entirely nonsensical nicknames for her. He waggled the spoon at Bethesda and gave the ice cream a creaky, imploring voice. “Eeeeat me. Pleeease eeeeeat me….”

  Bethesda gave in and took the spoon, giving her father an opportunity to grab her spiral notebook. He held it up right in front of his eyes and squinted. “Let’s see what we have here! What on god’s green earth is a Finkleman?”

  “It’s not a what, it’s a who, and that’s what I’m trying to figure out. Ida Finkleman is my Music Fundamentals teacher,” explained Bethesda, reclaiming her notebook and wiping a smudge of chocolate syrup off the lower right-hand corner. “Look, Dad. No offense, but I don’t really think there’s much you can do to help on this one.”

  “That’s preposterous! ” her father protested. “First of all, I’m a good helper! Secondly, I know lots of stuff! Thirdly—did I say I was a good helper already? ”

  “Yeah, Dad.”

  “All right, then. Gimme a crack at it. What else is an old man to do? ”

  Bethesda’s father started pretend crying, blowing his nose vigorously in his napkin. Bethesda knew from many years of experience there wasn’t anything she could say that would make him back off. So she pushed the spiral notebook back across the table. He beamed and bent over it intently.

  “Hmm,” he said softly, peering at the mystifying scramble of letters that Bethesda had copied from Ms. Finkleman’s desk drawer.

  “Hmm, what?” asked Bethesda wearily.

  Bethesda’s dad didn’t answer. He held up one chocolate-stained finger for quiet and studied the spiral notebook in silence for a long moment. Then he snapped his fingers, looked back up at Bethesda, and said, “I’ve got it!”

  “Really? What is it?”

  “It’s a code.”

  Bethesda rolled her ey
es. “Thanks, Dad, but I got that far already.”

  He shrugged and licked chocolate off his fingers. “Oh, well.”

  “What I’m trying to figure out is what the code means.”

  “That I don’t know. Although …” “Although what? ”

  “It’s going to sound ridiculous. But there’s something kind of strangely familiar about those letters. Like I don’t know what it means, but the meaning is somehow … calling to me.”

  He was right: It sounded ridiculous. And yet Bethesda’s foot sprang to life, suddenly squeaking insistently against the table leg, like it was a bloodhound that had just picked up a scent.

  “Calling to you? ” she asked, looking at her dad skeptically.

  “Yeah. Calling to me. Like from another life. Or something.” Bethesda’s dad laughed at himself, embarrassed. “Okay, so I guess I wasn’t much use this time. That’s what you get for—”

  Suddenly Bethesda shouted, “Aha! ” and pounded on the table hard, hard enough to make the ice-cream spoon dance in its bowl. Bethesda’s dad, startled, pushed back from the table. “Honey?”

  “Come on!” Bethesda ran upstairs, taking the steps two at a time. She was thinking about all those boring stories her dad had told her about his past, from before he met her mother. About growing up in Brooklyn, and about the navy—and about his “punk rock” days. All the silly pictures, the torn jeans and the pierced ears and the spiky black hairdo. And what did he always say, whenever he finished some silly story about those years? “But that was another time,” he’d say. “Another life.”

  They were in her parents’ bedroom, in her dad’s closet.

  “What are we doing up here, cheese potato?”

  “Show me your record collection.”

  A huge smile appeared on Bethesda’s dad’s face. “Really? You want to see my records? I’m honored. Seriously. I always knew—”

  “Hurry up!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  They dug out the stack of records, the musty black disks in their shiny paper sleeves, and Bethesda riffled through the stack, looking for … well, what exactly she was looking for, Bethesda wasn’t totally sure.

  Until suddenly, there it was.

  “Oh, man,” said Bethesda’s dad from over her shoulder. “I haven’t heard that in yonks.”

  Bethesda examined the record more carefully. It wasn’t a full-sized LP. It was what she had heard her dad call a seven-inch, a small record with just one or two songs on each side. She read the faded yellow sticker, which was printed in a messy font designed to look like handwriting. On the top it said the name of the band: Little Miss Mystery and the Red Herrings. At the bottom, in tiny type, it said North Side Sounds. “That’s the record company,” her dad explained. And in the middle, dead center, were the song titles. There was just one song on the A side, called “Allergy Emergency.” The B side was called “Not So Complicated.”

  Bethesda’s eyes opened wide. She grabbed her spiral notebook and reexamined the mysterious code she had cribbed from Ms. Finkleman’s desk drawer. There it was, the seventh line: (e?) NSCOMP.

  NSCOMP.

  “Not So Complicated.”

  And the first line: AGY EGY

  “Allergy Emergency.”

  “Oh my god, Dad,” Bethesda said, her eyes widening. “This isn’t a code! ” “It’s not?” he said. “It’s a set list.”

  Which is how it came to be that at precisely 9:42, when Bethesda Fielding’s mother got home from Mackenzie Magruder McHenry, the downtown law firm where she practiced appellate litigation (and often had to work on Saturdays, because she was, as Bethesda’s dad liked to say, “a big shot”), she found her husband and daughter dancing around the living room to a band she hadn’t heard, or so much as thought of, in fifteen years.

  “Good lord,” said Angela Fielding with a laugh. “What’s going on here?”

  “C’mon, gorgeousness,” hollered her husband. “Dance party! ”

  Bethesda whirled past, clapping her hands and leaping to the beat. “Guess what, Mom?” she shouted. “I solved a mystery! ”

  7

  MOZART’S PIANO CONCERTO NO. 20 IN D MINOR

  On that same night—at that very same moment, in fact—in a high-rise condominium on the other side of town, an unremarkable brown-haired woman was fixing herself a cup of Sleepytime tea. In fuzzy slippers she padded from the kitchen into the living room. The unremarkable brown-haired woman sank down in her armchair, put her feet up on the matching ottoman, and exhaled. Before she had her first sip of tea, Ida Finkleman slightly raised her mug of Sleepytime and murmured a single sentence. It was a sentence that would have struck most who knew this most unremarkable woman as rather remarkable indeed.

  “The agouti,” she intoned softly, “lives on.”

  Agoutis are tiny brownish rodents who populate the verdant jungles of South and Central America. Ida Finkleman had never seen one, but once she had read about them in National Geographic and felt a strong tug of kinship with the little fellows. Agoutis, the article had said, were “shy and nervous creatures.” As you would be, too, Ms. Finkleman felt, if you lived where they did: in a habitat teeming with much larger creatures who were always trying to eat you. An agouti’s only hope of survival, National Geographic explained, was to be at all times as small and still and plain and dull as possible.

  Which was exactly how Ms. Finkleman felt at school.

  To her, Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School was a jungle. Boorish, clumsy sixth graders rooted blindly from class to class, bumping into the walls. Tall eighth-grade girls pranced through the hallways like gazelles, preening for one another and letting out gales of twittery laughter at jokes only they could understand. Crass seventh-grade boys gathered in packs in the cafeteria, flinging Tater Tots and flicking bits of meatloaf like gorillas scuffling with their dung.

  When she was teaching, it was even worse. Ms. Finkleman, timid and skittish, stood meekly at her music stand, speaking in her mousy voice about Beethoven or Copland, struggling to be heard above the din. It was a tough world for a little agouti, and Ms. Finkleman knew that she could be doing something else if she chose. Her parents in Sarasota told her so every time she called, handing the phone back and forth to each other.

  “So? You’re so miserable? So quit!”

  “So come down here, you’re so miserable!”

  “It’s beautiful down here!”

  “The trees!”

  “And the juice! Delicious!”

  “Come and work for your cousin Sherman!”

  “He runs a very successful funeral home!”

  “No, thank you,” Ida always told them. And they would always ask why, and she would always say … because.

  Because as hard as it was to get through her days, at least they were days filled with music. Thinking music, talking music, and even, every once in a blue moon, managing to teach music. Just yesterday, for example, she had played her sixth-period seventh graders a selection from Peter and the Wolf, and Natasha Belinsky (of all people) had raised her hand suddenly and said, “Oh, wait! So it’s like the music is the characters talking! Except they’re not talking! They’re being music!”

  Ms. Finkleman was so surprised by Natasha’s flash of insight that she was momentarily struck dumb. Then, when she was finally able to stammer out the words, “Why, that’s exactly right,” Natasha was so surprised she choked on her gum and had to go to the nurse.

  These small, sporadic victories kept Ms. Finkleman going. On such meals did the little agouti keep from starving.

  And when she was at home, Ms. Finkleman could put on her slippers, fix a mug of Sleepytime tea, and leave the jungle behind. She turned on her stereo, closed her eyes, and lost herself in the bracing first movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 20 in D Minor.

  How soothing they were, her familiar pleasures—how very human.

  8

  TINNY BOYER

  All ((right, people, settle down!” bellowed Mr. Melville, clapping his b
ig hands together for quiet.

  It was first period Monday morning, time for the presentation of Special Projects. Mr. Melville, being Mr. Melville, decided the running order at random as they went along, so no one knew when they might be called upon to present. If it worked like it was supposed to, about half the class would present today, the rest tomorrow. But if it worked like it usually worked, there would be enough stragglers, incompletes, and presentations that went over time that Special Projects would drag on at least through Thursday.

  “Hmm,” Mr. Melville muttered darkly, stroking his beard. “Who shall be our first victim?”

  Bethesda leaned forward hopefully in her chair but did not cross her fingers. She had decided early in her middle school career that it was too dorky to cross your fingers in hopes of being called on. Instead she pictured a giant pair of fingers in her mind and mentally crossed them. Just as dorky, true, but at least no one could see it. Nervously, Bethesda undid and then redid her twin pigtails. Her Chuck Taylors, a new pair emblazoned with black-and-gold stars, squeaked rhythmically against the side of her chair.

  Mr. Melville slowly scanned the classroom with his big shaggy head. Squeak, squeak, squeak, went Bethesda’s new sneakers. Squeak, squeak, squeak.

  “Let us begin with … Mr. Boyer.”

  Bethesda sighed and uncrossed the fingers in her mind as Mr. Melville settled his stern gaze on Tenny Boyer.

  “All right, Tennyson,” Mr. Melville said. “Knock our socks off.”

  There was a long pause, as there was any time a teacher called on Tenny Boyer. Finally Tenny’s voice, raspy and uncertain, came from the back of the room, and said what it always said.

  “Huh?”

  Mr. Melville launched the Eyebrows of Cruelty upward in feigned surprise and then twisted his lips ironically, as if to say, “I’m not really surprised, my arched eyebrows notwithstanding.”

  “Your Special Project, Mr. Boyer?” Mr. Melville said. “On the great unknown?”