Coming Ashore

by Catherine Gildiner

  “You’re insane,” I said, looking in my rear-view mirror. He was still nodding as he listened to his walkie-talkie.

  Finally he came back to the car and said, “Well, Miss McClure, I see from your speeding record you have quite a heavy foot.”

  Suddenly Sara began singing in a heavy Brooklyn accent,

  Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,

  You gotta understand,

  It’s just our bringing up-ke

  That get us out of hand.

  He threw his head back and laughed, “Hey, you sound like the guys in the movie.”

  In the rear-view mirror, I saw a long line of cars waiting to get into the gate of the parking lot. He must have too, because he waved us on.

  After I drove through the gate, Sara leaned her head out of the passenger side and screamed to the officer, “We live at the Alcazar Hotel. Come and protect us in those big boots of yours.”

  As we parked, Sara sang, “Officer Krupke, I’m down on my knees,” then she looked at me and added, “hopefully committing an indecent act.” I just shook my head as we got out of the car. I knew Sara well enough to know that this was not going to be the end of that policeman.

  All teachers had police escorts to and from their cars. There were also weapons checks, and many of the students were frisked at the doors. We walked into a room marked Faculty Lounge and were faced with a number of unwelcoming black faces. We were told that the faculty lounge we were looking for was down the hall. When we walked into that one, we were faced with white teachers only. Here I was supposed to meet the teachers who were to be my mentors. The head of the English department had a facial tic and about every fifteen seconds his face jerked to the left and he grimaced. He said he’d been there thirty years and counting. He said it hadn’t killed him — yet. The other teacher who was to be my direct supervisor was late “that day.” The teachers talked about their jobs as though they were doing time in the pen and they hoped that one day they’d be released. They spent a great deal of time discussing how to protect themselves and how to manage the students. In all the time I spent in the faculty lounge, which diminished as time went on, no one ever discussed curriculum. In every hallway, there were two guards who were not police but hired thugs who carried some sort of strange electric cattle prods (the Taser of yesteryear) and bats to keep order. If a kid had to use the lavatory, he or she was escorted by what the students, and eventually everyone, called “the mice,” since they wore solid grey uniforms and grey caps. When I thought of the money spent on this manpower, the police in the parking lot and yard and all the attendance officials and social workers, it frustrated me to no end and ultimately made me sad. If they had devoted that manpower to teaching, we would have had a one-to-five ratio instead of one-to-thirty-five.

  On my first day of class, Marilee, the young teacher whom I was assigned to work with and who would be evaluating me, dashed into class late. She was pretty in that rubber-stamped Ohio University sorority kind of way and possessed a perkiness that passed for cooperation in undiscerning circles. She told me it was best to “let me handle things on my own” so I could “get my feet wet.” I guess I’d run into another believer in benign neglect. That was her way of saying she was hightailing it to the mall now that she had a babysitter. She said she had lots to do to prepare for her wedding. She was marrying some guy from the swanky suburb of Shaker Heights who was doing a stint in the National Guard to stay out of Vietnam so he could take over his father’s business. She had actually put his picture up on the faculty lounge bulletin board. She said over her shoulder as she breezed out of the classroom, “Oh, don’t send anyone to the office if they misbehave. They’re scared of them down there.” Without introducing me to the class, she left, swinging her car keys.

  I looked up at the newly arrived class of seniors; these were supposedly the motivated kids since they had not quit school at sixteen when they had been legally allowed to. I was twenty-one teaching eighteen-year-olds and some who had failed several times, making them almost my own age. I wrote my name on the blackboard and one lug in the front row stood up and said in a slightly high-pitched voice for such a large man, “Ya want to teach me somethin’ tonight, baby?” I let it go. He kept it up, “Honey, I got a real blackboard you can write on,” and everyone laughed.

  I was not expecting this and snapped into automatic pilot, ­retorting, “Call me when your voice changes, Junior.” I then swung into action and walked to the back of the class and broke up a poker game by ripping only one card. The guy was furious. He stormed out but was booted right back in by the mice. He liter­ally flew by me and landed crumpled against the radiator. No one seemed to take much notice.

  After quickly standing up and carefully dusting himself off, he snapped at me, “I was just interactin’ peacefully like I’m supposed to be doin’.”

  “This is a school. We are here to learn how to use the English language and interpret English literature. Interacting can be done on a street corner.” Now I raised my voice. “When you go for a job interview someday, are you going to tell them you know how to interact?”

  I walked back up the aisle and caught sight of two pregnant girls, one of whom looked as though she was about to give birth momentarily. The one who was the most pregnant said under her breath to her less pregnant friend and the three ladies in waiting who surrounded them, “Hair dye is for whores, honey.”

  There was very little point in saying I didn’t dye my hair or have sex for money, so I chose to ignore her. But I admit to being shocked. I decided I had hastily judged the walking wounded in the staff room.

  A large boy in the front row named Tyrone seemed to be a class leader. He smiled brightly and said, “Don’t mind them girls, Miss. They called the five pillars of salt. They ain’t never leaving Gomorrah.”

  My tone betraying my incredulity, I announced, “Listen, you are graduating from Thomas Paine High School. Give me liberty or give me death is carved on the front of your school. If you want to vote for death, then keep on doing what you’re doing. Liberty is when you learn something and can make some choices. I’m glad Thomas Paine can’t see the walking dead in this place. You had better fasten your seat belts because I have no idea what you’ve been doing, but we are moving these cattle out of Laramie starting tomorrow.”

  When I met Merilee to debrief for five minutes at the end of the day and told her about the “interacting misunderstanding,” she said, “He was mad because I let them play cards. I find they need time to interact.” (She said the word interact as though it was a religious term.) “I really think as long as they are not arguing they are learning social skills.”

  I couldn’t understand how her standards had sunk so low. What I really couldn’t believe was that she didn’t even bother to put on a better act for me. I would have at least faked it and had the student teacher watch a few of my classes until I could creep out the back door. Most agreements are unwritten and this one was “You don’t squeal on me and I give you an A.” What Merilee didn’t get was that, even though I’d never once wanted to be a teacher, I planned on getting an A anyway.

  CHAPTER 13

  five pillars of salt

  While we try to teach our children all about life,

  our children teach us what life is all about.

  — Angela Schwindt

  After the first week of teaching, Sara got in the car after a long day, slammed the door and declared that it was hopeless trying to teach with no supplies. While rummaging around in the teacher’s supply cupboard for some art materials, all she found were piles of confiscated weapons ranging from nunchuks to Saturday Night Specials. In a back corner under the eaves, she found a big pile of mouldy, tattered copies of the novel Of Mice and Men. She brought one home to show me and said as she held it up, “This is a fossil left over from the early days when they had a curriculum.” She handed me the faded blue 1948 edition with two old-­fashion
ed-looking, bow-legged cowboys on the cover. Sara added, “Now, tell me what ghetto youth are going to relate to cowboys in spurs? I’m not even black and I don’t give a shit.”

  I knew how powerful that book had been for me when we’d been assigned it in grade school. I’d read it aloud to Roy, who couldn’t read. He and I both loved every page of it. In the book, the two main characters, George and Lennie, are itinerant ranch hands who yearn for the American Dream of having a ranch of their own someday. Steinbeck knew how to portray the glory and dignity of America’s disenfranchised. Crooks, the black stablehand who ­nobly suffered loneliness rather than plead to belong to the group of white cowboys, had the same veneer of pride that covered despair, deprivation and loneliness that I saw in the classroom. I thought teaching the book could be perfect if handled well.

  The following Monday, I handed out the novel to each student. I thought they would all laugh, but instead they opened the books, ignoring their deplorable condition, and acted as though I’d given them something interesting. I found that most of them stumbled over the descriptions but did far better on the dialogue. When they took turns performing the character of Crooks, they were spot on. I realized from the class discussion that they knew personality types and they really understood motivation. They saw the innocent beauty of the mildly mentally handicapped Lennie, who experienced no racial prejudice. The students saw Lennie as outside of the black and white dichotomy and immediately related to him. They were touched when Lennie unknowingly suffocates the pet mouse he keeps in his pocket, then accidentally kills a woman because he doesn’t know his own strength. Nearly everyone had a Lennie, a special needs child whom everyone tolerated in their neighbourhood. We had our first real discussion about character development, foreshadowing and what makes a human responsible for a crime.

  The students who were not on drugs or who hadn’t permanently frozen from the inside out with freezer-burn rage, which amounted to about half of the class, enjoyed reading aloud if it was dialogue — they liked dramatic performance. I set up different chapters of Of Mice and Men to be read with different interpretations, but they all had to be defensible in the book. It worked.

  About two days later, I was at a movie theatre with Sara to see Midnight Cowboy. I reached into my camel-coloured Ralph Lauren Polo coat to get some gum and felt something warm and furry. It still had a heartbeat. My hand moved down to its wet pink tail. I jumped in the air, saying, “Sara, I have some live thing in my pocket. It’s pulsating like the tell-tale heart.”

  Sara imitated Mae West’s voice, saying, “‘Hey there, big boy, is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?’” and then went back to watching the movie.

  After the movie, I made the mistake of pulling the small grey mouse out of my pocket in the lobby. It had by now totally expired. The audience scattered, leaving us with no line-up at the refreshment counter so we could purchase our popcorn in time for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, our second feature. Sara said the mouse caper was a great trick to get to the head of the popcorn line.

  Much to Sara’s disgust, I kept the mouse in a baggie in the fridge until the next morning. I wore my same Polo coat to work and left it on the back of my chair. I had Tyrone act the role of Crooks, the black stablehand. Carlson, a large, lanky baritone who was quiet but intense, played Lennie while wearing my coat. I was told by some of the other kids that Carlson had a brother who had been a star basketball player until the year before, when he’d had a high fever then a seizure that left him forever after mentally handicapped. The brother, although older than Carlson, shadowed him on the weekends. Carlson knew exactly how to play the role, how to fidget correctly and mimic his brother’s gait and intonation. His performance was mesmerizing, and for the first time even the five pillars of salt sat at attention.

  We performed the scene where the hulking Lennie, who loved petting animals, inadvertently kills his pet mouse in his pocket by touching him with too much force. We turned the lights off, pulled down the shades and turned on a huge battery-operated light that one of the boys had brought from somewhere. The light shone on Carlson as he walked over to George, Lennie’s partner. Carlson, as Lennie, reached into his pocket and pulled out the dead mouse and put it in front of George, who was played by Tex. The whole class gasped, and I nodded to the players to continue with the scene. Carlson played Lennie with such angelic innocence that when he said, “Oh now, George, look what I gone an’ done,” he had us all in his pocket; there was spontaneous clapping from everyone when the scene finished. I thanked everyone, saying that the rodent donors had chosen to remain anonymous, but I wanted to thank them for the mouse or we would never have had such a marvellous scene.

  When we did the section of the book where the tartish wife of the boss’s son comes on to Lennie, I was shocked that Yvonne, the most pregnant pillar of salt who usually kept her eyes on the clock and sighed heavily whenever I spoke, offered to read and act the part. Tyrone said she wouldn’t even have to act. Yvonne pulled a knife out of her sock and tore across the room toward the offender as everyone laughed. I caught Yvonne by the arm and sent her back to her chair. (I didn’t want to call the mice to throw her around since she was pregnant.) Something let loose in me. I had yet to get angry and I just let Tyrone, a well-known Casanova, have it: “How dare you say one word to Yvonne about her condition? If you were a woman, you would be sitting in the same condition many times over.”

  Yvonne, picking up on my tone, interrupted me to say, “You sayin’ I made some mistake? I want this baby. I’m marryin’ this ­father soon as he gets hisself sorted out.” The boys in the back seats snickered as she continued. “I ain’t made no mistake. I don’t want to be old like you and have some baby when I’m a granny.” The rest of the class made an mmm-mmm sound: Yvonne had pushed a boundary with me and they knew it. I chose to let it go — the idea of being pregnant in high school was so awful to me that I thought she had the right to live any desperate fantasy she wanted. I kept Yvonne after class that day to apologize, saying I was sorry that I’d made assumptions about her pregnancy that were clearly unwarranted. I’d embarrassed her instead of helping her. She stood with her arms on her hips and snapped, “Not only you got the wrong idea, you gone and gives it to the whole class. Now I gots to live that down. From now on, keep your nose out of my business.” I decided that was a good idea. I think she was shocked that I had apologized, but she didn’t want to lose face so she said, “Yeah, you went around putting my business on the street. Now you tellin’ me you sorry.” I offered to say something to the class the next day, but I realized it would have brought more unwanted attention to the situation. She said, “Forget it. You gone and done enough,” and stormed out of the room.

  The next day, Yvonne told Tyrone that she was going to play the part of the farm owner’s wife and she didn’t want “no manner o’ thing comin’ out his big mouth.” I was surprised that she wasn’t just bowing out. This time everyone was respectful or at least quiet.

  Carlson played Lennie and Yvonne played the farmer’s wanton wife. This very pregnant girl was perfectly able to play the part of an evil femme fatale. She changed the words only slightly to ­enhance the performance. She cuddled up to Carlson and said that she knew what it was like to touch soft things. She said her hair was not nappy but soft, just like his baby mouse. Then she picked up his hand and ever so gently put his hand on her hair. She said, “That’s okay, sugar, just feel how soft that be.” I have seen many versions Of Mice and Men, but I have never seen one that approximated the intensity of Carlson and Yvonne.

  Although there was a part of me that winced seeing a pregnant teenager attempt such outrageous flirtation, rubbing her body against a boy’s and making every word and movement a sexual innuendo, I admired her guts. I would have been terrified to flirt with a man at any time, let alone while pregnant and in front of a crowd.

  Two months later, when Yvonne had her baby, she went alone to the hospital,
was home for two days, gave it to her tired mom to raise and returned to school on the third day, not wanting to miss the prom. The boy who got her pregnant asked another girl to the prom and left Yvonne on the sidelines.

  >> <<

  I opened the next unit by announcing that we were going to do poetry. The class groaned and one student threw himself into the aisle with his arms and feet in the air as though he were a dead ­rodent with rigor mortis. I handed out a mimeographed sheet with a poem.

  I read the first of several verses aloud:

  Love the lie and lie the love

  Hangin’ on, with a push and shove

  Possession is the motivation

  that is hangin’ up the Goddamn nation

  Looks like we always end up in a rut (everybody now!)

  Tryin’ to make it real — compared to what?

  No one got very excited until they saw me unveil the expensive record player I’d borrowed from Sara and lugged into school. I put on the record by the jazz greats Les McCann and Eddie Harris, who had recorded the lyrics. The class had a completely different reaction to the song, which had a strong staccato rhythm. Those who had tripped over the words while reading them could suddenly read every word as they pounded out the rhythm on their desks. A few of the tough guys from the back row, the Huey Newton clones who wore black berets and bullets over one shoulder, nodded and for the first time participated by reading another verse aloud:

  Slaughterhouse is killin’ hogs

  Twisted children killin’ frogs

  Poor dumb rednecks rollin’ logs

  Tired old ladies kissin’ dogs

  Hate the human, love that stinking mutt (I can’t stand it!)

  Try to make it real — compared to what?