Class Dismissed

by Kevin McIntosh

  Whoa, bullseye, thought Patrick. But he only said, How so?

  He was responsible for all those passengers. He was first mate.

  What about the captain? The crew screaming ‘jump’?

  That doesn’t matter, said Sanji. It is Jim’s choice. And his honor.

  Iz about ree-spect, boomed James from a couch in the back. Everyone turned to him. It was the first they’d heard from James, who was tossed into the EICL dumpster a few weeks after school began, released from custody. For what offense, Patrick was never informed. But no one chose to sit next to his muscular, tattooed body. Ree-spect, y’all, said James, thumping his chest twice with a fist.

  Yes, James? said Patrick, trying to disguise his surprise, delight, alarm.

  He s’posed to be a man, James declared, pulling the tiny noun to at least three syllables. But he couldn’ do it. He couldn’ do it. And James slumped back into the couch, glowering, flexing the thin scar that ran from the right corner of his mouth to his chin. It was the first and last literary analysis he would share with his fellow participants; James would disappear suddenly, several weeks hence, slipping once again into the murky depths of the New York State court system.

  The bell rang before Patrick had a chance to have James clarify his remarks, which was just as well. But he reflected on them that afternoon on the subway. True, his lesson hadn’t touched on the finer points of Conrad’s art—his use of the past perfect at Lord Jim’s critical moment, for example––but it was the first ride home where Patrick thought, I can do this. I can do this. And James was right: Iz about ree-spect. Tomorrow, he would tell the participants he was Mr. Lynch.

  Patrick tore off a corner of his bologna sandwich and turned to Dorie, who sat at the head of their lunch table, hunched over her split pea soup. “Would it be…imprudent to inquire as to the whereabouts of the rest of the Huck Finns?” he over-articulated, smoothing a make-believe mustache, trying to hide just how pissed-off he was. Dorie curled her thin lips defensively, making them disappear. George nearly coughed up his Diet Coke. George loved Patrick’s Wally impression. Denise and Naomi looked up from their lunches, always ready for the teacher’s lounge floorshow.

  “I told you we’d finish it next week. Tuesday, you can have all the friggin’ copies you want. Capeesh?” Dorie gathered the fingers of one hand together and shook them at Patrick, Brando as a tiny, frizzy-haired Jewish woman from Queens.

  “I only need six, Doris, thank you. Six is all I ask.” Patrick popped the chunk of bologna sandwich in his mouth, signaling that the controversy was at an end. She’d said nothing to him about the Huck Finn copies. But how could he stay mad at Dorie, who wrote the “American Dream” grant with him, who––truth to tell––did the lion’s share of the book room reorganization? And to whom, really, he owed his teaching career. It was Dorie, six years ago when the Experiment in Cooperative Learning finally imploded, who insisted to the director of Science & Tech that they snag Patrick. At Science & Tech, he’d become a real teacher. If not for Dorie, he’d be selling insurance for Susan’s father.

  “Denise,” said Dorie, licking split pea from that almost-missing upper lip, “didn’t you hear me tell Patrick––”

  “Oh no, Dorie, I’m not going near that mess.” Denise poked at the salad in her Tupperware container. “My whole computer lab crashed this morning. Thirty-two bored teenagers staring at blank screens. Ugly, ugly.” She shook her head, stabbed some romaine. “I’ll worry about my hard drives, you and Mr. Lynch can fight over Mark Twain.” She turned to Patrick and flashed that brilliant smile, one of the things he looked forward to at lunch, that got him through the afternoon. And it made him laugh just looking at pale, chickadee-sized Dorie next to big, brown, and beautiful Denise. Odd partners in crime, it seemed at first, though both were city girls (Denise survived the South Bronx) and mothers of teenage sons.

  “What is that outfit Maria’s wearing today?” Naomi asked.

  “Nice segue,” said George.

  “No, seriously.”

  “The little bustier under that lacy thing?”

  “Where’d she get that, Victoria’s Secret?” asked Dorie.

  “I hate when my students have better underwear than I do,” said Naomi.

  “You must hate them all,” said George.

  “Must work for Abdul,” Patrick chimed in. “I found a love note on my floor. Seems he’s getting some in Sitkowitz’s class.”

  “No,” mumbled Denise, munching lettuce.

  “I hate when my students have better sex lives than I do––say nothing, George.” Naomi brandished her plasticware.

  “Put down the knife,” said George.

  “It’s a spork.”

  “Put down the spork.”

  “One of you ladies should speak to Maria,” offered Patrick.

  The women looked at him in varieties of disbelief.

  “I’m serious. Something’s going to happen to that girl.”

  “Already happening, I’m afraid,” said Dorie.

  “Hello,” Naomi said.

  Denise shook her head. “Such a smart girl.”

  “It’s the Ramirez Effect,” said George.

  “The what?” asked Patrick.

  George looked at Dorie and Denise. “You remember that girl, seven, eight years ago? What was her name, Ramirez?”

  “Anita.”

  George nodded, yogurt dribbling down his chin. “Anita Ramirez. Sweetest, smartest little girl. And flat as a…a chessboard—”

  “A chestboard?” said Naomi.

  “––when the year started. A real late bloomer. Then, like magical Barbie, she grew.” George put down his yogurt to demonstrate the inflation curve. “Suddenly, she was queen bee. And her grades never recovered. The bigger they got, the more her grades fell––”

  “That would make a good story problem for you, George.” Patrick lowered his sandwich. “‘If x is Juana’s cup size, and y her GPA…’”

  Denise pointed her fork at Patrick and George. “You boys have no clue what these girls go through. Girl like Maria has grown men doggin’ her all over the Heights. Thirty-year-old dealers offering her jewelry—”

  “I know, Denise, you’re right.” Patrick put his hands on the lunch table. “That’s why you should talk to her. Or her mother––”

  “Who do you think got her that outfit?” said Naomi.

  George turned to her. “Maybe you should call, Nomes.” He swiped some yogurt from his graying mustache. “After you straighten Maria out, her mom could give you some, you know, tips.”

  “Spork you, George.” Naomi smiled and batted her eyes at George, the big brother she never had. Like Dorie and Denise, Naomi and George were a pairing that shouldn’t have worked, but did. George wrote ad copy for twenty years (and remained proud of that famous line from his condom account, “Pleasure dots––for her,” showing just how sensitive a gay man could be to a woman’s needs) before he decided to quit Madison Avenue and teach math to inner-city youth (“And thus canceling,” he said, “that reservation in hell”). Naomi, destined for med school, planned to do Teach for America for two years but had stayed for five. Pretty, whip-smart, unhappily unattached, Naomi, all soft curves and hard edges. What did she want? Patrick sometimes wondered. That sharp tongue wound up in his ear one drunken faculty Christmas party, a moment they seemed to have agreed never to acknowledge.

  “Why must it always fall on the female faculty?” asked Dorie. “This is a huge problem. And no one expects the men to break up every fight.”

  “Maybe Betty could do another workshop on self-esteem,” Denise said. Guilty laughs all around at the expense of their beleaguered social worker. Patrick looked at his colleagues and marveled once again at how this disparate little group cohered. They’d hit some bumps, to be sure. When the Daily News revisited the Yankel Rosenbaum stabbing, Denise and Dorie
got into it one lunch period––a chair was overturned, Patrick learned some choice Yiddish phrases––and Denise ate in her room for a week. Occasionally one of George’s quips cut unintentionally deep and Naomi lunched at the Golden Dragon for a few days. And Dorie’s memory lapses could push Patrick to the edge. But the anger subsided; they worked it out, somehow. They had to: Denise and Dorie had The Garvey Gazette to turn out every month; George and Naomi co-taught that math/science unit on bridge-building. And Patrick––he was no New Yorker; conflict-avoidance was in his DNA.

  “We did have a dress code,” said a voice from the nubby red couch against the back wall of the teacher’s lounge, behind a New York Post, “once upon a time.” The voice, impossibly nasal, bearing the heavy imprint of its native Lawn Guyland, belonged, unmistakably, to C. The paper sank to its owner’s lap, revealing a face whose features––narrow-spaced eyes, flat nose, cracked lips––seemed to have fallen in on themselves, forming a valley between a jutting chin and ledge-like forehead. A face, reputedly handsome in its youth, that long ago collapsed in disappointment. C turned to a pair of hands clenching an outstretched Times. “Didn’t we, Sidney?”

  “Indeed we did, Jerry,” said X, the voice behind the Times. “Long pants––no jeans––with belts, for the boys, collared shirts––tucked in, mind you. Girls wore skirts and blouses. No skin. Gym shoes were for gym––”

  “No patent leather, I hope,” said George.

  X allowed the above-the-fold Times to crumple down. “We let the Catholics worry about that, George.” He didn’t smile. The topography of X’s face was the opposite of C’s: buggy eyes, a long sharp nose pointed accusingly at the world. They also parted company when it came to grooming: whereas C favored the classic comb-over––dark greasy strands raked between furrows of scalp––X’s head was topped by a fuzzy salt-and-pepper toupee, like a small middle-aged dog had taken refuge on his head, and died. (“Take off your hat!” X had screamed at a student some years ago. “Take off your wig!” the student had countered, reportedly, a story too good not to be true.)

  Though the men on the couch were a contrast in appearance, they shared a bedrock belief: Everything used to be better. They seemed, to Patrick, airlifted from an earlier New York City, one he’d seen on television and in movies back in Minnesota––an Irish, Italian, and Jewish city, one with three baseball teams, with goofy, lovable cops and sophisticated women who shopped Fifth Avenue in white gloves and men who wore dark suits, skinny ties, and hats (not caps). Nothing in the past quarter-century had altered their vision of this city: in their New York, Jack Kennedy was president; Mickey Mantle roamed the Yankees’ center field; the children were well-dressed, well-behaved, and white. They refused to make concessions to the realities their current students faced. Any deviation from the standards set in the Golden Age was unacceptable, to be railed against. Their every utterance was complaint, their expressions, in repose, dyspeptic. If they’d ever been educators, Patrick thought, they weren’t now. They were kid-haters, screamers, so burnt-out that younger staff referred to them only by their nicknames: Crispy and X-tra Crispy. Or, simply, C and X.

  “Maybe you could talk to Silverstein about the dress code.” C smirked at the lunch table. “He’s pretty good about those things.” X gurgled in amusement.

  A visitor stumbling into the teacher’s lounge would have looked C and X over and concluded that these haggard figures were marginal to this system, subs, perhaps, in for the day. The visitor, however, could not have been more mistaken. True, C and X had little to do with teaching and learning, which, the public is led to believe, are the core activities of education. But C was the building’s union rep, a job he had inherited from X. If there was a prince of this little city, C was it, and X his trusted adviser.

  Now, Patrick was a union man––weren’t they all? How could you not be? The union had paid for the crown on his number three molar, the contact lenses he wore. If not for the union, he would have spent this all-too-brief lunch period trying to keep several hundred young people from hurling macaroni-based products at one another in the cafeteria. He was grateful for every benefit, every right collective bargaining had wrung from the system. But at the building level the union was the protector of the most senior and least motivated: Brian Callahan, who insisted on keeping room 117 (the room nearest the exit and, some said, the bars on Amsterdam Avenue) in perpetuity, regardless of how many times younger faculty were forced to shuffle rooms around him; Luisa Maldonado, who refused to go on field trips and would spend the day sipping coffee in the teacher’s lounge while a younger colleague was drafted to schlep her class to the aquarium at Coney Island.

  C and X reserved the cushiest assignments for themselves. X, having taught math for countless years, now presided over the library, a room with few books and fewer students. C, head of the social studies department when Garvey had been one school, had restyled himself as a reading specialist. Now he tutored one or two students several periods a day in his former office. The other periods he received petitioners, the Callahans and Maldonados, weighing their grievances like a Little Italy don.

  C fixed his eyes on Patrick and grinned. The scheduling showdown in the library last year, Patrick thought. C would never forgive him that. George had warned him: You take on the king, the king must die.

  It had seemed so wonderfully transparent to Patrick, the new schedule, so right. Longer periods, no bells, less time in the hallways with boys grabbing girls, bumping each other, fewer fights. More time teaching and learning. What was there to debate? The lunch table had immediately concurred and nominated him to run it by Silverstein. The principal was uncharacteristically enthusiastic. Great idea, he agreed, should have happened long ago. Silverstein tugged on his bottom lip. But there’s that sticky union rule about schedule changes, you know.

  Patrick didn’t know. And when the lunch table heard that any schedule change had to be approved by a 75 percent vote of the faculty, they were daunted at first. But Dorie rallied them—shamed them—into action, and they worked the hallways of Marcus Garvey like seasoned ward heelers. They called in every chit from every colleague—classes they’d covered, textbooks they’d lent, detention periods they’d taken over—and called on every bit of goodwill the four of them had amassed in their collected years at Garvey. After several weeks of bare-knuckled politicking, George, the self-appointed lunch table “whip,” announced that, by his count, they were over the 75 percent mark. Barely.

  Silverstein introduced the topic of the new schedule at the faculty meeting; there was no way around that. But he was shrewd about it, Patrick had to concede. Any plan with the principal’s imprimatur was DOA with C, X, and the other Lifers. To them, education was a zero-sum game: anything that helped administration hurt them.

  Silverstein looked down at his clipboard. “I’ll keep this meeting brief.” Despite the tension in the library that afternoon there were smiles and rolled eyes all around. Every faculty meeting began with this promise, but the principal was famously a man of many words. No point summarizing in two sentences when six would suffice. “It has been proposed that our schedule be changed from eight forty-two-minute periods to seven fifty-minute periods. According to union rules, 75 percent of the faculty must consent for the proposal to be adopted. The floor is now open for discussion.” Then, to the surprise of all, he sat. Good start, thought Patrick. Kept his fingerprints off it. Deft use of the passive voice.

  A phlegm-clearing noise broke from a far corner of the library. All eyes went to X as he rose, smoothing the lapels of his plaid sport coat. “Look, he’s entered the ’70s,” George whispered.

  “Shhh,” said Patrick.

  X stood next to a blackboard he’d wheeled into the library. He was surrounded by antediluvian faculty. Generally, teachers sat grouped according to mini-school, but this issue had divided them into new units of self-interest: generation, department, personality type. The naked blackboard was angled by th
e window, illuminated dramatically by the southern exposure. X began flipping the board to the other side, but it stuck in mid-revolution. C sprang up, loosened the nut at the side of the board and helped X swing it around.

  The backside was covered with numbers. Two grids were at the top of the blackboard; beneath each were sets of equations, some connected by serpentine arrows in blue, green, and pink chalk.

  “It seems simple, at first, this new schedule,” said X, arching his fingertips, rocking up on his toes at simple. “And practical. Fewer periods, less moving around. We talked about it at Garvey way back in the ’60s. Some of you remember the ’60s.” He paused, giving that grimace of a smile. “Or maybe not.” A few chuckles from the Lifers. That place in Patrick’s sternum tightened. He expected the numbers from X, the old math teacher. But not the rhetorical flourishes—setting up the straw man, the attempt at humor. Patrick leaned back next to George; the perpetual smirk was gone from the former ad man.

  X led the faculty down his yellow brick road of figures and squiggles. Patrick’s eyes glazed as they had in sophomore algebra. An occasional phrase popped out at him: not a minute more for lunchtime; blood from a stone. Patrick surveyed the faculty. Peggy O’Malley, the PE teacher, was nodding, vacant-eyed, the way Susan had when she dragged him to her accountant to help with her taxes. Susan had bobbed her head while Lonnie Appelbaum prattled on about the new 508(b) exemption she could probably take, if she wanted to. “You have no idea what Lonnie was talking about, do you?” Patrick had asked on the subway home. Susan shrugged. “You’ll visit me in prison, right?”

  Two tables to his left, Laura Steiner was bent forward, eyes narrowed. How he’d worked Laura Steiner! He’d made a special trip after school to the art room, where he found the stocky art teacher sponging up papier-mâché paste. She was nervous, as always, that any change would be bad for the art program; art was always the first to go. C had already gotten to her and convinced Laura that the period axed from the schedule would be hers. “Do you know what the market is for unemployed art teachers?” she’d asked Patrick, pulling at her spattered smock. “Oh, Laura,” he’d said, leaning against the wall like a high school jock, “the Garvey art program is famous.” He deepened his voice. “They wouldn’t dare cut it.” Laura looked up at him, perhaps recalling their dancing to “Inna Godda Daveeda”—the long version—at the faculty Christmas bacchanal. She brushed her bangs with the back of her hand. A streak of wheat paste crossed her forehead. “You don’t think?” she said.