Other than the ceaseless barking of the insane dog, it was a glorious, glorious day! Making altogether too much noise, the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students took their place onstage to the right of young Tobias Wilcox. The longer they had been away from the orderly classroom of Mrs. Leni Ravenbach, the more scruffy, less pleasant, and less presentable each child had become! Truly, the eighth-grader looked as if he had been dragged out of a polluted river after a month underwater.
No one could be quiet. I was so deeply embarrassed for Principal Hertenstein. How marvelous he looked in his three-piece dark gray suit and bright cardinal-and-gold tie, standing before the parents, the grandparents, and that horrid barking dog!
He raised his hand, gently, quietly, and with scarcely a noticeable motion. Everyone in the sweltering gymnasium was instantly silent. Including the dog.
“Shall we begin?”
As Larry Dooling, the McKegway Gazette reporter, made notes on his little notepad, the first little girl, the one in the kindergarten, did a fine job. She did not pee-pee in her ruffly underwear or vomit. Quite the improvement over the kindergarten poetry learners in years past!
I rubbed my big, hard belly and waited with great anticipation for the first-grader and the second-grader and the third-grader to start and finish their poems. I was so pleased that I had been able to reach young Tobias Wilcox and been able to help him, and that he had seen the light of day and realized a warm, wonderful poem about his beloved Grossvater would be the best thing in the world for him, his parents, and his future.
The first grade child and second grade child, they did well. Actually, not so well. The first grade child could not stop looking at himself on the big video screens, and the second grade child forgot the words to his poem and had to be reminded six times. Finally, he cried and sat down. How awful for Mrs. Jiang, his teacher! I observed her bright red face and her shame. She should have drilled him more. Then she would not have been embarrassed in front of everybody in the whole, entire world.
The third grade child, the less said about her and her idiotic poem, the better.
At last came the grand moment for which we all had been waiting.
Mr. Hertenstein said, “Representing Mrs. Ravenbach’s fourth grade classroom, Toby Wilcox.” The amount of applause young Tobias received while stumbling to the center of the stage was disconcerting. I had no idea the child was so popular.
He removed his baseball hat and put his hands behind his back like Abraham Lincoln. He looked around the room. He looked at me. His teacher.
Inside, I felt warm and peaceful. A sweet poem about a beloved grandfather . . . wunderbar!
What then came out of his mouth was not what I was expecting. I will never forget a word of it. Not in a million years.
He said, “This is called ‘My Teacher.’ I wrote all of it myself.” He was smiling an enormous amount. His teeth looked like piano keys. He was smiling more, in fact, than I’d ever seen a child smile in my entire teaching career.
He began to recite his awful poem.
“Her crowning glory is her golden hair;
We wish her manners were equally fair.
She lectures that the worst thing is a liar,
But our classroom smells of her pants on fire.
She goes on and on about what we lack,
While she ‘invented’ Mr. Ravenbach.
I bet she made him up, who knows why . . .”
Everyone was sitting up straight. No one was breathing. Each and every person in that hot, stinky gymnasium was drinking in the awful Dreck Tobias Wilcox was reciting as if it were the nectar of the gods.
I regarded their faces.
They were believing what the odious child was saying.
The room began to swim and swirl. I tried to raise my wonderful self from the rickety chair. My until-now-reliable muscles were not helping. A taste of panic spread through me like slow fire, not unlike five shots of Schnaps.
Then, from across the dark gymnasium, I saw a tiny woman slicing ahead like hot acid through a sea of dirty little ants. Mrs. Button! My dear friend! Coming forward with an expression of righteous anger that made my heart swell in my great, firm bosom. I could see that she had something she wanted to share with one and all. The look of venomous hatred on her face said it was going to be directed at young Tobias Wilcox, her across-the-street neighbor and tubby nemesis. She was going to give him a piece of her mind!
The moment, the day, the entire school year would be handed back to me, as I so richly deserved. Victory was about to be mine.
Disgusting, fat, repugnant, reprehensible, and not too bright Tobias Wilcox took a deep breath and bellowed, “Mrs. Button! You stop right there! Don’t you even open your tiny little mouth with your dead-person lipstick! It doesn’t matter how rich you are, nobody in this entire gym wants to hear what you have to say! Your kids graduated forever ago and you’re not even a parent here! You only came to get me in trouble and tell lies to help your fat friend Mrs. Ravenbach! Don’t come over to my house! You only pretend to be my mom’s buddy! Don’t ask her if you can borrow sugar, or butter, or a loaf of bread, or two eggs! I don’t ever want any more of your stupid brownies!”
“Why . . . you impertinent . . . little twerp,” Mrs. Button stammered.
“Get outta here! This’s not your school! It’s mine!”
The entire student body, they clapped! Apparently, the bitter feeling young Tobias Wilcox held for his across-the-street neighbor was shared by all of the children. This came as quite the surprise, as she was a totally delightful woman. Who made such lovely tea cakes.
My dear friend, Mrs. Button, was, for the first time since I’d known her, unable to say a single, solitary word. Not one! With all the blood boiling inside her, her eyes were about to explode.
As she walked away, her lovely dress seemed to grow three sizes as she shrank just a little. Pushing on the gymnasium door, she pivoted and stared at everyone with hateful black rage. The expression on her sharp-toothed face was the most poisonous, the most vengeful I had seen on any face, ever.
Even my own when I practiced in the mirror.
As the gymnasium door clapped shut behind my dear, dear friend, I resolved, the next time we had tea, to give her an extra lump of sugar. She deserved it.
Like the Tirpitz’s twin 38-centimeter deck guns revolving to face a tender target, my attention to young Tobias Wilcox I directed.
Knitting clutched to my marvelous bosom, my fashionable French high-heeled shoes made a wonderful thundering sound as toward the stage I marched. Tobias Wilcox’s poetry-reciting voice was extraordinarily clear and painfully loud, and, worse, could be heard by every person and dog in the gymnasium, as he said . . .
“She’s so compelled to lie, lie, lie
About me stealing her dumb brush and comb;
THE PENITENTIARY SHOULD BE HER HOME.
WHEN PEOPLE ASK ME WHAT I LEARNED IN SCHOOL—”
I’LL TELL THEM SHE TAUGHT US HOW TO BE CRUEL.
BUT I COULD PROBABLY FORGIVE HER LIES
IF, MR. HERTENSTEIN, SHE’LL APOLOGIZE.”
My face hurt, my ankles hurt. My chest hurt. I was afraid I was going to fall down like a giant redwood tree, dead of a heart attack. Encouragingly toward our principal I looked, but he remained maddeningly silent. I yelled at Tobias, “SIT DOWN. NOW.”
He said, in a most irritating tone, “I will not.”
“Mr. Hertenstein, YOU MUST STOP THAT BOY!”
Principal Hertenstein said, “Why?”
Tobias scrunched his little fat-cheeked face and said impertinently, “Why should he stop me?”
If there is one solitary thing that makes me lose all sense of the order and the discipline, it is being sneered at by an inferior.
“YOU HAVE VIOLATED THE FIRST RULE OF THE ALL-SCHOOL POETRY CONTEST!” I was breathing so hard.
His little voice was soooo syrupy nasty. “What rule was that, Mrs. Ravenbach?”
“EVERY CHILD’S P
OEM IS REQUIRED TO COME FROM THE WRITING THAT EACH STUDENT CREATED IN HIS OR HER JOURNAL!” From my mouth, spittle flicked.
He sounded too sweet, like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Too sweet. “I wrote in my journal just like everybody else.”
Unable to keep the victory from my voice, I deeply inhaled. My wonderful chest expanded. “YOU KNOW AS WELL AS I DO THAT ALL THE ENTIRE SEMESTER LONG, NOT ONE SINGLE WORD OF THIS HORRID POEM WAS EVER MENTIONED IN YOUR PRIVATE JOURN—”
The entire gymnasium went as silent as the Lakehurst Naval Air Station the morning after the Hindenburg disaster . . .
I had made a terrible mistake.
My first.
Fat little Tobias Wilcox’s deep, scratchy voice floated out above the heads of every person in the gymnasium. “Mrs. Ravenbach, you . . . read . . . my . . . journal.” His voice was as lethal and precise as a hypodermic needle filled with the potassium cyanide. He almost sounded German.
At me every child was looking. No one cares what the students think.
At me every parent was looking. No one cares what the parents think unless it’s time to get the tuition check.
Our beloved principal, Mr. Hertenstein, was looking at me most intently. He was the one I most didn’t want looking at me.
Into a walkie-talkie Richard spoke. “Now hear this. This is the Commander of the Red October.” The strange man across the room picked up his own walkie-talkie and listened as Richard said, “Proceed toward target at flank speed.” The vaguely familiar man set down his walkie-talkie and moved toward me.
I said, “Tobias Wilcox, there is no way I could have known what was in your confidential private journal! Teachers do not read their students’ personal, confidential, private journals!”
“You did.”
The strange man reached me.
I said, “And how such a thing could you possibly be thinking?!”
Tobias Wilcox said, “I’ve known it a long time, but who’d believe a kid, so we gave it to Mr. Grossinger, and guess what?! He found your nasty teacher fingerprints all over my personal, confidential, private journal! WHO DARES, WINS!”
“We . . . who is this ‘we’?”
The man squeezed my arm. A bit harshly. I inspected him. He was wearing, I must admit, a lovely dark blue worsted wool suit.
“And who might you be?!”
“Eddie LeJeune.”
Every child shouted, “FAST EDDIE?!”
“Mrs. Ravenbach, I am no longer Fast Eddie LeJeune . . . I am the Honorable Edward T. LeJeune. I am a federal judge.”
Every child in the gymnasium screamed.
The dog barked so much, it threw up on a kindergartener.
Tobias put on his nasty hat, jumped off the stage, and directly toward me he ran.
I had a terrible creeping sensation that the order and the discipline were going to become something that only existed in the past and the past was coming very quickly.
Mr. Hertenstein said, “Mrs. Ravenbach? What do you have to say for yourself?”
“I am an educator! Why would I lie?!”
Right in front of me, Tobias did a ridiculous little happy dance and said, “Because you are a yucky human being! You put those hairbrushes and comb and mirror in my desk and pretended someone saw me, just to get me in trouble! Didn’t you?!” When I said nothing, he shrieked, “DIDN’T YOU?!!” Natürlich, I kept mum. There was always a chance he would be struck by the lightning.
Tobias said, “Mr. Hertenstein, I got something I gotta tell everybody at the McKegway School! Federal Judge Edward T. LeJeune did not repeat fourth grade and has never been in a penitentiary!”
From the audience, came the cheers. Cheers! I could not believe it.
The next time you mention someone being in the penitentiary, make sure that person is well and truly cold in their grave. It makes for fewer unpleasant confrontations, such as that one.
Pupils and former pupils from all directions squeezed in—like a vice. Fourth-graders, fifth-graders, sixth-graders, seventh-graders, eighth-graders, and also parents, grandparents, and custodians! There were even parents who many years ago in my class had been students. It felt like the witch trials in Salem. Or Joan of Arc, right at the end.
“Who’d ever want to kiss you?!”
“With your stinky mole!”
“How come you never got fired?!”
“You’re mean and you’re ugly and you smell like farts!”
“You ruined my son’s life!”
“I hated brushing your hair, it was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done!”
“No, no! The most disgusting thing was rubbing her icky feet!”
Tobias Wilcox said, “I never touched her nasty old gross feet!”
Federal Judge Edward T. LeJeune said, “Neither did I, Toby. You and I share a lot in common. We should have lunch sometime.”
The sea of bright red, angry faces gave me the awful sensation that they were chanting, “Burn her! Burn her! Burn her!”
I decided it was best to be elsewhere.
As I staggered toward the McKegway School for Clever and Gifted Children gymnasium doors, I saw fat, disgusting, deceitful, wretched, and most decidedly unpleasant Tobias Wilcox being kissed by Drusilla Tanner on his dirty cheek and being lifted on the shoulders of his classmates like a Roman emperor or a World Cup goalkeeper, amid hurrahs, huzzahs, hoorays, and overall tumults of exultation.
“Toby! Toby! Toby! Toby Toby Toby Toby TOBY!!”
Never have I ever seen a child so happy. His chums, at their teacher, began to laugh.
I left.
Even as the heavy metal doors slammed behind me, I could hear them laughing.
As I squeezed into my Volkswagen, I could hear them laughing.
And I can hear them laughing still.
CHAPTER 16
The last day of that endless school year, it was gray and awful and poured rain.
Not one child cared.
As they sprinted up the hallway to the front doors for the last carpool, the children squealed about how they were going to burn their schoolbooks, or shoot them with the shotguns, or throw them at homeless people from their mothers’ automobiles. All the parents were excited too.
Usually, I was loving the last day because the students would always come up to me and smile, and give me precious little gifts, and tell me how much they loved being in my homeroom.
This year, that did not happen.
Not one single student came up to me in the carpool line to say, “Thank you, Mrs. Ravenbach. You are the finest teacher I’ve ever had in my entire life. I am so lucky to have had you as a teacher, because now I know my life will turn out to be fine.”
Not this year. Sadly.
I saw young Tobias Wilcox dump his wonderful schoolbooks into the trash receptacle by the driveway. He was smiling.
Lately, he had been smiling quite often. Probably because, after the commotion had subsided at the All-School Poetry Contest and the fifth-grader, sixth-grader, seventh-grader, and eighth-grader said their poems, the judges awarded the King of Poetry prize to young Tobias Wilcox. It turned out that he had written his ghastly “My Teacher” poem in his journal—in teensy tiny handwriting that only a fourth-grader could possibly see. I only wish that, instead of crowning him King of Poetry, they had stoned him to death.
Especially since Mr. Hertenstein mounted a vigorous campaign to get me sacked.
Tobias ran toward the carpool line.
His father lifted one of those boom box things onto the roof of his automobile. He pressed “play” and that horrible song BLASTED across campus. Sung by that horrible long-haired man with all the runny eyeliner.
“School’s out . . . for summer!
School’s out . . . forever!”
All the children and all the parents and all the teachers sang along with the horrible song. When they sang about the McKegway School for Clever and Gifted Children being exploded all the teachers were laughing.
Tobias veered toward
me, smiling a smile from his left ear to his right ear. I knew, deep in my heart, that he was coming to apologize for his wretched behavior. A warm feeling flowed through me for the little child.
I knelt down, spread my arms to embrace him. He stopped ten feet away and jammed his right hand in a little fist, shoving it toward me. And then, he flipped up his middle finger and shot me the bird!
I looked around. No one had noticed. Young Tobias Wilcox gave his wonderful, wonderful teacher the finger and no one saw. He was not going to get in trouble.
It broke my heart.
All this limp American parenting and lax behavior and pathetic lack of the order and the discipline! Because of the deficiencies in his upbringing, I am certain that young Tobias Wilcox will end his days looking through stainless-steel bars in a maximum-security penitentiary, probably in Nevada.
That grim future was far from his mind.
As he whirled around and bounced to his father’s open arms, he was thinking only about summertime.
CHAPTER 17
It would be nice, I think, if there were a real Mr. Ravenbach.
It is difficult to live alone. Sometimes it is wonderful that no one tells me what to do, or how to think. Sometimes it is sad.
My consolation is that I have my students.
And, natürlich, my dear friend Mrs. Button.
It is so, so helpful for a teacher to have a thoughtful Freundin on the board of directors of the school where one is teaching! And so, like a gangster quietly disappearing into the witness protection program, any silly talk of Mrs. Ravenbach and her beloved job parting ways . . . gently . . . vanished. Wunderbar!
I will have a wonderful summer planning my course curriculum, content in the knowledge that, come September, I will have a homeroom filled with new, eager, delightful, wonderful students. Next year’s children will be my best pupils ever. All happy, well dressed, and eager to learn what Mrs. Ravenbach wishes to teach them . . . everything they need to become the wonderful adult citizens, far, far from the penitentiary.
Next year will be the year I shall win my fifth Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching at the McKegway School for Clever and Gifted Children!
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