by Greg Sisco
“…magic things, patiently waiting…”
“Macie, am I going to have to call your mom again?” I ask.
I notice my hands are shaking. I breathe in and out deeply to try to calm myself.
Macie stops and gives me a look aiming to win my empathy. “Please,” she says. “Just another second. It’s important.”
I don’t want to damage her. I don’t want to be cruel. But I won’t let her do this to the rest of my class. “If you aren’t going to tell the truth…” I begin.
“It is true!” she shouts. “If any of you have parents that know about ghosts or monsters or anything, you have to help me. The witch doll talked to me the other night and I think it wants to kill my mommy or take her away from me and I have to stop it!”
“…waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
That’s when I finally lose it. I start screaming her name and trying to grab her, trying to drag her out of the room where she can’t impart these kinds of disgusting lies on the minds of her fellow students. I find myself chasing the little brat around the front of the room as she screams about witches and evil and how she’s more scared every day.
I finally get hold of her arm and try to pull her away as she bangs the doll down over and over on my desk, screaming, “I don’t want her anymore! I don’t want this doll or Mommy’s doll or any goddamn doll!”
She breaks the doll’s head off on the desk and sends it flying into the classroom and landing at some poor girl’s feet, who is looking up with tears in her eyes as I lift Macie up over my shoulder and carry her kicking out of the classroom.
And I know, I know at the end of the day all of these children will come home from school and their parents will ask “How was your day?” and they’ll say “One girl was screaming about witches and banging a doll on the desk.” And then they’ll ask Mommy and Daddy if there is such a thing as a witch, and whether there are ghosts who can possess dolls and take over houses. And all I can do is pray, pray that none of these children have a father like Arthur who’s going to reinforce this stuff in their heads until they lose their minds in the future and turn their suffering spouses into emotional wrecks.
In college they taught me Frederick Douglass said, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
It’s probably true. But no one ever taught me to do either.
* * * * *
Mr. Van Berkum won’t talk any sense into this girl, and neither will a day or a week or a month of detention. They might shut her up, but they won’t make her understand the damaging nature of screaming these things to a classroom full of her peers. I guess that’s why I drag her into a janitor’s closet and chew her out before I take her to the office.
This isn’t really proper etiquette for a teacher. I could get put on suspension for it, maybe even fired if the parents found out and really kicked up a fuss. But if I stop one child from growing up to be like Arthur, then I’m at least doing a service to the world.
“This kind of immaturity is not okay in the classroom,” I tell her. “You can’t get up there and scream and cause a scene and make everybody uncomfortable. It’s not a civilized way to behave.”
“But it’s true!” Macie protests.
“No, it isn’t, Macie, and you know that perfectly well. There is no magic or witches or spells. And even if it was true, do you think you’re the only person in the world who has problems? You don’t see anybody else screaming at the rest of the class and trying to scare them. They all behave themselves the way people should.”
“But they’re not in danger!”
“What danger? Does your mom hurt you? Are there problems at home? You can talk to me about these things. If there are real problems, you can talk to me and I can help you.”
“Then help me from the doll!”
“The doll is just a doll, Macie. There are no ghosts, no witches, no… It’s not real! You’re too old to believe in that kind of childish nonsense. You’re not a baby. And you should be mature enough not to scare your classmates with it. It’s a terrible thing to do.”
“You don’t care,” she says, turning away from me. “You say you do, but you just want everybody to shut up and listen to you.”
“I try to care, Macie, but when you go off acting like a stubborn little bitch, you make it difficult to do.”
I say it without thinking and regret it right away, but when Macie turns her gaze back to me it’s not with a dropped jaw and teary eyes like I’d expect from a girl her age. It’s just an angry, hateful glare.
I try to recover. “You can talk to me, or the nurse, or Principle V, or any of the grown ups here at school. You can tell us anything and we’ll try to help you, but you have to be civilized and respectful about it. You can’t act crazy and scream at a bunch of children who haven’t done anything wrong and infect all of them with your problems. Understand?”
She gives me a look like you give a stupid child, the look I should be giving her, and shakes her head.
“Do you understand me?” I repeat.
“You know what I think, Mrs. Harris?” she says. “I think you’re the bitch.”
I sigh. I try to pretend the sentence doesn’t hit me as hard as it does.
“You said it first,” she tells me. “That’s called collateral.”
I grab her by the arm and take her to the office and explain the situation to the principal. He just nods his head and tells me to go back to my students and a minute later I’m racing back to the classroom, hoping things haven’t gotten completely out of control in the ten minutes or so I’ve left them unattended.
When I notice my hands have taken to shaking uncontrollably, I have to stop to regain my composure. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve never lost it before at school. Not like this.
I get my cell phone out of my pocket and check it for a missed call. Still nothing. As I’m sticking it back in my pocket, my eyes find their way through the doorway to the gymnasium and I see the banner hanging over the bleachers. Suddenly my hands go back to trembling and my legs feel weak and I walk into the gym and sit on the floor with my hands shaking in my lap and I breathe in short little sobs.
The banner reads:
BE KIND.
FOR EVERYONE YOU MEET IS FIGHTING A HARD BATTLE.
I know the quote. There’s some speculation as to who said it first. Ian Maclaren. Plato. I don’t know. In college we read Maclaren and he did say it, only the word he used was pitiful, not kind.
One thing they never taught me in college was how to be kind, especially when my own battle is this hard. Matter of fact, sometimes I wonder if they somehow inadvertently taught me the opposite.
* * * * *
Macie’s right. I’m the bitch, not her. I’m the one screaming at an eight-year-old girl for being frightened. I’m the one putting my problems on other people. I’m the one behaving badly and damaging someone else. I can’t get the banner over the bleachers out of my head when I walk back into the classroom.
The class is all sitting silently with their heads down, waiting patiently as I come back in.
“Okay, sorry about that,” I say. “I think it’s time to get back to our division. So I need everybody to take out their math books and open them to…”
As I’m speaking, I turn toward the chalkboard and my voice catches in my throat.
“Who wrote this?” I ask the class. “Who wrote on my board?”
The text on the board. Again.
“I am a part of all I have met.”
Yes. Standing here screaming at a frightened little girl. Telling her to shut up and bottle her problems and swallow her pain like me. Chastising my husband for his belief in the supernatural, making him ashamed of leaving the house to the point he has to come back and be terrified.
Fine. Sure, Tennyson. I am a part of all I have met. But God help me, I wish I knew what to do with that thought. I wish I knew how to sharpen my senses with it and make the magic things in the world st
op waiting.
“Who wrote it!?” I shout at the class.
Everyone is looking back and forth at each other. Nobody wants to fess up. But they have to know. A full classroom of children and one of them had to walk up and write the entire sentence. Everyone had to see it.
“I’m going to count to three and if nobody will tell me who did it, the whole class stays in for recess.”
That sunken look on all their faces when I say it. It hurts just to see it.
“I am a part of all I have met.”
“One…”
They look to each other frantically, hoping somebody saw something, hoping somebody will save them.
“Two…”
I feel like crying myself. I don’t want to punish this group. But somebody has to know. They have to.
“I wrote it,” comes a voice from the back of the classroom.
Every head spins around. Every student, along with me, turns their eyes to Martin.
“Why?” I ask him, and I realize I sound like I’m begging.
“I don’t know. I think it’s cool.”
“Where did you hear it?”
“In a book my mom gave me.”
I have a hundred questions but I don’t know how to ask them, especially not in front of a whole class. I want to ask about the other quotes, and the typewriter. I think he’s lying, but I don’t understand why. Whatever I was hoping for when I begged the class to confess, this wasn’t it.
“Never write on my board without permission,” I say. “That’s a lunch detention.”
He smiles and nods. I hate to let it be over with that, but I don’t know what else to do.
I feel my cell phone vibrating in my pocket. With no thought given to where I am, I snatch it up, putting it to my ear without even checking the ID.
“Arthur?” I ask frantically.
“Edna,” says a female voice on the other end I barely recognize as Ellen. She sounds terrified, like she’s about to beg me for help.
“Ellen?”
“I came to your house. I had nothing to do today so I was going to do some packing for you, to surprise you. And… Oh my God.”
I rush out of the classroom again and into the hall. I speak to her in a hushed voice.
“What is it, Ellen? What happened?” But I already know. That sick, twisting feeling in my stomach, it comes from already knowing. I just need to hear it out loud to give me the excuse to curl up on the floor.
“Edna,” says Ellen, a level of empathy in her voice you hope you’ll never hear directed at you. “Arthur’s dead.”
* * * * *
Arthur didn’t die well like Mom did. I wasn’t there to see it or hear it, but comparing their bodies, it doesn’t take a coroner to spot the differences. Mom’s eyes were shut and she looked at peace. Arthur is contorted with his fingers curled like he was clawing at the floor, his eyes wide, and his mouth stretched open and twisted to one side. It looks like it might be open so far he dislocated his jaw.
Mom died sleeping. Arthur died screaming.
If Ellen had her way I wouldn’t even see Arthur there, but I push past her into the living room and wish I’d taken her advice and stayed back. I’d rather never see the horrific sight of a husband of two-and-a-half decades with twisted limbs reaching out for nothing, or anything. He’s lying right in front of the door. It’s almost as if he were trying to get out of the house as he collapsed. You always assume that the reality of a situation can’t be any worse than your imagination, but sometimes the world gives your imagination a run for its money.
I sit in the living room and call the authorities from my cell phone and sit there chain smoking without an ashtray as a couple of handsome young guys come to the house to put Arthur on a gurney and take him out of my sight.
When they’ve gone, Ellen asks, “Do you need me to help you call people? To let them know?”
It sets in then just how empty our lives have become, how distant we were from each other. I don’t have a single number to call. I could call his doctor if I wanted condolences and feigned empathy, but it won’t concern him. A man whose profession is in dealing with the sick and dying has emotional walls built higher than even mine, I’m sure. The medium who confessed to being a charlatan yesterday? Ha. If he had the powers he’d claimed, he’d be chatting it up with Arthur right now.
No. Nobody to call. Poker buddies whose names I don’t even know. A few days ago I entertained the possibility of a mistress. I know he was too much of a luddite to program numbers into his phone, but maybe back at the apartment he’s got an address book tucked away somewhere I can go through with a phone.
I don’t need much emotional support for that though. To call people I’ve never met or don’t remember and say, “Hey, your friend’s dead.” “Hi, the older man you’ve been sleeping with passed on. Who’s this? Why, I’m his wife. Good day, ma’am.” I don’t mind any of that. I can get through it.
I wonder who he would have called. If he could have put in calls to five people to let them know he wouldn’t be seeing them anymore, what numbers would have been on his list? Would it extend any farther than me?
That’s the real pain of the whole thing. My life extends no further than what’s in this house now. I have Ellen. One old friend. Above her I had Arthur, who would have been first on my list, but the young men taking his twisted body out of my house are taking him out of my life as well.
That’s all I have left anymore. Ellen. A house. A thousand knick-knacks organized into piles of what’s worth keeping and what’s worth pretending to keep and an enormous pile of what’s not even worth that.
And memories. Too many of those to count. Painful memories of all the times I stepped off course, all the reasons I never made it where I was going. A trail of breadcrumbs from someplace hopeful to a place where I’m alone. A brain filled to burst with past regrets, worthless quotations, and self pity.
“To regret deeply is to live afresh,” said Henry David Thoreau.
Fuck you, Thoreau.
One thing they didn’t teach me in college was how full of shit every philosopher was who ever etched out a name for himself.
“No,” I tell Ellen. “There’s nobody to call. I know. I’m not sure he had anyone else.”
She takes a seat in front of me at the table. “Is there anything I can do?”
I snuff out my cigarette on Mom’s table. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do anymore.”
“I’ll take you home,” she says. “You need to get some rest.”
I shake my head. “I don’t want to go home.”
“What do you want to do? Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” I say, standing up. “I don’t know. I think I just want to be alone.”
* * * * *
There’s a memory box sitting in the master bedroom. A small collection of things I was planning on taking back to the apartment instead of to storage. Things of Mom’s and Dad’s that I could keep around and look at if I ever needed something to spark those old memories for me. After Ellen leaves I sit down on the bed and start digging through it.
Mostly it’s photographs. Their wedding picture. Old family albums from when I was a little girl. A couple of stories I wrote in grade school about dinosaurs or princesses. Grandpa’s pocket watch Dad had held onto as a memento the way I’m holding onto my parents’ things. Their wedding rings.
This hairpin with a gold flower on it. I don’t know its significance, if it even had any. Mom used to wear it on date nights with Dad. I never asked her where it came from and she never told me. Now I wish I had. Everything has a story, but the story varies depending on the perspective. I only know the hairpin’s story from my own perspective.
When I was in third grade, Mom gave it to me to wear in the school play. I wanted to look grown up and Mom said I’d look grown up if I wore it. Maybe I did. I don’t know.
These days I feel like not much has changed. Like I’m still that little girl dressing in a grown up
costume and putting on a performance, hoping I can convince the world I know what’s going on.
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
Everyone knows that, from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. You don’t need college for that, although they’ll tell it to you all the same.
Yes, everything is acting. Put in your golden hairpin and pretend you’re not a confused and terrified child like the rest of us. We’ll all pretend together, and maybe for a minute now and then we can forget how scared we are.
As the variation from The Merchant of Venice goes, “I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; a stage where every man must play a part, and mine a sad one.”
As I look down at the golden hairpin, I feel Mom brushing my hair, saying, “Oh, don’t look so down, pretty girl. Mommy will always be here.”
I bow my head as my eyes tear up and I feel her run a hand down my arm and take the hairpin. She pins it in my hair.
“There you go,” she says. “Beautiful.” She kisses the top of my head.
I jerk my head around suddenly and she’s not there. Nothing but an empty room, like I knew there would be. I jump up from the bed and put a hand to my chest to steady my heart.
What is this? These kinds of delusions, hallucinations. I’ve never had them before. Since college I’ve hardly had an imagination at all.
My hand finds its way to my hair and I feel the pin there. Did I pin it there myself? I must have.
I pull it out and throw it on the bed. For some reason I anticipate a slap from Mother, but it doesn’t come. I back up until my back hits the wall. I turn and run through the door.