Don't Put the Boats Away

by Ames Sheldon

  She knows that girls expect chemistry to be hard. Math and science courses can make students feel really stupid because the answers are either right or they’re wrong, so she works to make her classes fun. Since reading and learning strictly from books was difficult for her when she was a student, she uses lots of demonstrations and experiments in her teaching.

  Walking back and forth in front of the long counter, she answers their questions about air pressure. Then she dangles a conversational gambit before them. “For a scientist, girls, nonconformity is an essential attribute. I know at your age conformity has a distinct appeal—most of you don’t want to stick out from the crowd—but I can assure you that thinking for yourself is terribly important. A scientist must be curious about whether what we actually see is what we seem to see. We must analyze every observation, open it up, turn it upside down, inspect every facet. You must not make assumptions.”

  A student replies, “But if you’re a nonconformist, won’t people think you’re a difficult person?”

  “You’re absolutely right, Anna. Scientists don’t typically have the best social skills. We can be awkward around people who don’t think like us. It’s not easy to swim against the tide. But enough lecturing. I have a demonstration for you. Please clear the counter.”

  While the girls move their books and notebooks to the floor, she opens a cupboard and brings out an empty beer can. She hands it to Cathy, who sniffs the can and upends it to see whether there’s any beer still left inside. The other girls titter.

  “Rats,” she jokes, “it’s really empty.”

  “All right. I want you to put a small amount of very cold water into the can. Jeanne, you fill a bowl with two to three inches of water and set it aside.”

  Jeanne gets off her stool and goes to the cupboard for a bowl, which she fills from one of the faucets. Cathy runs the water a minute before putting the can under the tap.

  “Now get some tongs, Cathy, and hold the can over a Bunsen burner. You’ll need to heat it for several minutes.”

  The girls are quiet while they observe Cathy. Harriet checks her watch. The Bunsen burner hisses.

  “Mrs. Wright,” asks Cathy, “how long do I need to keep doing this?”

  “Be patient. Watch for steam to exit the can.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  Ally asks, “Is it going to blow up?”

  White steam rises from the hole in the can. The girls move closer.

  “Thirty seconds more,” says Harriet. A long pause. “Now, quickly invert the can into the bowl of water, making sure the hole in the top is immersed. That seals the can and starts it cooling.”

  Cathy flips the can into the bowl.

  The other girls step back. A few giggle nervously.

  Bang! The can crumples with a sudden sound that’s almost as shocking as a gunshot.

  Ally screams.

  Harriet takes the tongs from Cathy and lifts the can out of the water. It looks as if it’s been crushed. She says, “The can collapses inward because suddenly it doesn’t have any water vapor inside. It implodes.”

  “That was exciting!” says Ruth.

  A quick knock on the door to the classroom heralds the appearance of Miss Braun. She looks to be in her early fifties, though her hair is completely white. “Is everything copacetic here?”

  “Of course. We’ve just imploded a can.”

  She nods. “Please stop by my office before you leave today, Mrs. Wright.” Then Miss Braun exits.

  Ally says, “Uh oh, Mrs. Wright is in trouble now if she has to go to the principal’s office.”

  Harriet’s glad Ally feels comfortable enough to tease her. “I’m not worried,” she says.

  Nina, the AFS student from Germany, says, “Miss Braun’s name means brown but her hair is all white.”

  “Isn’t that ironic?” Cathy remarks. “People say her hair turned white when she saw her fiancé’s plane crash in an air show.”

  Harriet says, “That’s enough now, girls. You’re dismissed.”

  As they troop out, the girls thank her for the fun demonstration and wish her a good break.

  Despite what she said, she does feel a little anxious, wondering what Janice Braun wants to discuss with her.

  She enters the principal’s spartan office. Although Miss Braun has been the head of Hartley School ever since Harriet was a student here, there are no photos or personal items around. The room gives nothing away about Miss Braun’s life outside the school.

  She stands in front of the desk. “You wanted to see me, Janice?”

  “Take a seat, Harriet. I have a proposition for you.”

  “Oh?” Sitting, Harriet pulls her A-line dress down toward her knees, which she presses close together. The short skirts on dresses nowadays certainly look good, but they are not the most comfortable. She wears modish clothing and straightens her wavy shoulder-length hair purposefully so the girls see that a science teacher can be feminine and stylish too.

  “Miss Bryan plans to retire in June. I would like you to consider taking her position as director of the upper school.”

  She’s startled. “Why me?”

  “You have the respect of the faculty, you’re an excellent teacher, and you know what good teaching entails.”

  She has a sinking sensation in her stomach. She knows she should be grateful for the opportunity to move up an echelon at her school, and if she wants to please her boss, she should probably say yes.

  “I’m honored that you thought of me, Janice, but I really like teaching the girls. I learn so much from them. I love their questions.”

  “You could continue to teach one course each semester. I think you’d find this job in administration would give you an opportunity to look at the bigger picture for our school and to see where private education is headed.”

  “What exactly would the job entail?”

  “You would be responsible for the upper school faculty and curriculum. That means hiring, evaluating, and if necessary, firing teachers who don’t make the grade.”

  Harriet doesn’t think she would enjoy that part. She likes her colleagues, but she’s younger than most of them. On the other hand, in the three years she’s been at Hartley, only one teacher has left and been replaced.

  “I’d also like you to make sure the sequence of courses in each subject area makes sense, so they build appropriately upon each other and there aren’t any major gaps in what the students learn. You would work with your colleagues to implement improvements.”

  “That part sounds interesting. But as you know, I am divorced with two children at home. Having my summers off is important to me.”

  “You could take the whole month of July every year.”

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Of course there would be an appropriate increase in your salary.”

  “Thank you for the offer, Janice.” Rising from the chair, she says, “I’ll get back to you in a few days with my decision.”

  “Excellent.”

  The next day is surprisingly warm for late March, and Harriet can’t wait to get outside and take a long walk. Retta is off playing tennis with a schoolmate, and Joey took the train into the city for a program at the Museum of Natural History. Usually the children spend a week during spring vacation in San Francisco with their father, but not this year—Ron’s young wife has just had another baby, so he asked Harriet to keep the children with her until June, when they’ll go to him for a month.

  She strides quickly along the trail through the woods near the house she and Ron built, enjoying the songs of birds and the start of springtime. Is that a red-winged blackbird she’s hearing? She’ll have to look at the bird book when she gets back home. She’s wearing a jacket, a long-sleeved blouse, and lime-green short shorts, which make her feel attractive because she knows she has nice legs, just like her mother. Not that she’s trying to attract anyone these days. She is so completely occupied with her job and her children and her family that she
doesn’t have time for a man. That’s been true ever since she and Ron split up, when she couldn’t allow herself to give in to her feelings. She had to be tough—she had a family to raise! Anyway, at this point she’s probably too independent to take on the role of wife ever again.

  Which job, is the question. She loves teaching chemistry to the bright young ladies at her alma mater, and she’s grateful that Retta can attend this school too. As a teacher at Hartley she doesn’t have to pay tuition for Retta or for Joey at Warden, Hartley’s “brother” school, so long as her children maintain an average of B or better.

  This is not an easy decision. She believes she’d be happy to spend the rest of her working life as a chemistry teacher. On the other hand, she has seen problems that need to be fixed. The sequence of science courses should be rearranged, and the labs need to be scrutinized. She’s completely overhauled the instruction and instrumentation for the chemistry labs; she guesses biology and physics could use updating as well.

  As director of the upper school, she could probably make more of a difference to the quality of the education Hartley girls receive, and it might be a good way to employ her bossiness. The business courses she took at Madison would probably come in handy too. And a larger salary would certainly help. Retta will be going to college in another year, so that expense is looming.

  Thinking she probably shouldn’t turn down an opportunity like this, she starts walking faster. As soon as she gets home, she’ll telephone her parents and invite herself to lunch. Since selling Sutton Chemical to Dupont, her father has joined several boards, and he is on Warden’s board of trustees now. He’s sure to have some thoughts about this.

  Right now the sun warms her back as she strides along. The buds on the trees are swelling, and green shoots have started emerging from the forest floor. After the cold, dark winter, this feels like the resurgence of life itself—a new beginning.

  Harriet joins her parents for lunch. They sit at the dining room table, glasses of lemonade at their places. Eleanor hands her the platter of egg salad sandwiches.

  Her mother chuckles. “After eating eggs constantly during the war, I never thought I’d ever serve egg salad sandwiches again.”

  Harriet says, “I remember that you came up with the strangest concoctions to use eggs in new ways—your eggs in noodle nests were memorable.”

  “With all the chickens we were raising for the war effort, I had to do something! Eggs were coming out of our ears.”

  “You were very creative, Mother.”

  “Thank you, dearie.” She takes a bite of her sandwich, then says, “What do you hear from Ron? I hope he’s still attending his AA meetings—it’s the only way to stay sober.”

  Harriet rankles at the implication that she should constantly monitor Ron’s behavior from three thousand miles away. On the other hand, she knows she needs to be aware of anything that impacts her children’s safety when they are out in California with him and Shelley.

  “I don’t know about Ron. I want to talk with you about a proposition Janice Braun put to me.”

  Her father raises his eyebrows.

  “What did Janice propose?”

  “You know her as Janice?”

  “We’re on a committee together.”

  “I didn’t know that. Anyway, she’s asked me to consider becoming director of the upper school at Hartley.”

  “That’s very exciting,” her mother says.

  “It’s scary too,” she replies. “I love teaching. This job would be mostly administrative, and I’d be working eleven months of the year. That’s an even bigger commitment of time.”

  Her mother asks, “What does your gut tell you to do?”

  “I feel flattered and interested but also cautious—what if I hate it?”

  Her father clears his throat. “I think you should take the position, Harriet. This is a critical juncture in the history of both schools. Janice and I are on a confidential committee of top administrators and board members from Hartley and Warden who are meeting to discuss the possibility of merging the schools into one coeducational institution.”

  “Whoa! I had no idea.”

  “As I said, this is confidential.” She can tell he’s proud to be involved in this.

  “A merger would change everything!” She doesn’t like the idea at all.

  “It would indeed. I expect we’d get a lot of pushback from alumni.”

  “I really liked going to a girls’ school and a women’s college!” She’s surprised by how vehemently she feels about the matter. “I know what it’s like to be in a class with both men and women. At Madison the men totally dominated classroom discussions—we could hardly get a word in edgewise. When they’re adolescents, girls can be intimidated by boys in the classroom.”

  Then it occurs to her that if a merger is implemented, she could lose her job. This could be another reason to take the job as director of the upper school—she’d be in a better position to fight against the merger.

  Her father pulls a cigarette out of its package and lights it. “We have to be practical, Harriet. With declining enrollments and rising costs, many of the single-sex schools are facing the same questions. Can we afford to maintain and operate two parallel sets of facilities? And there are questions about whether it’s even wise to keep boys and girls segregated from each other. Some of the studies suggest that children learn more adaptive social skills if they’re taught in mixed classrooms.”

  “The girls wouldn’t have a chance to be heard!”

  “They’d have to learn to speak up for themselves. I should think you’d want that, Harriet.”

  She has to laugh. “Good point, Father.”

  “Take the job, Harriet. We’ll have fun working together again.”

  “It would be interesting to participate in high-level deliberations about the future of my school.” Her stomach feels tight: is it excitement or fear that she could find herself at odds with her father?

  Months later, the family’s summer house is filled to the brim with children and adults when the whole Sutton gang spends the first weekend in July together at Sea View. Sandy beach tools, buckets, and pails litter the porch, along with packs of playing cards, paperback books, magazines, a cribbage board, and glasses with the dregs of milk or Kool-Aid. It’s midmorning, and Nat is busy in the living room with all four of his children and Harry’s two; they’re practicing a song Nat has written, which they plan to perform for the family tomorrow night. Both Harriet’s daughter, Retta, and Nat’s daughter Abby play guitar. Nat’s son Ned is a drummer, and of course, Nat has his saxophone. The younger children are there too. Harriet can hear the excitement in her brother’s voice as he takes them over the musical phrases again and again.

  She sits with Eleanor and Dorie in adjacent chairs on the porch while George is back at the dining room table with his newspapers. Dorie, still in her bathrobe, listlessly turns the pages of Ladies’ Home Journal. Eleanor is reading Man’s Search for Meaning. Harriet’s legs are crossed, and she’s jiggling her foot back and forth.

  Eleanor says, “I love this book. Viktor Frankl is so wise.”

  Dorie asks, “Who?”

  “Viktor Frankl is an Austrian therapist who survived the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, where he lost his family and the manuscript of a treatise he’d written. His experience led him to develop a new approach to healing patients—he calls it logotherapy. Frankl says, ‘The striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man.’”

  Harriet puts both feet on the floor. “That’s what The Feminine Mystique is about too!”

  Dorie sighs. “What’s The Feminine Mystique?”

  “You should read the book, Dorie. Betty Friedan talks about the yearning in women who are expected to find all their fulfillment in the home, the women for whom simply being a wife and mother is not enough.”

  “With four kids, I don’t have time to read books,” she tells Harriet. Dorie returns her attention to her mag
azine.

  Eleanor riffles through Frankl’s book, then stops near the end. “This statement hit me like a ton of bricks: ‘Suffering ceases to be suffering … at the moment it finds a meaning.’ That’s exactly what happened to me.”

  “What do you mean, Mother?”

  “Eddie’s death nearly killed me. It wasn’t until I started wondering what I could do with my experience of suffering that I started to find my way. Helping others deal with their own grief is where I found the meaning for my life.”

  “I’m so glad, Mother.”

  “It’s made all the difference.”

  Actually Harriet thinks it was treatment at Dia Linn that was most helpful in getting her life back on track. “How is your grief group managing without you this summer?”

  “My co-facilitator keeps it going when I’m away.”

  Ten-year-old Ernie emerges from the living room. “I’m hungry,” he tells his mother.

  Dorie looks up. “It’s not time for lunch. I’ll make sandwiches in a while.”

  “Peanut butter and fluff?”

  “Sure.”

  Ernie heads back into the living room. The screen door slams behind him.

  Harriet says, “I’d be glad to make Ernie a sandwich now, Dorie.”

  “I can’t be giving the kids food every time they ask for it. If I did that, I’d be in the kitchen all day long. We eat three times a day—that’s it.”

  “Okay,” Harriet replies. “I’ll go see how the musicians are doing.” Her children returned from California just two days ago, so she craves the sight of them.

  When she enters the living room, the music stops.

  With mock fierceness, Nat says, “You’re not supposed to be in here! Our songs are meant to be a surprise.” He looks stern but he’s teasing her, at the same time making a big deal of this for the children.

  “Sorry.”

  As she retreats, she hears, “All right, kids, from the top. ‘Let’s not put the boats away. Maybe we’ll stay for one more day.’”