“I’d be glad to discuss this in conference,” Mrs. Cary said politely. “If you’d stop by the office, they can—”
“She’s supposed to give her talk today, and you have no right to assign such a personal and irresponsible assignment,” Jennifer’s mom said.
“Mrs. Shoates, you’re welcome to visit as a guest, but this is my classroom, and I’m afraid you need to follow my rules here,” Mrs. Cary said. “We can put Jennifer’s talk off for another day, if you prefer. …”
“Mo-ther!” Jennifer protested, and I wondered if a face could actually explode, her cheeks were so bright. “Just let me get this over with. Please!”
We held our breath. Mrs. Cary waited. Finally Mrs. Shoates sat back down.
It was strange, but I’d lost all stage fright, because I knew that everyone was thinking about the woman at the back of the room, not me.
“Okay, class. Comments on Alice’s talk? How well did she do convincing us that animals are truly needed for research?” Mrs. Cary asked.
“I’m still not convinced that those experiments get the study they need before they’re approved,” one guy said. “I think she should have focused more on that.”
“But that wasn’t the point,” another boy said. “The question is, if they were approved and monitored carefully, do the results justify using animals in that way?”
A girl said, “If my grandmother had cancer, wouldn’t I want every possible study to be done that might save her?”
Mrs. Cary allowed another two minutes for discussion on my topic, and then it was Jennifer’s turn. I took my seat, and Jennifer went to the front of the room.
If we hadn’t felt sorry for Jennifer when she gave her first talk promoting chastity, we ached for her now. I did, anyway. If my dad ever came to school and threw a fit like that, I’d crawl under the desk. I mean, we’re in high school now. How long is Jennifer’s mom going to fight her battles for her? How can Jennifer become independent if her mom takes over when things get tough?
Jennifer’s voice was a little too soft. Too shaky. She began by saying that she still felt that virginity before marriage was best. But there might be some situations where having sex would make sense. I stole a look at Mrs. Shoates, and she was shaking her head. Jennifer plowed on.
If a man or woman was physically disabled, she said, and they weren’t sure they could have sex, maybe it was best to try first before they married. And if an elderly widow would lose her husband’s annuity if she remarried, maybe it was forgivable if she had sex with another man without marriage if they had a loving relationship. But people who lived together before marriage had higher divorce rates than those who didn’t.
Jennifer stood stiffly at the front of the room when she had finished, and I could tell she was purposely avoiding looking at her mother.
“Okay, class. Comments?” Mrs. Cary said.
“I thought she was supposed to be defending sex before marriage. How did those statistics about divorce rates help out there?” asked Brian.
“Yeah, what about couples who have sex but don’t live together? What about that?” asked someone else. “Jennifer’s argument was supposed to be about virginity, not just having sex.”
The chair at the back of the room squeaked again. “I cannot believe I am listening to this discussion in a Maryland public high school,” came Mrs. Shoates’s voice.
“Mrs. Shoates, I’m going to ask you to use your guest manners and let my students do the talking,” Mrs. Cary said. “I think your daughter can handle this herself, and it would be good to give her that opportunity.”
I raised my hand. “I think Jennifer should be congratulated for examining another point of view under extremely difficult circumstances,” I said.
Mrs. Cary nodded.
“But she only used extreme examples as opposing points of view,” a girl said. “What about all the reasons two younger persons might want to have sex without it doing any harm?”
The chair at the back of the room squeaked again.
Jennifer said, “Maybe sometimes it’s good to wait for the things that are most important to you. Maybe instant gratification shouldn’t apply to everything you want in life. I think maybe it makes it a little bit special to wait.”
“That’s also a good point, Jennifer, although you’re back now to your original argument,” Mrs. Cary said. “But I’m afraid our time is up, and we need to go on to our next speaker. Jay, your last talk was on teaching evolution, so let’s see how persuasive you can be for creationism.”
I realized then that Mrs. Shoates had left the room, and I felt quite sure she was on her way to the principal’s office.
I was glad to see Lester hanging around at dinnertime that evening because I wanted to tell everyone what had happened in speech class.
“That Mrs. Cary is one brave gal,” said Sylvia. “I’m not sure I’d take that on.”
“You’d never come to school and embarrass me like that, would you, Dad?” I asked.
Dad grinned. “No. I just embarrass you in front of family.”
“I remember when you came by school one day, Les, when I was being bullied on Seventh Grade Sing Day,” I said. “But you didn’t embarrass me, you saved me. Denise Whitlock said she’d stick my head in the toilet if I didn’t sing all the verses to the school song.”
“Yeah, I do sort of remember that,” Les said. “Figured you needed a little help when I saw they’d backed you up against a car in the parking lot.”
“That was one of the nicest things you ever did for me,” I said. “Maybe someday I can return the favor.”
“Doing what? Rescuing me?” he said.
“You never know,” I told him.
• • •
When we got to speech class on Thursday, something wasn’t quite right. Mrs. Cary’s mouth. Her eyes, maybe.
“I’ve been informed that we have to suspend our assignment for the time being,” she said.
“Whaaaaaat?” The exclamation came from all corners of the room.
“It’s really all I can tell you right now,” she said. “Someone will be doing an evaluation of it, and they’ll make a decision.”
All eyes turned to Jennifer Shoates, who sat like a stone, her face a pale pink.
“And so,” Mrs. Cary said quickly, “we’re going to do a reading of Waiting for Godot, by the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. There are five roles, and we’ll take turns reading the lines.”
We didn’t want Waiting for Godot. We didn’t want an Irish playwright or reading lines. We had started the second part of an assignment we thought we were going to hate, and it was one of the most intense and thought-provoking assignments we’d ever had. We wanted to see it through. Jennifer must have been feeling our laser stares, because they seemed to pin her to her seat, keeping her motionless.
Mrs. Cary began the new assignment immediately, passing out paperback copies of the play and assigning the parts of Estragon and Vladimir and Lucky and Pozzo and the boy to various students. We were stunned.
When the bell rang at last, Jennifer was the first one out of the classroom, but some of the rest of us gathered outside in the hall.
“We know who’s behind this, don’t we?” Brian said.
“How can she do this?” I asked. “How can one parent decide what the rest of us can or can’t do?”
“Look. My aunt has a friend who works in the school office,” one of the guys said. “I’ll find out what’s going on and e-mail you guys. Give me your addresses.” We did, then we walked off, grumbling among ourselves.
That evening the news traveled from one student to another by IM. Mrs. Shoates hadn’t gone to see the principal the day before as we’d suspected. She’d gone home and called the superintendent, and he’d said that a supervisor would come out around noon on Friday to discuss the matter with Mrs. Cary, Mrs. Shoates, and the principal and that the assignment would be suspended for the time being.
One guy wrote:
Let’s organize a walkout Friday wh
en the super shows up.
Another said:
Hey, let’s take the whole day off in protest!
But I suggested that we have a demonstration over the lunch hour when the supervisor was there, carrying signs saying how we felt. That seemed to go over well, and we set to work.
I told Dad and Sylvia about it, and I thought they’d try to talk me out of it. But Dad only said, “Don’t try to stop the supervisor’s car with your bodies, please.”
And Sylvia said, “‘Polite’ and ‘orderly’ are the passwords, Alice. Don’t give the principal any other reason to side with Mrs. Shoates.”
I called Lester next and told him what we were going to do.
“Ah! A little civil disobedience, huh?” he said.
“If it’s something I really care about, I can be as militant as anyone else,” I said.
“You carrying an AK rifle or what?” he asked.
“Signs, Lester! Signs saying what we stand for,” I told him.
“Go, Alice!” said Lester.
When lunchtime came on Friday, we took our homemade signs from one of the student’s cars in the parking lot, where we’d stashed them before school that morning, and gathered on the sidewalk outside the front entrance. We’d told everyone to use thick black markers and print in big block letters. The pieces of cardboard were assorted sizes and colors, but they expressed what we felt: DARE TO THINK; SUPPORT CONTROVERSY; WHAT’S WRONG WITH DEBATE? WE LOVE CARY; DISCUSSION NEVER HURT ANYONE; WHO’S AFRAID OF LEARNING?
Somebody must have alerted the press, because a reporter showed up from the Washington Post and another from the Gazette. I had told Scott about it, and he made sure that Don was out there with his camera too, taking pictures for The Edge.
We were orderly. Polite. We didn’t block the driveway or keep anyone from entering the school. When a car with a MONTGOMERY COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS sticker on it pulled into the parking lot, we were pretty sure it was the supervisor and began to chant, “Keep our school … free to think! Keep our school … free to think!” The supervisor stared at us, at the signs, then she quickly parked and walked in a side entrance.
The principal came out on the steps and looked us over, seeming more puzzled than angry. “Anybody want to talk about this?” he called out, coming down the walk.
“We’re just showing our support for a great teacher,” somebody said.
“We want to show that we think the assignment Mrs. Cary gave us was a good one and that one person shouldn’t be allowed to dictate what the rest of us can learn,” I told him.
“I guess I’m a little surprised that an ordinary parent conference, which is an everyday occurrence at most schools, should become public knowledge,” the principal said.
“Mrs. Cary doesn’t know anything about this demonstration, but the Freedom of Information Act should apply to students too,” a guy said. “We have a right to know what’s happened to an assignment that involved us.”
We stayed outside through the lunch period and through fourth period as well. We figured we’d get detention for that, but it was worth it. When the bell rang for fifth, though, we went back inside.
When we got to Mrs. Cary’s sixth-period class, she simply smiled, welcomed us back, and asked who was ready to give their three-minute persuasive talk. We cheered.
What we found out later was that the principal and supervisor felt the same way we did even before the protest, but they wanted to give Mrs. Shoates a chance to formally voice her concerns about the assignment.
Another thing we students agreed on—most of us, anyway—as we left the room after class was that Jennifer shouldn’t have to suffer anymore. It wasn’t her fault that her mom had caused a problem, and we shouldn’t treat her like a freak. No girl should have to be accountable for the behavior of her mom. And I wondered if my own mother would have done anything like that to embarrass me. I think I would gladly have suffered what Jennifer went through, though, if only I could have had my mom.
Mark Stedmeister called me at the Melody Inn on Saturday and said that some of the kids were going to the old Steak House in Gaithersburg for dinner—our last get-together before the holidays. He wanted to know how many cars we could count on.
“Tonight?” I said. “Not mine. Dad’s going to be working late here at the store, and Sylvia wants to do some shopping.”
“Want to ride with me, then?” he asked. “I’m picking up Penny and Pamela. Liz can ride too if she wants.”
It sounded like a good idea, and I told Dad where we were going. At seven that night, Liz and I got in Mark’s car, and he set off for Penny’s, then Pamela’s. The Steak House restaurant was a sort of run-down place that was probably scheduled for demolition. The staff was mostly college kids who worked evenings, and though the food wasn’t anything to rave about, it wasn’t too expensive and the portions were huge.
Jill and Justin didn’t show up, but Karen came with Keeno. Patrick didn’t make it, and neither did Gwen. Brian and a few of his friends from school were holding a long table for us when we got there, so it was sort of the old gang and sort of not.
Pamela, Liz, and I shared the deep-fried onion rings, and we ordered steak sandwiches and Cokes. Mostly the talk at the table was about finals, the PSAT, what we were going to do over winter break, and who had already been out looking at colleges.
“Patrick, of course,” I told them.
“Jill’s waiting to see where Justin’s going, and then she’s going to apply,” said Karen, who had the scoop. “Except that Justin’s parents don’t like her and want him to study in England or something.”
“Really?” said Liz. “Why don’t they like her?”
“Jill says they told Justin she just wanted to marry into money,” Karen said. “I’ll bet they don’t realize that Jill and Justin have been going together almost longer than any couple in school, but that doesn’t satisfy his folks. Jill said she and Justin have a plan, but I don’t know what. It’s all she’d tell me.”
I noticed that down at the end of the table Brian was pouring beer into an empty glass, then slipping the bottle back in the gym bag on the seat beside him.
Pamela laughed. “That’s the real reason the guys like to come out here. If you bring your own, the waiters look the other way.”
I didn’t know if Brian’s folks knew he was raiding their beer supply or knew and didn’t care. I figured they didn’t care. Mark didn’t appear to be drinking, though.
It was only nine when we finished at the Steak House, and Keeno said we were all invited to his cousin’s birthday party in Germantown.
“How far is that?” I asked. “I have to be home by midnight.”
“Only eight miles or so. We don’t have to stay long,” Keeno said. “I’ve got some gag gifts for him. His birthday was yesterday, but they’re having a party for him tonight.”
“So why weren’t you there this evening?” Liz asked.
“Oh, I said I’d come by later with friends. He isn’t really a cousin. Sort of a second or third cousin, actually. But he’s a lot of fun.”
Liz looked uncomfortable, but she had to be back by midnight too, so we were going to hold Mark to that. We followed the other cars.
Keeno’s friend lived out beyond Germantown in a wooded rural area, and it took longer than I expected to get there. By the time our cars found the address and we made our way through the crush of people just inside the door, filling every room, it was after ten and had begun to snow. I figured I could stay until about eleven fifteen, and then I’d tell Mark we had to leave.
If there were any adults present, I didn’t see them. Brian was goofing off, using a quart jar as a beer stein. There were as many beer bottles on the kitchen table as there were Coke and Sprite cans, and the floor was sticky.
Keeno had the usual gag gifts for the birthday boy—fly in a fake ice cube, plastic vomit, dog turds—but the guy was plastered and didn’t appreciate them, so Keeno tried them out on us. It was when he put his hand up the back of m
y sweater, though, and pulled out a pair of black panties that he made me laugh.
“What are you? A professional magician?” I asked.
“Magic fingers,” he said, letting them creep up under my sweater again, trying to unhook my bra. I laughed and slapped his hand away.
Several guys came up to me during the next hour and asked for my name and phone number. Liz’s, too. I tried to think of a composer who sounded credible. J. S. Bach, maybe. I said I was “Janice Bach” and gave them the number of the Melody Inn. Liz thought it was hilarious. She gave them Jill’s number.
Around eleven fifteen Liz and Pamela and I went looking for Mark. Some kids were going upstairs together, and I hoped I wouldn’t have to look for him there, but Brian said he and Penny and Karen had headed out to a movie.
“What?” we cried.
“Relax!” he said, his voice a little too loud. “There are plenty of cars. Pu-len-ty!”
He told us to get in one of the cars out on the lawn—that those three were leaving now, taking kids home. Pamela and Liz and I went out on the porch. It was snowing lightly, and all the cars, bushes—everything—had been frosted with a quarter inch of white.
“C’mon, we’ve got room,” someone called from one of the cars.
Liz was closest, so she ran over, bracing against the wind, and got inside. Some more girls ran past us and then some guys. I wasn’t sure which of the cars Pam got in, but somebody yelled, “We can still squeeze in one more.”
I stepped through the snow as the first car backed out into the street and crawled in the backseat of another just as Brian came around the hood to the driver’s side.
“Whose car is this?” I asked in the darkness, as all the cars looked alike in the snow.
“Brian’s,” said a guy up front.
I got out. “No, I’m going with someone else,” I said.
“Hey, Al, get in!” Brian yelled. “It’s snowing! Close the fucking door!”
“No … I’ve … I’ve got a ride,” I said, and headed back to the porch, my heart pounding. Damn Mark! I was thinking. How could he drive us out here and then go off to a movie? I started looking for Keeno and went over to a window to see inside. Keeno was on the couch with a girl. Kissing. Very deep kissing, evidently. Great! Now what should I do?
Dangerously Alice Page 16