by M. O. Walsh
He had a theory to explain it.
The phenomenon of high-speed aging, as particularly experienced by high school educators, Douglas had long thought, was a simple by-product of the space-time bend that occurs when otherwise reasonable adults are forced to navigate an adolescent’s world. It wasn’t merely the headaches teenagers caused that did it, with their nuisances, their ignorance, their bodily horrors, but rather, like everything else ironic about teaching high school, it was the way a school day being cut into fifty-minute blocks to keep it active for the students inevitably made it interminable for the faculty.
Take Douglas’s day, for example: four sections of American History with two different preps (one freshmen, one junior level), an Honors World History class (for seniors with college hopes), a noisy cafeteria lunch, then a break which is not really a break at all because you need to call your wife, who suddenly thinks she’d be better off in Saudi Arabia, and then have your picture taken by a romantic rival while your window is broken by a future Hall of Famer before prepping for three more sections of World History, Civics, and Louisiana History, respectively, each of which you will try to teach while your students stare blankly at a custodian named Wilson who is trying to fit a piece of plywood into the broken window frame without any discernible tools. All of this in the same building, often in the very same room, each scene beginning over again during the same stretch of day. It was, in many respects, like going to work on a loop.
In fact, Douglas liked to think that if you tallied it all up and considered each individual class a person teaches as an entire workday unto itself, which Douglas felt it was, mentally, then a person who teaches high school ends up working for eight different days within the span from eight a.m. to three p.m. alone. This is not to mention the day they live before coming to work, with their various family, children, and breakfast scenarios, nor the one they must face afterward, with those same families and dinners and bills. Thusly, a mathematician might surmise that high school teachers actually live ten entirely different days per each ordinary day, which means they live through fifty separate days in the five-day workweek enjoyed by most human beings. Tack on the two normal days for the weekend and the typical four-month semester actually adds up to around eight hundred days in fall and eight hundred in spring, or somewhere around two years of life per semester, which, of course, means that for each year a person teaches high school they’re actually doing about four complete years of living. It is therefore not unusual for a freshman, by the time she graduates, to witness her favorite teacher age sixteen years to her four. And, if that teacher were to get roped into teaching summer school as well, then, by Douglas’s calculations, they might just turn to dust.
This is why even the most optimistic educators Douglas has ever known, those hired fresh out of college in Baton Rouge or New Orleans, with all their new lesson plans and pedagogies and wholly revolutionary ideas for bringing Deerfield education into the twenty-first century, often end up looking like their own grandparents before they’ve made it through their first year of faculty meetings. The new Social Studies teacher, for example, Betsy Miller, who Douglas had found quite attractive just a few years ago, with her bouncing pixie haircut and fashionable eyeglasses, now wore only flowered muumuus to school, her hair done up in a tight and dull bun. Young Matt Clark, as well, the English teacher with an MFA degree who had once been known to stand in the quad reciting Whitman at full throat, going Dead Poets Society all over the place in his snappy suspenders and pleated khakis, had twice come to work this semester alone wearing a different shoe on each foot. He had no idea he had done this, the poor guy, and his students skewered him for it. It was hard to blame them. The old are such easy targets.
Yet Douglas understood that the way the faculty tottered around campus, scribbling reminders on their own hands, shuffling around student essays like they were incomprehensible contracts, was the result of living for far more days in each single day than the rest of the world. Douglas also knew that very few of them besides Pat Howell, the school principal, had done this at Deerfield Catholic longer than he had.
It was Principal Pat that Douglas now saw as he left the school building, lugging his large trombone case with him on the way to his lesson after school. This was to be expected, as Principal Pat was known to keep a hawkish vigil over the parking lot come dismissal, making sure no one was smoking or drinking or fighting or, worse, proliferating the human race on her watch. Principal Pat was a strong and spherical woman, whose tucked-in shirts and high-waisted pants made it nearly impossible to tell where her breasts ended and her belly began, and whose large and magnified eyeglasses gave one the impression that she might be able to see everything that happened on campus, whether she was physically there or not.
“Hubbard?” Pat said. “Is that you?”
“All day long,” Douglas replied. “And probably tomorrow.”
She studied him for a minute and frowned. “I didn’t recognize you without the mustache. When the frip did that happen?”
“Last week,” he told her. “We’ve had two faculty meetings together since then. We spoke after lunch today about my window. That was maybe two hours ago.”
“Right,” she said. “That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Mr. Nevers assured me that he’ll pay for the window out of his signing bonus.”
“Not that,” she said. “After our meeting, I started thinking about all the great work you’ve done at Deerfield, how dib-nab long you’ve been working here, how well you get along with your cock-a-poo colleagues, and how even these dribbin’ students seem to respect you.”
Principal Pat, one might notice, had a strange way of speaking. Her thirty years of being a Catholic school principal, complete with her own self-imposed no-cursing-on-campus policy, had given birth to an entirely new lexicon of near curse words that she alone employed with impunity. To her credit, she didn’t settle for things as easy as crud or dang, as most polite people in Louisiana might do around children, but instead bequeathed her invectives with a sort of bouncy and alliterative quality that Douglas rather admired. There were flim-flams and gob-nobs and mysterious curses like deekin-hawks strewn throughout any conversation you might have with her, at any time of day, in virtually any setting. Douglas relished this aspect of her personality most in faculty meetings, where listening to her admonish a colleague was not dissimilar to what he imagined sitting in a jazz club might be like, hearing Etta James scat on the mic in her prime. Not everyone enjoyed this quirk of hers, though, he was sure, because even the most naïve parent at Deerfield Catholic could glean from any conversation that Pat was fighting deep-seated urges to call their child a shithead. In fact, Douglas figured, if a person were to substitute her invented sounds for the curse words they obviously stood for, they’d realize the school principal was likely the most foul-mouthed woman in the parish.
“You know,” Douglas told her, checking his watch. “I’ve also been thinking about how dib-nab long I’ve been working here recently.”
“Don’t give me that bully-brick,” she said. “I’m serious. You deserve some flip-floppin’ recognition for all you do around here.”
This conversation made Douglas uneasy. He was not at all used to being complimented at work, by his students or his peers, or by anyone other than Cherilyn, really, who, in her predictably thoughtful way, had made a sort of art form out of it. Beyond her little mentions of his looking handsome as they left the house for dinner parties or an anniversary, which Douglas miraculously believed every time she told him, Cherilyn had also taken on the role of providing for Douglas at home the compliments she felt he was likely not receiving at work.
She’d elevated this habit to such a degree that, for the last five years, at the end of each spring semester, Cherilyn held a small ceremony for Douglas at their kitchen table. She would
dress nice, in a blue blouse and long white skirt he had once mentioned liking, and fix him a glass of his favorite bourbon, Basil Hayden’s, which at thirty-four bucks a bottle was seriously high cotton on their budget. She would then proceed to emcee her own little private awards show for Douglas in which she held a box filled with thank-you notes that she herself had written, all in the guise of his ungrateful peers and students. The notes would thank him for a wide variety of small extracurricular services he had performed throughout the semester, ones Douglas must have mentioned to Cherilyn at one time or another. Since she often didn’t know the students’ names about whom he complained, the notes would be signed with things like: “Sincerely, that boy who didn’t show up for his midterm but you let me take a make-up anyway because you are a caring and sensitive person” or “All my best, from the geography teacher whose class you covered when I had that ‘cold’ that everybody knows was actually a court date for my DUI.” Each event ended with him being presented with the same small trophy Cherilyn herself had made that had a golden apple on top of it and “Teacher of the Year” written across the bottom, which she kept on a mantel in their office.
These were bighearted nights in which Douglas and Cherilyn laughed together, as lucky couples are apt to do, about her surprising and sly sense of humor in the notes, about his endless gullibility when it came to work (which he swore every year to curtail), and about the impressive imbecility of nearly everyone he came in contact with when he left their home each morning. But what most tickled Douglas about this little ceremony of Cherilyn’s was the fact that these notes meant she had actually been listening to every single conversation they’d had throughout the school year, which Douglas imagined must seem to her like an endless string of very similar days. This could not have been easy to do. He often wondered how Cherilyn could retain these anecdotes that he himself had forgotten, if she remembered everything that he’d ever said to her, or, perhaps even better, if she went off and wrote the thank-you notes the very night he complained, as if she were always fashioning little presents for him in the way some parents are perpetually Christmas shopping for their children. If so, then hers was a love, Douglas knew, that didn’t take a day off. And, as if proof of how hard it was for Douglas himself to listen to every detail in a conversation, he realized that this quick memory of his wife had removed him from his conversation with Principal Pat entirely, who was now coming to some conclusion about a point he had no idea she’d been making.
“So, I’ve decided,” she said. “Who in the fudge-pop better than you to replace me?”
“I’m sorry,” Douglas said. “Replace you? For what?”
“Earth to Hubbard,” she said. “Haven’t you been listening? It’s official. I’m retiring. I’m no good for this place anymore. I am no longer, how the flake to say it, in my element.”
Principal Pat then removed from a pocket, which was perhaps in her pants or perhaps in her shirt, a small slip of blue paper. Douglas recognized it immediately as being from the DNAMIX machine.
“Oh, Lord,” he said. “What are we going to do about these things? Heddy Franklin told me today that she is supposed to be a samurai. She spent all of first period doing origami. And let me be clear that she has no idea how to do origami. You think it’s time for a ban? If you say so, I support it. I second the motion right here. No need for a meeting. I’ll even help you print up the papers. Maybe Heddy can fold them for us.”
Principal Pat was known for her swift and unilateral action against fads. As soon as it seemed the kids found something in common, something they all enjoyed, she sent home bright pink warnings in everyone’s folder that read “NOW PROHIBITED” and listed their new favorite toy. Years ago it was Silly Putty, then homemade slime and fidget spinners and, of all things, Rubik’s Cubes. Despite their educational applications, if the kids liked it, Principal Pat typically got it the hell out of there.
“I’m not in the banning business anymore,” she said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Look and see for yourself.”
Douglas took the blue slip of paper, having already made up his mind about the ludicrousness of these readouts, and opened it up. It looked just like Cherilyn’s, with all the little numbers and factoids, suggesting, though, that Principal Pat, unlike Cherilyn, was not capable of producing human children. It read at the bottom, in bold, Potential Life Station: CARPENTER.
“I’ve put in my two-week notice with the archdiocese,” she said. “I’m moving to the country to build me a home, just like the song says. I thought you might be a good candidate to replace me.”
“You’re joking,” he said. “Pat, this is just a piece of paper. It came out of a vending machine.”
“It’s not just a piece of paper,” she said. “It’s the right piece of paper. It hit me like a train when I read it.”
Douglas set down his trombone. He looked around the parking lot as if he might be hallucinating, or perhaps being filmed for some sort of candid-camera situation. He removed his beret and wiped the sweat from the top of his head. “Just one question, Pat,” he said. “Do you know anything at all in the big beeping fleeping world about carpentry?”
Pat reached into either her breast or pants pocket and pulled out a pair of safety goggles. She held them up in the air like evidence. “I bought these over at the Rockery Ace yesterday,” she said. “So, I know about safety. That’s one thing I know. I also know that my grandpa was a carpenter, and that the big man’s son was a carpenter. I know it’s mainly a hammer and nails and I also know what nobody else could know, which is that as soon as I saw that piece of paper, I built a house in my head. I could see every part of it: the wooden floors, the vaulted cathedral ceiling, all those nuts and bolts I could screw in and feel good about. It was all right there as if it had always been, but I just hadn’t looked. And I have to tell you, Hubbard, when I saw myself in that house, all covered with sawdust and dirt, I became a different person, like the most badass momma-jomma you’ve ever met. Even today, I feel totally new. Heck, I’m surprised you even recognize me.”
“You know,” Douglas said. “There’s a rumor that Phil Reed has been spiking the coffee in the teacher’s lounge again. You been hanging out in there today?”
Pat didn’t reply but instead looked at the parking lot as a group of seniors peeled out in their pickup trucks. To Douglas’s dismay, she didn’t even bother to jot down their names for detention tomorrow. “I stated in my resignation letter,” she said, “that I would like to pick my replacement. I’ll be giving them your name tomorrow.”
“Look,” Douglas said. “I appreciate the gesture, but you should know that I’m not particularly in the market for more responsibility right now.” He tapped his trombone case with his foot. “I was thinking of a change of employment myself.”
“Don’t be flicking ridiculous,” she said. “You’re meant for this, Hubbard. You’re good at this. Anybody can see that. Some people are no great mystery.”
What Douglas wanted to tell her, of course, was that she had him all wrong. This life he’d been living in blazers and button-up shirts, this was the lie. The truth of him was an artist with talent likely too molten hot for this town to contain. He just hadn’t pursued it yet. But instead of saying this, Douglas asked, “What about Father Pete? Wouldn’t he make the most sense to step into a sort of emergency situation like this one?”
Douglas knew the answer to this already, which was no, Pete Flynn would not be very good at this at all, but Douglas mentioned him only because he now saw Father Pete in the parking lot, walking over to his old beat-up blue Toyota pickup.
“Please,” Pat said. “The kids would eat that man alive. He’d be hitting the whiskey by noon. Men of God are too fragile to be principals.”
Pat took her slip of paper back from Douglas, folded it into one of her pockets, and said, “It’s a lot to soak in, I know. Talk to Cherilyn about it, be sure s
he knows you’ll get a pay bump, though not nearly as much of a bump as it should be, if you were to ask me, and get back with me tomorrow.” She then patted him on the shoulder and walked back toward the school building.
“Wait,” Douglas said. “One thing I have to know, Pat, from a true carpenter like yourself: How exactly do you plumb a line?”
It was an ugly urge that made Douglas ask this, as it was a question he himself didn’t know the answer to. Yet he’d heard it used in various conversations with men that had this kind of knowledge and hoped, in some petty way, he might embarrass her for also not knowing.
Pat opened the door to the school and turned back to face him. She pulled the safety goggles over her head and stretched them out over her eyeglasses. She looked like she might be going snorkeling. “As a matter of fact,” she told him, “I don’t know. But I aim to find out. I plan to start by getting a plumb and then getting a line and then, finally, Douglas, being happy in my own skin.”
Douglas looked at the ground. “Good answer,” he said. “I’m happy for you.”
“Don’t lie,” she told him. “This is a lot to think about. We carpenters have a saying, though, Hubbard. When God closes a door, we just build ourselves a window. Maybe this new job could be your window.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe you’ll go home and have a wrench fall on your head and come back to reality.”
“Reality!” Pat said and bent over laughing. “That’s a good one.”