“Fourth grade is in Vermilion, second Lemon, first Tangerine, fifth Salmon. We have an excellent teaching staff. They'll be a real resource for you.” Steckelberg opened the door and stood aside, gesturing toward the darkened classroom as if presenting a prize she had won. Eril supposed she had. It was a job, after all. The heat had been off for two weeks and she could see her breath. A long table below the windows on the opposite wall was covered with cages of hamsters, a rat, a fish tank, a tiny garter snake under a heat lamp.
“Your predecessor was quite the biologist. We're sorry to lose her. She had a last-minute job offer after Christmas. Some kind of fieldwork out in New Mexico, dietary habits of predatory birds. She was coming in to feed the animals up until yesterday.”
On the table, Eril's predecessor had left long lists of instructions on the care and feeding of the animals. She had also left bowls of soft gray balls of owl vomit filled with the fur and bones of whatever the owl had eaten. The contents of twenty pellets had been glued, spread-eagled, on squares of cardboard, the bones arranged into the skeletons of voles and shrews. It was an ambitious project for third graders. The skeletons were caked in Elmer's glue, slivers of rib bones shellacked onto skulls, paw bones the size of rice grains wedged into eye sockets. Larger bones were scattered across the table, sticks and bark and the jagged brown dust of dried leaves, sea shells that smelled like the residue of the animals they'd harbored, damp and rotting and salty. It was a great wreckage of life.
Steckelberg left and Eril walked across the room to the table. The portable felt suspended over some uncertain, hollow space. Once she heard the principal's car pull away, wheels spinning in the unplowed lot, she jumped up and down. The floor quivered. Eril was not used to feeling so large. She looked at the walls, the alphabet in cursive, the American flag, a series of Your State Symbol posters: the official fish of the state of Michigan was apparently the Brook Trout, the official mineral the Petoskey stone. The official state game animal was the White-Tailed Deer, for which, she read, the hunting season was divided into periods for Archery, Regular and Late Firearm, and Muzzle-loading. She wondered if her eight-year-olds would know these things. She wondered what she was supposed to teach them. For a moment she wanted to cry.
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Monday morning she stood and watched the children arrive, stripping off their coats and boots in a pile near the door. The children stared at her suspiciously and read her name,
Ms. Larcom,
on the blackboard along with the date and a Word of the Day:
fortitude.
A boy lifted the rat out of its cage and cradled it in his hands, letting the long, hairless tail dangle in the air like a tentacle. “Binx's tumors have gotten bigger,” he announced, and set the rat on a blond girl's head. The girl screamed and the week went downhill from there.
Thursday was a field trip, already arranged by the departed biologist. There was no money to charter a bus, so Eril had been left instructions to walk the children to the corner and catch the 16B Ypsilanti/Ann Arbor to the Natural History Museum. The docent delivered the museum rules while standing next to a transparent plastic woman with light-up organs. Bored, the children pressed the buttons to light her pancreas, large intestine, esophagus. Then the boys figured out what the mammary glands were, and the woman lit up like a strobe light, like a showgirl, until the bulb in her left breast went out with a loud snap. A hot, burning smell lingered.
“They're very immature,” a voice commented, down by Eril's waist. She looked down at Donald's brown hair, so light it looked dusty, like he was either prematurely old or extremely dirty. He'd worn a sweatshirt with dinosaurs on it to mark the occasion. He'd said it like that, “to mark the occasion.”
“Maybe you should tell them to stop.”
“They'll get bored in a minute.”
“You're the teacher. You should tell them to stop.”
“You should mind your own business.”
“You're not a very good teacher, are you?”
“Maybe you're not a very good student.”
“That's not true,” Donald said. “I'm an excellent student.”
Of Eril's twenty students, she'd decided she liked Donald the least. He'd held her hand on the bus, refusing to notice the way the other kids mocked him, and lectured her on how Archaeopteryx was the first prehistoric bird with both scales and feathers, and how during the Ice Age Mastodons had once walked here, right here, along the 16B bus route. It seemed to Eril that there was something very wrong with him.
The docent walked them past the plastic woman to the Hall of Dinosaurs and paused by a duck-billed Parasaurolophus skull. “Are you signed up for the planetarium show?” she asked Eril.
“Sure,” Eril said. “The planetarium sounds good.”
“They might be a little young.”
“For the planetarium? They'll be okay.”
During the show a cartoon astronaut, white and puffy like the Michelin Man, floated across the starry ceiling. “The surface of the sun is very hot,” the narrator intoned. “Much too hot for humans to survive. They would burn up instantly.” The astronaut disappeared into the yellow circle of the sun as a man's screams faded into silence on the soundtrack. One of the students whimpered. On the way back to Morningcroft, Eril threatened not to let the troublemakers, the mammary gland boys, the whimpering girl, the incessantly chatty Donald, back on the bus. “I'm going to leave you here,” she said. “Let's see how you like that.” It was a clumsy threat, Eril knew as she made it. The kids knew she didn't mean it, and this just confirmed what they'd suspected for a week: Ms. Larcom was not a very good teacher.
At the staff meeting that afternoon Eril asked about curriculum, about lesson plans, about discipline, about what was and was not appropriate for third graders, about all the things she was only just realizing she knew absolutely nothing about. Besides the principal and secretary there were four other teachers, refugees who had come to Morningcroft Montessori in search of a place to exercise their frustrated talents, their curricula reflecting the different directions they wished their lives had taken. One decorated bulletin boards with her own hand-painted borders, spent two weeks every January on watercolor reproductions of famous paintings, the originals taped to the students' desks so they could be confronted with their own inadequacy. Another recycled the vocabulary of modern dance into stress-relieving activities, physical fitness initiatives. The fifth-grade teacher had filled her classroom with all the musical instruments she could afford, meaning mostly bongos and plastic xylophones. She had written a version of the Code of Hammurabi set to bongo accompaniment for a unit on Justice Through the Ages. “
An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,
” she sang, drumming her hands on the table. “The kids love it.”
They asked Eril what drove her, what she loved, what she could twist into thematic units that met MEA standards for the third-grade year. But Eril was a woman without great talents, forced to pride herself on small, unexpected skills, like the way
she could untangle knots, hold her breath for two and a half minutes, or the way she'd taught herself in the sixth grade to balance things on her head the way women did in third-world countries or finishing schools. She still practiced sometimes, unloading groceries from the car and balancing a twelve-pack of diet soda on the top of her head, plastic bags in each hand.
That Friday, the end of her first week, Eril commenced teaching grammar. It was something she knew. The four types of conditionals, starting with the Zero. The conditional tense for certitude, a state of inevitability:
If you heat water to 100 degrees Celsius, it boils,
Eril wrote, then crossed it out.
If students misbehave, they are punished,
she wrote in larger letters. The chalk squeaked as she made the final
d
and the children complained. Eril rapped her knuckles on the board. “Five examples in your notebooks. Go.”
She walked around the room and looked over their shoulders.
If you go to the sun, you die. If astronauts go to a star, they scream and burn up.
Donald had two sentences so far:
If climate change happens, species go extinct,
and
If people are mean to someone, they will be sorry.
“That's the first conditional,” Eril said. “We haven't learned that yet.”
“They
are
sorry,” Donald corrected.
“It's grammatically correct. But it's not really true. They aren't usually sorry at all, are they?”
Donald erased his sentence.
Morningcroft was not a real Montessori school. Morningcroft was not, as far as Eril could tell, a real anything apart from some last-ditch effort to avoid Ypsilanti public schools. For parents who couldn't afford other private schools or charters and didn't bother looking too closely, there was always Morningcroft. The student body, Steckelberg had told her, was a stimulating combination of disadvantaged youth and wealthy hippie offspring. Eril had just earned an Associate's Degree in Behavioral Science at Washtenaw Community College. She'd switched from a Hospitality major in her last semester; a surprising number of the requirements had been the same.
When Eril saw her friends all they wanted to talk about was the job, how funny it was, Eril as a schoolteacher, Eril who'd never cared for school, who couldn't do math, who had no affection for English beyond the mechanics of it, who, at twenty-one, hadn't even scraped through a real college, who had filled out applications to be a desk clerk at the Marriott, an assistant manager at a sandwich shop, a receptionist at a furniture distributor, and a schoolteacher, and gotten hired by the school. “It's just for the semester,” she told them. “Teaching's not for me.”
“We could have told you that,” they said, and she'd wish desperately that someone had.
On her better days, she could decide it wouldn't have made any difference if they had or hadn't. As little as Morningcroft could get away with paying her, without certification, without a clue, it was more than she'd earn elsewhere. Enough to keep her in her apartment, pay the higher car insurance premiums since her parents had removed themselves as co-drivers. Enough to call her parents and give them the number of a cell phone she'd paid for herself.
On other days Eril would drive the long route home, back into Ann Arbor, past the house she'd grown up in and that her parents had sold, and think about how she could teach forever and never afford to live in that neighborhood again. She felt as if the job, her whole post-parent life, was an elaborate game with particular rules about money, about independence, about fortitude; it was only sometimes that she remembered there was no judge, no winner to be declared, no prize to be awarded.
One of the rat's tumors kept growing, swelling out from his armpit to the size of a Ping-Pong ball. It dragged along the ground as he walked, until there was a bald patch at the bottom of the swell. The children refused to touch him anymore. Eril followed her predecessor's instructions to the letter, but the rat got sicker, the snake got sluggish, the shells got stinkier. Whatever kind of green thumb the other woman had had with animals, Eril thought, she had the opposite. The water in the fish tank grew cloudier. There were special snails, Donald explained,
who were supposed to eat the algae but couldn't keep up since Eril didn't seem to take good enough care of the water. The snails hid all day, Donald said, sleeping, but if it was dark and quiet, like at night, they would come out and start eating the algae. This, he told Eril and the rest of the class, was called
nocturnal.
“I know that,” she said, and wrote it on the board with a line under it.
Donald asked, “Do you know what the opposite is called? What we are? Sleeping at night?”
“Why don't you tell us?”
“Maybe I don't want to.”
Eril didn't know the word he meant, and Donald knew it. She turned to the blackboard.
Second Conditional,
she wrote.
If Donald behaved himself, he would not have to touch the rat.
The class whispered. Eril walked to the table, the thin floor echoing beneath her. She lifted Binx out of the cage, supporting the tumor with her right palm so the weight of it wouldn't drag on the rat's skin. She carried Binx to Donald's desk and set him down, cupping her hands into a loose enclosure. “Touch the rat,” Eril ordered.
“
Diurnal.
The word was
diurnal.
”
“It's a little late for that. Touch.”
Grimly Donald stroked the smooth white fur on the rat's head. The rat's whiskers twitched.
“Now touch the tumor,” Eril said. That had been the Word of the Day two weeks ago,
tumor,
so the students could put a name to what was happening to their class rat, define his misfortune and use it in a sentence.
“Ewww www. . . , ” the class called out, and Eril shushed them. For once it worked, and the classroom was silent as Donald traced the bulge with the tip of his index finger. Eril saw him shaking and almost told him to stop, it was all right, he could stop. But only almost. The class was quieter than it had been all semester. She couldn't fold now.
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That night Eril's mother called to gloat about the weather. “What's the temperature there? Forty-something?” Eril's parents had sold the house just after Christmas; her father had taken
early retirement, and they'd kept an eye on real estate prices, looked at condominiums in Florida or Arizona, places where they would never have to shovel snow again. The day they left for Scottsdale, Eril moved into a studio apartment filled with boxes of her old books, clothes, stuffed animals that her parents had announced they would no longer have room for. She had her bedroom furniture and whatever else her parents hadn't wanted. She had two coffee tables and no couch. She'd sit on one table, put her feet up on the other, and watch her parents' old television set. The boxes stayed piled along the walls, four of them wedged under the card table she ate at. She'd forget and bang her knees against them as she ate frozen pizza in the evening.