Ms. Hempel Chronicles (12 page)

Tonight, she knew, he would go back inside. He would raise his voice, move furniture across the floor, and in the morning, around the table, the four of them would look into each other’s tired faces. But one night, another night—soon, she thought—there would be an apartment.

And suddenly it was no longer her word, her idea.

“Calvin," she said. “Turn it off”

Without the flashlight, her brother wouldn’t be able to see. She wrapped her hands around the cold cylinder and pulled.

But he did not let go. “No.” He said fiercely, “It’s late."

From behind her came the sound of the radio, speaking into the emptiness of her bedroom. The voice said, “This kid who keeps calling me, he wants to hear the Clash. Now normally, I would never play the Clash. Yes, I know, we wouldn’t have punk rock without them, but I mean, you can hear the

Clash on other radio stations. You can hear the Clash on oldies stations. We just don’t play the Clash here on the Rock Hotel, "-Shred explained. "But this kid who called, he got me thinking about when I was his age, when I heard the Clash for the fi
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time. I had never heard anything like them. London Callings, that record changed me. I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you if it wasn’t for that record. So I’m going to play that song, for that kid who called. What can I say? It’s a song of my youth."

Mr. Meacham, the department chair, offered to buy Ms. Hempel a lemonade after school. If you are a person of passion and curiosity and ferocious intellect, he told her, you are a born history teacher.

“I teach English,” Ms. Hempel said.

“You don’t teach English,’’ Mr. Meacham corrected her. “You teach reading, and writing, and critical thinking!”

It seemed, to Ms. Hempel, a grand way of putting it. Through the wide cafe windows, she watched her students come barreling out of the school’s front gates. Did she really teach them anything? Or was she, as she often suspected, just another line of defense in the daily eight-hour effort to contain them.

“What’s wrong with the way history is taught in this school?” Mr. Meacham asked.

“Not relevant to the kids?” Ms. Hempel ventured.

“Relevant!” he cried. “Whoever said history had to be relevant?”

He then spoke in a pinched, miserable voice that Ms. Hempel had never heard before. "Look, kids, the ancient Egyptians aren’t so different from us after all! Look, kids,

when we study the ancient Egyptians, we’re studying a reflection of ourselves!

"All this fuss about relevance,” he said, restored to nor mal, “is a process of erosion. There won’t be any history ^ by the time they’re through. Just social studies!’ And Mr. Mea. cham leaned back on his stool, nervously, as if he were History and Ms. Hempel were Relevance.

“When students look at history,” he said, “they shouldn’t see their own faces; they should see something unfamiliar star-ing back at them. They should see something utterly strange,”

But that’s what they do see when they look in the mirror, Ms. Hempel thought. Something strange.

“So, no, that’s not what I had in mind,” Mr. Meacham continued, somewhat more cheerfully. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the way history is taught in this school: not enough writing. A lot of reading, a lot of talking, but not much Writing; And that”—Mr. Meacham smiled at Ms. Hempel—-“is where you can help.”

“Me?” Ms. Hempel asked.

“You can teach them. Not only how to think about history, but how to write about it.”

Ms. Hempel saw that Mr. Meacham was mistaken. He had confused her with someone who liked teaching seventh graders how to write, who felt happiest and most useful when diagramming a sentence or mapping an idea or brightly suggesting another draft. This was not the case. The thought of increased exposure to seventh-grade writing made Ms. Hempel worry. What happened when one read too many Topic Sentences? Already she could feel how her imagination had begun to thicken and stink, like a scummy pond.

If only she could develop for her subject the same dogged affection that Mr. Meacham felt for his. People approached her,

possessed by their enthusiasms, and Ms. Hempel would think, How beautiful! She loved enthusiasm, in nearly all its forms. For this reason she found herself scorekeeper for the volleyball team, facilitator for the girls-only book group, faculty adviser to the Upper School multicultural organization, Umoja. a
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d now, teacher of seventh-grade United States history.

Mr. Meacham handed her a book that weighed approximately ten pounds. Its title, she noted, was full of enthusiasm

(America! America!).

First Assignment. Choose three people, of different ages (in other words, don’t grab the three seventh graders sitting closest to you), and ask them, the following question: Why is it important to learn about American history? Record your findings. Include the name, age, and occupation of your interview subjects. Bring in your results and share them with the class.

'“To help us better understand ourselves,”’ Tim read from his binder. “Alice Appold. Forty-two. Chiropractor.”

“I didn’t know your mom was older than mine,” Daniel said.

“My mom is fifty-three!” Rachel announced with dismay.

“Ms. Cruz said that the reason it’s important to know about American history is because if we don’t know our past, then we don't know our future.” That was Stevie.

“My father said he won’t answer the question because it’s leading,” Kirsten said.

‘“It’s our responsibility as citizens,”’ Tim read, again from his binder. "James Appold. Forty-three. Restaurateur."

“My mother said that if we don't understand the struggles our ancestors went through, we won’t appreciate the nice life that we have now,” said Chloe, staring at Tim, who hadn’t raised his hand.

Julia Rizzo spoke next. ‘“Those who don’t remember th past are condemned to repeat it.’”

Six students looked up in territorial surprise.

“That’s what my mother said!”

"So did mine!”

“I was just about to say that.”

“My sister,” said the other Julia, who would never have the same answer as anyone else, “told me that not knowing y
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history is like being a person who’s lost their memory.”

“An amnesiac,” Kirsten said bossily.

Amnesiac, Ms. Hempel wrote on the board, and then experienced an instance of it herself. It was a condition that sometimes afflicted her. She would turn her back to the class; she would forget everything. What is a noun? Who were the Pilgrims? And, more troubling, What was I saying? Or: How did I get here? The tether would snap, and she would be set adrift, the sleek green board stretching out all around her. She would feel, against her back, the warmth of eighteen faces. She would feel she might do anything in this moment, like sing a song from My Fair Lady. But then a pigeon departs from the windowsill, Stevie lets out a hiccup, a telephone, somewhere in the building, rings; and she recovers. Oh yes. I am Ms. Hempel. It is second period. A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea.

“A person who’s lost her memory,” Ms. Hempel said to the other Julia. “How true.”

And she thought of the terrible blank she had drawn the very day she’d been hired to teach at this school. Upon signing her contracts and shaking everyone’s hand, she found herself sitting in the faculty lunchroom over a plate of garbanzo bean salad and across the table from Mr. Meacham, who, as it turned out, taught a course in Chinese history. He was disappointed to learn that she did not speak the language, not a word of it.

“And your family?” he had asked. “What province are they from?"

It was at this point that Ms. Hempel’s memory failed her. Hunan? Szechuan? Were those provinces or just restaurants? And what kind of food was she, by hereditary right, supposed to most enjoy? She knew the answer, she did! She was simply nervous.

"Chungking?” she murmured, which didn’t sound particularly correct, but Mr. Meacham was already moving on.

“What a shame,” he said, “that your name isn’t more indicative."

“Yes.” She didn’t understand what he meant “It is too bad."

“Is there a middle name, perhaps?”

“Grace?”

Mr. Meacham frowned, thinking. “Or a family name. Your mother’s maiden name?”

“It’s Ho "

“Ah!” He smiled and swallowed the last of his milk. “Have you ever thought of hyphenating?”

He tried it out. He used the word euphonious. He said the name over to himself, three times.

“Ms. Ho-Hempel,” she said. “That’s what they would call me?”

Mr. Meacham nodded happily.

“But—" How could she put this? “Won’t there be a lot of jokes?”

He didn’t follow, g “You know, ho? As in, ‘pimps and,’ As in, ‘you blankety blank—She waved her hands at Mr. Meacham, as if guiding

him into a very tight parking space. “Do I want a bunch seventh graders calling me ho?”

Mr. Meacham looked at her, perplexed. "That’s precisely the idea.”

He picked up his lunch tray. “You’ll be expanding their horizons. An awful phrase, but a sound principle”

She had a whole summer to practice saying it. Ho-Hempel She even wrote it down on her name tag for the new faculty orientation. But when the first day of school finally arrived children came crashing into her homeroom and by the time the last of them appeared—Michael Reggiano, congenitally late—she had lost her resolve altogether.

Ms. Hempel liked the land bridge theory, especially the part about the lumbering mammoths and the hunters in hungry pursuit. The hunters were following the game, a phrase that made her think of small boys running after ducks in the park. The two things couldn’t be at all similar; following the game was probably a lengthy and thankless process involving mammoth dung and very little real chasing or spear throw-1 ing. But still, that was how she pictured it: the band of hungry hunters pursuing a herd of lumbering mammoths. These hunters were so absorbed by the chase, they went running across a land bridge connecting their home, Asia, to an entirely unfamiliar and uninhabited continent, North America, without even noticing it. A land bridge was more difficult to imagine. The book described ice ages, glaciers, the freezing of oceans, their bottoms now exposed. Did that make sense? Did that big glacier, pinned atop the world like a yarmulke, somehow suck up the water in the Bering Strait? Apparently so. In that case, was crossing the land bridge like skirting a rampart of ice,  bearing down on you from o
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e side, or was it like trudging along a marshy strip of beach, ith the glacier a white ship floating off in the distance? The book didn’t elaborate. All that mattered was the appearance of
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he land bridge, so that the mammoths could lumber across, so that the Asian hunters could follow, so that the Western Hemisphere could become populated.

"Any questions?” Ms. Hempel asked.

“What if Ferdinand and Isabella hadn't given Columbus the money?” asked Travis, who enjoyed hypothetical situations.

"What if the hunters hadn't crossed the Bering Strait?" he would eventually ask.

And, “What if the Pilgrims had decided to stay in Holland?”

Ms. Hempel wasn’t sure how to answer these questions.

“Then I guess we wouldn’t be sitting here!” she would reply, airily.

This seemed to be the answer Travis was looking for. He nodded and said, “I guess not."

Grandpa’s Chest. The year is 1691, and the settlers at Jamestown are packing up and moving the colony inland. Imagine that you are helping your grandfather sort through his belongings. Each item, that he puts into his chest reminds him of some significant event or person in Jamestown’s history. For instance, an old tobacco pouch might remind him of the crop that saved the colony from total ruin (“Ah, I remember it well—if Pocahontas hadn’t taught John Smith how to plant tobacco, we never would have survived. But rich folk back home loved chewing the stuff. Soon everybody was growing it—even in the streets!"). Write a scene in which you describe this conversation with your grandfather as he reminisces' over the contents of his chest. Note: Tou will need to include ati eight items!

“Before I read my scene," Audrey said, “can I tell a joke?"

Ms. Hempel said yes.

“My father told it to me. It’s a dumb joke, but I wanted to tell it. First he said, ‘Why is it important to learn about American history?' Remember? The assignment we did? And then he said, ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat’”—Audrey paused, sheepishly-—‘“the seventh grade!’”

The class laughed. So did Ms. Hempel.

“The best reason yet!” Ms. Hempel declared. “Who wants to repeat the seventh grade?”

And then it occurred to her: She was repeating the seventh grade, in fact for the fourth time, and she would still be repeating the seventh grade when Audrey and Kirsten and Travis were out in the world, doing things. Over and over again, the Jamestown settlers would complain of the mosquitoes, the tea chests would tumble into the harbor, the Loyalists would be tarred and feathered and paraded through the crooked streets. Every November, the war would be won; every October, the colonies would rebel; every September, Ms. Hempel would turn to the board, pick up the chalk, and write: First Assignment.

Out of all the days in the month, Affinity Day was perhaps the most difficult. Ms. Hempel questioned the choice of Affinity, which she normally used to describe how she felt about Thomas Hardy, but the word was already a fixture, Umoja's gentle way of saying No White People Allowed. The organization s founders had decided, in the interests of unity, that once

a month of its nonwhite members should congregate without its white members. Or, to put it a preferable way, its members of color should gather without its members of noncolor.

INow Ms- Hempel was left with a classroom half full of

, nervously rattling their lunch trays. Where to begin? The white members probably suspected that as soon the door swung shut, the Korean kids would start speak-f Korean, and the Puerto Rican kids would start speaking S anish, and the black kids would start speaking in some new
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d alluring way that no one else had caught up to yet. From inside the room would come the sounds of profound relief: laughter, slapping of hands, little moans of commiseration. Delicious food would be shared. Maybe some hilarious imitations of the other, absent members would be performed.