Saying Grace (6 page)

“So you
do
remember each other.” She was pleased.

“Yes,” said Henry. “Very well. It’s just this habit women have of changing their names.”

“Men too. Henry,” said Emily, and they both laughed.

Rue turned to Malone. “Do you like
Mad
magazine? Or Pogo?”

Malone nodded. “If you go to the top of the stairs and turn right, you’ll find a room with big stacks of them.” The children thanked her and thundered out.

Rue looked at Henry looking at Emily. “So, what
is
her name?”

“Goldsborough,” said Henry.

“How nice. How eighteenth century. You should take it back,”

she said to Emily. “I don’t usually give personal advice, but having met Dr. Dahl, I think I would take back Goldsborough immediately.”

Emily took the advice.

S
chool had been in session for a week and a half. Emily Goldsborough was, to put it mildly, having a problem with the eighth grade. Oddly, she found that handling fourteen-year-olds had virtually nothing to do with what she had learned in primary grades during her ed courses. The wizard of the class, running the show behind masks and curtains, was a sharp-faced boy, Korean by birth, with the distinctly un-Korean name of Kenny Lowen. The worst thing was Emily could never catch Kenny at anything. Out of the corner of her eye she would see a note being passed, or a conversation in sign language, but when she whirled to look, it was always someone else holding the note, or stifling laughter.

Hughie Bache had once gone ostentatiously sound asleep in her class, causing the other boys to come unglued with amusement.

Students would get up and walk around without permission and even leave the room. When Emily asked what they thought they were doing, they would say with mock surprise that Miss Smith always let them, or they thought class was over, or that they needed the bathroom. She’d sent Glenn Malko to Mr. Dianda three times.

What she didn’t know was that Margee Malko had come in to complain to Rue that Mrs. Goldsborough was picking on her son.

Mike Dianda came repeatedly to observe Emily’s classes, but when he was there the children were angels. The small sarcastic woman who taught history in the class next door kept coming in to ask if Emily could keep the noise down. Emily thought it was a rude question. If she could, she would, wouldn’t she? At home at night she was tense with despair. She’d always been better with small children than teenagers, but she’d never had this kind of trouble.

She didn’t need this fear of failing. She’d failed enough, at more or less everything up to now, or at least it felt that way. Certainly at being a wife, if you asked Tom. And if she hadn’t yet failed as a mother, she hadn’t really been tested, had she? Anyone could be a Saying Grace / 37

decent mother with a big car, a full bank account, and nothing to do all day except work on her tennis and remember someone’s dentist appointment. Try it working full-time at something you stink at, with so little money you have to say “No” every time your children ask for something, in a dingy little house that looks to your daughter like the kind of house people’s maids live in. Try doing that and still keeping your sweet and loving temper.

Cynda Goldring, who taught English, made a point of sitting with Emily at lunch. Cynda had a glossy flip of dark hair, big white teeth, and incredibly long fingernails, such that Emily wondered how she could hold the chalk. She told Emily comforting stories.

“You’ll get better, and the kids will let up on you. You think these kids are tough? I used to teach public school until one of my eighth graders tried to rape me in the girl’s room. He was seventeen and weighed about two-twenty. I took a forty percent pay cut to come here, and believe me, it was worth every penny.”

Cynda made her laugh, and so did Janet TerWilliams, who taught second grade and drove a new BMW. The bad part of the job was the job. The good part was that for the first time in fourteen years, Emily belonged to a group other than her family, and she found that you form a different kind of bond with people with whom you share work. She found herself measuring time a different way and valuing money a different way. She felt a longing to succeed that was entirely different from wishing to win at games; it was a matter of identity.

When she taught in the younger grades, she had moments of hoping she was going to be really good. Certainly she was learning a new respect for the mixture of tact, kindness, imagination, and skill that went into this job. She thought of teachers in her children’s old school whom she had hardly seen as people like herself; she’d seen their ordinary clothes and heard their occasional grammatical mistakes, and known only that they hadn’t had fancy educations like hers.

She wondered now if she’d ever had any idea of how hard it was to be good at what they did. She began to take home information on teacher enrichment workshops and seminars she hoped Rue would send her to. She hired Ann Rosen, and instructed her to file for a divorce.

38 / Beth Gutcheon

“Her class control is terrible,” said Mike Dianda. “She didn’t command their respect from the beginning, and I don’t think she can recover.”

Rue pushed a paperweight around her desk. The parking lot gossip vine had it that Mrs. Goldsborough was nice but clueless.

Several eighth-grade girls aiming at competitive high schools were worried they wouldn’t score well on their admissions tests. There had even been complaints from other teachers—well, from Lynn Ketchum—about the noise from Mrs. Goldsborough’s classroom.

“I guess I better start interviewing,” said Rue. “Will you go on working with her, though?”

“I will.”

“Did you get to observe Roberta Shaftoe?”

“I spent an hour in pre-K this morning.”

“And?”

“I don’t see how we can keep her,” said Mike. “She won’t come to school without a hat. If her hat of the day comes off her head, she gets hysterical and yells ‘Where’s my bankey?’ over and over, even if it’s right at her feet. She treats the other children like objects in her fantasy life. This morning I saw her yell ‘Danielle, the phone is ringing!’ and then answer the phone herself, as if Danielle were in-animate.”

“What kind of hats?”

“Baseball yesterday. Mickey Mouse today. Her small motor skills are terrible. She can’t cut out a paper doll without cutting off its head. She can’t write her name. She’s terribly fearful of loud noise and new situations.”

Rue sighed. The Shaftoes, delighted with The Country School, had just donated $2,100 to the Capital Campaign fund for a bronze plaque to be set in the new gym lobby floor, with their names on it.

And then there was the Bird Feeder Affair.

At her own expense, and with her own little hammer, Catherine Trainer had hung a bird feeder outside her classroom window and was loopy with excitement when there appeared among the robins and mourning doves first a dark-eyed junco and then a western tanager.

“A western tanager!” she had babbled to all who would listen.

Saying Grace / 39

“Oh, it was lovely with its little red skullcap and that golden breast.

You know you almost never see one. You hear them sometimes, but they’re terribly shy. You hear them call
piit err ick!
The children were so excited!” She went on so much about it at lunch that Bill Glarrow, the business manager, actually left his office during class hours and went over to the middle school to view the bird feeder. The next thing you know, he had torn it down and was going off with it.

Malone gave a fairly merciless accounting to her mother of the spectacle Mrs. Trainer then made of herself. She stopped her history class in midsentence and shouted at the window, “What do you think you’re doing?” Then she sprinted from the classroom, and the delighted children ran to the windows in time to see her catch up with Mr. Glarrow and give him a great angry push with both hands.

Malone demonstrated how Mrs. Trainer had
pushed
and the astonished look on Mr. Glarrow’s face before he gathered his wits and saw who was attacking him.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” she had howled at him, red in the face. Surprised into indiscretion, Mr. Glarrow had pointed and shouted back, “Look what’s happening! The birds are sitting on that branch up there, waiting to get at the feeder, and they’re shitting all over the camellias!” The children were overcome with delight. They looked down and saw that the hedge of dark green leaves below them was glazed with white, a virtual birdy toilet. “Those are specimen shrubs!” Mr. Glarrow had yelled. “Do you know what it would cost to replace them? It’s not a cold climate, for god’s sake, the birds have enough to eat!”

Apparently Mrs. Trainer and Mr. Glarrow then had a race, speedwalking, to see who would get to Rue first. Mrs. Trainer won, because Mr. Glarrow had to stop outside the office to put down the bird feeder. By chance Rue appeared in her office doorway just in time to see Mrs. Trainer burst into the reception area, and Catherine beetled into Rue’s office and threw herself into a chair. They were in Rue’s office for about ten minutes when Catherine came out calmer, but sniffling and still talking about the dark-eyed junco, and went back to her class.

Then Rue went in for a talk with Bill Glarrow, and after a while he stumped off to the middle school. Emily later learned he had 40 / Beth Gutcheon

been sent to apologize to Mrs. Trainer for not discussing his decision with her before he acted upon it, although Rue agreed that he was perfectly right to prevent the death of the camellia bushes, dark-eyed junco or no.

The parking lot was ablaze with gossip by next morning, with the moms of fifth graders retailing this story to anyone who would listen.

C
handler Kip had not been anyone’s first or even second choice for president of the Board of The Country School. He was fairly new to this Board and had no other experience with nonprofits.

He had no talent for building consensus; his management style was to give orders and expect them to be taken. As with many self-made people, appearances were very important to him, and he didn’t have much tolerance for deviation from what he considered normal.

Rue had had an unfortunate confrontation with Chandler the first month he was on the Board. Her assistant head had been hired away by a school in New York, and Rue wanted to hire Mike Dianda.

Since hiring the staff was in her job description, she foresaw no problem. But she mentioned her choice to the Board as a courtesy, and Chandler made a great fuss. It was bad policy to promote a member of the faculty to management, he claimed. Rue gave several good reasons why it was not. Mr. Dianda was weak, Chandler then claimed. Discipline would be his province, and Mike Dianda couldn’t

“play in the traffic.” Rue, baffled, insisted that the opposite was true.

His judgment was sound, he kept a cool head when all around him were losing theirs, and he had excellent rapport with both faculty and parents. The objections went on without making definitive sense until Ann Rosen said, “Chandler…are you trying to tell us Rue shouldn’t promote Mike because he sleeps with kangaroos? Because we know that, and we don’t care.”

Chandler had turned crimson, and there had been laughter. Because Ann Rosen read him absolutely right, he dropped the discussion. Because Ann Rosen was his social equal, he couldn’t hold such a grudge against her as he felt entitled to. But Rue was his employee, an overweight, self-important schoolteacher, and because of her, he had been humiliated. Rue, who did not feel herself to be less than Chandler’s equal, did not notice that she had made an enemy.

Nobody thought that Chandler would be a perfect Board pres-42 / Beth Gutcheon

ident. But it was a time-consuming job, and usually thankless, and for the last year and a half, Chandler had made it clear that he actively wanted it. The other more likely candidates actively didn’t.

When at a faculty retreat (which Chandler had been too busy to attend) the Board vice president began to weep during a role-playing exercise and announced that he had at that moment decided to retire from public life and devote himself full-time to undergoing Jungian therapy, the nominating committee was left with no other candidates.

They decided the school had weathered worse things; it would weather Chandler.

“It’s only for two years,” Rue had said to Henry. “How bad can it be?”

Rue had a full agenda when she arrived at the California Chuck-wagon for her first weekly lunch with Chandler Kip. The Chuckwag-on was a cafeteria with wagon wheels next door to Chandler’s office, where you stood in line to order Stew ’n Biscuits or Doc’s Rattlesnake Chili and then ate at formica tables and were done in twenty minutes.

That was all right with Rue; whenever she was off campus for more than an hour, something seemed to blow up or catch fire.

Rue explained about the problem with the Shaftoes, and Chandler nodded. She reported that Emily Goldsborough wasn’t working out and they were seeking a replacement. Chandler concurred. Chandler reported that he had had an angry call from a mother of a second grader who claimed her daughter was being abused by her teacher.

“By Janet TerWilliams? I can’t believe it. Who was this?”

“Helen Blainey.”

“Ah,” said Rue.

“She said her daughter was made to sit in a corner for half an hour. The child had been humiliated.”

“Did she tell you what her daughter did to deserve it?”

“Her point was that the child is seven…what
could
she have done?”

“She announced in a loud voice that there are too many fucking Jews in this school,” said Rue.

“Oh.” Chandler noticed that two people at the next table Saying Grace / 43

turned to stare at them. He tried to look as if he and Rue had sat down together by accident.

“If she does it again, I’m going to expel her,” Rue added. “I hope I’ll have your support.”

Chandler broke off a piece of sourdough bread, rolled it into a pill, and ate it. “That seems hard on a seven-year-old.”

“It’s the mother I’m expelling. I discussed this with Mrs. Blainey the day it happened. You can see what kind of support I got.”