Chapter Fifteen

It was the first week of the third grade.  The Tail was sitting in the front row, a few feet from his teacher, Mrs. Tyler.  He knew that he had to try very hard, because Mrs. Tyler was a very strict teacher.  She had a reputation for strictness, which he had been made aware of in the first and second grades.  There were many stories about her, handed down from older classmates, which served as examples of her reputed strictness.  These were tales that recalled punishments she had exacted, or rewards she had taken away.  He knew that these stories were probably exaggerated, but this did nothing to lessen his fear of her.  He had already spent two years watching her supervise the playground during lunch recess, and even if the stories weren’t true, there remained the fact that she was one scary old lady.

        In the week since he’d entered the third grade, he had grown a bit more accustomed to her.  Learning her classroom routine had helped.  Mrs. Tyler’s class was the first classroom on your left, after you climbed the staircase to the second floor.  It was a very long, very wide room that Mrs. Tyler probably regarded as her personal fiefdom.  There was no art on the walls, because Mrs. Tyler didn’t like art.  There were no toys or building blocks for the students to play with, because Mrs. Tyler didn’t like toys.  Students who wanted to play – and who were, moreover, allowed to play – were sent outside.  

Mrs. Tyler’s classroom was a place in which to hear Mrs. Tyler speak, to complete assignments, and to face punishment.  Her favorite punishment was sentences, exactingly copied from a textbook onto a piece of notebook paper, which was ripped to shreds upon completion.  More grievous offences were met with a rap across the knuckles with one of her rulers, standing by oneself in a corner, sweeping the floor during recess, or – feared above all else – a visit to the principal’s office.  Back then principals could still paddle students, and no one thought to complain about this practice.

        One of the students sitting just behind the Tail had been paddled that day.  The other boy’s face was still wet with tears and red with humiliation.  The rest of the students, those sitting behind the first row, stole glances in this boy’s direction.  There were twenty one pairs of eyes, all looking to that one boy and sympathizing with him.  There were five additional pairs of eyes – the entire first row – afraid to turn and look in his direction.  Dressed in similar T-shirts, dresses, and easily buttoned pants, there was a common sentiment among them, and that sentiment was trepidation.  The source of their trepidation was standing before the class, using a length of wood to indicate a place on one of the wall maps.

Mrs. Tyler was a curt, dried-up, taciturn sort of woman, and the boys and girls of her second grade glass had many reasons to fear her.  The punishments were bad enough, but she also had subtle ways of shaming students in front of their peers.  She had eyes in the back of her head, and the Tail never really knew when or from where he was being watched.  He tried not to let his fear impede his performance in class, but there were times when he stuttered, there were times when he faltered, and there were times when he failed to properly account for himself.

        The Remedy was also in Mrs. Tyler’s class, and he was a handsome boy, if any boy was ever handsome.  He was seated to the rear of the class, and he was probably drawing pictures in his books, or staring out the window.  He was good at sports, and the girls in their class couldn’t stop talking about him.  He wore sports jerseys, and was up on the latest arcade games.  He had seen the Seahawks in the Kingdome, and he had won a fight with a boy in the fourth grade.

The Tail wanted so much to be friends with this handsome boy, but the handsome boy had devious ways of ignoring him.  When he approached the handsome boy on the playground, the other boy would suddenly grow agitated.  When they passed one another in the hallway, the handsome boy always looked the other way.  Sometimes the handsome boy would just run off, and not bother to explain himself at all.

And the handsome boy, the Remedy, was just one boy among many in their class.  None of the boys in that class liked the Tail, none wanted to play with him, and all took to calling him names during recess and gym class.  Some of this was due to peer pressure, but some of this was also due a natural aversion they held for this studious, unkempt boy who sat in the front of the class.  He was fat, he wore strange clothes, he got good grades, and his social skills were poor in the best of times.  He was a natural object for their collective scorn.

        The Tail tried not to take it personally, but it hurt just the same.  Whenever he returned home, sad and defeated, his father told him stories to cheer him up.  But the stories weren’t always enough, even though he pretended that they were.  His mind often wandered of its own accord to other, less sunny places.

        The day before, he thought he had seen his mother with the other mothers as school let out, but it had just been his mind playing tricks.  That had been someone else’s mother.  His mother was dead.  His mother, his father said, had liked to drink too much.

        “Hello, are you listening?” Mrs. Tyler’s voice cut in, “Are you daydreaming again, young man?  I’m talking to you, and if you don’t answer me quick, there’s a visit to the principal’s office in store for you!”

        “I’m sorry Mrs. Tyler,” he squeaked, all at once ashamed, “What was the question, please?”

        She was standing in front of the class, in all of her skeletal, formally attired glory.  Her hair shot up at surprising angles, threatening to dismantle the structure of hairpins and clips carefully arranged there.

        “The question,” she said again, fuming, “Is what side the Italians fought on during the Second World War.”

        He knew this one.  He had read that chapter the night before.  “The Axis Powers,” he answered, “with Germany and Japan, but the Allies got to them before the other two.  The Allies took Italy before V-E Day.”

        “Excellent,” she said, appeased.  Then, to the handsome boy, “And you?  Young man?  In what year did V-E Day occur?”

        There was a long and painful silence from the back of the class, but he feared to turn around.  He tried to remain perfectly still, and to keep his eyes upon Mrs. Tyler.  He knew that this was the best way to avoid trouble.

        The handsome boy was sitting somewhere behind him, and it was obvious to all that he didn’t know the answer.

        “1954?” the handsome boy finally said.

        Mrs. Tyler smirked as a boy to the Tail’s right intently picked a nostril.  A girl to his left farted, almost silently.  There were colorful posters all over the walls, of historical moments, and family scenes, and math facts.  Mrs. Tyler had pulled the linoleum blinds down over the sweating, wood-framed windows.  It was dark.

        “Is that correct?” she turned back to the Tail, “Did V-E day happen in 1954?  After Truman had dropped the bombs on Japan?”

        He struggled, aware that his response would only serve to shame the other boy.  He wanted to help his classmate.  But he knew that he was trapped.  “No,” he said, “I don’t think so, Mrs. Tyler.”

        “So when was V-E Day?” she pursued.

        “In 1945,” he answered, “After the… after the Allies accepted the Germans’ unconditional surrender.”

        “Yes,” snapped Mrs. Tyler, turning to face the handsome boy, somewhere behind him, “And at any rate the War ended the same year, only a few months later.  If someone could do a better job in school he would know that.”

        So it went.  Mrs. Tyler lectured on, and he knew he had escaped her snares for the day.  The handsome boy, however, would have to wonder what tortures the old woman was devising for him, what inconveniences awaited.  Perhaps it would be sentences on the blackboard.  Perhaps it would be extra homework.  Perhaps an even greater ignominy, announced before the gaping mouths of the assembled class.  The handsome boy wouldn’t know until the bell rang.  That was the hour Mrs. Tyler reserved for her little revenges.  That was the hour she waited for, each day.  And Mrs. Tyler was not one to forget.

        She droned on in her usual monotone, her plaid skirt and antique white blouse swishing through the room as she paced before the class.  Her glasses slipped, and she adjusted them.  Her throat caught, and she coughed.  Never had he feared anyone as he feared her, and this was one of the relatively good days.  Some of the other boys said it was whiskey in her thermos.  Some of the girls said she was wanted for murdering her husband in another state.  The first tale was plausible, the second almost so.  It was easy to imagine Mrs. Tyler murdering someone, especially after lunch and a thermos spiked with Jim Beam.

       The bell declared the beginning of recess, and Mrs. Tyler stopped short.  The students were told to go and play, but to walk in the halls, and no fighting.  He rose slowly from his desk, knowing that none of the other students would want to play with him.

If anyone did it was by some mistake, by an odd number of kids on a team, or through an act of pity.  There was another, effeminate boy in another class that talked to him sometimes, but this other boy was much older than he was, and capricious by nature.  The handsome boy had called the both of them fags on the playground several times, and the handsome boy had not been punished for it.

        The children filed dutifully toward the door, most of them relieved to be away from Mrs. Tyler.  She didn’t have recess duty that day, and that meant she would remain in class, angrily correcting their papers.

        He followed the Armenian girl with the unpronounceable name out the door, and as he looked back he saw the handsome boy still sitting at his desk in the back of the class.  Mrs. Tyler held him there with her gaze alone, her eyes burning into him from her desk near the blackboard.

        A word popped into his head as he watched the Remedy: Nuremburg.  The Nazis had faced trial at Nuremburg.  It seemed to him that no tribunal at Nuremburg had ever been as frightening as Mrs. Tyler.  Mrs. Tyler would have had the Nazis writing sentence after sentence on the blackboard, only to erase them later.  Or else she would have given them a piece of notebook paper, and a pencil that was too small for her purposes.  Either way, they probably would have preferred the rope, or the firing squad, or however it was that the tribunal handed out death.

        Two atomic bombs ended the Second World War, with more finality than the first.  This he had learned the night before.  Did all those Japanese people have to die?  And what was it like to be cooked in a fire so hot that it approached the heat of the sun?  So hot that it burned you before you knew you were burning?  Was such a thing right?  Were words like “wrong” or “right” useless in the context of two countries going to war?

        It seemed to him that the pendulum of morality was always swinging, and that one never really knew where one stood in relation to it.  The handsome boy had called him a fag on the playground.  But the handsome boy had so many friends, all just as willing to call him a fag, and all equally unwilling to play with him.  And yet there the handsome boy was, staying inside for another recess.  There he was, shamed before all.  A pendulum swinging between wrong and right, loneliness and shame, even life and death.  Maybe his father had a story for this feeling, too.