Sputterpub's Blog

There was quite a brouhaha about that swastika. It was 1960 then, not that long after the war to end all wars. Eve’s parents came to school and impressed everyone with their directness and civility. That made Rita pay a little more attention to Eve.

“She really is bright,” Rita reported to Joan. “She’s been having these headaches and they make her obnoxious. But I had her vision tested yesterday, and she’s getting glasses now. The headaches should go away. I don’t know, Joanie,” Rita conjectured, “but I think that girl will grow into a fine person. Interesting, anyway. Unlike the others.”

“The others in class?”

“No, just the other three. Isolating them has worked for the rest of the class. But Betty Sue and Kurt and Pete? I tell you: I look at their faces and I can imagine them roughening into adulthood and then sagging into age. I can do that. And I can imagine someone analyzing their childhoods at the ends of their lives, turn it around and look from here at the adults they’ll likely be…

“Betty Sue won’t get far from where she is now. Kurt will probably go into sales and be some kind of corrupt, and I imagine Pete will lead your standard life of quiet desperation.”

Rita didn’t manage to forecast the fights.

There were no incidents of note between the swastika graffiti and early spring. Then Betty Sue had occasion to “call out’ first Kurt and then Eve.

Heard on the playground: “Betty Sue’s a re-tard” and “I’m rubber – you’re glue – whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you” and “Make me” and “I don’t make babies; I hurt ‘em.”

Reported to Rita by some of her good students: Betty Sue called Kurt out. They met (with their seconds: Patty for her and Pete for him) in the field between school and the community center. Betty Sue provoked Kurt into throwing the first punch but she won. Smaller than Kurt, she was more athletic than he, and she was angrier.

Reported later, by Eve-with-her-parents: Betty Sue called Eve out and Eve tried to ignore her. She didn’t react to the taunting words during school hours, and she started for home with her neighbor Cindy right after the last bell. Betty Sue and Patty caught up with them in the middle of the fighting field. The taunting began again. Eve tried to keep walking. Betty Sue got in her way and snarled in her face. Cindy just stood there. Other kids arrived and formed a loose sympathetic circle, but no one intervened. Betty Sue continued to provoke, with Patty providing unnecessary encouragement. Still Eve wouldn’t fight. Finally Betty Sue exorcized her hostility by defacing Eve’s white cotton blouse. With a number two pencil, she wrote every bad word or phrase she knew on the blouse yoke and back. Eve endured the inscription in silence. She tried to be dignified. She wondered why no one helped her. When she got home and her mother hugged her out of her wrecked blouse, they both saw that the pressure of the pencil had made small lacerations on her shoulders and upper back.

Betty Sue got suspended for three days. She had to apologize to Eve. Eve got shamed by the fight. She had to work her way through that. Rita got to reckon with the fact that she needed to change jobs. She wasn’t doing these kids any good as a teacher any more.

She made some thoughtful forecasts to Joanie at the end of that year. They had already decided that between Rita’s savings and Joan’s earnings she could afford to go back to school in psychology. So what if she was sixty-three: she came from longevity…

She predicted that Kurt would have an okay life. She figured he’d always have an asshole childhood but he’d likely end up a hospitable, semi-educated man. She predicted a boring future for Pete; he didn’t have the oomph needed to even begin to live up to potential. She knew Eve would grow into her brilliance and be a formidable successful personality. She assumed Betty Sue would continue her family legacy of poverty and sloth. She expected she herself would be a satisfied therapist; that’s why she made the big change.

As it turned out, she was wrong about herself and Betty Sue. Rita made it through the program and got the license, but she found her new career disappointing. It was even more repetitious than teaching, and promoted more pessimism.

Betty Sue blew everyone away by making it to and through college (sociology) on a financial-need scholarship, and then through law school on a scholastic one. She was a litigator for a mere six years before starting on what has been a meteoric political career.

Even Kurt ‘n Pete vote for her.

Rita was terribly tired by the end of that first day. Kurt had already balked at everything she assigned, arguing with her or rocking but not doing, while Pete slouched in his seat and watched. Betty Sue’s presence hadn’t inhibited them, and she in turn seemed to be picking some sort of feud with Eve Hoffman, the dark quiet girl who sat in front of her.

“I’m not sure I”m going to make it this year…” Rita said as she entered her house. She expected to find Joan in the living room but the couch was unoccupied. “Joanie? Where are you?”

“I’ll be out in a minute.” Rita heard water running in the bathroom sink.

“You’re not at it again, are you?” Silence. “Joanie; don’t. If you keep shaving your arms the hair will just grow back thicker.”

Joan Selman and Rita McDaniels had known each other for twenty years, taught in the same school for fifteen, lived together for ten. Rita was a decade older, but at their ages that made no difference. They knew each other well. Joan knew that Rita would never stop advising her, and Rita knew that Joan would rarely heed the advice.

“At this point,” Joan said as she walked into the living room while rubbing lotion into her forearms, “the damage has been done. I’ve been shaving for thirty years; if it really does make thicker stubble I guess I’m already enjoying the effect. Want wine?”

“Sure…” Rita expelled the word with a tired sigh as she sat heavily into the couch. “And how was your day?” Joan taught fifth grade, a gentler year than sixth. She previewed many of Rita’s students for her each term.

Joan carried two glasses of red wine to the couch. “Not bad, actually. I may just have a good class this time. So far all sweethearts. Not like last year.” She sipped her wine, set her glass on the big coffee table, and relaxed against the high back of their antique sofa. Rita noticed tiny red bumps of inflammation on Joan’s pale arms.

“Apparently it’s my turn this year. I got Kurt ‘n Pete.”

“No!” Joan sat up strongly. “We have three sixth grade classes. Those two have got to be separated. I complained over and over to Skiles last year…”

“Well the Miller and Lefkowicz families must have complained louder.” Rita’s eyes met Joan’s in agreement about their opinion of Vice Principal Lorna Skiles. “I talked to her at lunch. The two families believe their underachievers will do best together.”

“I’m sorry, Rita.”

“It’s okay. I’ll get through it. I always have, haven’t I?” She smiled for a moment. “Anyway, I’ve also got Betty Sue Stuben, and I put her between the boys. That should make for something.”

It did. As the days shortened through September and October, Kurt rocked and mocked, Pete slouched and smirked, and Betty Sue got irked and harder. Eve began to speak up in class, which surprised Rita. She knew the girl was bright; the school had just skipped her from fourth grade to sixth, and Rita couldn’t remember that happening before. That skip also meant Joan had no advance knowledge about Eve, who appeared shy at first, so Rita was amazed to watch the child blossom and humiliate herself. Eve appeared to be an unbridled egotist, smart and talking smarter, blowing hard about being one of the “chosen people” in a school with few Jews, irritating everyone but mostly those nearest her seat. Hostilities grew between Eve and Betty Sue, Eve and Kurt ‘n Pete, Betty Sue and Kurt ‘n Pete, the four of them and the rest of the class.

For Halloween Betty Sue climbed onto her roof and managed to egg Kurt ‘n Pete. The boys in turn sniped with Kurt’s BB gun from his bedroom window; Pete aimed and hit Eve in the upper thigh but she was far enough away that it didn’t do more than sting. Just before Chanukah a swastika was painted on Eve’s driveway. That really upset her parents, and the perpetrator was never found, but Eve always knew it wasn’t true anti-Semitism and it was Kurt ‘n Pete.

Kurt Miller and Peter Lefkowicz were two among thirty in their sixth grade classroom. They were the bad apples in Miss McDaniels’s thirty-sixth year of elementary school teaching; frankly, she didn’t have the patience any more.

Kurt was kind of ugly and naturally insolent. He wore a habitual smirk, he spoke out (loudly) without ever raising his hand, and when he wasn’t speaking he rocked in his desk chair, pushing forward and snapping back in the small space. Autistic children rock like that, and Rita McDaniels knew it, but Kurt wasn’t autistic. He was too mean to be autistic.

Kurt was fat, freckled, and clumsy. His brown hair was chopped off in a careless home style. He bit his nails.

Pete was rather good looking. Dark-haired and fair-skinned with fine features. His eyebrows would bush out and meet over his nose by the time he was in high school, his features would sharpen, his posture would bend and his hair would grow coarse, but in sixth grade he was handsome. He had a facial expression that looked cutely confused then, but it would mature into a look which was usually sardonic and sometimes mean.

They were only two out of thirty, but Rita McDaniels knew that they’d require attention out of all proportion. They were brighter than average, neither working to potential of course, so there they sat, rocked, laughed, and siphoned far too much of her away from twenty-eight others.

“I’m too old for this,” she thought that first day of the school year. “No,” she amended as she set her bag on the teacher desk, “it’s not that I’m too old; it’s just that I’ve done this for too long.”

She was sixty-two then, and more of an observing psychologist than a teacher. She could run through the sixth-grade curriculum on automatic. Her teaching for the last decade or so had not been inspirational to her students or herself; what popularity she still had came from her reputation. The parents of some of her current students had been in her classes twenty-five years ago; they remembered the dictionary quizzes and current events contests that Rita no longer had the energy to run.

She didn’t get satisfaction out of teaching any more, but she enjoyed forecasting. A long time ago Rita noticed that when she looked at the childhood photograph of an adult she knew, she could see the face of the adult in that child. She figured that she ought to be able to see the face of the adults in the children before her, and she often played a predictive game. The students found Miss McDaniels’s way of sometimes looking at them unnerving; rumors grew about her stare the way they grew about Miss Selman’s stubbly forearms.

She didn’t do much predicting on that first day of school. Rita was preoccupied instead with the seating plan. If she separated Kurt and Pete it seemed to her that she’d have problems in two areas of the room. She decided to concentrate the issue and she seated the boys close but not next to each other. She put Betty Sue in between.

Betty Sue Stuben was… well, trailer trash would have been Rita’s father’s phrase for her and her family. They didn’t actually occupy a trailer – there was no court or mobile home park in the area anyway – but the large family was crowded into a three-bedroom box house on the flat land near the freeway. Betty Sue was the third of eight children; her two older brothers as well as her alcoholic father came and went in that household so that they were sometimes an unsupported seven and at other times an in-fighting ten.

Rita didn’t think Betty Sue was stupid, but she could tell the girl wasn’t bright either. She had stringy mousy brown hair, nondescript features in a pasty face, a firm average-size twelve-year-old body. Most of the other sixth graders started the year at age eleven, but Betty Sue hadn’t been sent to kindergarten and had only been enrolled in first grade when she was seven and a representative from the school district came calling. No; Betty Sue wasn’t bright, but she was feisty and wouldn’t tolerate Kurt’s and Pete’s habitual hostility.