Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

“What do you do,” I asked her despairingly as we stood monitoring the dusty playground during recess, “about going to the bathroom? I mean, one starts and then they all want to go. I know they all don’t have to go, but they say they do. And if I don’t let anybody go, there’s liable to be an accident. And they’re all taking advantage of me. I know they are.”

Miss Fremen’s wrinkles gathered into a smile for me. The faintly suspicious smile, the not altogether committal smile teachers cultivate.

“The very first day of class I tell them,” she said, drawing herself up to a state of forthright dignity to illustrate how she told them, “little people, I can tell when you really have to go to the bathroom and when you don’t. So I warn you, I just warn you not to ask to be excused unless it’s urgent.” Miss Fremen stood there frozen for a moment, clad in what had every appearance of an armored corset under her thin summer voile, her face square and omniscient, her hair kinky, spatulate, and slightly burned from a recent permanent.

“How marvelous!” I sighed. “But Miss Fremen, I wouldn’t dare try it. I’ve got a weak face.” I didn’t say it, but I thought that the corset had a lot to do with it, too. And if I tried to wear a corset I’d have to hold it on with scotch tape.

“Oh, now it’s not weak,” Miss Fremen said sympathetically, the words scratching grandly over the ancient grate in her throat. You have to talk loud on the playground to be heard at all. “You just haven’t learned to frown right. When I was in Normal School we learned how to teach before we graduated. Nowadays they don’t teach you anything practical. It’s not your fault, Lillian,” she went on, grating more gently, “they closed up all the Normal Schools. But you’ll learn. Don’t worry.”

The bell rang, as it always does in the middle of conversations, and we went on up. Paralyzed with admiration, I watched her fourth grade marching silently into the room next to mine. The cadence was perfect. No face was sullen. No face rebellious. Miss Fremen’s wrinkles dropped into a wink for me, and she closed her door silently. My door creaked noisily as I herded in two thirteen-year-old stragglers, both a head taller than me. Then, practicing my Frown, I went about the room collecting the post-recess tribute of marbles, gum, rubber bands, paper clips and an occasional frog. Miss Fremen, I thought enviously, had probably not had a problem in fifteen years. No one would think of chewing gum or clinking marbles or shooting paper clips in her class.

But I was wrong about the problem. I noticed her going about with a worried frown after a few weeks. No one else noticed it, because a worried frown differs only in very subtle ways from a natural, authoritarian frown. But I had made a special study of Miss Fremen, particularly of her facial expressions, and I knew something was wrong.

“Lillian,” she told me one day when it was our turn to supervise the playground again. “I’ve been a teacher a long, long time.” She was breathing in the dust like the purest mountain air, and her eyes darted around, from plain habit, so that no corner escaped her. She frowned. “I don’t like that Sansoni boy talking to those third graders,” she said. She collared a passing pupil. “Go tell Billy Sansoni I said to play by the big boys.” She turned to me. “Billy’s going to be just like his daddy.” She shook her head fatalistically. Bad blood in the family.”

“What were you going to say before?” I asked. I was anxious to know what sort of problem could possibly beset a teacher like Miss Fremen. It had to be a school problem. Miss Fremen didn’t have any other life.

“Oh,” she said, the worried frown replacing the authoritarian frown, “a very funny thing. Peculiar. In all the years I’ve been teaching there’s never been anything like it. I really ought to tell Mr. Buras. But I don’t know. He’s a fine principal and a fine disciplinarian, even if he’s not allowed to spank any more. But he’s not a man to understand anything that’s, you know, peculiar.”

“Yes?” My curiosity was becoming more vulgar all the time, but I tried to keep it out of my voice.

“You remember that conversation we had back when the term opened? About how to keep the children from making a game out of asking to be excused?”

“I remember it vividly,” I answered.

“Well, there’s one little boy in my room. Jerome. He’s from one of those migratory families. Oil fields or fruit picking. I’m not sure which. This Jerome. I can tell when he has to go to the bathroom.”

“Well,” I said, feeling sort of let down, “that’s not very surprising. After all, when you’ve been around children for so long, little things like their facial expression and their tone of voice ...”

“Um!” Miss Fremen said emphatically. “No. You don’t understand. You see... Get off those bars, Emanuel. Those are for the swings. You’ll kill yourself and I’ll get blamed.” Emanuel slid down swiftly.

“I know it before he says anything,” Miss Fremen went on. “He’ll be just sitting there, bent over his workbook. One day I told him, ‘All right, Jerome, you may be excused.’ And then the children called it to my attention that he hadn’t asked to be excused.”

“But he went?”

“Oh, yes. He had to.”

“Maybe your imagination,” I said, coughing from the dusty air. “After all, they always welcome the chance to get out of the room.”

“I’ve been teaching twenty years,” Miss Fremen said indignantly. “I don’t have any imagination.

I didn’t know whether to grin or not, so I didn’t.

“And it isn’t only that You know, they changed the workbooks last year and there are a few things that have different answers now than they did when I was a girl, and several times Jerome has given my answers, and how would he know..

At that moment the bell rang and I didn’t think much more about it, being busy keeping my class in line and being annoyed with Jerry Dufossat, who was leering at me with gum in his mouth.

It was that afternoon we had the bomb scare. It is also one of the few times in my life I’ve been left absolutely alone with a decision, and done the unobvious thing, because it was such a terrible chance to take.

You know, teachers do a lot of things beside teach. And we have to worry about a lot of things besides whether Johnny can read.

One of the things we have to worry about is the children’s safety. And for that, one of the last things in the world we want to see is a strange man hanging around the school yard.

Well, I saw one, that lunch hour, but he just walked around the block and watched the children and didn’t try to talk to them or come into the school yard, so I just kept an eye on him. He was a slouched, dull-eyed man, and he looked so much like a degenerate character I decided he must be an actor practicing.

The second time he came around the block I went over and asked if he were the father of one of the children in the school yard.

“Yeah,” he said, pointing indeterminately, and slouched on.

He smelled like liquor. But sometimes it’s cough syrup and he did have a cough. A hack, now and then, like a comment on whatever dreary thoughts such a man must have.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought I’d better call him back and tell him to take his postprandial strolls somewhere else, because teachers have to be very nervy, but just then the bell rang—and you can’t imagine how many problems are solved, or never get solved, because bells ring.