Elizabeth Massie: Wire Mesh Mothers

Miriam grinned, a pseudo-sympathetic and knowing grin. Kate sat straight to belie her panic, crossed her legs and drew her short auburn hair up behind her ears. On the center of the table were piles of educational magazines. She picked up one, Elementary Education Today , and let it fall open to where it would, which was a blow-in ad for sets of no-fail, individually-paced cards for reluctant readers called “Ready-To-Read.”

She stared at the happy multi-cultural cartoon students, boys and girls, making a rainbow border around the card, assuring any interested teacher that yes, Asians and Caucasians and Afro-Americans and Hispanic children alike will find this program so inspirational that it makes them want to hold hands in a circle and smile.

“How are you going to get them to read your cards when the biggest thrill in their lives is a puddle of urine on the floor?” she whispered. She shoved the magazine away.

No , she thought. I refuse to sit there with the parents and try to be professional while they cuss me out, demand my head on a platter, and tell me they pay my salary. Well, I don’t need the damn salary. And I won’t lower myself to fight their battle in court to redeem myself. I know how that works. It doesn’t work, that’s how it works.

Her lungs ached. Tears tickled the backs of her eyes, and angrily she dug them away. She wouldn’t lose tears over this.

I won’t go through with it. I will not do this.

Outside the window was the parking lot. Teachers’ cars, a bus on the far side, getting gas at the single pump near the dumpster, an UPS truck by the mailbox, waiting to pull back on the road. Stray bits of white cotton fiber, blown here from the vast, harvested fields near the school, clung to the base of the hedges like lost baby ghosts.

Take it in, Kate. As Romeo said, “Eyes, look your last.” They are going to fire you. It doesn’t matter who you are, they are going to bring you down like wolves after a deer. Kiss this place good-bye. So typical, Kate. What have you accomplished lately? Yes, please, do tell .

“Cut it out, Kate,” she said, catching her chin in her hand and squeezing it just enough to make it sting. “Stop it, I can fix this. There is nothing that cannot be fixed. I’m college-educated, master’s degree, for Christ’s sake. Willie’s father didn’t finish grade school. I just have to think it through. They cannot have the best of me.” She got up, plugged a couple coins into the Pepsi machine then returned to her chair with can in hand. She popped the top and took a drink.

“I tripped and bumped into Willie. I may have looked like I pushed him, but I bumped him.”

Yeah, sure. And that second grader Mistie Henderson isn’t being abused in spite of her bruises and behavior and Mr. Byron isn’t sneaking down to the nature trail after school with our sweet school secretary Miriam and Susan Jansen, our music teacher, didn’t have a nose job over the summer.

“This is ridiculous,” she whispered.

Her face fell into flat palms.

“Lord, girl, what went on in your class today?”

One palm slid away enough to reveal Deidra Kirtley, second grade teacher, standing by the table with her arm around a set of dog-eared science workbooks. Deidra was the closest thing Kate had to a friend at school. She was an attractive, chunky lady of fifty-something, dark-skinned and quick-witted. She was loud, abrupt, and confident. And she didn’t seem to care that Kate was a McDolen.

A number of the Pippins Elementary teachers silently and sometimes not so silently resented Kate because she didn’t have to teach, she did it because she had wanted something to do when her son had gone off to a private school in Pennsylvania. Kate had come in three years ago at the age of thirty-eight, with a brand new master’s and all sorts of shiny and bright teaching concepts. And they had rolled their eyes. Oh, all over the school did the eyes roll.

Kate had tried to ignore it, to laugh it off. She could sometimes even see herself from their vantage points — a thin, plain-faced woman who dressed just a bit more formally than they, who didn’t have their disillusionment but didn’t have their experience, either. Most of the teachers in Pippins were natives of the area. They’d attended Franklin State College thirty miles to the east, and had returned like salmon to their place of birth to marry, reproduce, grow old, and educate subsequent generations. They knew the territory, knew the ropes, knew the populace and its intricate weavings of love and war. They knew why a child from the Via family shouldn’t be seated next to a child from the Spradlin family. They knew not to sing happy birthday to any of the McCaffrey kids because they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and not to ask much about the absences of certain fathers at parent conferences because they were in prison over in Mecklenburg. They knew which mothers baked the best cakes and cookies for the Spring Fling, and knew which mothers not to ask because their offerings were often embedded with dog hairs or mealy bugs.

Kate did not know these things instinctively. She tried to absorb what she could, she listened in on teachers’ lounge banter, she tried her own brand of humor out on her fellows when the chance arose, but found herself always at the periphery, always not quite in the inner educational circle, never invited to the small gatherings on Fridays at one of the restaurants in Emporia, gatherings which were heralded by little computer printed announcements and stuck into certain mailboxes on Thursday afternoon, gathering which were referred to as “BMW Meetings.” Bitch, moan, and whine. The sounded like fun. There wasn’t much going on at the McDolen home recently, what with Donnie gone off the school and Donald finding myriad reasons not to spend much time at home.

Most often, however, Kate didn’t have the time to ponder her lack of complete acceptance at Pippins Elementary. She was too tangled up with the day-to-day of teaching. Mothering had been hard; teaching was no easier. She tried to follow student I.E.P.’s to the letter. She tried to focus on the weekly fourth grade team meetings in which the team leader, Patty Ryder, constantly wasted time by telling boring stories about her on-the-side career of raising purebred miniature poodles. She spent untold hours hunting down science equipment which never was in the storeroom and grading homework papers which were more often than not a waste of pencil lead.

But other times, being on the outskirts hurt. Other times, it just seemed like the latest on the failure hit parade that was Kate’s recent life.

Deidra, however, would talk to anybody.

“You’ve heard, every agonizing detail,” said Kate.

“I’ve heard all right. I just thought your take on it might be…interesting.”

“It was an accident. I tripped on my heels. The caught in the carpet.”

“You don’t have carpet.”

“I tripped on a crack in the tile floor.”

“Yep. Tripped with your fist balled up and swinging. I can see that right now.”

Kate felt her toes begin to dance inside her shoes. “Don’t you have students somewhere?”

“They’re in music. Got another twenty minutes.”

“I really don’t care to talk about it.”

Deidra sat next to Kate. She placed her elbows on the table and put her folded hands beneath her chin. “It’s not like you’ll be fired or anything.”

“No?” said Kate. “This could become a mother of a legal battle. Did you teach Willie Harrold?”

Deidra nodded. “I did at that.”

“He peed on the floor,” Kate said. “Peed, Deidra. Stood there and just let it go.”

“Pee washes up, you know.”

Kate groaned.

“Okay, so he peed?”