Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“Fine,” Miss Ferenczi said. “Well, now. That was very good.”

“Miss Ferenczi!” One of the Eddy twins was waving her hand desperately in the air. “Miss Ferenczi! Miss Ferenczi!”

“Yes?”

“John said that six times eleven is sixty-eight and you said he was right!”

“ Did I?” She gazed at the class with a jolly look breaking across her marionette’s face. “Did I say that? Well, what is six times eleven?”

“It’s sixty-six!”

She nodded. “Yes. So it is. But, and I know some people will not entirely agree with me, at some times it is sixty-eight.”

“When? When is it sixty-eight?”

We were all waiting.

“In higher mathematics, which you children do not yet understand, six times eleven can be considered to be sixty-eight.” She laughed through her nose. “In higher mathematics numbers are … more fluid. The only thing a number does is contain a certain amount of something. Think of water. A cup is not the only way to measure a certain amount of water, is it?” We were staring, shaking our heads. “You could use saucepans or thimbles. In either case, the water would be the same . Perhaps,” she started again, “it would be better for you to think that six times eleven is sixty-eight only when I am in the room.”

“Why is it sixty-eight,” Mark Poole asked, “when you’re in the room?”

“Because it’s more interesting that way,” she said, smiling very rapidly behind her blue-tinted glasses. “Besides, I’m your substitute teacher, am I not?” We all nodded. “Well, then, think of six times eleven equals sixty-eight as a substitute fact.”

“A substitute fact?”

“Yes.” Then she looked at us carefully. “Do you think,” she asked, “that anyone is going to be hurt by a substitute fact?”

We looked back at her.

“Will the plants on the windowsill be hurt?” We glanced at them. There were sensitive plants thriving in a green plastic tray, and several wilted ferns in small clay pots. “Your dogs and cats, or your moms and dads?” She waited. “So,” she concluded, “what’s the problem?”

“But it’s wrong,” Janice Weber said, “isn’t it?”

“What’s your name, young lady?”

“Janice Weber.”

“And you think it’s wrong, Janice?”

“I was just asking.”

“Well, all right. You were just asking. I think we’ve spent enough time on this matter by now, don’t you, class? You are free to think what you like. When your teacher, Mr. Hibler, returns, six times eleven will be sixty-six again, you can rest assured. And it will be that for the rest of your lives in Five Oaks. Too bad, eh?” She raised her eyebrows and glinted herself at us. “But for now, it wasn’t. So much for that. Let us go on to your assigned problems for today, as painstakingly outlined, I see, in Mr. Hibler’s lesson plan. Take out a sheet of paper and write your names on the upper left-hand corner.”

For the next half hour we did the rest of our arithmetic problems. We handed them in and then went on to spelling, my worst subject. Spelling always came before lunch. We were taking spelling dictation and looking at the clock. “Thorough,” Miss Ferenczi said. “Boundary.” She walked in the aisles between the desks, holding the spelling book open and looking down at our papers. “Balcony.” I clutched my pencil. Somehow, the way she said those words, they seemed foreign, mis-voweled and mis-consonanted. I stared down at what I had spelled. Balconie . I turned the pencil upside down and erased my mistake. Balconey . That looked better, but still incorrect. I cursed the world of spelling and tried erasing it again and saw the paper beginning to wear away. Balkony . Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t like that word, either,” Miss Ferenczi whispered, bent over, her mouth near my ear. “It’s ugly. My feeling is, if you don’t like a word, you don’t have to use it.” She straightened up, leaving behind a slight odor of Clorets.

At lunchtime we went out to get our trays of sloppy joes, peaches in heavy syrup, coconut cookies, and milk, and brought them back to the classroom, where Miss Ferenczi was sitting at the desk, eating a brown sticky thing she had unwrapped from tightly rubber-banded waxed paper. “Miss Ferenczi,” I said, raising my hand, “you don’t have to eat with us. You can eat with the other teachers. There’s a teachers’ lounge,” I ended up, “next to the principal’s office.”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I prefer it here.”

“We’ve got a room monitor,” I said. “Mrs. Eddy.” I pointed to where Mrs. Eddy, Joyce and Judy’s mother, sat silently at the back of the room, doing her knitting.

“That’s fine,” Miss Ferenczi said. “But I shall continue to eat here, with you children. I prefer it,” she repeated.

“How come?” Wayne Razmer asked without raising his hand.

“I talked to the other teachers before class this morning,” Miss Ferenczi said, biting into her brown food. “There was a great rattling of the words for the fewness of the ideas. I didn’t care for their brand of hilarity. I don’t like ditto-machine jokes.”

“Oh,” Wayne said.

“What’s that you’re eating?” Maxine Sylvester asked, twitching her nose. “Is it food?”

“It most certainly is food. It’s a stuffed fig. I had to drive almost down to Detroit to get it. I also brought some smoked sturgeon. And this,” she said, lifting some green leaves out of her lunchbox, “is raw spinach, cleaned this morning.”

“Why’re you eating raw spinach?” Maxine asked.

“It’s good for you,” Miss Ferenczi said. “More stimulating than soda pop or smelling salts.” I bit into my sloppy joe and stared blankly out the window. An almost invisible moon was faintly silvered in the daytime autumn sky. “As far as food is concerned,” Miss Ferenczi was saying, “you have to shuffle the pack. Mix it up. Too many people eat … well, never mind.”

“Miss Ferenczi,” Carol Peterson said, “what are we going to do this afternoon?”

“Well,” she said, looking down at Mr. Hibler’s lesson plan, “I see that your teacher, Mr. Hibler, has you scheduled for a unit on the Egyptians.” Carol groaned. “Yessss,” Miss Ferenczi continued, “that is what we will do: the Egyptians. A remarkable people. Almost as remarkable as the Americans. But not quite.” She lowered her head, did her quick smile, and went back to eating her spinach.

After noon recess we came back into the classroom and saw that Miss Ferenczi had drawn a pyramid on the blackboard close to her oak tree. Some of us who had been playing baseball were messing around in the back of the room, dropping the bats and gloves into the playground box, and Ray Schontzeler had just slugged me when I heard Miss Ferenczi’s high-pitched voice, quavering with emotion. “Boys,” she said, “come to order right this minute and take your seats. I do not wish to waste a minute of class time. Take out your geography books.” We trudged to our desks and, still sweating, pulled out Distant Lands and Their People . “Turn to page forty-two.” She waited for thirty seconds, then looked over at Kelly Munger. “Young man,” she said, “why are you still fossicking in your desk?”

Kelly looked as if his foot had been stepped on. “Why am I what?”

“Why are you … burrowing in your desk like that?”

“I’m lookin’ for the book, Miss Ferenczi.”

Bobby Kryzanowicz, the faultless brownnoser who sat in the first row by choice, softly said, “His name is Kelly Munger. He can’t ever find his stuff. He always does that.”

“I don’t care what his name is, especially after lunch,” Miss Ferenczi said. “ Where is your book? ”