Wire Mesh Mothers (4 page)

Willie grinned. "I didn't do
nothin
’. Why you always picking on me?"

Jenny scrunched her eyebrows. Another girl giggled then put her hand over her mouth. Christopher popped his lips and bounced the heel of his shoe off the floor, enthralled with the diversion. The showdown rarely varied from its usual choreography. It was an old movie known well by the students. The ending never changed. Willie did whatever he pleased. Ms. McDolen kept her cool and sent Willie to the office after a heated argument. Show over. Willie one. Ms. McDolen zip.

Hopeless. Impotent
.

Kate took ten slow breaths. A routine that was supposed to work
. Take a few moments, breathe slowly, and you can put things into perspective. Things need to be in perspective.
Teachers were patient, understanding. Teachers always knew how to maintain control, regardless of the circumstances. Teachers were good with perspectives. It's what they were paid for; it's what they were trained for. God bless teachers.
  

God bless us, every one.

Willie looked at Christopher and grinned.

"Go to the office, Willie," said Kate. The veins in the backs of her hands tingled the way they did when she took three cold tablets instead of two.
I hate this. This is wrong. It’s always wrong
.

Willie licked his finger off then wiped it on his jeans leg. "Can't make me," he said. "My daddy said you couldn't make me leave 'cause it's against my rights. I gotta get my education.”

"Go to the office now."
 

"You can't make me."

What is wrong with me? Why can’t I ever get this right? He’s a child, for heaven’s sake, a little delinquent, but I’m the adult here.

"'
Gainst
my rights.
 
You can't boss me, you can't touch me, neither."

This is insane.

“Can’t touch me! Can’t touch me!”
 

I can't do this anymore. I’ve tried, God, for three years I’ve tried and I just can’t do it anymore
.
 

Kate McDolen, trained professional, patient teacher, leader and guide to young minds, felt the snap in her neck. Felt the electric clotting behind her eyes, static and immense. The chalk dropped from her fingers and bounced, once, on the floor by her Easy Spirit pumps.
 

Willie sniffed, a harsh, challenging sound.

When she spoke this time, her heartbeat was in her mouth. Her tongue tasted of metal. "Willie. Go. Now."

Here’s your last chance, Willie. Here it is. Take it.

Please, just this once, Willie.

Willie, grinning, "I'm sick of you trying to tell me what to do. Call my daddy and see what he says."

"Go."

"Ain't going." The smile given to Christopher, the nasal snicker.

You little shit, just go!

“Ain’t going ain’t going ain’t going ain’t going!” A shrug.

Maybe it was the shrug more than it was the pee.

But in that second Kate was rushing from her desk in a whirl of sweater and skirt and chalky fingers and she was slamming her fist against little Willie
Harrold's
grinning face and sending that little grinning face with the body to which it was attached to the floor like a roped calf in a rodeo. The boy fell on his butt, crumpled onto his back, and slid several feet, thumping into a couple of the nearby desks on his way. When he gasped and looked up, there was a streak of blood on his face.

A slight alteration in the usual Willie-Kate dance. Just a minor change of routine.

"Whoa!" shouted Christopher.

"Mrs. McDolen!" screamed Marion
Kiddel
.

Kate stared at the boy on the floor. She was panting as if she’d just run a mile. The teacher in her said she should offer him her hand and help him up and then proceed to figure out how the hell to remedy this situation. To apologize, to do some quick double-talk to gloss over the situation. But she couldn't.
 

Not this time.
 

Her heart drove against her ribs like the gloves of a prizefighter hammering home his final blows.

Kate turned on her heel, walked back to her desk and said, "Marion, go to the office and tell Mr. Byron that I need him immediately." Her voice was steeled and far away in her ear.

And as she returned to the chalkboard and picked up a nice, new stick of chalk, to continue her lesson on adjectives, the only one she could think of was "fucked."

“W
hat is that you’re wearing?” asked Mistie’s teacher.

Mistie looked down at herself. She had on her coat. She had on her pretty nightie. Princess
Silverlace
had a pink gown like this.

The other children at the math table stopped playing with the colorful little base ten logs and stared at her. They never talked much to Mistie except to tell her when to get in line or when to get away from them.

“Mistie?” repeated the teacher. “Let me see.”

Mistie stood still while the teacher pulled back the coat and looked at the nightie. “My goodness, just what is that?”

Mistie put her finger in her ear.

“Mistie, what are you wearing?”

Mistie thought of Princess
Silverlace
on Nick. Princess
Silverlace
was beautiful like Tessa except she was older and taller and she had a crown that glittered gold and silver. She wore a long, pink, and sparkly gown. She had a throne in a castle and everybody loved her. People gave her presents because they loved her and she did good things for the people because she loved them. Mistie watched it when her Daddy wasn’t around. When he was around he would say, “What’s that shit? I didn’t work out gettin’ cable to waste it on this crap,” and turn the channel.

“Is that your night gown?” asked the teacher.

Mistie rubbed the acetate and it felt good.

“Mistie, I’m writing a note. I want you to take it to the office and give it to the secretary. Do you understand me?”

Mistie nodded. She knew where the office was. It was a bright place with grownups. It had a bench and it had potted plants.

The teacher scribbled something on paper at her desk. She put the note into Mistie’s hand. Mistie didn’t read it. She wasn’t good at reading.

“That’s all, Mistie. Go on.”

Mistie went on.

T
he teachers' lounge was empty. Most of the teachers regularly ate in the cafeteria with their students, even though they were allowed a duty-free day once a week. Today was no different. It was 12:24 p.m. The fourth and fifth grades were at lunch working their way through potato barrels, oily green beans, and oven-fried chicken. It wasn't Kate's duty-free day but she'd hastily traded with another fourth grade teacher, Benita Little, who didn't care one way or other because she not only ate in the cafeteria with her students every day, she actually sat with them instead of at the teachers' table by the stage.

Kate had eaten lunch with her students every day for the first two years. But not this year.

This year teaching had dissolved into a shadow of most everything else in her life. Dull and uninspired. A set of motions which did little but spin circles around each other.
  

Through the lounge wall was muffled cafeteria commotion, the buzz of one hundred twenty-some students and occasional ping of the bell from the teachers' table, indicating the noise level was too high. In the corner of the lounge, the Pepsi machine hummed. The photocopy machine in the office down the hall chunked and clunked as it plagiarized a coloring book for one of the kindergarten teachers.

But the most insistent noise came from Kate's head.

Mr. Byron and Willie's father will talk with you tomorrow morning at seven thirty.

Kate closed her eyes, took her head in both hands and shook it like she shook the Pepsi machine when it ate her quarters. The humming in her mind rattled a-rhythmically, and then settled down again to the excruciating clamor.

Mr. Byron called Willie's father because Willie cut his face on the leg of a desk when you knocked him down and he needed stitches. We have a serious situation on our hands.
 
Willie's mother and father will be tomorrow at seven thirty sharp. You must have that accident report filled out and everything in order before they get here
.
 

The principal, Mr. Byron, had come to the classroom a few minutes after the incident, with Marion
Kiddel
bouncing beside him, her teeth chewing her lower lip, her eyes huge.
 
"Here he is, Mrs. McDolen," she'd said in case poor Mrs. McDolen had gone so crazy that she could no longer recognize her superior. Willie was shrieking that he was dying, that Mrs. McDolen had killed him, and the rest of the students in the class, amazingly, were too stunned to do anything but stare at the wreckage and wait to see what was going to happen. Willie had been escorted by the principal back to the office, but right before lunch, he had returned to Kate's room.

"Willie’s family is going to require more than an apology," Mr. Byron had said, taking her aside as her students lined up to go to lunch. In one hand he had clenched a blank accident report form, the other hand was drawn up around a pen and shaking like a bad Bob Dole impersonation. "They've been waiting to take us to task on something serious, Mrs. McDolen. I think we just handed it to them on a silver platter."

I don’t need this. This is wrong, completely wrong
.

“Damn it all."

"Say what,
hon
?" It was the secretary, Miriam Calhoun, peering into the lounge. She was waiting to use the women's restroom across the hall, a popular meditation spot. She was young, with fluttery eyes and Pentecostal hair. Today, her vest and pants ensemble was a dark green Christmas thing, with red threading through the fabric that made it look, from this distance, like a little blood vessels all over the material.

"Oh, nothing," said Kate, trying a smile. "Just muttering to myself." But of course it wasn't nothing, and of course Miriam knew it wasn't nothing. Without a doubt she'd heard what had happened in Kate's classroom this morning. Every staff and faculty member would know by now. Word of mishaps and confrontations circulated the school as quickly as a case of chicken pox in kindergarten.

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."