This is a picture of Jane Russell.
This is not my first attempt to write an account of my childhood. I began this same book 23 years ago at a time when I was teaching art in a private school in Lenox, Massachusetts. The school was the Berkshire Country Day School, and I taught art to sixth through ninth graders.
The title of the book I started at that time was going to be, “Moo So Lean Ne, The Italian Cow.” I also considered the title “Medieval Experiences in the Twentieth Century,” not taking into account that it was a title that would have become dated in my lifetime.
The first paragraph of my first attempt begins: My mother never understood sexual symbolism. I became aware of this when I was 15 at dinner. My mother served spaghetti, meatballs and sausage. My particular plate, with all those items, looked exactly like a penis. I tried to point this out, “Mom,” I said, “this plate of spaghetti, meatballs and sausage seems to be arranged exactly like a penis.”
She looked at me with dismay saying, “How can you say such a thing or even think it? It only looks like that if you turn it upside down.”
My intent back then was to write a farce. My mother never said any such thing.
That text floundered on a shoal, and that shoal was my sixth grade teacher. Twenty-three years ago I tried to write a description of her and my experiences in that grade, but I couldn’t do it. I kept thinking that no one would ever believe something like that actually happened.
My sixth grade teacher was Mrs. Wagner. I have introduced her already as the woman who asked me to punish myself by hitting my hand with a ruler. She was famous in her lifetime as a notoriously wicked, violent woman. For years after her tyrannic rule, whenever classmates got together who had graduated from Hughes, the question would come up, “Did you have Wagner?” If the answer was yes and it involved several people, an evening might be dedicated to the swapping of our horror stories.
Now again, I will attempt her portrait, knowing that it will not be believed. I could use as a guide the text I wrote 23 years ago, but I don’t need to. It is all still etched, as if with acid, on the zinc plates of my brain.
She was a tall, shapely woman and I would bet that she resembled Jane Russell. I came across a picture of the old Jane Russell on the Internet and I thought yes, old Jane sure reminds me of old Mrs. Wagner. I see no reason to elaborate on the irony of that comment, as I am sure there are a great many old married couples for whom this oddity makes more than perfect sense. She wore spike heels every day, and for the entire year of sixth grade the sound of the clack of her heels coming down the hall towards our door produced in all of us a Pavlovian dread and trembling. She sounded like what she was, a Nazi in jack boots. The heels were a blessing however because we were all SILENT when she opened the door to her room and entered.
She was tall, well built, and always wore dresses. Her dresses were rather tight fitting and always of a shiny material and with some sort of tie, or decorative belt at the waist. Her posture was stiff and erect.
I sat in the center seat of the front row. She had placed me there because I was a "troublemaker." This was an undeserved reputation, as at that time I was the exact opposite of a troublemaker, all I cared about was finding some way to keep from flunking and failing test after test.
Mrs. Wagner would give her lectures standing in front of my desk — right in front of it — so that at times he legs pressed against the desk’s front edge up there where the inkwell was. The center of gravity, and I emphasize the word gravity, of her body, was, therefore, only a few inches from my face. That implied triangle in the center of her dress, which was right in front of my face, never registered in my conscious mind. I was in a state of terror for an entire year.
Why was I in terror of her? Because she viscously hit me with a ruler every chance she got. Beating myself in the cloak room was not some unusual experience, it was a thing of everyday life.
I am left-handed. Left-handed people have difficulty writing because their hand covers up the letters they have just written. In order for a left-handed person to write they cramp their hand around so the pen comes down to the letters from above. This cramped style was not “Palmer Method,” which was the only way we were allowed to write. Palmer Method is not possible for left-handed people, it was invented without taking them into consideration. If I saw that she was watching me I would pretend to do the impossible Palmer Method, but when she looked away I would resort to my own personal crippled calligraphy. We used dip pens also, whose ink would smear if I wrote in the proper way. To get me to write with “Palmer Method” Mrs. Wagner would creep up behind me quietly when I was writing and then hit my hand with a ruler from behind just like killing flies. She was sadistic. This was everyday life for a year, and the physical punishments were not the worst of it.
Her most tragic victims were girls however, and I use the experience of Dorothy as the best example of Mrs. Wagner’s sadism. Dorothy was a average student, not remarkable in any way. She was asked to stand up one day in class and recite the months of the year. Dorothy set in to name them, but when she was nearly done, at about October or November, her mind went blank. Mrs. Wagner kept her standing there, as she struggled to think of the word November, but she just couldn't pull it up. Probably if one could have looked into her mind it was like a curser was stuck, telling you to shut down and reboot the computer. Dorothy continued to stand there for a long time, the room was silent, then tears began to run down her face.
I was only beaten. What was done to Dorothy over the next several weeks was much worse than any beatings. A tough child is proud of beatings, they are merit badges. I was envied for being slapped across the face, and being shaken by the shoulders so that my head was tossed around like a rag mop.
But Dorothy was being ruined as a human being.
The following day, in the middle of some unrelated subject, Mrs. Wagner stopped the proceedings and said, out of the blue, “Dorothy, stand up.”
Dorothy stood up.
“Recite the months of the year.”
Dorothy would again rush through the months breathlessly until she would again crash at November, and again she would have to stand there until she was fully engulfed in tears. Only after Dorothy’s sobs were audible was she allowed to sit down.
This happened every day at some unexpected moment, for several months. Toward the end of this ordeal Dorothy would not say “January, February, March...” she would simply stand up and begin sobbing. She would stand there sobbing for several minutes, not saying a word, and then Mrs. Wagner would ask her to sit down, with a tone of distinct disgust in her voice.
That actually happened.
And inhumanities of a similar sort from first bell to dismissal every day for a year.
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