Memoir

4

This is the fourth part of a serialized memoir. Parts 1, 2, & 3.

Community Junior High School 145, or, since 1987, Arturo Toscanini Community Junior High School 145, took up a whole block on Teller Avenue. The front entrance was framed and shaded by a curving metal portico from 1965. That swooping, maybe shining structure is what I can see most prominently as I attempt to walk, twenty years ago, on great sidewalks that expand and contract in my memory.

It was the first day of summer professional development. Inside, adults greeted each other in every direction. Nobody spoke to me as I walked in. They were not unkind, but they were not interested in me. They wanted to touch and laugh with the people who understood. As lovely as their families were, they did not quite understand, and they knew I did not either. Life outside this building was not comparable to life inside.

In the cafeteria, there were long white tables. One presented an array of muffins, cantaloupe slices, and coffee paraphernalia. Another held a pile of three-ring binders. Several tables were folded up and stacked against the wall. The rest were filling with teachers. I picked up a muffin and coffee and sat down.

Principal H. walked into the center of the space. I had met him three weeks ago, when he hired me to teach 6th grade special education. The interview had been brief. In the shade of the metal portico, I wrote down what he said about the school’s history and demographics. He told me to “put my little book away” and walked me inside, showing me a spacious room on the ground floor. He asked if I was ready for the assignment. I said I was. He said, “You have to be tough,” and gave me a set of keys.

Now, he wore creased pants and a shirt whose collar sometimes reflected the fluorescent light. I remember a loose watch, a microphone held confidently. A gold chain rested below his clavicle, visible because he kept the top buttons undone. This image has a scent, an always perceptible cologne. Not too strong. Details I could not have perceived from where I was sitting.

He asked for our attention and waited until we gave it. He greeted his staff, of which I was now a member, and made several comments that made the returners nod or chuckle, but which I did not understand. He seemed happy to be there, happy to be among his people, and I was buoyed by his energy.

After these remarks, a woman walked toward him. She took slow, deliberate steps. Of her blurred personage, I can see a professional dress, tall, colorful heels, a face framed by long, reddish hair, straight today, but sometimes in curls, sometimes with bleached highlights, and long curving nails, slowly tapping. These she wrapped carefully around the microphone, accepting it from Mr. H. She said, in a slow, deliberate cadence, perfectly fitting the rest of her persona, that her name was “Ms. Morgan,” and that she was excited to be our co-principal this year.

I looked at Mr. H. He shifted his weight back and forth as she spoke, and though he kept his hands still, his face reacted to each slowly-said phrase with a new expression. They began a back-and-forth, and his demeanor became playful, even flirtatious. I didn’t understand the details, but I sensed he was being forced to share the principalship with this woman against his will. I looked at the teachers around me and found confirmation. In a corporate setting, they may have kept their feelings hidden behind a pinched smile. But in this middle school cafeteria, they allowed their faces to form as they would, while she spoke, into a resting blank, or they narrowed their eyes. Some of them stole glances at the table from which Ms. Morgan had emerged, where a handful of sober-looking people, wearing ties and muted colors, sat expressionless.

Before long, one of the large binders was set before me, “Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop” printed on the front. In the staging area, one of the expressionless people, a young woman with tight black curls, wheeled a kind of portable easel toward Ms. Morgan. This held a giant lined Post-It note. The expressionless woman popped open a thick marker and stood next to it. There was a beat. Ms. Morgan said one word, her New Yorker’s pronunciation harmonizing with the French.

“Memwah.”

Read part five here.