MacBride with an A,
Originally Published in "Eclipse" magazine, Fall, 2011
None of us realized
that afternoon when we paraded into Miss MacBride's class and discovered her
posed like a Richard Avedon fashion model in front of her desk how eager she
was for us, her twenty-six students, to like her. Because I'm near-sighted, I staked out a seat
in the front row and had a chance to look her over while we waited for the bell
to ring. Orange-lacquered nails gleamed
on tanned fingers on either side of round hips a yard and a half from my
nose. When I raised my gaze over the
twin peaks of her bosom toward her yellow-brown irises she caught my eye and
smiled, but I diverted my focus toward the other kids, most of whom I knew as
acquaintances, if not as friends.
"This is sophomore English," she announced, her words coming across low and warm with the resonance that's the product of serious voice training. "My name – you see on the board – is Guinevere MacBride. I'm particular about the a in Mac. I don't like to get notes meant for Mr. McBride in Wood Shop and I doubt if he enjoys receiving my messages."
Arms folded so they pushed up her breasts, ankles crossed, striped skirt stretched over her thighs, she offered us a wide, somewhat wobbly smile. "This is the first year I've felt older than my students -- I'm twenty-eight and you're, what, fourteen? There you are: I'm twice as old as you."
Nobody said anything on that first morning, but most of us were fifteen and a couple of fellows were sixteen. Kim Morganstern was thirteen, but she was a genius.
At first glance, Miss MacBride seemed to be a friendly female who'd be easy to get along with, but we soon sensed with the antennae that adolescents raise when confronting adults who have power over them that she was too anxious to pretend she was one of us. Even while insisting that kids in her classes were expected to bust their butts for grades, she giggled girlishly and leaned forward with little asides, as if she were one of the gang. She should’ve known you can't be both a hard taskmaster and a buddy.
"D'you think she meant that stuff about not giving A's?" Kim Morganstern whispered after class.
But the main topic in the hallway was Miss MacBride's hirsuteness. Although her heart-shaped face came close to being pretty, Guinevere MacBride's cheeks and upper lip obviously had been shaven and her arms were definitely shaggy. The inevitable remarks about "Monkey Woman" and "Hairy MacBride" were tossed out, but none of us had a reason yet to be aggressively malicious. That came a week later, when she returned our first essays.
Half the class flunked and I was handed my first "C" ever. Whatever our past grades, we didn't meet her standards for English composition, and she was going to make sure we understood that.
"Jeez," moaned Angel Gomez, "what does that bitch want?"
"I know what she needs," growled Charlie Proctor. "But I ain’t givin’ it to her. A guy'd get lost in all that hair."
Miss MacBride appeared to erase her facial hair only once a week. We found it fascinating to watch the dark fuzz emerging day by day across her olive skin. Rosa Stimson wondered aloud in the cafeteria why she shaved her legs and face, but not her arms.
As we muddled through the initial skirmishes of the semester’s educational wars, we were embarrassed more and more by the woman’s coy flirtatiousness. Behind her back, the girls ridiculed her youthful skirts and sweaters and the way she flaunted her figure. The boys fluctuated in their feelings, resenting her most on her hairiest days. Without realizing it, we were disturbed by the contradiction between her abnormality and her conspicuously female shape and behavior.
We also had to deal with her philosophy of life.
If Miss MacBride believed in anything, it was love. According to her, every story we read, every poem, every play, conveyed the message that people should love each other. With the perverse stubbornness of adolescents, we resisted her message of kindness, understanding, and love, yet sometimes when she recited poetry she managed to transcend both her own eccentricities and the limitations of her audience. At those moments, the class unwillingly slid under her spell as her voice wove a tapestry of language and symbol, nuance and style. Squinting near-sightedly while she breathlessly read Alfred Lord Tennyson or Edna St. Vincent Millay, I gradually realized that Miss MacBride's power over the class's imagination was real and strong, and was based in equal parts on her passionate personality and her exotic hirsuteness.
A drama major in college, she’d nurtured fantasies of a stage career, but this dream soon had been channeled into the more realistic goal of making a living by teaching drama. Leaning against the blackboard, polishing the chalk tray with the back of her skirt, she reminisced about the year when she was a student teacher and helped high school kids scarcely older than she was produce Our Town. Her hope, she confided to the two dozen of us, was to teach drama again, but I wondered about her other aspirations that had been discouraged and frustrated. Did she still carry them locked within her, shielded from ridicule and pain?
On the last day before Christmas vacation, Miss MacBride told us we'd worked hard and deserved a break. She had us put away our books and then spent the next fifty minutes perched on the edge of her desk, ankles swinging, wide-cheeked face glowing, while she sang Christmas carols with us. The adolescent voices were as erratic as they were unsentimental, but it turned out she was a trained soprano who’d starred in amateur musicals and sung on the radio. Her a capella solo of "Ave Maria" reminded me of Jane Powell in old movies. She looked touchingly pleased when we showed we were impressed by her voice.
"If you have time during your holiday," she said, before we left the room, "turn your radios to KDYL during the Dill Riordan show. You might be surprised by what you'll hear." With a little coaxing, Miss MacBride confessed that she was a friend of the variety show host and was going to sing on his program. "When I told Dill I was a teacher," she admitted, with one of her kittenish giggles, tucking streaked brown locks behind one ear, "he said he wished he'd had teachers like me!"
In the hall, Charlie Proctor hissed, "Why would that guy've wanted a hairy teacher, for Chrisake?"
A spasm of anger made me want to punch Charlie, but of course I couldn’t risk a reputation for defending Hairy MacBride. Also, I was mad at her in a way I hardly understood – perhaps because she made herself so vulnerable to the young barbarians who prowled the aisles of her class. It was as if she wanted us to hurt her. No adult, and especially not Guinevere MacBride, should be so naive. And I wondered about her relationship with this radio guy: did she go to bed with him? What right did a twenty-eight year-old female teacher have to a sex life?
Despite my mediocre beginning in her class, I worked like hell so that she broke her rule and awarded me an A-minus for the first quarter. Everybody in the class shared my pride in this victory. (Even Kim Morganstern only got a B.) However, in January when the final semester grades came out, my famous A-minus was erased by a B. Despite my youthful confidence, I hadn't been able to sustain my success. I stared at the blue letter vibrating on the yellow card. Miss MacBride had sabotaged me; her B knocked me off the Honor Roll.
The class gathered around, gaping at the bit of thin cardboard on my desk.
"The bitch," muttered Charlie Proctor.
"That's shitty," said Jack Langlois. "Really shitty."
Their own grades might've been involved. That B was an insult to the whole class. Now, I hated Miss MacBride more than I’d ever hated any teacher in my life – more than I’d hated any human being.
"Grades are only symbols," she reminded us, her words flying over our heads as we gathered up our books. She seemed to gasp for breath between sentences, undermining her statement: "...Remember, they mean nothing by themselves.”
We didn’t even acknowledge her as we left the room.
I labored diligently during the second semester, but with malice in my heart, challenging her, ridiculing her speeches about human decency and kindness, insisting that life was ugly and grim, that human beings were selfish and violent, and only saps believed in love.
Finally, on a steamy winter afternoon, Miss MacBride told me to stay after class. Twenty-five pairs of eyes glanced from her to me as they left the room. She silently erased the blackboard until they were in the hall, then she closed the door and walked to her desk, the clacking of her high heels on the composition tile floor like a drum roll before an execution.
"I know what you're trying to do,” she said, “and I can't have it. I want to teach these kids some values."
She folded her orange-nailed hands on a stack of papers as she gazed down on me with those oversized brown eyes – a look, no doubt, she’d practiced in the mirror as a drama student.
I shrugged: "D'you want me to transfer to another class?"
Oily skin shining, an afternoon glow through the windows highlighting the stubble on her upper lip and chin, she foolishly let me see that she was surprised and hurt by my challenge before she snapped back:
"Don't be stupid. Support me. You know you're the class leader. Don't waste that potential on petty differences between us. I can teach you a lot, if you’ll let me. I’m a very good teacher." Maybe she was trying to manipulate me with flattery, but don't think I wasn't tickled to hear that admission and plea. "We'll talk again," she said.
She let me go, but I wondered as I watched her hands fidget with a pencil on her desk which of us would win this battle – because, as far as I was concerned, a battle it continued to be. However, now, whenever I raised my hand to attack one of her inanities about love and life, she ignored me, and if I spoke without raising my hand, reprimanded me.
After a week of this, I marched to the Dean of Students and demanded he transfer me to another English class.
"A conflict of personalities," I complained. "And I'm not learning anything, anyway."
Dr. Hastings raised his white eyebrows and tapped his blotter with a blunt blue fingernail. Although he went through the motions of looking through schedules, the outcome was as preordained as the fact that this boring little man would be principal before his career ended: I couldn't transfer from Miss MacBride's class, he explained, without disrupting my entire schedule.
"No other sophomore English class is given at that hour," he told me. He sounded annoyed that Miss MacBride and I had complicated his existence.
The next afternoon, Miss MacBride ordered me to stay after class again.
"You two making love, or what?" whispered Charlie Proctor, as he slipped past my desk.
As soon as the room was empty, Miss MacBride slammed the door.
"You could've talked to me before going to Dr. Hastings," she said. "Instead of sneaking behind my back."
The vertical stripes of her green and yellow dress ballooned over her hips below a thin gold belt, her buttocks shifting nervously within the sleek fabric. I let my survey of the woman move across her breasts to her face. She needed a shave, but as her brown eyes focused on me a startling twinge of lust shot through my skinny limbs. I felt like a total pervert.
For an instant, she seemed to be silently pleading with me, but I refused to let any shards of sympathy penetrate my male pride. It occurred to me at that moment, with youthful egotism, that I might get her sacked. Her job, I reasoned, was more important to her than a grade was to me.
“I’m in school for an education,” I said. “And I’m not learning anything in your class.”
Stubbornly, I stared at the pictures of Tennyson and Byron and Laurence Olivier that she’d impaled on the bulletin board.
“That’s too bad, because, young man, you have a lot to learn.”
Our class together was the final one of the afternoon. We hurled words and emotions at each other for almost an hour, occasionally aware of the aimless enthusiasm of the baseball team practicing on the field outside. Gradually, I became aware of an odor in the room: female perspiration, her odor.
"I suppose you've missed your bus," she said, finally. I nodded. "I'll take you home, then."
Nervous that one of my friends would see us, I followed her to the faculty parking lot, but we met no one. Half way across the macadam, I stooped to pick up a key and stuffed it into my pocket. I collected keys. You can find a lot of keys if you keep your eyes open.
The seat cover in Miss MacBride’s old Chevie was torn and the floor littered with spent matches, empty cigarette packs, loose papers, and books. Without looking at me, she lit a Winston. This was the first time a teacher – any teacher, male or female – had smoked near me. I felt as if she'd done something indecent, as if by that single action all of my suspicions about her morals had been confirmed.
Puffing on her cigarette, she scattered ashes across her chest and lap as she guided the disreputable car across town. Paralyzed, I sat beside her, convinced that she was evil, not only because she smoked, but because she was a woman and a sexual being and a creature who didn't know how to conceal these aspects of her existence. The hair on her face perversely exaggerated her womanliness. I knew I'd choke to death before we reached my house.
I couldn’t decide if I should hate myself for my behavior or blame her for forcing me to act this way, but despite my bravado I felt guilty and ashamed – not that I would’ve admitted it to any one.
After that day, an uneasy truce existed between Miss MacBride and me, but the rest of the class watched us with distrust. Then one afternoon during the last quarter, she ran into the room, threw her shapeless leather purse on her chair, and clasped her hands in front of her breasts.
"I'm going to have the drama classes!" she announced, breathlessly. "Next year. Mrs. Brogan is giving them up because rehearsals take her way from her family." Miss MacBride was so flushed and excited that, despite the perspiration glazing her forehead and chin, she looked young and pretty. "It's such an opportunity for me! I know there's a lot of talent in this school. And I have so much I can bring to it – together we can make something wonderful happen. You must try out for the play next year! All of you!"
I couldn't tolerate seeing Miss MacBride happy.
"What play? The Hairy Ape?"
She stared at me as if she'd been hit on the forehead by a rock. I couldn't believe I'd said those words. In fact, somewhere in my brain I hoped that I'd only imagined them and hadn't actually pronounced them aloud. But the silence in the room told me that I'd said them, all right, and would pay the consequences.
"No," she said, at last, her voice quivering, but as cold and deliberate as she could make it. "But I've been thinking about another O'Neill play: Ah, Wilderness! It's about a boy who's too smart for his own good."
The bell rescued the rest of the class, but she gestured for me to stay in my chair. When she turned from closing the door, I saw tears trembling between the red rims of her yellow-brown eyes. I'd never made a woman cry before.
"I wish you could get out of my class," she said, breasts heaving, head tilted back as if to keep the tears from spilling out of their precarious pools. "I want you out of my class."
She snatched her purse and stomped gracelessly toward the door, but the leather strap swung loose from her arm and the purse hit the wall. Falling open, it poured its contents across the checkerboard-patterned floor. She looked at me with hatred in her eyes: no tears, now, just hatred.
I knelt to help her gather up cosmetics and tissues, keys, and other junk. She snatched a small package from under a chair and stuffed it into the depths of the handbag, but not before I glimpsed the Kotex label. Beneath the bleached hair on her cheeks, her skin burned red. As I returned a fistful of loose change, my hand brushed against her shaggy arm, a shiver crossing my body.
She snapped shut the heavy purse and gave me a long, silent gaze. I don't know what she was thinking or feeling, but at that moment she struck me as pitifully vulnerable and alone. Suddenly, I was shocked by the gratuitousness of my actions. Then, without another word or gesture, she left me in the classroom, twenty-eight vacant chairs condemning me.
The end of the term finally rescued us, summer passed too quickly, and then our lives were launched across yet another school year. I was worried I'd be assigned to Miss MacBride's junior English class – school administrators often were guilty of such perverse actions – but discovered when I picked up my schedule that fat and friendly Mr. Cibber was stuck with me for the year.
I hadn't even considered enrolling in one of Miss MacBride's drama classes and managed to avoid her during the first weeks of the Fall semester. When we finally did pass in the hall, I didn't know where to look, but she nodded and said, "Hello," as if we'd never been enemies. Nevertheless, I wouldn't have auditioned for the Evening Off Broadway she was planning if she hadn't stopped by me in the cafeteria one day to invite me to try out.
"You used to recite poetry beautifully in my class," she said.
The tooled leather purse hung from her shoulder, summer-tanned fingers resting on the wide flap. I looked at her across my half-eaten hamburger, trying to figure out why she was being so nice. Then I realized, as I tried to think what to say and searched her face for a clue, that she liked me. Despite everything I'd done, a connection existed between us, a bond that she seemed to want to preserve. I shrugged and told her that I'd think about it. Behind me, Charlie Proctor snorted.
"Go ahead," he urged, after she left. "I dare you to try out."
Pretending that I didn't care if I got a part or not, on the last afternoon of auditions I dropped by the Little Theater and read a few speeches. I decided I'd be willing to take on the Gentleman Caller in the scene from The Glass Menagerie that made up a third of the program, but she gave me the bit part of the nerdy tax collector in the You Can't Take It With You scene. The funny thing was, I wasn't even pissed off about it. Maybe I couldn't make up for what I'd done last year, but I'd show her I could be a good sport.
The combined casts for the scenes from the Tennessee Williams and Kaufman and Hart plays and the O’Neill one act were large and restless during the evening rehearsals. While Miss MacBride directed one scene, kids from other scenes roamed backstage, around the theater, and up and down the halls, waiting for their turns on stage. Pleas that they sit quietly at the back of the Little Theatre were spectacularly ineffective.
Miss MacBride's efforts to control the kids soon degenerated into a series of temper tantrums alternating with speeches about why we should be good citizens instead of rowdy hoodlums. None of the adolescent actors were impressed by either her impassioned appeals or her shrill anger. Each night, the kids not on stage wandered through the school, necked in empty classrooms, played games in the halls, and disrupted late choir and band rehearsals.
Piggy Strahorne, the Vice Principal, heard about the nightly commotion and, with his customary light touch, reduced to Miss MacBride to tears. She, in turn, screamed at the cast, but their behavior didn't improve. Finally, Piggy sat in on a rehearsal, himself. That evening, while he squatted in the rear of the Little Theater cleaning his fingernails with a penknife, everyone managed to behave, but the night of the dress rehearsal Angel Gomez threw a chair at Mike Celello, missing Mike but sending it through one of the plate glass cafeteria windows.
After that, Piggy damn near cancelled the whole show, but Miss MacBride pacified him by announcing that Angel, who was playing the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie, wouldn't go on. Somebody else would take his part, reading the lines from the script. The rest of the cast protested that she was being unfair, but she said that after what we'd done we were lucky Mr. Strahorne let us go ahead with the show. She asked me if I'd read the part, since I was familiar with it, but I shook my head. In the end, Ronnie Kimmel read it and did a pretty lousy job of it, too.
Monday after the final performance, Miss MacBride called a cast meeting – to discuss the cast party, we thought. Most of us were in the room when she walked in, wearing a high-necked red dress against which her hirsute shadow contrasted unpleasantly.
"Don't worry," she began, "there isn't going to be a cast party for this group. In my entire experience in drama, I've never worked with such an undisciplined, rowdy bunch of so-called actors. Haven't you any pride?" She hesitated and the only sounds were Angel Gomez cracking his knuckles and Lana Roth fidgeting in her purse. "It was bad enough that we had to have a substitution for one of the major roles, but some of you didn't even know your lines. Unless you were deliberately flubbing to embarrass me – and I wouldn't put that past any of you. The audience probably thought it was my fault. It's not something to giggle about, Lana. And please do me the courtesy to not apply makeup while I'm talking."
She stopped and, turning her back on us, walked over to the chalkboard and stared at it for a moment, before continuing. When we saw her face again, it glistened with perspiration and the brown of her eyes was screened behind a liquid film.
"To think that Mr. Strahorne had to come to rehearsals to enforce discipline! And that window! I've never been so humiliated. You all should be ashamed of yourselves – doing this to me!"
"So what've you done for us?" demanded Angel Gomez. "As a teacher?"
Miss MacBride stared at us, then turned and waved toward the door with her hand. We filed out, embarrassed for her, as much as for ourselves.
We had a cast party, anyway, without Miss MacBride, at Lana Roth's house.
For the next few months, I was busy with classes and my own life, such as it was. That spring, Miss MacBride directed an old murder mystery, Night Must Fall, for the annual play. I didn't have anything to do with it, but I heard stories about what went on during the auditions, when she made a speech telling everybody who tried out that some of them were bound to be disappointed but she hoped they'd still support the play.
"I wanted roles when I was in school," she said. "Many times, I knew I could perform a role better or sing better than the girl chosen, but if the director had a little blonde in mind, a little blonde got the part. Talent isn't always enough."
No one was clear what message she was trying to get across, but of course some of the students who read for parts were disappointed – including several of the most popular and powerful kids in the school. Frank Evensen, student body president and California state speech champion, had expected to play Danny, the murderously charming lead, and his sidekick Dick Troutman assumed he’d get the role of the inspector who traps Danny. As far as they were concerned, Night Must Fall belonged to them. They were so sure Miss MacBride would give them the parts that they didn’t even hang around to watch the other auditions. But Hairy awarded the leads to a pair of boys no one had considered competition: Billy Marek, a cocky loner that nobody knew much about, and Joe Stamp, a fat misfit notorious for his foul breath and raspy voice.
Once again, Guinevere MacBride demonstrated her ability to alienate the maximum number of students.
Frank and his gang – including Bliss Tuckerman, Alan Jarvis, and Norm Murasaki, presidents of the three most important social clubs – steadily and energetically ridiculed the play and everyone involved with it. You'd hear them in the cafeteria at noon and at the Creamery after school, laughing at Hairy and her corn ball mystery and its cast of misfits. Despite my own grievances toward Guinevere MacBride, I felt a growing pity as I watched the campaign against her production.
The week before opening night, Frank Evensen and Dick Troutman, who were also editor and cartoonist of the school Reporter, mimeographed a fake edition filled with articles and cartoons satirizing Night Must Fall. When we arrived at school in the morning, the mock papers were already distributed on every desk. I ran into Miss MacBride in the hall between classes. Her damp brown eyes stared into me, and I averted my near-sighted gaze from her recently depilated chin.
"Why do they hate me?" she asked.
The dirty tricks didn't end with the fake edition of the school paper. The morning of the day the play was to open, we discovered that beards and masses of hair had blossomed on each of the photographs attached to the posters publicizing the play, so it looked as if it had been cast with a tribe of werewolves.
Night Must Fall's three-night run attracted twenty-eight people for the first performance, twenty-one the second night, and exactly thirteen people the final night. I know, because I went to all three performances and counted. On that last evening, I turned around and saw Miss MacBride sitting in solitary misery at the back of the almost empty theater. For some reason, I felt as if I were responsible for the fiasco.
After the show, as I was waiting for a city bus under the only street lamp not smashed, Miss MacBride drove up in her battered Chevie.
"Get in," she said. "I'll take you home." A couple of blocks later, she lit a Winston, dropping the paper matchbook onto the mess on the floor. "You know I smoke," she said. "And I need it."
A yellowish street light briefly illuminated her face, her shaggy arm, and the smoke from the cigarette curling inside the car. This woman, I realized, had taught me more than any other teacher – more than I wanted to know. She’d taught me so much that I was afraid of her, but at the same time as we drove through the cool night, I felt a man, stronger than the woman beside me – almost her protector. We didn't say much as we bounced across town in the corroded Chevie, but she seemed calmer when she dropped me off in front of my house.
I twisted the loose door handle, jiggled it, and the door flew open, a couple of empty cigarette packs falling to the pavement. I turned back and looked at Miss MacBride, who seemed to be in a trance, staring at the filthy windshield. Then she raised her eyes in my direction and managed a bit of a smile. She was clutching the steering wheel so tightly that she might’ve been trying to keep the thing from flying out of the car like a murderous discus.
“Thank you,” she said, the two words enunciated with terrifying clarity.
Only a few weeks of my junior year remained, weeks occupied with finals and school elections. I ran for Student Body Treasurer but lost to Lee Ann Simpson – Frank Evenson’s girl friend. The kids still talked about what Hairy needed. We all said that if Hairy MacBride had a man she'd relax and go easier on her students. We also joked about the courage needed by any man who dared make love to her.
Angel Gomez told me to be sure to drop by drama class on the last day of school. Something special was going to happen. So I was seated at the back of the Little Theater, where the drama class was held, when Lana Roth stood up and announced that the class wanted to say something. Miss MacBride nodded.
Lana said that the drama students had talked it over and felt ashamed for the bad time they’d given her during the year, so they wanted to give her a present. Lana held out a package. Miss MacBride was really pleased. I could tell from the back of the room how pleased she was, but I had a premonition as she fumbled and ripped the silver paper off the box, the blue ribbon coiling over her fuzzy wrist.
I half-rose in my seat, squinting as I tried to see what was happening. Everybody was staring silently at Miss MacBride as she opened the box. Her face twisted and she dropped the package, running from the room. I heard her crying as she lumbered down the hall.
Pushing my way to the front of the room, I looked at the box on the floor. Beside it, on the torn silver paper and blue ribbon, lay a Gillette safety razor.
#
That summer, I worked downtown in the stockroom of a variety store that had been around since before the Depression. It was lousy job and the old guy who ran the place was a grumpy bastard, but it paid pretty well – at least for a kid just turning seventeen. Sometimes, I had to work late, into the evening, but I didn’t have anything else I needed to do and I was saving everything I earned toward college.
It was after one of those late shifts, as I made my way down one of the dark side streets toward my bus stop, that I heard her voice. Although the kids all talked about Miss MacBride’s appearance, she had a distinctive voice, low and mellow – the trained tones of a singer and actress, I guess. She sounded upset, as if she was crying, or had been, which seemed strange at ten o’clock at night, but it was her, alright. She and whoever she was with were on the other side of a square brick column at the entrance to Lorenzo’s Corner Bar & Café. I hesitated next to the brick wall, not sure what to do.
“Don’t go to New York without me, Dill,” she said. “Don’t leave me here.”
I couldn’t make out what he replied, but it was embarrassing, standing on the street, listening to Miss MacBride begging. They moved on around the corner, voices rising and falling. I followed as far as the spot where they’d been standing, then peeked around the edge of the building. An old street lamp that hadn’t been smashed sent a dim amber light over the two of them. They went on down the block and I backtracked, going the long way to my bus stop.
When school started in the Fall, I wondered if Miss MacBride would be teaching again. Did that Riordin guy take her to New York? Or did she follow him, hoping he’d relent once she was there? The desperation I’d heard in her voice had shocked me. I hoped I wouldn’t see her again, that she was three thousand miles away, but two days after the beginning of my senior year I saw Guinevere MacBride coming down the hall toward me in that striped green dress. She asked how my summer had been. I mumbled something about working most of my vacation.
“Good for you,” she said. “I know you’re going to have a bright future. Don’t get so busy with your senior year activities that you forget to try out for the play this year. I’m counting on you old timers to help me out.”
And, bulky leather purse swinging from its long strap, she strode off down the corridor.
"This is sophomore English," she announced, her words coming across low and warm with the resonance that's the product of serious voice training. "My name – you see on the board – is Guinevere MacBride. I'm particular about the a in Mac. I don't like to get notes meant for Mr. McBride in Wood Shop and I doubt if he enjoys receiving my messages."
Arms folded so they pushed up her breasts, ankles crossed, striped skirt stretched over her thighs, she offered us a wide, somewhat wobbly smile. "This is the first year I've felt older than my students -- I'm twenty-eight and you're, what, fourteen? There you are: I'm twice as old as you."
Nobody said anything on that first morning, but most of us were fifteen and a couple of fellows were sixteen. Kim Morganstern was thirteen, but she was a genius.
At first glance, Miss MacBride seemed to be a friendly female who'd be easy to get along with, but we soon sensed with the antennae that adolescents raise when confronting adults who have power over them that she was too anxious to pretend she was one of us. Even while insisting that kids in her classes were expected to bust their butts for grades, she giggled girlishly and leaned forward with little asides, as if she were one of the gang. She should’ve known you can't be both a hard taskmaster and a buddy.
"D'you think she meant that stuff about not giving A's?" Kim Morganstern whispered after class.
But the main topic in the hallway was Miss MacBride's hirsuteness. Although her heart-shaped face came close to being pretty, Guinevere MacBride's cheeks and upper lip obviously had been shaven and her arms were definitely shaggy. The inevitable remarks about "Monkey Woman" and "Hairy MacBride" were tossed out, but none of us had a reason yet to be aggressively malicious. That came a week later, when she returned our first essays.
Half the class flunked and I was handed my first "C" ever. Whatever our past grades, we didn't meet her standards for English composition, and she was going to make sure we understood that.
"Jeez," moaned Angel Gomez, "what does that bitch want?"
"I know what she needs," growled Charlie Proctor. "But I ain’t givin’ it to her. A guy'd get lost in all that hair."
Miss MacBride appeared to erase her facial hair only once a week. We found it fascinating to watch the dark fuzz emerging day by day across her olive skin. Rosa Stimson wondered aloud in the cafeteria why she shaved her legs and face, but not her arms.
As we muddled through the initial skirmishes of the semester’s educational wars, we were embarrassed more and more by the woman’s coy flirtatiousness. Behind her back, the girls ridiculed her youthful skirts and sweaters and the way she flaunted her figure. The boys fluctuated in their feelings, resenting her most on her hairiest days. Without realizing it, we were disturbed by the contradiction between her abnormality and her conspicuously female shape and behavior.
We also had to deal with her philosophy of life.
If Miss MacBride believed in anything, it was love. According to her, every story we read, every poem, every play, conveyed the message that people should love each other. With the perverse stubbornness of adolescents, we resisted her message of kindness, understanding, and love, yet sometimes when she recited poetry she managed to transcend both her own eccentricities and the limitations of her audience. At those moments, the class unwillingly slid under her spell as her voice wove a tapestry of language and symbol, nuance and style. Squinting near-sightedly while she breathlessly read Alfred Lord Tennyson or Edna St. Vincent Millay, I gradually realized that Miss MacBride's power over the class's imagination was real and strong, and was based in equal parts on her passionate personality and her exotic hirsuteness.
A drama major in college, she’d nurtured fantasies of a stage career, but this dream soon had been channeled into the more realistic goal of making a living by teaching drama. Leaning against the blackboard, polishing the chalk tray with the back of her skirt, she reminisced about the year when she was a student teacher and helped high school kids scarcely older than she was produce Our Town. Her hope, she confided to the two dozen of us, was to teach drama again, but I wondered about her other aspirations that had been discouraged and frustrated. Did she still carry them locked within her, shielded from ridicule and pain?
On the last day before Christmas vacation, Miss MacBride told us we'd worked hard and deserved a break. She had us put away our books and then spent the next fifty minutes perched on the edge of her desk, ankles swinging, wide-cheeked face glowing, while she sang Christmas carols with us. The adolescent voices were as erratic as they were unsentimental, but it turned out she was a trained soprano who’d starred in amateur musicals and sung on the radio. Her a capella solo of "Ave Maria" reminded me of Jane Powell in old movies. She looked touchingly pleased when we showed we were impressed by her voice.
"If you have time during your holiday," she said, before we left the room, "turn your radios to KDYL during the Dill Riordan show. You might be surprised by what you'll hear." With a little coaxing, Miss MacBride confessed that she was a friend of the variety show host and was going to sing on his program. "When I told Dill I was a teacher," she admitted, with one of her kittenish giggles, tucking streaked brown locks behind one ear, "he said he wished he'd had teachers like me!"
In the hall, Charlie Proctor hissed, "Why would that guy've wanted a hairy teacher, for Chrisake?"
A spasm of anger made me want to punch Charlie, but of course I couldn’t risk a reputation for defending Hairy MacBride. Also, I was mad at her in a way I hardly understood – perhaps because she made herself so vulnerable to the young barbarians who prowled the aisles of her class. It was as if she wanted us to hurt her. No adult, and especially not Guinevere MacBride, should be so naive. And I wondered about her relationship with this radio guy: did she go to bed with him? What right did a twenty-eight year-old female teacher have to a sex life?
Despite my mediocre beginning in her class, I worked like hell so that she broke her rule and awarded me an A-minus for the first quarter. Everybody in the class shared my pride in this victory. (Even Kim Morganstern only got a B.) However, in January when the final semester grades came out, my famous A-minus was erased by a B. Despite my youthful confidence, I hadn't been able to sustain my success. I stared at the blue letter vibrating on the yellow card. Miss MacBride had sabotaged me; her B knocked me off the Honor Roll.
The class gathered around, gaping at the bit of thin cardboard on my desk.
"The bitch," muttered Charlie Proctor.
"That's shitty," said Jack Langlois. "Really shitty."
Their own grades might've been involved. That B was an insult to the whole class. Now, I hated Miss MacBride more than I’d ever hated any teacher in my life – more than I’d hated any human being.
"Grades are only symbols," she reminded us, her words flying over our heads as we gathered up our books. She seemed to gasp for breath between sentences, undermining her statement: "...Remember, they mean nothing by themselves.”
We didn’t even acknowledge her as we left the room.
I labored diligently during the second semester, but with malice in my heart, challenging her, ridiculing her speeches about human decency and kindness, insisting that life was ugly and grim, that human beings were selfish and violent, and only saps believed in love.
Finally, on a steamy winter afternoon, Miss MacBride told me to stay after class. Twenty-five pairs of eyes glanced from her to me as they left the room. She silently erased the blackboard until they were in the hall, then she closed the door and walked to her desk, the clacking of her high heels on the composition tile floor like a drum roll before an execution.
"I know what you're trying to do,” she said, “and I can't have it. I want to teach these kids some values."
She folded her orange-nailed hands on a stack of papers as she gazed down on me with those oversized brown eyes – a look, no doubt, she’d practiced in the mirror as a drama student.
I shrugged: "D'you want me to transfer to another class?"
Oily skin shining, an afternoon glow through the windows highlighting the stubble on her upper lip and chin, she foolishly let me see that she was surprised and hurt by my challenge before she snapped back:
"Don't be stupid. Support me. You know you're the class leader. Don't waste that potential on petty differences between us. I can teach you a lot, if you’ll let me. I’m a very good teacher." Maybe she was trying to manipulate me with flattery, but don't think I wasn't tickled to hear that admission and plea. "We'll talk again," she said.
She let me go, but I wondered as I watched her hands fidget with a pencil on her desk which of us would win this battle – because, as far as I was concerned, a battle it continued to be. However, now, whenever I raised my hand to attack one of her inanities about love and life, she ignored me, and if I spoke without raising my hand, reprimanded me.
After a week of this, I marched to the Dean of Students and demanded he transfer me to another English class.
"A conflict of personalities," I complained. "And I'm not learning anything, anyway."
Dr. Hastings raised his white eyebrows and tapped his blotter with a blunt blue fingernail. Although he went through the motions of looking through schedules, the outcome was as preordained as the fact that this boring little man would be principal before his career ended: I couldn't transfer from Miss MacBride's class, he explained, without disrupting my entire schedule.
"No other sophomore English class is given at that hour," he told me. He sounded annoyed that Miss MacBride and I had complicated his existence.
The next afternoon, Miss MacBride ordered me to stay after class again.
"You two making love, or what?" whispered Charlie Proctor, as he slipped past my desk.
As soon as the room was empty, Miss MacBride slammed the door.
"You could've talked to me before going to Dr. Hastings," she said. "Instead of sneaking behind my back."
The vertical stripes of her green and yellow dress ballooned over her hips below a thin gold belt, her buttocks shifting nervously within the sleek fabric. I let my survey of the woman move across her breasts to her face. She needed a shave, but as her brown eyes focused on me a startling twinge of lust shot through my skinny limbs. I felt like a total pervert.
For an instant, she seemed to be silently pleading with me, but I refused to let any shards of sympathy penetrate my male pride. It occurred to me at that moment, with youthful egotism, that I might get her sacked. Her job, I reasoned, was more important to her than a grade was to me.
“I’m in school for an education,” I said. “And I’m not learning anything in your class.”
Stubbornly, I stared at the pictures of Tennyson and Byron and Laurence Olivier that she’d impaled on the bulletin board.
“That’s too bad, because, young man, you have a lot to learn.”
Our class together was the final one of the afternoon. We hurled words and emotions at each other for almost an hour, occasionally aware of the aimless enthusiasm of the baseball team practicing on the field outside. Gradually, I became aware of an odor in the room: female perspiration, her odor.
"I suppose you've missed your bus," she said, finally. I nodded. "I'll take you home, then."
Nervous that one of my friends would see us, I followed her to the faculty parking lot, but we met no one. Half way across the macadam, I stooped to pick up a key and stuffed it into my pocket. I collected keys. You can find a lot of keys if you keep your eyes open.
The seat cover in Miss MacBride’s old Chevie was torn and the floor littered with spent matches, empty cigarette packs, loose papers, and books. Without looking at me, she lit a Winston. This was the first time a teacher – any teacher, male or female – had smoked near me. I felt as if she'd done something indecent, as if by that single action all of my suspicions about her morals had been confirmed.
Puffing on her cigarette, she scattered ashes across her chest and lap as she guided the disreputable car across town. Paralyzed, I sat beside her, convinced that she was evil, not only because she smoked, but because she was a woman and a sexual being and a creature who didn't know how to conceal these aspects of her existence. The hair on her face perversely exaggerated her womanliness. I knew I'd choke to death before we reached my house.
I couldn’t decide if I should hate myself for my behavior or blame her for forcing me to act this way, but despite my bravado I felt guilty and ashamed – not that I would’ve admitted it to any one.
After that day, an uneasy truce existed between Miss MacBride and me, but the rest of the class watched us with distrust. Then one afternoon during the last quarter, she ran into the room, threw her shapeless leather purse on her chair, and clasped her hands in front of her breasts.
"I'm going to have the drama classes!" she announced, breathlessly. "Next year. Mrs. Brogan is giving them up because rehearsals take her way from her family." Miss MacBride was so flushed and excited that, despite the perspiration glazing her forehead and chin, she looked young and pretty. "It's such an opportunity for me! I know there's a lot of talent in this school. And I have so much I can bring to it – together we can make something wonderful happen. You must try out for the play next year! All of you!"
I couldn't tolerate seeing Miss MacBride happy.
"What play? The Hairy Ape?"
She stared at me as if she'd been hit on the forehead by a rock. I couldn't believe I'd said those words. In fact, somewhere in my brain I hoped that I'd only imagined them and hadn't actually pronounced them aloud. But the silence in the room told me that I'd said them, all right, and would pay the consequences.
"No," she said, at last, her voice quivering, but as cold and deliberate as she could make it. "But I've been thinking about another O'Neill play: Ah, Wilderness! It's about a boy who's too smart for his own good."
The bell rescued the rest of the class, but she gestured for me to stay in my chair. When she turned from closing the door, I saw tears trembling between the red rims of her yellow-brown eyes. I'd never made a woman cry before.
"I wish you could get out of my class," she said, breasts heaving, head tilted back as if to keep the tears from spilling out of their precarious pools. "I want you out of my class."
She snatched her purse and stomped gracelessly toward the door, but the leather strap swung loose from her arm and the purse hit the wall. Falling open, it poured its contents across the checkerboard-patterned floor. She looked at me with hatred in her eyes: no tears, now, just hatred.
I knelt to help her gather up cosmetics and tissues, keys, and other junk. She snatched a small package from under a chair and stuffed it into the depths of the handbag, but not before I glimpsed the Kotex label. Beneath the bleached hair on her cheeks, her skin burned red. As I returned a fistful of loose change, my hand brushed against her shaggy arm, a shiver crossing my body.
She snapped shut the heavy purse and gave me a long, silent gaze. I don't know what she was thinking or feeling, but at that moment she struck me as pitifully vulnerable and alone. Suddenly, I was shocked by the gratuitousness of my actions. Then, without another word or gesture, she left me in the classroom, twenty-eight vacant chairs condemning me.
The end of the term finally rescued us, summer passed too quickly, and then our lives were launched across yet another school year. I was worried I'd be assigned to Miss MacBride's junior English class – school administrators often were guilty of such perverse actions – but discovered when I picked up my schedule that fat and friendly Mr. Cibber was stuck with me for the year.
I hadn't even considered enrolling in one of Miss MacBride's drama classes and managed to avoid her during the first weeks of the Fall semester. When we finally did pass in the hall, I didn't know where to look, but she nodded and said, "Hello," as if we'd never been enemies. Nevertheless, I wouldn't have auditioned for the Evening Off Broadway she was planning if she hadn't stopped by me in the cafeteria one day to invite me to try out.
"You used to recite poetry beautifully in my class," she said.
The tooled leather purse hung from her shoulder, summer-tanned fingers resting on the wide flap. I looked at her across my half-eaten hamburger, trying to figure out why she was being so nice. Then I realized, as I tried to think what to say and searched her face for a clue, that she liked me. Despite everything I'd done, a connection existed between us, a bond that she seemed to want to preserve. I shrugged and told her that I'd think about it. Behind me, Charlie Proctor snorted.
"Go ahead," he urged, after she left. "I dare you to try out."
Pretending that I didn't care if I got a part or not, on the last afternoon of auditions I dropped by the Little Theater and read a few speeches. I decided I'd be willing to take on the Gentleman Caller in the scene from The Glass Menagerie that made up a third of the program, but she gave me the bit part of the nerdy tax collector in the You Can't Take It With You scene. The funny thing was, I wasn't even pissed off about it. Maybe I couldn't make up for what I'd done last year, but I'd show her I could be a good sport.
The combined casts for the scenes from the Tennessee Williams and Kaufman and Hart plays and the O’Neill one act were large and restless during the evening rehearsals. While Miss MacBride directed one scene, kids from other scenes roamed backstage, around the theater, and up and down the halls, waiting for their turns on stage. Pleas that they sit quietly at the back of the Little Theatre were spectacularly ineffective.
Miss MacBride's efforts to control the kids soon degenerated into a series of temper tantrums alternating with speeches about why we should be good citizens instead of rowdy hoodlums. None of the adolescent actors were impressed by either her impassioned appeals or her shrill anger. Each night, the kids not on stage wandered through the school, necked in empty classrooms, played games in the halls, and disrupted late choir and band rehearsals.
Piggy Strahorne, the Vice Principal, heard about the nightly commotion and, with his customary light touch, reduced to Miss MacBride to tears. She, in turn, screamed at the cast, but their behavior didn't improve. Finally, Piggy sat in on a rehearsal, himself. That evening, while he squatted in the rear of the Little Theater cleaning his fingernails with a penknife, everyone managed to behave, but the night of the dress rehearsal Angel Gomez threw a chair at Mike Celello, missing Mike but sending it through one of the plate glass cafeteria windows.
After that, Piggy damn near cancelled the whole show, but Miss MacBride pacified him by announcing that Angel, who was playing the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie, wouldn't go on. Somebody else would take his part, reading the lines from the script. The rest of the cast protested that she was being unfair, but she said that after what we'd done we were lucky Mr. Strahorne let us go ahead with the show. She asked me if I'd read the part, since I was familiar with it, but I shook my head. In the end, Ronnie Kimmel read it and did a pretty lousy job of it, too.
Monday after the final performance, Miss MacBride called a cast meeting – to discuss the cast party, we thought. Most of us were in the room when she walked in, wearing a high-necked red dress against which her hirsute shadow contrasted unpleasantly.
"Don't worry," she began, "there isn't going to be a cast party for this group. In my entire experience in drama, I've never worked with such an undisciplined, rowdy bunch of so-called actors. Haven't you any pride?" She hesitated and the only sounds were Angel Gomez cracking his knuckles and Lana Roth fidgeting in her purse. "It was bad enough that we had to have a substitution for one of the major roles, but some of you didn't even know your lines. Unless you were deliberately flubbing to embarrass me – and I wouldn't put that past any of you. The audience probably thought it was my fault. It's not something to giggle about, Lana. And please do me the courtesy to not apply makeup while I'm talking."
She stopped and, turning her back on us, walked over to the chalkboard and stared at it for a moment, before continuing. When we saw her face again, it glistened with perspiration and the brown of her eyes was screened behind a liquid film.
"To think that Mr. Strahorne had to come to rehearsals to enforce discipline! And that window! I've never been so humiliated. You all should be ashamed of yourselves – doing this to me!"
"So what've you done for us?" demanded Angel Gomez. "As a teacher?"
Miss MacBride stared at us, then turned and waved toward the door with her hand. We filed out, embarrassed for her, as much as for ourselves.
We had a cast party, anyway, without Miss MacBride, at Lana Roth's house.
For the next few months, I was busy with classes and my own life, such as it was. That spring, Miss MacBride directed an old murder mystery, Night Must Fall, for the annual play. I didn't have anything to do with it, but I heard stories about what went on during the auditions, when she made a speech telling everybody who tried out that some of them were bound to be disappointed but she hoped they'd still support the play.
"I wanted roles when I was in school," she said. "Many times, I knew I could perform a role better or sing better than the girl chosen, but if the director had a little blonde in mind, a little blonde got the part. Talent isn't always enough."
No one was clear what message she was trying to get across, but of course some of the students who read for parts were disappointed – including several of the most popular and powerful kids in the school. Frank Evensen, student body president and California state speech champion, had expected to play Danny, the murderously charming lead, and his sidekick Dick Troutman assumed he’d get the role of the inspector who traps Danny. As far as they were concerned, Night Must Fall belonged to them. They were so sure Miss MacBride would give them the parts that they didn’t even hang around to watch the other auditions. But Hairy awarded the leads to a pair of boys no one had considered competition: Billy Marek, a cocky loner that nobody knew much about, and Joe Stamp, a fat misfit notorious for his foul breath and raspy voice.
Once again, Guinevere MacBride demonstrated her ability to alienate the maximum number of students.
Frank and his gang – including Bliss Tuckerman, Alan Jarvis, and Norm Murasaki, presidents of the three most important social clubs – steadily and energetically ridiculed the play and everyone involved with it. You'd hear them in the cafeteria at noon and at the Creamery after school, laughing at Hairy and her corn ball mystery and its cast of misfits. Despite my own grievances toward Guinevere MacBride, I felt a growing pity as I watched the campaign against her production.
The week before opening night, Frank Evensen and Dick Troutman, who were also editor and cartoonist of the school Reporter, mimeographed a fake edition filled with articles and cartoons satirizing Night Must Fall. When we arrived at school in the morning, the mock papers were already distributed on every desk. I ran into Miss MacBride in the hall between classes. Her damp brown eyes stared into me, and I averted my near-sighted gaze from her recently depilated chin.
"Why do they hate me?" she asked.
The dirty tricks didn't end with the fake edition of the school paper. The morning of the day the play was to open, we discovered that beards and masses of hair had blossomed on each of the photographs attached to the posters publicizing the play, so it looked as if it had been cast with a tribe of werewolves.
Night Must Fall's three-night run attracted twenty-eight people for the first performance, twenty-one the second night, and exactly thirteen people the final night. I know, because I went to all three performances and counted. On that last evening, I turned around and saw Miss MacBride sitting in solitary misery at the back of the almost empty theater. For some reason, I felt as if I were responsible for the fiasco.
After the show, as I was waiting for a city bus under the only street lamp not smashed, Miss MacBride drove up in her battered Chevie.
"Get in," she said. "I'll take you home." A couple of blocks later, she lit a Winston, dropping the paper matchbook onto the mess on the floor. "You know I smoke," she said. "And I need it."
A yellowish street light briefly illuminated her face, her shaggy arm, and the smoke from the cigarette curling inside the car. This woman, I realized, had taught me more than any other teacher – more than I wanted to know. She’d taught me so much that I was afraid of her, but at the same time as we drove through the cool night, I felt a man, stronger than the woman beside me – almost her protector. We didn't say much as we bounced across town in the corroded Chevie, but she seemed calmer when she dropped me off in front of my house.
I twisted the loose door handle, jiggled it, and the door flew open, a couple of empty cigarette packs falling to the pavement. I turned back and looked at Miss MacBride, who seemed to be in a trance, staring at the filthy windshield. Then she raised her eyes in my direction and managed a bit of a smile. She was clutching the steering wheel so tightly that she might’ve been trying to keep the thing from flying out of the car like a murderous discus.
“Thank you,” she said, the two words enunciated with terrifying clarity.
Only a few weeks of my junior year remained, weeks occupied with finals and school elections. I ran for Student Body Treasurer but lost to Lee Ann Simpson – Frank Evenson’s girl friend. The kids still talked about what Hairy needed. We all said that if Hairy MacBride had a man she'd relax and go easier on her students. We also joked about the courage needed by any man who dared make love to her.
Angel Gomez told me to be sure to drop by drama class on the last day of school. Something special was going to happen. So I was seated at the back of the Little Theater, where the drama class was held, when Lana Roth stood up and announced that the class wanted to say something. Miss MacBride nodded.
Lana said that the drama students had talked it over and felt ashamed for the bad time they’d given her during the year, so they wanted to give her a present. Lana held out a package. Miss MacBride was really pleased. I could tell from the back of the room how pleased she was, but I had a premonition as she fumbled and ripped the silver paper off the box, the blue ribbon coiling over her fuzzy wrist.
I half-rose in my seat, squinting as I tried to see what was happening. Everybody was staring silently at Miss MacBride as she opened the box. Her face twisted and she dropped the package, running from the room. I heard her crying as she lumbered down the hall.
Pushing my way to the front of the room, I looked at the box on the floor. Beside it, on the torn silver paper and blue ribbon, lay a Gillette safety razor.
#
That summer, I worked downtown in the stockroom of a variety store that had been around since before the Depression. It was lousy job and the old guy who ran the place was a grumpy bastard, but it paid pretty well – at least for a kid just turning seventeen. Sometimes, I had to work late, into the evening, but I didn’t have anything else I needed to do and I was saving everything I earned toward college.
It was after one of those late shifts, as I made my way down one of the dark side streets toward my bus stop, that I heard her voice. Although the kids all talked about Miss MacBride’s appearance, she had a distinctive voice, low and mellow – the trained tones of a singer and actress, I guess. She sounded upset, as if she was crying, or had been, which seemed strange at ten o’clock at night, but it was her, alright. She and whoever she was with were on the other side of a square brick column at the entrance to Lorenzo’s Corner Bar & Café. I hesitated next to the brick wall, not sure what to do.
“Don’t go to New York without me, Dill,” she said. “Don’t leave me here.”
I couldn’t make out what he replied, but it was embarrassing, standing on the street, listening to Miss MacBride begging. They moved on around the corner, voices rising and falling. I followed as far as the spot where they’d been standing, then peeked around the edge of the building. An old street lamp that hadn’t been smashed sent a dim amber light over the two of them. They went on down the block and I backtracked, going the long way to my bus stop.
When school started in the Fall, I wondered if Miss MacBride would be teaching again. Did that Riordin guy take her to New York? Or did she follow him, hoping he’d relent once she was there? The desperation I’d heard in her voice had shocked me. I hoped I wouldn’t see her again, that she was three thousand miles away, but two days after the beginning of my senior year I saw Guinevere MacBride coming down the hall toward me in that striped green dress. She asked how my summer had been. I mumbled something about working most of my vacation.
“Good for you,” she said. “I know you’re going to have a bright future. Don’t get so busy with your senior year activities that you forget to try out for the play this year. I’m counting on you old timers to help me out.”
And, bulky leather purse swinging from its long strap, she strode off down the corridor.