Joy School (2 page)

“I was thinking I’d make some peanut-butter cookies,” she says, slow and careful. I nod. It seems to me that we always have our antennae out, no matter what we say; that we can pick up on a person’s hurt in our hearts even if it never makes it to our brains. And people like Ginger have the manners to do something about it. I will get to mash every raw cookie with the fork to make the crisscross pattern. You feel a little talented when you see the cookies come out of the oven. Ginger lets me do all the good parts, every time. Pretty soon, I could love her.

H
ere is my life, five days a week. First off, English. Mrs. Brady. She is actually my favorite, so I wish I didn’t have her first, I wish she would be saved to make up for the rest of the day. But she is first. She has a beehive hairdo, and when she stands by the window, you can see through it. It sort of looks like brown cotton candy. Once I saw a hairpin coming out a little and that is what reminded me that her hair isn’t always like that. She has black cat-eye glasses, and she always wears this outfit: a pleated skirt, a blouse with usually a round collar, a cardigan sweater, brown shoes with heels so little you don’t know they’re heels until she turns around to write on the blackboard. Her handwriting is so clear and beautiful. I can’t believe a person does it. Even on the board, every letter so perfect, every line so straight. She was born to be a teacher, you can tell by everything she does, including walking across the room talking to us but also deep in thought. She is serious about her subject and she says things that are heartfelt and she doesn’t care who makes fun of her in the halls afterward. Especially poetry. When she reads from the skinny books she brings in, she’ll speak so hard from her feelings that her
voice gets deeper. And when she’s done, she’ll press the open book into herself, just under her bosom. The pages must get warm from her body heat. Sometimes I think of her and her husband sitting at their kitchen table eating dinner, their napkins exact squares on their laps, talking in prayer voices about John Keats. About the tragedy of how he died, looking out the window in a foreign place, thinking, oh jeez, it didn’t get to happen. Maybe they eat by candlelight while the hi-fi plays piano music—it wouldn’t surprise me at all. It would be so cute, how the light of the flames would flicker in their eyeglasses when they were being so serious.

Mrs. Brady calls on me when no one else gets it, even if my hand is not up. This is how I know that in a way I am her pet. I think in a tidy corner of her brain she keeps the thought, Well, I can always count on Katie. And she is right. There is nothing in English so far that I don’t like, even the sonnets that I have never heard of anyone else liking except English teachers. I excel in English, I always have. Not the grammar part, but getting what the author means. Interpretation, they call it. I think it’s why I got to skip grade four.

After English comes the opposite: Math. Harry Hadd is the teacher, if you can imagine such a name. He wears a wrinkly white shirt and no tie and some pants that look like one little breeze through the window and they’ll fall down. His shoes are black high-top sneakers, except for a day when the principal came to watch
the class. Then he wore brown tie shoes all shined up fake. He keeps his sleeves rolled up and it is a mystery to him why every kid in class does not understand everything in the book from day one. He says things like that all the time, “day one.” He calls us by our last names, too, “Miss Woodward,” “Mr. Evans.” This makes us all feel worse. They have tracks here in this school, and I believe I am in the dumbest class for math. It’s supposed to be a big secret, but give me a break. Everybody knows. In English I’m in with the smart kids. They mostly have all their classes together. I only do well in English. In other subjects I am normal except in math where I am dismal. In those achievement tests you have to take, my line for math goes so far down, way below the red line they draw in that says you should at least be here. I just don’t get math. Even if I go for extra help, one on one, I don’t get it. I went for a lot of extra help in another school, where I had a teacher who was so nice, Mr. Dieter. He was a real ugly man married to such a pretty woman, which always made me in a good mood. He would explain and explain and explain and it was like my brain was closed for business. Finally, I would just feel so sorry for him I would say, Oh! I get it! but I never did. And he would hand me back my D–test with a small red note, “Katie—what happened? See me.”

Third period, gym. If I were to make up a torture for someone, it would be you have to have gym right in the
middle of your day. Your body is not in the mood for gym in the middle of the day. You have done some work to try to look all right for the day, you have slept on rollers and stood in front of your mirror for a long while that morning and all that, and then splat, gym. You have to run around and get messed up and then you have to take a shower and even if you cheat and just stand in front of it with your towel on, your underwear hidden beneath, the steam still gets you. And changing in front of everyone. And smelling that rubbery smell mixed with BO. Plus the teacher, as usual, is a mean woman. Every gym teacher I’ve ever had has been mean, like she has a problem she is going to punish all of us for out on the courts. This gym teacher is named Miss Sweet. This would be what they call irony, I’ll tell you that. Even though she is called Miss Sweat behind her back. She has little lips, which you think the body forgot to send the bloodline to; they are pale and straight. She wears gym shorts and a sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up and severe socks and sneakers. They’re the same gym shorts we wear, but on her they look different. She has a whistle around her neck, and her hair is pulled back into a ponytail although it’s not long enough for one. It’s like she’s so strict even her hair cannot be loose. She carries around a clipboard to write mean things down about you, and once when I failed to clear the bar for the high jump, she hit me on the butt with it. It was because in her opinion I should
have been able to do it. I tried again, failed again, but she didn’t hit me again because I wasn’t worth it. If I ever get to be God, I’m calling all the gym teachers in the world into one room to say this: All right, knock it off!! And then I’m going to make them all change into pink formals with pink satin heels. If I were to draw on a paper what gym does for me, I would make one dot. And then I would erase it. But I have to do it, every day, in the middle of the day, right before lunch.

Which is another thing.

It is hard enough to do lunch when you know a place. But when you are new, you have never seen anything so big as the lunchroom. There are secret maps, and you’d better not mess up. Which I did, of course. The first day, I sat at the popular table. As if I should know. First one perfect girl sat down, then another. They were making big eyes at one another, rattling their bracelets around, but nobody said anything. They just sat around me like white surrounding black until I got it. I said, “Excuse me,” and moved, and they all laughed together. It was kind of a pretty sound.

I sit mostly by myself, or by someone miscellaneous. I don’t talk. At first I tried, but nothing good ever came of it. I would see the person I’d talked to in the hall the next day and say hi and they would look at me like,
What?
So I just eat and that is the one good thing about this school, they have very good food. On Sloppy Joe day, I go back for seconds. I get them, too. The cafeteria
ladies like me. They see what goes on. Kids think they stand back there with their big metal spoons and big aprons and just think, Oh I see the corn has gone down, I guess I’ll go on back and get some more. But when you look up you see that of course all the faces are different. And they are interested in you and friendly and a lot of them really care that you eat well. And they feel happy when you like things. They don’t usually give seconds, especially not to the boys, who are not sincere when they ask, who just want to use seconds for food fights. But they will give more to me. This is how far things have gone down, that my only friends in school are the cafeteria ladies. And not even really. They take breaks together, they sit at a table in the corner with some coffee and a little of this and a little of that, things we had for lunch. If I went up and sat with them, they wouldn’t like it either. I think in about a few months I will be sitting with someone real. It’s hard to tell. I have never had such a hard time getting my place in a school. You wish you could bring a book of directions to yourself that everyone would read. But no. You just have to wait until the time that a crack comes.

After lunch is history. This man who teaches it, Mr. Spurlock, is insane. Here is his idea of how to teach: Copy notes that you have written in your bent-up spiral notebook onto the blackboard. Tell the class to shut up about two hundred times. Write small and creepy so nobody can read it. Then tell your class to copy the
notes from the board into their notebooks. While they do, sit at your desk and read the newspaper and pick at your side teeth with your little finger. Just before the bell rings, say, “Any questions?” I swear this is exactly true. Not one kid likes him. Plus his shoes are about five hundred years old. If he were mental, which his shoes look like, you would feel sorry for him. But he is not mental. He is just the worst teacher of all time in the history of the whole universe. Probably he is a made-up thing from a science experiment to find out: How much can kids take?

Next, French, and the teacher is so beautiful she could be Miss America. She wears French things like a scarf around her neck. She wears short-sleeved sweaters and long tight skirts and nice leather shoes that tie. She smells like good perfume. But her problem is that she never speaks English to us and sometimes we just need to know something. It is only beginning French. So what I want to know is where does she get off from the first day rattling on in French, French, French? One day I tried to complain. After class. I said, “Miss Worthington, I don’t think you should talk only in French.” And she said, “Ah, ah, ah!
En français!!”
You feel wound-up frustrated in there. But here is the most surprising thing: I am learning French. Last Saturday, when the mailman came, I said,
“Voici le facteur!”
My father asked me What did I say and I said That was French for Here’s the mailman, and he said Is that right? So at
home I am glad I have her. But in class it is a torture. Sometimes in class I see that my heel is jiggling bad.

Last in the day is home ec. Here is where they teach you how to make food you never want to eat and how to make clothes you never want to wear. Our menu for Fall Festival will be pork-sausage casserole. It has sweet potatoes and apples in it. The teacher’s name is Miss Woods and every time I see her I think about a woman who got colored wrong in the coloring book. She has really red hair, from a box, anyone can see. She wears way too much blusher and blue eye shadow. My best friend Cherylanne lives in Texas, where I just moved from last summer, and she knows everything about makeup. But I know she would throw up her hands in despair if she was told to fix this woman. Miss Woods talks in a high, excited voice and she hardly ever shuts up. I guess one good thing I could say about her is she is always in a good mood. We’re going to make aprons next week out of dishcloths.

And that’s school, except for the bus ride and homeroom. Homeroom is where they vote for people to be things and where the crabby teacher takes attendance. Every day, she looks like she has just been in a fight. And we are supposed to go to her with problems. She is our advisor. Here is her advice: Don’t bug me. And the bus ride? Imagine you are alone on a bumpy vehicle that smells like baloney and takes ten hours to go one block. That is it.

T
here is a routine on Saturday morning. First, my father sleeps late. I clean my room and then come into the kitchen to plan dinner, because that is my night to cook. I am good at meat loaf and baking whole things like a chicken. He doesn’t care if we have repeats, so this morning I am thinking I’ll just make meat loaf like I did last week. But when I sit down to eat cereal and look at my cookbook I find the recipe for Italian spaghetti and think maybe I’ll try that. It looks good all curled up on the plate. They also show you some bread sticks in a glass in the middle of the table and the tablecloth is red-and-white checkered. This is what my home ec teacher would call setting the scene. She’d probably tell you to play some Italian accordion music on the hi-fi, too. This cookbook is for kids and the first instruction is always this: Wash your hands. Like they’re talking to morons. I’ve outgrown it. But there are still some good ideas in it.

The spaghetti recipe says you have to use tomato sauce and tomato paste and Italian seasoning, which I don’t think we have. So I will have to wait until he
wakes up to go to the store and get some. I kind of like getting ingredients you don’t have at home to make something. That puts you even more in the mood to make it. I wish I could go to the store myself, but nothing is walking distance from here except a church at the end of the block. It’s Catholic. It has a very quiet smell of incense all the time, which is nice, and it has very pretty windows, the stained-glass kind where the red looks like wine and the blue is so deep and beautiful you wish you could put it in your pocket and take it home with you. I like to sit in that church when no one is there, although I do sit in the back row, since we’re not members. The cushions are a dark-red velvet that turns lighter if you rub it the wrong way. Sometimes I kneel there, not to pray, just to make my head that kind of empty still that has a person feel more comfortable than they thought they were. The priest there is named Father Compton. He doesn’t mind my being there. He calls you “child” like he’s in the movies. He’s old and has whole tufts of white hair growing out of his nose and he walks bent over, but his eyes are clear and smart and they notice the right things. When he’s looking at you, you can tell he’s thinking kind thoughts, but he doesn’t embarrass you by saying them out loud. You don’t have to do anything back.