Abusing Authority

The real life "Ms. Flanigan" eyeing me, in stripes, to make sure I don't talk

In sixth grade, Ms. Flanagan said I talked too much. In September, she called me loquacious. By April, she had to resort to a different approach to shut me up.

         “Michelle, you’re being much too loquacious.”

She said it just like that, one hand suspended in mid-air, holding a piece of chalk, the other on her waist -- she had been writing on the board and stopped because I was talking, turned in my seat to face Amelie who sat near the back of the room because she was tall, taller than most of the boys. We must have been in the middle of an English lesson.

         “Do you know what loquacious means?” she turned back to the board to write the word for us all to see. Ms. Flanagan was a petite woman with black hair, a little nose, a little mouth, and big brown eyes. The chalk snapped as she dotted the ‘i’.

         I shifted in my seat, trying not to giggle.

         She continued talking, not really waiting for anyone in the room to answer the question, “Loquacious means talkative, as in excessively talkative,” she faced the classroom, looking me in the eye, and smiling wide.

         I sat in the front row because I, being well under five feet tall, couldn’t see over the others’ heads otherwise. We were in one of the new classrooms on the backside of the playground, the ones that had been finished over the summer. They still smelled like fresh building materials and paint. There was a window at the back of the class that looked onto an old oak tree, under which lay a huge tractor meant for climbing, the hole covered by a piece of heavy plywood. The bathrooms in the new building smelled new too, all the faucets and toilets worked, and there were shiny chrome boxes on the walls in the stalls of the girls’ bathrooms, shiny chrome boxes for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade girls who might be having a period. During recess, we had to walk around younger kids who played jacks on the brand new black top in front of the classroom.

         “Loads of loquacious laughter,” said Amelie, as Ms. Flanagan went back to writing on the board. She said it quiet enough so Ms. Flanagan wouldn’t know who was speaking out of turn but quiet enough so I could hear. Amelie and I, and couple of others, started laughing. Ms. Flanagan turned quickly around, her super straight curtain of black hair swung around with her.

         “Okay, girls, that’s quite enough,” her smile gone, her eyes narrow. Her hair was mostly all black, but there were a couple of wiry grey hairs that sprouted at the crown. I could see them sticking out when the light hit her hair in just the right way or when standing up close.

         Ms. Flanagan was hip in her own way. We all liked her a lot at first and wanted her approval because she was petite and pretty and because she was our teacher. Besides my music teacher, Mr. Lark, I had only had female teachers up to that point and they had all been dowdy in some way. My first grade teacher, Mrs. Robinson, was remarkably fat. I always marveled when she lead us in PE on the black top, singing “Head, shoulders, knees, and toes, knees and toes,” coming very close to touching her toes every time. Ms. Flanagan seemed younger and more hip than many of the others who wore heavy shoes and tent sized dresses that made them look older and heavier than they probably were. Ms. Flanigan wore blouses and slacks rather than dresses and her slacks weren’t made of 100% polyester.

         But during the second half of the year, the boys and the girls were separated for sex ed. All the sixth grade girls came to Ms. Flanagan’s class to watch the sex ed movie from which we learned the anatomical names for the different parts of the male and female genitalia. Several weeks before, we all had to get permission slips signed by our parents to even participate or we’d be sent to the library where we might have been able to find a book that covered the same material. We learned about semen, or sperm, and how it got from the male body into the female body, and how it can fertilize an egg, which would result in a pregnancy. On a separate day, so as not to scare the total crap out of us all at once, we watched a video about VD. The movie was full of graphic examples of people with hideous rashes on their hands and feet, stories of people who went insane because their diseases went untreated. We learned words like discharge, chancre, testes, and clitoris. Sometimes poor Ms. Flanagan would use the terms like “balls” and “crotch” to clarify what she meant, and she did it with straight face. I didn’t dare look at Amelie.

Once the movie was over, Ms. Flanagan got even more serious than she had been. The lights were back on, the move projector was pushed to the side of the room, and she was standing at the board.

         “Now girls, it’s important that you understand that if you have sex, you will get pregnant.”

         It sounded like something adults say just to scare kids out of doing something they might want to do, and I knew it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true according to the first sex ed movie that explained how a women could only get pregnant during a certain time of the month, sometime after she had her period. And I knew it wasn’t true because our house was small, and my mom was loud, and I had heard my mom have sex plenty of times, way more than three times, but I kept my mouth shut. I knew this wasn’t the time to talk out of turn or contradict, but I really wanted to. I wanted to expose the lie.

         By April, Ms. Flanigan had had it with all my talking, and I was tired of her too -- tired of her posing as a hip, modern female teacher when she wasn’t one at all.

One day in April, after a particularly loquacious morning, Mrs. Flanagan, interrupted my talking, and held up a roll of invisible tape.

“Michelle, come up here. Come here and take a piece of this tape and put it over your mouth.”

         I didn’t move or get up. I stared at her, thinking at first that she was making a joke.

         “Michelle, come and get a piece of tape, she said again, shaking the roll of tape in her hand.

         I got out of my seat and walked the length of waxed floor from my desk to hers. I took some tape off the roll and went back to my seat. A few students were watching, and the others were pretending to be focused on Ms. Flanagan’s lesson on the board. I had been given no other orders. I didn’t know for how long I was supposed to wear the invisible tape, but I didn’t want her telling me to do it again, so I pressed my lips together and covered them with two pieces of tape. I had to breathe through my nose, and I was aware that some others were still watching me. Amelie was quiet. And now, so was I.

         Just before lunchtime Ms. Flanagan remembered that I had the tape over my lips and told me to remove.

         “Oh, Michelle, it’s been so quiet. I almost forgot. You can take the tape off now,” she looked at me and shifted quickly back to her lesson.

         I hesitated because I wasn’t sure if I should remove the invisible tape slowly or all at once. It didn’t matter either way. As I pulled up and over, a layer of my skin came off with it. I winced and spoke, my voice a bit scratchy at first.

         “My lips are bleeding,” I rasped loudly, making a scene. “ Ms. Flanagan, my lips were chapped – the tape ripped off my skin.” I held up the tape for affect.

A flash of worry lit up her face, not for me, but like she didn't quite know what to do -- then the bell rang. Without looking at me again, she found her lanyard of keys, put it around her neck and excused us all for lunch. 

First Dance

         At twelve, school dances were an awkward way to spend two hours. I spent most of them sitting on a cold metal chair around the perimeter of the cafeteria, waiting for someone to ask me to slow dance to “Theme From Greatest American Hero," or waiting to hear The Police. Still dances were better than sitting home with my brother and sister, while my mom got stoned and her live-in boyfriend Danny drank beer and watched TV.

My first dance ever was by far the worst. My best friend Amelie and her mom had gone to live in Carson City, so I had no one to dance or sing along with to our favorite songs like, "Hit Me with Your Best Shot," or "Jessie's Girl," by Rick Springfield. And no one really danced. Some kids stood around in small clumps, or sat around the perimeter, waiting for some kind of sign telling them what to do. The cafeteria looked different: big and sort of empty.  The long lunch tables on wheels that folded in half upright were stowed away at one side of the room and the lunch counter was covered by its sliding cold metal shade.
         As he always did, along with one seventh and one eighth grade teacher, Mr. Lark chaperoned the dance. While uncomfortable in my hand-sewn dress, I always felt safe around Mr. Lark, the school's double-duty music teacher and vice-principal. I had been one of his admirers since second grade when he gave me the solo in the Christmas program, and I had since learned to play the flute under his tutelage then joined the elementary school band.

When I was first learning to play the flute, Mr. Lark pulled me out of class once a week for a private lesson in a small room off of the cafeteria in which sat only two chairs, a music stand, and sheet music. Being raised by a single mom, Mr. Lark, was for many years, the only man in my life. I practiced the flute everyday for at least fifteen minutes, as he suggested, because I loved music, but also because I wanted to hear Mr. Lark say how much I had improved on "Merrily We Roll Along," which, to his delight, I had recognized as "Mary Had A Little Lamb." When I asked, he told me that "Mary Had A Little Lamb" had been renamed "Merrily We Roll Along" because the publishers thought we might feel childish playing a song they sang over and over again in nursery school. Like we wouldn't notice. I sure noticed “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and the alphabet song. Those were kind of the same too.  When I mentioned these other songs, Mr. Lark smiled and said that I had a good ear.
         Before seventh grade dances, our K-8 "socialized" boys and girls in PE by implementing the infamous square dancing unit -- only to be outdone by the Chicken Fat record we exercised to on rainy days. While I liked boys a great deal and had already been kissed, I didn't especially like holding sweaty boy hands. I would have rather been playing music instead of dancing to it, or waiting for some boy with sweaty hands to ask me to dance or not ask. After the first dance of the year, us girls realized we could simply dance together to our favorite songs, rather than waiting for Ian Dresner or Brett Harding to ask us. Noel Lark, Mr. Lark's younger daughter, would often lead the girls to the floor in a flurry of wild dance moves -- she didn't seem to care at all that her dad was there watching.

         This night, I sat waiting on a metal chair, with a couple of other girls who weren't dancing, thinking I shouldn't have worn the stiff purple dress that my mother had spent several days making for me, hunched over her sewing machine. It had a stiff, floral, quilted belt that never lay quite right. It was already getting late, and I hadn't really danced at all. I had watched others slow dance, spotting horny eighth graders about to get too close, expecting Mr. Lark, Mr. Roundell, or Ms. Martz to tap them on the shoulder and a make a "separate" command with their hands. I only got up from my chair once and it was to walk to the refreshment table. I had a cup of punch served by someone’s mom and wandered back to my seat glad to be up at least walking in time with the music.

         The dance ended at 9:00 PM sharp, and before I left the house that night, I made my mother promise she'd be in the lot waiting for me when the dance got out. Since I had no reason to hang around once the dance was over, I made my way to the parking lot in my stiff dress.
         She wasn't there.

         Trying not to appear too concerned, I sat down on the cement wall, just off the half-circle drop off zone in front of the school. I watched as the Twain Harte and Ponderosa Hills kids got into their parents' over-sized, newer model, sedans, usually American made. The hills kids always seemed to get picked up first. A few eighth graders who lived between one and three blocks from the school, slowly made their way home on foot, savoring their last moments of freedom, reliving their favorite moments of the dance. I strained my ears to see if I could hear who they were talking about. All the while, I kept my eyes on the parking lot, trying to match the headlights on the car coming my way with the shape of the headlights on my mother's 70's model Nova. The town kids’ parents' cars were easy to spot. They were loud, usually with a bad muffler, or strange pinging sounds coming from the engines, and maybe even a whiskey burn on the side. I was getting pretty huffy after about the fifteenth car -- my mom had promised to be there right at 9:00, to arrive just as the dance had ended. It's not like she was doing anything important. She probably wasn't doing anything at all. I could feel the angry red flush spread from my cheeks to my ears. I squeezed my eyes closed to shut off the throbbing behind them. I didn't know what I was waiting for.
         "Michelle," I heard Mr. Lark's voice coming down the walk behind me, "your still waiting for your mom?"
         He was on his way home. There was no one else around -- no cars had pulled into the school’s loading zone for several minutes. It was probably 9:30.
         "Yeah, I'm still waiting," I said trying to sound hopeful and confident, only my voiced thinned and trailed off at the end of the sentence.
         I wondered if Mr. Lark wanted to look over at his house, which was practically across the street from the school. I had watched Noel walk home by herself ahead of her dad who was still busy with his vice-principal duties. She had stopped and waved and did silly dance moves until she had to cross the street. In his music teacher role, Mr. Lark was silly and irreverent; Noel had certainly inherited his personality. Mrs. Lark who I didn't see often even though she lived just across the street was an elegant woman, known for being beautiful and selling Avon. I knew some people in town thought she was stuck up, but I had seen her smile at Mr. Lark in a sweet shy way a couple of times. I thought that was nice.
         "I could call someone," Mr. Lark offered, now standing beside me watching the parking lot as I had been.
         "Um, you don't need to do," I said, "She'll be here any minute, " as I said this I thought of the previous summer while camping when we saw Mr. Lark and the kids. They had a campsite near ours, and my mom and her friends from town, who also knew Mr. Lark, invited him over to stand around our campfire. My mom was giggling with her girlfriend. They had just smoked a joint in the bushes, and the smell lingered in the air.

         "I told her not to come right at 9:00." I didn't look him in the eye when I said this last part. I looked down at his sturdy brown leather shoes.
         "Are you sure?"
         "Yeah, I'm sure. You don't have to wait, she'll be here."
         "Only if you're sure," he said, nodding and turning to face me directly. I always thought he looked a bit like John Denver – the same glasses, a similar shaped face, the same haircut.

Later in 8th grade, he would ask me how I got the large bruise that covered the left side of my face, and I lied then too -- only that time, I don't think that he believed me.

         "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. She'll be here soon, I'm sure of it."
         Before he turned on his comfortable shoes and walked home, he told me to come and knock on his door if my mom didn't come soon after all, and I agreed that I would. He probably even poked his head out of his front room window to see if I was there. Knowing that he would, I decided to leave after only a few more minutes. My face turned hot again at the thought of Mr. Lark seeing me wait there for my mother who wasn't coming at all.

I walked with no rush down Elm, the last lit street in town. I was still hoping to match her headlights with the ones from my memory, and once I turned down Oak street and walked past the last row of lit houses, I would have to make my way down the long stretch of road in the dark -- no sidewalks, no street lamps, nothing but the cold night air and the sound of crickets, and the occasional heart racing rustle in the blackberry bushes that lined one side of the road. It's only a little field mouse, I told myself each time I jumped at a sound. As I rounded the bend on Oak Street, the light from the houses faded behind me. My breath caught in my throat as my eyes worked hard to adjust to the darkness. It wasn't until I exhaled that I realized I had been holding my breath for several paces. Still hoping my mom might remember that she was supposed to pick me up, thinking that she might have a good explanation for being late, I looked for headlights coming my way from down the road, but not a single car passed by on the long, dark stretch. Now more scared than anything, I tried not to think about the rustling sounds of the tall grasses and trees on the hillside along the road, and kept my eyes focused on the streetlight at the end of the long stretch of unlit road -- the corner of Oak and Bodenhammer Lane. My house on Box Factory Road was just beyond that lit corner. I worried about tripping over large rocks or dirt clods, or turning my ankle in an uneven dip in the shoulder. I worried that something would jump from the blackberry bushes to get me. But if I kept up my quick and steady pace, I would be there in about three or four minutes.
         Once at Box Factory Road, I was no longer scared or ashamed that I been left to walk home alone in the dark. I was angry. Trudging up the driveway to my house, I had no idea what I was going to say or do, once I got inside.
         My mom was in the kitchen at the sink getting a glass of water.
         "Michelle!" she said, looking very surprised to see me.
         "You were supposed to pick me up and hour ago," I said, pushing the door hard behind me.
         "Oh, Michelle," she said, smiling stupidly.
         "What's so funny?" I shouted and marched to my room.
         I let the trap door to the attic bedroom that I shared with my sister drop with a thud. My sister, asleep in her bed, on her side of the A-frame, stirred from the noise but didn't open her eyes. I stood frozen in place, watching, not daring to make another sound.

My throat tight, I exhaled, glad to not have woken or disturbed her dreaming, her long blond brown hair a mess over her pillow, her innocence. But I wanted to go to her and touch her cheek, to pull the blankets up to her chin and lay down beside her.

I went to my side of the room instead. 

Middle School Malaise

middle school aged MCG with friend Stephanie Ballard

        “You sure do move your arms a lot when you talk,” Mr. Roudell said, interrupting. I was telling him that Missy Baker had been tripped by a group of boys on the black top. She did not fall.

“Are you sure she didn't just fall?” he asked looking down at me, his

head blanking out the sun. “Missy falls a lot,” he continued.

         “No, I'm pretty sure she didn't,” I said, pointing at the boys who Mr. Roundell had stopped but didn't bother talking to. “She was running from the ball wall, and they were watching her, and he,” I said, waving my arms and pointing again, “Moved right in front of her and sort of put his foot out.”

“What are you Italian?” he said laughing as he said it.

         I could feel my face flush red. I forced myself to speak.

         “No, I'm not Italian; I'm Mexican,” I said.

I regretted those words as soon as they came out of my mouth.

         “Oh, yeah Mexican,” he said, smiling as he turned away to scan the yard.

         Speechless, I stood and stared at the black top, which spread out all around me in all directions, hard, and rough, and hot.

Everyone got to know Mr. Roundell right away because he was a yard duty teacher, tall, and strict, and really mean to certain students, but all the middle school grade teachers were noticeably meaner: Mr Roundell and his propaganda laden social studies lessons, Ms. Martz who never smiled even when we discussed her favorite books in English, and Mrs. Casserly who talked as much about her husband, who later dumped her, as she did multiplying and dividing fractions. Housed on the elementary school campus, the middle school classes were taught on a block schedule by teachers who seemed to believe it was their job to toughen us up for high school.

I had Mr. Roundell for homeroom in seventh grade where I noticed that he excelled at being cruel with a smile on his face.  While he managed to humiliate me a couple of more times before I graduated from Summerville Elementary, his attitude toward certain students and the movies he showed in class about evil communists hardened me to his tactics. Mrs. Casserly was strict too, and she was moody, but always a tad nicer to those who were already good in math. I wasn’t one of those students.

         Mrs. Casserly wore skirts to cover her wide hips, except on Fridays when she wore jeans and was always in a rush, always trying to fit the long math lesson into the little time she had. Bit she was never in too much of a hurry to tell us a cute story about Mr. Casserly and how their initials were AC/DC, electricity, not the rock band. AC for Anna Casserly and DC for David Casserly. She must have been a newlywed even though she didn't look like one because she talked about her husband a lot.

Early in seventh grade alone at my desk with a pencil and paper, being slow at multiplication facts was discouraging, but I at least understood the concept of multiplication. I couldn't keep up at all when we got to multiplying and dividing fractions and decimals. I could almost feel my brain shutting down. I tried paying very close attention to everything that she wrote on the board and raising my hand and asking questions though probably not enough. I tried calling Mrs. Casserly for help when the others were working problems, and she'd answer my questions in a whisper, as quickly as she could, in a rush to get back to the board to see who had come up with the right answer. She'd scrunch up her face when I asked the same question more than once or when I asked her to repeat something that she had just said. By the end of September, I was totally lost.

I had always been stronger in reading and writing, but elementary school math had been fun too. My third grade teacher Mrs. Shnauble had taught math using blocks, and puzzles, and boards with nails and rubber bands. Mrs. Shnauble had a loft in her classroom, and we were allowed to take the puzzles and boards with nails, or books, to the loft where it was comfortable.

         Mrs. Casserly tried checking in with me when she could once she noticed that I was getting behind, but eventually she stopped checking on me at all. I would sometimes find the courage to ask a question because I knew that's what I was supposed to do, and because I wondered if she noticed I was still in the room, but usually I just faced the board while she lectured and pretended that I was following along. After a while of fearing her chalked hand on her hip and furrowed brow, I stopped asking questions, and Mrs. Casserly went on no longer helping me, and I began thinking that I deserved to be ignored, and like Mr. Roundell had pointed out, that being Mexican had something to with it.