She shakes her head.
I’m not surprised. Even if she wasn’t deteriorating from the inside out, it’s unlikely that she’d remember an incident from when we were in kindergarten. The letter would mean nothing to her, because she never came to see us there. Our kindergarten class was a pretty laid-back public school experience. A big chunk of the year was to be dedicated to the alphabet and mastering this crucial sequence. We soon learned that our kindergarten teacher had a very special, secret relationship to someone really, really important.
—
“Okay, everybody,” said Ms. Prescott, a pretty young blonde, during the second week of school. “This is a really big secret, and it’s super important that you don’t tell kids in other classrooms about this, because it would make them feel bad. But. Guess who I know?” A chorus of hushed and reverent “Who?”s greeted this question, and a couple of hands even went up, as though there might actually be a right answer to this ridiculous query. “One of my close friends is someone named…” She walked over to a closet in the corner of the classroom, ducked inside, and then bounced back out, exclaiming, “Elmo!”
This piece of information was greeted with near hysteria in our classroom, where it was obvious that everyone watched Sesame Street. Elmo was as close to a celebrity as it got for rural five-year-olds, and excited whispers circulated around the oval of squirmy kids when this announcement came. We could not believe our good luck.
In retrospect, I wonder at the injunction to secrecy. It didn’t strike us as weird, at the time, but maybe that’s because childhood is filled with so many of these strange entreaties against transparency. “Don’t tell your mother.” “Promise you won’t show Mom and Dad.” “Becky definitely can’t find out, okay?”
We soon learned that Elmo’s role in our classroom was to appear every Monday morning with the “weekly letter.” Apparently, he would spend all week chasing around the next week’s letter, and late on Sunday night, he would finally catch it and trap it in the closet at our classroom, waiting to be liberated by Ms. Prescott on Monday morning.
But. There was a catch. She needed help to bring out the letters, drag them out into the sunny space of our classroom. The implication was that the letters didn’t want to be seen, known, unveiled. It took the conjoined efforts of at least three people to midwife them into the class: Elmo, Ms. Prescott, and a classroom parent. This meant that every week, one of our parents would show up to help Ms. Prescott introduce that Monday’s letter. Meaning that one of our parents would eventually come to our classroom! Our circle was abuzz with excitement.
Letters were assigned randomly, so that no one became jealous or possessive. For example, it would have made sense to assign me A, for Ava. But our class also had an Adam and an Anthony, and they could just as plausibly have laid claim to that primary chunk of our alphabet. Zelda and I were assigned one letter because there were twenty-seven students in the class. Any guesses what letter that was?
Marlon, of course, was the one who brought us to school early one Monday morning in spring, as our kindergarten year was winding down. He wore a wild Hawaiian shirt and mismatched plaid trousers and a bizarre hat with earflaps, exactly the sort of clothes that appeal to five-year-olds. Marlon always knows his audience, and he arrived fully prepared to charm.
“Okay, kids. It’s Monday. Everybody know what that means?” Ms. Prescott said.
“Letter day!” we all hollered in frenzied anticipation. There is no explaining why this whole process was so much fun, but it was extremely titillating. The puzzle of that closed door, the jelly-kneed expectation of having some foreign body appear behind it, dragged there against its own volition, even if you knew what came next in that limited queue of letters. We could scarcely contain ourselves.
“That’s right!” Ms. Prescott cooed, rabble-rousing. “So, what letters have we done so far?” My hand shot into the air. “Ava?”
“Aybee?ceedee?eeeff?geeaitch?ayejaykay?ellemen?ohpeekewar?esstee?youvee?dubbleyou?exwyezee!” I expelled in a single breath.
“Almost! You’re getting ahead of yourself there a bit, though. That’s all the letters. What was the last letter we did?” A few hands poked up, Zelda’s included.
“Zelda?” Ms. Prescott pointed. I can only assume that she was giving us both a chance to perform in front of our parent, rather than intentionally fomenting sibling rivalry. But Zelda smiled slyly, with barely a glance at me.
“P. And before that O. And before that N.”
“That’s right!” Ms. Prescott congratulated her. Marlon beamed.
“So what’s next, guys?”
“Q!” someone shouted from the back.
“Hey, what are our rules? We raise our hands, right?” Our teacher sternly arched her eyebrows. “Let’s all say it together. What letter are we doing today?”
“Keewww!” we all responded.
“And today, we have a very special visitor.” Ms. Prescott looked fondly at my father with an expression that suggested he was indeed very special. “Ava and Zelda’s dad. And what’s your name?” she asked him, in the same tone she used to address us, then immediately blushed because she realized how ridiculous she sounded.
“My name is Marlon!” my father announced, batting not one eyelid. “And I’m here to get the letter Q on the hook!” He produced a collapsible fishing pole from his pocket, and we all squealed. This was new! Normally the parents just made a show of pulling the letters out of the closet while a profoundly unhelpful Elmo cheered them on. Fishing! We’d never fished for letters! Ms. Prescott looked amused and concerned; she must have been wondering if there was a hook on that line, and whether she was legally liable if Marlon accidentally snagged somebody’s lip or cheek.
“Well. Goodness. Let’s go to the closet, then,” she said, unwilling to be disagreeable in front of Marlon. We knew the drill, so we remained glued to the carpet while Ms. Prescott walked over to the door. She knocked once, then twice. “Elmo?” she called.
“Is that you, Ms. Prescott?” she answered herself in a decent ventriloquist version of Elmo. This may have been her single most important skill as a teacher.
“Yes! Do you have a letter for us today?”
“Why, yes, yes, I do!”
“I have a friend here to help us get it out. His name is Marlon, and he has a fishing pole!” Normally parents were introduced by their last names, a “Mr.” or “Mrs.” But my father had easily bypassed those formalities.
“Wow, a fishing pole! That sounds great.”
“Are you ready for us to open the door, Elmo?”
“You bet!”
Ms. Prescott theatrically flung the door open and leaned in, scooping up the Elmo puppet in a practiced move.