All my fears are absent in Tom. He’s not afraid to break bones, talk to girls, or swear. He’s thirteen now, and I can feel him riding away from me, disappearing down the road, the reflector on the back of his ten-speed glinting in the sun. Very soon—at least two years before he’s licensed to drive—he’ll take Dad’s car for an occasional, illicit spin around South Brook. It’s the only four-wheeled conveyance available to him, because Mom—after driving Tom to the hospital, where his arm is put in a cast—makes the skateboard disappear. It simply vanishes, like Jimmy Hoffa or Patty Hearst or the kidnapped Italian prime minister Aldo Moro.
Speaking of whom, I bring a note home from my seventh-grade teacher, Mr. Berglund, that Mom shows to Dad, who reads it first in disbelief, then in apoplexy. Mr. Berglund, Dad informs me, says I’m struggling in our weekly class discussions of current events. The next day, for the first time in his life, Dad pays a visit to one of my teachers, driving to Nativity instead of 3M to ask Mr. Berglund how this can possibly be. “Steve reads the newspaper every day, cover to cover,” he says, in a conversation he’ll recount to me years later. “He wants to be a newspaper writer.”
Mr. Berglund says I don’t appear engaged at all in the weekly oral quizzes about the news and that furthermore…
“What are these quizzes about?” Dad says.
Mr. Berglund cites the new Susan B. Anthony coin, the death of Pope Paul VI…
“He’s bored,” Dad says. “This stuff is too easy. Ask him about Rhodesia. Or the Camp David Accords.”
“Those are not boring?” Mr. Berglund says, not without justification. “Most of our seventh-graders…”
“Ask him about Jonestown,” Dad says. “Ask him…”
“I hardly think the Jonestown Massacre is appropriate…”
“Try it,” Dad says. “Please.”
For the rest of the year I will get a separate quiz on current events, except on those days when we have a substitute teacher, when instead we will take the day off to watch filmstrips and devise diabolical new ways to torment the sub. A few of the girls in the front of the class quietly seethe as the boys in the back plot their schemes against the new teacher, but those girls also inadvertently act as a human screen. So when Ricky Furness asks a question and the teacher turns to the board to write the answer, Ricky climbs out the classroom window, walks back into the school through the front door, and then—in full view of the sub now—walks into our classroom, which he never walked out of, as the bewildered teacher wonders how this Houdini of classroom cutups managed to do what he just did.
One morning, to stifled applause, Sister Roseanne informs our class that we’ve required, at the last minute, a substitute teacher who shall arrive here shortly. As she steps out of the classroom, we sit at our desks, trembling with anticipation, plotting ever-crueler practical jokes, which I secretly want no part of even though I usually play along with them. These pranks invariably involve thumbtacks and spitballs and wholesale seat swaps every time the teacher’s back is to the class, a plot the boys are hatching in the cloakroom when Sister Roseanne returns from the hallway and we all jump back into our desk chairs.
“Your teacher is here,” the principal informs us, sweeping open the door to the hallway. “Class, say hello to Mrs. Rushin.”
The world goes silent around me. I have the sensation of being underwater, of drowning, of seeing everyone around me without being able to speak or hear or breathe. Every classmate has swiveled his or her head toward mine. A few of them are pointing at me, and when I finally gasp for breath and can hear again—it’s as if I’ve resurfaced after sixty seconds—the first sound is Kurt Mason saying “Our sub is your mommy!”
“Mister…” Mom scans the seating chart on Mr. Berglund’s desk. “Mister Mason. I’m sure if your mommy were teaching today, you would show her the proper respect and see to it that your friends did the very same. Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, Mrs. Rushin.”
“You will raise your hand if you have anything else to say, is that understood?”
“Yes, Mrs. Rushin.”
“That goes for all of you,” she says. “Very well, then. Let’s get started. Open your math textbooks to page forty-seven…”
Every textbook, wrapped in brown grocery-sack paper from Red Owl or Penny’s Supermarket, is dutifully opened. As the morning wears on, Mom demonstrates a mastery of mathematics and American history and literature that I’d only ever seen her exhibit in the form of balancing a checkbook or reading another John F. Kennedy biography or foisting her threadbare childhood copy of Jane Eyre on me. She also demonstrates a firm grasp of classroom discipline. I don’t relax, exactly, and I certainly don’t raise my hand once, not least because I don’t want to reveal the growing sweat stains beneath my flagrant armpits.
But I do glimpse her previous life, and her alternate life, the one she might have had teaching instead of raising five children, fighting the daily tsunami of laundry. (Is this why they call it Tide?) Mrs. Rushin, I realize, has kept one redhead and four shitheads in line while Mr. Rushin is in Tokyo for two weeks at a time eating spareribs at the Tony Roma’s in Shinjuku. When she has to, she rules our house with an iron fist, gloved in yellow latex, clutching a wooden yardstick from Lattof Chevrolet. From the opening seconds of class, as she chalks her name onto the board in that impeccable Palmer hand, it is clear to my classmates that nobody at Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary—twenty years after Mrs. Rushin last taught full-time in Cincinnati—will be writing “Pussy” on her blackboard.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she asks me back home when I’ve gotten off the school bus, unable to bring myself to ride home with the teacher.
“Don’t ever do it again,” I say.
“Why, were you embarrassed?”
“Obviously,” I said.
“Of your own mother?”
Sigh.
“I’m just teasing,” she says. “Of course you were embarrassed. Come here.” She removes a Kleenex from her purse and wipes an Oreo crumb from the corner of my mouth. And instead of resisting, as I usually do these days, I let her do it.