School started the next week. AJ was entering high school, which he considered momentous. And while I had a year of kindergarten behind me, it had been at a private Montessori school, so this would be my first year at the neighborhood school, Bryant Woods Elementary. First grade was the real deal, I decided, the time when the serious business of learning would begin.
Better still, our teacher was brand-new and beautiful, with a cloud of permed hair and peasant-inspired clothing—a loose blouse worn belted, a flowing skirt, high-heeled boots. The moment I saw her, I decided I had to be nothing less than teacher’s pet, even if I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant. I wanted to bring her home, introduce her to my father, make her my mother. I decided all those things before we had finished saying the Pledge of Allegiance. With a six-year-old’s logic, I reasoned that the way to ingratiate myself with Miss Gordon was to show her I was beyond first grade, on a par with her, perhaps better suited to be her assistant. As she began to lead us through the alphabet, I sighed loudly and said to no one in particular. “This old thing.”
“What was that?” Miss Gordon asked. She didn’t look happy to have been interrupted, so I didn’t speak up. The boy across the aisle, Randy Nairn, spoke for me.
“She said, ‘This old thing.’” He added a sneer to my tone that I swear wasn’t there, spoke in a high voice nothing like mine, screwed up his face in a prissy moue. The class laughed. Miss Gordon didn’t.
“Louise Brant? Is that your name?”
“Luisa, but I go by Lu.”
“Well, Luisa”—oh, the refusal to use my nickname was hurtful, a rejection of my friendship—“if you’re already bored, we can see if you’re ready to do second-grade class work. In fact, maybe I could take you to Mrs. Jackson’s class right now, just throw you in. Sink or swim.”
I sensed a setup. Although I could read, I understood there was more to school than reading. What I didn’t understand was Miss Gordon’s instinctive dislike, her hostility. Adults always took a shine to me. Adults liked me better than kids did. I was smart. I behaved. I could hold my own in a conversation. And when they found out I was the daughter of Andrew Brant, most adults beamed at me, even Republicans. There was talk, after the trial, that my father could be state’s attorney general if he wanted, maybe even a congressman or a senator. I wondered if Miss Gordon knew who my father was, if there was a way I could drop the information casually.
“I’m fine here, ma’am.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“What?”
“That ‘ma’am’ sounded very sarcastic, Luisa. You are to call me Miss Gordon.”
“Yes, ma—yes, Miss Gordon.” The ma’am was Teensy’s fault. It was as if everyone in my life had set me up to fail—AJ, by teaching me to read, my father for encouraging the habit, Teensy for insisting on manners. Didn’t anyone in my family know how the real world worked?
Things never got better that year. They didn’t get worse, but they never got better. Even my impeccable classwork did not endear me to Miss Gordon. And when it came to creative work—drawing pictures, using our new words to make simple poems—she was particularly harsh with me. My neat, bland drawings were never placed in the center of the blackboard display. She hated my brown cats and black dogs, my blue skies and yellow suns. She even seemed to dislike my precise rhymes, while she heaped praise on students whose words didn’t really go together, insisting they had imagination. She stretched out her arms as she stretched out the syllables of that word—EH-MAH-GI-NAY-SHUN! Miss Gordon valued creativity above everything.
Later that fall, when my father went to parent-teacher night, he came home and sat on the edge of my bed to report back, at my insistence. I had told him I wanted to know exactly what Miss Gordon thought of me, word for word. To my father’s credit, he agreed to honor this request, although he warned me it might hurt. I imagined a Band-Aid being ripped from my skin. I never cried when that happened. I could handle words.
“I’ll be okay,” I assured him.
He sighed and began his summation.
He had been told that Miss Gordon was frustrated by my hostility toward creative work. I lacked, yes, EH-MAH-GI-NAY-SHUN. Oh, I could do any task that was based on studying and having facts at hand. In the world of right answers, I was 100 percent. But asked to draw a picture or tell a story, I pestered Miss Gordon with endless questions about the “rules.” Did there have to be a person in the story? A tree? Must it have a happy ending? How many words? What do I need to get an A?
“Why is it so hard for you to imagine things, Lu? You read lots of stories.”
“I can imagine things fine,” I said. “But I want to make sure I get the best grades.”
“Why? I’ve never told you that I cared about your grades. All I ask is that you do your best.”
“Yes, being the best is important. Winning is important.”