I originally wrote this story in 2011 in a graduate writing workshop. The professor gave us a one-word prompt, “math,” which was that year’s prompt for the Atlanta version of Creative Loafing’s fiction contest. I didn’t win, nor did I know much about math (other than geometry), but I loved sneaking that prompt into this semi-autobiographical account of a high school teacher’s influence on me.
My high school friends and family have been warned that story is, well, a story. All names have been changed; the primary character, Mrs. Balsham, is truly an amalgamation of several (real) teachers.
I’m sharing this recording now, because just this week, a beloved history teacher from this era died. Upon getting the email from our tightly-knit school, I heard immediately from three friends: “Did you see the news about Ms. Jarvis?”
Our varied memories of her classroom flooded our text threads. There’s so much more to say about her, but in the meantime, this story is for Martha Jarvis, the best of the many real Myrna Balshams.
If you’d rather read than listen, here it is!
Myrna Balsham taught me tenth-grade chemistry, or least she tried. It wasn’t so much her failure as my own – balancing an equation might as well have been performing colorectal surgery on myself as far as my math prowess was concerned, both painful and impossible. Mrs. Ball Scum, as we called her, though she did not deserve it, wasn’t even really a teacher. I mean, she was hired to teach, but other than Xeroxing the ready-made dittos that comprised her teachers’ edition of our textbook, she failed to fulfill her job description. Her expertise was theological rather than scientific. She had a Master’s degree in Anglican Studies from the nearby seminary and was a last-minute fill-in for the revered chemistry teacher Miss Terwilliger, who gave birth to twins over the summer. Later we learned that the Headmaster knew Ms. Balsham because they both had children in the third grade at our K-12 prep school, and over cocktails at a parent function, he promised her the job. Apparently, she had taken enough college Chemistry to squeak by, but she had never held down a classroom of her own.
We sensed that, but we didn’t care. After all, we were tenth-grade boys, really only interested in the chemistry that made our dicks swell, stuff we’d learned about in Family Life taught by the sumptuous, doe-eyed Eleanor Holden. But that was biology, which is not chemistry, and Eleanor Holden was not at all Myrna Balsham. Ms. Balsham was of indeterminate age, wore a Celtic cross over her shapeless dresses every day, but said “Goddamn” once when trying to explain Avogadro’s number. She was easy to sidetrack, probably her best trait. I used her distractibility to win her over to me. Being in her good graces, I thought, would invoke pity and she would pass me.
Besides, I was more a Humanities guy. I preferred the dark, cool art history lecture room to the over-lit, cold chemistry lab. I liked the coziness of the history classroom with its posters of Mayan temples and various coats of arms hanging on the wall. Even the Geometry classroom was even OK with its colorful and complex double-helix statue, and polygons made of fluorescent flexible straws suspended from the ceiling by fishing line.
Ms. Balsham’s only room decoration, apart from the periodic table she’d inherited, was a hand-drawn rendering of her imaginary pet, Fluffy the Alligator, whom she consulted from time to time. Under the alligator’s likeness in faded magic marker was the seemingly rhetorical question, “What would Fluffy say?” He loomed over us from his perch between the chalkboard and clock at the front of the room, unavoidable.
“Fluffy’s getting angry, might chomp on you,” Ms. Balsham would say in an odd babylike voice when we were misbehaving or off topic. “Fluffy’s hungry!”
We knew Ms. Balsham meant business when Fluffy’s name was invoked. During tests and quizzes I stared at his single eye, drawn in profile, like some escaped Egyptian hieroglyph. And while he seemed to stare back, he certainly never gave me any answers.
One exam was so excruciating I finally raised my hand and asked, “Is this what they do in Hell all day?” Ms. Balsham gave me a detention, but later told me she was glad I had finally cracked a joke.
Ms. Balsham gave us answers to questions we were not asking, like the time she went off about credit cards as the root of all evil. She taught us how long it would take to pay off X amount of debt at Y% APR. And one morning after almost getting a speeding ticket on her way to school, she taught us another life lesson: to ask the cop when the last time he had his radar gun calibrated. She got her out of that ticket, but that trick never worked for me. One time when I was pulled over, the cop laughed at me for simply asking.
I got to know Ms. Balsham even better the following year. Short on staff, the school kept Ms. Balsham on as a roving substitute, and, I liked her, despite my previous year’s C average in Chemistry, so I joined her after-school activity, the Bachelor’s Survival Club. It was geared toward teaching us “boys to be gentlemen,” as she said. We learned to sew buttons, to cook, to iron shirts. She taught us proper etiquette in asking a girl to dance. She taught us how to tie a double-Windsor knot, for some of us were still wearing clip-ons on chapel days and it was obvious.
“It’s more sophisticated, looks manly and substantial,” she said of the Windsor. “Clip-ons are for children, and children are not gentlemen.”
She must have known that some of us, like myself, didn’t have fathers around to teach us such things, that our mothers were too busy. She must have even speculated that others of us would never marry or have a steady girlfriend or even boyfriend, so we would need to be self-sufficient.
“I don’t want you living on Ramen noodles, either in college or in your bachelorhood,” she told us. “One day your mothers won’t be there to feed you anymore, and I won’t be here to teach you these things.”
She was right. One afternoon at the end of my junior year, Ms. Balsham turned left onto a busy street and was hit by a pick-up. The rescuers used the jaws of life to pry open her mangled car door and pull her out, but she was already unconscious, never to wake up. We got the news the next morning in a special convocation. When it was over I went to the Chemistry lab and instinctively took Fluffy off the wall.
Myrna had an effect on me that went beyond getting me to iron and tie the perfect tie. After college, a bit listless, I thought I wanted to be a teacher, to show the world to someone else, to stray off topic and to be remembered.
After graduation I found what I thought would be an ideal job teaching advanced placement Art History. I’d majored in it in college and even had an internship at the Corcoran in Washington. That was enough expertise for a private school to hire me. Surely a class of this caliber would only draw the students most devoted to the Humanities. What it attracted, though, were grade-grubbing overachievers who didn’t care about Giotto’s frescoes, or Raphael’s chiaroscuro or the seemingly magical vanishing lines of Velasquez’ “Las Meninas.” After I rambled one morning about postmodern ennui, one student asked, “So, is this is on the AP Exam?”
“Not necessarily, but it’s stuck in your head no matter what, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” I retorted.
I just wanted them to love me, and it was clear that they didn’t.
“Someone’s crabby,” she said.
Since the school wouldn’t let me form a bachelor’s club in a co-ed environment, I coached Knowledge Bowl instead. It was worse than the classroom. It was just a bunch of fact-cramming know-it-alls with buzzers in their hands. I tried to distract them with gossip from the teachers’ lounge, but that didn’t interest them. They wanted to know facts and they wanted to know them now. I lasted two years in that job. During my last week as I packed up my personal belongings from the Art History classroom, I found a crumpled poster in my desk drawer. It was Fluffy the Alligator looking a little worse for the wear but still intact, his marker outline faded even more with time. I had forgotten he was in that drawer, having decided early on in my teaching career not to hang him up for fear of being ridiculed. But I was glad to see him, and I wondered what he thought of me now. The thought flickered a moment and I got interrupted and stuffed him into a cardboard box along with my slides and lesson plans.
What would Fluffy say to me now? I hear his voice mixed with Myrna’s: “Fluffy disappointed. You not live up to self. You only go for glory. Should be ashamed. Fluffy pissed, Fluffy hurt.”
Fluffy was right. Fluffy was always mad at me, always disappointed.
I didn’t know how to operate without letting him – or Myrna – down. I switched schools, thinking that would help. I taught a regular level Ages of Humanity class, thinking the students would be more distractible, more human. They laughed at the fat, busty Venus of Willendorf, comparing the busty statue to their religion teacher. It was all I could do to suppress a grin. My new, funnier students could also not get over the Mayan ritual of foreskin piercing. I egged them on, showing them an Egyptian fertility god’s huge genitals and Courbet’s “Origin of Life” – one hairy crotch shot. I never cared what the connection to the curriculum was; I just wanted my students to laugh. Fluffy continued to judge me, and I started to judge myself. I was no gentleman.
After two more years in the classroom, I finally gave up teaching and got a job in corporate America. All I was qualified for was an entry-level job at a media conglomerate’s public policy office in Washington, D.C. I was a glorified temp. I hand-delivered movie passes and gift baskets to the Senate and House office buildings on Capitol Hill – (to thank or to bribe I’m not 100% sure). I handled our boss’s day-to-day affairs when his secretary was on vacation. That meant anything from answering his phone to photographing the items on his desk when they re-carpeted his office so every item could be returned to its precise location. God knows he couldn’t handle his fake Brancusi paperweight one inch out of place. I arranged for Housekeeping to clean his Frankfurt hotel room – despite not knowing the German or Turkish of the desk and Housekeeping staff. Why couldn’t he just push the maid-shaped button on his phone like everybody else?
More importantly, what the hell was I doing? I was used to being in charge, not to being somebody’s subordinate officer. I hated typing his daughter’s application to Bard. I resented faxing his reservation for a bike trip through Burgundy. I loathed renewing his subscriptions via telephone for Der Spiegel and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Why was he reading these anyway?
I turned to Fluffy, now poised on my office wall, and asked what to do.
All I got was a one-eyed, silent stare.
I kept stumbling through that job, slowly climbing the ranks to that of Assistant Director, complete with an office and a placard on my door. I loved no longer being camped out at the reception desk with a vapid young man who didn’t know a Rembrandt from a Warhol. He once asked me to proofread a letter he’d written. It was so poorly constructed, I wondered if a monkey or baby – one of those instances you hear about – had managed to bang the letter out through some miracle. I could feel myself letting down my elite education more and more by the day. Myrna would have rolled in her grave, had we not traveled to her hometown and sprinkled her ashes in the Susquehanna.
I recently thought back to that tenth-grade year in Chemistry when we were taught the concept of stoichiometry. I didn’t fully understand what it meant at the time, but I got the gist: It had to do with measuring the proportion of reactants and products within a chemical reaction. The concept has stuck with me. How much of Myrna is in me now? Did I stray too far from her, somehow burning her off into vapor? Had she lived, would I have stayed in touch with her, would she have continued to mold me? I thought of what she said to me one Wednesday in tenth grade when I played Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” on the piano in chapel. I got stuck on a certain phrase, going around in circles, and couldn’t move beyond it for at least three interminable minutes. I finally gave up, went to the microphone by the altar and pronounced, “Well, that was only supposed to take a minute. I’ll leave you in peace now.”
Relieved by the joke at my own failure, the room guffawed. Myrna found me after the service and said, “Well done. Sometimes you just have to give in and laugh at yourself.”
I’m still at that corporate job. I keep moving up the euphemistic ladder and make a pretty decent living at doing things I hate, things I don’t believe in. Sometimes I don’t even understand the language that comes out of my own mouth – “plugging the analog hole,” “corporate governance and its relationship to corporate sustainability.” It’s a far cry from the cave paintings at Lascaux or the Duomo in Milan or Picasso’s Blue Period. Those are the things that sustain me. Plugging the analog hole does not.
Perhaps Myrna knew the difference between vocation and avocation, too. After all, she could have become a priest, but she chose us instead.
We were her ministry.
Instead of sticking with a career I despise, I should have gone back to school to become a curator or an art historian or a better person.
But I didn’t.
Fluffy mad.
Honor Roll