spiral down to nothing and attrition rates skyrocket. Word was out to steer clear of teaching as soon as Madeleine Sinclair’s predecessor passed his Senate confirmation.
So what’s to be done when there’s a demand but not a supply? What’s the procedure for that? For the Department of Education, backed by the muscle and money of the Fitter Family Campaign, there were two answers: finance and force. A carrot and a stick, to put it in simple terms.
As it turned out, the stick worked better.
Even with scholarships and stipends and promises of high salaries, pensions that would make a career navy admiral turn green with envy, it still wasn’t enough to fill college classrooms with prospective teachers.
So started the draft.
Mrs. Parks and Mrs. Flowers bark out another set of orders to the now-crowded room, and I wonder if they were on the committee that identified me as a potential educator and shunted me into the box I’ve been living in.
“I figure you for an English teacher, ma’am.” Ruby Jo says “figger,” not “figure.” It’s new to my ears, but endearing all the same.
“Nope. Biology and anatomy. You?”
“Chemistry.”
You’re kidding, I think, and as soon as the words are in my head, I regret them. They sound too judgmental, too needlessly surprised, too much like Malcolm. Instead, I say, “Organic or inorganic?”
“A little of both,” Ruby Jo tells me. “You think maybe we can sit together on the bus ride, ma’am?”
I take a look around the room. Every man and woman here seems miserable, like they’re about to be loaded onto a cattle car to a state penitentiary. Ruby Jo, though, she’s got a bit of spark.
“On one condition,” I say. “You stop calling me ‘ma’am’ and start calling me Elena. Deal?”
“Yes, ma’am,” she says, and her face opens into a broad smile that warms me like a summer sun.
THIRTY-FIVE
THEN:
“Maybe you should try talking to her,” Oma said. We were in the kitchen at my parents’ house, and I had just come home from school.
“Why?” I said. Today’s topic was the new girl in my third-grade class. She was small and dark and shy, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was Rosaria Delgado didn’t speak more than ten words of English. The problem was compounded when our teacher made us partners for a science project and I ended up tied for the lowest grade in the class. “I got a C because of her.”
“So, what? You’re going to make her feel even worse by treating her like a piece of old cheese? Leni, I am ashamed of you.”
I stood there, arms folded in a defiant nine-year-old snit, watching Oma smear butter on toast. She offered me a slice, and I turned up my nose, even though I wanted it.
The things we do for spite.
I never spoke to Rosaria again, and I made sure my friends didn’t. It was easier than I thought, making up stories about Rosaria Delgado’s family and where they lived. We sneered at her outfits and mimicked her accent. If our teacher put one of us in a group with her, we ignored her input and did things our way.
We did this from January until June. In September, Rosaria didn’t come back.
We’d won.
Oma didn’t seem to think so. “Here is a question, Liebchen,” she said. “What if she were your daughter?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Not at nine years old. So I made one up, just to make her think I wasn’t backing down. “My children are all going to be perfect.” And I stormed out of the kitchen with my best nine-year-old attitude, thinking, So there.
THIRTY-SIX
Here’s a thing I’ve learned:
Never trust any of those mapping apps.
It isn’t that the apps are wrong, but they don’t account for refueling stops, rest stops, unclogging-the-onboard-toilet stops, food stops, change-of-driver stops, or letting-off-the-passengers-whose-final-destination-is-Missouri stops. Nor do they foresee unexpected snow in the mountains, a tire blowout in southwestern Pennsylvania, or the roadwork that reduces I-70 to one slow-crawling single lane of rush hour traffic on the outskirts of Columbus,