Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,33

locker. None of this is directly relevant to the story of how the unlikely quartet of myself, Chris DeMatteis, Frankie Caldwell, and the strange and disturbed Mandy Blemm were brought by circumstance to coalesce into what became known more informally as The 4, except perhaps for the fact that Art and Civics were the only two classes for which we left our homeroom. Both of these classes used special facilities and materials, so both had their own quarters and specially trained teachers, and the pupils came to them from their respective homerooms at specified periods. This was, in our case, second period. The single-file line in which we proceeded from homeroom to Mrs. Barrie’s and Mrs. Roseman’s respective Art and Civics rooms was silent, alphabetical, and closely supervised. The very late ’50s and early ’60s were not a time of lax discipline or disorder, which made what occurred in Civics on the day in question all the more traumatic, and caused several of the class’s children (one of whom was Terence Velan, who was perhaps somewhat effete for a boy of that era, and sometimes wore sandals and leather shorts, but was extremely good at soccer, and had a father who was a hydraulic engineer from West Germany who had attained American citizenship, and could also roll his eyelids up in such a way as to disclose the mucous membranes of their insides and then walk around the playground like that, which lent him a certain cachet) to transfer out of Hayes Primary for good, as even just being back in the building caused traumatic, perseverative memories and emotions.

Only much later would I understand that the incident at the chalkboard in Civics was likely to be the most dramatic and exciting event I would ever be involved in in my life. As with the case of my father, I think that I am ultimately grateful not to have been aware of this at the time.

MY SEAT WAS NOW, TO WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN MRS. ROSEMAN’S CONSIDERABLE CHAGRIN, NEXT TO THE WINDOW.

Mrs. Roseman’s Civics classroom, which had portraits of all 34 U.S. presidents evenly spaced around all four walls just below the ceiling, as well as pulldown relief maps of the thirteen original colonies, the Union and Confederate states circa 1861, and the present United States, including the Hawaiian islands, and steel cabinets filled with additional resources of all kinds, mainly contained a large metal teacher’s desk and black slate chalkboard at the front of the room, and 30 total bolted desks and chairs in which we, Miss Vlastos’s 4th grade homeroom class, were alphabetically arrayed in six rows of five pupils each. Mr. Johnson being a sub, we had amused ourselves by altering Mrs. Roseman’s normal seating chart and reversing our assigned rows’ east-west placement in the classroom, placing Rosemary Ahearn and Emily-Ann Barr in the first desks of the row nearest the west wall’s coathooks (which were always empty, as Mrs. Roseman’s Civics classroom was not anybody’s homeroom) and classroom door, and the latter of the Swearingen twins at the front of the easternmost row, next to the first of the east wall’s two large windows, whose heavy shades could be lowered for filmstrips and the occasional historical film. I was in the second to last desk in the easternmost row, which was a logistical error that Mrs. Roseman would never have allowed, as I was classified as unsatisfactory in Listening Skills as well as its associated category, Following Directions, and every full-time teacher in the first several grades at R. B. Hayes knew that I was a pupil whose assigned seat should be as far away from windows and other sources of possible distraction as possible. All of the school building’s windows had a reticulate wire mesh built directly into the glass in order to make the window harder to break with an errant dodgeball or vandal’s hurled stone. Also, the pupil to my immediate left in the next row in the ersatz arrangement was Sanjay Rabindranath, who studied maniacally at all times, and also had exemplary cursive, and was perhaps the single best pupil to sit next to during tests in all of R. B. Hayes. The wire mesh, which divided the window into 84 small squares with an additional row of 12 slender rectangles where the first vertical line of mesh nearly abutted the window’s right border, was designed in part to make the windows less diverting and to minimize the chances that a pupil could