Chapter 2
The bursts of energy that pulsed through the halls on the opening day of school kick started the old buildings like jumper cables that were fed by a nuclear power plant. Everywhere, young girls were laughing in nervous, giggly groups. The nuns were radiantly smiling and hugging their returning charges. Ron felt eyes on him at every moment. There was no sense in trying to blend in. How could be blend in? He was the only male in the school. The bell sent people scattering like careening bits of mercury. Ron stood in back of his podium. His hands were sweating. His collar was tight. He wanted a cigarette. The girls sitting in front of him duly rose at the sound of Sister Irene’s voice. “Ladies, welcome back to school. Your teachers and I have been anxiously awaiting your return. Let us pray for the health of our families, for the souls of those who have walked these halls before us and for our continued dedication to the shaping of our lives and the lives around us. Let us pray. We ask our Heavenly Father and the Blessed Virgin for guidance” Everyone blessed themselves. Ron remembered how to do it. He felt his jaw twitch as he looked down and mumbled his way through the Lord’s Prayer, and then a Hail Mary, and then a Glory Be. He heard the quizzical cacophony as some of his students prayed in rattling Spanish. Then Sister Irene’s voice said, “When you have completed your homeroom paperwork, please send attendance sheets to the main office. For today and today only, we will delay that start of classes until we have received all of the homeroom sheets.”
His first class was 9th grade reading. There were twenty-eight students in the class and twenty-nine chairs. Ron Tuck smiled his dimpled grin as they entered the room. They looked down shyly when they saw him smile at them and some of them squirmed in their chairs like they had to go to the bathroom. The faces were white and brown and black and combinations of all of those. It did not take Ron long to discover that in this Reading class, that was using a 9th grade literature book, only about one half of the students knew enough English to carry on a conversation. Mostly, they just spoke Spanish. He looked down at the copious notes that he had prepared on the first there stories and realized that they were absolutely of no use to him. Then his brain began to whirl with a high speed that was as strange as it was exhilarating. “Ok, who here can understand every word that I’m saying?” More than half the hands shot straight up proudly waving in the air. “Great,” said Ron smiling and making fleeting eye contact with each and every one of them. “Now how many of you would be able to understand the same words if they were written in a book in English?” About half of the hands sadly lowered. The girls, looking around to see who was still among the chosen, gave a couple of eye rolls at those who still had their hands up in the air but were lying. Ron had it in his head now. “Those of you with your hands up, please stand along the back of the classroom.”
A tall girl with very dark hair that was swept back into a shoulder length tangle had a look of intensity on her face that drew Ron to her.
“You are?”
“Elena.”
“Do you speak Spanish, Elena?”
Everyone in the class laughed and Elena’s dark eyes were dancing and she laughed with them. “We all speak Spanish, Mr. Tuck.”
Ron looked at her evenly. “I don’t. Am I the only one here that doesn’t speak Spanish?”
Six or seven hands went into the air. Ron saw that those girls did not have Hispanic features. “So Elena, what do you think we should do to help everybody?
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Elena.
Ron looked at them and said. “We are going to break some rules today. First of all I want you to sit with your friends and not in the alphabetical order that I’ve put you in.” He intoned. “That wasn’t real bright of me was it?” The girls laughed cause of the way that he said it, and because of the dramatic look of self loathing that comically swept across his face when he said it, and because all of the teachers in the school always put them in alphabetical order. “Here are the new rules. You sit with your friends and if you have more than one friend you sit with the one that speaks the least amount of English. If you haven’t any friends that don’t speak English, you tell me and I will assign you to someone.”
“Do we have to sit with someone who doesn’t speak English,” said a freckled girl with red hair and glasses. “I mean suppose we don’t want to?”
Ron felt an instant tension in the room. Spanish words from the back that he couldn’t understand and the sharp turn of heads. Ron walked towards the girl smiling, and then with a wink of his eye and a flash of his grin that he settled just on her, he said very softly, “I need you to help me. Wouldn’t you like to help me?” He saw the girl begin to grin and heard some laughter in the room.
One of the Spanish girls who had a silver streak running through her dark hair said, “I’ll bet she would help you do anything.”
Mocking laughter bounced off the walls of the class. The red haired girl blushed furiously. Ron went back to the podium. “Here’s the thing. It’s not good to be dumb. Nobody wants to be thought of as dumb. Knowing language is a way to not appear to be dumb. Language is a way that can help you get what you want. That’s my job, to help you get what you want.”
He said it so earnestly and looked right into the eyes when he said it. They couldn’t help but believe him.
The class was over just as Ron was getting comfortable with his students. “I need more time,” he said to himself as he watched them file out. But then there was another group who was filing in and it started all over and Ron learned that what he’d just done could be done more smoothly the second time.
The reactions weren’t exactly the same, but the gist of it was, and by lunchtime he had discovered the power of his smile with them. It was a tool. It was an ally. He could buy time with it. He could change the mood of everyone in the room with it. Ron thought that maybe it was too much power to have but he liked it and if he didn’t misuse it, what was the harm?
His schedule said that he had lunch now. He looked up at the clock. Lunch? It was 10:40 in the morning and he had lunch?
As he walked up the wide worn wooden staircase, several girls hurried passed him. None of them failed to look at him. Ron thought that he would have to start ignoring the looks.
Making his way to the room marked faculty lunchroom, Ron had no idea of what to expect. All he really hoped for was an ashtray and a place to get some coffee. Both were available. The Mr. Coffee pot was half-filled and Ron selected one of the freshly washed mugs that were turned upside down on a linen napkin that was spread over a small countertop. The nuns did not use this room; they went back to the convent or stayed in their classrooms during lunch. This was for lay faculty. Ron grinned thinking he was one of the lays.
A round table that comfortably seated six or could squeeze in eight was covered with a clean plastic tablecloth. Ron took his coffee and slid in next to a washed out bleached blonde who sat curled over her coffee over her coffee cup puffing vigorously on a cigarette. She said, “I’m Doris, we met briefly yesterday before the penguins carried you off.”
Nodding, Ron said, “Hi how ya doin?”
“I’m wondering if they’ve used deodorant since June.”
Ron didn’t know what to answer to that and so he said nothing and lit a cigarette. Doris waited until two more teachers came into the room before she repeated her quip about body odor.
“You just have to desensitize your nose again Doris,” said Marsha, a husky brunette with dark plastic rimmed glasses.
“The first place I’m headed when I get out of here is the shower,” said Doris.
Ron wished that she would go now. Then he saw Marsha looking over at him and his coffee. She said coldly without introducing herself, “The coffee club is 3 dollars a week and you are responsible to bring and wash your own cup. Ron nodded and then saw that Marsha was still staring at his coffee mug. He looked down at it too and then back up into her fleshy face.
“Did I use yours?”
“You used somebody’s”
“That was a mistake,” he said quickly getting up and pouring the remainder of the cup into the sink and rinsing out the mug. It was a cursory sloshing of water that did not by either Doris or Marsha’s standards constitute a wash, but he was oblivious to them and set the mug, still dripping back on the once fresh linen. Then he walked out the door.
“Where did she get him? said Marsha.
“With what they pay here, what do you expect?” answered Doris.
Ron’s next class was senior English and this was a different story altogether. The twenty two girls who came into the room wore uniforms that were tight through their hips and across their breasts. They were last year’s uniforms and the girls hated them except that they could hike the skirts up and take them in so that their breasts seemed to be bursting to get out and bounce and sway and be free. They looked at Ron differently too. They had all seen him before class; they had made sure of that. This was the guy that the frosh girls, some of whom were their younger sisters and cousins, were talking about, were looking dreamy and goo-goo eyed about. But these girls were different. They drove. They had real boyfriends. Some worried monthly about becoming pregnant. Some had learned that there were less dangerous ways to keep their boyfriends happy and satisfied. They were organized.
When he stood in front of them and began calling the roll, their looks were so obvious and powerful that Ron retreated back behind his podium, anything to give himself a little distance between them and him. This was senior English and that meant English literature. After they’d each filled out their cards and gotten their books and said their names, Ron looked at them for a long moment and then said, “Page 6, Beowulf. Here’s the question. What’s a monster?” He looked up at them from the text. They looked down. He could play too and he knew how to look into a girl’s face just long enough to have the tingle of his eyes and smile begin to work on her. Then he looked up and said again, “What makes someone or something a monster?”
“Ask my stepfather, said Andrea who wasn’t buying his act. She’d stop him right in his tracks with the first thing that she said. But Ron seemed oblivious to the overtones of her comment.
He continued, “Is a monster born a monster? Do you know monsters? Are any of you monsters?” Then he began to pace as if he was in deep thought. He walked up and down the aisles, checking to make sure that they all had the books that the students were required to purchase every year, new or used. Most of the girls had used ones that came with at least one year’s worth of notes and, if you were lucky, a copy of most of the tests. But there was nothing written in any of the margins that was going to help them. Ron said, “Tonight start reading Beowulf, but for now, he strode quickly to side table where the stack of paper that he’d been given yesterday was waiting. “Write to me about what you know about monsters.”
“You mean like King Kong or Godzilla?”
“Or the Creature from the Black Lagoon,” said Ron, with a reference that none of them got. I’ll tell you story,” said Ron. “When I was a kid growing up down on Broadway,” he started lining up his street credits, “we thought that there were monsters that lived in the empty storage bins in the basement. And we used to dare each other to go down there without turning on the lights. Do you think that there were real monsters down there or were