The Constellations

Roy thought that

roy THougHT THaT Nathan Hale Elementary—a.k.a. Nathan Jail—smelled like all of Eric’s other schools. Maybe all schools, period. Kids, like dogs, might give off any odor at a given moment, but Roy was amazed by the combination of old textbooks, floor wax, finger paint, and cafeteria emissions that inevitably overpowered the array of things students stepped in, ran through, ate, drank, and produced by natural processes. Deb knocked on the open classroom door and impatiently waved Roy forward. Hands were shaken. Having forgotten most of the parent-teacher conference,Roy was surprised to see that Miss Birch—he knew her only as Eric knew her—stood close to six feet tall. She parted her hair with a surveyor’s perfection and tonight wore it in the kind of ponytail Roy associated with high school girls. They sat in chairs borrowed from the teacher’s lounge. “Try to ignore the holes from the cigarettes,” Miss Birch said. Deb laughed politely. Roy craved a smoke. Deb motioned to Miss Birch’s red sweatshirt. “You went to Wisconsin?” “The People’s Republic,”Miss Birch replied with a nervous laugh. “I’m an administrator at UIC,”Deb said.“Did you like Madison?” “Yes. But I only went for my Master’s, so I escaped full indoctrination .” Roy tried to imagine Miss Birch smoking grass or chanting chants.From the looks of her he guessed it more likely she’d spent Friday nights at the library and worked off her vegetarian meals worrying about the dean’s list. Deb folded her hands in her lap and from the summit of her rigid posture asked,“So how is Eric doing?” “Very well,” Miss Birch said.“As I told Mr. Conlon during parent -teacher conferences,”—she glanced at Roy,—“Eric is a bright, 36 The Constellations motivated student. Sometimes he’s too interested in what he wants to learn and not interested enough in what I want to teach him.” She stretched a gangly arm and took a worn paperback off her desk. “Please return this to him,” she said, handing Roy the library’s copy of Chariots of the Gods. “He was reading it during phonics today. Boys go through a flying saucer phase now. With my brothers it was dinosaurs.” “You take it in good humor,” Deb said, as she improved her posture even more. Roy thought, Please don’t eat the poor girl alive. Miss Birch turned more formal in response. “Reading I can handle. In my experience, bored children don’t usually choose books as an alternative.” She turned to Roy. “I have a question. Eric attended the Akhmatova School.What did you think of it?” As far as Roy knew, his wife sent Eric to Akhmatova because she had admired the teachers and administrators she met in her education classes. Since Cammy went to a special school, it made sense to send Eric to one aimed at children at the other end of the spectrum. Or that was Roy’s opinion—Jean would never admit to that kind of calculation,nor allow the suggestion Cammy could be anything less than the Leonardo da Vinci of the special needs set. Akhmatova’s rules required every parent to observe the class once. Roy had no idea what to make of it. The team of four teachers looked like the staff of a used record store—lots of denim and hair, no shortage of beads and ankhs, either. They ran around checking on groups of kids, at times herding a pod across the hall to the library, say, or into the corner of the room set up like a temple to arithmetic. During his visit Roy watched one of them plop down with a guitar and start strumming the chords to“Suzy Q.” That an educator would play such a dumb-ass song offended Roy far more than the intrusion of music into the school day.According to Eric, it was the most played song by far. This did not raise Roy’s opinion of the place. “It was unusual,” Roy answered. “Yes,” Miss Birch said, smiling. “My wife liked that the kids learned at their own pace.” Kevin Cunningham 37 “Did you agree?” “Eric seemed to get a lot out of it,” Roy said. He felt suddenly self-conscious of the sawdust on his shirt. His desire for a cigarette proceeded from craving to torment. “I didn...