4
THE SCHOOL was an old one. I had begun attending it in kindergarten, and for a long time I had thought that the people who had gone to the school years ago must have been much bigger at my age than I was or than any of my friends were. Everything in the school seemed taller, wider, higher, or heavier than necessary. My friends and I struggled to climb the stairs, stood on our tiptoes to use the water fountains or the urinals, sat on the sinks to look into the mirrors. I had grown accustomed to seeing the building as too big and the boys and girls as too small.
When I opened the door to Mrs. Graham’s room, I was struck at once by the fact that the boys and girls fitted their desks. Their elbows rested on the desktops, and their feet reached the floor. The fourth grade, I could see, was what the school was about. When you reached the fourth grade, you would fit. I wasn’t going to fit, and everyone would know it as soon as I sat down.
Mrs. Graham was standing beside her desk. She had a book in her hand, a book with a navy-blue binding, an arithmetic book that I would soon come to regard with a deep, quiet, enduring hatred.
On Mrs. Graham’s desk was a large vase made of milk glass, and in this vase were flowers, lots of flowers. I don’t remember what kind of flowers, but there were always flowers in the vase, sometimes so many flowers that, if Mrs. Graham sat at her desk, I couldn’t see her at all from my seat at the back of the room.
“Peter!” cried Mrs. Graham. There was so much pleasure in her voice that I felt at once that I must know her, not merely that I must have met her, but that I must have known her for a long time, that somehow circumstances had separated us, and now fate had at last brought us together again, to our surprise and delight. I was immediately as happy to see her as she seemed to be to see me.
“Hi!” I said, gleefully. She closed her book emphatically and tossed it toward her desk. It struck the vase, which tipped and rocked, and looked as if it might fall to the floor, but a boy in the front row leaped from his seat and steadied it. Before he sat down, he shook his head a couple of times and smiled indulgently. Mrs. Graham never noticed any of this, since all her attention was focused on me.
She was an enormous woman. She was not fat; she was just constructed according to a giant set of plans. Good nature and affection seemed to burn within her: her cheeks glowed red, and she approached me with the awful momentum of a locomotive under a full head of steam. She scared me to death, yet she was irresistible. I was drawn to her, and so strong was her attraction that I held my arms out as I walked toward her, as if I would hug her as I hugged my mother.
As Mrs. Graham advanced, boys and girls pulled their feet in safely under their desks. At one point in her advance she stepped on a piece of chalk that was lying on the floor, and it exploded under her shoe, sending chalk dust flying outward to form a starburst pattern that the janitor never succeeded in removing.
We didn’t hug when we reached each other. Mrs. Graham stopped, took a deep breath, extended her hand toward me, and said, “Welcome to the fourth grade.”
I put my hand in hers and she shook it. “Thank you,” I said. I loved her at once, respected her, and feared her. I knew from that moment that I would do anything she asked me to do, told me to do, or even hinted that perhaps I should do. And I knew she’d make sure that I got through the fourth grade all right.
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