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I BEGAN MY WORK as director the very next day, full of enthusiasm but with no idea at all of what I was supposed to do. Mrs. Graham called me to her desk while the other students were working on some very tricky multiplication problems that she had written on the blackboard. I began to think that being a director was quite nice. Patiently and with a great deal of pleasure, she explained what my duties would be.
This became the pattern for the next couple of weeks. I would spend part of each day standing beside her desk, listening while she coached me in low, murmuring, conspiratorial tones, tones so low, so murmuring, and so conspiratorial that there were times when I couldn’t figure out what she was saying. I didn’t want to tell her that I couldn’t hear her at those times, so I would just nod my head and hope that I wasn’t missing anything really important.
She never told me directly what I should do. She suggested. I pretended to think the suggestion over and then agreed that it was exactly what should be done. I was as nervous throughout all of this as I have ever been about anything, but I was most nervous—most frightened—in the early days, and what I feared most was that when I actually began directing the fourth-graders I would do something so outrageously foolish, so third-grade, that it would ruin my chances of being accepted by them forever.
In those hours I spent standing beside her desk, Mrs. Graham and I developed a mutual understanding that was quite uncanny. I was soon able to anticipate her gestures so well that I could snatch a chair from in front of her before she barked her shin on it and move her vase out of harm’s way whenever she swept her arm out to make a point. She took a protective attitude toward me, an attitude that she might have taken toward a timid and skittish kitten. I began bringing a chrysanthemum or two each day to add to the bunch of flowers in Mrs. Graham’s vase. This turned out to be a continually changing bunch. Each day she added some fresh flowers and threw away a few of the oldest.
“Do you know why I keep these here on my desk?” she asked me on the day that I first brought her the chrysanthemums.
“Because they look pretty?” I suggested.
“Because they smell pretty,” she said. She leaned toward me and spoke in her conspiratorial mumble. “This classroom stinks,” she said.
I can recall the odor of the room, the odor of chalk dust, ordinary dust, the smell of wet wool that came from the coats and sweaters spread out to dry on the big steam radiators below the windows, the waxy smell of crayons left to melt on the radiators, and, quite prominently, the smell of those wonderful hard-salami sandwiches that Spike used to bring every day in a brown paper bag: thin slices of aromatic salami on spongy white bread with lots of butter. About midmorning, when the smell of Spike’s sandwiches reached my desk, my stomach would begin to growl and my mouth would start to water. The memory alone is enough to make me want to break for lunch.
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