127: The school was an old one.
Little Follies, “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” Chapter 4
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.
[to be continued on Tuesday, November 9, 2021]
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
In Topical Guide 127, Mark Dorset considers School; Reality, Real and Fictional; and Foreshadowing from this episode.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.