In that first hour of my first day of what I didn’t know at the time was to become my life-long career, on that opening Tuesday after Labor Day, which marked the unofficial end of summer, the day before the kids arrived to begin a new school year, I entered the 7th Grade classroom in what they called the “T-Wing.” The “T” stood for “temporary” and “Wing” meant that the sub-standard, U-shaped cluster of prefabricated wooden classrooms was an add-on attached to the real brick and mortar junior high school.
The twenty-four classrooms had been nailed together in those halcyon post-Korean War days, when the suburbs were exploding with people fleeing the City for a piece of Long Island dirt and a parking space. The T-Wing’s purpose was to house the thousand-strong classes of newly entering 7th graders in semi-isolation and prevent them from mingling with the general school population. Apparently economy and not the comfort of so many kids funneling in from the district’s eight elementary schools had been the major consideration when the uninsulated T-Wing with the bouncy floors and vibrating windows was erected. Of course I didn’t know then on my first T-Wing encounter the early fall and spring extreme heat or the bone-numbing winter cold that lay ahead. Ignorance and inexperience were bliss and probably why the 7th grade and most of the new teachers were relegated there. Each September when a new batch of frightened and confused 12 year olds entered the T-Wing for the first time they would invariably ask, “So why didn’t they call it the ‘U-Wing’?”
My classroom was T-3, three doors up on the left side, the odd side, in the corridor that made up the right side of the U. The base of the U was a long empty hall with a small office in the center for Mary Whiting, the new assistant principal. Within it was Mrs. Whiting’s very small private bathroom that made it unnecessary for her to leave her remote T-Wing outpost ever. On the other side of the U were rooms T-13 to T-24, interrupted by a faculty room and a storage area for old furniture and textbooks.
In June T-3 belonged to Miss Kashuba who had tended her resignation on the last day of school after she collected her final check and disappeared. But evidence of her was everywhere in the room, from her name hand printed on a 3x5 index card affixed with tape to the little glass panel in the door, to the ornately crayoned, multi-colored “Miss Kashuba” centered over the cracked slate blackboard directly above her desk, likely student created for extra credit. Posters stapled to the bulletin boards and authors’ names affixed to the wall covered the front of T-3 that was not blackboard including Ernest Hemingway spelled with two m’s. The classroom looked as though Miss Kashuba had fled for her life, taking only what she could carry when the last June bell rang.
At least, I thought, I wouldn’t have to decorate for a while.
Miss Kashuba’s ghost haunted the rest of the classroom as well. In her center desk drawer I found an assortment of teacher stuff – paperclips and rubber bands, safety pins, a math compass that had no place in an English classroom, three leaky ballpoint pens and a handful of pencils with broken points. There were crumbs of lunches past, a half eaten roll of Tums, travel size no-name aspirin and an almost empty bottle of congealed Pepto Bismol, coated on one side like dried out pink finger paint. I tossed it, missing the pail branded in black marker “Ms. K-S,” shorthand, I presumed, for the mysterious Miss Kashuba. I wondered why she would have gone to the trouble of hyphenating Kashuba. It was short enough. Unless the “S” following the hyphen was Miss Kashuba’s married name, “Smith” or “Smyth,” or “Silverman,” making her Miss Kashuba-Someothersomething. Or maybe she was getting married and that was the reason for her sudden departure from T-3. Of course if she were married before her June disappearance she wouldn’t be Miss Kashuba, and if she were planning a summer wedding there was no need for the hyphenation. Was the “Ms.” an indication of her independent spirit? It was a mystery that I pondered while I poured over the rest of her remains – a water pistol, a torn MAD Magazine and matches. Did Miss Kashuba smoke? Or were they taken from a student bent on burning down the wooden T-Wing when no one was watching?
The side drawers contained white ditto paper, lined composition paper yellowed with age and half a box of mimeograph masters to make dittos that made my fingers purple when I touched them. The middle drawer was empty except for a tube of Hazel Bishop Coral lipstick, a bottle of Midol and tampons. And when I fished into the bottom drawer under the jumble of absentee notes, I came up with a pair of lady’s panties – size 7, fringed with lace. Hers? They had to be. They were too grown up, unless I was mistaken about 7th grade girls. Were they a back up pair for the “Days of Midol” when the tampons were too late? I picked up the Pepto Bismol from where it lay on the floor. The hard pink inside had been knocked loose by the impact with the linoleum tile. Some had spilled onto the floor through the cracked plastic bottle and the rest sounded like a baby’s rattle when I shook it. From a hook on the side of the blackboard where they hung I took the small hand broom and metal dustpan, each monogrammed “Ms. K-S,” and swept up the mess. Then I carefully placed the broken bottle, the Midol and the tampons into the pail. I slipped the panties from the drawer and into a folder of my new leather attaché case, a graduation gift from my parents, for closer examination when I had the time. The prospect of getting to know Miss Kashuba more intimately was compelling. And I was twenty-two.
I inspected the rest of T-3 before the 10 o’clock building meeting in the auditorium, poking through the student lockers at the back, the front closet where books never returned to the Book Room lay in a tumbled heap, an old fuzzy sweater covered in cat hair hung from a broken hook and a peeling bumper sticker exhorted, “Go Comets!” in faded orange and black, the school colors. The rusty file cabinet with the broken lock was filled with stacks of unmarked projects and compositions from the previous years. Miss Kashuba was a bit of a slacker.
Then I heard her voice in my ear. “Just you wait, newbie, until those compositions and book reports and class projects start piling up because you have more important things to do with your time than sit around reading them and marking them up with red pencil. Wait until the little gnats are gnawing on your ankles clamoring for their grades. If you make it long enough as a teacher, kiddo, eventually you’ll get tired of marking all those crappy papers with the recurring errors, the alots, its/it’s, your/your and there/their/they’res never learned no matter how many times they are taught. And you’ll run out of excuses for not having their grades, so just to keep them quiet you’ll announce that you lost their papers after you graded them and make up marks. Just be sure to make them higher than they would actually get. That way everyone is happy. In a week you’ll know who’s smart and who’s not.”
I dumped the ungraded papers into the pail, to preserve Miss Kashuba’s reputation and to make room for my own papers.
During the following days I learned a more about Miss Kashuba from the veterans who populated the teacher’s lounge I discovered in the main building where they ate, smoked, napped and played cards. Her first name was Elaine and that teachers’ first name were closely guarded secrets to be kept from their kids at all costs, lest they run around the building calling their teachers Wayne or Fred or Hortense. And one of the many official memos included in the “First Day” envelope directed teachers to address one another as Mr., Mrs. or Miss Whatever.
Some of the things I learned about Miss Kashuba conflicted. She left because she “burned out” on teaching after only five years. She had a better offer for more money that she couldn’t refuse. She had to resign to avoid legal action for a “little indiscretion involving a high school junior,” a boy in her first year class who returned all grown up to thank her personally for everything she had done to and for him. She was single, a player. She didn’t leave to get married. She wasn’t pregnant and she didn’t leave to have an abortion, or to give birth to the young high school junior’s bastard in a distant convent or with relatives out of town, at least as far as the people who knew her knew. Though her “flighty nature and eccentric personality” didn’t preclude her possibility of maybe getting pregnant wherever she might have landed. I gleaned from these conversations that Miss Kashuba wasn’t much liked by most of the females on staff, though she was very popular with many of the male teachers, single and married. Her resignation was another example of her impetuous nature, So go she did, after the end of the school year party, without a good-bye to anyone. She drove off into the summer sunset in her new red Chevy Chevelle SS convertible and a young guy at her side. No one had heard anything from or about her since the day she disappeared.
In mid-November a postcard arrived from Venezuela with one sentence: “Glad I am here! Ms. K-S,” and an arrow drawn in ink pointing to a thatched hut in the center of other thatched huts in a clearing surrounded by of tall jungle vegitation. Some speculated that Miss Kashuba had joined the Peace Corps and was winning the hearts and minds of brown South American people one heart and mind at a time. Others thought she was there growing marijuana.
And still Miss Kashuba (I couldn’t imagine ever calling her Elaine) remained close by – in my class, my mind, my heart and my ear. She spoke to me during those harrowing first teaching days of filling out index cards (“Last name first, people. Last name then first name! And print.”), alphabetical seating charts and book distribution, where I had to invent unique student numbers for that would identify me as the teacher, the class period and year (“Scal-101-64”) and copy them correctly into each student’s book and on each student’s index card so that book collection or accountability for lost books would be easier the following June, or just trying to keep the little nits and gnats in their seats without popping up like Jacks in the box and rushing my desk with their problems and concerns: “Did I do this right?” “I don’t understand what you said to do.” “Can I go to the Boy’s Room?” “My nose is bleeding!” “Ted Fuchs stole my pen!”
“You better get tough with them,” she told me. “This isn’t ‘Camp School’ where everybody has fun and you are the social director. They don’t all have to like you. So if you think of it more like a medium security prison you’ll have a better chance of survival. Don’t smile until Thanksgiving, and don’t show weakness. They can smell weakness – and fear! And if they do, they will have you hanging out the window by the end of the week.”
She was there that first Parent’s Night when a father interrupted my nervous presentation to call everyone’s attention to Ernest (two m) Hemingway clinging to the wall. “His name is misspelled,” he said pointing at the error. “Isn’t that a bad example for students in an English class?”
I hemmed and hawed. I could have blamed it on the teacher who had previously occupied the room, but I didn’t. Instead my face grew hot and I began to perspire, soaking the collar of my white shirt. And then Miss Kashuba was standing behind me. “If you had tenure you could tell the old fart that you really don’t give a shit. And when you have a little more experience and are able to think on your feet, you’ll have explanations ready for such emergencies.”
“I will do that,” I heard myself saying, “not often, but from time to time. I’ll make intentional mistakes – just to see if anyone catches them – who’s paying attention. It’s a fun way to make the students part of the learning process, and–” I added, “– a way to get extra credit.”
Perfect! Some of the parents smiled and nodded their approval. The next morning I had an official memo from the principal in my mailbox instructing me to remove old Ernie from my wall. I did.
Gradually, as I grew more secure, traces of Miss Kashuba faded. Inside T-3 my bulletin boards replaced hers – free color photos of cute baby animals and book cover posters from the Scholastic Book Club. The writers on the wall gave way to “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” compositions, book reports recommending “this book to all my friends,” illustrated haiku, short stories where everything was only a dream and student created advertising projects like Sammy Luban’s “Hershey, Hershey, Hershey Brown Is Beautiful!” poster. He sent it to Hershey hoping they would use the idea and received a personal response signed by the vice-president of Hershey. The letter explained that Hershey was America’s number one candy bar and they didn’t need to advertise. For his efforts Sammy also got a 5 lb Hershey Bar and a $25 gift certificate.
Just before the spring break that first year, someone stole my “Ms. K-S” desk chair and replaced it with a straight back wooden one that didn’t tilt. All my investigative questioning was to no avail. My search failed to turn up the missing chair. It wasn’t in the T-Wing, which led me to suspect it had been spirited off to the main building where some strange ass was resting in the very place where Miss Kashuba’s ass had once resided. The following September I liberated a brand new desk chair with lumbar support from a new teacher’s classroom in T-16. I chalked it up as my “right of seniority.”
All the time the rusty file cabinet in the back of my room slowly filled with my own personal effects and ungraded papers.
Over the years rumors of Miss Kashuba continued to circulate though fewer and further in between as those who had known her personally moved to other schools, retired and died. Joanna Bender, a Home Ec teacher, reported seeing Miss Kashuba in Brooklyn wheeling a carriage with twins through a shopping mall while dragging a toddler by the arm. “And she was fat and unkempt.” Mr. Franks, a flamboyant-bordering-on-gay social studies teacher said she tended bar in The Pines on Fire Island during the summer. And Tony Palumbo, a math teacher and former boyfriend, said that she had moved to become a showgirl in Vegas.
In my head her voice grew fainter, but it never disappeared completely. My mind often wandered as I wondered what Miss Kashuba was doing that very minute I was teaching The Raft, a 213 page non-fiction book by Robert Trumbull about three World War II naval airmen adrift for thirty-four days on the Pacific in a leaky rubber raft. The book’s potential was overshadowed by the ho-hum manner the story was told. It put the kids to sleep and me on automatic pilot, especially after two or three years reading it with five classes. The whole thing might have been better condensed, reduced to a short story, a single page, one paragraph. “The plane crashed. The three guys got into a raft. The survived 34 days with almost no water and the very little food they caught. They were rescued. Period.” I thought about Miss Kashuba as I read about Old Yeller’s demise to the sobbing classes, and at the end of Daniel Keyes short story, “Flowers for Algernon,” when re-retarded Charlie Gordon says farewell to Miss Kinnian in a note asking her to put flowers on his dead mouse Algernon’s grave – “Good-by Miss Kinnian and Dr Strauss and evreybody. And P.S. please tell Dr Nemur not to be such a grouch when pepul laff at him and he would have more frends. Its easy to make frends if you let pepul laff at you. Im going to have lots of frends where I go. P.P.S. Please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard....”
Sometimes I thought of Miss Kashuba while I stared through the cracked glass of T-3, across the grass of the open space between the U arms of the T-Wing and I watched Mrs. Whiting’s rectangular bathroom window illuminate. The light projected her moving silhouette against the frosted glass and the unsuspecting assistant principal sat and stood, sat and stood all day, every day in the course of her administrative duties. My head filled with images of the lithe and supple Miss Kashuba in the Peace Corps peeing in the bushes, tantalizing all those South American men with her straight white American smile and her big American breasts. The conjured pictures of her traipsing through Europe on $5 a day armed only with her backpack, a bottle of Midol, some loose tampons, a supply of birth control pills and a back up pair of underwear excited me.
Passing through the various stages of my life – marriage, parenthood, divorce – I wondered where she was in hers. Had Miss Kashuba ever married? Did she have kids? Had she suffered the pangs of life and collected the scars of living it along the way? Did she find true love in the arms of Juan García Quesada, her Venezuelan coffee farmer? Was she – is she happy?
To this day Miss Kashuba is with me still, well beyond my teaching career and deep into retirement. We have grown old together, Miss Kashuba and I, grown wider and wiser, slower and whiter. I think of her at the oddest moments – during visits with my various doctors, before a routine colonoscopy, standing in line at CVS waiting to have my Lipitor refilled. Has she ever been seriously ill? I think of her while planning vacations. I wonder if Miss Kashuba has ever been to Australia? And I think of her on those long nights when I am alone and can’t sleep, wondering if she is alone and sleepless too. But mostly I think of Miss Kashuba, wherever she may be, whenever I see hanging on the hook in my basement that small hand broom and metal dust pan with the faded monogram, “Ms. K-S,” the very one I took with me on my last day.
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