Whatever Happened to Elaine Kashuba?

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.

© 2012 Joseph E. Scalia

Sliced Tomatoes

In the Jewish neighborhoods he was known as the master of vegetables. The orthodox women hardly talked to him, except to call out their orders in Yiddish, enough of which he understood, or to haggle about his prices or the accuracy of the weight on his scale that hung from the side of his wagon. To them he was Morris, the fruit man, the maven of tomatoes. And even though his name wasn’t Morris, he always answered to it. And he used the Yiddish he had learned to sweet talk the women who complained the most. “I will never get rich if all my customers are like you,” he said with a smile, always throwing a little extra into the bags to keep them happy.

On the Spanish blocks he was to produce what El Exigenté, the demanding one, was to coffee. The kids chased along beside the peddler on the sidewalk pacing his tired horse, Bianca, an old swaybacked mare that was more mottled gray than white. Some urged the horse to giddyap, while others shouted for her to whoa. Most times the old mare just ignored them. Sometimes she raised her tail and dropped “road apples” on the pavement while the little kids laughed and pointed. The older boys on their bikes circling the wagon like the cowboy and Indian movies they’d seen at the Loew’s Oriental on 86th Street at the Saturday matinees, picked them up and threw them at one another. They called to Roberto, el rey de frutas y verdures, the undisputed king of the fruits and the vegetables, to toss them some of the bruised fruit the over ripe bananas he pulled from the bins on his wagon to keep his stock fresh. And he always did. He prided himself on the widest selection of items, from succulent summer peaches to the most exotic melons, from string beans to eggplants, never too young, never too ripe and never bruised.

Bianca knew the daily routine, weaving her way slowly up and down the one way streets, stopping in front of the same houses whether he was on board holding the reins or walking beside her on the sidewalk calling, “Fruit man! Fruit Man!” She knew to turn just one block before the black neighborhood began where the people wanted everything for nothing, and she headed back toward the Italians in Bensonhurst. That was where they lived and where she knew he would put on her feedbag.

One late afternoon of a particularly long day, she was especially restless and exceptionally hungry, despite the occasional apples he had fed her along the route. She had complained all morning until well after noon, while he negotiated prices with the customers. That was when she snorted, clumped her metal shoes on the warm asphalt, neighed and pulled the reins free from where they were loosely tied to the wooden brake next to the empty seat. Without warning she began to move and soon she was trotting away. He called at her to stop and cursed, shaking his fists at the horse as he chased after her on his old legs, but when she turned at the corner he watched her disappear into the traffic, pulling wagon and spilling fruits and vegetables on the street behind her.

A long hour later, perspired and hot, wiping his face with the bandanna he always carried folded neatly in his back pocket and used as a cloth when he ate his lunch, he found her standing docilely at the curb 57th Street waiting for him on in front of the Mrs. Mascucci’s house, where they ate lunch every day. The peddler had known her husband from the old country, and after the man died he made it a point to stop there each day and look after her.

“What happened to you, Fonz?” she called to him with easy familiarity in Italian, using the shortened form of Alfonso that was his real name. “We thought maybe you fell off. Or maybe the gypsies on Second Avenue took you.”

The other women laughed. They had already picked through the fruits and vegetables and filled their own orders and weighed them before Fonz arrived. They used the assorted paper bags he carried on the wagon, making change and leaving their payment in the cash box that was in the driver’s seat.

“We watered the horse with the hose and gave her a bucket to drink, but it looks like she wants to eat.”

“Ah, signora,” he answered in the same Neapolitan dialect, “I knew she would be here.” He smacked the horse on her haunch and the sound made Bianca lift her head and turn back her ears. “This horse knows the route better than I do, and she is quick to remind me where to stop and when to move on. But today she made me take a long, hot walk in the sun. You are a bad horse,” he said in a scolding tone, “and should be made into glue.” But then he rubbed her spotted coat lovingly.

He found the old leather feedbag in the seat on top of the wagon and filled it with oats. Then he slipped the bag over her muzzle and set the strap behind her ears. When he saw that she was quietly munching he retrieved his own lunch, a sandwich made by his wife on Italian bread and wrapped in waxed paper, along with pieces of fruit that were bundled in a brown cloth sack. “I tell my wife, signora, I don’t need the fruit,” he said on more than one occasion. “That I have more fruit on the wagon than I could ever eat. But she insists. You know how women are. And she packs it anyway, fresh figs from the tree.” He showed her. “And sometimes maybe a home grown tomato or two from the garden.”

They climbed up the front steps to the little table and four wooden chairs she prepared for him every day with a carafe of home made red wine and two glass tumblers. He first pulled out her chair and then his own before he opened his bandanna, placed it carefully on the table and laid down the sack of food. She turned over the tumblers and poured some wine for the both of them, half a glass for her and a full one for him. It was their ritual, one they had practiced for years.

“Giuseppe,” she called to her grandson who standing on the sidewalk watching the horse shoo flies with her flicking tail, twitching her leg when the landed there, “you go get the jar of cold water from the ice box for Fonz,” she said in accented English. “And some glasses. But don’t drop them.”

When the screen door slammed behind the boy she reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a brown bag that she handed over to him. It was another of their rituals, one started more recently after her grandson, a finicky eater at best, discovered the fruit peddler’s lunch one afternoon and the man offered part of his sandwich to the boy. Every day after that he looked forward to Fonz’s arrival and lunchtime, relishing whatever the man unwrapped, eating things he would never consider even trying when his mother cooked it. Over the weeks he had devoured yellow squash flowers egg-battered and fried golden brown with onions, cold zucchini circles sliced thin and sauteed in olive oil, marinated in vinegar and garlic with fresh mint leaves that added flavor, green peppers over-stuffed with seasoned breadcrumbs, steamed artichokes that looked strange and tasted delicious, and even fried calamari that made his throat close whenever he smelled it cooking in his mother’s kitchen.

Soon the boy returned with the water, balancing three fragile glasses that he set down carefully on the table.

“So, Giuseppe, shall we see what Mrs. Fonz packed for us to eat today?” he asked, winking at the woman. He unwrapped his sandwich and nodded. “It looks like una bella frittata of potatoes and eggs and some peppers and onions too. And for you?” He handed over the other bag that the boy opened, peeling aside the aluminum foil to show him. “Eggplant parmesan,” he said, looking at the little hero sandwich, the heel of the Italian bread overflowed with eggplant in tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese. ”Better than what she made for me, I think. Maybe we can trade,” he joked, but the boy bit into the sandwich and chewed contentedly.

“Your mother made eggplant last night,” his grandmother said, “and you wouldn’t even taste it.”

“That’s because her eggplant isn’t as good as the kind Mrs. Fonz makes,” he said with his mouth full.

And for a few minutes they both sat in silence eating their lunches. Fonz finished his wine and she went to pour him a second glass.

“No, grazie, signora,” he said. “Bianca and I still have miles to go before the day is over.” He reached into his pocket and removed a folding knife that he opened and wiped carefully on his bandanna. “But maybe some of this.” He picked up the large red tomato his wife had packed for him. He cut through the skin with the sharp blade, creating perfect precision slices uniformly thick without damaging the fruit. He handed over one of the slices to each of them.

“Good luck with that,” she said biting into hers. “This boy never eats tomatoes. He even has butter on his macaronis.”

“What?” Fonz asked. “You don’t like tomatoes? What kind of Italian are you? Sicilian?” he joked.

His grandmother laughed and shrugged her shoulders. “Ah, what can you do? His father’s family is from Sicily,” she said with a tone that was lost on Giuseppe.

“Well,” he said, turning his attention back on to boy, “I am a tomato expert, you know. Not only do I sell them, all kinds, plum tomatoes your grandmother makes into her delicious sauce, big red tomatoes for salads and for slicing with olive oil and oregano. But I grow them too. And I have eaten them cooked, raw, red, yellow and green, for more than sixty years. Even in my breakfast cereal! So I am quite the expert. Maybe you just think you don’t like them because you haven’t tasted these special tomatoes from my garden the way I like to eat them.” He pulled two slices of fried potato from his lunch, large almost perfect circles, and he put them on each side of the tomato. “It’s a very special potato-tomato sandwich,” he said and handed it over to Giuseppe.

The boy held it between his fingers like a cookie, examined it, and after the slightest hesitation he took a bite. A smile spread across his face. “Delicious!” he said. “I love potato-tomatoes,” and he gobbled it down in three bites, looking for more.

His grandmother laughed again and she shook her head. “Only from you, Fonz,” she said. “Only from you.”

Fonz nodded and patted the woman’s hand. “As with so many things in life, signora, it is all in the presentation,” he said.

© 2010 Joseph E. Scalia