Inspiration Resistant

Mrs. Whezen ran an orderly class. Children were arranged in rows and columns and could not speak without first raising their hands and even then, only if called upon. Mrs. Whezen was a monochrome woman of an indeterminate age, at least to my eight year-old eyes. She wore crisp black skirts that fell to just below her knees and taupe stockings just slightly darker than her natural skin color. She wore white cotton blouses with starched collars. She taught the basics and she kept order. I welcomed this since I came from a household where my parents argued over every last thing like squirrels with a vanishing supply of nuts.

It was a shock to me and a bad portent that Monday when we all streamed in after first bell and Mrs. Whezen was not where she usually sat, clasping her hands as if summoning her gods, at her shiny black desk which came up to our chins. After five minutes of restless roaming, of boys and girls experimenting with new seats or running to the windows, the Principal came in and boys and girls tumbled finally into their proper places. I’d already taken my seat. It was a comfort after this unmoored start to the day, to know where it was.

The Principal cleared his throat and ushered a woman into the room. A woman who was not Mrs. Whezen. He introduced her as our new teacher for the remainder of the semester. Mrs. Whezen would not be returning, he said. He did not offer an explanation and we did not expect him to tell us the truth if we asked. He told us that Mrs. Lightly -that was the usurper’s name! - would be teaching according to the new state curriculum that Mrs. Whezen had not adopted. He said this through pursed lips, implying that Mrs. Whezen had failed us and that Mrs. Lightly was here to set things right. He cleared his throat and nodded. He had nothing more to say. He left us in the hands of Mrs. Lightly.

Those hands, soft and plump, like nesting doves, began to clap. “Children,” Mrs. Lightly warbled, “children, get up and stretch your hands over your heads. Pretend that you are flowers welcoming the sun and shake the sleep from your eyes.”

We all looked at one another, but started to rise in scattered groups, until eventually, we were all standing. When she clapped her hands again, we began to raise our hands over our heads like lumbering Frankensteins. We waved in a parody of flowers, as if we were all creatures that took things lightly.

It got worse. Mrs. Lightly told us to rearrange our seats, our orderly rows and columns, into a semicircle, the focal point of which was to be Mrs. Whezen’s desk.

My classmates looked uncertainly at each other. “I don’t know where to sit,” Sally said nervously. She was a slight, wan girl who was not shy about letting us know her moods. I stood rather stolidly by my desk, which I had cleverly, though almost undetectably, marked. While the others had moved desks willy-nilly, I moved my own and made sure I stayed with it.

“Why, sit anywhere,“ Mrs. Lightly beamed. “The new curriculum is about freedom. About empowering you and teaching you to make smart choices.”

This sentence echoed in my head. It seemed to be just another way of describing how adults liked to make you feel good or bad about things in order to get you to do what they wanted. Adults were the masters of moods - yours if not their own. They believed that if you thought a decision was your own choice you’d fight less. “Psychology,“ my father called it. When my father used this technique on my mother, she’d call him a bastard and would start to cry.

Like frenetic ants, my classmates moved desks. When the semi-circle was completed, and the scraping of chairs died down, I sat down by my own desk. I felt empowered.

Mrs. Lightly sat down at Mrs. Whezen’s desk with a soft, happy plop. Despite her name, she was an expansive woman. Her blouse strained against her bosom - the top two buttons were untidily open. She wore a swishy peasant skirt, with dark splashes of purple and pink. She had to gather it under her as she sat and it seemed to bunch up as she settled herself on her chair. We waited. She ran her fingers across the surface of the desk as if to claim it.

“Our classes from now on will be about expression,” she said to us, clasping her soft pale hands, in front of her, mesmerizing us with this gesture. “Who can tell me what that means? ‘Expression’?”

Charlie’s hand shot up as we all knew it would.  “It means how your face looks,” he said, without waiting for her to call on him or even to nod in his direction.

Mrs. Lightly smiled, her cheeks dimpling prettily. “Well, not exactly.” She waited a moment to watch Charlie’s own face look crestfallen. “Good start though. Expression is a form of creation. It’s an act of turning yourself outwards and sharing your insides with the world.”

I immediately began to think of a horror movie in which a deadly plague turned people’s insides out. I could tell from the rustling and giggles around me that my classmates were thinking similar thoughts except for Charlie who was picking his nose.

“How do we do this? Share our innermost thoughts?” She asked unclasping her hands and beckoning to us to answer her.

“We can speak,” Karen said, wriggling in a desk that was too small for her gangly frame. She didn’t even bother to raise her hand. I frowned.

“Yes. Yes. That’s right, we can speak. And we can create poetry or write stories or draw or dance. In the new curriculum, learning itself is couched in expression.”

I wasn’t sure how math and science could be a couch. I was increasingly coming to realize that the things Mrs. Lightly said were always somewhat “off.”

“But what about tests?” Martha Sims asked, the freckles standing out on her blanched face.

Mrs. Lightly looked down at her desk. She grasped a ruler in her hands and let it rap against the surface, her disappointment in Martha Sims clearly visible on her face.

Then she looked up with a brave, martyred expression. “If we learn,” she said, “the tests will take care of themselves, won’t they class?”

“Yes,” voices murmured in a sycophantic chorus. I sighed. She looked in my direction but did not see me yet.

She clapped her hands again. “Class, let us introduce ourselves to each other, but as we dream to be. I want you to stand up by your desk and tell me a name you’d like to be called by and what this name should tell us about you.”

We all shifted nervously in our seats. Mrs. Lightly said, “For example, today, I would like to be Miss Star. I want this name to tell you that I intend to aim high with you and make you glow.”

I was embarrassed for her because of this display. But Sally shot up from her desk, “And I want to be called Cloud,” she said hurriedly, as if anyone else would take that name from her.

“Very good,” Mrs.Lightly/Star said. “Now tell us why.”

Sally blushed. She hadn’t thought it through. I knew it was enough for her that she thought the word “cloud” had a pretty sound. “Because. Because I want to move across the sky,” she said, her face beet red now. There were some titters in the class but not outright laughter because we did think Sally was somewhat brave.

Mrs. Lightly smiled, but I thought it was somewhat condescendingly. As if Sally’s choice had been somehow deficient. My other classmates started standing up, one by one, but I knew no one would ever say anything Mrs. Lightly would ever sincerely praise. As much as she wanted us to express ourselves, she wanted to control our expression. Finally, it was my turn.

“My name is George. I want my name to be George and to be called George. Because it is who I am. Because my parents named me this.”

The class was hushed. Mrs. Lightly’s eyebrows lifted at my insurrection. “Well, George, plain George, don’t you want to stretch yourself a little?”

She drew out “George” as if it had three syllables, each time pronouncing it slightly differently, always mockingly.

“Not really,” I replied.

“Well, this class going forward is going to be all about original thought. Perhaps George should think about changing his attitude. What do you think class?”

“Yes, Mrs. Lightly,” my classmates all murmured.

“That’s Miss Star today,” she smiled at us. When she glanced at me, her smile stretched and turned a bit frosty.

She walked about the classroom handing out sheets of drawing papers and crayons. As if we were first graders and not in the third grade. She told us to draw a picture of a Thanksgiving scene as a way of summarizing what we knew about the history of this holiday. My classmates immediately began tracing pictures of their hands. This is how we were taught to draw turkeys in kindergarten, the fingers representing tail feathers, the palm the body, and the thumb the head of the turkey.

I could see every one drawing their turkeys with fanciful feathers, coloring even the body of their turkeys with psychedelic colors. It was messy looking and not realistic. Turkeys have brownish feathers on their bodies. The colored feathers are only on their behinds. I pursed my lips and tried to remember what I knew about Thanksgiving. I drew a table and a mother, a father and a child. I drew them in black clothing with white collars. I tried to draw an Indian man with an armful of corn and I tried to remember if I should draw him happy or sad. I decided I should draw him as someone who saw things going badly, the way I saw this school year going. I struggled with my picture. I had just started drawing people’s bodies as shapes and not made of sticks and triangles.  Finally, I drew a turkey on a plate in the middle of the table. It looked like a chicken, the kind you get frozen at the store. Still, I was happy about my drawing. It was different from the others and I thought I’d done the right thing, gotten the assignment really right. Maybe this teacher would like me for it and we could start again because having a teacher against you can be a really bad thing.

Mrs. Lightly started to walk around the class. She lifted Karen’s drawing to show everyone. Karen’s drawing was of a hand-turkey. Its body and tail feathers were decorated with glitter glue. Karen had her own stash of glitter glue that she carried everywhere and I heard the other children murmuring resentfully that it wasn’t fair. Mrs. Lightly told Karen this was a great start. She gave Karen a gold star that she placed on Karen’s forehead, grinding it onto the smooth expanse of Karen‘s brow with her thumb.

She kept walking and picking up more drawings, all of turkeys. Some looked a bit as if they’d been electrocuted. But she had effusive praise for all of them and kept placing gold stars on my classmates foreheads like a glittery brand, her plump thumb pushing on the stars to get them to stick. The familiar way she touched the other children, brushing hair away from foreheads made me feel nervous. I was repelled , but longed for her to come around to me, to lift my drawing to show the others and to comment on my expression and then to lean into me and press a golden, glittering star on my own forehead that I could take home to show to my mother.

She came to me finally and looked down at my desk, studying my drawing. Her silence and the way she was drawing her eyebrows together in concentration made me nervous, but I thought it was because she was considering what my picture meant. At last she took it and lifted it up and silently showed it to the class. “Do you see class? What George has done? What’s missing from this picture?” The class murmured but no single voice rose above the others. “I’ll help you.” She looked at me as she said this. “What’s missing, George, is imagination. Do you understand class? What’s missing?”

Now everyone murmured “imagination” in a single echoing voice. I felt myself blushing and bit my lips. Mrs. Lightly smiled down at me and turned the drawing so that the blank side faced up. “Try again, George. It’s alright. Everyone gets things at their own pace.”

She walked back to her desk. “Now the rest of you, take out a sheet of loose leaf paper and write a story to go with you picture.”

I reached into my backpack for some paper, but Mrs. Lightly grabbed my wrist. “No, George,” she said “I want you to finish your picture.”

I stared at her but didn’t answer back. I’d been raised not to answer back. I stared down at the blank side of the paper. I started to trace my hand and colored in the shape. One color on top of the other. With my thumbnail, I cleared patches, to allow different underlying colors to show through. It took me five minutes. When she came back to my desk, Mrs. Lightly said, “That’s better, George.” I looked at my drawing, at my pretty lie. I took a sheet of loose leaf paper out and wrote “turkey, turkey, turkey,” in different colors and different sizes, in print and cursive, even in turkey shapes.  I looked around at my classmates and saw their earnest, happy faces. Sally clutched her pencil in a cramped hand and bent her face and long black hair to her desk. Karen wrote a line and looked up at the light fixture then frowned and erased the line, writing another one.

Mrs. Lightly sat at Mrs. Whezen’s desk looking at her hands, at her pink polished fingernails. A small satisfied smile played on her face. I realized she was probably younger than my mother and that she thought she had an iron will when it came to us, to shaping us.

I decided I would keep my own shape.

I turned my picture around so that the images of the family and the sad Indian still faced me. In my head I made up a story that took place when the Indian man went home and tried to tell his own family about what happened and what it meant. But I would keep my story to myself.  On the lined page of paper in front of me, I kept writing “turkey, turkey, turkey” until the page was filled.

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Photo credit

Hand turkey by beingkatie