1963. I am 6 years old.
The cloak room smells pleasantly of old wood. It's not cedar but something else, clean with hints of oil and citrus. The tall, deep closet, insulated by all these winter coats, is blessedly dark and quiet. Sitting inside by myself, I hear only faint sounds of my first grade teacher instructing the other thirty-one students on the subject of the days in a week.
My teacher’s name is something like Mrs. Rigatoni. She is thin, usually tense with very good posture, and she wears beaded chains on her glasses. She adds an "r" to certain words, which I find sophisticated, though I don't dare, personally, to call the nation’s capitol “Warshington." Mrs. Rigatoni calls our winter coats our "wraps," which I find odd. What are we, Christmas presents? Cocktail weenies rolled up in browned biscuit dough?
Because the left legs of the school desks are all lined up along the seams in the speckled green linoleum floor, and because everyone must sit up straight, with both feet on that floor, there's no screeching or creaking of bodies or furniture moving coming in from the other side of the heavy cloak room door. All I hear is the unpleasant, never-ending sharp buzz of the teacher's voice. When she talks, she reminds me of a radio station that's not quite tuned in all the way; at first, the buzz doesn't bother me, but after a few minutes, my nerves are starting to feel irritated and my muscles begin to feel twitchy.
I feel sorry for the poor saps sitting under the glare of the fluorescent lights, learning the difference between Tuesday and Thursday whether they want to know or not. I can't see them, but I imagine some of them are looking down, any time they can break the "eyes front" command. Bored, they run their fingertips along the round indentations at the top right corners of the desks where inkwells used to sit in the old-fashioned days. The wooden desktops lift on hinges, and inside we are to have our own personal set of school supplies in there, and nothing else. Most especially, we are not to have anything in our desks which belongs to the school or to another student.
I know this is because we live in a slum, and our teacher isn't from around here. Some of us don't get the things we require daily from our parents, and we solve the problems of no lunch or no pencil by taking what we need by stealth or force. This doesn't happen very often, really, considering how poor most of us are. Sometimes the consent to let someone "borrow is only semi-consent. but and it's something we all live with. Since our teacher isn't from our world, she thinks we all live very badly and have the morality of stray dogs.
Taking things that aren't ours is stealing, and stealing is really, really bad. If even the tiniest object belonging to any student disappears, say a used fancy pen/pencil eraser which is gray on one end and white on the other, there is hell to pay. We all must open our desks while the teacher rummages around and looks for the stolen item. It doesn't hether the missing eraser was actually stolen, lost, misplaced, or used up. There will be prolonged confrontation, frantic rummaging, and descending mists of helplessness and shame which drift down over us like the yellow sulfurous exhaust from the tall smokestacks of the nearby coke-processing plant.
These missing-school-supply panic drills are so stressful that there are one of the major reasons I have taken to sitting in the cloak room as often as I can get away with it. Even in the calmer periods when the pencils, erasers and manila paper are all present and accounted for, I still find first grade hard to take, as it is so boring and I am a natural fidgeter. We first-graders all know what trouble fidgeting can bring. (The best thing that can happen is that you'll be asked in front of the whole class is you are restless because you need to be excused to go to the restroom.)
But of course it's boring. I can already read and it is excruciating to sit in restless silence while the teacher pressures the more dyslexic kids to sound out the words. This public humiliation, along with the "borrowing," is another cultural gaffe on the teacher's part. She does not understand that our families are all Appalachian people who moved to the factory town from the world of tobacco farms and coal mines, three hours' drive south of where we sit. Our culture has few advantages to middle-class life, but one of the things we experience at home is that failures and mistakes and inadequacies are dealt with privately. To "show up" someone in an area where they lack ability is considered to be extreme. Even fools, drunkards and ignoramuses are left their humanity and dignity, and someone influential is sent to help the struggler get back on the right path of life. This business of forcing a kid to sound out short words letter by letter is not only dull, but it makes me angry at the teacher. How can a grown-up lady with chains on her glasses not even know that we don't treat others this way? And of course, I'm also mad that I know there is nothing I can say about it. The teacher is convinced that of the thirty-three people in this room, thirty-two of them are wrong in nearly every action, thought, and belief.
My stomach twists as we move around the reading circle and each of these strugglers tries, with a shaking voice, to make enough effort to please our tormentor and take her attention away from themselves. We are all new to this social situation, and none of us knows what to expect from moment to moment. In the Indianapolis public school system at the end of the baby boom, there was no daycare, no kindergarten, no social conditioning of any kind except for playing with neighbor kids in the front yards. At age six, we had all been simply enrolled in a full day of school five days a week. From the second day onwards, we are expected to be productive, neat, and courteous, and on time. It is a factory town and an education will aid us in life to. . . oh, c'mon. Even at the age of six, I sense that school is really an excuse to explain our failures to achieve. If only we would try to learn to put a "T" on the calendar for Tuesday and a "Th" for Thursday, we would not have to drop out of school at sixteen, work on an assembly line for forty years, and die before we are sixty. Maybe I don't know the details of all that, but I'll tell you what I do know: old people are rare on my street.
Public School No. 2 has one classroom for each of the six grades. At the basement level is a large open room where we sometimes play musical chairs, which I am terrible at, and where we sometimes take naps on canvas-covered mats, which I am good at. I have exceptionally fine nap skills, actually. I always find my mat quickly by looking for my picture. Each mat has a the metal-rimmed round tag which encircles a small round black-and-white photo of me, trimmed from an extra copy of the class picture taken in the fall. In the photo, my bangs are at a slant because my mother cuts my hair with her sewing scissors but I love myself anyway and I am glad to have found my own face among the thirty-two circle photo tags.
I am always among the first students to find the correct nap mat. Each afternoon we troop down the basement stairs, I quickly drag my tan cotton-covered pad to the farthest corner. By curling up on my side and turning to face the wall and then waiting until the teacher shuts out the banks of ceiling lights one by one till my corner turns dim, I can sneak my thumb into my mouth for a few minutes of comfort. At home, the pad and nail of my thumb are usually painted with a bitter substance. This thumb stuff comes in a small glass jar which has a tiny brush coming down from the inside of the lid. I've seen this kind of brush spread rubber cement on the backs of square photographs before they went onto heavy black paper pages in photo albums. The thumb stuff in the little jar could also be rubber cement, for all I know. It tastes horrible and that means I can't suck my thumb at home.
By maneuvering myself into the dimmest back corner, facing the wall and having a peaceful moment with my non-bitter thumb, I have come a paragon of Rest Time virtue. The other children are restless and giggle and poke each other, while I am held up to the class as a good example. This makes me feel a little guilty because of the secret thumb-sucking. By first grade, I already understand that self-medicating is a weakness is character, but what can I do? Those afternoon nap periods are pretty short – fifteen minutes or so – and there is no way lying there on a thin mat on waxed linoleum, listening to giggling and threats to tattle, will restore my soul without the aid of my thumb.
Even if I get to suck my thumb during rest time, I am still pretty overwhelmed by the intensity of Public School No. 2. The teacher is cranky because she is supposed to have twenty-six students, and she's got thirty-two. The kids are not happy because they have already been yelled at forty-two times, their school shoes are too tight but their dad got laid off from GE, and they had to hold the red lunch ticket in the cafeteria, the one that says your parents didn't have fifteen cents for a hot lunch. I personally live in a house where everybody's mad at everybody else most of the time anyway, so to steep in a classroom full of resentment is really more than I can tolerate, whether I get to suck my thumb on my nap mat or not.
To supplement resting time, I have taken to hiding in the cloak room. This "room" is a tall dark closet built out from the wall of the classroom, on the same side of the room as the glass-paneled door to the hallway. The door naturally drifts shut on its own, because the school is on an embankment, and over time, the school building's foundation has begun to tilt toward Rural Street.
Inside the cloak room, narrow bench runs around three sides, just under the bottom hems of the winter coats. We children sit on this bench to put on or take off our rain boots, which we call rubbers, or our winter boots, which we call galoshes. The dark wood ceiling is high, and the cloak room seems roomy to me then but of course I am very small. I like to nestle into the space between two winter coats, and sit sleepy and content as I listen to the softened sounds of the classroom.
My blessed sanctuary was found on that lucky day when I had forgotten my tissues. My mother, a licensed practical nurse and is thus hygienic, She always sends me to school in clean underwear and in my coat pocket there are three Kleenexes folded in half the long way
That October morning, the day of magic, I had settled myself onto the hard wooden seat of my desk and then, right after the bell rang, just as I was arranging my two pencils (pointed left) in the shallow pencil ditch at the top of the desk, I realized my Kleenexes were still in my coat pocket. and I had to wait till after attendance was taken (last name first, first name last), for permission to go to the cloak room
My nose felt a potential drip but it held off, mercifully, as Mrs. Rigatoni checked off Tompkins, Lionel and Verren, Muriel and Wheatley, Jerome, Being a first-grader with several weeks of experience under my patent-leather belt, I knew to wait for our teacher to stick a felt Mr. Sun face on the flannel board with “TODAY’S WEATHER” in felt alphabet letters in a semi-circle at the top. Then I politely raised my hand, and when called on, I asked to visit the cloak room.
Mrs. Rigatoni searched the area around my desk with her eyes, then the desktop. “I see that you already hung up your wrap before the bell, Marion, and that you have your two sharpened pencils.”
“I forgot my Kleenexes,” I said squeakily.
“So you have forgotten your tissues?”
“Yes, ma'am,” I said nervously. “I’m sorry.”
“You may go and fetch them this time,” said Mrs. Rigatoni. “Please take more care in the future.”
I extracted myself from between desk and seat and went into the cloak room. The door, on two oiled brass hinges, naturally closed behind me but the cloak room was far from claustrophobically dark. Even with the solid wooden door shut, I could see because a strong line of bright fluorescent light glowed at floor level, and more light crept in here and there between boards, adding a bit of pleasant zebra stripe pattern to the sleeves and collars of the wool and nylon and canvas duck coats and jackets hanging from the curved brass wall hooks.
I found my coat -- blue wool, smelling of mothballs, with a fur collar that had lost all its fluffiness before I inherited it from Cousin Sherry. I lifted the pocket flap, and took out the folded Kleenexes, which I tucked under the fabric belt of my cotton shirt dress. My cheap synthetic socks had scrunched down into my school shoes, so I sat down for a minute to pull up the tops of my socks and fold them over, though the creased fabric would not stay in shape for even a moment.
I leaned back against the wooden wall of the cloak room, enjoying the dark and quiet. “Hey, it’s nice in here,” I thought, as I heard an irritated Mrs. Rigatoni teaching the class to print the word “doll.”
Safely inside the cloak room, I heard the commands “Ball, stick, ball, stick, stick!” followed by the shuffling sounds of shoe soles on the linoleum tiles as desperate children attempted to erase misplaced balls and sticks from the manila paper. This paper was printed with blue dotted lines in between two solid lines. The printed letters were supposed to touch top and bottom, but if you made a mistake and erased too vigorously, the soft paper tore in an accordion-pleated triangle of doom.
I stayed in the cloak room for a couple more minutes, then sighed and stood up. My own piece of manila paper was lying on my desk without the word "doll" penciled on it. I eased the door open quietly and crept back to my seat.
Mrs. Rigatoni hadn't noticed my return. She was hovering behind a boy named Nathan who was having a hard time with his pencil. Eight years later, Nathan escaped into the Industrial Arts building, where he used a blowtorch to practice welding pieces of steel plate. At this moment he was in capital letter versus small letter hell. He had capitalized something he shouldn’t have, and if capital punishment had been an option in the first grade, Mrs. Rigatoni would have applied the maximum sentence possible. Nathan would have been diagrammed out of the sentence of life.
*****
Now it is December, I have discovered that I can stay in the cloak room for an hour at a time if I like. This overcrowded Baby Boomer classroom has so many student stuffed into it that there is a partial row of desks crammed along the wall at the very back. The unfortunates whose names start with letters after T in the alphabet have their backs poked by the handles of the wooden supply drawers where the manila paper and jars of white paste are kept. The room is so full of children that if my desk is empty for a while, everyone including Mrs. Rigatoni just feels a vague sense of relief that there is a little more available air for breathing.
All I have to do, when I need some peaceful solitude, is to ask, just after the attendance roll is called, to go and get a pencil or a tissue or my field trip permission slip from my coat pocket. I am the only one who ever goes to the cloak room and stays, and I am surprised that no one else ever copycats me. All I can figure out is that the other students don’t notice me any more than Mrs. Rigatoni does.
On this day close to Christmastime, I am enjoying the comfort of darkness and wool, cheerfully nibbling at the crusts of a desiccated peanut butter and jelly sandwich left behind in a wrinkled paper sack, humming under my breath and enjoying the sacredness of time alone, when there is a silence where Mrs. Rigatoni’s constant, harsh voice should be.
I realize that I have been called on to read aloud. Mrs. Rigatoni has said, “Marion, you read for us, starting at the top of page 67,” and then she has looked up to see that my desk is empty. She must now be scanning the attendance sheet. No, I am not absent. She has now remembered vaguely that I asked to go get my eraser an hour and a half before Reading Time began.
In sharp hard steps her teacher shoes come down the side aisle and the cloak room door is jerked open. The sudden flash of fluorescent light is startlingly intense. And I can’t remember what happens after the invasion begins. It probably involves me being dragged by one arm, but she didn’t kill me or I wouldn't have written this.
[The photo above is of Public School #3 on North Rural Street in Indianapolis, which was the elementary school with the cloak room in it. The building is now a social-services center.]
