Available Surfaces III: Mrs. Quack and Miss Cuckoo [T.R. Hummer]

Lay on, Macduff,/ And
damn'd be him that first cries, "Hold, enough!" —William
Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5 scene 8

Mrs. Quack sat at her desk in front of the class, striking a
classic Quack pose of cynical boredom. From a perspective of many decades on, I
realize that she was a relatively unusual specimen: a country cynic. Real
cynicism is rare among country people, who generally can’t afford the luxury of
denial.

But Mrs. Quack had, so to say, come in from the cold. She
still lived in the country, but she did not work on the farm where she lived;
every day she got in her old Ford and drove to town to teach sixth graders. How
she came to such a pass I haven’t a clue, but the situation was unfortunate for
everyone involved.

Any sixth grader in her class could have quickly told you
one thing about Mrs. Quack: she did not care, at all, for sixth graders. Sixth
graders, to her, were ridiculous creatures, too close to childhood to be taken
seriously, but too close to puberty to be idealized and adored.

To be fair, we were, like all captive groups of eleven year
olds, a tough room. Adolescence has its horrors, and those are well known; in
the coming years we would all turn into monsters of one kind or another.
Preadolescence is less obvious, but it has its profound discomforts. At eleven,
one is an adolescent of adolescence. An adolescent ignorantly desires to die
and be reborn as an adult; a preadolescent abysmally wants to die and be reborn
as an adolescent. O to be thirteen! To attend a prom! To have real pimples!

Mrs. Quack observed all that, daily, for many years. By the
time I came to her class, her hair was white (pinkish rather than bluish white,
an important distinction in those days) and her soul darkened from overexposure
to the peculiar hormone-scented sixth grade classroom. Whether her cynicism was
natural to her or had been adopted as the only defense mechanism she could
muster in her circumstances I can’t say. I can see, though, that to have been a
failure for so long at a job that would never call your hand could lead to a
cynical outlook. Her failure had begun on the first day she stepped into a
sixth grade classroom, for teaching sixth graders is hard, and Mrs. Quack was deeply, even fundamentally lazy.

Later on, in junior high and high school, I had teachers
who, under similar conditions, had turned vicious. Mrs. Quack was too indolent
to muster meanness; instead, she cultivated an amused mien that ill concealed
the fact that, really, she couldn’t be bothered to give a good goddamn about
much of anything.

*

Our backwater little school had, in an effort to innovate,
decided that from fifth grade on, students should work with more than one
teacher, to prepare the way for junior high, wherein one had one teacher for
each subject. Accustoming students to moving from room to room, from aegis to
aegis, would toughen us up for what was to come.

Our school had two classrooms for every grade. My class was
comprised of about 40 students, like most other classes before and after, so
this system worked reasonably well. For the first four grades, then, I was
installed with 19 of my peers in one room with one teacher (Mrs. Honey, first
grade; Mrs. Bright, second grade; Mrs. Dim, third grade; Mrs. Nobody, fourth
grade) but in fifth grade, I had two teachers, Mrs. Goodcop and Mrs. Badcop.
Likewise in sixth grade, my time was divided between Mrs. Quack and Miss
Cuckoo.

Like Mrs. Quack, Miss Cuckoo had white hair, but it was
neither pinkish nor bluish: it was simply white, and straight, cut in a sort of
pageboy style. Mrs. Quack clearly enjoyed the blandishments of the beauty
parlor, and came forth clipped and curled and colored. Miss Cuckoo’s style was
more au natural. She verged, in fact,
on the unkempt, and likely it was only peer pressure (intense in our little
community with regard to matters of personal appearance and hygiene) that kept
her from a witchy disreputability.

Where Mrs. Quack was completely transparent, Miss Cuckoo was
a mystery. I find nothing at all in my memory banks about her background or her
circumstances, beyond the fact that, unlike every other teacher in my
elementary school, all of whom were female, her title was “Miss,” not “Mrs.”
That alone was suggestive of many gradients of difference, but what it meant
none of us were capable, at the age of eleven, of penetrating; nor, frankly,
did we try. We were not being schooled in empathy, and therefore we possessed
none. All we knew about Miss Cuckoo was that she was crazy, and that seemed to
be all we needed to know.

*

Miss Cuckoo’s insanity, if that is what it was, took so
benevolent a form that she expended an entire adulthood as a public school teacher.
If her professional superiors or peers ever discussed her strangeness with her,
I am not aware of it, though of course I wouldn’t be. When I started first
grade, Miss Cuckoo’s assignment was as a teacher of first graders, but I landed
in the classroom of the kindly Mrs. Honey, and so did not encounter Miss Cuckoo
at close range except on the playground, where from time to time she exhibited
forms of exuberance that later on might have seemed peculiar, but to a first
grader was simply part of the scenery. By the time I entered sixth grade—why I
do not know–Miss Cuckoo had been reassigned. She and Mrs. Quack shared
responsibility for the sixth graders. Mrs. Quack was in charge of reading and
math, Miss Cuckoo of social studies and anything that fell into the category of
the arts.

Had Miss Cuckoo been my own age, she would have grown, I
think, into a very happy hippie girl, smoking weed, listening to forbidden
music, and dancing naked in meadows at rock concerts. Had she been born in late
nineteenth-century England, she would have been a free spirit and consorted
with Pre-Raphaelites, Decadents, and Symbolists; she would have inhaled opium,
sipped laudanum and absinthe, and posed in the nude for Rossetti, who would
have rendered her as a medieval maiden garlanded in wildflowers.

Unfortunately for Miss Cuckoo, she had been born in the
wrong place and time. She had an affinity with Duse and Isadora Duncan, I
believe, but she was stuck in remote small town America, and by now, as she was
beginning to fade, in the 1950s and early 1960s. To us she, like Mrs. Quack,
seemed impossibly old—both of them were in their sixties, as old as our grandparents!—and
yet she also seemed the youngest child in the room. Most of the time, in fact,
she gave every appearance of being terrified of us, as if a five year old had
been put in charge of a group of children six years older. Sometimes all that
fell away, and then, as she became more manic, she became eccentric and
incomprehensible, like a child on a sugar high.

 Of the general run of her pedagogy, I have absolutely no
memory. This is remarkable, since I can remember, for better or worse,
particulars of both style and substance from every other elementary school
teacher I studied under. Mrs. Cuckoo, however, has left no trace in my
recollection in those terms, and I can only conclude that this is true because
she had absolutely nothing to impart. Some alcoholics are maintenance drinkers;
Mrs. Cuckoo was a maintenance teacher. She spoke to us, read to us, lectured at
us, to pass the time merely. This was done not in a spirit of boredom but under
the lash of fear: she must pass the day in order to escape us.

On the other hand, I well remember that from time to time
she would suddenly, and for no discernible reason, burst into song. Her voice
was that of an aging woman, but it was not unbeautiful for that. The songs she
sang she made up, to all appearances, on the spot. Sometimes they would come
from some chance phrase encountered in a book, or uttered by her, or (horror of
horrors to the child so afflicted) by one of us, but her song would quickly
lose its relation to any external thing. She would dance up and down the aisles
of the classroom singing, an expression of ecstasy transfiguring her otherwise
tortured face; if she happened to be wearing a scarf, as she was prone to do,
she would unwind it from her neck and wave it gracefully around her head in an
expressionist dance that I now understand had its origin in the 1920s.

She also had a few set pieces, one of which quickly became
famous, or notorious, among all the children of the school. She would have us
clear the center of the room of desks, forming a circle around the edges of the
room; she would drag out of some closet a tall wooden folding ladder. Then she would
perform a musical skit of her own devising. Based on the old gospel song
“Jacob’s Ladder,” it consisted of twelve verses, one for each year of our
school experience, and a chorus. Her ladder had twelve steps, and for each
verse she would ascend one step.

I have forgotten the substance of the verses, but the chorus
is burned into my memory, as we children were required to sing along. It went

            We
are climbing the educational ladder
            We
are climbing the educational ladder
            We
are climbing the educational ladder
            Every
day of our lives

 I did learn lessons in prosody from this composition. “We
are climbing Jacob’s ladder” flows along quite well, but substituting “the educational”
for “Jacob’s” causes an elocutionary train wreck—six syllables where two should
go–that even Miss Cuckoo negotiated very poorly. And by the twelfth verse,
Miss Cuckoo would be perched at the very top of the ladder, doing her best
simultaneously to stay balanced there, to maintain some semblance of modesty
(she was, thank goodness, enamored of long skirts), and to sing at the top of
her lungs. By this time we children would be exhausted with laughing at her,
and would simply hum along with her in a kind of comatose disgust, for this
performance was repeated erratically but regularly every two weeks or so.

The Educational Ladder was the blueprint of our education;
we were on rung six of twelve, and we were so sick of it already that we
thought jumping off a bridge might be preferable.

And so we passed our year, shuttled back and forth daily
between the Country of Cuckoo and the Queendom of Quack.

*

Fox, my “best friend,” was vigilant. I put “best friend” in
quotes here, because we were not really so much best friends as a pair of
drowning people thrown together in a maelstrom and trying to survive. He was
without a doubt the most intelligent person in the room, but he was also the
most tortured; he was the victim of an atrocious family, abused by a drunken
violent father. His response to that abuse was to embrace it as an excuse for
every kind of failure, but it made his senses keen. He gravitated to me because
I was also intelligent, and because he envied me the relative stability of my
family life. In return he tortured me, psychologically, in every way he could
devise, which, as he was very bright, were many. He was determined, for one
thing, to cure me of my innocence, especially where grownups were concerned.

“Psst,” he said, “hey, Turtle,” meaning me: “Watch. She’s
about to do it again.”

We were supposed to be working on a writing exercise. Fox
and I had already finished; we were both quick studies. Most of the other
students were still struggling on, gripping their pencils white-knuckled, and
sweating. I was, as usual, using my spare time daydreaming. Fox, as usual,
spent his keeping watch.

“Do what?” I said.

“Just look.”

Mrs. Quack was grading our arithmetic homework. We had
handed in our papers folded once vertically, as she required, with our names
written on the outside. She had her grade book out, and was checking off names,
consulting each paper by glancing at it without opening it. From time to time
she looked out at us, smirking. “Not done yet, Kitten?” she’d say to one slow
girl. “Christmas is coming.” Once she got up and crept over to a child who had
his head down on her desk; she gave the boy a light tap with her ruler. “Sleep
on, Macbeth,” she said to him when he looked up, confused. “That’s Shakespeare,
you know. Have you read Shakespeare? No? Then finish your work.” Years later,
when I read Macbeth and found the
line she was misquoting, I just shook my head and thought: typical.

“I first caught her doing it last week,” Fox said, as Mrs.
Quack sat back down and resumed her marking. “I’ve watched her every day since.
She does it every time. Every time.”

“Does what?” I said. Fox irritated the hell out of me most
of the time, but very often if I paid attention to him I learned something
important beyond the garbage he tended to spew. And just then I saw what he
meant.

Having finished tallying who had turned in a homework
paper—but without ever having opened a single one to check the work—Mrs. Quack
tossed the bundle of assignments into the waste can.

“Does that,” Fox
said. He was on the verge of exploding with laughter; he hissed like a manic
teakettle. “You saw what she did? You saw?”

I had seen. Her act felt like a blow to the side of the
head. It was a gross, flagrant act of malpractice, but worse, it was a
betrayal. I had spent perhaps an hour on my math homework, getting it right,
recopying it neatly. All that had counted was my name on the outside of the
paper.

Fox was jubilant. “You see what this means?”

I saw it meant Mrs. Quack was a terrible teacher, perhaps
even evil in her own stunted way. But that’s not all Fox understood.

“Look here, Turtle. Check my writing assignment.”

I looked over his shoulder. His paper was blank: he had done
nothing. He pulled the blank paper out of his notebook, folded it, and wrote
his name on it.

“She’ll be taking up the papers any minute,” he said. “This
is all she gets from me.”

I looked down at my own notebook. I was, that year, favoring
a certain brand of notebook paper. It was lined in green instead of the
standard blue, and it was also edged in emerald green; I liked it because I was
going through a phase of obsession with Frank Baum’s Oz books. I had read every
one of them, and was heartbroken that there were no more, so every afternoon
when I got home from school, I got the notebook down and added a few pages to
my own addition to the series. I loved my notebook, I loved its Emerald City
edges. I even liked doing my homework, because it meant I got to write. It
didn’t matter to me so much what I
wrote. Words, numbers, it didn’t matter: I loved the work I did, and I took
pride in it.

But now something had changed. A contract was broken. The
notebook was compromised, the act of writing betrayed. I had written a page of
proper sentences, as assigned. Now I turned that page; I pulled out a blank one; I folded it over
and signed it. Never again, that school year, would I do it any other way, nor
would Fox, and our delinquency would never once be detected.

Across the hall, Miss Cuckoo was singing: We are climbing the Educational ladder.
We were up to the sixth rung of the ladder. Miss Cuckoo’s voice danced over the
prosodic error that was the word “educational.” Mrs. Quack sighed at her desk
in her boredom.

I sat at my desk, all that day, in stunned and sullen disillusionment.
In some ways, I am sitting there still. Sleep on, Macbeth. Your sentence is
written, but your page is blank. Sleep on.