Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay Read Free Book Online

a thousand times better? Who made these rules, anyway?
    By the end Parley’s eyes were wet, and she felt torn in half.
    Blushing Mary Miller said, “He likes you.” They were in the schoolyard together at recess. Mary held the handbell in the crook of her arm. “He walks you home.”
    “I don’t like it, that’s why.”
    “You don’t?”
    “I hate it, Mary.”
    Mary, who had a wide face and eyes of no particular colour, gave her a startled look and a small “oh.” After a moment, she said, “But he’s such a gentleman.”
    “He’s a sadist. A gentleman sadist.” And Connie laughed.
    She came on hard to Mary’s soft; sharp to Mary’s mild. “A gentleman sadist,” she repeated, feeling that she had stumbled upon the truth, a pearl of truth produced by the irritating sand of Mary Miller.
    “Mother thinks we’re lucky to have him. He’s doing so much for the school. All his experience.”
    “Then what is he doing
here?
If he’s so experienced?”
    “Well, I never thought of that.”
    Mary was not a stupid woman, but she had stupid eyes.They looked blank or they looked surprised. She was like soft mud. She would teach until the end of her days. She would live with her mother, who had been a schoolteacher herself. She would plod in her sensible shoes through one day after another, not a good teacher, but adequate, and her mother was adequate company, and everything was adequate and only adequate.
    The weather was colder by now. They were in their coats and woollen tams, standing with their arms folded for warmth near the back door of the school.
    “You never wanted,” and Connie waved her hand towards the horizon, “to just take off?”
    “I can’t. Everybody else did. It would break my mother’s heart if I left.”
    Parley Burns strode back and forth at the foot of the schoolyard, smoking one of his cigarettes.
    “He makes me feel despicable,” Connie said, yielding to meet Mary’s sad honesty halfway. “I can’t explain it.”
    Mary regarded her. “You must encourage him.”
    “But I don’t.”
    “Or he wouldn’t walk you home.”
    She raised the handbell and rang it. Recess was over.
    Connie stood there, registering the forcible prick of Mary’s assessment. The needle in the haystack of Mary.

    Parley assigned the work and play of
Tess
, handing out parts, choosing certain students to write the in-between narration, others to gather costumes and props, others tomake copies of the text. He assigned Michael to build the columns of Stonehenge, telling him they needed to be tall but portable, impressive but light. “You’re in charge,” he said, giving the job to the son of the man who owned the hardware store.
    Connie’s classroom became the hub of the enterprise. Immediately to the inside-left of the door was the cloakroom from which the fledgling actors, dancers, musicians made their entrances and exits. The scene of Tess’s home was played with chairs and a small square table, tablecloth, teacups. When the chairs and table were removed, a bench and milk pails formed a dairy. Later, the corner of the schoolroom became Stonehenge.
    TIME: evening. SEASON: summer
.
    Parley Burns printed the words on Connie’s blackboard, and they quickened her heart. At fourteen, swept up in her father’s plans to move West, she had asked herself what she would do with her own life, and the answer had come with the urgency of youth: I will go onstage. But nothing had happened the way she planned. At fifteen, she saw her mother die. At seventeen, she was training to be a teacher. At eighteen, she was teaching school. At nineteen, she would turn her back on teaching and take up newspaper reporting. At thirty, she would remake her life yet again.
    But the biggest change, she told me more than once, was her mother’s death. In historical accounts you find reports of deep and early snowfalls that continued day and night for weeks, after which nothing was ever the same. Fruit trees died, never to