Teacher by Mark Edmundson Read Free Book Online Page A

other for about a decade—that he doesn’t care. Then he tags Donald Bellmer again and again, Bellmer, with his Dumbo ears and big feet and hands. Bellmer was tall and pale and so shy and indrawn that he almost seemed like a ventriloquist’s doll who was waiting for the master to come along, prop him on his knee, and let the show begin. He hit blond, open-mouthed Carolyn Cummer, and then he looked at her apologetically, like a low-rung courtier who’d sullied the empress.
    Almost everyone is watching Dubby now. He’s in the position of the prospector who’s perhaps struck a vein of gold. Out ahead of us, he has taken the necessary daring step and quickly revealed what looks to be the way things will go with this new guy.
    Tired of shooting, the Dub gets into another line. He stomps his feet a little, offers a few animal noises, maybe a lip-fart or two. And Lears lets it all go. He pays the Doober no mind, though he seems to see Donny working away. Probably he’s too afraid to confront him. Probably he doesn’t know what to do.
    We begin to loosen up. We drum the desks; we yack as loudly as we care to with our neighbors. We pull out newspapers. A few lay their heads down and begin a nap. Some kind of discussion does seem to be going on—yes, Sandra is dropping in a word here and there. And this Lears character, ignoring our antics, is talking back, taking her seriously. He thinks he’s in an actual school. Occasionally, he stops and looks at all of us, contemplating the group en masse.
    And what did he see as he looked out at us? Lears, you have to keep in mind, was here on leave from Pepperland. He came from the world where men wore beads and earrings and carried little purses and displayed muttonchop sideburns and walrus mustaches and decked themselves in army-surplus gear. They sported pink-tinted granny glasses, headbands, multiple rings, bell-bottoms, Mexican sandals. The idea, often, was to reach to both extremes. The real stylists would mix macho touches—boots, spurs, a Confederate cavalry cap, say—with female odds and ends—silver amulets and love beads and a sweet little braid or two.
    The women wore minis (there were rules against these at Medford High) and long bread-baker skirts, and hair like bed curtains, hanging evenly down, and no bras (no bras!) and absurdly bright peasant blouses. Lears’ contemporaries were at the time busy forming a ragtag peasant parody army, high as magpies on weed, mushrooms, and acid, pushing the pigs against the wall (and being shoved there in turn), getting it on, and reinventing (or trying to reinvent) America wholesale. Lears’ legacy suit, with the lapel paper clip and the gunboat shoes, was a costume; he was goofing on the whole idea of straightness. He was fresh from the revolution, out of that great tragicomedy that’s since been dubbed the sixties, but at the time simply looked like a standard-issue re-creation of the world from top to bottom that was going to continue forever.
    What Lears saw was Dubby stupidly lurking behind the prop that was Rick’s back and the rest of us following his antics like chimps seeking their lowest level of common amusement, straining to achieve our ultimate goal, which was to turn everyday life into a species of our favorite diversion, television. Yes, if you could turn school into TV, that would be fine indeed, well worth the labor of getting up, doing the ablutions, and boarding the bus.
    What he saw when we sat still and tried to listen was also in some measure the world created by TV. For we looked like nothing so much as people who aspired to be in family sitcoms, aspired, that is, to a certain wholesomeness, fed as we were on American cheese and Wonder Bread, with Fluffer-Nutter sandwiches and sloppy joes on the weekends. The girls wore jumpers and pleated skirts and had their hair militantly lacquered, into imposing helmets. What our school alone used in hair spray would have been enough to burn a considerable hole in the