Levelling Miss Lutz
Jackie Davis Martin
Jackie Davis Martin
| We like this story because: We've all known a teacher like this. They never get it do they? Yet they keep on trying. |
| Miss Lutz was crazy the girls concluded. Every one in their seventh grade class thought that, except maybe Henry Osmond who played the trombone with his cheeks puffed out. The girls rolled their eyes elaborately to one another when Miss Lutz shared—that was her word, as though they had asked for any of this—a story of how she had visited Appalachia or made baskets with the Navajos or--here they really stretched and managed a full head tilt showing their incredulity-- experienced Beethoven’s Fifth in her own body. She stood straight in her skirt and blouse—she always wore skirts and blouses—and shook her frizzy hair with a shiver, reliving the symphony’s music. She told the class that she was only twenty-six, as though they cared how old she was—and only, imagine! She had made life her classroom, she said. Again the girls rolled their eyes. The girls were Catherine and Leslie and Ida and Kate. They felt superior to everyone else because two of them, Catherine and Kate, were clearly the smartest in the class and the other two, Leslie and Ida, the prettiest. They were together all the time. Once, in Art class, they’d been assigned to carve linoleum blocks into a design. They cleverly put together their initials in a fancy CLIK and, since it was a linoleum block meant to print, stamped their arms and legs all over. Miss Lutz had a fit! When they returned to her classroom—that was another thing: they were with Miss Lutz in a new unified studies program all day, escaping only for Art or Gym or Music—she pulled them by the hands into the connecting unfinished storage room where she arranged five chairs in a circle near its door and talked about exclusion and what a clique was. She kept saying cleek, which made the girls giggle. Even more amusing was the way Miss Lutz kept leaning around them to tell the rest of the class, peering through the open door, to get back to their assignments. The assignment was to write letters to opera stars and classical musicians in hopes that they would write back. Miss Lutz had framed her own letter from someone named Renata Tebaldi and hung it near the light switch. “Look what you’ve done to your bodies,” Miss Lutz said, glancing down with true sadness at Leslie’s and Ida’s pretty bare legs all marked up with the purple stamp, then back to the ink- smudged chubbier arms of Catherine and Kate. Worse, she reminded them, was to show off, to act as though they were better than everyone else. Their punishment would be to sit out the day marked up with their own conspicuous artwork and think about what it meant. They themselves could decide whether they’d go home that way. (They wouldn’t; they all knew that.) Another time, when Miss Lutz had taken them to the Heinz Pickle Plant for a tour—she thought up the most boring things to do—the girls generously helped themselves to the pickle pins heaped in large wooden barrels at the Heinz exit doors. The pins were miniature plastic pickles attached to a safety pin. Cute: except who would wear them? But there they were! So, Catherine and Kate stuffed their pockets and Leslie and Ida followed suit. Some traitor on the bus—no doubt Henry Osmond—told Miss Lutz that they’d taken more than their fair share. Another talk. Miss Lutz never yelled, just gathered them in a circle again, their bodies slouched against the onslaught. She would find boxes, she said. Each girl could package up the pickle pins she stole in her own individual box and write her own individual letter of apology to H.J. Heinz. They couldn’t believe it. “You may each keep one pickle,” she said. “To wear.” Miss Lutz was exhausting. Why couldn’t she just teach? One day they’d have a rabbi and a priest visiting to discuss brotherhood, another day they’d be building the Parthenon out of flour and water and newspaper strips, on another they’d have to learn Roberts Rules of order to conduct a class meeting on whether to study contemporary sculptors or the French and Indian War. The final straw came when she instructed the girls in the class to stay in the room for lunch, pushing the tables together and unpacking her own brown bag, sitting down with them. “We’re all women,” she said, “and we’re going to talk about our bodies.” The girls—the CLIK—turned their heads very slowly, eyes widened in alarm, even shame, for Miss Lutz. “Has anyone here started menstruating?” She bit companionably into her thick tomato sandwich. No one said a word. Catherine had. In sixth grade. It was a bitter and embarrassing situation and she could barely stand to tell her mother. Her face turned hot with exposure, as did Leslie’s. Leslie and Catherine were the only CLIK members with periods. Miss Lutz smiled inquiringly in their direction. Most of girls—there were fourteen total—leaned into their lunches and the only sounds were the unfolding and refolding of waxed paper and the soft undulation of giggles at the end of the table from Peggy and Alice and Patty who were short and skinny and didn’t even wear bras. “Well!” Miss Lutz said, as she sliced an apple with the paring knife she always brought with her, “I experienced the proud onset of menses at age twelve.” She looked from girl to girl and waited, but her admission invited no response. “We’ll continue the discussion next month,” she said. “Month is what menses means.” She pushed the pile of slices to the middle of the table. “Would anyone like some?” They all shook their heads, no thanks. Years later, when she sliced apples for her own children, Catherine could not disassociate the fruit from the word: menses. It was Catherine who thought of the plan to trip up Miss Lutz. She had first entertained the notion, she said, when they’d sat in the extra room for the tattoo lecture. In the girls’ bathroom the four girls leaned against the white sinks and stifled giggles as Catherine plotted Miss Lutz’s tripping up, making a fool of herself. Around them tiles sparkled in the afternoon sunlight that gleamed through clean opaque windows. That was it: the school was new, the furniture new, the teachers too new, they thought, and some of the construction work was not finished at all, which was the case of the room adjacent to their seventh grade class. “She’ s probably not even supposed to be in that room,” Catherine observed of Miss Lutz, “let alone have us sit in there.” Catherine’s dad was head custodian at another school, giving her opinions a decided clout. Over the course of the next school day each of the girls would peer into the Lutz Room, as they called it, to assess the most vulnerable part of the incomplete flooring, how they might disguise it and lure the unsuspecting teacher in. Leslie had actually darted into the room and poked her foot at the exposed tar-paper, as though testing the ocean’s temperature. Enough to give way a little, she’d declared. After their last class—music, away from Miss Lutz—they lingered in the hallway near the music room, rehearsing their respective roles, before they took the late bus home. The class decision to make Mexican murals (goaded by Miss Lutz, of course, how would they ever have thought of that?) played into their hands. Miss Lutz had acquired giant rolls of art paper and buckets of poster paint in primary colors. The girls begged to spread out their almost finished designs; they needed room, they explained, so they could be sure their murals were in a proper sequence. Could they please, please just lay them out for a bit in the big storage room? “She’ll be happy that we’re actually involved,” Catherine said, “so she’ll let us.” The next part of the plan was that one of them—Kate had volunteered—would call out in alarm, forcing Miss Lutz to run quickly over the carpeting of their paper murals and forget the unplanked area near the center of the floor. Then, crash! The teacher would fall. “Like a klutz,” Leslie said, which they thought was really clever. Lutz the Klutz. Oh, it was thrilling to think about! The morning dragged. They listened to Mayan chants on an old tape recorder Miss Lutz had brought to “share” with them. Then there were the dreary reports by Henry Osmond and his group on Zapata and land titles and Hidalgo and his excommunication. Finally, it was project time. Catherine was right, of course—the girls were allowed the use of the back room; they would demonstrate the story aspects of murals. Miss Lutz was thoroughly pleased. They had to push the five conference chairs off to one side and lift and restack a few boards to make room for the broad mural papers, which they shook like bed sheets onto the flat floor, making sure their edges overlapped. Then, with brushes thick with red paint, they squiggled and zigzagged a common border design, carefully stretching and bending as though playing Twister, their lips tightly pressed together in tense and amused anticipation of the drama to come. Kate’s scream of alarm--they’d decided she’d seen mice scurrying--caused several kids to run to the doorway first—something they hadn’t anticipated—so Catherine had to hold them back to allow Miss Lutz to run ahead. Kate was near the windows at the end of the room, arms too aflutter to be believed (too dramatic Catherine decided right then and there), but evincing something like panic. Miss Lutz ran toward Kate, in real alarm, and crash, fell through the paper just at the spot they planned. Fell through! Oh God! She was supposed to trip, to fall, not fall through. She screamed, almost as loudly as Kate had. Her leg was caught in a hole, her skirt helplessly crumpled around her. She tried to get up, to get her footing. The entire class ran in to see the disaster, to see Miss Lutz floating in a sea of painted paper, wet with the fresh paint the girls had applied liberally in the zeal of their ruse. “Don’t! Don’t!” she said to two of the boys who reached to help her up. Kids were actually laughing, though, covering their mouths so no one would see. “Get a janitor. Get Mr. Harding, next door.” Miss Lutz called out orders from her pool of paper. “Just Tom and Billy go; the rest of you stay here.” The class hovered around the broken murals. Kate stood still near the windows, a greater panic in her eyes than she had play-acted minutes before, arms not in mock-distress but frozen at her sides. Catherine, Leslie, and Ida had each backed away and stood in horror on the fringes. Miss Lutz’s glance traveled levelly to each of the girls’ eyes, before she turned to the others and said, “I think I’ll be all right. I’m just trapped here a bit. We’ll see.” Mr. Harding dashed in like a hero, holding at bay his own group of seventh-graders who’d followed him. He dramatically extended his arm toward Miss Lutz, just short of grasping hers, and said they’d wait for medical help. That help arrived immediately as the school nurse, tall and scrawny, slipped through the kids to join Mr. Harding. The old janitor huffed behind her. The murals were ripped randomly away—the girls, the CLIK, gasped. They would have to do them all over again! Least of their worries—their eyes revealed all. Miss Lutz remained, one leg twisted under her, the other out of sight, the gape in the floor alarmingly evident. Straddling the hole, the three adults awkwardly lifted Miss Lutz to safe ground, her blouse riding up beyond her bra as they pulled (the boys stayed silent), her disheveled skirt smudged with red (red, of all things--they all thought it—on a skirt), her nylon hose torn to beige ribbons. But she was standing. The nurse tugged her garments into place. “Can you walk?” she asked. Miss Lutz limped a few steps. It was her twisted leg that was a bit sore—the freefall one had survived she said, trying to smile. Her eyes were wet, her mascara had run; she looked a horror. The girls allowed a fleeting exchange of eye contact, of pure joy at Ms. Lutz’s being on exhibit, ridiculous and shut up for a change, for an audience beyond what they could have anticipated, before their fear returned. The janitor took charge. He crushed their Mexican murals into a trashcan, brutally pushing them down with a broom handle. “Everyone, out of here!” he said, brandishing the broom. The room was off limits, the room was dangerous. He shooed the kids in front of him like puppies, back into their classroom. Catherine and Leslie and Ida and Kate had stayed at the edges to watch, watching each other, too. Now Leslie and Ida joined the stream, taking their seats—or seats in general—it was against Miss Lutz’s freethinking style that students become attached to seats. Miss Lutz’s wooden chair was placed front and center, and she was ceremoniously restored to it by her rescuers. “Up front,” Catherine mouthed to Kate. “Near her.” Kate frowned, but then caught on. The two moved brazenly to the front of the classroom, sitting close to Miss Lutz and leaning forward with what they hoped the class— mostly Miss Lutz—would see as innocent concern. She waved away the nurse; Mr. Harding had already gone with his group, and the only sounds were the banging and slapping of the janitor cleaning up the back room. Miss Lutz surveyed her students, the four girls in particular, and hobbled from her chair to the board to write “Gandhi, Jesus, Turning the other cheek.” They would have a discussion, she said, an open forum, on what the names and expression meant. Then they would think about what had happened this morning and decide what to do about it. The CLIK darted glances at one another. Miss Lutz was going to make them squirm--they could see it!—force a confession, point out their guilt. Their eyes widened with panic. In fact, Miss Lutz smiled a little, directly at Catherine. “Does anyone want to start?” Henry’s arm shot up: “I know about Jesus!” he said. “I never heard of that other name, but I can tell about Jesus. Wanna know about Jesus?” Just then Mr. Roper, the principal, appeared in the doorway. “Miss Lutz!” The brightly lit hall behind him made him seem a dark giant. “Miss Lutz.” She steadied herself with a hand on her desk, her clothes still askew. Mr. Roper beckoned her to the doorway. Ida, who was on that side of the room, later reported their exact words. “This is a public school, Miss Lutz,” he’d said. “We do not ‘do’ Jesus!—I don’t care what your point is.” Ida reported that the teacher had tried to tell him she was Jewish, but he went on to tell her she had no right to use that storage room, to open it, to risk the safety of children. It was a good thing it had happened to her and not to the girls working there. “Surely you know better.” That’s what he had said. When Miss Lutz tried to explain that the children knew about the problems in the conference room; that they were very careful, Ida mimicked Mr. Roper almost shouting “Conference room? Conference room?” but she couldn’t hear what was said next since it got too whispery. Miss Lutz’s eyes were wet when she returned to the board and erased all but Gandhi and then, as Mr. Roper waited in the doorway, erased “Gandhi” too. Mr. Roper glanced around the room—at the pyramid of the Aztec ruin whose name sounded like Titty-Kan, at the piñatas hanging from the ceiling, the flopped sombrero taking up most of the teacher’s desk. “For your lesson plans you submitted the Mexico Unit, right?” he said. “Well, return to it.” Afterward they tried to pretend the mural accident hadn’t happened. Miss Lutz showed up the next day in another straight skirt, a fresh white blouse; the back room was locked. No action was taken against the girls that day. Or the next week, then two. When they got together after school, they weren’t sure how to act. Sometimes they’d giggle about what a great success the trick had been, how much fun it had been to watch Miss Lutz fall down, how they’d had to suppress their laughter. Other times they’d almost collapse with the relief of having come that close to killing someone; they’d grasp each other’s hands in disbelief that their parents hadn’t found out, or that Miss Lutz hadn’t sunk through to some creepy muddy abyss below. They still thought Miss Lutz was crazy, but it was they who’d lost their footing. She was keeping notes on them, Kate suspected, to get even with them later. Leslie and Ida insincerely offered that maybe Miss Lutz thought they had really forgotten about the unfinished flooring. Catherine declared that Miss Lutz knew and wanted them to know she knew. That sounded like one of Catherine’s show-off riddles, until Kate agreed. Maybe she knew but really didn’t want to know, Kate said. They were, in short, perplexed and unsettled. For her part, Miss Lutz treated the CLIK the way she treated the other kids, although her eyes sometimes lingered on one or the other. That’s what they had all felt, the girls said, traipsing down a path behind the school to a clearing in the woods. The class was on yet another field trip—this one to learn how to build a fire and bake the potato each of them was carrying. Miss Lutz, up ahead, held a box of aluminum foil high in the air, waving it aloft like a beacon. Today they were getting instruction, she said, in how to survive. The air grew chilly that day, in spite of the clear sun, and the students huddled in little groups around fires, grateful for the hot potatoes. “We’ll be all right,” Catherine whispered to Kate and Leslie and Ida, just as Miss Lutz, circling the groups, stood behind theirs. The four girls were crouched together, holding their potatoes under their chins, and scooping the pulp with plastic spoons. “Don’t potatoes taste good,” Miss Lutz said, “without accoutrements?” The CLIK checked the impulse to giggle, even when Miss Lutz added, “It’s good to strip them to their essence.” She’d smiled, actually touched Catherine on the shoulder. Miss Lutz didn’t return to their school the following year, and the girls were on different schedules, then different high schools, then separate lives altogether. On the afternoon of that field trip, as Catherine remembered it, the CLIK, safely bringing up the rear, had mimicked Miss Lutz’s words. But their fun-making lost its zing, even then. For her part, Catherine, years later--beyond marriage and divorce, beyond raising children on her own— continued to eat her baked potatoes dry. © Jackie Davis Martin All Rights Reserved millionstories.net |
www.millionstories.net
| The One Million Stories Creative Writing Project One Million Stories... One Million Dreams... |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| Join In! |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| STORIES |