ABC, 123

ABC, 123

Kindergarten was a shock.  I had looked forward to starting school, and had wished away the days of the summer of ’69 with great impatience.  While another generation was reveling at Woodstock, I was riding a tricycle, reading The Bobbsey Twins’ Mystery at School, and waiting for real life to begin. 

I think I had somehow gotten the idea that in school, I would finally find friends.  It was a disappointment to find out that this school had no library, but I was sure that—at the very least—my classroom would be filled with like-minded five-year-olds and admiring teachers. 

I might have been wrong.

St. Mark’s Lutheran Kindergarten, where my mother sent me because she thought it would be more personal and less mindless than the public school, turned out not to be a haven for the radical intellect.  We learned to pray in unison (three times in three hours of school), we learned to shut up until we were called upon, regardless of how brilliant our potential contribution to the discussion might be, and we learned about the dangers of calling the bathroom by the wrong name. 

You would think that restroom nomenclature would be pretty low on the list of curriculum priorities.  What does it matter what you call it, as long as you know how to use it?  The first time that nature called during class, I raised my hand.  I knew the rule.  You raised your hand for everything.  Got it.  So I did. 

When Mrs. Renshaw called on me, I said, “I have to use the toilet.” 

“You have to use what?”  Mrs. Renshaw stared at me.  Charles and Susan started to giggle. 

“The tollet!”  I shouted.  Perhaps my pronunciation was not what it might have been.  Perhaps toilet was one of those words that I rarely, if ever, had said before.  I hadn’t needed to say it.  In my family, if you needed to use the bathroom, you just used it, without even raising your hand once.  The porcelain receptacle itself did not need to be addressed by name.

So, maybe I pronounced it “tollet”.  I was a reader, not a talker, and it was one of those words that I’d encountered more in print than in conversation.  It was no reason to resort to public humiliation. 

“Do you mean the toilet?” snapped Mrs. Renshaw.  I nodded, turning a deeper shade of red.  The other children were either falling out of their seats laughing or frozen with fear, imagining themselves in my place.

“Go, then,” she waved me off into the hallway, where the bathroom was—blessedly—at some distance from the classroom.  I stayed there, in the tiled, two-stall facility with painted wooden boxes in front of the toilets to make them viable for small people, until I had finished crying.  Then, drying my face and assuming what I hoped was a neutral expression, I returned to my seat.

The most disappointing thing about kindergarten was the book.  I had expected school to be bursting with books.  Books made me happy, and I was ready to get happier.  Instead, what we got was We Read Pictures.  This was the first book of the Dick and Jane series, a softcover book of picture stories from front to back.  No words.  Dick, Jane, Spot, and Puff pantomimed adventure after adventure, going through life from cover to cover without a word.  Dick leaned back and held his stomach like a clean-shaven, malnourished Santa, and from this we were to infer laughter.  On the next page, Mother’s hands flew to her mouth, which was shaped like a lipstick-red “O”, from which we were meant to infer surprise.  Puff was captured in mid-air, halfway between the table and the floor, and a vase of flowers was shown spilled on the rug.  We were, I supposed, to infer that Puff was about to be in the doghouse. 

When Mrs. Renshaw handed out these books, she told us the title: “This book is called We Read Pictures.” 

My hand was up before the words were out of her mouth.  She looked at me and frowned.  “Yes?”

“I read words,” I announced.

Mrs. Renshaw fixed me in her gaze and admonished, “Stop bragging.  Be quiet and pay attention.”

Again the color rose in my cheeks, but this time I was baffled.  Why would reading words be a bad thing?  Would we not read words in school, after all?  What was the point, then, of being here, of sitting in uncomfortable chairs, reciting prayers, and waiting for everyone to get quiet?

The pictures weren’t even very good.  Jane’s dress was never dirty, Mother never gave another driver the finger, and Spot never peed on anything. 

For the rest of that year, we read pictures.  Our names were the only thing that we were allowed to write.  We read pictures, we prayed, and we had special visitors, like Santa Claus.  Santa Claus, rumor had it, was actually Phillip’s uncle, but Mark cried anyway.  The thought of Santa Claus in our very own classroom, perched on a folding chair on the dingy linoleum squares, was too much for him.  He cried and refused to go up to collect his gift when Santa called his name.  I thought unkind things about Mark, and felt twinges of guilt for these thoughts.  I already knew that the whole Santa Claus thing was just a marketing ploy, so it was pretty much the same as having, say, The Jolly Green Giant come to visit, but I knew that we were still supposed to be kind to one another. 

Our presents were coffee mugs.  This, to me, showed some lack of forethought.  Now, had they given us cigarette cases, some of my classmates might have been using them by fifth or sixth grade.  Glass coffee mugs, though—depicting a boy and a girl with heads bowed in prayer—were doomed to grace our mothers’ china cabinets for decades.  Maybe that’s why I still have mine.  If the gift had really been of any use, I would have broken or lost it by now. 

The kindergarten curriculum seemed to be focused on the celebration—primarily with crayons and construction paper—of holidays.  At Eastertime, though, we dyed eggs, painstakingly printing our names on two each.  The last day before Easter Break, our teacher hid them.  We fell upon the room like a swarm of locusts, leaving no tissue box unturned.  Cries of “I found mine!” filled the air.  I found one of mine in the coat closet.  The other one just didn’t seem to be anywhere. 

One by one, my classmates skipped to their places, an egg in each hand.  The party would begin as soon as all the children found their eggs.

It was not going well.  Somewhere in the room was an egg with my name on it, and it was evading me completely.  Kevin couldn’t find his second egg, either, and he and I crisscrossed the room in ever-growing despair.  I wished that it were the day before, and that Kevin and I could go back to playing Lassie under the tables.  Even though he always insisted that he had to be Lassie and I had to be Brandy, Lassie’s girlfriend, it had been better than this. 

Finally, Mrs. Renshaw told us to sit down.  She walked over to the art area and reached into a coffee can filled with paintbrushes.  Her hand emerged with a small, purple object with my name on it.  She held it out to me without a word, and I took it.  I understood the implication of this failure, the look on her face that said that this only confirmed her assessment of my suitability for participation in the human race. 

Seeing her pull Kevin’s egg from beneath the leaves of a plant was little consolation.  The world was surely filled with the hapless and inept, but I did not plan to be among them.  I vowed never to be put in that situation again.  Next year, in first grade, I would case the room in February.  I would map out every flower vase, every paperclip dispenser, every coat pocket in which something could possibly be hidden, and I would find my eggs before the teacher could spit out the word “Go!”  It was becoming increasingly clear that school was a labyrinth of challenges that had nothing to do with reading, and that the next twelve years might not be as rewarding as I’d hoped.

The turtles were another example.  Mrs. Renshaw was a veritable font of mimeographed worksheets—all without words, of course—and one day, she gave us one covered with turtles. 

They looked so friendly; how could you go wrong with turtles?  I cheerfully pulled out my chubby green pencil.  There was the turtle, heading off down the road with a bandanna tied to the end of a stick.  In the next frame, he had the bandanna untied, and there was a sandwich and an apple in it.  His mother probably hadn’t let him have a ginger ale.  I could relate. 

The following frames included images depicting the turtle fishing, talking with a friend, drinking something out of a bottle, showing a fish to a larger turtle who must have been his uncle, and having a meal with another turtle who must have been his mother.  The point was to number the four lines of frames in the order in which we thought they would happen in a story.  I was a little bit disturbed at the idea that a water creature would be willing to hunt and kill other water creatures, but maybe living in a little cottage with purple shutters—okay, everything on the mimeographed sheets was purple—had distanced him from his roots.  Maybe after he showed it to his uncle, he would have thrown the fish back into the stream, just like I did the one time I let my father talk me into fishing.

I numbered the lines in just they way they would have happened.  I passed my paper to Andrew, who was the paper monitor that day, and turned my attention to the next round of prayer.

The next day, Susan was the paper monitor, and she handed our papers back.  She held mine out to me with a sad shake of her head.  I stared at the paper.  It looked as though the formerly carefree turtle had stumbled upon the set of a horror movie.  Red slashes were everywhere.  Most horrifying of all was the letter at the top of the page:  F. 

I couldn’t believe it.  An F? 

On turtles?

I figured Mrs. Renshaw must not have understood my paper.  Maybe she wasn’t very good at stories; imagination didn’t really appear to be her forte.  I grabbed the offending document and marched to her desk, ready to patiently explain it to her.

She told me to go sit down.  She told me that if I weren’t always in such a hurry, I might do more things right. 

I sat down.  The rest of the class recited the Lord’s Prayer in that creepy, droning way that always made me think of the zombie movies my grandfather sometimes watched late at night.  I didn’t feel like praying.  I sat with my hands folded and my scuffed red corrective oxfords under my chair, imagining a story in which the turtle and I would go off together, whistling and kicking a can down a country road.  Mrs. Renshaw would call and call our names, but we would keep on walking.