This is an ongoing story, meant to be read in order. If you’re just arriving here for the first time, please start at the beginning by following the index.
To get to Ms. A’s hidden classroom in the attic, we follow the teacher's aid up a narrow dark stairway on the far left side of the old Kindergarten building. I had never climbed those stairs during my two years in Junior and Senior Kindergarten. I knew it was there because I had seen teachers and janitors slinking through the doorway leading to the stairwell, soundlessly closing the door behind them as if they were entering a forbidden world. Now that we are first graders, we are ready to experience whatever is up there.
Coming out of the stairwell, the mysteries of the second floor begin to reveal themselves. To my left is a large, bright room where, through the open door, I can see a few tables and chairs. An adult woman sits alone at a table in the center. Wait? What?! It's my old Junior Kindergarten teacher, Miss Akimoto, sipping coffee! She sees us, smiles and waves, then—acknowledging the awkwardness of this situation, where the non-teacher version of herself is unintentionally on display—turns away to read her newspaper.
Getting over this shock, I look straight ahead to see a half stairway leading to a loft-like attic. Led by the TA, the three of us climb the stairs and enter a small bare room containing nothing but a blackboard and a few tiny desks. And the awaiting Mrs. A.
Her name is Mrs. Atchinson, but, recognizing that that is a mouthful for first graders, she graciously lets us call her by a simple letter. The fact that it’s the first in the alphabet is apt: we’re there for remedial reading.
***
Adjacent to the big, modern, multi-tiered and multi-winged structure that is the main campus, the old kindergarten building has the appearance of a large garage, or a church rectory—a dilapidated appendage with toilets that you flushed with pull-chains. Having recently graduated to the first grade and the lowest tier of the main building, we are not exactly thrilled about being sent back to this creaky old tool shed, even if it's just for 30 minutes three times a week.
The kindergarten building is the sole surviving edifice from the original iteration of Francis W. Parker School founded in the early 20th century. The dark, ivy-covered red brick of the old building gives it a forbidding air, a reminder of Parker's less prosperous past. The fact that people in the main building try to ignore the existence of the eyesore in the backyard may say something about wanting to forget about that—or it may just be that they've become accustomed to the modern conveniences of the new building. In any case, viewed from the wide modern glass and chrome doors of our new residence, the building looks like the past; sad, old, outdated—practically sepia-toned if not altogether black and white.
The playground that acts as the buffer zone between it and the main building now seems impossibly small and cramped—as do the kindergartners running and tripping around its grounds. Like the building, the kindergarten playground is its own little world: only the kindergartners, not deemed ready to engage with the older kids, play there. Kindergarten world only rarely interacts with the larger collective that is lower-school-through-high-school. In the scheme of things, Kindergarten is lower than lower school.
But our first-grade position within this big new building is clearly entry-level. We’re in our own little wing with 2nd graders, far removed from the bustle of the older grades—just four homerooms off an abrupt hallway leading on one side to the courtyard for the older kids, on the other back to the playground of the Kindergarten building.
The past threatens to pull us back, the future beckons with all sorts of new danger and excitement. We’ve been placed in a holding room, a purgatory between the old world of half-days with their twenty-minute naps on personal rugs and the upstairs world where, in their own wing, 3rd-through 5th graders lord over us. (They will eventually return to our floor for 6th-through-8th grades in an even more isolated wing: middle-school-world—a group that is itself protected from the even more dangerous realm of high school.)
We are told not to play in the kindergarten playground with its tiny swings, jungle gym, and people. We are proud of the fact that we are now considered a threat to those little twerps. We have now graduated to the main playground area out the other door, where the older kids torment us. But, to balance things out, Randall and Perry do sometimes lead expeditionary raids into the kindergarten territory to harass the little kids. I sometimes join in, just to prove I can be as thoughtless and mean as them. But, for the most part, we stay in our new realm.
So I can't help but feel shame when I am told I need help with reading and must join two other classmates, including Perry, on thrice-weekly retrograde trips to the baby building. The fact that Perry is joining me does sort of ease the embarrassment: at least he can’t harass me for being stupid when he himself is stupid. But my willingness to join him and Randall on occasional raids into the baby territory is no doubt influenced by the fact that I need to mitigate the requirement that I go there legally. I’ll show those damn kindergartners. I’m only going up there ‘cause I’m special. That’s what our first-grade homeroom teacher, Ms. Lestner, says.
Mrs. A, an elderly woman in conservative clothing—thick wrinkled stockings, long wool skirt, pink-gray cardigan sweater opening to a faded flowery top— stands there waiting at the top of the steps with her graying hair bobby-pinned into a bun, smiling warmly, doing everything possible to ease our anxiety about being there in the first place.
Along with me and Perry, there's Jessica, a nerdy, oblivious kid in mismatched clothing who picks her nose incessantly and indifferently. We're here because we were experiencing learning issues in the first grade. (Already? So soon? We've barely gotten started here before we've become problems!)
We get our letters mixed up; words melt into a jumble of ever-changing letters. The alphabet itself is malleable, the concept of vowels and consonants seems arbitrary.
“A, E, I, O, U and—”
“Sometimes Y!” I shout, Perry mumbles bitterly, Jessica, busy placing her latest booger under the desk, echoes five seconds later.
Sometimes? Why sometimes Y?
(Y sometimes why?)
No, I wasn’t dyslexic.
I was just slow. Slow to wake up to the order of things. The order of things as they were being presented by the people who have mastered the order. For all I knew, they created the damn order.
Arbitrary. That’s what it looked like in my first-grade classroom as Ms. Lestner was explaining it. She’d scratch the word of the day up on the blackboard.
“C-A-T. What does that spell?”
“Peter?”
Silence.
It spells trouble for me. I don’t like the way it looks. It has no solidity to it. It looks like it can, at any moment, devolve into its constituent parts. And those parts!
The C, for example. Hard or soft. The A? Like Mrs. A?
“Sound out the letters.”
K…
…A…
…….T
Good. Now put it all together.
K
A
T
What does she mean all together? It’s just
K
A
T.
My eyes are blurry, but I have perfect vision. No, my mind is blurry.
Slumping of shoulders. Hers, then mine.
Off to Mrs. A.
Across the courtyard, up the stairs. Slink across that courtyard quick. Just get to the stairs. And the other stairs.
During one session with Mrs. A, I pee in my pants. I'm developing a bad habit of holding it in, afraid to tell her I have to go. So I wait too long. She sympathetically fetches a pair of pants and underpants from the used clothing bin downstairs. Meant for Kindergarten twerps. Damn, another retrograde movement.
As Perry snickers gleefully, she leads me to another mysterious realm. The second-floor bathroom is straight across the hall from Mrs. A’s room, up a mirror set of stairs into an even smaller room. A bathroom loft. A tiny outhouse of a unisex washroom. Dark, even with the light turned on. Another stairway to shame. And the pull-chain toilet flusher.
Perry will make a full report to Randall about this.