Chalisbury Summers

I hate Summer the most of all the seasons. Don’t go misunderstanding me – I’m no fan of the rest of the year. I just hate Summer the most, is all. My Paps used to say hate was for racists and rapists, but evidently he was wrong because I am neither and I have plenty of it. It wasn’t even very good alliteration, come to think of it. My Paps was a Special Ed teacher in Chalisbury, New Gin. Chalisbury was the smelliest, most pathetic little town anywhere. You couldn’t see where you were going half the time, what with the dead bugs’ wings floating on the dust into your face. I suppose the only reason my Paps moved us there was due to the work being so easy. Special Ed teaching in Chalisbury was smooth as a bowl of custard, because there were no Special Ed kids in Chalisbury. Oh, sure, there were plenty of kids you’d look at and think, that little doodle is not getting taken care of very well, because they’d be walking down the hallways squinting cross eyed at crap that wasn’t there or humming very quietly or twisting their left ankles some degrees sideways with each step and you could tell something was wrong but not in their ankle. Their folks either just pretended nothing was wrong, or genuinely believed nothing was wrong. Chalisbury was hostile as heck to any kind of difference in anyone or anything. Mrs. Kim planted chrysanthemums one Spring on a block that was otherwise completely peony, and all the land in front of her house was mowed over; not in a friendly-neighbor fashion, but as a warning. So the parents of the Special Ed kids just stuffed their thoughts up their floral cotton-clad bums and my Paps didn’t have anyone to do anything for all day. He went to the principal and said, “why am I here if there are no kids who need me?” And the principal said it was mandated by the state that Special Ed support be available. My Paps just sat twiddling his thumbs in his office all day, chatting to the secretary, whose name was Ms. Clanyard. Ms. Clanyard had a little more to do than my Paps did, because every once in a while a child with a burn or a cut would come in to get sympathy and a Band Aid. Ms. Clanyard specialized in sympathy. She had these giant brown eyes with specks of gold and she’d look right at your wound with them, like that would help somehow. She was good at making sympathetic noises. Little mumbles of consonants and “there, there.” I didn’t know any of this until my Paps married her, and there she was making kind noises at our house and my bedroom and my train and all my toys and my doll named Rann. “What’s her name, dear?”

“Rann.”

“Ann?”

“No, Rann.”

“You don’t spell Ann with an ‘r,’ dear.”

“I’m not trying to spell Ann.”

“Hmmm.”

Ms. Clanyard didn’t really care what my doll was called, which was just as well. She cared about Paps, which was good because it seemed to have been a while since anyone but me cared for Paps. Since she was a proper Chalisbury woman, she tried to have her last name changed to Dunn, but the previous Mrs. Dunn, my mother, wouldn’t let that happen. Every time Clanyard tried to go to the bureau, there would be lighting or an earthquake or a report of a serial killer loose on Highway 4. I don’t think my mother had any objections to the marriage, it was just that she’d adapted Mrs. Dunn as her identity. The position wasn’t a role that got filled, emptied, and then filled again by someone else. It just wasn’t that simple. My Paps couldn’t regift his name to another lady, that wasn’t how it worked. The name Dunn wasn’t just his property anymore, it was my mother’s and it was also mine. I didn’t have much of a preference in the matter.

My Paps and Ms. Clanyard would walk the halls of the school arm in arm, and the other teachers whispered behind their backs that my Paps was a good-for-nothing who wasn’t even really trained to do the job he wasn’t doing and Ms. Clanyard was a mind-addled loon herself and that was the only reason she married him. When I graduated from school in the Summer of ’94, the whispers had grown to a low hum of menace. The graduation festival happened at an open campground just outside Chalis, and volunteers had stayed up all night stringing banners between the trees that read “CONGRADULATIONS GRAD 1894,” because they’d been printed wrong and no one could be bothered to fix them. The principal leaned in and declared that the entire event would be 19th century themed. She came in a hoop skirt that made stupid clacking noises every time she so much as blinked. Her husband wore a pair of her leggings and a bowler hat. Nobody dared to laugh directly in his face but there was an undercurrent of tittering that he often participated in, because he wanted to appear to know the joke. Ms. Clanyard was relieved at the diversion – vicious comments previously aimed at her marriage to my Paps were now aimed at the principal’s husband and his leggings. “Welcome to ye olde graduation party,” the principal bellowed. Since it was 1894, microphones were done away with. We all knew it was really because the school didn’t want to pay for them. “We shall commence the ceremony with the crossing of the stage by the entire staff.” Twelve people crossed the stage. My Paps was one of them. Ms. Clanyard was another. They were at the end of the line but still, when they got on stage there was sniggering. The parents of the kids who needed Special Ed but couldn’t have it sniggered the loudest. One father sniggered so hard he choked on his own spit and created a small crater around himself with his coughing. When the teachers were all onstage, the principal announced that the graduates would now be crossing the stage to collect their diplomas. The geography teacher shook our hands. The PE teacher moved the thread on our caps from the right to the left. The art teacher handed the diplomas to the drama teacher, who handed them to one of the math teachers, who handed them to a teacher whose subject no one could really describe, who handed them to us. Everyone participated besides my Paps and Ms. Clanyard. It was like in kindergarten when there’s some silly activity like baking crayons and everyone has a job – peeling the paper off the crayons, putting them in the pan, handing them to the teacher, taking them from the teacher, cutting them out of the molds, wrapping them. It’s a little assembly line. It was an assembly line on stage that day; teachers who were so skilled at making sure everyone in kindergarten was included in the crayon baking process were equally skilled at making sure my Paps and Ms. Clanyard were excluded from the graduate baking process. The implication was that they’d had no part in any success the students might achieve. When I got on stage, the crowd couldn't take it anymore. They had to verbalize. Someone yelled, “burn the witch!” Which I suppose was in keeping with the theme. That got everyone switched from booing to yelling, like they’d just remembered language had specific sounds that could hurt people in specific places. Booing was a wider approach, like dropping a bomb over a country and hoping the one person you were trying to kill was around for it.

“Hey, Ed, how do you like it up there?”

“Burn the witch!”

There was a lot of “burn the witch!” Ms. Clanyard looked at my Paps.

“He has no answers! He does nothing!” Someone yelled.

The principal intervened. “The Salem trials were two centuries before this, folks. You have missed the action. But not all of it – good news, we still have the barbecue,” she said. The guy in charge of the barbecue turned the heat up much further than it needed to go for a Summer day like that. A small flame erupted in the center of the crowd. “Burn the witch” was a chant now, around and around the little flame. Ms. Clanyard looked like she was about to cry. She looked like she could have used someone who was as good at sympathy as she was, but there wasn’t anyone else like that in Chalisbury. She got off stage and ran around to the porta-potty, where no one could get to her. My Paps hauled the porta potty onto the top of his second-hand Volkswagen truck and drove off. I was still on stage with my diploma when the fire and cries of “burn the witch!” had died down. No one was in the house when I got home. I called my Paps’ cell phone and he said they were in a motel in New Jersey. “Are you coming back?” I asked.

“Nah. We’ll be closer to your college from here, anyway, when that starts.”

“What about your jobs?”

“We’ll find new ones.”

I spent the rest of the Summer by myself in that house, and I liked it. I ate popcorn for dinner and antacids for necessary desert every night. As I got on the Greyhound headed to college, I bumped into the new Special Ed teacher. I knew it was her because she was the only person disembarking in our little hellhole of a town. She was getting off the bus with a blue hard-covered suitcase. She took her sunglasses off and gave Chalisbury that look travelers are known to give places they stop at – a look like you just found the meaning of life, like you are the star of a movie and the camera is doing a closeup of your face right now. A look like you believe you are going to do something in this town.