Teacher's Lemon

When Mrs. Reese glided, as if on incandescent ice, into my sixth-grade classroom, I gasped. All the other teachers wore printed house dresses well below their thick knobby knees with ugly sensible shoes, the type favored by my grandmother with her painful bunions. The sight of this new teacher’s flaming orange, full-length leather coat with fur-trimmed collar and black high-heel boots was truly startling. Even more breathtaking was her shoulder-length, platinum blonde hair. She appeared at my school like a misplaced movie star, lost in rural Ohio in a freaky episode of the Twilight Zone.

Furthermore, Mrs. Reese acted mighty peculiar. On recess duty she stood stock-still with her hands deep in her orange pockets, staring out past us and ignoring the ongoing commotion. I wondered what she was looking at, since there was nothing beyond the turnip patch but endless rows of corn. As if to confirm this, the air smelled of decayed root vegetables and damp earth.

Most days I ran past her motionless body to the edge of the field to play baseball with my friends. While waiting to bat, our conversations sometimes centered on our teacher.

“Never saw such fancy clothes,” said my Amish friend Rachel, nervously touching the point of one of the straight pins that held the front of her plain cotton dress together. She pressed a bit too hard, then sucked her fingertip.

I nodded in agreement and wondered why Amish boys got to wear buttons on the front of their shirts, when the girls could only wear them on the back of their dresses.

The other Amish Rachel sighed and tossed a soft ball into the air. “Don’t worry. Your parents won’t see her.”

This second Rachel was a good pitcher and the smartest girl in our class. Amish parents never hitched up their buggies to come to an open house, or both Rachels might have been yanked out of Uniontown Elementary. As it was for all Amish children, their education was scheduled to terminate after eighth grade.

My own mother went to open houses and the PTA. One day I overheard her talking with a neighbor, who worked in the school cafeteria. “Unbelievable,” my mother said as she poured coffee, “Aron’s teacher is a snooty floozy. You should’ve heard the way she talked to parents. I have half a mind to complain to the principal.”

“Yeah,” Mrs. Drake agreed and dropped a lump of sugar into her cup. “That woman really puts on airs. At lunch, she had the gall to ask for a lemon instead of salad dressing. You know, that real good Thousand Island I make from scratch that everyone––but her––likes.”

My mother’s voice lowered to a whisper. “The rumor is she’s married to a black man. They live up in Akron. No one around here would rent to them.”

Mrs. Drake shook her head as she stirred in another lump. “No, Bertha in the office says she’s married to a short, bald Jewish man from New York City.”

“Well,” said my mother after a quick sip, “that dick-brained superintendent must be desperate for teachers, because she wears enough makeup to qualify for another profession, if you know what I mean.”

Mrs. Drake let out a catty laugh, which made my mother grin.

Since I worshiped my teacher and adored her clothes, when I grew up I planned to move to Akron. At school I acted like an obedient worker bee, happy to do whatever task the queen might desire.

“Class, could someone draw a pie on the blackboard for our math lesson?” Mrs. Reese asked, looking directly at me.

My hand shot up so fast, I almost dislocated my shoulder.

“Okay, Aron, you may do it.”

As she handed me the chalk, I felt lightheaded, breathing in her musky-cinnamon scent, and thrilled to draw for her any pastry chart under the sun.

Mrs. Reese rewarded my total devotion, perfect behavior, and artistic bent; to my amazement I became her teacher’s pet. When a poster needed pinning up or papers handed out, I was the girl for the job. No adult or teacher had ever shown me such favoritism. I was in heaven and longed to dress in fur and orange leather and move to the big city of Akron, or even as far away as Cleveland.

Mrs. Reese missed a lot of days. Inevitably a gray haired substitute hobbled into the classroom, wearing black lace-up shoes and an ugly brown shirtwaist with a circle pin. When Mrs. Reese returned from these long absences, she seemed possessed by an overzealous English demon. She filled blackboard after blackboard with grammar rules and whole passages from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style and diagrams of complex sentences. She went at it all day and expect us to copy the information into our notebooks. I found those days tortuously boring.

When she put on her reading glasses, I became transfixed. Not only did her glasses wing out to sharp points with sparkly rhinestones, but when she put them on, this signaled that she was about to read a story. Her silky sophisticated voice ignited my imagination. Her favorite author, Edgar Allen Poe, sent goose bumps down my spine in the most exquisite way. Her stories transported me out of the classroom, past the endless turnip fields, and into the wide weird world. What a fantastic revelation, to have someone read to me.

Then came my fall. Lining up for the first spelling bee, all the butterflies in my stomach turned to stinging wasps. No surprise, I was eliminated the first round. Though I can hear, I simply cannot differentiate sounds. That together with a blasted case of dyslexia made me a poor speller. The expression on my teacher’s disappointed face was definitely sour lemons.

People with dyslexia have varying degrees of difficulty not only with reading and writing but also with pronouncing new words.

After the spelling bee, the winner, blonde Diana, became the new pet. Like all my previous teachers, Mrs. Reese made me stay inside during recess to write words over and over. Being good at math and the best artist in the class, I could copy perfectly, but it never did much good. No matter how perfect I tried to be, I knew a teacher who loved the written word simply does not have a bad speller as a pet.

Though demoted, I remained her devoted admirer. After every recess, I’d rush back hoping she’d put on her sparkly reading glasses. It was this love of stories that made her so special, even though she broke my thirsty heart and enveloped it in her flaming orange leather.

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