ISMs

M.B. MCLATCHEY

 

Long before we hear it, we feel it. The treble hum of one boy, then another, intoning the notes of an a capella that is winding its way down the long sheeny hall toward us. The confident girls brush the cantors away. They sing their own rondo: a circle of chatter about girlfriends stealing girlfriends, about sleepovers, about the sensual unknown of after-school. In a performance that is part Carol Channing/part Hepburn, the lead boy presses his lips together and mimics the long, muffled moan of the distant chant. Primping unruly and invisible curls, he weaves his way among us, until at last he leads his congregation in singing some of the Ordinary—the Sanctus and the Agnes Dei.

Of course, he is mocking her. And yet, his insolence requires such study of her pulse, her every note, it’s difficult to see him as condemned. He takes us to her like a divining rod. With each approach, softer and softer, we hear the Sanctus—or is it the Agnes Dei?—until, with resounding confidence, the Sanctus reigns. By the time we reach the doorway to her classroom, we know how her piece goes. At the threshold to Room 20, in a pitch that Johnson Public Elementary School would rightly characterize as religious, we are humming the right notes.

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It is our first week of school in the fourth grade. She is the only teacher who does not escort us from the playground to the classroom. You know your way back, she will say with a thermal hug, and we know what she means, but not really. There are terms here, but they are so encoded, apparently too precious to iterate. It is as if the most perfunctory elements of our lives—leaving and returning—will now require from us a new vigilance, a wakefulness. Parents and federal laws aside, coming back will require—oddly enough—an exercise of our will.

 

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