Sin listened — or feigned listening to a made-up caller — and I thought about all the things that hadn’t turned backward in his life: The trees in his yard didn’t lose leaves in May, for example. His plates didn’t come out of the dishwasher dirty. His clothes didn’t appear to become dirtier straight out of the washing machine.
I pulled into a parking space in front of the bar. My father said over the phone, “An oyster-shucking knife isn’t sharp, but it can still cause harm. I met a hand doctor one time who invested in oyster-shucking knives.”
I turned off the ignition and said, “That’s not Mom.”
Sin said, “Hello?”
After School
Later on, in the parking lot waiting for bulldozers, we thought back at how a young girl — no one remembered her name — transferred from either Arizona or North Dakota, suffering from allergies we couldn’t comprehend. This was 1970 or thereabouts. Her parents brought along what appeared to be a certifiably genuine prognosis from an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Ragweed, goldenrod, dandelions, crabgrass, centipede, pine bark: this girl seemed to be pretty much allergic to everything the South had to offer. Back then we were all young, and we thought things like poor thing, et cetera. This was a time before charter schools and school choice and private schools and home schools. Our custodian, Mr. Willie, wasn’t pleased, but there seemed to be no choice but to kill all the shrubbery, cut down trees, gravel over every inch of the school grounds, spray DDT on the ball fields, and remind each other that no roses could ever be delivered on anyone’s birthday, Valentine’s Day, Secretary’s Day, and that all future proms would be corsage- and boutonniere-less. No one argued about it — we wanted to make this little girl and her parents feel welcome in the community.
She graduated. She matriculated to Arizona State or the University of North Dakota, as I recall. I’m not sure why someone on the school board never piped up, “Well, now that that’s over, we need to replant some azaleas out front.” We just remained barren. I still taught only biology and chemistry back then and even kept nothing but plastic and/or ceramic accessories in my classroom aquarium, or the little habitat I sketched out for box turtles that Mr. Lawson constructed with his third-year Advanced Shop students.
It took another decade before — again, this was a child who transferred from northern Minnesota — we found ourselves liable if anyone brought peanuts, walnuts, or pecans onto the school grounds. I remember this particular case only because the tenth grader, Marty Mortensen, had an hourglass-shaped head. I’m saying, it looked like a peanut rested atop his shoulders. I wouldn’t be surprised if his parents — I think they moved down here because the whole family suffered from that depression that supposedly sets in from short days and long nights — acquired a questionable medical professional to make up Marty’s allergy, as an attempt to thwart likely and subsequent days when they served boiled peanuts in the cafeteria and one of our more observant students yelled out, “Hey, my plate’s filled with little Marty Mortensen heads!” like that. Sometimes children throbbing with hormones don’t think about how words can echo in a fragile peanut head right on up until about the twenty-year reunion when he returns to the Moose Club with an automatic weapon.
So there we were in a school that looked plopped down in the center of a wasteland, forever wanting nuts in our brownies or cookies. Plus the Snickers, Payday, Almond Joy, Reese’s Cups, and Baby Ruths disappeared from the vending machines and we opted for either plain Hershey’s bars or plain M&Ms.
As an aside, how come blind people don’t have that seasonal disorder all the time? I never heard about Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles or Helen Keller moaning around how they needed more sunlight.
Anyway, it might’ve been 1984 when more than a few children realized they were allergic to cigarette smoke. There went the outdoor smoking area, there went teachers smoking in the lounge. Deep down I understood that everyone should quit anyway. I showed a filmstrip that involved healthy lungs compared to coal/asbestos/glass dust/cigarette-damaged lungs. But goddamn. We got to where we took turns being late to our own classes. One day I’d pretend to need to check oil in my engine block between second and third periods, just to stand outside and smoke while Mrs. Allen looked in on my class. Other days Mrs. Allen feigned forgetting her extendable pointer in the trunk of her car and I told her history class stories that weren’t in the textbook. Our P.E. teacher flat out took showers at the end of every class and smoked in the stall.
I think it took almost six years before we had a child so allergic to dust mites that our whole home ec division got wiped out mid-semester. Soon thereafter we had a couple students show up with medical forms saying they couldn’t be within a hundred feet of anyone wearing perfume or cologne. This included deodorant, pomade (Mr. Willie’s), hairspray, and acne cream. I didn’t bother taking down precise notes to all of this — I had enough to worry about, seeing as kids needed to dissect frogs, the district couldn’t afford ordering the things, and I spent many a Saturday night/Sunday morning gigging — but this seemed to be when our school really started to deteriorate.
A whole knot of tenth graders, out of nowhere, learned that they were allergic to both paint fumes and alumina, one of the central ingredients in glaze. So we quit offering art classes and the two part-time teachers got laid off. On top of this, Mr. Willie couldn’t paint over graffiti. “General upkeep” vanished from our work environment.
I kind of liked one of those art teachers. She let her students paint still lifes and imagine what a walnut would look like resting atop a pear, banana, orange, or mango. Call it passive aggressive, but she always hung her students’ canvases in the hallways.
Mr. Lawson couldn’t take it anymore. He smoked and had a hard time waiting for the three o’clock bell. His students — in the past they’d been best in the state for their cabinetry skills — could now only wish to gain employment at Naked Furniture, what with the “no paint” directive. Lawson, on one particularly bleak winter day when he caught his students firing nail guns at one another, walked over to his miter box, placed his arm down, and cut off his left hand.
Gary Doherty sprang into action, evidently because he’d almost made it up to Webelo in the Boy Scout hierarchy. That kid ran directly to the first-aid station, extracted gauze, a compress, surgical tubing, and those gloves. He staunched Lawson’s bleeding long enough for the EMTs to show up, take the shop teacher down to the emergency room at Gray-wood Emergency Regional Memorial, and not connect his hand back on like they do at regular hospitals filled with doctors who paid attention in med school.
When everything settled down, that’s when we learned that Doherty had a latex product allergy.
From what I heard, his doctors told him he could never use a condom. From what I heard, Doherty succumbed to a number of sexually transmitted diseases by the time he almost finished his associate’s degree in pulpwood management at one of the technical colleges.
And then — perhaps a geneticist or eugenicist could explain this — everyone became allergic to something. Maybe a clinical psychologist, or that absurdist playwright I read back when I thought I wanted to be a big-game veterinarian and came across a book called Rhinoceros, has something to say about how no one wants to be left out. We had students coming in with doctors’ notes saying they couldn’t be around PVC pipes, copper tubing, plaster, Styrofoam cups, everything. A swarm of young girls were afflicted with migraines due to fluorescent lights. The offspring of the Perfume People decided they couldn’t be near hand soap of any type, from GoJo to Ivory. By this time one of the many right-wing governors of ours had made it so anyone could call him- or herself a certified teacher, open up a certified charter home school, and let the kids play video games and read the Old Testament all day in order to make them better soldiers.