Memoir: Though I Go To School, I Shall Fear No Evil

Miss Smith turns down the blinds against the streaming light. She picks up a book, carries it with her to the lectern and looks from student to student.

“Today we have reached a chapter termed “Evolution,” about a man named Charles Darwin and his theory that humans evolved from monkeys or apes.”

“Children, this is not the truth. Man did not evolve from lower species. Therefore, we will not study Evolution today, but we will look to the words of God and pray for forgiveness for what this man, Darwin, has done.”

The good thing is, I know how to disappear. I have practiced each day since kindergarten at Normal Park and practice makes perfect, as my piano teacher says. I look into my science book. If I don’t see Miss Smith, then she doesn’t exist, and if she doesn’t exist, then she can’t see me. I could easily be mistaken for part of the desk, or, a metal bar. I have magical powers. I will vaporize into the wet hot molecules in the room.

The book in her hand is The Bible. “Here is the story of how the world began,” she says, “how God created Adam out of a lump of clay and, so that Adam should not be lonely, and how he made Eve from his rib. How a common serpent convinced Eve to eat an apple from the Tree of Knowledge, and how Eve got Adam to do the same, and due to Eve’s connivery, God cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and made them ashamed of their nakedness. And that is why you must wear clothes, today, children and abhor your wicked nakedness.”

Wet half circles form under the arms of the white shirt she has pushed half way up her large, pale arms. Her thick grey hair sticks to her pale forehead. A round clock hangs above the flagpole at the center of the room, tick, tock, tick, tock. The second hand makes its way slowly around the circumference. “Due to Eve’s curse mankind is cast from Paradise forever. Mankind knows sin. Is born in sin. And God had mercy and gave his only son to this world of sinners. And Jesus died for our sins. So pray to Jesus. Ask him to forgive you for your sins. Say the Lords prayer with me now, children.”

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.”

Miss Smith smiles with the faraway, happy expression she gets after prayers. Grammar, she writes in bold white letters on the chalkboard.

Would anybody care to analyze a sentence?

Today, she writes, is the First day of the Rest of my Life.

June Farber raises her hand. She approaches the board. Her good-girl letters curve around the sentence. Good. Now. Life is short. Anybody?

Several girls raise their hands. June sits down.

“I want a boy,” Miss Smith says. “John?
John shuffles to the chalkboard. Life, subject. Is, verb. Short. He looks around, grinding the heel of his shoe against his ankle and grinning.

“Well?”

“I don’t know what short is.”

The last bit of air drains from the room. Miss Smith scowls. The hands on the clock reach number three. The buzzer shatters the spell of the grammar lesson. Miss Smith purses her lips and pats blushing John on the head. I walk out of the classroom, then once out of Miss Smith’s sight, go faster up the sunny corridor, still not running…never run…. out the door and into the garden where the sprinklers rock, click clack, showering the courtyard with gentle drops that land on the ground and smell of wet earth, and then out to the parking lot where a line of cars of waiting mothers forms up to the porch.

I search for the tan Nova my mother drives, craning my neck around the other girls for the arm poised on the driver’s side window, the finger flicking the cigarette ash out onto the shimmering sheets of heat that rise up from the asphalt that smells of tar and gets soft when a foot sinks into it, her long, manicured, red lacquered nails.

Car by car, children depart. The girl with the bunched up face and pug nose lingers nearby. She stares fixedly at the leafy entrance to the school. At the first hint of any car passing on the road, she jumps like a Jack in the Box. When no car turns in, she crumples back down on the curb. Finally, a red Oldsmobile turns into the parking lot. She waves to the Oldsmobile, gets in and then the car sputters and takes off back through the parking lot out to the street, leaving a stinking trail of air behind.

“Still here?” The principal’s face is far away, up above.

“Yes, Sir,”

“She’ll be here.” He paces back and forth, back and forth.

My legs look funny stretched out in front of me, my thick white socks turned over at the ankles, and what about the texture of my Buster Brown shoes,

He goes back inside.

A car drones in the distance, growing closer and louder. The sound strikes up and then fades behind the cawing of crows. The crows perch on the branches of the maple tree, black wings folding in. Crisp red leaves drift to the grass, leaves I’d like to fall into, if only I were at home, laughing, dropping face first into the crackling dryness to send the leaves flying. Another car drones. Louder the sound whines, stronger, and then someone’s lawnmower drowns it out. The janitor’s broom brushes the porch. “Ain’t nobody come for you?”

“Nope.”

“They will.”

The scab on my knee has opened somehow. A car’s motor sounds closer, closer, and then, really loud, and the beige Nova rolls around the corner and into the parking lot.

“Mommy,” I leap up and I stand at the edge of the curb. I have been so successful today at avoiding being seen that I fear my mother may drive up and, not seeing me, simply drive away. My heart pounds. Mommy blows out smoke rings and waves. The Nova stops. I slide into the back seat. It is urgent that my mother can always see me. This is tricky magic, to be invisible to some and seen by others. I will get even better at it. Mommy’s wears her thick black hair swept around her head like a giant wave frozen with a tip on one side. The scent of Floral net spray mixes with the smoke of the Winstons.

“How was school today?”

“Good.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“That sounds nifty.” She breathes in the cigarette.

Smoke fills every corner of the car.

“You shouldn’t smoke.”

“Why not, Honey?”

“I can’t breathe.”

“Stick your head out the window and you can.”
She tips her head and looks at me in the rear view mirror, as she turns onto
the main road.

“It gives you cancer.”

“Does it?” She tilts the rearview mirror so she can see me better.

“We learned about it today in science class.”

“Oh.”

She readjusts the mirror and puts her blinker on.

I roll down my window and hang out my head, wondering if the wind can blow my nose off. We turn left onto the road which goes up the hill, through the wooded area that has no houses and further on to where the houses start, small houses with white clapboard fronts close together, then on up the hill to where the lots become bigger and the houses longer and taller. Up the hill further, past the pump house, which supplies water to the neighborhood, through another wooded area, past the two storied house where Mrs. Benton rakes the leaves in her yard. She keeps on raking, as the Nova passes, bent over, and then Mommy makes the right turn that curves around the bottom of the hill and the woods surrounding our house. I can see it through the splashes of red, orange and yellow leaves, the short wall made of granite that wraps around the yard: home.

She turns left and drives the short distance to the mailbox, which sits at the bottom of the steep driveway and reads 17 Folts Drive. The flag stands. She pulls the car up to the box and rolls down her window. She mashes her cigarette in the ashtray, sticks her hand inside the box and pulls out the mail. She flips through it and then tosses it down on the seat beside her. The car skids on the gravel and climbs. She feels around the closed visor above her and pulls out a small beige box, points it at the garage doors and like magic, the doors roll open.

Bea stands at the kitchen counter, forehead beaded, her brown arms covered with flour, shaking fryers in a paper bag. I run up to her and wrap my arms around her waist. “You gonna get covered with flour, just like I is, if you don’t watch out.”

“I don’t care.”

“Be sure not to overcook the green beans, Bea, and did I tell you to bake the potatoes?”

“Yes M’am.”

“Thanks.”

“Come here, I want to talk to you.”

I follow my mother out through the swinging kitchen doors, past the bar, through the playroom, the front door, and down the long hall, all the way back to my parents’ big room. “Come here.”

She stretches her legs out over the ottoman. A patch of white skin shows between her tight black pants and white socks. A loop goes from the bottom of the pants under her foot. A breeze blows in the screened in window behind her smelling of the fire
Mrs. Benton has lit to burn her autumn leaves. The crab apple tree with its wilted blossoms bends and bows before the place where the dark woods open up.

“Come sit on my lap.”

I climb into the chair and onto her lap. She switches her legs back and forth. I slide onto the chair, into the tight place between her hip and the armrest. She shifts around, inspecting me.

“How was school today?”

“Good.”

Her eyes contain both green and brown. On the other side of the room, a line of more screened-in windows, all of them open, look out to a maple tree with brilliant leaves.

She puts her arm around me and moves me onto her legs. In the distance beyond the maple tree, I see the outline of the Tennessee Valley Authority dam and the Tennessee River snaking muddily beneath the lake. Her tight shirt has black and white stripes.

“Honey, look at me. Did anybody make any comments today? Do they say bad things? Do they call you names?”

“No, Mommy.”

She studies me hard, the way I study my books when I feel Miss Smith watching me, every letter magnified to twenty times its size.

I blow bubbles of saliva.

She puts her hand over my mouth.

My legs are half as long as hers. She sees me looking at them. “You have movie star legs. Do you know that?”

I adjust my butterfly winged shaped glasses on my nose and reflect on the nest of blonde hairs on my calves. I wonder where they’ve come from and why.

She pulls me close. “How did so much beauty come out of me?”

I know I will never be as beautiful as her. I am only partially visible is the one thing and the part you can see is practically deformed. All the women at the beauty parlor tell me how beautiful my mother is and how nice. She reaches for her purse, pulls out her pack of cigarettes and taps it against the arm of the chair. She strikes a match and lights the cigarette, enfolding us in a cocoon of smoke. The phone rings. “Sorry, Honey.” She reaches to pick it up. Once she gets started, she’ll be on there for hours, talking, laughing, smoking, until Bea rings the dinner bell. My mother works and work means talking on the phone forever.

“Miss Smith prays with us, Mommy,” I say, taking her face between my hands and turning it towards me.

The phone goes on ringing.


Hell is a sea of fire and brimstone. The Devil has his way with you if you have sinned. He throws sinners into boiling vats of oil, and then pulls them out screaming, then throws them back in, again and again, forever into eternity. The flames of Hell scorch your skin but cannot kill. You want to die, you beg to die, you may even plead with the devil, but you cannot, will not, may not perish. Your soul must suffer everlasting damnation, no turning back.

Whether the Devil elects to shove you behind a boulder twenty times your size and make you push it up a mountain over and over for time everlasting or whether he chooses to give you a gluttonous feast and make you sick as a dog, but you have to go on eating, depends on the sins you have committed in this life. He may lash you with a whip made of tongues of fire. He may poke you with a forked pitchfork. He may lock you in a room without any windows and nothing in it, no food, or, water. He may hang your upside down. There is never water in the fiery sea of Hell. He may lash you to a pole and let the flames dance around you.

Miss Smith’s eyes glisten with excitement, her voice trembles. Her broad hands lie motionless on the lectern. Wind rattles the blinds, lifting them up, billowing into the classroom with the scent of a storm. Those who believe in Jesus will ascend to Heaven and be welcomed by St. Peter to the streets paved with gold and the music of angels with gilded harps…

Her voice trails off into a standstill. The whole class waits for her to go on. I follow her gaze to the door of the classroom to see my mother, dressed in plaid pedal pushers and short-sleeved sweater. Her purse hangs on her arm.

Vanish, I tell myself, as she strides towards me through the rows of my classmate’s turned heads, glancing from me to Miss Smith, who stands, her hands still motionless upon the lectern, the New Testament placed neatly to one side. At my desk, she takes my hand.

“C’mon,” she says.

Someone snickers.

It’s okay. They can’t see me.

“Get your things together.”

Fluttery fingers try to grasp hard objects like pencils, notebooks, forget the erasers, they only cost a dime. I drop my books, shakily retrieve them, and then cram them into my shoulder bag. At the door, Mommy stops, turns and looks at Miss Smith. Miss Smith stares back at her. The whole class melts into buttery blue. If I don’t see you, then you don’t see me. Using my arm like a rudder, my mother guides me down the hall and out into the parking lot where the sky hangs low, the sickening color of thunderstorm.

She opens the back door of the Nova. I slide in. Rain pelts the car. My mother opens her door, jumps into the car and turns on the windshield wipers. The rain changes into tiny balls of hail.

“This should cool things off,” she says.

We make the turn off the main road. She pulls over to the side of the road, as the hail grows thicker. The windshield wipers whip back and forth. The windows steam up. It isn’t a holiday and I’m not at school. “Why, Mommy?” I say.

She cups my chin in her soft white hand and gazes down at me. “We’ll talk about it later. I’ll explain everything to you later. Okay?”

School is boring, but staying home is worse, unless I can watch TV, which I can’t. Mommy has gone to talk on the phone and I am supposed to be reading the Nancy Drew book we checked out of the library last week, but I’ve already finished it and there’s nothing else to do. I am so bored I can only lie on my bed and shut my eyes and dream of being as beautiful as my mother, who is as gorgeous as the Barbie doll she finally let me buy this year. She has large breasts like Barbie’s and wears many of the same type of clothes, although she is against Barbie in every way. Now that I have Barbie, I want Barbie’s dream house, too. I don’t think Mommy will let me have a dream house. She said Barbie is as far as she will go. She said Barbie is as far as she can go. The other girls have everything Barbie loves, purses, long white gloves, bras, prom queen dresses, sunglasses, so many high-heeled shoes they don’t mind if they lose one. My friend, Kathy, has a pink plastic box for carrying Barbie, Ken and Barbie’s best friend, Suzy, and all their things. I envy Kathy with all of my heart.

I am a princess with a wicked stepmother. She ties me up to the big hard chair. She puts me away in a tower where no one can see me. I am more beautiful than she is. She can’t stand it, so she feeds me gruel. My belly cries out. There is sweetness to my suffering, because I am so beautiful. The ropes hurt my dainty arms as I struggle against them. If I loose my glasses I won’t be able to see anything, but when the prince comes, he will restore my perfect vision with a kiss.

Ugly Fool! The chair tips over. I land on the floor, splat, with the chair on top of me. Ha! He kicks the chair away and puts a black shoe on my chest. I try to get up. I’m almost away from him when he dives on top of me, stinky boy yuck breath right in my face. I hate your guts he says, narrowing the eyes behind his smudged glasses.

“Mommy!”

“Shudup or you’re dead.”

He looms above me. He points a finger, “Bam, bam, bam, bam,” then picks up his military hat and puts it on. At the door, he watches me get up and

“Bam, bam, bam.”

“Deader than dead.” He spins on his shiny shoes and turns the corner into his room.

I get up to follow him. When I reach his door, he leans towards the mirror over his bureau, unbuttoning the shiny gold buttons, folding the jacket over his desk chair.

“What do you want, snot face?”

“Nothing.”

“Get out.”

“No.”

“Cross that line and the punishment will be dire.” He points to the line where the beige carpet begins. I stick out my toe and put it on the line. His short hair glistens. I put my toe over the line. He tosses the shirt on the floor. I put my whole foot over the line. He takes off his belt. I put my weight on the foot. He drops his belt onto the floor and comes at me. He grabs my shirt. I wiggle away and flee into the foyer, howling like the Dark Shadows vampire dying from the sight of the braided garlic flung in his nose.

Mommy and Daddy are sitting on the couch, sipping martinis.

Daddy throws my brother a terrible look. “Stop it, now.”

I plop down by Daddy and blow bubbles with spit.
My brother sits down by Mommy and they both frown at me. The last bubble pops.

Daddy puts his arm around me and leans down, “Whenever I sleep, I never count sheep, I count all my dreams about…”

Daddy isn’t handsome. He would be, except for his nose. His nose is too big. I feel sorry for Daddy because he isn’t handsome.

“Olive?” asks Daddy.

I open my mouth.

Bea rings the golden bell.

Daddy slaps his hands on his thighs and then claps them together. “Time to eat.”

I sit across from my brother. He sits down and stares at me with one side of his lip raised and the bottom of his eye skin pulled down on both sides. Mommy and Daddy seem far away at the ends of the table.

Bea serves plates of fried chicken, baked potatoes and green beans.
“Stop it!”
“What?”
“Leave your sister alone.”
“I’m not bothering her.”
“He was…”

“Don’t tattle.” Mommy picks up her fork.

When the hostess raises her fork, you can start.

“Tattletale.”

“Stop calling your sister names,” says Daddy. “How was school today?”

“School was great. I learned how to salute.”

Mommy puts down her fork as he salutes at her. Then she looks in a funny way at Daddy. Daddy takes a long sip of iced tea.

The delicious juices of fried chicken stream into my mouth. My teeth break through crispy skin and sink into tender meat.

“They’re praying at Brights and saluting at Baylor,” Mommy says.

Daddy bites into a drumstick and then looks out at something in the yard.

Mommy puts her head down on the table to the side of her place mat.

“Ah, Honey,” Daddy says, wiping his lips with a cloth napkin. “They’re at the best schools in town.”
Mommy picks up her head and sighs. “Aren’t they lucky?”

In the morning, there is no talking at the table with the blue cloth in the nook by the windows, only the sound of Daddy’s spoon slicing into his half a pink grapefruit, and the clink of Mommy’s spoon against her coffee cup. She wears a tight fitting sweater with sleeves that show her creamy arms. Her intense, sharp hazel eyes flicker from me to my father. Daddy wears a fresh shirt with a paisley tie. He looks somber in a brown suit jacket that matches his pants. He lowers his eyes and sighs.

“We have something to tell you,” Mommy says. Mommy says Brights is a private school and Miss Smith can pray and I have to listen to everything she says about Jesus Christ, who was a wise teacher and a good man, but not a savior as Miss Smith believes, nor is the Devil real, nor do sinners boil in vats of oil in Hell, and Mommy says she won’t stand for it, not one more day, even if it is the best school in Chattanooga. Brights is a private school and she’s not going to pay for the privilege thank you very much and when she talked to the principal about it he said Miss Smith could teach the children whatever she liked. If Miss Hanshaw at Normal Park hadn’t been so uneducated as to actually tell my class that everyone in Holland has blonde hair, oh, for God’s sake, never mind…

Mommy shakes her head and looks at Daddy, as if to say this is all his fault. Daddy shrugs and says that Rivermont Elementary is a very good school and he bets I’ll make some new friends today. Plus, Mommy says, you can ride the school bus. It comes right by the house. Today, of course, she’ll take me, but tomorrow morning I can go by myself and won’t that be great?

I decided to stop sucking my thumb a long time ago, but now I realize it wasn’t a good idea. I lean against the car window, thumb skin resting against the top of my mouth, crunching myself up against the door so Mommy can’t catch me in the rearview mirror and tell me to stop sucking your thumb, it’s terrible for your teeth. I pull at a strand of hair and rub my forefinger down the length of my nose, and watch the long stretches of brilliant-colored woods on Hamilton Road give way to the kudzu covered bank behind the Winn Dixie grocery store, where the two story high statue of Jesus rises above the commercial neighborhood at the top of the hill with His arms outstretched and at His feet, in flashing lights the blue and yellow words,
“REPENT!”

A minute later, the Nova turns into the parking lot, which meant nothing to me yesterday, but today represents the entire universe, Rivermont Elementary School. The playground looks barren except for a cluster of trees past the chicken wire fence. The school seems dwarfed by the acres of red clay and stones behind it, an area Daddy would call “undeveloped”. Kudzu climbs the hills, where the flatlands end, covering up the rocks, the earth, and even the trees. Mommy says the weed makes the countryside look defeated and that the mayor should do something about it before it gobbles him up.

“Here we are,” she says, flashing me a lip-sticky smile.

The scab on my knee has crusted over. Cars whoosh by.

“C’mon.”

Mommy’s hand steers me down the dimly lit hall to the principal’s office. The secretary wears glasses like mine, but much bigger, giant, beneath a puff of white hair in a cloud around her head. I kick my legs back and forth, back and forth, my white and black saddle shoes sweep against the metal bar at the bottom of the chair. From behind the principal’s door I hear my mother’s voice and the principal’s louder scratchy voice, but can only make out, “Bible, Bible, Bible.”

When they come out of the office, Mommy bends down in front of me, head to head, and takes me by the arms. Her eyes travel from the principal to me, and then back to the principal. He touches his creepy black mustache and walks out into the hall and stuffs his hands into his pockets. “Miss Maddox?”

The secretary follows the principal out into the hall.
Mommy’s eyes zoom in on me. “You are going to go into Mrs. Finch’s class. At eight-fifty-five.”
She looks at her watch and I hear her with a stomach-tilting lurch. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six… Outside the door, children stampede past the principal.

“I’ll walk you to your room.”

Maybe I can run for it like they do in Dragnet, but no, Mommy has me by the hand, guiding me down the hall.

I stand at the door of the forlorn-looking fifth grade classroom and feel a nudge and then my wobbly legs get me to my desk under the watchful eyes of thirty kids, each one hungry for any sign of weakness I might reveal, my mother off to her day of smoking, laughing, talking on the phone, and stretching out her creamy legs over the ottoman.
During Bible class, Mrs. Finch instructs me to pull my desk outside the classroom door and to read Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time, while my fellow students study the Good Book. The desk scrapes the floor as I pull it from across the classroom around the out-stretched legs and various shoes of other ten-year-old’s, and get it out in the unbelievably dark and quiet hall. The door clunks, and the clunk echoes, as I sit down in the standard nineteen sixties-style desk with the chair and top connected by a beige metal tube. And there I sit until hours, no, days, no, successive lifetimes have passed, and I am Rip Van Winkle, who goes to sleep for hundreds of years and awakens to a changed world I am unprepared to navigate. Mrs. Finch opens the door. A shard of light falls on the floor.

“Bible class is over, Honey. You can come on back in now.”

Dragging my desk behind me, I begin the trajectory back into the hall of learning, ready to absorb the lessons of the day.

This story appeared last year in Saint Anne's Review, a Brooklyn-based literary magazine