Best Practices

                    after Donald Barthelme’s “The School”

The New Girl’s parents chose her name for beauty, you see, because they left their true home behind, and she would only know that home’s beauty if it was a part of her. They could have given her an American name, but they chose their own language. I understood because I had parents like hers and a name like hers, a Persian name. You probably don’t get it, so I’ll speak simply: They had chosen love over newness and novelty, and they knew that would scare some people. Maybe that’s why the New Girl’s parents had chosen our school and worked multiple jobs to afford it. Soon, we would all be working multiple jobs to afford anything. This was our last year of happiness, you see, though we didn’t know that. We just lived inside the word today, and it was April, then, the beginning of spring.

We were on the second floor, so my classroom windows opened without opening, for safety purposes, to sky and a long view of this town in Nowhere, Texas, and wherever you looked, near or far, was desert’s tired light. We hardly had trees here, and a ground so opposed to trees that you almost laughed when you thought of them, trees with their bark and branches and spindly twigs. Leaves? Please, we drew our leaves on paper. We mostly kept the students inside where the light was no better, to be honest. We tried to decorate our rooms to be sensory in aesthetic ways. It’s not easy to beat a desert, but we always tried for beauty, did our best with cinder blocks and linoleum and fluorescent light. The school spent its money on things like our theater and robotics lab—spaces parents would be more impressed by—and let a lot slide with the classrooms in the language arts pod, though they kept promising to update our floors.

Today, we were writing poems because it was National Poetry Month, and I had brought in pictures of the beautiful things that poems are about, like trees, moons, and flowers. All they wanted to write about were video games and Taylor Swift. Which were also fine subjects to write poems about. They had a hundred languages, and they were happy most of the time. I wanted to give them something new—just in case. Happiness wasn’t always easy.

We had pushed the desks up against the wall and turned the lights off for mood. We sat on the rough mauve area rug in the middle of the room. Philip asked for peppermint in the diffuser, and so it was. Our diffuser was white, and that was a poor choice on my part. Children like to touch things.

Anyway, today, we were trying to write.

You’re thinking I shouldn’t have expected much given their age and their absence at the talent show last week, but you don’t understand the intersection of art and performance like I do. Besides, none of my students were in the talent show, inasmuch as we had discussed True Performance. You see, I believed in teaching art, not expecting it to appear just because there’s an audience. Though I would never tell that to any of my colleagues. And I had my class formally excused with the promise of another, larger project that was taking up our time. A lie. We had only small projects, ones that you couldn’t put on display. We had projects that were ongoing, like Meditative Lunch and Sustainable Play. All our projects were art, and all our art was its own language. Sometimes, during Outdoor Grandeur, they would break into performance and throw a quick side-glance at me to see without seeing if I was watching. I was always watching. True Performance means you don’t care if I’m watching.

Today, some of them attacked the white page and some laid back to stare at the white ceiling. Some clung to the windows, the long view, the tired light and loose dirt and its crooked horizon. Our lungs were full and cold with peppermint, and it wasn’t even Christmas. April. Poetry month. Today. We had already done Poem in Your Pocket Day and an exquisite corpse poem, neither of which went well. Keanu refused a poem from Chloe, and, as she said, “broke [her] chain,” and someone had corrupted our exquisite corpse poem with a racial slur. I just wanted us to write poems, without rules, really, except Be Good Humans. Not writing as “activity.” True Performance.

I had also brought a picture or two of love. Old pictures. You understand.

None of my students really looked at the pictures except for the New Girl. She shuffled through them like someone had done a magic trick, asked her, “Is this your card?” and she kept saying “no,” searching for it. Shuffling tree, moon, flower, love. She spotted me watching her, waiting for apotheosis, harmony of individual and world, Word & Love. Perhaps, secretly, she had forgotten her card.

Standing slowly, smoothing her hair, the New Girl approached me with the picture of the moon and said she would like to work with textiles and incandescent lights to know her subject.

I asked if she knew anything about the moon.

She said the moon was where she came from.

I asked her didn’t she come from Iran.

She said no, that she came from the moon and shone like the moon and moved like the moon and moved things like the moon moved things.

I asked what the moon moved.

She said water, love, dreams, but only the good ones.

I gave the New Girl the unshaded lamp from the Teacher’s Oasis and one of my cardigans. She asked to be alone, so I put her behind my desk and flanked her with a student desk and my file cart. The stark white of the tiles peeked through the nexus of area rugs I had laid down to give the room character and keep the echoing of dread and other alarming sounds to a minimum. Happiness takes work, you know? The New Girl sat behind my desk where my chair would typically be, pushed her small fingers through the cheap carpet’s ply, as if working a loom, and stared at me for a moment. She asked if I cared much for the threadbare cardigan, and I said no, that she could transform it and whatever else she wanted. Carte blanche, I said. She seemed to know French, to know all languages. I would remind her to wash her hands later, for this was her time to get into the dirty process of art. Today, she was in her own immersion school, and I wanted her to write all about her moon. To be inside her art—mess and danger, be damned. Besides, light bulbs couldn’t get hot enough to catch anything on fire. Could they? I didn’t think much about danger, except when I had to, when it crept into my school like a thief in the night. Or more boldly. Then, I had to think about it and, sometimes, talk about it with them. I had not spoken with them about the racial slur yet. Maybe I secretly hoped they had forgotten.

I heard my name, one of the children whispering. I didn’t tell them that they had to be quiet to write poems, but they were quiet anyway. Maybe they knew I was still mad about the talent show, not at them but that Mrs. Graham’s students had won, and they were having a pizza party today, a prize our administration decided upon after the fact. Before, the prize had just been a blue ribbon. And rewarding art with anything flaunts materialism in the face of that which is sublime, teaches only our systems of control and nothing of truth. Anyway, it was only partially about the pizza for me. Mostly, I hated that Mrs. Graham received praise for false performance. And she was awful to me, you see. I didn’t think my students understood the details, though they picked up on the general nature of our animosity toward each other.

Olivia whispered that she wanted a Twizzler. I could do this here at my school: give one child candy and not have the thirteen others begging for some too. Here, they got what they needed and knew what they wanted.

Olivia knew I kept them in the back closet with the craft supplies. Olivia would grow up to be an Etsy Queen, just like her mother who made shirts with pearls sewn on them, adorned shoes with rhinestones. I made Olivia stand by the closet door while I grabbed her a Pink Lemonade Twiz and one for me too. We sat on the floor to chew, lick, suck like you do when it’s your last year of happiness and you have no idea. Olivia asked me if I remembered when the boys had all been nice, and I said no, I couldn’t remember. We had a good laugh over that, though we were both sad because we knew which boy had written the racial slur. I said that he had been happy once—that much was true. Happy and kind are different, Olivia said.

When I had first started here two years ago, Mrs. Graham was nice to me. Later, she complained about the Persian food I heated up in the microwave in the teacher’s workroom. I hardly ever made Persian food because of the time involved. Since my mother’s death, I’d been cooking it once a month to remember. To feel something like fullness, and I’d thought it was working. I would be sitting in my empty classroom at lunch just staring out at the heat when sense memory would do its trippy work. Then, in late November, there was a note: “Please only use the microwave for food that doesn’t have offensive smells.” What is an offensive smell? Sometimes, peppermint is an offensive smell, you see. Not today.

Olivia tapped my arm and pointed to the front of the room.

A cone of light, then a Pre-Storm Sky waved on the ceiling at the front of the room. I couldn’t imagine how the New Girl had rigged that so quickly or gotten the wave effect. Olivia said that she was jealous of the way the New Girl had eureka moments and “like, just, whoa.” I said me too.

Today, we were happy with our candy, happy to watch the storm. I let go of the old anger and let sugar do its work.

My name would never sound like something sweet here, or like anything with weight or import: graham, gram. I would never be a grandmother—or a mother. My students were not like my children, not even close. Our work was far more important than that, than family. My job, you must understand, was different from everyone else’s. I understood that most acutely when the New Girl had first arrived. Both of her parents came in for a meeting before she attended. Both were Dr. Ahmadi, one a medical doctor in private practice and one professor at our local community college. I could never remember which was which. I had to be careful to direct my gaze at the parent I was speaking to.

“We worry for her safety, given the state of things,” Dr. Ahmadi, the mother, had said. “You understand.”

And I did. She tilted her head a lot while she talked, which reminded me of my own mother, who would never have come to a parent-teacher meeting willingly, her insecurity about her own English language skills keeping her away, except from my band concerts, those contrived performances, where she felt, perhaps, more comfortable in the music.

I said, simply, “Yes, I understand, and I promise she is safe here.” In truth, I didn’t know if Dr. Ahmadi, the mother, was worried about racism or school shootings or an old-fashioned kidnapping. So much stranger danger.

Her husband was a short man, shorter than his wife, and he spoke little, simply a greeting and goodbye. He nodded a lot.

“Your name—it’s Persian?” she asked.

I nodded. Her husband nodded.

“Where are your family from?” she asked, smiling sincerely, which gave her husband cause to laugh a little. Perhaps, he knew it was passé to ask such things. Or maybe his laughter was confidence screaming out of the diasporic void, We are here, not from.

I told her. I named the little town and told her a few endearing things about it before dropping that my mother was dead, a fact that moved the conversation back to scholastic topics.

When they left, Dr. Ahmadi, the mother, held out her arms to hug me and made a face that said she knew I needed it. I played along, and let a Persian word slip to please her more. You always have to please the mothers. After she left, her perfume lingered for hours, which was very Persian, if you ask me. Now, in the belly of a peppermint whale, I was wondering if I’d upheld my promise.

Brenden approached with his Hamlet skull, a security blanket type of prop he held whenever we did arts, and he asked Olivia for a sniff, not a bite, of her Twizzler. Olivia squished her face and went up to the front of the room, where she climbed on my desk to spy on the New Girl. Brenden stood still in front of me. During open house in October, his father had confided that when he was younger, a dog had bitten Brenden, a bad bite, one that left a scar. This was why Brenden was shy and anxious, he told me, but I’d never seen a scar or heard Brenden talk about the incident. The shyness manifested not as silence, you see, but as an inability to continue conversations. As just now, he stood rather frozen in front of me, perhaps unsure what to do because Olivia had walked away. Finally, I let him smell my Twiz, and he smiled and said, “Summertime.” I nodded and pointed out, toward the rest of the room. Then, he held his Hamlet skull high and followed Olivia’s path to the front, and this started a chain effect. I stayed in the back of the room with the Twizzlers.

The Pre-Storm Sky grew somehow. The students uttered sounds of wonderment, walked with their eyes stuck to the ceiling-slash-sky. How did she do that? they asked. I did not answer, tried to enjoy this moment where the class was running itself. One child said something about pressure fronts, and another said, Inside?

As I pushed myself up, a wave of dizziness struck, and I braced against the wall. I thought I felt wind. Opening my eyes, I saw a whirlwind in the center of the room. The ceiling was a swamp of clouds, while outside there were no clouds at all. Though I wasn’t dizzy anymore, my head ached from the pressure. My left knee, too. Everything in my aging body felt the pressure of the New Girl’s storm.

When a raindrop splashed on a desktop, the children gasped and clapped. They had never seen an Inside Storm before. At no point did the New Girl stand up, so our only proof that she was still with us were a rumble and a downdraft that froze our breath.

Watching her Art was a joy and an old sadness for me. I remembered my mother telling me about how the British came to Iran and dug down, extracted oil, that dirty stuff, like it was the most valuable thing her country had to offer. She said instead, they should have been there reading and fighting for the poetry of Hafez alone, her Shirazi idol.

Children started grabbing sweaters and jackets, if they had them. Some pulled their arms and heads inside their shirts like turtles. I heard someone utter the word snow. Earlier in the semester when it had been winter, sort of, we had been on edge because of the winter storm they called Uri, a name which meant light. Some had been confused about how we could have a snowstorm in a desert, so we had to talk about that. Yet, I’d been grateful to only have to explain the weather because in recent years I had gotten more and more difficult questions about Bad Humans. Now, I heard some of them whispering these questions to one another, knowing not to ask me because I would not know the answers. After our exquisite corpse poem had been corrupted, I’d started to fill out paperwork to have the guilty boy transferred to another class. It was rare for such requests to come from teachers and not parents. Holding the transfer form in my hand, I felt I had failed. Like I was a failure. That old feeling: shame. There was something else in there, too. Would he actually be better off, happy even, in Mrs. Graham’s class where they won pizza for False Performance? Was I afraid of him, and was it strange for a teacher to be so afraid?

The New Girl’s storm was its own kind of strange, and we could only watch. So, we watched as her storm sucked in our toys, our art, our hope and fear, our flimsy yet beloved ceiling, and lifted off with only the quiet sound of nature’s rhythm. We had no more words, just weather.

Someone’s small hand held mine, but I didn’t know whose because it was our last year of happiness. We all gazed up. I had to laugh, you see, and it was like I’d been holding it in for a long time because my laugh got lighter and lighter, easier and easier. Today, we had done it. How did I know, you ask? All art is dangerous. That’s how.

When the tornado sirens sounded, I heard the children scream and finally looked down and around. The New Girl stood, then, on top of my desk—to see me, to see Olivia, Keanu, Brenden, Philip, all the rest. All of us. Her look was simply this: They named me for beauty, so here it is. Like she’d done it a million times, though perhaps not wearing pink denim overalls.

But how? How did the New Girl know her power at such a young age? And what else did she know?

Did she know how peppermint made me think of yogurt, cucumbers, and mint leaves mixed together? How the desert felt like home. How poems should not be read but chanted like prayers in your mother’s voice. How my name meant tree, and her name meant water. How the classroom door would open.