A HISTORY OF SCREAMING
Wendy BooydeGraaff
She’s small, seven or eight years old, with a multi-coloured striped one-piece bathing suit from the discount store. She’s been invited to a birthday party, a pool party for one of her classmates and she can’t believe her good luck. She doesn’t have a pool, none of her neighbours have pools. A pool! In the backyard! Heaven. She didn’t know Shelly owned a piece of heaven.
She brings a gift. A card game, from the same discount store as the suit, wrapped in twice-used paper, ironed to make the creases less obvious. A reused green bow, slightly smushed. A handmade card taped on top with her signature drawing of the orange, pink, and yellow sunset. All the kids in the graduating second grade class are there. They have gifts also, bigger ones with shinier paper. Paper with no creases. A pile of gifts grows like she’s never seen. She adds her small rectangle to the top of the pile. It slides down, way down. She sees Diane and Kathy, Darren and Brian. No one calls her name, “Carrie!”, the way they do when other kids arrive. Or maybe she is the last one to arrive, and no one noticed anyone arriving.
The pool is a big round O in the backyard, with a ladder up the side that she climbs up and up and then over the little ledge and there’s the blue water contained by the wavy plastic sides. There’s no shallow and deep end. It’s all one choppy round circle of cool water and she jumps in, splashes like the others. Her tiptoes touch the bottom. Some of them are playing a game, Marco Polo, and she’s never played this before. She knows how to swim, she had to take lessons at Valentino, the community pool. Swimming is the one kind of lesson she gets to take besides school itself because her mother once saved a drowning person. Swimming is a necessity, not an extra, especially when you live so close to Lake Ontario. There isn’t enough money for extras.
Carrie splashes and watches until she, too, knows how to play. She’s laughing and yelling along with everyone else when suddenly Shelly’s mom is looming over the pool, her hair curled in a roll above her forehead and two rolls down the sides, like a judge’s wig. She is pointing and leaning and yelling, oh the yelling – screaming – saying, “You! Stop! Stop! What are you doing?” Carrie follows the line of the pointing finger and sees it leads right to her own chest. Her ribs tighten in shock. She looks around the pool and the other children are looking at her, too, with that bewildered yet somewhat relieved look children have when someone is in trouble and it is not them.
Carrie climbs out of the pool. Her wet multi-coloured suit sags in the behind. Carrie doesn’t understand why she has to come out of the pool under the watching shadow of Shelly’s mom. She shivers in her thin hand-me-down towel. Her family doesn’t have thick pool towels with blue stripes or Strawberry Shortcake on them. The other kids are splashing and playing like nothing happened but something has happened. Carrie did something so bad, so very bad. She wishes she knew what she did differently from the other children.
Shelly’s mom has disappeared into the house. Carrie sits there on the sharp cut grass that prickles right through her towel, prick, prick, pins, needles, until the cake is brought out. Carrie creeps closer, sits behind Kathy who sits with her on the bus to school every day. Kathy is in the circle of kids. Carrie hugs her legs close, pokes her head around the knobs of her knees so she can watch. Shelly opens her presents and oohs and aahs, squeals over the Papa Smurf and the Smurfette plush dolls she receives to add to her extensive collection. A blast of shame runs through Carrie when Shelly opens the very last gift, the one that has slid down and separated from the rest. It’s a card game, and Shelly says “Thank you” in the polite way they are all taught to receive gifts, even ones they don’t want, and sets it aside. Now there are sack races and three-legged races and Carrie thinks she is allowed to do these things because they are outside of the pool and it’s only the pool from which she’s been banned, right?
She screams and yells alongside the other kids and falls and skins her knee and doesn’t want to show anyone because the yelling and pointing finger might come for her again, for getting blood on the grass. She looks around. Shelly’s mom is nowhere, disappeared with the leftover cake and dirty plates. Shelly’s brother, Steven, is coming toward her. He is big, in high school already; there are only the two of them in this family with the wide-open space of years between Steven and Shelly. Carrie cowers, tries to hide her knee under the thin ply of her towel. Steven kneels beside her and he’s got a little box with metal clasps that he unlatches. He pulls out a Band-Aid. He stretches out her leg in front of her and says don’t worry in his deep grown-up voice while he wipes something across the scrape that stings. Carrie doesn’t mind stinging, she’s used to life stinging. He bends her leg up so her knee points to the sky and makes a triangle underneath. He stretches the Band-Aid across the scrape and she can see that a bit of the sticky part is stuck to the scrape and it will hurt but she doesn’t care because Steven is nice, he doesn’t care that his mom yelled at her and maybe he’s doing this so nicely and gently because his mom yelled at her.
Steven walks across the expanse of grass toward the line of shade trees where Carrie can see his mother – Shelly’s mother – in a lawn chair, a curl of smoke rising from her fingers. Steven crouches beside his mother. Their heads bend toward each other. The mother waves her hand in a wide gesture. Steven nods, shades his eyes with his hands as he looks over at the children. Carrie thinks they are talking about her. Her chest burns. Steven takes the cigarette from his mother’s hand and puts it to his lips.
Carrie straightens her leg, and the Band-Aid pops up, making a little peephole of reddened gauze. She contorts her upper body, and through that bloody peephole she watches Steven pass the cigarette back and sit on the ground beside his mother, smoke pluming to his nose. Even she knows how to put a Band-Aid on so it doesn’t pop up in the middle. She forgives Steven, because he was nice. Because he didn’t yell when she got blood on the grass. Because he has kindness in his eyes. Even if he dotes on his mother and smokes the same cigarette from her yelling lips, Carrie decides she will like him forever.
* * *
Another birthday party, fourth grade this time, so a sleepover. Rose’s house. Five girls. Exclusive. Carrie has never been to a slumber party. She doesn’t know how they work other than how books and after-school specials on TV depict them. She thinks they are supposed to stay up all night talking, giggling. Maybe make some prank calls about refrigerators running. (Hello? Is your refrigerator running? Yes? Well then you better go catch it!) Rose’s mom comes down to the basement where the five of them are quick pretending to sleep in their sleeping bags and whisper shouts, “You, you come with me. You are the cause of this.” And of course, the finger points at Carrie.
So, her first slumber party, Carrie sleeps in a bottom bunk of an empty bedroom with a feather pillow that makes her sneeze and sneeze and sneeze, while her friends are in the basement, cozied up together. She pictures them as she drifts off to sleep, coexisting on another plane that’s really only two floors below her: telling ghost stories, stifling screams of laughter, pretending to be asleep when the mom checks on them, again.
Carrie’s mother says allergies, this is why Rose’s mother singled her out. She must have been the loudest, or laughed too hard, or gave the crappiest present – though Rose’s family doesn’t seem snobbish in that way. Carrie thinks to herself, going over and over in her mind what she did that made her be the one forced to sleep separately. She thinks everyone was laughing and giggling. She thinks it can’t be only her that was loud. How come the others were okay with her being sent upstairs? How come no one came and got her later? Were they unspokenly happy she was singled out? What did they do when she left? When she asks Kathy and the others next Monday at school, no one can quite say what exactly they had done, what exactly they had whispered. “You know, slumber party stuff.” Carrie doesn’t know what actually happens at a slumber party because she’s still never been to one.
***
Carrie goes outside to pick the cherries, the white ones, the ones they don’t sell at the market because they only have the one tree of Rainiers. They keep those rosy whites for themselves. She positions the wooden orchard ladder, adjusts the third leg for stability, and climbs up, high, high, high. Carrie has picked fruit her whole life, all eleven or twelve years. She loves working her way up to the very top step. She was born on this farm, of this farm. It is in her and made of her and she is in it, in the soil, inside the fruit she is picking. She eats a ripe perfect cherry and tastes home.
Typically she picks plums or sour cherries or peaches alongside her sisters, her mom, the local teenagers they hire to pick $2.00 a basket. Today Carrie is alone. Her parents, in the house. An unexpected arrangement that has not happened previously in her twelve known years. Maybe a promise of cherry pie if she picks them. But then she’d have to be picking the sour cherries. Maybe Eskimo pie. A bad name, about which people say they didn’t realize back then, how could a recipe name be hurtful or racist. It’s unbaked cheesecake with a graham cracker crust and cherry topping. Sweet, cold, good, despite the name, which Carrie will change to icebox cherry dessert or cherry pie cheesecake when she’s older, when it becomes clearer to her that changing the name of Eskimo pie will make it, and by proxy, her, more acceptable to the potlucks and summer barbecues she infrequently attends. She will breathe an inward sigh of relief when, as an adult, she goes to the home of a colleague with the icebox cherry dessert in a cooler and finds out over dinner he is tribally enrolled. As if changing the name of her mother’s dessert absolves her. As if it could erase the guilt of keeping the stained recipe card inscribed with Eskimo pie in her mother’s blue handwriting. For this she will berate herself, that she wants to keep this physical memory. Now, on the ladder, Carrie doesn’t know any of this. She’s salivating over the promise of Eskimo pie. She’s got the harness round her back, the wooden basket dangling from the hooks in the front, her hands free to pick, pick, pick.
The day is warm, with a breeze. Normally she doesn’t like work, however, this is work with a promise. Her fingers smell like cherries, are coated in the familiar waxy rime of cherry skin. The leaves tickle her arms. She would whistle “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” if she knew how. She stretches for the shiniest, sun-soaked cherries on the branches arching skywards. She doesn’t sense the teeter, doesn’t notice the fall, can’t hear anything except a high-pitched scream like the kind a small-motored weed-whacker makes. She doesn’t recognize her back now horizontal on the hard wooden slats of the ladder, the tractor-mowed weeds poking her arms, the empty wooden basket scratching her arms, the view of the cherry tree leaves framed against the clouds. She doesn’t feel the jostle, the bending under her shoulders and under her knees, the concave sink of her ribcage, the lift into the air. Her dad is running – he never runs – running with her in his arms, running toward the house, deep creases in his windburned cheeks, his twinkling eyes flat. It isn’t until she is placed on the little chesterfield behind the kitchen door that she realizes the high-pitched sound is hers, her own involuntary screams. She clamps her mouth closed, ending the sound. Her eyes are dry. Screaming hurts. She never wants to scream again.
* * *
Carrie is walking across the soccer field at school with two friends, the same friends she is always with: Kathy and Belinda Mae. Carrie is twelve or thirteen, in grade 8, about to graduate from a small K-8 school into a slightly bigger but still small high school. She is a field day captain, a participatory leader of a multi-age group, kids from grade 7 down to kindergarten, competing in hop-skip-jump, relay races, high jump. She is not particularly athletic, so her team – they named themselves The Leap Frogs – won’t win the big prizes, and that’s okay. She enjoyed coaching the younger ones, encouraging them to run hard, or lean forward into the landing after running long jump so they don’t step or fall back, losing precious inches in the sand. There’s running long jump and there’s standing long jump, for which it’s important not to let toes grip past the start line. Now at the end of this long, physically exerting but internally warm-glowing day, the kids are lined up along the soccer field sidelines for the last of the fifty-meter dash heats. The teams have dispersed into grade levels again, and she and her friends have a leaders’ break: popsicles in the gym. That’s where they are headed, the sticky orange popsicle with two sticks holding it up.
Out of the blue sky she hears it, her name is yelled across the field, followed by the ultimate denigrating word of the time toward a female, one the feminists had not claimed as their own, not yet, not in the mid-eighties in that smallish town where she went to school. The word, the harshness of that word, screamed at her in all its grating glory. The startling nature of it. And it is applied to her, Carrie. No one ever called her anything close to that before. Her sisters have called her brat, pest, selfish. Never this word. Not to her face. Not about her. She turns on the field, rough cut grass under her runners. Running shoes, she will call them when she grows up. Now she calls them runners, the way erasers are rubbers, shopping carts are buggies. All of this exists in the same moment, a moment she turns toward and can therefore see roll out in slow motion: One of the grade sixers, Veronica, a kid she barely knows, a kid that goes to Escarpment Church, same as Carrie, and their older sisters are sort-of friends, leans forward on her crisscrossed legs and screams, “That Carrie Meyerink, ever since her dad died, she’s been such a BITCH!” A statement screamed at her, yet only about her, as if meant to be overheard – yet screamed, so everyone heard.
And it’s true, last summer Carrie’s dad did die, and the world has not felt the same since, the world changed and also it kept going, pretending nothing happened at all, ignoring that one of the living, breathing, thinking, doing, hurting, loving members of it died. He died. And here is Veronica saying Carrie is the bitch who had changed. Carrie turns and sees her, Veronica, cross-legged on the grassy side-lines, leaning forward, shouting her brains out, shouting a word that they don’t say in her Christian school, a word that is as bad as Fuck-head or Asshole out there in the secular world, a word that cuts to the core of her because she doesn’t know how this person could think this about her – this person who barely knows her and certainly has never talked to her before. What has she done to this Veronica? She doesn’t know this kid beyond her name, her face. Does everyone she doesn’t really know think this way?
Her friends look at Carrie and Carrie doesn’t know how to react so she keeps walking across the field, sandwiched between her friends, wondering if that could have really happened because of how strange it is, how very weird that this happens in front of everyone and no one, not one teacher, friend, onlooker reacts, so she walks away from the kid who yelled BITCH at her in the middle of the field and she will act like she has forgotten but at various times throughout her life she will pick up this incident and hold it in her hands, turn it over. This is what the world thinks of her? Someone leaned forward, shouted that over a field of people. It must have been urgent, this naming: Bitch. Yes, her father had died over the summer, nearly a year prior. Yes, she had changed, she felt it inside: withdrawn, looser, tender like raw meat. She holds her outside shell tight around herself so nothing leaks out, so none of the soft malleability inside her can be exposed and poked. Is that what a bitch is?
***
There are different words for the sounds. Each one has a different connotation based on experience. Scream. Yell. Holler. These sounds come from pain, fear, surprise. Or they come from rage, hatred. Shriek. Shout. Howl. Screaming so the other ceases to exist. Screaming with the edge of superiority. Screaming to supersede all other sounds, emotions, people.
***
Classroom. Billie Jo. Carrie never thought she’d teach someone named Billie Jo in downtown Grand Rapids yet here she is in her first class-room where she put up the bulletin board paper with staples and cut-outs of apples, photos of her new students in the apples, The Apples of my Eye is what the board reads, so these new students will know how important they are to her, that they are valued already, before they’ve ever entered the classroom, where she cleaned and arranged the desks and there is a person, a young person, named Billie Jo in her class. Bil-lie Jo is a name she’d read about in books. In her childhood she knew Ida Mae, Terri-Anne, Carole Ann, Debra-Lynn – girls with two names that had to be hyphenated or spoken together as multi-syllabic first names – girls who dropped the second name in the sophistication of adolescence. Though these girls were her contemporaries and her friends, Carrie associated these names with old-fashioned books donated to her by well-meaning neighbours. But Billie Jo – that was a double boy’s name that added up to a girl’s name. She can’t figure it out, this name for a child who isn’t interested in learning or life and who ended up in her special education class.
All of the kids have glimmers in their hearts, aspiration in their eyes, except Billie Jo. Carrie is sure she is capable of instilling the love of learning in Billie Jo, too. Carrie herself loves learning, so any child in her class would gain the same by osmosis, by swimming in the same classroom air every single day. The education department preached this saviour narrative: every child in her future class would succeed because of her magical influence.
The longer she will spend in this school, the more she will deter-mine she has underestimated poverty. She has underestimated the system that has failed the parents, how minddullingly impervious this system is to individual circumstance and personal history. She has overestimated her own reservoir of hope, her belief that working hard makes a difference. But for now, her first year, she is bursting with promises and the superpower of education to bestow on her students.
Billie Jo is barely at school, barely feels like a student of hers. Bil-lie Jo’s mother keeps Billie Jo home for her own company one less day than the truancy officer requires before making a visit. 180 days of school, 45 absences a year. If she had more, she’d be considered chronically absent and lose her government assistance. There are 10 children in Carrie’s class, and all of them are receiving assistance of some sort. She knows this because they all get the free lunch option, not even the reduced lunch, which is two dollars a week. Billie Jo is the only student in the class, and one of two students in the school, who does this absentee numbers game. Never more than two – on rare occasions – three days in a row absent, never more than twenty-five total per term. Or was it more? The secretary knows. The secretary – whose title has not yet changed to administrative assistant – is the one who gave Carrie the background information: Billie Jo has asthma, a medical issue, that arrives conveniently on spelling test days, or on field trip days, or on any day where anything more taxing than staying quietly in one’s seat is required. This misuse of public funding is not the ubiquitous problem Reagan purported with his derogatory terms. It is the Clinton era, now, Welfare to Work. It is true that each school knew one or two parents that took advantage of the rules – took advantage was a judgement call, a social indictment. Not one teacher or staff member would choose to live like Billie Jo’s mom, but at least three of the staff, including the school secretary, like to gossip about her choices. The mom’s choice to keep her daughter home for company. The mom’s work to get her GED down the hall in the adult-education class (on those days her mom had class, Billie Jo comes to school). The mom knows something, knows she can earn a smidge of redemption through education, even if it’s only a box to check on the government forms. Did any of this wear off on her daughter? Pliable as the rag dolls at craft shows, Billie Jo is so devoid of anything she seems vegetative. No energy. No interests. Robot-like in any sort of educational task. Her listless blue-gray eyes track Carrie as if she were at home and watching television, long blinks ten seconds from sleep.
Then the day comes, it is unremarkable in every way, a day three-quarters of the way through the school year, when Billie Jo’s mother comes striding down the hall. Carrie had been asking in the office if she had grounds to report Billie Jo’s mother for willful absenteeism, how that worked, what she could do because nothing else was working. She was trying to get Billie Jo educated. She couldn’t save Billie Jo if she didn’t show up. The girl would be able to read if she put any amount of time into it. If she came to school. Carrie is adept at seeing the abilities of students, of pinpointing where and how the problem can be patched. Still, it takes time and consistency. Intervention. Daily intervention. Reading. Commitment. There, at the front of the class-room, Carrie hears the booming of angry footsteps coming down the usually silent hall (except at recess times, passing times). Booming footsteps shaking the centuries-old floors, rattling the antique doors on their rusting hinges, though at the time, Carrie doesn’t know what this sound signifies. She doesn’t know how her door will bust open, how these sounds will try to stomp on this child-centered community she has built inside this old, old room with the leaky windows and the pole that intrudes upon the center of the room. She is new, a very new teacher albeit a respected one, finishing up her first year, and she’s confident in her teaching abilities. Much, much later in life she will wonder how that mother got past the school office. No mandatory check-ins, locked doors, ID checks, buzzers. There is a looser sort of check-in those days, an honour system, a lined paper on a clip-board. To get to Carrie’s classroom, Billie Jo’s mother had to pass the secretary sitting in the office, pass the resource room, pass four other classroom doors. Even if Billie Jo’s mother didn’t stop inside the small room cramped with photocopier and wooden desk, someone must have seen her stride by, purposeful shoulders hunched forward in attack-mode, arms swinging, hair breezing back in self-created wind, heavy feet not quiet. Why didn’t the secretary or the principal intervene? Much later, when Carrie told the secretary what happened, a stabbing pleasure crept up to the secretary’s lips, a knowing, clichéd sign of dis-solidarity.
The old classroom door, wooden, slams open at the back of the room. The mother of Billie Jo – her name is Theresa – Theresa’s hair is mussed, her face flushed, her body with arms not quite flat at her sides flare up with the accusatory wide stance of a grizzly, glazed eyes, one arm extended toward Carrie. She is yelling upon entry. A bubble of spittle resides on the corner of her lip. She’s shouting a long stream: “You keep calling to know if Billie Jo is sick well she is she has asthma that’s why she’s not in school.” Carrie looks to Billie Jo who was in the classroom at that minute, her pale face watching the interaction with interest. Not proud, not quite proud, though a little I’ll show YOU look. We’ll show YOU. Carrie will not register this until later when she rehearses the moment over and over again in her mind. She will see the other children, Renisha, Lennie, Kody, Nimsi, staring at them, the two adults as if in a face-off, as if in a live Jerry Springer show. Carrie says to Theresa calmly, “Oh hello, why don’t we discuss this out in the hall,” though internally she wonders what the heck she could have done because she feels guilty as if she is doing something wrong. She deserves being yelled at, other people hate her, and it was only a matter of time before this image of her doing good, her respected teacher act, fell apart too. Such a pessimistic undertone to an optimistic professional. She walks from the front of the class to the back, past the desks, past the angry mom who is there to show her a thing or two, and into the hallway. Carrie wants to protect the kids from this yelling woman, and she also wants to protect herself and her dignity, which is why she goes first to the hallway. She is the target, the anger will follow her. This she knows.
She goes into the wide, wide hallways of a school built one hundred years ago, not lovingly restored like the homes four blocks away in the historic district. She turns and there is the mother, Theresa, be-hind her, yelling. The yelling is already losing its vehemence because yelling is for show; it’s a weapon, it’s an invitation to war – only if the target cowers or yells back or there is an audience. The hallway is empty, doors are newly closed, and Carrie’s back is calm and straight, though inside her heart is canted. She knows never to show weakness. The yelling dissipates. Bits and pieces of narrative emerge. A truancy officer has visited Theresa’s home. She is angry. She can’t afford to lose her benefits. Carrie says, “I didn’t know a truancy officer visited your home. I understand how that would be scary and hard. I don’t want you to lose your benefits. I am concerned about Billie Jo, I want her here, I think that’s best.” Theresa says, “She’s mine! You’re not the boss,” which translates into “How dare you! I know what’s best for my own child,” the line that rings through the ages of misinformed parents taking an individualist and selfish stance on child-rearing. It sounds good from a freedom perspective but it forgets about the village of people that affect a child, that strengthen a child, that form community. Interdependence. The strength of a society. There is no arguing because Carrie will only be Billie Jo’s teacher for another 47 days, of which Billie Jo will be present approximately 29, and then she will be in a different class, a different school called middle school. All of the students get passed to the next grade, especially those in special education classes such as Carrie’s. Though Carrie will think of Billie Jo throughout the years, the longer she teaches, the more she realizes how little influence she wields, how short of a time she has to effect change.
***
A few years later, another mother comes into the classroom, angry and yelling. The child, Jonathan, warned Carrie that morning, said, “My mom’s coming. She’s not happy. Something about you called the house, you bothered them too much.”
The calls for conferences are what he means. Jonathan’s parents have never come for parent conferences – missed the one yesterday, in fact, where she and the school psychologist and the social worker sat at a round table waiting and waiting while the dark blanketed the windows and the halls quietly echoed the last footfalls. She called the house, hoping to discuss Jonathan’s educational plan, needing parental presence at the scheduled meeting, and a signature on the educational plan required by the school and the Michigan Department of Education. The parents are angry, busy, don’t have time for that crap. This is what the mother yells, but Carrie knows what to do, how to walk into the hall where there is no show, it’s merely the teacher now, the teacher who possibly loves the kid as much as the parent does. She has a vision that this child can be, already is, more than what the parents expect. The child has told her before he came to this school, before he joined her classroom, he used to get in fights. He used to be in trouble all of the time. Here, in Carrie’s class and on the playground, he has not gotten in trouble once. Here, he is calm, quiet, even-toned with the clenched jaw of a nighttime grinder.
Carrie has made a mistake with him once, when she took the students to a theatre production and told them to wear nice clothes. She has an idea of Sunday best from years of church, pressed navy pants and button-down shirts for the boys and flowered blouses for the girls. The students come to school with nicely combed, picked, braided hair, oiled at the scalp if they have frizz, or gelled if they have cowlicks. Jonathan is wearing one of those red and white basketball warm up suits, the kind that make the swishing noise when he walks, and she thinks he must have better clothes at home, that he forgot to dress nicely. When she asks him, he shows mild surprise by raising his eyebrows a millimeter. Jonathan does not have many emotional reactions, unlike his mother. “These are my best clothes,” he says. “Don’t you like them?” He is an old man in a very young body. His voice is lower and grainier than an eleven year old’s usually is. Maybe the woman in front of Carrie, yelling at the wall, is angry that she doesn’t have better clothes for Jonathan, or that she has to go to IEP meetings or lose the extra funding the state gives her for raising her child with a learning disability. Maybe she resents this 20-some-thing teacher thinking she knows something about kids and how they ought to be educated. Or maybe she just needs to yell. Carrie’s heart races the way it does when she sees police lights behind her. Her de-fault is that she has done something wrong, that she has to be perfect, that perfection is somehow expected and attainable, her own hubris and self-criticism so intertwined that she can’t unravel how deeply flawed this is, how she feels when she gets it wrong is itself wrong.
This time, with Jonathan’s mom’s full screaming attention spot-lighting on her, she gets something right. She runs into the classroom, grabs a file from the cabinet, a pen from the desk, and runs back into the hallway where the mom is breathing fire out of her nostrils. Carrie pushes the pen into her hands, says, “While you are here . . . I know you are busy, so while you are here let’s get this IEP out of the way.” The mom signs, eager to scratch her angry mark, leaves with her pink carbon copy of the form with Jonathan’s learning and socio-emotional goals, one of which is about appropriate verbal expression.
Carrie’s logical mind knows people scream because of their own issues. Still, it hurts. She wants to do good in the world and she is yelled at. She is not seen as someone who is doing something good by the people she wants to help. They do not see education as the most valuable asset for rising out of poverty. They haven’t seen it work before; they haven’t seen anyone make it into a world of steady income and health care coverage and neatly organized plans. Carrie hasn’t seen it work either; only in movies and in personal interest stories has she heard of the superhuman effort it takes to overcome disadvantage. She believes every-single-one has this superhuman capability, that there’s room for everyone to rise, especially her students, but most people are tired, and she sees her students for one or two years and then never again. There is hurdle after hurdle after hurdle – for her and for them.
Jonathan’s mother’s molecules of anger settle into a mist around her. There is nothing to do about it but go back into the classroom where the students look at her face, check in on her. She knows these children so well, knows how they at first think how a woman in charge is fun to watch when she gets taken down a peg – anti-authority impulses normal for preteens, or is it the prevalent anti-feminist attitudes? – and then she sees their admiration, that she strode into the classroom with dignity and therefore has earned their respect. This is the first time she is yelled at that she thinks that even though there was no resolution or change effected, she has somehow won. As if this is a competition. She files the signed form and goes back to teaching her students.
***
Carrie holds the baby in her hands, her baby, the one she conceives and births. She strokes her baby’s downy forehead. I will never scream at you, she vows. I will never let you think you are one of the ones to be hated.
It is a lie, of course it is a lie. Carrie cannot see how sometimes in her sleep-deprived, self-deprived future, this tiny one breaking a knickknack or writing in a book will snap her resolve, how this grow ing little one will run toward a moving vehicle or smack a playmate on the forehead or throw sand in the eyes of her grandmother. Carrie will yell. She will scream. It will happen in the heat of frustration. She will not understand where this anger came from, how this eruption boils within like a secret volcano. And when she does emit the primal sound, the history of all the screams in her life will crest over her chest and stop up her lungs. She will see her child cower, her round eyes looking up, soaking up and swallowing the rage, taking it in as if it’s her own. And what will it do there, inside her daughter?
She will not be able to stop the screams, not all of them, but she will figure out how to mitigate. She will train herself, ascertain tiny step by tiny step to make sure her daughters – because there will be more daughters – have a shorter history of screaming than she did. It won’t be enough to ensure they don’t have their own histories of screaming, but it will be something.
Wendy BooydeGraaff’s work has appeared in Necessary Fiction, X-R-A-Y, Phoebe, Ninth Letter online, and Iron Horse Literary Review.