Each of these parents, Ms. Hempel told herself, is as mortifying as mine were.
A mother began: “This book they’re reading—I was just wondering if anyone else was troubled by the language.”
Ms. Hempel smiled bravely at the instigator. “I’m glad you brought that up,” she said, and reminded herself: This woman can never find her car keys. This woman is always running late.
A classroom of parents, squeezed into the same chairs that their children occupied during the day, looked at Ms. Hempel.
She couldn’t say, Your kids are okay with me. I promise.
Instead, she said, “When I chose this book, I was thinking of The Catcher in the Rye. Because every time I teach Catcher to the eighth grade, I feel like I’m witnessing the most astonishing thing. It’s like they’ve stuck their finger in a socket and all their hair is standing on end. They’re completely electrified. What they’re responding to, I think, is the immediacy and authenticity of the narrator’s voice. And part of what makes Holden sound authentic to them is the language he uses. This book’s impact on them is just—immeasurable. Even the ones who don’t like to read, who don’t like English. It suddenly opens up to them all of literature’s possibilities. Its power to speak to their experiences.”
Ms. Hempel paused, surprised. She had recovered.
“I thought to myself, Shouldn’t the seventh grade get the chance to feel that? That shock of recognition?”
And she meant it, in a way, now that she had to say it.
What happened then? Ms. Hempel doubted it had anything to do with her speech. Perhaps an insurgency had been building quietly against the concerned mother, who probably hijacked Parent Association meetings, or else was always suggesting another bake sale. Maybe they heard in her complaint an echo of their own parents, or they believed on principle that words could never be dirty. Maybe sitting in the plastic desk-chairs reminded them of what school felt like.
One after another, the parents began describing their children: She talks about it at dinner. He takes it with him into the bathroom. You don’t understand—the last thing that she enjoyed reading was the PlayStation manual.
They spoke in wonder.
At nights, I hear him chuckling in his bedroom. He says that he wants me to read it, that he’ll loan me his copy when he’s done. When I offered to rent the movie for her, she said that she didn’t want to ruin the book.
“I knew it!” a father announced. “It was just a question of finding the right book.”
And the parents nodded again, as if they had always known it, too.
“Well done!” Another father, sitting in the back row, began to clap. He smiled at Ms. Hempel. Three more giddy parents joined in the applause.
Ms. Hempel, standing at the front of the classroom, wanted to bow. She wanted to throw a kiss. She wanted to say thank you. Thank you.
And then it occurred to her: perhaps what had so humiliated her about her father had made someone else—a square dancer, a waiter, the director of the seventh-grade production of Cats—feel wonderful.
THE NEXT MORNING, IN HOMEROOM, Ms. Hempel helped Cilla Matsui free herself from her crippling backpack. “Your dad,” she noted, “has this very benevolent presence.”
“Benevolent?” Cilla Matsui asked.
Ms. Hempel always used big words when she spoke; they also appeared frequently in her anecdotals, words like acuity and perspicacious. It was all part of her ambitious schemes for vocabulary expansion. Most kids took interest in new words only if they felt they had something personal at stake. “You’re utterly depraved, Patrick,” she would say. “No, I won’t. Look it up. There’s about six of them sitting in the library.”
So Adelaide’s comments were astute. Gloria had an agile mind. Rasheed’s spelling was irreproachable. Even those who weren’t academically inclined deserved a dazzling adjective. David D’Sousa, for instance, was chivalrous. These words, Ms. Hempel knew, were now permanently embedded. Even after the last layer of verbal detritus had settled, they would still be visible, winking brightly: yes, I was an iconoclastic thinker.
Because one never forgets a compliment. “You looked positively beatific during the exam,” Miss Finch, her tenth-grade English teacher, had told her. “Staring out the window, a secret little smile on your face. I was worried, to tell the truth. But then you turned in the best of the bunch.”
Thus, beatific—blissful, saintly, serenely happy—was forever and irrevocably hers. She shared the new word with her father; she showed him the grade she had received. Aha, he said, with great vindication. Aha!
Uncomplimentary words, however, seemed to overshadow the complimentary ones. That wasn’t it, exactly. But whereas an ancient compliment would suddenly, unexpectedly, descend upon her, spinning down from the sky like a solitary cherry blossom, words of criticism were familiar and unmovable fixtures in the landscape: fire hydrants, chained trash cans, bulky public sculptures. They were useful, though, as landmarks. Remember? she used to say to her father: Mr. Ziegler. White hair. He made us memorize Milton. And when that failed, she would say: Don’t you remember him? He was the one who called me lackadaisical.
Her mother’s memory was terrible, but her father could always be counted on. In his neat, reliable way, he sorted and shelved all the slights she had endured. Oh yes, he’d say. Mr. Ziegler. Looking back on those conversations, she wondered if perhaps it wasn’t fair to make him revisit the unhappy scene of her high school career. Remembering old criticisms is only fun once they have been proven laughably incorrect. Fractions! the famous mathematician hoots: Mrs. Beasley said I was hopeless at fractions!
When her father died, a year ago that spring, Ms. Hempel had spoken at his memorial service, along with
