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The
Music Teachers of St. Augustine's Elementary
By
Suzanne
Rivecca
None of them
last long. The first one is large and imposing, wearing blue shirt-dresses
that swing just above her nylon calves. Her hair is iron-gray and swept
into a stiff marcelled helmet, and her glasses have silver chains. On
the first day she marches in, faces us, and sings out stridently:
“Hel-lo, boys and girls!”
We stare at her. She continues to sing.
“Re-peat after me!” Her singing is completely joyless, militaristic,
her voice full-bodied but corroded with rust, like the iron hull of
a great ship. “Repeat!” she sings. “Hel-lo, boys and girls!”
Lamely, we half-murmur, half-sing, “Hello boys and girls.’
“No!” she roars. She is still singing. “I’m not a boy! I’m not a girl!
I am Mrs. Stykos!”
We stare.
“I say, ‘hel-lo, boys and girls;’ you say, ‘hel-lo Mrs. Stykos!’ One
more time we’ll try a-gain!”
She will not stop singing. Throughout her brief tenure, she sings every
word. We are supposed to do the same. When we forget and speak normally
— “Can I go to the bathroom?”— she makes us sing it to her, with that
ramrod, stiff-spined, Hitler-Youth enunciation, until she is satisfied.
She yells and screams, veins bulging like exposed wires in her shiny
forehead, but always in song. She makes some of us cry. It is disconcerting
to be reprimanded in the key of F; it is like a musical, like Annie
Get Your Gun gone horribly wrong and turned on you in wrath.
One day she does not come. There is no explanation. In her place is
a young woman with Candies sneakers, stringy Suzanne Vega hair, and
plastic-framed glasses. She has not only composed her own song, but
has choreographed a bizarre dance to complement it. We learn that she
expects us to shamble aimlessly around the classroom, twiddling our
wrists cucaracha-style, while singing
The Virgin Mary had a baby boy
The Virgin Mary had a baby boy
The Virgin Mary had a baby boy
And she said that His name was—
HUH!!!—
Je-SUS!
At the climax of the stanza—that grunting, vaguely lustful, crudely
declarative HUH!!!—we are instructed to freeze in place and
stamp one foot down hard. Then let the name of Jesus burst from our
lips, a big post-boom like the aftershock of an earthquake, give it
a second to sink in, and start all over from the beginning.
We perform this song at the Christmas recital, throwing ourselves into
it with half-mocking abandon, making the HUH as basely suggestive
and lascivious as possible, rolling our little wrists like flamenco
dancers and bringing our feet down hard on the stage, a big collective
thump for Jesus that leaves the teacher beaming with pride, the principal
puzzled, and the parents aghast. The Candies lady does not return after
Christmas break.
Instead there is a man. He is the only male we have ever seen sing anything
besides hymns, in front of us, on purpose. He has a black mustache and
he conducts us as we go through the scales, his eyes closed, his narrow
face twisted as if in pain or ecstasy. He plays classical music on a
record player and closes his eyes.
There are rumors among us:
He is gay.
He is a child molester.
He is the long-lost son of Mrs. Stykos, or the long-lost lover of the
Candies lady.
Mr. Swinzick doesn’t last either, because we drive him out. He doesn’t
do anything wrong. He just fails to convince us of his authority. Mrs.
Stykos and the Candies lady were hated, but accepted as the natural
doyennes—tyrannical and cartoonish, flaky but eminently self-assured—of
scales and dances and dippy songs. That was their province. Mr. Swinzick,
on the other hand, does not belong among us. He was not made to corral
and bully us into musical literacy via John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.
And so he is rejected, instinctively expelled from our sullen presence
like a pathogen swarmed and flushed out by antibodies. Before we know
it, we have mocked and taunted and ignored him into sheer insensibility,
and he quits.
Some of us feel bad. Some of us don’t. Then comes the next one, a blonde
lady in a striped turtleneck sweater. She smells like unwashed hair,
and her favorite thing is to make us sing Kumbaya while waving our hands
above our heads—
“Reach for the sky, kids—oh, Lor-ord, Kumbaya—“
and, like twenty warring conductors’ batons, day after day, our small
arms all go up.
Suzanne
Rivecca is originally from Michigan and is currently in the
MFA program at the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in
So to Speak: a feminist journal of literature and art and is
upcoming in The Peralta Press Literary Journal.
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