Creative Writing: Mrs. Guvendeim and the Invisible Apostrophe

By Matthew Milman

I’m the closest thing to a perfect stranger society will
allow children in the legal care of. Still, there’s something
ironic about writing my own name on a long, milky chalkboard in a
classroom full of hollering students. I’m not their real
teacher. I’m just a substitute, a scab ““ I get a day
pass in the parking lot, if I’m lucky. I can’t really
take myself seriously, not really.

What am I ““ a scavenger? Migrating from teachers’
lounge to teachers’ lounge, never sitting in a chair of my
own, always one borrowed from some sickly woman or recently
pregnant one; swiping up sugar cubes and swapping medical opinions
on the most recent coma victims of “The Young and the
Restless.” There I was ““ a wandering sub in search of a
homeland.

I tried to be whimsical about the whole thing, my educational
diaspora, that is. I wanted to flare things up a bit. My last name,
Smith, wasn’t carrying its weight, so I started adding a star
in place of the dot on the “i.” But after the novelty
of that wore off, my hand, tired of the same routine, began to draw
big squiggly lines under the whole name.

I was testing my own creative limits, going out to
arts-and-crafts stores late at night in pursuit of exotic shades of
chalk. One I bought cost $7. I treated the four-inch stick of magic
with the utmost care. Though the name of its color was something
I’d ignorantly mispronounce, I could only describe it as a
gentle melting of pink and orange that possibly resembled the sun
that shines in heaven.

But the little four-inch wand wasn’t enough, I was going
to need real magic.

Once-a-week browsings through the old thrift stores turned into
thrice-a-week rummagings. “Oh, what an exotic hair
piece,” I’d often get in the teachers’ lounge the
next day, and would hold back the urge to make a “Yes!”
fist like Michael Jordan did when he beat the Knicks.

I’d present myself, nervous in the last minute before the
first bell while the children zipped and unzipped backpacks and
folders. I finally had an audience for my thirsty-for-coffee lips
and hungry-for-a-cigarette soul.

Regulars, as we subs refer to them, think they have it made.
They get to really teach. They get to ed-u-cate, en-rich, en-liven.
They get to meld and mold minds, and at the end of the year, send
their beloved pupils off into the next grade, one step closer to
the real world, and again, each year replenish those empty seats
with new, bright, eager minds and smiles. Reinventing children
every year, that was their job.

But I saw that I was the one who could reinvent myself every
single day. I wasn’t “The Nice Teacher,” who got
the most gifts at Christmas and with whom all the PTA moms wanted
to organize events. Nor was “The Resident
(old-but-never-getting -older) Bitch.”

It seemed I always wound up with the Bitch in elementary school,
my friends usually bragging about their lack of homework, and the
pivotal allowance of their much nicer teacher to let them decide
for themselves at the beginning of the year where to sit. While
Mimmie and Hiedy were rubbing elbows, I was stuck next to Carl
Smith, whose idea of a shower had something to do with a garden
hose ““ I was sentenced to predetermined seating by means of
alphabetical arrangement.

I was always stuck behind that booger-eating moron Smith. I
tried, once, getting away with calling myself by my middle name,
after I came back to school from summer, as girls often did when
they came back from summer ““ reinventing themselves in silly,
superficial ways. Alas, there were no other Smiths in the class.
Not a single Smith, besides the two of us, in the whole time from
first to fifth grade. My first name could have started with a
“z,” it wasn’t going to make any difference. Over
the course of those years I watched, always from the left, as Carl
graduated from boogers to glue sniffing, perhaps the biggest jump
in his entire schooling.

As a sub I could transform myself not only as a teacher but as a
person, weaving entirely elaborate and nuanced pasts for crazy
German piano instructors who became teachers after strenuous
lawsuits and medicated soccer moms who just needed to get out of
the house after 20 years.

It all started out with a purple sweater and big metal glasses.
Then came the chords for a long Southern drawl.

I began to let my social life affect my mood. After a sour
evening at a bar, or worse yet, in my apartment, I’d show up
in a charcoal sweater, thin wiry frames and the really long skirt I
stole from my mother. I ““ she, rather ““ went over so
well I decided to complement the skirt with a faint Russian accent
that only showed up in restrained vowel sounds.

I returned to the thrift shops in search of whole ensembles and
made my way to the Halloween section of K-Mart. From there, outfits
and voices turned into whole performances, and performances melded
into personas. I was a drop-dead hit; that phone call from the
placement office came every morning at the same dark time, before
most of my coffee was drunk. I was playing all across the New York
City Public School District, one classroom at a time.

In my mind I was a superhero, balancing a boring nightlife with
an utterly fantastic day life, coming in 45-minute bursts between
the rings of bells I believed to be coronation trumpets.

I realized something, finally, when I was standing in that last
minute before the first bell, holding up my imported chalk to the
milky green track as it stretched before the usual jog across the
board. There was always one thing I could never get around. The
last name.

All superheroes require an alias. I had five. Mrs. Guvendeim.
Misses Cohn ““ I spelled it M-I-S-S-E-S, explaining that I
didn’t like the idea of being labeled someone’s
possession (no matter how much I loved my nonexisting husband)
““ hence the invisible apostrophe after the “r” in
Mrs. Manchaot, my third name. For that one, I loved the
students’ silly attempts at pronouncing it, though I made no
attempt to ever actually settle on one. There was also Mrs. Faht,
who, of course, the displaced New England kids got a kick out of,
and finally Ms. Cellic, a reincarnation of my real-life third-grade
teacher.

It wasn’t like I couldn’t get away with it all. I
mean, honestly, who remembers the names of their substitute
teachers?