Jacqueline Doyle
Teachers’ Pets: Five Micromemoirs
First Grade
It was perfectly acceptable to have teacher’s pets in those days, at least that’s how I remember it. I can see my first-grade teacher, plump, with tightly curled hair. Was she really named Mrs. Darling? Her teacher’s pet was named Lynn and Mrs. Darling used to pick her up and swing her high above her head and they both laughed in delight. If I were to run into Lynn on the street today I would immediately dislike her, even after all these years. I already knew how to read in first grade, this was before Sesame Street, most kids learned later in school, but I’d learned at home with my father and a phonics book with a picture for each letter of the alphabet and ladders in the back of the book that you could climb as you sounded out words, one word to a rung. I’d read ahead in our first-grade English book during our reading circles, and finished the entire book way ahead of time, but Mrs. Darling didn’t believe me. Mrs. Darling had her pet who followed the rules and I was the sassy little girl who claimed she knew so much. I wasn’t trying to make trouble, not then, but reading ahead eventually got me out of the New Jersey suburbs. It was a relief.
Sixth Grade
Did she really commit suicide later, Mrs. W., the only teacher I remember singling me out for special praise? In sixth grade we did a lot of creative writing and Mrs. W. liked mine, one I remember from the point of view of a chess piece in an ivory chess set that changed hands and traveled around the world like I wanted to. A gawky eleven-year-old, I thought I needed to become less of a tomboy but didn’t know how and I even didn’t mind when she had my parents in for a conference because she thought I’d plagiarized a rhyming poem about a tiger, since that seemed like a compliment, it was good enough to be plagiarized. I hadn’t plagiarized, not from William Blake or anyone else, but my father always read a lot of Rudyard Kipling out loud to me and that’s what the poem sounded like, though why anyone would want to imitate Kipling, I still don’t know. My mother told me on the phone about the suicide, an offhand do-you-remember-so-and-so? It figures that I’d be drawn to the teacher harboring darkness inside. She told me once that I needed to learn how to take a compliment, and I still haven’t, but I think about that a lot.
Senior Year
I stole a book he’d checked out of the library and somehow believed he wouldn’t notice. This was high school when I enrolled in an independent study with Mr. McD., an English teacher who also had a pet, her name was Bonnie, a cheerleader I think. I really wanted to read things they weren’t teaching, for example James Joyce and William Butler Yeats, and this was a small book of literary criticism called The Golden Nightingale by Donald Stauffer, beige with gold lettering on the spine, which was frayed, he got it out of the county library for me and I treasured it and didn’t know how to get a book like that. He never asked me to return it to him. So I kept it and later when I was in college I ran into him in a small grocery store when I visited home for vacation and he nodded, tight-lipped, barely acknowledging my greeting. I would have been unfriendly too. He was dying of cancer then, so that might have been the reason, not the theft. He was wearing the tweed sport coat he always wore. I stole a book from the library once when I was in grad school in upstate New York, writing literary criticism myself. I underlined passages in fine point black magic marker in the book, which was out of print, but that’s another story.
Yoga Class
In my yoga class in California I didn’t tell anyone that I was an English professor. Because I hate how people suck up to you when they find out, or how people like my dentist say they’ll have to mind their grammar. But I didn’t really like being seen as a featureless housewife in the yoga class either, and I really disliked my yoga teacher’s pet. A girl-on-girl crush that seemed to make the student uncomfortable. I think the student’s sister may have been a yoga teacher too and they knew each other outside of class. Whenever we had to voice intentions or talk about what yoga meant to our everyday lives, the teacher would ooh and aah over the student’s pretty unremarkable answers. I’m still petty about pets, as you can see.
My Pets
You’re probably wondering whether I’ve had pets as a teacher, and the answer is yes, but I don’t think I made them obvious, and they weren’t the ones you might expect. Not the hard workers or students who followed the rules, not the ones who got the best grades either. I secretly admired the outliers, the ones who took risks with their writing, the ones who alienated the class with their off-the-wall comments. My pets were the ones who couldn’t care less about being pets. My pets played with grammar and ignored outlines and liked writers who did that too. Unscrew the locks from the doors! Whitman said and really can you teach Whitman and then insist that fragments and comma splices and long coiling sentences with participles are wrong? Can you teach Gertrude Stein who said grammar was patriarchal and then insist on the perils of repetition and digression? It may have been a typo or it may have been intentional but Whitman ended the original Song of Myself with no period I think because life goes on and on
Jacqueline Doyle has published flash fiction in Wigleaf, CRAFT, and trampset, and flash nonfiction in F(r)iction, The Collagist, and matchbook, among others. Her flash fiction chapbook The Missing Girl is available from Black Lawrence Press, and her flash nonfiction has been featured in Creative Nonfiction’s “Sunday Short Reads” and numerous anthologies. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her online at www.jacquelinedoyle.com and on twitter @doylejacq.
