By Harry Bauld
The name in block letters on the board the first day of sixth grade said Miss Hudgins, but in our lingo she was only Brillo, the nickname a talisman from the dark backward and abysm of student loathing in honor of the wreath of steel wool that bristled from her head like the Nazi infantry helmets we saw in World War II movies.
Everything about her seemed gray. Small, slate eyes were buried deep in the well-done steak of a face, ashen and mottled. Her burlappy dresses were like the drapes at the Dello Russo funeral home, often festooned with charcoal buttons the size of Ring Dings. She was thick as a bear. The saber-like edge of her baritone struck fear into even the street-toughest of her charges.
It took only days to teach us that in Brillo’s world all the most dismal trains of education would run on time. Rote drilling and an irritable strictness were the cornerstones of her pedagogy, with an occasional flourish of ridicule.
“I’m starting to think these pupils are stupid,” she once said, appealing to an absent authority, as we slumped in silence before some dangling modifiers. Once, reading aloud from a spelling test, I pronounced the word “spatula” spah-TOOL-ah. “The whole world is not Italian,” she groused, and Sheila Sullivan behind me snickered. And then there was the morning Michael Marcarelli threw up at his seat, perhaps from the half-pint carton of nearly room-temperature milk we bought for fifteen cents at lunch every day and which, in that era before expiration dates, often tasted a tick or two past its prime. Brillo looked aggrieved at the desktop covered with barf. “I see that some of us are not quite house broken,” she said. Student scuttlebutt told of the time she had spit in the face of Tommy Alonardo, a huge sixth grader, when he had called another kid in class a fugginape.
She made of our flat greater-Boston accent a pretentious, pseudo-British tremolo—in South Medford we were unfamiliar with the concept of “Brahmin,” though her name and accent strongly suggested she wasn’t “from here.” Whenever we (finally!) lined up correctly for recess or group trips to the basement, her euphemism for the toilets, she opened the vowels of command like Mountbatten: “You may pahhss, clahhss.”
From my front row seat, every lesson was Attack of the Fifty Foot Teacher. Her habitual classroom posture was to tuck one menacing forearm under her aggressive breasts and, with the free hand, hector us with a wooden pointer she cracked impressively against a variety of surfaces to regain our perpetually slack attention. Years later, Dickens’ description in Great Expectations of “Tickler”—the switch with which Pip’s severe older sister “brings him up by hand”—evoked the clear memory of Brillo’s fearful dowel.
Not that she ever touched us with it.
Instead, wielding it against a defenseless map, she thrust it at Australia, which seemed to cower under the rubber tip like a lost piglet. “We don’t want communism THEY-AH,” she barked, and on we went to the Greek myths. I didn’t get it. How would communism, apparently some kind of Russian and Chinese mental illness, but highly communicable (hence, I thought, the name), get onto this big island, and, once THEY-AH, what was bad about having it surrounded on all sides by water and a coral reef heavily populated, as I knew from the previous year’s oceanography project, with man-eating sharks? That seemed like good containment to me. But we quaked in agreement.
One steaming fall afternoon, with the windows open to the heat of what in those innocent days we called Indian summer, our math concentration melting in runnels down the roots of our hair—there was not so much as a fan in Brillo’s room, an absence she justified by explaining how distracting the whir of machinery could be on young minds mastering sentence diagrams—we heard seventh graders, her recent graduates, trailing loudly home from Lincoln Junior High, a few blocks away on Harvard Street. One of the collateral advantages of aging up was the earlier dismissal.
I can’t remember what we were doing, but I do remember when the voices outside floated up from the street and settled like an unwelcome hand on the back of my neck. Gradually, the discord congealed into a unison jeer. “BRILLO! BRILLO!! HEY BRIIIILLOOOOOOO!!!”
The classroom was sucked into silence, stiller even than when Brillo would glare at our hopeless fumbles with fractions. I felt, more than heard, a thick rustle of fabric behind me. She strode forward, her back to the class, Kong among the circling airplanes. She reached up to take the long pole that hung by the window, seven feet of polished red oak with a brass head shaped, I always thought, like an upside-down map of Italy, a tool even the tallest teachers needed to reach the upper sash of the windows, the top of which, when closed, must have been eight or nine feet above the floor.
We kept our heads down, pretending to be absorbed in our own work while actually waiting, through the fisheye lens childhood provides for detecting adult foible, for what would come next. It seemed perfectly plausible she would stomp down into the street twirling the pole like a spinster version of the Kung Fu masters newly popular on TV and scatter the baboons like bowling pins, or use it as a medieval jousting lance to skewer them, or, with a primitive guttural cry, hurl it from the window like a javelin. Instead, though it was a hot afternoon, she pushed the top windows closed. Then she reached up bare handed to pull on the bottom sashes.
At the last window, closest to me, she stretched on tiptoe from her thick wrists down to the sturdy black shoes and the effort exposed a dark half moon of sweat under the left short sleeve. The impressive wattle below her biceps swung like a rope bridge in a gale, and memory, its full Freudian camera rolling, seems to provide—though it can’t have been true—a view down the tunnel of that sleeve into the forbidden shadows of armpit, where a patch of hair furled like an anemone. Our obsession with what we referred to only as B.O. offered more engaging and acceptable sub-plot possibilities, although no scent of anything other than the usual classroom bouquet of mucilage and our own warm-weather stenches reached my row; certainly before this none of us had gotten close enough to her to establish a baseline from which any current aroma might or might not depart. But something else compelled our larger fascination when she finished enclosing us in what was now becoming the steaming greenhouse of the room and turned again toward her desk.
Hearing the last window thud shut, we lifted our heads like a herd of antelope at the watering hole who’ve felt a tremor. Though she had a grip on herself tighter than any she’d had on the pole, I—we all—saw through it. As the cries outside continued, muted but not silenced through the closed windows, the meaty planes of her face turned to stone, like the gorgon we were reading about in Edith Hamilton, whose own evil power was used ironically against her. But poetic justice did not explain the flush at the back of my neck that drove my eyes to my paper, which stared back in blank accusation, turning me, too, to stone.
The catcall persisted day after day. Some classmates had siblings at “The Lincoln,” and perhaps those elders, receiving communiques from younger spies in enemy territory, received daily intelligence that their ordnance was finding its target. So the siege drove on through the fall, suspended only, like my Little League baseball games, on account of rain.
One day after dismissal, I forgot my baseball glove behind the folding doors at the back of the room where we kept coats, hats, and other gear “out of distraction’s way,” as Brillo demanded. Returning to the classroom, I found her bent medievally over stacks of busywork we had slogged through that day. The brick building of Tufts School seemed part cathedral and part prison, quiet after school except for the echo of the janitor pushing his bucket through the halls and the hush of light traffic outside on Medford Street, where a couple of throttled maples unconvincingly impersonated the postcard image of New England autumn. I can still conjure the newly mopped floors reeking of artificial pine, unctuous and suffocating.
I slunk through the classroom door, hoping to ghost in and out. At my step, Brillo looked up, her reptilian gaze refocusing. As if she had been expecting me, she peeled off her glasses and with an impatient nod indicated the chair near her desk. The empty seat yawned as I imagine the electric chair looks to convicts. Obedience, fear, and confusion beetled through me. In Brillo’s universe, to forget an important article was a steep moral failure. I had just decided to sprint gloveless back to the park when into my paralysis her voice rang like the school bell. “Sit, child!”
She never addressed us by name. It was always “Miss,” or “Mister,” or more often—as if it were somehow distasteful to call attention to budding sexuality by distinguishing our genders—simply “Child.” Patti Gulino said this was because she didn’t know our names. I think now it was more likely she was some distance beyond caring, which was not quite the same. In any case, it was still early in the term. Patti’s mother had been in Brillo’s class herself in sixth grade—“a thousand years ago,” according to Mrs. Gulino—and said maybe Miss Hudgins had been teaching so long all the names ran together and so, like a good teacher, she probably just didn’t want to make a mistake. Mrs. Gulino also suggested that many of the teachers, particularly the older ones, had never quite recovered from the assassination of the president four years before. This was difficult for us to comprehend, since that November day hadn’t made any coherent impact on us second graders, and it was hard to imagine anything derailing the classroom locomotive that was Brillo or the dull carriage of school obligations. It was true that at odd moments when they were together a shaken look sometimes came over grown ups and they suddenly talked in low voices, but I always attributed this, even then, to all the liquor.
One eye still on her papers, Brillo poured some juice out of a carton into a paper cup. I vaguely understood this was intended for me, but my joints felt like tin. Then she opened the square top of the small brown bakery box she occasionally kept on her desk.
This box—or its larger cousin-—was a talismanic object of my childhood, tied with fine red-and-white-dotted string from the big conical spool at Lindell’s bakery in Ball Square in Somerville, wrapped twice in quadrants around the box and knotted expertly on top into an unsolvable triple bow by one or another of the Lindells. Sunday mornings it arrived with magic regularity on the kitchen table where my mother cut the string with a satisfying click and revealed an assortment of doughnuts and the apple-butter danish my father inexplicably favored.
Inside lay two of the coconut crullers my brother and I cherished above all others and sometimes fought over.
“No thank you,” I said, the obligatory first response to any invitation by strangers or friends’ parents to eat. Using my family’s economic struggles and my own bottomless hunger as a guide, I judged that all hosts secretly wished to keep the bologna sandwich, the provolone, the pizzelle for themselves. Part of the dance was that the offer (if it was genuine) would be made again and again.
Brillo shrugged and closed the box.
In my imagination, a confetti of shaved coconut fell like ticker tape on a parade of departing pastries cruising like Cadillacs into the distance.
“You like to read,” said Brillo. It was not a question. Brillo rarely asked questions, unless she suspected you would not know the answer. Otherwise, she made declarations and challenged you to contradict or disagree. The unstated rule of my home was to speak to adults only when asked a direct question. The last thing you wanted was to call any attention to yourself—either to reveal your sinfully lazy position stretched on a bed with Sherlock Holmes adventures and thus be summoned “down cellar to do something constructive”—or to be once again the subject of my father’s favorite axiom from his Air Force days: “It is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
But it was certainly true that my stumbling book reports were eager and copious.
“You have books at home,” pursued Brillo. This was much less true; beside my bed I had a handful of paperbacks rescued from library discards: Kon Tiki, The Agony and the Ecstasy, some Peanuts cartoons, The Sea Around Us. For entertainment in my home we confined ourselves to shouting at the television during Red Sox games and beating the lights out of each other. But I shook my head and discovered a thread of voice.
“The library,” I croaked. The one-room neighborhood branch was a refuge.
“You are reading something now.”
I nodded. Brillo leveled her jowls at me, waiting.
“Lust for Life,” I said. “It’s about an artist.” To give the impression I was reading it for the first time was disingenuous. I was on my third pass through the book and now often opened it at random to revisit and memorize favorite passages.
Brillo tilted her chin to the ceiling. “Ah yes. A lurid and sentimentalizing work,” she humphed, more to herself than me. “You like art,” she said. She pointed to the wall where part of the ornithology project Willie Wunderlich and I had collaborated on was tacked up. “Bring me your cardinal,” she said.
She inspected the drawing over the tops of her glasses. I had never actually seen a live cardinal; I was pretty sure they avoided Medford, for safety and perhaps aesthetic reasons. My model had come from a photograph in a magazine. “The proportions are all wrong,” she said, wrinkling her nose as if smelling something unpleasant. “The beak, the crest. It’s not a parrot, child.”
I sat quietly. “But,” she went on appraisingly, “the line shows promise. There’s life in it.”
I didn’t know what to make of this. In my experience, promises, as my father often announced, were made to be broken.
“You like novels,” she continued.
I was still thinking about van Gogh. “I like books about real things.” What I responded to in books like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was not the magic, or the mystery, or the adventure, which felt predictable and dull, but the fact that the classroom encyclopedia revealed that the narwhal was real and not a fantasy of Jules Verne’s imagination.
Brillo paused. I waited to be dismissed. Then she reached down into the gray canvas bag she carried on her shoulder to school and placed on the same little stool next to her desk every day. We had often wondered at its contents—a blonde wig, cigars, a bullwhip?—but dared not even violate its orbit, let alone attempt a peek into its depths. Now she dug in it briefly and fished out a book.
“You haven’t seen this,” she declared, holding it out like courtroom evidence.
I turned it over in my hands. She was of course correct, but in ways even she may not have understood. In South Medford, in those days, any clothbound book in its pristine dust jacket was as rare as color television. (The library either ditched the dust jackets or smothered books in a cloudy, industrial plastic, and often tore out endpapers and violated pages with a maniacal barrage of stamps, labels, paste, tape, and card pockets.) The ivory finish of the paper jacket was as smooth and welcome under my fingertips as the lathe-turned polished grain of a new Louisville Slugger. Large, black letters on the cover read In Cold Blood. For a moment I thought it was a guide to achieving the state of being Miss Hudgins approved of and modeled every day for us. There was no other design but the letters and a muted rose-at-the-end-of-a-needle graphic I didn’t understand in the upper right corner. The author’s name was printed below in red: Truman Capote.
“It’s a new kind of book,” she said. “Tell me what you think.”
Obediently, I opened to page one.
“Not NOW,” she huffed. I must have looked confused. “Take it with you,” she ordered and returned her attention to her papers. Only libraries, in my experience, lent books. After quite a long pause I understood our meeting to be over. I grabbed my glove from the closet, folded the book into the glove where a ball would go, and trailed away to the park.
As fall turned to winter I occasionally found myself after school discovering a reason to return to the classroom to get something out of my desk and then staying—briefly at first, and then for slightly longer. In these further interviews Brillo talked about books or elaborated on her theories about Southeast Asia. “The Russians are not like us, you know. The Chinese … ” When I said I had liked In Cold Blood and offered to return it (I had read it secretly in my room, fascinated and terrified), she said I should keep it. She herself had “reservations,” about it.
“I approve of his methods, but not his goal,” she said, another of her incomprehensible pronouncements. In her turn, keeping her big face neutral, she would listen to my inarticulate effusions about batting averages or the strange charge I felt when I looked at van Gogh landscapes. We never talked about family, certainly not hers and even more certainly not mine—for that too, the alcohol and the abuse, indeed for any “problem,” there was no vocabulary. It was 1966 in South Medford, Massachusetts.
Sometimes when I came in she would hand me a book across the desk—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or Rembrandt: The Complete Etchings—and for fifteen minutes or so she would grade papers and I would turn pages in ambiguous if not quite companionable silence. Occasionally the principal, Miss Mack, her skin rubbery as a deflated balloon, would appear to fence over some administrivia. One day, sometime in early winter, when Brillo opened the Lindell’s box, I jumped forward, snagged a doughnut, and retreated like a timid pigeon. On my walk home through the snow, the taste of the coconut, that sweet ash, still hung around my lips.
In class that year, after Willie Wunderlich and I had already pounded through our math book, whenever yet another lesson on fractions began, Brillo shooed us crossly away to a far corner to read A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court or Mysterious Island. This was her gruff and informal version of what today might be called “gifted and talented enrichment,” but these impatient dismissals, along with my meetings with her, were my first recognition—in or out of my family—that I might possess worthwhile abilities that did not involve running, throwing, or hitting something or someone.
My classmates didn’t seem to know about these ambivalent little master classes with Brillo. To “stay after,” as it was called, signified only punishment.
One day during recess Carol Buonocorsi sidled up to me.
“You hafta stay after yesterday?”
“No,” I said. I could feel my ears begin to burn. Carol wore the shortest skirts in the class; when she walked, clicking her flats across the ancient classroom parquet, her thighs were oyster-curves of elusive temptation. At recess she usually reserved her slinky titillations for Nicki Padovani, who was five eleven and had already begun to shave.
“Musta done something,” she persisted.
I shook my head.
“So what were you doing?”
“Nothing,” I said, which was almost true but felt very much like a lie.
Carol’s unibrow darkened dimly with doubt and partly with sly cruelty.
“Was Brillo in there?”
I hesitated under the teasing erotic awning of her gaze. Across the playground, Nicky watched us, dangling by one hand from the swings pipes like the ape he was.
“No,” I said miserably.
In my mind I was not “staying after” but “going back,” as if that were somehow different. Brillo herself never brought it up. Perhaps she knew all the ways her reputation might compromise mine among my soon-to-be-Brillo-shouting colleagues. I don’t know whether she intuitively understood, meeting my brutish father and cringing mother on Fall School Night, how complicated things were for me at home—whether she was trying consciously to provide sanctuary, or whether she herself just had nowhere very interesting to go. By so many other names goes love.
In spring, when the good weather returned, so did the voices crashing like Hitchcock seagulls through the window. Those afternoons, something nameless inside me was pierced and wilted, though with time it turned out to be disappointingly easy to maintain a poker face. As everyone knew, Brillo was to be feared and despised, and that was that.
At the end of sixth grade at Tufts School there was no moving ceremony of commencement, no Hollywood last-day hugs, no gifts and cards from grateful parents for nurturing etc. etc. The concept of nurture, if not the word itself, was beyond my parents’ comprehension, and in truth it would be difficult to see how it applied to Brillo’s dealings with us. The last day we lined up as usual, waited for the familiar pedantic tones we would happily never again endure in this lifetime, and sprinted screaming with release out into the echoing hall and down the stairs to Medford Street below, inmates paroled. A couple of the bolder delinquents even ventured their own first giddy “BRILLO!” and then ran like hell to La Cascia’s deli for a celebratory Italian sub “with everything.”
I never saw her again. I’m a teacher of many years’ experience myself now, and, like many teachers, especially at the beginnings and endings of the school year, I’m often thrown back on the memories of my own schooling. Once a year or so ago I phoned the superintendent’s office in Medford to find some record of her, a family, a first name, even. An assistant, sounding burdened, promised half- heartedly, I thought, to look into it.
That next fall I went on to The Lincoln. The route home took me and many others up Medford Street past the high windows of Tufts School. Certainly that imposing ursine form inside the second-story classroom must have been visible from the sidewalk. If I ever peeked up, I remember now only a bright fluorescence, sometimes the shades half lowered, and a few bright squares of paper stuck to the window panes—perhaps a drawing of a jay or a dolphin by some new trembling novitiate. But I do know that on warm fall and spring afternoons, I sped with my head down past the school’s open windows, trying unsuccessfully to duck the hail of BRILLO!s that rose and fell around me like arrows. In my rush I must have looked, to anyone glancing down from those windows, like one of the guilty.
She was neither a wonderful woman, Brillo, nor a particularly good teacher, even by the standards of those days: way too rigid, impatient, terrifying, and condescending. Nor was she a heroic spirit against the odds, all that Dead Poets Society romanticism; she was just, I think now, a lonely burn-out close to retirement going a half-step beyond the bounds of her job, for her own obscure and perhaps unexamined reasons, to be nice to some kid—to play a favorite, in truth, another of her faults as a teacher. And yet all these years later, though I finally have this apple for her, I find, with shame and sadness, there is nowhere to give it.
About the Author:
At Columbia Harry Bauld was twice first-team All-Ivy shortstop and broke Lou Gehrig’s records. (Unfortunately his academic records.) A writer, painter, translator and teacher in the Bronx, he has won awards for work that has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S. and the U.K. He was included by Matthew Dickman in the anthology Best New Poets 2012 (UVa Press) and has performed in New York and elsewhere as a magician and jazz pianist.