Ms. Hempel Chronicles

Crossing

MR. MEACHAM, THE DEPARTMENT chair, offered to buy Ms. Hempel a lemonade after school. If you are a person of passion and curiosity and ferocious intellect, he told her, you are a born history teacher.

“I teach English,” Ms. Hempel said.

“You don’t teach English,” Mr. Meacham corrected her. “You teach reading, and writing, and critical thinking!”

It seemed, to Ms. Hempel, a grand way of putting it. Through the wide café windows, she watched her students come barreling out of the school’s front gates. Did she really teach them anything? Or was she, as she often suspected, just another line of defense in the daily eight-hour effort to contain them.

“What’s wrong with the way history is taught in this school?” Mr. Meacham asked.

“Not relevant to the kids?” Ms. Hempel ventured.

“Relevant!” he cried. “Whoever said history had to be relevant?”

He then spoke in a pinched, miserable voice that Ms. Hempel had never heard before. “Look, kids, the ancient Egyptians aren’t so different from us after all! Look, kids, when we study the ancient Egyptians, we’re studying a reflection of ourselves!

“All this fuss about relevance,” he said, restored to normal, “is a process of erosion. There won’t be any history left by the time they’re through. Just social studies” And Mr. Meacham leaned back on his stool, nervously, as if he were History and Ms. Hempel were Relevance.

“When students look at history,” he said, “they shouldn’t see their own faces; they should see something unfamiliar staring back at them. They should see something utterly strange.”

But that’s what they do see when they look in the mirror, Ms. Hempel thought. Something strange.

“So, no, that’s not what I had in mind,” Mr. Meacham continued, somewhat more cheerfully. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the way history is taught in this school: not enough writing. A lot of reading, a lot of talking, but not much writing. And that”—Mr. Meacham smiled at Ms. Hempel—“is where you can help.”

“Me?” Ms. Hempel asked.

“You can teach them. Not only how to think about history, but how to write about it.”

Ms. Hempel saw that Mr. Meacham was mistaken. He had confused her with someone who liked teaching seventh graders how to write, who felt happiest and most useful when diagramming a sentence or mapping an idea or brightly suggesting another draft. This was not the case. The thought of increased exposure to seventh-grade writing made Ms. Hempel worry. What happened when one read too many Topic Sentences? Already she could feel how her imagination had begun to thicken and stink, like a scummy pond.

If only she could develop for her subject the same dogged affection that Mr. Meacham felt for his. People approached her, possessed by their enthusiasms, and Ms. Hempel would think, How beautiful! She loved enthusiasm, in nearly all its forms. For this reason she found herself scorekeeper for the volleyball team, facilitator for the girls-only book group, faculty adviser to the Upper School multicultural organization, Umoja. And now, teacher of seventh-grade United States history.

Mr. Meacham handed her a book that weighed approximately ten pounds. Its title, she noted, was full of enthusiasm (America! America!).

FIRST ASSIGNMENT. CHOOSE three people, of different ages (in other words, don’t grab the three seventh graders sitting closest to you), and ask them the following question: Why is it important to learn about American history? Record your findings. Include the name, age, and occupation of your interview subjects. Bring in your results and share them with the class.

“‘To help us better understand ourselves,’” Tim read from his binder. “Alice Appold. Forty-two. Chiropractor.”

“I didn’t know your mom was older than mine,” Daniel said.

“My mom is fifty-three!” Rachel announced with dismay.

“Ms. Cruz said that the reason it’s important to know about American history is because if we don’t know our past, then we don’t know our future.” That was Stevie.

“My father said he won’t answer the question because it’s leading,” Kirsten said.

“‘It’s our responsibility as citizens,’” Tim read, again from his binder. “James Appold. Forty-three. Restaurateur.”

“My mother said that if we don’t understand the struggles our ancestors went through, we won’t appreciate the nice life that we have now,” said Chloe, staring at Tim, who hadn’t raised his hand.

Julia Rizzo spoke next. “‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’”

Six students looked up in territorial surprise.

“That’s what my mother said!”

“So did mine!”

“I was just about to say that.”

“My sister,” said the other Julia, who would never have the same answer as anyone else, “told me that not knowing your history is like being a person who’s lost their memory.”

“An amnesiac,” Kirsten said bossily.

Amnesiac, Ms. Hempel wrote on the board, and then experienced an instance of it herself. It was a condition that sometimes afflicted her. She would turn her back to the class; she would forget everything. What is a noun? Who were the Pilgrims? And, more troubling, What was I saying? Or: How did I get here? The tether would snap, and she would be set adrift, the sleek green board stretching out all around her. She would feel, against her back, the warmth of eighteen faces. She would feel she might do anything in this moment, like sing a song from My Fair Lady. But then a pigeon departs from the windowsill, Stevie lets out a hiccup, a telephone, somewhere in the building, rings; and she recovers. Oh yes. I am Ms. Hempel. It is second period. A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea.

“A person who’s lost her memory,” Ms. Hempel said to the other Julia. “How true.”

And she thought of the terrible blank she had drawn the very day she’d been hired to teach at this school. Upon signing her contracts and shaking everyone’s hand, she found herself sitting in the faculty lunchroom over a plate of garbanzo bean salad and across the table from Mr. Meacham, who, as it turned out, taught a course in Chinese history. He was disappointed to learn that she did not speak the language, not a word of it.

“And your family?” he had asked. “What province are they from?”

It was at this point that Ms. Hempel’s memory failed her. Hunan? Szechuan? Were those provinces or just restaurants? And what kind of food was she, by hereditary right, supposed to most enjoy? She knew the answer, she did! She was simply nervous.

“Chungking?” she murmured, which didn’t sound particularly correct, but Mr. Meacham was already moving on.

“What a shame,” he said, “that your name isn’t more indicative.”

“Yes.” She didn’t understand what he meant. “It is too bad.”

“Is there a middle name, perhaps?”

“Grace?”

Mr. Meacham frowned, thinking. “Or a family name. Your mother’s maiden name?”

“It’s Ho.”

“Ah!” He smiled and swallowed the last of his milk. “Have you ever thought of hyphenating?”

He tried it out. He used the word euphonious. He said the name over to himself, three times.

“Ms. Ho-Hempel,” she said. “That’s what they would call me?”

Mr. Meacham nodded happily.

“But—” How could she put this? “Won’t there be a lot of jokes?”

He didn’t follow.

“You know, ho? As in, ‘pimps and.’ As in, ‘you blankety blank—’” She waved her hands at Mr. Meacham, as if guiding him into a very tight parking space. “Do I want a bunch of seventh graders calling me ho?”

Mr. Meacham looked at her, perplexed. “That’s precisely the idea.”

He picked up his lunch tray. “You’ll be expanding their horizons. An awful phrase, but a sound principle.”

She had a whole summer to practice saying it. Ho-Hempel. She even wrote it down on her name tag for the new faculty orientation. But when the first day of school finally arrived, children came crashing into her homeroom and by the time the last of them appeared — Michael Reggiano, congenitally late — she had lost her resolve altogether.

MS. HEMPEL LIKED THE land bridge theory, especially the part about the lumbering mammoths and the hunters in hungry pursuit. The hunters were following the game, a phrase that made her think of small boys running after ducks in the park. The two things couldn’t be at all similar; following the game was probably a lengthy and thankless process involving mammoth dung and very little real chasing or spear throwing. But still, that was how she pictured it: the band of hungry hunters pursuing a herd of lumbering mammoths. These hunters were so absorbed by the chase, they went running across a land bridge connecting their home, Asia, to an entirely unfamiliar and uninhabited continent, North America, without even noticing it. A land bridge was more difficult to imagine. The book described ice ages, glaciers, the freezing of oceans, their bottoms now exposed. Did that make sense? Did that big glacier, pinned atop the world like a yarmulke, somehow suck up the water in the Bering Strait? Apparently so. In that case, was crossing the land bridge like skirting a rampart of ice, the cold blue glacier bearing down on you from one side, or was it like trudging along a marshy strip of beach, with the glacier a white ship floating off in the distance? The book didn’t elaborate. All that mattered was the appearance of the land bridge, so that the mammoths could lumber across, so that the Asian hunters could follow, so that the Western Hemisphere could become populated.

“Any questions?” Ms. Hempel asked.

“WHAT IF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA hadn’t given Columbus the money?” asked Travis, who enjoyed hypothetical situations.

“What if the hunters hadn’t crossed the Bering Strait?” he would eventually ask.

And, “What if the Pilgrims had decided to stay in Holland?”

Ms. Hempel wasn’t sure how to answer these questions. “Then I guess we wouldn’t be sitting here!” she would reply, airily.

This seemed to be the answer Travis was looking for. He nodded and said, “I guess not.”

GRANDPA’S CHEST. THE YEAR IS 1691, and the settlers at Jamestown are packing up and moving the colony inland. Imagine that you are helping your grandfather sort through his belongings. Each item that he puts into his chest reminds him of some significant event or person in Jamestown’s history. For instance, an old tobacco pouch might remind him of the crop that saved the colony from total ruin (“Ah, I remember it well — if Pocahontas hadn’t taught John Smith how to plant tobacco, we never would have survived. But rich folk back home loved chewing the stuff. Soon everybody was growing it — even in the streets!”). Write a scene in which you describe this conversation with your grandfather as he reminisces over the contents of his chest. Note: You will need to include at least eight items!

“Before I read my scene,” Audrey said, “can I tell a joke?”

Ms. Hempel said yes.

“My father told it to me. It’s a dumb joke, but I wanted to tell it. First he said, ‘Why is it important to learn about American history?’ Remember? The assignment we did? And then he said, ‘Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat’”—Audrey paused, sheepishly—“‘the seventh grade!’”

The class laughed. So did Ms. Hempel.

“The best reason yet!” Ms. Hempel declared. “Who wants to repeat the seventh grade?”

And then it occurred to her: she was repeating the seventh grade, in fact for the fourth time, and she would still be repeating the seventh grade when Audrey and Kirsten and Travis were out in the world, doing things. Over and over again, the Jamestown settlers would complain of the mosquitoes, the tea chests would tumble into the harbor, the Loyalists would be tarred and feathered and paraded through the crooked streets. Every November, the war would be won; every October, the colonies would rebel; every September, Ms. Hempel would turn to the board, pick up the chalk, and write: First Assignment.

OUT OF ALL THE DAYS in the month, Affinity Day was perhaps the most difficult. Ms. Hempel questioned the choice of Affinity, which she normally used to describe how she felt about Thomas Hardy, but the word was already a fixture, Umoja’s gentle way of saying No White People Allowed. The organization’s founders had decided, in the interests of unity, that once a month its nonwhite members should congregate without its white members. Or, to put it a preferable way, its members of color should gather without its members of noncolor.

Now Ms. Hempel was left with a classroom half full of students, nervously rattling their lunch trays. Where to begin? The white members probably suspected that as soon as the door swung shut, the Korean kids would start speaking Korean, and the Puerto Rican kids would start speaking Spanish, and the black kids would start speaking in some new and alluring way that no one else had caught up to yet. From inside the room would come the sounds of profound relief: laughter, slapping of hands, little moans of commiseration. Delicious food would be shared. Maybe some hilarious imitations of the other, absent members would be performed.

“So,” Ms. Hempel began. “Is there anything that’s on your mind? Anything you’d like to talk about?”

Everyone concentrated on their lunches. No one wanted to talk. The wall clock suffered one of its attacks; the minute hand shot forward, and then jumped back again. Balancing their trays, they had come, docile and curious and considerate of Ms. Hempel, but they didn’t know what to do next. She didn’t know how to show them. She exhaled noisily to signal that it was now safe to let go, but no one seemed to take her cue. Perhaps they weren’t holding in their breaths.

Perhaps they moved through this school with ease and ownership; perhaps it was unfair to expect that they should feel discomfort. But that’s what Ms. Hempel half hoped would come spilling forth: tales of woe, a collection of slights and insults and misunderstandings. Wonderment at the nature of one’s hair; clumsy impressions of the deli man’s accent. Expectations of brilliant athleticism, or of preternatural skill with calculations. A belittling of one’s dearest accomplishments: We all know why she got in early to Yale. They could gather together here, with their lunch trays, and share these offenses. Theirs would be a kinship based on grievance. Then Ms. Hempel could feel as if she were providing something: a community; a sense of — affinity.

But no one was talking. Either they felt no outrage, no struggle or unease, or else they felt all these things and were not comfortable enough around Ms. Hempel, or each other, to describe it. Ms. Hempel feared that the latter was true — for she was aware of the struggle, she had been witness to it — she had seen Alex and Shanell and Andréa walking toward the bus stop, their heads bent together in solace and conspiracy; she had seen Nestor smiling, widely, entreatingly, altogether too readily; she had seen Clive rambling down the hallway, looking as if he had lost something. It could not be easy, being at this school. She had no way of fortifying them. In fact, she was making it worse — making them trail up here to her classroom, making them parade out of the lunchroom, carrying their trays.

Ms. Hempel felt the tenuousness of her claim. She wished she wasn’t only half.

“Well, I have something on my mind,” said Amara, Umoja’s newly elected president. “I had an encounter with Mr. Meacham.”

It concerned the list of research topics that he had presented to his Intellectual History class. “According to Mr. Meacham, Montaigne and Hobbes and Ralph Waldo Emerson were the only ones around doing any thinking.”

Amara spoke of the great Nubian civilization, its delicate art and extensive trade and ingenious devices for irrigating the land. And the kingdom of Aksum — their alphabet and their gods, the grandeur of their obelisks! The stone thrones and colossal statues. She then leapt over thousands of years, arriving at Wole Soyinka and Leopold Senghor and Chinua Achebe. Glorious thinkers, all of them.

Amara remembered Ms. Hempel. “Look at the Chinese!” she added. “They had poetry, and philosophy, gunpowder and noodles and silk, when all those Europeans were running about waving clubs at each other. Wearing animal pelts!”

THIS WAS A WAY OF THINKING that Ms. Hempel couldn’t quite rid herself of. As she accompanied her class through the Reformation, and the growth of European empires, and the race to explore, and the discovery of the new continent, and the settlement of the first English colonies, she often found herself wondering, What was going on in the rest of the world? Her thoughts would begin, Meanwhile, back in China… but she wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence.

All she could say for certain was that the English colonists seemed an unhygienic, scrabbling bunch. They died off at an alarming rate.

“Does that mean we’re going to see people dying?” asked Jonah.

“Possibly,” Ms. Hempel said. “But if anyone dies, remember that it’s a re-creation.”

“It will look real, though,” Jonah said. “Won’t it?”

It should, if Plimoth Plantation recreated death with the same devotion with which it clothed its inhabitants, bred their livestock, built their dark and smoky homes. Ms. Hempel had studied the brochure. Upon any day of the week, one could step back into the year 1627. Scores of thrifty colonists would mill about you, busy with their chores: cleaning muskets, plucking chickens. And when you asked them a question — Why did you come to America? Or, What is that there you’re growing? — the colonists would look up mildly from their labor, and offer you an off-the-cuff and fascinating answer. They might then introduce themselves: Captain Standish, Goody Billington, Governor Bradford. Each colonist’s accent was true to the English county from which he or she hailed. Even the swine were recreated: modern pigs, being too dainty, had been crossbred with a warthog; thus the hairy, truculent animals that now rooted about at the edges of the settlement. Ms. Hempel was very excited to see it all for herself, even though it did mean spending a long time on a bus.

“Ask lots of questions!” she yelled, trying to secure the seventh grade’s attention. The bus was luxurious, its seats high-backed and plush. Probably every kind of mischief was occurring, unseen. “You will get the most out of the experience that way!”

Ms. Hempel worried that her students might be overawed by the colonists, might spend the whole day staring at the strange pigs. So she had assembled a list of suggested questions, of the type that curious seventh graders might ask an English colonist. These she distributed as the kids came careening down the aisle of the bus, tangled up in their backpacks and clipboards and sweaters. Ms. Burnes waited outside to make sure they didn’t go anywhere.

Ms. Hempel stepped off the bus last. The air! It delighted her, it was brisk and wood-smoky; it smelled the way early music sounded: thin, feverish, slightly out of tune. Ms. Hempel hurried to the top of the path, flapping her hands to encourage the seventh graders, who tended to clot and clump and meander off into the distance; she touched their arms, she called to them, “Just a bit farther! Just over the crest of that hill!” And there it was: the settlement, the colonists, the sea. The blue sky, and the white smoke rising up in wispy streams. The roofs, gray and matted; the gardens, brown and stumpy; the roosters, red-crowned and wandering. The fort, with its cannons peeking out from under its eaves. The high, ragged fence, running along the perimeter of the settlement. Its purpose was to protect the colonists at night — to keep out the Spanish, or unfriendly Indians, or wild, hungry creatures of the forest.

“But you don’t sleep here, do you?” Jonah wanted to know. “After this place closes, you go home.”

The colonist scratched at his delicate beard. “Aye, I go home and sleep in my own bed. You can see it yonder,” he said, pointing at a gray roof. “And if you happen upon my wife, you tell her that I will be back for the midday meal.”

About ten or so seventh graders had another colonist surrounded. He was leaning jauntily upon an axe.

“What was the voyage over like?”

“What was your profession in England before you came here?”

“Did you come here for religious freedom or economic opportunity?”

“How do you feel about King Charles marrying a Catholic?”

“What is the literacy rate in the colony?”

They looked up from their sheets and stood braced for his answers, their clipboards jutting forward. Soon they would be free to climb on things and poke long, tough blades of grass into the animals’ pens. But the colonist, suddenly, had turned gruff. “I was a planter there, in England, and I am a planter here,” he said, before wielding his axe and letting it fall decisively into an upended log. The seventh graders moved away, in search of a more obliging colonist, and Ms. Hempel followed, whispering, “Have conversations with them.”

But some children needed no prompting. Peering into the dim interiors of the houses, Ms. Hempel saw Annie explaining, with many violent shakes of her pencil, why Indians ought not to be called savages; Daniel squatting beside the fireplace, examining the contents of a big, tarnished pot; Maria reaching out and stroking a woman’s dress, asking, Is it scratchy? Does it itch?

Jonah was looking around for the dying. He couldn’t even find a colonist who was feeling sick. He ran up to Ms. Hempel and told her this, rather pointedly.

“It isn’t winter yet,” Ms. Hempel said. “Come back a few months from now, and they’ll be dropping like flies.”

She drifted about the settlement blissfully. She ran her fingertips along the fence; she pressed her nose into the marigolds that hung drying from the ceilings. She asked, in every house she entered, what was cooking for supper. The seventh graders darted about her but they seemed, to her enchanted eye, nearly invisible: a school of silver minnows, and she, a great, stately carp. All she saw were the marigolds drying, and the bread rising in the wooden trestles, and the colonists calling to each other from their chores. Ms. Hempel surrendered, without protest.

“So where are all the kids?” Jonah was asking Governor Bradford. “Why aren’t there any kids around?”

“Why, the lambing season does not come until spring!” said Governor Bradford. “You will not find any kids before April.”

“Children,” Jonah said. “You know what I mean. There aren’t any children here. Because they’re all at school.”

“Nay, we have neither school nor schoolmaster here, but we hope for a schoolmaster soon to come from England.”

“Their real school,” Jonah said. “They can’t skip it. That’s why they aren’t here.”

“Have you not seen our children?” Governor Bradford asked. “Mine own son was here not a moment ago. He went to fetch wood for the fire. And Winslow’s two girls wished me a good afternoon, but a minute afore you spake to me. They were on their way to gather crab apples, it being the season to harvest them.”

“Very convenient,” said Jonah.

“If you do not see our young folk, it is because they must work. No one rests here,” said Governor Bradford, with finality.

How magnificent! Ms. Hempel rejoiced. How unperturbed he was, how convinced. Governor Bradford was unmistakably himself. Ms. Hempel aspired to such a performance. If only she, too, were a colonist. But why not? She could learn to do these things: to sew a jerkin, render fat into soap, and muck out a barn. She could say aye, and betwixt, and if the Lord wills it so. As she herded the seventh grade back onto the bus, and frowned at the little wooden muskets they had purchased at the gift shop, and reminded them to put their notes in a very safe place, she entertained the possibility. When she returned home, she would write a letter to the Plantation. Of course, she could not ask a colonist how she might join them; they would rebuff her, good-naturedly, just as Governor Bradford had done with Jonah. She must address her letter to the administration, who were probably tucked away somewhere behind the bluffs. Perhaps a whole network of cubicles and fluorescent lights stretched out beneath the settlement, hidden and labyrinthine. Her letter would be opened by one of these underground workers; a response would be posted; by next fall, she could be bending over, stoking a fire, and when the seventh grade came tumbling through, she would glance up; she would say, “My name is Alice Bradford, and aye, the voyage over was a dreadful one.”

THE CHILDREN RUSTLED AND murmured in their seats; Ms. Hempel and Ms. Burnes had repossessed all of the muskets, which, as it turned out, fired rubber bands; the bus hummed along the highway. Ms. Hempel dozed against the window, and thought of Plimoth. But the more clearly she imagined herself there, the more she longed to be somewhere else. Somewhere the flies didn’t cluster above the food, somewhere the dresses didn’t itch. Somewhere she didn’t have to spend all Sunday upon an uncomfortable bench, listening to sermons. She wanted to be somewhere clean, and civilized, and sweet-smelling, where everything she touched pleased her fingertips. She wanted to be… in China!

If, in Plimoth, she rises before the dawn, and lugs water from the icy stream, the bucket bumping against her, then, in China, she wakes to the sound of bells tinkling in a breeze, and the patter of tiny footsteps racing across the courtyard, the plash of a fountain, and a merry child laughing. The floor is cool beneath her feet; the robe slides over her, like liquid. She has slept for many hours, and dreamt of landscapes, of journeys, of an old man living on the very top of a mountain. She will go out into the garden and her father will interpret her dreams.

If, in Plimoth, her garden is wild with tansy and mugwort and raggedy spearmint, then, in China, her garden is one of peonies, and tea roses, and lychee trees, and chrysanthemums. It is a garden of craggy rock and still water; in the pool grows a forest of lotus blossoms. Her father sits beneath the pavilion, his eyes closed lightly in thought. Sunlight stipples his lap; a butterfly alights there; a cicada chirrs by the still waters of the pool. “Father,” she calls to him, “tell me the meaning of my dream.”

“You must write a poem,” he says, and he summons the ink boy. A rosy child appears, round and soft as a peach, bearing the bamboo brushes, and the inkstone, and a scroll of strong, translucent paper. He lays the inkstone upon the ground; it is smooth and dark, coolness rising from its surface like a mist, and with quick, sure strokes, the ink boy grinds the cake. Upon the inkstone there appears another pool, black and still, a perfect miniature of the pool beside which the ink boy sits and grinds. He will continue grinding as she writes, so that the pool will never shrink, so that the flow will not be interrupted once inspiration takes hold of her.

Her father is pleased with the poem. “You found the meaning of your dream,” he tells her, and he reaches inside his robe. When his hand reappears, it is holding a peach. She takes it from him, and sees that it is not a peach, that though it is round and pleasing as the boy, it is smooth and hard as an inkstone. It is ivory, carved in the likeness of a peach. Upon looking very closely, she sees that tiny ivory monkeys are clambering up its cheek. One balances precariously atop the stem, its monkey arm outstretched in invitation. Upon looking even more closely, she sees that the top of the peach can be removed, like the lid of a teapot, and that the monkey is inviting her to open it. Off comes the top of the peach, and she is delighted to discover that attached to its underside is a delicate ivory chain, and that attached to the chain are more monkeys, hanging off wildly, in attitudes of rascality and abandon. It is as if, inside the peach, every kind of mischief is occurring, unseen. But there are not only monkeys dangling off the delicate chain, there are also treasure boxes, and pods. The treasure boxes are carved shut, but the pods, she finds, can be opened with the help of a thumbnail. Inside the pods? Tiny monkey babies, curled up in sleep. Each successive pod is tinier than the last; each monkey baby more perilously small. She eases the chain, the monkeys, the pods, back inside the peach. She replaces the top. She is filled with the delicious, dangerous sense that if she were to continue extracting the chain, the pods would grow even smaller, as would the monkeys and the treasure boxes and the very links of the chain itself, smaller and smaller, until they all but disappeared. “Thank you, Father,” she says, and slips the peach deep inside her robes, where it will be safe.

Above her rises a face, smooth and round like a moon, or a peach, or the seed of a lychee nut. Two eyes gaze at her, black and still like a pool.

“Ms. Hempel.” It is Jonah. His chin is resting atop a high, plush seat. His dark eyes shine in the light from a streetlamp outside the bus. “We’re home,” he says. “Wake up.”

Ms. Hempel stirs. “I’m awake,” she says. And she is; her eyes are open.

“I thought that place was fun,” Jonah says.

“So did I,” she says, and suddenly wants to reach up, to touch him on his cheek.

MS. HEMPEL HAD TOLD HER CLASS about the Indians’ admirable habits. “Even the hooves,” she said, “would be used as ceremonial rattles.” She drew a circle on the chalkboard to illustrate the wholeness of their lives, and inside of this she wrote the words harmony and balance. When she described the Europeans’ profligacy, and their brutal massacres, her students became enraged, and when she described the shrinking of the Indian population, they looked bereft. “But there’s a silver lining,” Ms. Hempel said. “I guess you could call it that.” Then she told them about the casino she had visited the previous summer: the great glittering elevators, the famous comedian, the tables thronged with customers, all losing money. “The Pequots are very rich and powerful now,” she said, and the class grinned with relief.

Having spoken of the Indians so approvingly, Ms. Hempel was dismayed to find, during a Sunday afternoon in the bookstore, a new publication dedicated to contradicting her. She stood in the aisle and frowned. According to the latest anthropological discoveries, Indians were not good friends to Nature; they clear-cut forests, hunted game to near extinction, savored delicacies such as the buffalo fetus while leaving the mother to slowly decompose in the sun.

The book was displayed on a shelf that held a variety of other books all with apparently the same bent. Ms. Hempel realized that a small industry had sprung up, whose sole purpose was to reveal the lies and hoaxes of American history. Paul Revere did not shout “The British are coming!” Thomas Jefferson did seduce and impregnate Sally Hemings, his slave. The founding fathers were not in the least bit interested in equality for all. And mad John Brown was perfectly sane. Even the land bridge theory was under attack. It looked like the first Americans didn’t wander over the Bering Strait, after all.

Ms. Hempel felt irritated and betrayed. It had taken her a long time to finish reading America! America! and now here was a whole shelf of scholarship casting doubt on everything that she was about to teach.

But — she admitted it — these books did seem necessary; their existence made sense to her. History was so difficult to tell truthfully. A person could not be relied upon to faithfully recount her own past, much less the story of an entire country.

Before she discovered the history section, she had sat in a very comfortable chair, looking at a book of stories. The story she happened to read concerned a girl visiting boarding schools with her parents. At one of the schools, the campus is divided in half by a public street, and students must cross the street between classes. That night, the girl tells her parents that she likes this school best; she is impressed by how the students saunter across the street without even checking to see if there is traffic coming.

As she read the passage, Ms. Hempel trembled with recognition. It was her school! Not the school she taught at, but her school, the one she had gone to as a student. It had to be — the ancient campus, the street, the students ambling across. And, as whenever she thought of her school, Ms. Hempel was overcome by affection and wistfulness. What a magical time that was, how wonderful! She had spent four years there, in all seasons, but whenever she pictured her school, it was always late afternoon, and the light was always golden, the treetops always red; a boy sat cross-legged on the quad, and a guitar was in his lap. Somewhere, a pile of leaves was burning.

These feelings were very powerful, and they were also patently untrue. Ms. Hempel understood, quite rationally, that she had spent her four years in a state of fury and bewilderment. She had never understood how a person could be coltish until she saw the girls at her school — awkward, blond, impossibly appealing, chasing after soccer balls and hockey pucks and lacrosse balls with a long, loping stride and furious concentration. She gained weight in protest. She hid out in the costume closet, drinking cough syrup and despising the Grateful Dead. She won the role of a blowsy prostitute in the school play. When her history teacher, Mr. Warren, looked to her hopefully during a discussion of immigration, she scowled. Typical, she thought. She wrote a poem about it.

And if she didn’t look when she crossed the street, it was because she was too preoccupied, thinking of ways she might shock or demolish her school.

There had to be a sort of dangerous magic at work — when she was a student, she never felt, for even a day, that the school belonged to her, or she to it; and now here she was, sitting in a bookstore, recognizing herself as one of those blessed, oblivious, coltish people who could cross a public street without looking both ways. She had read the story; she had thought, My school! But it probably wasn’t her school; there were probably at least a hundred other schools just like it, schools where students believed that if they sauntered out into the street, traffic would stop for them. Now she was inducted into that awful confederacy.

SHE HAD SCOWLED AT MR. WARREN, her history teacher, but even if she had decided to join the discussion, she wouldn’t have had much to say. Her mother remembered little about the crossing. She was six years old at the time; all she could distinctly recall were the boys, diving for coins. The boat had anchored in Hawaii, and the passengers had stood along the railing, mesmerized — or so Ms. Hempel imagined — by the harbor and the people and all the activity. For days they had seen nothing but water. The most charming attraction was the boys, balanced along the edge of the pier like birds. If you tossed a coin over the railing, the boys would tip over into the water, easy as you please, as if tumbling into sleep. Straight down they dove, until they disappeared. The passengers would lean over the railing, peering breathlessly below them. And then a sudden rushing, a breaking of the surface, and a single arm appears, a beaming face, a hand holding up a bright coin for everyone to see. The boys paddle back to the pier, hoist themselves up, resettle; they turn their faces to the boat.

“Your grandmother remembers it all much more clearly than I do,” her mother had said. “You should ask her about it.” And, although she should have known that to suggest the idea would be to instantly sabotage it, she added, “You could interview her, use a tape recorder. You could do an oral history project.”

Ms. Hempel had planned to ask her grandmother; in good moods, she had even considered the project her mother suggested. She had also planned to learn Mandarin once she reached college. She did still plan to learn it; she did still mean to ask her mother about the objects illuminated inside the case at the far end of the living room: an inkstone; a brush; a peach, carved with monkeys; a scroll.