Mr. B
a childhood attachment, revisited
I was in the first class Mr. B ever taught. To me Mr. B could have been the oldest person in the world, on account of his big adult body and bald head. I’ve since done the math: when he taught me he was twenty-seven. Every day he wore a pastel-toned button-up with khaki pants and a brown belt. He was bearish, tall, with deep-set blue eyes shadowed beneath a heavy shelf of brow. I didn’t like it when he shaved; I preferred the beard, the blondish stubble that would scratch if you touched it. Mr. B was not beautiful. To see him was different than to feel him. I don’t remember when the seeing tipped into feeling, when he became the vessel for every ounce of affection and hunger accessible to me in my nine years, when at just a glance of him I’d helplessly smile, a sudden opening, a flower in a timelapse—
From kindergarten through the third grade, I went to the nurse with a stomachache so often that the routine embarrassed me. We both know, I’d think, that I don’t have a temperature. The nurse would leave me to recoup on the papery cot; I would lie in the dark and wait to be better. The ache went once I was alone, but then there was the dread of going back. Everyone else seemed to understand something I didn’t. In second grade, when the teacher, a small red-cheeked woman whose last name began with O, asked us for things people collect, I called out buttons, thinking of my jar at home. This disturbed the teacher. She asked me to repeat. Confused, I did, and then she was angry, telling me she couldn’t believe me—what was happening? My eyes welled.
A classmate saved me from my humiliation. ‘Buttons,’ they enunciated. I had been saying the word like ‘bu’ins’; I think the teacher thought I’d been saying ‘butts’. From then on I was uncomfortable with that teacher, worried my words couldn’t reach.
In third grade Miss Petty showed us a movie about a man and his sled dog competing in a gruelling competition. When they won I began to cry and could not stop, even after the lights came up and we were sent back to our desks. I couldn’t stop thinking about the swell of music, the happiness of that dog. I was still crying when Miss Petty took me into the hall. ‘Savannah, relax,’ she said, unhelpfully. I knew she found me ridiculous. ‘Are you crying because you didn’t like the movie?’
This new and offensive misunderstanding made everything worse. ‘I’m crying,’ I blubbered, ‘because I liked it!’
This same teacher allocated bus seat buddies for the field trip like this: the first in the circle chose their buddy, then the second, until everyone was paired. From the second half of the circle I sat, excited, wondering who might look my way—the options dwindled—eventually everyone had either chosen or been chosen, except me. I cried walking toward the bus. Miss Petty touched my shoulder with a tight smile and said, ‘I’ll never do that again,’ then apologized, something I’d never heard an adult do in real life.
And so my happy interactions were with imaginary things. There was a hermit crab I carried in my palm, a parrot who perched on my shoulder, a cool girl named Tina, black-haired with a dyed red streak, who I communicated with telepathically while she skateboarded alongside the bus.
Then fourth grade began, and there was Mr. B, wanting to play.
