G.g.Ashbrook 1/12/1999
Jennifer flicked at the coin and it spun around on the desk top staple meadow. Two heads of presidents, a glass green house and a post inaugural party with close friends. Six presidents all had small parties after their swearings, and at each party someone named Philip, a Francine, a teletype operator named Genrily [with a ‘g’ as in ‘green’], and a lively chap named Mossrow. Eight o’clock in the morning, from seven to nine at night, from different time zones, linen covered baskets with hot dishes and buckets of ice with bottles of wine; discuss; who for the fair-a-day should we pick, the people pick, but you, tuna tonight. Caught and smoked off the coast of France each time. The coin lost it’s moorings and felked and bounded off the desk in clatter.
"Delezerilla!" Hutched the reprimanding teacher in need of drain.
"Jennifer, Mr. Cowzez; Delezi’s my older sister, remember?"
The teacher twitched and turned to the board, then turned to Jen again squinting at her and then turned to the board once more. He proceeded to step up to the trustees of the school, and lay down slowly as they passed hyme along like an offering plate pulling scraps of paper out of his mouth each with a word of advice. "…Spells ‘ambidextrous’," Mr. Cowzez said putting down the chalk. "Can any here in hear tell me what ‘ambidextrous’ is?"
Behind her some faint whisper of Teddy, a waft of clover, clove on a wool sweater to the left. "Grover Cleveland," Jennifer said, shouting out without a hint of hand raise. "Shouldn’t the salt and pepper march together? It was a slightly day in the on-edge of Elsbrook, by the pond you know, Phil said, ‘George could do it. Write Spanish with one hand and Latin with the right, or some such thing. I swear it. He brought out a set over smoke what later liberty garden confused and did us a demonstration.’ And he said it just like that Mr. Cowzez."
The teacher tapped his chalk against the lens of his glasses (a nervous habit) and played with fraying stitching on his pants which on the way to work just that morning he’d pulled on Mrs. Ederfract’s wild rose bushes which had grown out all over the side walk and nearly covered half the street by Wednesday standing their in her un-uniform drinking bottle after bottle of the stuff. Pouring it in like it wasn’t going anywhere, and no time for swallowing. Youth. Cowzez checked the time on a silver pocket watch and clicked it shut. "That’s enough out of you," he said.
"But I am right aren’t I? The use of both hands, a lack of lop-headed distribution of control preference? But I do say, how could gender work that way?"
"Enough," he said, almost not paying attention. He hadn’t heard the song in years it came right to him. That long trumpet intro. The sound of crystal under the vaulted ceiling, the mushed-together sound of all those voices in one room, and how he’d thought at the time the sound was amplified by how much the women were exposing their breasts more than usual.
"Do you think?"
"She was there," he was gazing out the window. The children in the room were chewing slowly on tufts of grass which had grown out of the tops of their desks in his peripheral vision.
"And where did she go?" Jennifer asked him sternly.
They seemed to be loosing him. All day out in a boat with no oars filled with nothing but rolls of toilet paper and mangos. The large fishing boat pulled up to the side. "Jerry?" But the man inside the boat looked to be a teacher, gone off on a sad thought.
Meanwhile Jerry was handing out fish from a bucket "Hand caught!" to all the children, two for girls, one for boys. He had just sat down at the front desk ready to show them how he did it, when Mr. Cowzez remembered what he’d been doing, the man in the fishing boat now staring out at the blue water and Jerry hurling herring at him from the small boat below to get his attention. What was he going to do tonight?
"I’m going to have crab cakes." Mr. Cowzez said finally turning to the class with a gleam of reclamation. All the children in the class began laughing, and for a moment they all had their slimy fish sticking in head-bands like natives wearing feathers, or protruding from low cut dresses, or being stabbed with pencils, hacked with rulers, rubbed on the side chalk boards, until he looked right at them. Laughing, no. Sitting quietly; a first. "A Tuesday tradition." He stated, wandering what had been, or could have been, so funny. He looked around the room and noticed four children, three and one girl, standing with room assignments and sucking frozen citrus on a stick.
"Crab cakes, huh?" the new girl said, winking @ him and pulling a herring out of her pocket and squeezing soap bubbles out of its mouth.
"My Uncle was a Crab catcher," spoke up one of the boys.
Mr. Cowzez looked at the other boys, they nodded in agreement, one blew up a balloon and popped it with a syringe.
"Up," the girl said.
"Where are our seats, Mr. Cowzez? Your name is ‘Cowzez,’ isn’t it? May we call you Mr. Cowzez? Or does this country do something... different?" Asked the boy who’d first spoken, making a symbolically surprised face at the end of his sentence.
The teacher pointed a finger to the back of the room, "Right behind... Jennifer." And then he went back to the board and drew two hands and an eye, and the number three.
The additions had shuffled to the back of the room, and chatted as they sat down.
"We must write a post to George,"
"And Teddy, when he’s ready to be born, hehe,"
"shhhhh,"
"And perhaps Georgy can mail us some ‘liber-tea,’"
Chuckles all around. They were new in the class, old in the back yard, quiet in the kitchen, and of course she’d seen them somewhere before.
"Up here," the Teacher said tapping on the board, "We have the triumvirate of any pair of things; any two things."
She held the coin under an index finger one more time, and flicked it. But she missed Mark and the coin rolled on its edge to the front of the room and fell over when it hit the far wall. The teacher went over to it and picked it up. "When a coin has three sides, two flat and one which goes all the way around, you can’t really say ‘both,’ can you?" A president with three hands. Nonsense. Mark the summer time, with Mark, the summer time. ‘Is that One side? Still the first side?’ She wondered. A first.
They thought an answer.
Streaming along under Veronica, the fan, fanning along under Sunday. Two Tuesday boats racing port to starboard in a liquid bent stolen week-old but the nuts were good and the brandy switched for rootbeer and the tea, well the tea was always to the T, wasn’t it?
"More than dispute, much more than a simple negation." said Cowzez. The students thought again.
The boats were made of tightly packed leafs, Harris, Veronica’s second cousin...
"Within this room even," Said Cowzez. They started again. A second. And as he had said, much more than a simple negation.
"Is this some kind of a trick?" Asked Besker, who sat near the door always. "The light in the room is changing, and it’s not because the sun’s going down now either. What are you doing? It’s harder to breath now."
"Oh that would have happened anyway." Said Cowzez. "The question is what are you going to do about it? Think, try to remember though you’ve never said it or heard it here. Relax. Don’t think." And he turned to face the board again.
After a long pause. "What was the question? Was there a question?" someone asked.
"Close." He said, tapping chalk.
The earth spun, wondering what side to turn; with the round edge catching all the light in the mean time. The various attempts to answer the question, an old question the sun asked a long time ago. Each morning, ‘an answer?’ each night, stay by your peppermint barber shops, your palaces of straw mud or brick, or a think mind stuck at the end of a curved sharpened stick. The hungry fish are looking for a tune of just the right lick, with gaping grouper jaws and something deeper bottom back. The stick bugs and the bats by the side of the pond, are in the middle of debate. And the herds are running tortoise races with an eye not to be late. Would a reflection of stars cause the underside of leafs to wonder, or cause a thirsty man to wander in a dessert for a date? Or a man with spilling coffee rushing fear at being late? What to want to go home to, or a question in a plant, or a growing city centuries from ear to ear in where? To hear them bringing in the new year, or a birthday, all preparations, tied up hair, wrapping presents, hiding gifts, secret spoilers beware. Oh the earth is shifting sockets with a pockets worth of hmm, and a dial tone of ahh, with a wish for breath in double talk between wears searsly tweed. Down the chord slips one more bead, oh lets go swimming. The water's clean, the rocks high for diving, plenty back at camp and not a thought or word ‘surviving.’ A puddle casts a reflection, dimly said into distraction, "What did she say? I wasn’t paying attention."