My mother had attended all eight grammar school grades in the three-room schoolhouse.
One story and squat, the school now only went through fourth -- first and second grades in one room, third and fourth in another. Kindergarten was in a room of its own.
I say there were three rooms -- there were three classrooms -- but there was a another, the Teachers' Room, almost always off limits to children. Ordinarily when you got sick during the school day you sat at your desk, head on folded arms, until a parent arrived to take you home. However, if you threw up you were taken to lie down in the Teachers' Room.
Once Jackie Kinney threw up. When she recovered and returned to school she told me about the cracked leather daybed, the pillow covered in slippery white paper, the scratchy woolen blanket that smelled like dusty mothballs, and the light seeping in under the closed doors.
There were two doors to the Teachers' Room, one from the school's single hallway, and one that opened into the Kindergarten.
Our teacher, Miss Farrell, spoke to us through her cough-drop voice as if we were adults. During the first weeks of September Miss Farrell began each day by drilling us in the Pledge of Allegiance, the Lord's Prayer, and the Good Morning song after which she set us to task with thick white paste (Raymond Liang ate the paste), snub-nosed scissors and faded construction paper.
One day toward the end of September we sat at the low square table, three of us to a side, everyone concentrating hard to trace a hand with the thick lead of a chunky pencil. No one looked up to notice that we were alone. Miss Farrell had disappeared. Soon the recess bell rang; dutifully we single-filed out into the playground, boys to the west, girls east. At the second bell we filed back into Kindergarten and resumed the project. We had filled our papers with many traced hands before Miss Farrell -- unsteady and throatier -- suddenly reappeared to announce Story Time.
We sat on the big braided rug. Miss Farrell began to read. She stopped. The book rested in the dirndl folds of her lap as she began to remember out loud her fiancé who did not come home from the War. Her fingers -- slightly yellowed -- brushed undone hair from her dimmed eyes.
The final bell rang. We untangled ourselves from something heavy and sad. As we lined up to leave/ afternoon light pierced the open Teachers' Room door. The bottle, mostly empty, lay on its side in the dust under the daybed.