Time Is a Marshmallow

ONE

Justine hated reading aloud to the children in class. She would tell me every chance she got.

When cooking up those little fried green peppers that I loved so much. Or as she was dozing off as I played with her long red hair.

She hated reading to the kids, simple as that.

It cracked me up.

Could a carpenter hate a hammer?

I rationalized that if Andre Agassi could dislike playing tennis and win eight Grand Slam championships, perhaps love, passion and success are all mutually exclusive.

If only it ended there.

Every night, I could hear Justine talking to her teacher friends when sitting in the den. I promise, I wasn't eavesdropping or putting in any effort. It's just that, no matter where I sat on the over-sized corduroy couch, I'd hear her building a mountain of tiny grievances, each stacked on the other, in no particular order.

It left me wondering if my teachers were filled with the same distaste and trite resentment when I was a parochial school prisoner. Or, is my wife and her young counterparts products of a more selfish and materialistic generation?

Don’t get me wrong, I've hated my job just as much as the next guy, but the difference is, I’m not molding and shaping the future, unless of course, clanking on my keyboard dropping advertisements where advertisers want them is vital to our collective success.

Never did I think teachers were saints. In fact, I can count on one finger how many of them earned my respect. But to find out the sheer magnitude of their pettiness with one another and total lack of care, frightens me.

If you're wondering if my head lives in the clouds, it doesn't.

I’m a realist.

I always knew teachers went home and shopped for shoes, celebrated birthdays, fucked their husbands (albeit rarely from what my research told me), and on and on and on. However, if I knew they laid awake at night staring at the ceiling obsessing over chalk and book sales and carving pumpkins and school assemblies and fleeting glances, I would have dropped out in the third grade. Mind you, these late night internal seminars in my wife’s head are not rooted in a deep desire to educate today’s youth, rather, they are grounded in something else.

Something ugly.

Something that transports the love of my life 700 miles away when she's in the same room.

Our small dining room table is often littered with a rainbow of construction paper. This week, laminated cutouts of turkeys render the space useless. Stacks of spelling tests sit on the chairs.

“I’ll move everything by the weekend,” she assures me. “I’m working on our 'fall into fall' bulletin board.”

“Great,” I say, knowing all to well that in an academic flash it will be 'Win with Winter,' 'Spring into Spring' and 'SUNthing About Summer' moving into the dining room.

Teaching, for a teacher that actually cares, is not an 8:30am to 3pm gig, it’s hands extend much further, grasping and squeezing everything in their reach.

And make no mistake, Justine cares. I'm just not entirely sure about what.

“I have to make this one better,” my wife says, extending a conversation that I thought was dead eight minutes ago but still playing out in her head. “Last year Denise and Debbie gave me shit for a dated board.”

“Dated board?” I questioned.

“Yeah, I used some old lessons and stuff on our second grade hallway bulletin board.”

“Oh?”

"For Valentine's Day, I did that 'Thumbody Loves You' craft again," Justine said. "You know, where the kids stamp their thumbs on a card to give to their parents?"

"Oh yeah, I remember that one," I said. "So what's the big deal?”

‘Well I also did the “Boo-tiful” thing for Halloween and I could just tell that no one was impressed.”

“Well did the kids like it?”, I asked.

“Sure, but the staff gave me looks.”

Children are rendered second-class citizens as adults immerse themselves in a soup of silliness. And what becomes of the educator's spouses? Collateral damage, I suppose.

If I'm honest with myself, and being anything else would just be dumb, things at my place of work are no better.

The games played in high school hallways cast an ugly muddy shadow on the corridors known as the real world. The jocks lose strength, but not their ability to be self-absorbed assholes. Geeks, for the most part stay geeks. The explorers never settle down and certain people will always beat to an off-kilter drum, and I often sit back and curse them all.

It's suddenly obvious: Justine and I need a retreat.

TWO

Justine and I spent the weeks bridging fall and winter tearing down the old wallpaper in the living room. It seemed to have turned from light beige to coffee-brown overnight and had to be painstakingly chipped off the wall rather than peeled.

It was a challenge to remove more than six inches at a time.

We always have plenty to talk about, but for some reason, with every foot of glue stained wall exposed, came a new dark revelation of where we were. Work was draining us, leaving us as white as ghosts and as bitter as bitten aspirin.

More and more I find us embracing the past, reminiscing of our youthful weekends up north, getting lost along the lush weeping willows running parallel to the Charles River, making love on unfamiliar hotel beds and most importantly, leaving work a world away.

Pieces of wall snowflaked to the ground, lightly dusting the polished amber floors.

I finally mustered up the courage to ask.

“Let’s go away this weekend,” I said tentatively.

My hazel eyes wide, hopeful, forced on her.

She continued to stare at the wall, chiseling away at the crispy wallpaper.

“I can’t, I’ve got report cards to do.”

“Didn’t you do them last weekend,” I asked, barely masking my annoyance.

“I didn’t fill out the comments section,” she replied.

“James is a wonderful student,” I mocked. “He has shown great progress but I would still like to see him excel himself –“

“You think it’s easy?” she asked menacingly, for the first time all night searching for eye contact.

We have these battles more often it seems, some lighthearted, some not, on the difficulties of being a teacher.

In my estimation, teachers spend something like fifty percent of their careers attempting to justify their cushy bankers hours and summers off, an argument, that is never worth having. But I understand how we live in our own bubbles where individual events rule. Ingrown toe nails beat out world hunger, first kisses are chosen over cancer cures and bad haircuts are worse then paralysis.

Justine would not bend. Her face held the answer, if anything was gonna give, it was up to me to bring it on.

And I knew what I had to do.

I swallowed the world’s largest rubberband ball today, and the tightly wound mass sat in the pit of my stomach, itching to unravel, hoping I would allow little elastic bullets to bleed me from the inside out.

But today was my day.

Our day.

On four wheels I rolled under the rusty white shelter to fill 'er up unleaded regular. The brown bag of warm bagels crinkled under the crook of my arm as I raced into the florist to pick up as many flowers as the weight of eighteen dollars would bring. My nerves flared as anxiety doused whatever calm reality was left.

Under the red glare of the traffic light hovering over Union Turnpike and Utopia Parkway, I envisioned Justine in her classroom. All of the children are assembled neatly on our old pink oriental rug which is now affectionately known as the ‘reading rug.’

“Miss Michele?”, Judy asked.

“Yes, dear?” my wife replied.

“Remember when you told us that time is a mushmallow?”

“Marshmallow,” she corrected.

“Yes, mushmallow.” Little Judy continued, “What did that mean?”

Justine’s eyes hollowed out as her earlobes flushed crimson. The answer was nowhere to be found.

School bells slashed the pregnant pause and the children all shot upright, slinging their knapsacks across their backs and heading for the door in one swift motion.

Jody’s small slanted eyes remained fixed on Miss Michele as she waited for an answer.

THREE

Suitcases in tow, I made a quick left at Grand Avenue and pulled up in front of the school. My hand sat heavy on the horn as Justine looked out her window and shot me a perplexed look.

I don't think Little Judy ever got an answer that day. But as I saw Justine reach for her pocketbook and exit the classroom, I realized I was going to get mine.