Sponsor a story at EDF - Your message can reach thousands of readers for just $4
She would become the most famous poet the world had ever known. Future generations would speak of her employing the same venerable, hushed tone with which they spoke of Shakespeare. Every fact about her life no matter how paltry would be dug up, endlessly speculated over, from her favorite color socks — purple — to what she liked for dinner — hot dog casserole or chicken pot pie when the crust was really dry, the inside thick, creamy…
“Vanessa, are you listening?” The teacher’s words cut through her fantasy; her stomach rumbled.
“No…” There were titters, but she wasn’t trying to be cheeky.
“I mean yes,” Vanessa said, sitting up straight, hiding her yawn behind a nose-scratch.
Mrs. Rose’s eyes looked doubly terrifying magnified behind thick lenses. Her eyes were more like thorns that pricked than roses. Vanessa had never seen a blue rose, but still…
Oh that’s good, Vanessa thought. She’d have written it down, but Mrs. Rose was staring.
Vanessa was sure she could be brilliant… at something. She always got in trouble for dreaming in class, but she just had so many ideas. If only she had the guts to share them, everyone would know how talented –
“If you’ll complete the problem then.”
Mrs. Rose held out her chalk. Vanessa approached the board walking as slowly as she could. She was the condemned. She heard the drums rolling, bowed her head penitently: “Madame la Marquise, you’re condemned to beheading until you’re dead without a head for the crime of… daydreaming.”
They’d just read A Tale of Two Cities in English, and it was the best of times as opposed to this: the worst of times. It wasn’t that she hated math, but Mrs. Rose was so sarcastic. Vanessa was more nervous about Mrs. Rose snidely commenting on her comportment than about balancing the equation incorrectly. She bit her lip, prayed there were no grass stains on her skirt, that she would not so much as lift one foot and earn last week’s reproof: “This is math not a jig”.
If x=3, then y… y…
“Oh dear, I think we have a poet in our midst.”
Vanessa whirled around. Mrs. Rose held Vanessa’s notebook.
She was smiling, thumbing through the pages.
“That’s private,” Vanessa said, surprising even herself.
Mrs. Rose only snorted derisively and continued to read, silently at least. The whole class hardly breathed; they were waiting for a show– a Mrs. Rose Special. Then something strange happened.
Mrs. Rose’s shoulders rose and fell. She breathed in deeply, shutting her large, pale eyes for a moment, looking just then like any tired morning commuter on the bus, Vanessa thought, standing there defeated in search of a seat. Vanessa steeled herself.
“Where did you copy this?” Mrs. Rose said, dropping the notebook back onto Vanessa’s desk.
“I didn’t copy it,” Vanessa said.
Mrs. Rose said nothing, her pale eyes inscrutable as ever behind those coke bottle glasses.
Nervous laughter filled the room, but there was an instant hush when Mrs. Rose turned around.
“All right, then, who knows what ‘y’ should come out to?”
After Mrs. Rose got her answer she only told her tagline joke — those who can do, those who can’t teach and those who really can’t do anything fail math — before letting Vanessa mercifully return to her seat.
But when the bell rang at the end of the endless hour, Mrs. Rose called out Vanessa’s name.
“So it’s a private show,” Vanessa thought, sighing, stuffing her notebook into her bookbag, wending her way to the teacher’s desk while the other students streamed out the door like refugees seeking succor from the blitz.
“Your PSATs are coming up next year, Vanessa. I want you to try harder to pay attention in class. To pay attention to details,” Mrs. Rose said in her sharp staccato, sorting a stack of pop quizzes. Then she added, looking up: “If you didn’t copy that, and frankly I don’t know if I believe you, you really have something special. That line… about sitting and praying in the wind.”
Her tone was almost soft. The sunlight from the window behind her shone so her glasses were like two white, glowing stones shielding her expression: “That explains why you’re always daydreaming, I suppose. But keep it for after math class, all right?”
She sounded tired and sad. Suddenly Vanessa wanted so badly to share with Mrs. Rose what she’d shared with no one — her hopes and dreams that she really was special, might one day be world-famous, revered, a Nobel Laureate. The next Shakespeare! That or a film star. But the “frankly I don’t believe it” was a chasm her words would fall into. No words would ever bridge the distance between them. She nodded, but again Mrs. Rose wasn’t looking at her, back to her famous pop quizzes.
“Yes, Mrs. Rose.”
She never took that notebook out in any class again.
In later years, Vanessa would read on Facebook how Mrs. Rose died of an aneurysm while home convalescing from flu. Vanessa was a journalist then, married with two little daughters who delighted in Dr. Seuss rhymes and fairy tales their mother made up for them about girls who “could be anything they’d like to be” — though so far the requests were only for princesses. She was surprised when teardrops formed after reading the short post one of Mrs. Rose’s math prodigies had written.
“Was Mrs. Rose one of those special teachers?” her husband asked her when she read it to him while he washed up their dinner things.
“Not really,” Vanessa said, dashing away the moisture with the back of her hand, pretending she was just yawning. “She wasn’t special. She wasn’t special at all.”
But remembering how tired, how sad Mrs. Rose had looked that once behind her mask and how she probably never had a chance to sit and meditate in the sun and wind, Vanessa did mourn in that moment for Mrs. Rose.
Izzy David writes, reads, occasionally acts and frequently tends to an ever-expanding family of animals. Her stories, essays and poetry have appeared in Everyday Fiction, The First Line Literary Magazine and Apollo’s Lyre. Her one-act play “I Wear My Sunglasses At Night” was recently featured in The Friend Me Festival at Centerstage in Manhattan. She lives in Brooklyn.
GD Star Rating
loading...
THE MRS. ROSE SPECIAL • by Izzy David,
loading...
Did you like this story?
A new and interesting story is posted every day.
A new and interesting story is posted every day.
Subscribe to the RSS Feed! (what is rss)
Don’t miss another story! Subscribe to Every Day Fiction via RSS.- Share on Facebook
12 Responses to “THE MRS. ROSE SPECIAL • by Izzy David”
Comments
« HOMEGROWN • by Sarah Salway | Home | Podcast EDF080: The Most Epicly Awesomest Story! Ever!! • by Randy Henderson • read by Folly Blaine »
August 26th, 2012 at 4:00 am
The funny thing is, the voice here strikes me as very English, so much so that I was taken by surprise by the U.S. references (“math”, “PSATs”). Yet they belong; the author’s personal details confirm that.
What I read into it was that the teacher could see some of her own life’s path unfolding, that she herself had started with hope and faded into the wry theme of her favourite joke, and then the close of the story bears out the same happening again.
August 26th, 2012 at 5:17 am
The understated prose lifts this story beyond the ordinary – if that makes sense.
Great stuff – very thought-provoking.
Must admit, there was a bit of an English flavour to the story, though the words ‘favorite’ and ‘color’ in the first paragraph sort of set the scene.
August 26th, 2012 at 9:42 am
Interesting how the most disliked and feared teachers came sometimes come up with thought-provoking vocational guidance.
Although the details embellish the story, they can sometimes make it more difficult to follow because of their variety. One is often being led along a path somewhere that isn’t always essential to the story. For example, the Tale of Two Cities, the reference to the washing up at the end.
wellwritten. welldone.
August 26th, 2012 at 10:26 am
A great story.
There were moments when the teacher and student almost connected but because of her own repressed desires Mrs Rose wasn’t able to give Vanessa the encouragement she desperately craved. Very sad but true to life. 5 stars.
August 26th, 2012 at 11:14 am
I’m not sure why there is a confusion about whether this is “English” or not. It’s set in America as far as I’m concerned and when the author writes, “They’d just read A Tale of Two Cities in English…” I believe she means in English CLASS.
Anyway, I really appreciate that the protag wound up a journalist and not a poet laureate if only to add a necessary slice of realism. I would have liked a little some different than “she wasn’t special at all” but that’s a personal quibble. I felt like that line was very important but the choice of words (and the repeition) was a tiny bit out of step with the impact of the earlier 2/3′s of the story. But again, that is a personal preference.
Well done.
August 26th, 2012 at 11:18 am
Ooops, disregard above comment about English. The commenters were referring to voice, not locale. Apologies.
August 26th, 2012 at 11:40 am
Very sad, but extremly well written. Very true to life thought, sometimes encouraging words can be taken as an insult.
I really liked Vanessa’s reflections on Mrs Rose at the end. It made me think that Mrs. Rose wanted to do something other than be a math teacher, but never got the chance.
August 26th, 2012 at 3:57 pm
Exceptional story. This is the first five stars I’ve given in quite a while.
August 26th, 2012 at 6:38 pm
Agree with JenM (7) — very well-written, very sad. I was the Vanessa of my class, so teachers would sometimes ask if my poems or stories were actually my own. Luckily I was encouraged by my English teachers, although I did find the math teachers were not as impressed. Loved this.
August 27th, 2012 at 4:31 pm
So very beautiful! Five Stars. It seems to me that Vanessa cries because Mrs. Rose’s endless analysis and criticism perhaps cut her off from all beauty and joy.
August 29th, 2012 at 10:21 am
Nice job. The characters and their interaction felt very real, and the ending was sad, but true-to-life. Well done, Izzy.
September 10th, 2012 at 6:00 pm
Thank you for your kind comments. These comments mean a lot to me!