The Only Party In Town
By Deb Nordlie
The assignment seemed pretty enticing to us nine year-olds—merely duplicate the state of Pennsylvania by 8 a.m. Monday morning.
Fourth-grade curriculums in most states mandate that students study facts about their state’s bird and flag, learn the state song, find out something about the history of the state, the usual. Anyway, those were the program objectives, but to my teacher, Miss Wilson, all that was simply ephemera. She went straight to the glitz and glamour of a finished product, a salt-flour map of our state, Pennsylvania.
This assignment was delivered with exacting instructions. It had to be done Her Way, the Miss Wilson Way our family called it. And our family spoke of her and her Way often. Everyone did.
Miss Mildred Lucille Wilson was the topic of conversation of many parents whose children were registered in the Doylestown Public School System of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
She was the first woman anyone in our little town had ever seen with raisin-hued hair. Her eyebrows were unaccountably blackened and thick. She had no eyelashes to speak of. And no matter what the thermometer read, a ratty yellowed sweater covered her droopy clothing. She accessorized with black orthopedic shoes, mysterious because she never got up from her desk to move about the classroom. Her voice broadcast like a long haul trucker with a three-pack-a-day Camel habit. She fed herself snacks from her bottom desk drawer—smelly foods: meats and cheeses, I think, which she ate when she thought no one was looking.
And she hated her job.
“Children,” she would announce regularly, “you give me hives.”
She shared her dislike of us often, forcing our innocent giggles and good cheer to stay in the coat closet once we entered her bleak classroom. Yet despite her sour outlook, we each desperately craved her approval and attention because from eight to three, she was the only party in town.
Most of us kids remained naively optimistic regardless of her insistence on classroom gloom, and this new assignment promised us some excitement and a certain artistic thrill, perhaps then, even a smile or her praise.
“Due Monday,” Miss Wilson growled from behind her desk, “Points off for tardy work, so ya better get on it, ladies and germs.”
She designated a student, the perfect Brenda Mason, my nemesis, to pass out the dittoed instruction sheets, those directions seductively scented with ditto fluid to first sniff and then take home. She snarled further directives, “Family project,” looking at me especially, a single mother’s child.
But I was up to the challenge. I knew Mom and I could handle anything.
After school that day, I gave Miss Wilson’s instructions to my mother, and together, we shopped for the ingredients for my perfect creation. No one else but me could push the cart up and down the aisles of Jay’s Market. Finally, this was my chance to do something better than Brenda Mason. My plan was to make the best darn Pennsylvania since God Himself.
Everyone will be impressed, I thought.
Even Miss Wilson.
That evening, Mom and I measured the flour and sparkly salt, and she watched as I slopped water over the white heap. Twenty-eight drops of blue food coloring pockmarked the floury then slick mountain. First mixed with a wooden spoon that released a powdery cloud, then eagerly kneaded with my hands, the cobalt mass eventually became a pliant, flexible lump to be pounded into shape.
From my geography book, I had penciled in the outline of the Keystone State on plywood that Granddaddy had given me and with a bit of stretching, I finally succeeded in making the blue flour blob fill in my plywood template. Next, I lumped up the Appalachians near the east. I slapped down the valleys beneath. With my pointing finger, I squiggled in the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers on the west.
Oh yes, Mr. William Penn would have been delighted. I remember that my whole family was agape at my topographic mastery.
As an extra bonus, I had noticeably blue hands for the whole weekend to announce my artistry to the world.
Not due ‘til Monday, I carried pseudo-Pennsylvania down the basement steps to dry atop the washing machine. For the next two days my map had time to get firm and sturdy, fantastic enough for Miss Wilson’s approval and my obvious A, my work being so darn good that Brenda Mason would weep as she compared our projects.
Then, I figured, it would be admitted to the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Saturday morning, my sister poked a tentative finger into eastern Pennsylvania where New Jersey would have been, exclaiming, “Oh boy! By Monday, Deb, it’s gonna be perfect.” Sunday, Mom aimed from the south, Maryland, and remarked on Pennsylvania’s increased strength, “This is A work, Missy! I’m proud of you!” Even my brothers gawked. Granddaddy came to view the finished work. “Hot diggity!” he said, “I’d know this place anywhere. It’s Pennsylvania and it’s darn near perfect!”
But it wasn’t so perfect by Monday morning.
Not even ‘darn near.’
Because on Monday morning it was under water.
Flooded, in fact. And re-formed too: new hills and mountains had been inexplicably added during the night.
With heads hung low, my brothers were forced to admit the reason.
They revealed that in the night, they’d let a stray cat they’d found into our basement, saying, “We felt bad, guys. It was just too cold for him outside.”
And that’s how my project had become a feline privy. That’s how new topography had been added to my perfect Pennsylvania.
“This can’t be turned in like this!” Mom lamented, master of the obvious. “This is a big, fat mess! What will Miss Wilson say?”
After fuming at the cat, at both of my brothers, at Life in general, and my problematic entry into Miss Wilson’s Hall of Perfect Things, she pulled herself together enough to sit down on the basement steps and pen a note to my teacher on the back of my dittoed instruction sheet. Mom needed to explain my absent work for the day. Somehow. But words are difficult to come by for this type of mishap, that is, the appropriately sensitive words for this curious tragedy.
“Dear Miss Wilson,” Mom scratched, using the wooden basement steps for an uneven writing surface, “Debbie’s salt-flour map cannot be turned in today because—”
At this point her hand was stilled. She paused, and looking skyward, began to chuckle.
Then, one by one, we all saw this improbable event through Miss Wilson’s eyelash-less eyes.
Well, there is no description adequate for the gales of laughter, the howls, our guffaws as we imagined Miss Wilson reading whatever Mom could manage to author. We saw Miss Wilson’s black eyebrows rising higher and higher, in fact off her head, like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, right past her raisin-colored hair. Her wrapping herself up in that awful sweater as she read the words that would shock her, round her lips into a perfect O of revulsion and distaste. She might have to stand, yes, actually stand up to move outside the classroom and calm herself from the words Mom would write.
Suddenly, Miss Wilson’s reaction to this situation overshadowed Cat’s stinky amendment to my recreated Pennsylvania.
Helpless to stop our group hysterics, we hooted and snorted, we gave in to this episode playing out in our cinder block basement. I leaned against the washing machine, weak with feeble merriment, my sister sat on the floor, collapsed by laughter. Our giddy hilarity would ebb, seem to die, and then begin again, rising to an unsteady crescendo in wave after wave of mirth. Any solution to this bizarre affair would have to wait for us to control ourselves and capture some semblance of composure.
Of course, Mom had the toughest job. Wiping away tears sprung from this feline-induced educational incongruity, she was verbally baffled. What is the tactful vocabulary to describe this situation? How could she delicately describe to Miss Wilson the new terrain added to the Keystone State? She tried; she honestly did try but ended up discarding three letters that attempted to explain this hard-to-believe event. None of us could offer help, of course. We were focused only on Cat’s donation to my project.
Eventually, Mom abandoned writing letters and called our schools to say we’d be absent, us cackling in the background and surely heard by the schools’ secretaries. There was no way to stifle our reaction: here Mom was, lying her head off. And to school authorities. And about this absurdity? We eavesdropped. We giggled. We chortled.
Then Mom hung up the phone.
She crossed her arms and turned around, now all business.
“Kids.”
And abruptly, everything changed.
“Ok, kids, we all have cut this out and settle down. Deb, let’s work out a plan and deal with this awful mess. Let’s work together and get this right. We’re going to fix this.”
I went from giddy hysterics to the awareness of Mom’s message in a single breath.
Suddenly, a lump formed heavily in the back of my throat. I was on the threshold of a sob. No, not because of my problematic assignment, but because Mom said “together.”
“Let’s work together,” she had said.
We were in this together. We were going to come up with a plan. And with the help of us all, it would turn out just fine.
She winked at me and I flung myself into her arms, comforted. I knew then that Pennsylvania would be made perfect again. We’d make it that way. Together.
Led by my mother, my nearest and dearest including Granddaddy, began the project anew, again reestablishing one of the Thirteen Original Colonies, co-creators with the Lord God Almighty and the Founding Fathers. Giggling while we gorged on leftover potato soup and toasted cheese sandwiches with pickles, we again created the salt-flour mixture, then spread it, reshaped it. And as we laughed and worked, purring serenely around our ankles was the mangy yellow cat, escaped from the basement.
At our kitchen table, our hands sticky with Pennsylvania, my sister and I tried out the word ‘shit’ several times. Mom never chastised us. She knew the word was unsuitable for her third- and fourth-grade daughters, but she smiled and allowed it. She even uttered it herself two or three times in solidarity. She knew no other word that could be more apt.
It was simply a happy day. This day made up for Miss Wilson’s pettiness and negative attitude, Mom’s exhausting job, our absent father, our few funds. It was just a wonderful day.
The denouement? Ahhh, yes: Mom finally found the right words and sent letters to our schools explaining our absence. “Family emergency,” they all read. My spongy map was turned in on Tuesday morning. I got an A, but so did Brenda Mason. Miss Wilson still didn’t like me, but Mom said not to worry because she liked no one. And Cat ran away, possibly embarrassed about his culpability in this situation, his scatological transgression.
But he should have stuck around a bit longer, long enough to get thanks from Mom for the opportunity to highlight something far more important than an a fourth-grade assignment. While all of us were smiling and spattered in salt-flour dough, she helped me understand Cat’s real contribution; an awareness that today, here and together with my family, that this was really the only party in town.
Guest essay by Deb Nordlie. Deb has lived in five states and three countries, married once, had two children, and taught English since dinosaurs ruled the earth. After a lifetime of writing assignment sheets, she’s branched into life stories, believing “we are all anthologies filled with marvelous short stories and poems.” Currently, she teaches English in adult school and scribbles away at the Great American Novel.
Photo by N’tima Preusser.