As High as the Pyramids

Kevin McGrath was the first to step off the school bus. He stopped, stared, and murmured to himself. The other kids swarmed past him, not noticing or caring that the Intermediate School 51 Annex—its full name—looked exactly like a prison. A long, low building with tiny windows, it sat in the middle of nowhere on the side of a highway. Tufts of crabgrass stuck up through cracks in the asphalt recess yard, and the whole thing, building and yard, was surrounded by a black chain-link fence. 

The powers that be hadn’t known where to put the sixth graders. The Verrazzano Bridge had gone up, Staten Island’s population had surged, and by the late 1970s, the once-spacious intermediate school could barely hold three grades. Any building would do to house the swelling ranks of sixth graders.  

Kevin’s mouth kept moving until he became aware of himself and stopped. His mother was always trying gently to break him of the habit. She was kind about it, and Kevin made an effort for her sake, but he needed to mouth his thoughts—not to hear them as much as to feel their vibrations in his head. He was now at the back of the crowd, and he followed the other kids through the open gate in the fence. “The first shall be last,” he murmured to himself. 

Kevin harbored no illusions that he would stop being the class outcast now that he was in sixth grade and in a new school building with kids from several other elementary schools. He didn’t think very often about his social position, only at beginnings, like today, or when someone was overtly hostile to him, which was rare. Usually, he was just ignored. 

In the asphalt yard, the brand-new sixth graders stood around in clumps. Kevin stood in an empty spot between clumps and waited patiently for some adult direction. Some of the conversations around him sounded like bees buzzing, and some sounded like ducks quacking. He made an effort to keep his lips together and suppress the urge to mouth this observation to himself. 

A thick metal door opened onto the yard, and science teacher Kelly Brennan—Miss Brennan to the children—emerged with a clipboard tucked under her arm. She surveyed the crowd in front of her: fresh sixth graders who would love her as the last ones had. Things at work came easily to Kelly, and in her naïveté, she did not see a connection between this and her youth, her pert nose, her bright smile, or her resemblance to Cheryl Tiegs. She felt impatience for teachers who grew tired or jaded, and she especially did not see why they yelled. “I mean, she could just be nice to them, show a little enthusiasm,” she would tell her mother, referring to the perpetually annoyed woman who headed her department, who would surely have nixed Kelly’s idea for a school community fair had Kelly not brought it directly to the principal. In what would be his sole appearance in the recess yard for the year, the principal emerged from the building, raised to his lips the silver whistle he had borrowed that morning from the gym teacher, and blew. 

Michael Tedesco heard it in his social studies classroom. “Fresh troops coming in!” he said out loud to himself, knowing that he was employing a forced cheerfulness, but he kind of meant it, in a way. He didn’t like cynicism or bitterness; he tried to keep at bay his disappointment that several years into his teaching career, with a wife and a kid and another on the way, he was still out here in a random building in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Staten Island, which was the nowhere of New York City. Sadly, it fit with the way he was always on the fringes of everything, even of his own generation, having been a teenager in the 1960s but having somehow missed out on the rise of the Beatles, the hippie movement, participation in the new counterculture. Maybe it had been the strict, old-fashioned home he grew up in or the apathy of his friends. In any case, last year he applied for history positions at schools in Manhattan and didn’t get them. So he would make the best of things for another year here in the Annex. He got up to go meet his new homeroom. 

Out in the yard, Kevin paid close attention to Miss Brennan. Other teachers were filing out of the doorway, also paying attention to Miss Brennan, who positioned herself in different spots, stopping and raising her arm in the air as she called out a list of names, and the students flocked to her. She introduced each group to its homeroom teacher, then moved to another spot and began summoning another group. She was very efficient. 

Kevin heard Miss Brennan call out, “Lori Fein!” He turned. There she was, Lori Fein, striding over to her group. Kevin did not particularly like or dislike Lori, but of his classmates from fifth grade, she was the most familiar to him. He had never told anyone about that strange Friday when she—a very popular girl—had stayed on the school bus to the very last stop, which was his, and then followed him home and insisted on hiding in his basement guest room. Her father had died, and she seemed to have gone a little crazy, to have become a different person, almost completely silent at school, staying apart from all her friends—but not so different that she hadn’t been bossy about hiding in his basement and making him bring her crackers when she got hungry. 

No one would have believed the story, and anyway, she went back to normal. Kevin categorized that event in his mind as a “grand surprise,” something so out of the ordinary that he could not anticipate it and did not know how to react to it. Grand surprises were exceedingly rare. He found that most of the time, people behaved exactly as you would expect them to. Like now: As Kevin heard his name and walked over to the group, a boy he recognized from fifth grade saw him coming and rolled his eyes. 

When the twenty-seven homeroom kids were assembled, Kelly gestured to Michael, who was hovering nearby. “Everyone? Your homeroom teacher is MR. TEDESCO!” She emphasized his name as if they had won a prize. The kids stared at him blankly. Cheerleader extraordinaire, Michael thought, but not in an unkind way. Kelly was a good kid. God knows the teaching profession needed her energy. 

“C’mon,” he told the kids. “Follow me to your homeroom,” and he turned around and walked without looking back, a little bit of an experiment because this year they’d given him the Gifted and Talented crew. He shouldn’t need to keep looking back and gathering the strays. G&T was generally a good group to get—some arrogant ones, but usually fewer bozos. Inside his classroom, he counted them and noted, with satisfaction, that they were all there. It made him a little less disappointed that he was there himself. 

He looked over the matrix of pre-pubescent and pubescent bodies in front of him. Girls who had already developed ahead of the others were noisier—that was just a fact. And there was one smiling and talking while others tried to get her attention, half-whispering, “Lori! Lori!” He knew they would follow her, so it would be important for him to win her over when they were all in his social studies class together. And over there was a kid talking to himself: one crazy one, par for the course. And, God help him, a pair of diabetic twin girls (the teachers had been briefed; they had to let them go to the bathroom whenever they asked), who Michael could see he’d never be able to tell apart. They didn’t normally put twins in the same class, but there was only one G&T section, and his was it. He took an at-ease stance, both hands behind him, shoulders back, feet apart. “So,” he said to them. “Welcome to the Annex.” 

*          *          *

The first three weeks of school went smoothly for most of the Annex’s inhabitants. But in a private meeting, Kelly’s department chair told her, “No, my dear. We’re not doing science projects this early in the year for your community fair. The kids are not ready.” Kelly was more stung by the my dear than by the refusal. Who was Elaine to talk down to her when Elaine couldn’t even control her own students? That’s what Kelly would have liked to say. But she smiled a tight-lipped smile and kept things professional, as she always did. She thanked Elaine for her time, and she left that sterile little office.  

Indoor-outdoor carpeting covered the hallways of the Annex; otherwise, Kelly’s heels would have clicked righteously as she strode down to the faculty lounge. She stopped outside the closed door to catch her breath. 

Inside the lounge, the small window was open, which it was not supposed to be because the building was climate-controlled, but they needed to let out the cigarette smoke. Two teachers—math and Spanish—sat on the hard couch under the window, one smoking as she poured forth a narrative of complaint, the other interjecting words of sympathetic outrage. Michael sat at the table drinking coffee while he flipped through the copy of The New York Daily News that one of the teachers left there every morning. He didn’t look up at first when the door opened—people walked in and out all the time—but when he sensed someone just standing there, he raised his head and saw Kelly Brennan, looking intense. 

“Michael, I am so sorry to bother you during your prep period.” She said this with her usual energetic formality. “May I speak with you for a moment?” 

“Sure.” He closed the paper and looked at her expectantly, but she remained holding the open door, and he understood that she wanted to speak in private, somewhere else. He got up and followed her, coffee mug in hand. 

“Do you mind if we go to your classroom?” she asked him, already in motion. 

“No, not at all.” 

He walked behind her, keeping up with her brisk pace with some difficulty given his half-full coffee mug and the embarrassing fact that he was actually getting a little winded. He felt self-conscious about his pudgy middle. Kelly was attractive, but he felt no desire for her; being around her made him feel like an old man. 

He unlocked the door, hoping his classroom didn’t smell funny. It wasn’t too bad. He set his mug on his desk. 

Kelly faced him as straight as a soldier. He half-expected her to salute. “Michael, I’ve come to ask a favor. Would you please have your students do projects to display at the community fair?” 

Ah, yes, the Community Fair. Kelly’s brainchild that half the faculty were grumbling about. Elaine must have told her to forget about science projects this early in the year, so now she was coming to him to fill the display gap. 

“Just mine, or the whole social studies department?” He took a sip of his coffee. 

“Well, um. The whole department would be great. But do you think John would agree?” 

His crusty, past-retirement-age department head John? Not a chance. “How about we just have my classes do them?” 

Disappointment flicked across her face, then acquiescence. She agreed and thanked him, turned around on her high heels, and left him with a project to concoct. 

*          *          *

A few days later, Michael’s chalk danced across the blackboard. To Kevin, it sounded like Morse code. Click clickity click click clickity click. S.O.S., he mouthed. He and his classmates copied into their notebooks what Mr. Tedesco was writing. There was the word “project.” Uh oh. Kevin cringed. He hoped they would not have to do it in groups. 

“Ooh, can we do it in groups?” Lori Fein called out. 

“Hand, Lori,” Mr. Tedesco said without turning around. 

“But you’re facing the other way.” 

Mr. Tedesco turned around. When Lori talked back to teachers, she always did it in a playful tone, and they never got mad at her. 

One of the twins shot her hand up. 

“Yes, Patty.” 

“I’m Penny.” 

“Yes, Penny.” 

“Can I go to the bathroom?” 

“Yes.” He stood facing the class, rolling the chalk between thumb and forefinger, making a quick decision. “No groups. You can work either alone or in pairs.” He turned back to the board and continued the clickity-click of the project requirements. 

Kevin copied them gladly now, matching the rhythm of his pencil to the rhythm of the chalk. Briefly, he flipped to the last page in his binder and added a mark to his tally of whenever Mr. Tedesco got a twin’s name right or wrong. So far, he was running 55.3% wrong. 

When Mr. Tedesco gestured to the list of topics and opened his mouth to speak, the kids were too fast for him. Six or seven hands shot up simultaneously, and when they saw each other’s hands, they didn’t wait to be called on: 

“Can I do mummies?” 

“We want to do mummies!” 

“I said it first!” 

“My hand was up first!” 

“I want the pyramids!” 

“I want the pyramids! That’s not fair!” 

He stopped the cacophony with a sharp “Quiet!” and rolled the chalk between thumb and forefinger again. He announced that he would write names on slips of paper and distribute the topics randomly. This was met by a chorus of groans. 

Lori Fein’s hand went up. “Mr. Tedesco, wouldn’t our projects come out better if we pick our own topic? ’Cause then we’ll care about what we’re doing.” 

When Michael said okay, he wondered if it was happening already. If he was getting jaded, cynical, phoning it in, like his department chair, like some of the sad, older teachers he knew. It was way too soon for that! It was still early in his life, in his career. He should push his students, inspire them, make them take on the very topic they would be least comfortable with, and make sure the projects had some variety.  

Right. 

So Kelly’s fair would be awash in mummies and pyramids. It’s not as if he hadn’t taught about the agriculture of ancient Egypt, its geography, the social hierarchy, the rich mythology, hieroglyphics. He had. It’s just that no matter how much of that you taught them, the kids always clung to the mummies and the pyramids. Thanks, King Tut. 

 This didn’t convince him that he had not become a tired, pudgy, intermediate school teacher who didn’t care enough. No wonder he was still in this place. 

Kevin, meanwhile, had an idea. And he needed to ask Mr. Tedesco about it. But as the class was dismissed, and Kevin moved forward in the jumble of limbs and chatter and denim binders, he thought Mr. Tedesco looked gloomy. He would ask him on Monday. But he would get started on his project this weekend anyway. He was too excited not to. 

On the bus ride home, Kevin joined in with extra gusto when they drove past the ever-growing Staten Island landfill, its odor wafting in through the open windows, and all the kids belted out a chorus of “Eeeewwwww!” It was the only thing he liked doing with a group. 

At the same time, in another part of the island, Kelly pulled up in front of the weedy, overgrown lawn she would have to mow. She turned off the ignition and held the keys in her lap for a moment. Inside, her mother would be sitting on the couch alone, watching TV. Her father had sat there with her before he died. Now it was just her mother on the stained couch, her ratty bathrobe hanging open over an old nightgown.  

“Hi, Mom!” Kelly called over the applause and shouts and ding-ding-dings of a game show. Her mother looked up and nodded. 

Kelly could recall the exact moment when she understood that her family’s house was not normal. She was eight, and until then had never really questioned why she so rarely went to other girls’ houses, and they never came to hers. Then one day, she was getting off the school bus with two other girls, and before they parted ways at the corner, she told them happily, “Our dog had puppies yesterday!” 

“Ooh!” they squealed.  

“Yeah! She had them on the couch again,” and Kelly rolled her eyes and giggled, “so that’s annoying, but the puppies are so cute!” 

The two other girls looked at each other. They looked at each other the way adults look at each other when they know something kids don’t. And Kelly understood then, and in the days to come, that it was not normal for the family dog to have its puppies on the couch multiple times, for kids to go to school with their hair matted or with no socks in the winter, for a kitchen to be festooned with flypaper instead of addressing the root problem of the always-accumulating garbage, for a rusty rain gutter to be detached from the roof and dangling down the side of the house for years. Not normal in this tidy suburban neighborhood, at least. And she came to understand why her oldest sister had moved out while she was still in high school, moving in with the generous family of the close and caring friend she had cultivated. In the years since then, all of Kelly’s siblings left, one after another. 

As she did each day after work, she carried her bags directly up the stairs to her tiny but pristine bedroom. She had chosen to take the smallest room for herself so she could remake it on her starting teacher’s salary: the floor, the walls, the furniture, every inch. The rest of the house she kept as clean as she could—the sagging, separating floorboards swept, the flypaper gone, and the trash removed regularly—but she could not afford to salvage it further. So her bedroom was the one place she could relax and, with no sense of revulsion, put down her jacket, set down her bag. On her mind were the tests she needed to grade and the lesson on cell division she needed to plan, but foremost was her Community Fair, which was on track, all the pieces in place. She was pleased with herself. 

*          *          *

To ask his question about his Community Fair project, Kevin went to Mr. Tedesco’s classroom on Monday during lunch. Michael’s first thought was it just figures. It just figures that the crazy kid who talks to himself would be the one to show up with a question that threw Michael off and forced him to make another quick decision. But after that first pinch of annoyance, he reminded himself that, to be fair, Kevin’s work had been good so far, and he never caused a problem. It would be Lori, in fact, the popular and confident one, who’d be more likely to ask him a challenging question. But she hadn’t. It was Kevin standing before him, his eyes always at half-mast as if he could only stand to take in so much visual stimulation at once, who asked if his project could compare Staten Island to ancient Egypt. 

“Compare Staten Island to ancient Egypt, huh?” Old trick—repeat a student’s question to buy yourself time. Besides, Michael was genuinely surprised. “Huh. I never thought of that. What kind of comparison do you mean?” 

“Visual,” Kevin said. 

“Visual, huh. Can you describe it more?” 

“Well . . . I don’t want to give it away.” 

“Oh. Well . . . ” Michael wavered between protesting, in case it was something weird or inappropriate, and just saying okay, so as not to quash the kid’s creativity. Or was that the laziness creeping in again? Oh, Christ, who knows. “Sure. Okay,” he told him. 

And Kevin, glad to have that encounter over with, went swiftly down the carpeted hallway back to the cafeteria, not minding that he had to travel the long way around in order to obey the Annex’s one-direction-only rule for walking the rectangular loop formed by the narrow halls. It gave him more time to let his plans race and tumble and form in his mind and mouth, which moved in the shape of his thoughts as he moved through the school. 

*          *          *

At last, on a morning in late October, a small bunch of multi-colored balloons gamely festooned the gate in the Annex’s chain-link fence. A portion of the sixth graders getting off the yellow buses gripped large pieces of thick cardboard painted and papered over, which they carefully held horizontal. Glued onto the cardboard were pieces of plastic, Styrofoam, popsicle sticks, aluminum foil, and any other material that could be molded or re-formed to represent something else. Some had small toys glued on, such as old Lego people no longer played with and now pressed into service as pharaohs or pyramid builders. Others carried posters upon which they had drawn or glued depictions of animals and objects and labeled them with recently learned foreign words: El perro. Il cane. La chien. La mesa. La tavola. La table. Some carried tote bags with strategic board games borrowed from home for the day. And some carried nothing, for they would pick up their sculpture or painting from the art room and bring it to the gym to be displayed. 

Kevin was not among any of them. He had asked his mother to drive him to school, a rare request to which he knew she would say yes. He also knew he would have to respond to “Are you sure about this, Kevin? The teacher said okay? Are you sure?” He had his project triple-wrapped in thick trash bags, but she still noticed what he didn’t want the kids on the bus to notice until it was set up at the fair. He responded to her with confident yesses, and since she always trusted him about his schoolwork, she didn’t push it. He walked alone through the gate. 

The gym was buzzing. Kelly Brennan hurried here and there, directing students where to place their projects and posters and artwork, how to set up the math contest, and what posture and facial expressions were correct for members of the chorus. Her handiwork decorated the walls: evenly spaced crepe-paper garlands with a balloon at each juncture. It was meager but cheerful and the best she could do on the tiny budget the principal gave her. 

At one of the social studies tables, Lori Fein and her project partner showed off their project to Michael Tedesco. Beautifully rendered sarcophagi—complete with gold paint—interspersed with information typed on onion paper (to represent ancient parchment), cut out, and carefully glued. It had the well-done quality that you get from bright kids who are also good at art. 

The fair was ready to officially open. Kelly made her way through the display tables and toward the chorus, standing expectantly on a small set of risers at the front of the gym, waiting for her. She caught sight of Elaine, her science department chair, and she saw with hurt and surprise that Elaine was making a face. A very sour face, like a sneer. Kelly tightened inside. Really? she thought. Is she really going to be nasty about this? I didn’t even argue with her about no science projects; I just said okay . . . and she was so caught up in her anger at Elaine that she did not notice, at first, that others near Elaine were making faces too. Then some of the kids began holding their noses, laughing, and saying “Ew!” The twins from the Gifted & Talented class had their faces screwed up in identical expressions of disgust. 

Kelly hurried over, and the smell hit her. She looked to where the kids were pointing. By now, Michael Tedesco was coming over, and other teachers, and more kids. The smell was coming from Kevin McGrath’s project. He stood beside it. 

Kevin had divided a flat cardboard platform into two landscapes. On one half, the Nile, represented by blue paint, meandered through fertile green-painted ground, and near it, a well-constructed pyramid of yellow clay, its bricks clearly delineated, rose from a patch of glued-on sand. On the other half, four small aluminum-foil bridges perched at the edges of the cardboard. These were simply made, but each had a distinctive shape so that anyone from Staten Island could recognize the Goethals Bridge, the Bayonne Bridge, the Outerbridge Crossing, and the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. The brown-painted Fresh Kills waterways flowed through some flattened, glued-on brown grass. And from the flattened grass rose a pyramid, the same size and shape as the Egyptian one, but made of smelly garbage smushed together. A bit of brown banana peel was visible, and some silvery fish skin, but most of it was unrecognizable. 

Michael Tedesco laughed so loudly that he startled the kids standing near him, including Kevin. And he kept laughing. He couldn’t stop. 

“It’s not funny, Michael!” Kelly shrieked at him, forgetting to call him Mr. Tedesco in front of the kids, but far more alarming was the deep red color her face had turned. “Stop it! Stop it!”  

When Michael saw her face, he sobered up, but he was still grinning. 

“Get it out of here!” Her screaming infected the kids, who were now running up to the project, shrieking “Eeeeeewwwww!” and running away. Kelly zigzagged across the gym. In the stuffy, crowded space, the putrid smell seemed to be everywhere.  

“Doesn’t anyone have some Lysol or perfume, something?” she yelled. She had tried so hard with this community fair. She had tried her best. Was there no escape from garbage in her life? She stopped, and to her fury and shame, she burst into tears. 

“I think I do in my office.” It was Elaine, suddenly beside her, patting her on the back in a stiff but motherly way. “I’ll get it. Don’t worry, my dear. It’s going to be okay.” 

At the social studies table, Michael stepped forward and touched Kevin’s shoulder. “C’mon, let’s take it outside.” Michael lifted the project, and he suppressed the urge to laugh again. There was hope for these kids yet, he thought. There was hope. 

Kevin was in a bit of shock. He knew there would be a reaction, but not one quite like this. He categorized this event in his mind as a “grand surprise.” And as he mouthed the words to himself, there was another one: he accidently met the eye of Lori Fein, and she smiled and winked.  

“Kevin.” Mr. Tedesco was calling to him.  

The crowd parted, and Kevin followed his teacher out of the building. 

LAURA MAFFEI

Laura Maffei is the author of drops from her umbrella (poetry) and was the founding editor of American Tanka. Her short fiction has recently appeared in several journals. Born in Brooklyn and raised on Staten Island, she was a Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.