Mrs. Fehr liked me, and she didn’t like anyone.
She didn’t like Mr. Bemont, the buoyant orange yak who taught Global Studies and encouraged the class to address him as “Yon Bemonster.” Mrs. Fehr said Mr. Bemont was a minor league baseball mascot who got lost in left field.
She didn’t like Mrs. Simzak, who gave soliloquies on Weight Watchers points and extra credit for irrelevant questions like “which band goes by the acronym CCR?” Mrs. Fehr once saw Mrs. Simzak insert an entire Hostess Snowball in her mouth as though she had a flip-top head.
She didn’t like Mr. Wallace, the faculty advisor for the literary journal. He was revered becausehe regularly leapt on top of his desk, cotton-swab hair dislodging the ceiling tile, and let everyone dress up as their favorite protagonist on Character Day. Mrs. Fehr said if she saw one more Huckleberry Finn in cargo pants, she was going to hold a séance to get Mark Twain involved.
She didn’t like Eli, the Managing Editor from another school’s newspaper. He held my hand by the fingertips all day at the Columbia Youth Journalism Summit. After the Managing Editor kissed my forehead goodbye and said, “I do not need your phone number, Daisy Barlow,” Mrs. Fehr spoke her mind.
“You should not bother until at least grad school. They won’t be ready for you until then.”
This is not the prophecy you desire when you are sixteen and determined to find “forever” before graduation. I attended the sixth-grade social in my best velvet hat, expecting my inamorata to manifest between Boyz II Men ballads. I wore three-dimensional feathers to the ninth-grade cotillion, waiting for God to split the crowd. I squeezed into sequins half my body weight on Character Day, Daisy Barlow dressed as Daisy Buchanan, but they were all Huckleberry Finns. By junior year, I was getting old.
So, I wrote about the vicissitudes of life in the school newspaper, and Mrs. Fehr liked me. I quoted Rumi and Maya Angelou. I said love could be a bayonet or the precocious forsythia of February, but that was up to us. I parsed the lyrics of Counting Crows. I recruited olive loaf for an allegory on ego. I reminded freshmen of their worth. I was loyal to Mrs. Fehr’s newspaper, even though Mr. Wallace ran the literary journal and called me Daisy Buchanan all year.
This is how I ended up in the front seat of the yellow bus home from Columbia. Every October, public school journalists gathered to show our papers and learn to tell the truth with a modicum of marinara. We attended seminars on how to add music to zoning board announcements. We sat in Ivy League seats and pretended we were halfway to our Pulitzers. I won a purple ribbon in the Human Interest category. Mrs. Fehr bought me a blueberry bagel at a rest stop and told me not to “worry about men until they remember to wear deodorant.”
Everyone said that life must be difficult for Mr. Fehr, whoever he might be. Mrs. Fehr did not have family photos on her desk, but she wore a wedding band. Yon Bemonster said it was the one from Lord of the Rings, and that Mrs. Fehr was biding time to loose her orcs upon the earth.
Mrs. Fehr first called me into her office when I was a freshman. I had submitted an op-ed about how we all want to be elves, but happiness is being a Hobbit. After a garlicky opening salvo disclaiming her revulsion to both Tolkien and Mr. Bemont, she said I had “something special.” She prophesied that she was going to like me and informed me that she didn’t like anyone. She said that bookies in Nevada were predicting I would become the Editor in Chief in senior year.
She did not like most of her Editors in Chief, Basset Hounds drooling ego all over the newsprint. They wrote what they thought she wanted. Their lazy eyes spun like Magic 8 balls, submitting everything to the question, “what will get me into a top-tier college?” They were a bore. Even their rebellion sounded like a clarinet. They sprinkled in some socialism like salt substitute on a TV dinner. Mrs. Fehr did not like them.
She did not like anyone who attempted to pull one over on her. That was a doomed enterprise. The consequences were swift and did not include a stipend for therapy. Some poor rodent forgot the deadline for an original poem and submitted the lyrics to “Life is a Highway.” He bet high that Mrs. Fehr did not listen to Top 40 radio. The result was our seventy-year-old English teacher performing the song for the class, complete with air guitar.
I asked Mrs. Fehr if I could write about this, so long as I changed the names and details. She liked this proposal. It became the scaffolding for a cathedral, my finest article. I transplanted my heart into the green cursor of my word processor. I wrapped a blanket over the shoulders of my shamed classmate. I gasped at the terror and sustenance of poetry. I summoned sophomores and superintendents to courage. I declared myself the bride of language. I added a few flying buttresses and gargoyles and submitted my magnum opus to Mrs. Fehr.
Mrs. Fehr liked it. “You have written a lyric essay for The Paris Review.” Mrs. Fehr could not publish it. “I can’t do anything with this, Daisy.”
I did not understand.
“You need to remember your audience,” she scolded me. “You are writing for Beavis.”
I felt my eyebrow start to twitch. “You underestimate them.”
“You know I don’t. You need to write at their level.”
I thought of the Huckleberry Finns. One gave me a cookie to which he had affixed googly eyes. One read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to all the parents in the bleachers. One told me his heroes were Jimmy Buffett and Jean Valjean. None of them had excellent hygiene. None of them read the literary journal. But all of them thumbed through the newspaper.
“I wrote this for them.” I did. “I want them to read it.”
Mrs. Fehr liked me, which led to the unprecedented. “Then I’ll compromise.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I just need you to do one thing.”
“Okay.”
“Dumb it down.”
I felt something drop and shatter on the ground. My fingers grasped helplessly in the air. “I can’t do that.”
Mrs. Fehr’s eyebrows unsharpened. She opened her mouth, then closed it. She knew what I was going to say.
“I need to quit the newspaper.”
“You were going to be the editor in chief.”
I felt one of my own gargoyles snap off my masterpiece into my hand. He gnawed my knuckles. His hooligan bacteria snickered into my blood stream. “I’ll start my own mutant publication.” I was freestyling. “I’ll call it The Big Raft.”
Mrs. Fehr sank backward into her chair. “Oh, Daisy.”
My virus passed quickly. “I have no idea where to start.”
“You’re a competent creature. Just do me a favor.”
“What?”
“Don’t tell Wallace. It would make him happy.” She puffed her cheeks and attempted Mr. Wallace’s swing-music accent. “Awhh yeahhh! Faulkner didn’t dumb it down, Hemingway didn’t dumb it down, ain’t no way Barlow’s gonna dumb it down!”
I started to laugh. Mrs. Fehr was not laughing.
“Promise me you won’t give him that.”
“I promise.”
“He doesn’t like me, you know.”
I knew better than to argue. “Can I still go to the Columbia conference next year?”
Mrs. Fehr liked me. The answer was, nevertheless, “absolutely not.”
Image by Felipe Furtado on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Editors in Chief - December 27, 2024