Not Just the Belt But the Buckle
No amount of perfume could cover the punch of alcohol that enveloped Cindi Walarski. She had made an attempt to brush her hair, but the wrinkle and cling of her clothing strongly suggested she had woken not long ago fully dressed, made a hurried effort to become presentable, and created a paper thin veneer of sobriety and alertness.
“I’m so sorry.”
It was not the first time he had heard her say this. She had by this time become an inside joke among faculty members, particularly those whose demons were slain or caged safely away in the family attic hidden from public scrutiny. He, though, did not share in the joke. Cindi had confessed to him during a lull in a teacher in-service day last year that his wife Judy had saved her. Not saved her like pulling her from a burning car, but by showing her a path to salvation out of the depths of drowning in alcohol. It had been one of those moments, a moment when realness broke the wrapping of routine. He could not laugh at the jokes that followed Cindi Walarski like the scent of last night’s bender.
“It’s okay. We’ve got it going.”
He was, in fact, angry with her. Well, not really angry. Frustrated. It was on-line standardized testing day. The kids were bussed to school early, supposedly with charged laptops, and teachers were tasked with checking them in, passing out user name and password tickets (to be collected at the end of testing), distributing scratch paper and pencils and calculators if needed, and collecting cell phones (powered off) to be tagged and bagged until testing was complete. One teacher was proctor, the other monitor. The morning before, he had been proctor in his room, which, in addition to all the other tasks, meant he had to log-in at the teacher station as test administrator, find the room and test codes (the actual room number they were in was not the room number assigned by the testing agency), and read the official standardized testing directions from the official standardized testing directions script. A few small glitches aside (he has mistakenly assumed the official room number students had to enter was the number of the room they were in, 116, but, with the help of Kay Jammerson, his teammate for the day, they were able to determine that the room number was in fact ZMZDBY), everyone got through the test unscathed and on time.
This morning, though, Cindi Walarski was late and, as proctor, she was the one who had to log-in with her official credentials before the kids could begin. Testing was supposed to begin at 7:15 (“Not one second later,” Principal Cochrane had announced at Monday’s staff meeting). The students were all seated, some already beginning to fall asleep, by the time Cindi entered the room, initially walking past it like someone visiting the school for the first time. It was already 7:14. She walked past him with an embarrassed nod, and once at her teacher station, she set down her teacher satchel (colleagues joked that it hid a fifth of Stoli) and began rapping at the keypad to log-in.
“Geeez, it’s not letting me in.”
He approached the teacher station, breathing in the heavy scent of perfume tinged alcohol.
“Ah, here’s the problem. It’s not the same user and password as your school log-in.”
She looked at him, dazed and uncomprehending.
“You need the assigned user and password from the testing agency. The principal emailed them to us last week?”
Still, nothing. She had obviously not read the email with the two-page PDF of all staff members and their assigned testing credentials.
“So…what do we do?”
“Here, let me.”
He could feel the clock ticking—they should have started already. These test scores would be used to determine the school’s overall state rating, which could affect funding and grant possibilities, a battle-cry that had been drilled into every teacher’s head at every staff meeting for the past four months. He took the computer mouse from her and clicked open her school email account. He typed “Cochrane,” the principal’s name, into the search window and hit return, which took him to an endless list of unopened emails.
“This is it, this one, ‘Standardized Testing Log-In Codes.’”
He clicked on the email and opened the list, scrolling down until he found “Walarsky, Cindi.” He returned the mouse so she could log onto the test site and turned away from the stale burn of alcohol.
“Shit, I thought it was our normal school log-in. Why don’t they tell us these things?”
Cindi plunked away at the keyboard and he looked out at the mass of dull faces waiting for the test and room codes to begin their test. A few had obviously heard the word “shit” and exchanged knowing smirks. One made a drinking motion to another across the room and both laughed quietly. The joke was no longer faculty property.
“Okay, everyone, look alive,” he announced as Cindi continued trying to type in her credentials. “We’re going to get you your log-in information in a second. You will have to log in immediately. The test directions will be waiting for you once you open the test.”
It was now 7:26 and there was no time for reading the directions aloud. Starting late could bring a reprimand that would go in his personnel file. He had a clean record and he wanted to keep it that way but only Cindi’s credentials could open the test.
“The room number is, let’s see, 212, so at least log that in,” she instructed.
As he learned yesterday, that was incorrect. The logical or obvious was wrong. The rooms were assigned a code by the geniuses at the standardized testing lab.
“Hold up,” he told the class, then returned to the teacher station. “Here, let me have a look.”
He again took the mouse, which she gave up without resistance. She was on the wrong computer screen and he had to click “Back” several times to find the actual room code.
“Okay, listen up, here’s the official room code: KOTJMC.”
“Can you say that again?” a voice shot from the crowd. He left the teacher station and paced to the white board, where he wrote down the room code.
“So what’s the test code?” came another student voice.
He looked at the teacher station, where Cindi Walarski sat helpless. He could feel all the student eyes drilling into him.
“Just a second.”
He had just started to the teacher station when the room door popped open.
“What is going on here?”
Vice-Principal Drevin stood in the doorway pointing to her wrist, which had no watch on it but it was understood she was referring to the lateness of the room starting its test.
He had no answer. He paced quickly to the teacher station, took the mouse, hit “Next” at least ten times and arrived at the screen that revealed the test code.
“Your test code is MC5DET68. I’ll write it on the board.”
Not only were student eyes fixing on him, but the eyes of Vice-Principal Drevin, who had no doubt seen that the room had yet to begin from the monitor in her testing command station in the main office. He found himself beginning to perspire and his heart quickening. He wrote the test code on the white board, his letters and numbers a bit rushed, shaky.
“It’s 7:28,” said Drevin in a hushed voice, but she said it loud enough that even Cindi Walarski had to hear her. “This test was supposed to begin 13 minutes ago.”
“I know,” he answered. “There was a problem logging in. But we’ve got it now.”
Drevin stood with hands fixed on hips, then darted a glance at the teacher station, where Cindi sat glassy eyed.
“Finish getting them started then see me in the hall.”
She exited into the hallway and he turned back to the class.
“Give me a thumbs up to let me know you’re logged in.” He scanned the room until he saw all thumbs up. A shallow breeze of relief hit him. He stepped into the hall, closing the door quietly behind him.
“Drunk again, right?”
Drevin stood before him, hands still fixed on hips. He had a sudden flashback to elementary school when he was called into the hallway by his Vice-Principal, George Saucony, whom the kids covertly called “Mr. Nose” because of his enormous, bulbous nose. His greatest talent was striking immediate terror into tiny children. That day decades ago, he understood immediately why Mr. Saucony had called him into the hall. During lavatory break earlier that week, he and several buddies thought it would be hilarious if they peed into the handsinks and onto the handles. It was tough because the sinks were higher than their belt lines, but they gave it a go, mostly peeing on the wall or even onto themselves. This became a daily ritual until Tommy Pinner decided to up the ante and drop a #2 on the floor of the first stall.
“Listen, you little bastard,” spat Mr. Saucony, grabbing him by the ear and twisting. “I already know what you did and you’re already in trouble. I want names. Your pals already named you, smart guy, so your heinie is done. Unnerstan’ me? So give me the names of everyone else and you’ll only meet the paddle three times instead of five.”
Meeting the paddle. Everyone knew what it meant. Mr. Saucony had a wooden paddle shaped like an oversized ping-pong paddle. When you were in trouble, you chose between “meeting the paddle” or having your parents called. No one wanted their parents called. What happened at home was worse than the paddle, and the paddle was pretty bad. Towering over him, his bulbous nose reddening, Mr. Saucony held his ear with one hand and pointed an index finger into his face with the other.
He recited every name he could think of.
“That’s all of them? Huh? Any more? I find out you’re lying and you’ll get it twice as bad.”
“That’s all,” he sputtered, and Mr. Saucony released his ear. He was led by his shirt collar to the office, where he assumed the position (bent in half touching his toes) and received three stinging strokes of the paddle.
As tears seeped from his eyes, Mr. Saucony grabbed him by the ear again and twisted even harder.
“The poor custodian has to clean up that mess you made. You unnerstan’? You and your pals have no more lavatory breaks the rest of the month. I don’t care if you pee and poop yourselves, you unnerstan’? And the more I think about it, I’m going to have to call your parents. What you did is too nasty for just a whack.”
His butt cheeks screaming, he was flooded with a tsunami of Catholic shame, regret, and fear. He thought of the custodian, a small man with a crewcut who wore the same gray shirt with the name “Sal” stitched on it and the same blue pants every day, and he wondered how exactly he cleaned up Tommy Pinner’s mess. He thought of the beating he would receive when he got home, which was every bit as bad as he imagined and worse, his father not just using the belt but the buckle as well, and not just busting his butt but his back and arms to boot.
“I don’t know,” he told Vice-Principal Drevin, returning to the hallway and knowing he would have to have some believable explanation for the late start of the standardized test that could potentially affect the future of the school. He checked the hitch of his belt, straightening it. “Cindi, if she’s drunk, well, I don’t know. All I know is there was some trouble logging in.”
“But she was late, right?”
“Ah, a few minutes.”
Drevin looked away. Word had spread in the teacher lounge that the administration was receiving parent complaints about Cindi Walarski, something administrators avoided at all costs. Drevin’s posture said she had reached a last straw of some kind.
“Get back in and make sure things stay on track,” Drevin said, exhaling. “We’ll talk later.”
He returned to the room, the fluorescent lighting now foreign to his eyes. Most students were tapping away at their computers, but some had laid their heads down and were sleeping—their inevitable failure would have nothing to do with starting the test late or the proctor being drunk. He looked to the back of the room at Cindi Walarski, who sat at the teacher station, her eyes closed and a strand of hair hanging down limply onto her face.
“Your wife saved me,” she had told him that day a year ago in the hallway at the teacher in-service. His wife, Judy, had been leading AA meetings at their church for two years at that point. Judy confessed to the group that her life had become unmanageable, that she was close to losing her husband, her children, and her self-respect. Cindi Walarski attended her first meeting at the church and Judy laid bare her humiliation, her grief, and, finally, her hope.
“Listening to her,” Cindi had said at the in-service, “I knew I had to change. I had to get right. She made me believe I could do it and I’m so grateful to her. And I’m trying. I’m really trying.”
That day, Cindi hugged him in the hallway outside the cafeteria while they were on break, and he did not know how to receive the hug or if he should receive it at all lest a colleague get the wrong impression and throw some wood on the teacher lounge rumor bonfire. Judy never told him about the meeting. They had attended meetings together at first until Judy insisted she go alone.
“I got this,” Judy had told him. “I need to do this. Alone. On my own two feet.”
At one point, he was convinced his marriage to Judy and the life they had built together was over. The house in the subdivision with the beautiful flowers in the front, two children who were well-liked and reasonably successful, careers that would ensure a comfortable old age. And then her late nights after work to unwind and have a drink with the girls, the missed family dinners, the black-out drunks on the weekend, ruined birthday parties, missed work, the termination notice from her employer. He had already given up when something happened inside her and she took control of herself. Judy gave them their life back. Not exactly the same life as before—nothing could ever be the same after what they had endured—but a life he wanted to live and share with her, a new life, one married of the familiar same and the livable different.
The students pecked away. He walked to the teacher station. Cindi sat with eyes still closed. He wanted to hug her, or least place a hand of reassurance on her shoulder. When the test was over, he’d return to her room and bring a cup of the stale office coffee, and, smiling, tell her, “Good job. We made through another test day.” He looked at her, then back out at the students. He was a bit tired. He and his wife had binged movies on TCM the night before, some good ones, a very good one with Jack Lemmon and an actress whose name he always forgot. The computers clacked all around him. Things move on. They get done. The students would finish their tests, he would collect any pencils or calculators they borrowed, and he would return to the office with all required materials and the official manual attendance report, where he would pour Cindi a cup of coffee. He looked up at the clock, thought of later that evening and catching some TV with Judy, then adjusted his pants, making sure his belt buckle was as close to dead center as he could get it.
Author’s Biography
John Jeffire was born in Detroit. In 2005, his novel Motown Burning was named Grand Prize Winner in the Mount Arrowsmith Novel Competition and in 2007 it won a Gold Medal for Regional Fiction in the Independent Publishing Awards. Speaking of Motown Burning, former chair of the Pulitzer Jury Philip F. O'Connor said, “It works. I don't often say that, but it has a drive and integrity that gives it credible life....I find a novel with heart.” In 2009, Andra Milacca included Motown Burning in her list of “Six Savory Novels Set in Detroit” along with works by Elmore Leonard, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jeffrey Eugenides. His first book of poetry, Stone + Fist + Brick + Bone, was nominated for a Michigan Notable Book Award in 2009. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine called the book “a terrific one for our city.” His short story “Boss” appeared in Coolest American Stories 2022, which won the International Book Awards Prize for Fiction Anthologies. In 2022, his novel River Rouge won the American Writing Awards for Legacy Fiction.
