It wasn’t long before she had become a friend. She was a refreshing New Yorker—frank, pushy, talkative, well-meaning—who never judged me or made fun of my naive Midwestern earnestness. Her reddish glasses, propped halfway down her nose, complemented the color of her hair and gave her the air of a disheveled intellectual. A female Einstein, if Einstein had been attractive. She grew up in the Bronx with parents who were Romanian holocaust survivors. She seemed to know everything about the Grand Concourse and P.S. 457, where she’d taught for many years. I was sure she knew all about Anthony Frascatore, too. And today, that’s what I wanted to talk to her about.
“Mr. Frascatore and I got into it this morning.” I bit into my peanut butter and raspberry jelly sandwich and talked while chewing in an attempt to hide the angry tremor in my voice.
“He’s got a short fuse sometimes.” Bonnie waved her hand like she was swatting at a fly. “He hasn’t talked to me at all this year.”
I was about to ask her why when Frascatore appeared in the doorway. The last person I wanted to see. He sauntered over to the refrigerator and held the door open, turning and glaring at me as if the putrid stench of someone’s long-forgotten tuna fish inside was my fault.
“Geez,” Bonnie said, holding her nose. “Shut that.”
Frascatore grabbed a brown paper bag from inside and slammed the door. “Damned people leave their rotten food in the refrigerator,” he grumbled.
“So, Anthony,” Bonnie said, her voice a tease. “You still not talking to me?” She looked sideways at me and winked. I looked down at my sandwich.
“Why should I?” He put his lunch down on the table like maybe he was going to stay a while. I reached into my lunch bag for a potato chip. A strange smell emanated from Frascatore, some combination of aftershave, bologna, and sweat.
“Because maybe it wouldn’t hurt to listen to somebody other than Al Shanker and his cronies once in a while,” Bonnie joshed.
“You think I should listen to someone like her instead of our union president?” He jabbed his finger in my direction.
I opened my can of Diet Coke and it hissed.
“Admit it, Anthony,” Bonnie said in a now half-serious tone. “Going out on strike at the beginning of this year made things worse. We’re more divided than ever.”
He grunted. “Yeah, well, we gotta watch out for ourselves,” he said with a shrug. “We’re in the minority here. You know the stats same as I do, ninety-seven percent of our students are black and Hispanic.”
“Being taught by white teachers,” Bonnie said. “It’s our kids who are the ones getting the short end of the stick, not us.”
Frascatore’s face turned red, his mouth twisted in fury. “Don’t you start with that crap. We have to stand up for ourselves as teachers. If we let communities control our schools, it will be the end of our rights.”
“Not that simple,” Bonnie said with a shrug.
Frascatore grabbed his lunch from the table. “Mark my words,” he said. “Mark my words.”
I breathed a sigh of relief as he walked out the door in a huff.
“At least he didn’t go on and on about our right to discipline students,” Bonnie said with a roll of her eyes. “I swear, that’s all that man seems to care about.”
The tension was building inside me, waiting to be released. Did she know that Frascatore, in the name of discipline, thought teachers had the right to slam students against the wall? I would bet that if she’d seen what Frascatore did today, she’d be down at the principal’s office right now reporting it to Miss Huskings. I wanted to tell her what happened, but she had already started talking a mile a minute, and I couldn’t get a word in.
“Did I ever tell you about my dad? He scored at the top on the city teachers’ exam, and they still wouldn’t give him a job until he took a speech course to correct his Yiddish accent. Thanks to the union, they can’t deny someone a job because of accent or race anymore. Frascatore’s right that we need to be united, but he doesn’t understand what’s at risk here.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Bonnie glanced down at her hands for a second. Then she sat back with a sad sigh. “Look, Sylvia, my family is Jewish. I know what it’s like to be persecuted. For generations. It’s painful. It hurts me to see it happen to others. My friends feel the same way. What Anthony doesn’t get is that if the union keeps fighting the community control experiment in the black Ocean Hill—Brownsville district, the bond between us Jewish teachers and the black teachers is going to be broken.”
She paused and looked off into space before continuing. “My dad always said that one of the most precious and fragile links of our democracy is the solidarity of black and white working people through the unions. What scares me most, Sylvia, is that this conflict about who gets to control our schools is going to destroy that.”
She took in a quick breath like she wasn’t finished, but then she glanced up at the clock on the wall and started packing up her leftover food. “I’m sorry, hon, but I have to run. I’ve been going on and on without paying any attention to the time. I have to leave for a teachers’ conference this afternoon and I’m already late. It’ll be so nice to have a break for the next couple of days.” With that, she gave me a peck on the cheek and rushed out the door, leaving me alone with the last bite of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich sitting on the table and not knowing what to do about Frascatore.
So I did nothing for the next few days while I waited for Bonnie to come back. I avoided any conversation, even a greeting, with Frascatore, while at the same time keeping my senses on full alert and tuned in to his every movement. I listened for the sound of his voice. I kept my classroom door open so I could keep an eye on him across the hall. And the whole time, my conscience nagged at me. I hadn’t told the principal right away, but if he ever laid hands on another student again, I would not hesitate to do so.
Three days later, a sixth-grade student brought me a note from Miss Huskings. When I read Come to my office at twelve-thirty, all the muscles in my body tensed. I felt like a student being called into the principal’s office for doing something wrong. But what had I done? Maybe someone else had told the principal what I’d seen Frascatore do, and she wanted to know why I hadn’t come to her. Maybe someone had complained about my students singing and dancing during reading time, and Miss Huskings was going to question my unorthodox teaching methods. Maybe it was about something else. But what could it be?
By the time I hugged my students good-bye for the day and headed for the main office, I was pretty much a basket case. I leaned on the counter that ran from one wall to the opposite one. Behind me, a cluttered bulletin board was crammed with colorful pictures and announcements, cartoons, happy children’s faces, most of them white. In front of me, three desks on the other side of the counter were filled with uneven stacks of papers. To the left of them, a tall gray filing cabinet was piled high with haphazard stacks of ragged reading books. And behind the cabinet, hidden from view, was the door to the principal’s office, that narrow, secret opening in the wall known to suck in students who misbehaved. And teachers.
“You can go ahead and knock on Miss Huskings’s door,” one of the secretaries said as she lifted up the end of the counter and let me in.
I pulled my shoulders back, remembering when I was in elementary school, everyone said the principal had a stick in his office that he beat kids with. I never saw it myself. I’d never talked to Miss Huskings alone before, either, except to say hello and how are you in passing. Her mere presence on the auditorium stage during school assemblies and monthly teachers’ meetings was daunting enough. As I stood at the