Martha Cooney

Did you ever use a laminator? You stick a piece of paper - menu, class schedule, flyer, whatever –  in the open end of two conjoined flippy plastic sheets, and the closed end suctions your paper in nicely. Feed it into the machine and it irons the whole thing together, so you have a hot sturdy plastic sign. It’s really satisfying. Once I start I want to laminate everything in sight. 

 

I laminated all summer the year I got my own classroom at the Washington Heights Y preschool after two years as an assistant. I had a lot of ideas for my Pre-K room and made labels, signs and materials for every curriculum theme. When the school year started I did a lot of curriculum planning on the subway, because I spent a lot of time on the subway. 

 

Every day I left my Brooklyn apartment by 7, took the D train to West Fourth, switched to the A and took it up to 190th street, and got to school at 8. After the kids left at 3:30 I prepped for the next day, caught the A train to 168th to switch to the 1, got off at City College at 137th, bought a tamale on the corner, and went to grad class for the rest of the night; then I took the 1 train to 96th street, switched to the 2-3 express home to Brooklyn and wrote parent emails while I watched Mad Men and ate string cheese and fruit leather with my roommates, Beck and Dan Marino. (Dan Marino had such a good name, we had to use it in full every time.)  

 

I didn’t mind the minimum two and a half hours a day living on the subway. Besides doing schoolwork and work work, I watched the subway-world movie. It had everything. A man in a nice suit and Yankee hat got sick on the floor and a nervous guy told a woman in a fur trapper, “The only thing more beautiful than your hat is you.” There were international tourists, day trippers, students, commuters, people on a mission, wanderers, and weirdos. They read the New York Post, the Economist, Harry Potter, and cellophane-covered library books and wore boots, suits, hats, jewels, plastic ponchos, and Canada Goose jackets. There were mariachi bands, showtime guys doing flips, and violinists. And everyone carried everything: briefcases, school projects, jumbo rainbow shopping bags, plastic tricycles, lacrosse equipment, boxes of printed t-shirts, an upright bass, birthday balloons, six-foot lamps, a ten-pound bag of beans, a plush t-rex from the natural history museum, styrofoam chicken-and-rice box, snorkel and fins, knitting bags, sketchbooks, a set of twelve juice glasses from Crate and Barrel, deli flowers, Olive Garden to-go bag, and a 24-pack of toilet paper. 

 

I took a hamster onto the train in September. I got it from Janine, who was in my early childhood education grad program. We all bartered for classroom stuff, and animals were a hot item. “I’ve got three stick bugs if you want one,” somebody might say during Child Development. “Does anyone have any horned frogs?” or “Do you have a guy for bearded dragons?” Janine wanted to offload a hamster. She lived in Queens, so I took the 4 subway into Manhattan, switched to the 7 at Grand Central, took it through the underwater tunnel to Queensboro Plaza to meet Janine on the platform for the handoff (she took the W from Astoria), and collected the plastic carry case with my new friend. By the time it got to school the hamster had gotten a tour of five trains and three boroughs.  

 

“Okay,” my twenty-three-year-old assistant Kelly said, gentle and firm. “I don’t do animals.” She lined up avocados on the counter. We were going to Mexico today; the first of her weekly cooking projects. “If you wanna do animals, that has to be you.” She folded a stack of pretend passports in about five seconds. I could hug her every day for saying exactly what she thought. Not a problem! I couldn’t wait to nurture our biosphere. I added a baby snake plant in a pot full of good loose dirt. 

 

In class, I sat on the primary blue rug with eighteen four-year-olds and took suggestions for the hamster’s name. “Penis head,” said a kid named Emerson. “Rainbow,” said Madeline. She had this dry tone that made everything sound like ironic standup, and oh I loved it. Once I watched her talk with a classmate at lunch about Mary Poppins, take a bite of sandwich, then look at the kid and say matter-of-fact, without joy or regret, “I guess we’re friends now.” 

 

The hamster lived on an eye-level shelf above the math manipulatives and mostly kept to himself. So that I didn’t have to do it, we had a signup sheet where families could volunteer to take him home for the weekend. We combined names from the poll to call him Rainbow Fishy, which the kids picked for irony because we had a fish to name, too. 

 

It was the other thing I’d wanted for the room – a fish, a classic fish, swimming in its bowl watching everything, all-knowing and wise. I took the L to the Union Square Petco and found silvery-red betta fish in individual deli containers at the end of an aisle. I decided to get one for the apartment, too. I introduced the fish to Beck and Dan Marino, and we named it Sterling after John Slattery’s character on Mad Men. I held the other fish up next to it so they could say goodbye. Sterling was aloof. 

 

The class voted to call our fish Cuckoo Unicorn, and I got a big glass vase and set it up next to the snake plant. Emerson dumped the plant pot upside down into Cuckoo’s water. I rescued the fish from the dirt and got fresh water, and every day after I scooped Cuckoo into a plastic cup while I changed the water. At home I did the same for Sterling. For two weeks things went swimmingly - ha, ha. 

 

One morning I walked in and Cuckoo was belly up. When I got home at the end of the night, Sterling was also dead. I was shaken. This was one of those mysterious universe things, metaphysical, a phenomenon. “I think it was a joint suicide pact,” I told Beck. “I think it’s because two weeks is how long betta fish will survive if you don’t take care of them,” she said.

 

For three days nobody noticed Cuckoo was gone. Then at pickup Madeline’s mom asked, “What happened to the fish?” We made eye contact. She nodded and said, in the same dry tone as Madeline, “I won’t say a word.” 

 

When a kid finally asked, I said Cuckoo went to live with another fish at my cousin’s place. “That’s not true,” someone yelled. “He died.” I ignored this and rushed to tell the next part of our ongoing story about a bar of soap. I did the story in installations, like Charles Dickens. In each new segment the soap got wet and melted, then figured out how to reconstitute himself. (Pretty deep resurrection theme, when you think about it.) 

 

In January we got a visit from a new animal. During a naptime Madeline stood on her mat, pointed and screamed “COCKROACH!” (With real emotion.) The bug power-walked across the mat’s cracked blue vinyl. We didn’t keep him. 

 

Spring came; the toughest part of any school year. One day there was poop on the wall and nobody owned up to it. For all our sake, Kelly started leading yoga in the afternoons; I started a daily Diet Coke habit that followed my lunch of two microwave Lean Cuisines (Have you seen those portions? Come on.) “Diet Coke is bad for you,” said the same kid who called me out about the fish dying. Spring also meant it was time to study life in all its forms – seeds and flowers! Insects! A parent suggested a worm bin. I loved the idea.

 

Have you dabbled in vermiculture? It works like this: get a giant off-brand clear plastic tote, fill it with crumpled newspaper sprayed with water, add forty worms, spray it once a week, stick in fruit and veg scraps from school lunches (“Eat your banana BEFORE you put the peel in, Shmuli!”) and the worms will eat everything and make compost.

 

I told Kelly the plan. Her eyes asked the same question they did every week: Are we doing this because this is what people do in preschool? Or because you’re a special breed of maniac? 

 

“So you’re saying worm bin as a verb?” she said. She was knee deep in crumpled tissue paper for her Monet water lilies mural, loose sprigs of dried lavender, and printed-out photos of the kids making rustic French bread (It’s rustic because it’s round, I learned. Or is it round because it’s rustic?) “This thing is going to be full of worm poop and there’s multiple living worms that are only going to get larger the more we keep this here?”

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“Yeah. Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s gonna be great.”

 

“This is the grossest thing I’ve ever seen and I don’t want anything to do with it,” Kelly said. 

 

Not a problem! I wrote Get worms in the notebook I kept by the door, right under Emerson put baby doll in toy kitchen oven, turned dial to ON – third time this week — concern??? I got a hot tip about a worm stand run by the Lower East Side Ecology Center, took the L train to the Union Square farmers market, and bought a blue and white milk carton full of damp rich coffee-brown soil and fifty red wiggler worms and secured with rubber bands.

 

I didn’t have any extra bags and I hesitated to bring the worm container onto the subway. Of all the things I’d seen on the train, I had never seen worms and I didn’t want to be the one to debut them in case something went wrong. I knew I’d have to figure it out for tomorrow morning, but for now, I splurged on a cab home and put the worm carton on my bedroom windowsill. 

 

I worried about the container being secure and slept light. At one point, my brain kicked me wide awake, and I got up and turned on the light to make sure everything was good. Twenty or so worms were on the floor – staggered out in different locations, like an army battalion or soccer team – headed in the direction of the bed and, I kid you not, I swear to God I kid you not, one was on the bedpost. I screamed.

 

I’m not squeamish, but come on! I went to the carton and saw a few more of the gang squeezing through a crevice on top like lo mein noodles. I scraped them back in and looked at the floor worms belly-crawling across the dry hardwood desert. It was wretched. 

 

One by one I peeled the worms off the floor and opened the milk carton to drop them in. Each time their friends danced to greet the returning soldier – how was it out there?! I ran the carton into the kitchen, grabbed five “Have a Nice Day” plastic bags, bagged and re-bagged and wrapped and re-wrapped the carton, and repositioned all the rubber bands. (Find your way out of that, Houdini.) 

 

The rest of the night I laid in bed half awake and terrified, the same as after I watched The Shining. In the morning I saw Dan Marino in the kitchen drinking his Tropicana. “Were you screaming last night?” he asked. 

 

I found a small shiny laminate Victoria’s Secret shopping bag striped in pink and pink with sturdy string handles and loaded the worms in. I didn’t want them to Shawshank on the subway, but there was no way I was paying for a cab to Washington Heights. So I clutched the top shut and death-gripped the Victoria’s Secret bag from the Atlantic Ave D train platform to the transfer at West Fourth, past the newsstand display of Sunkist bottles, Chapstick and Welch’s fruit snacks, up two flights to the A, on the orange plastic seats en route to 190th, down the exit ramp, across two lights with black cabs honking, into the Y, down the hall, into the preschool, down the hall again, and into my classroom. I dropped the bag on the floor, sat in a child-sized chair and breathed in dried tempera paint and floor cleaner. 

 

I started to tell Kelly what had happened but she stopped me and refused to listen further. The worm bin tote had secure locks. We opened it up to give the kids a look, spray the newspaper, and add compost scraps for a month until it was time to go outside and return the worms to the earth next to a tree. There were still six weeks of school left, and I was tired. Along with the Diet Coke, I added a dangerous habit of buying Entenmann’s chocolate fudge iced cake from the bodega fridge and eating a healthy-sized square or two at the end of the day. 

 

With the year ending, it was time to raise caterpillars into butterflies, which I can’t even collect the energy to tell you about at this point. Fine, here’s the summary: we got a kit with caterpillars, fed them gruel, moved them into individual condos to turn into larvae, prayed we had enough practice at Operation because you needed the sturdiest surgeon hand to transfer the cocoons to the tent, watched half of them fall to the bottom, felt responsible for crippling one of God’s creatures, reminded the kids that the company guarantee says “Nature is Unpredictable,” told them the red liquid splattering out of the cocoons was not blood when the caterpillars emerged as Painted Lady butterflies, acknowledged deaths and injuries, opened the net outside, and watched concussive butterflies cling on a fingertip and flap their wings in drunk experiment before flying away. Insert symbolism about Pre-K graduation, blah blah blah. Okay, I know, it was sweet. 

 

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Tally for the year:

Hamster - 1 (survived)

Fish - 2 (dead)

Cockroach - 1 (escaped)

Worms - 50ish (inconclusive) 

Butterflies - 12 (2 dead, 1 maimed, 10 survived total)

Diet Cokes - 40

Entenmann’s Chocolate Fudge Iced Cakes - 10 

Baby doll degree of burn injury - 3 (metaphorical)

Subway fare - $1,040 ​​​​​

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