Once upon a time in the not-so-distant long ago a woman accidentally applied and then accidentally got a job teaching Language Arts to children.
Her name was Miss Vandenburgh and this semi-imaginary place was a Catholic school called Saint Anonymous, located in a historical locale on the grounds of a mission on the shores of the Silicon Valley that is not a geographical place and better resembles the topography of a fairy tale does, in fact, pertain.
Miss Vandenburgh applied and was hired for many of life’s wrong and mysterious reasons, as she was a well-published writer who’d taught literature and writing at several prestigious institutions of higher learning and appeared to be overqualified for the position, and also temperamentally unsuited.
However, she and the woman who hired her were rough contemporaries who shared both grammar and diction, as each came from the same Country of Origin, this being the Language Area of the San Francisco Bay. So too they were, in a broad manner of speaking, co-religionists, in that Miss Vandenburgh had been raised as the kind of genuflecting Anglo-Catholic that Roman Catholics, such as Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian, try their level best to be tolerant of yet aren’t.
This story appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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Which meant the two might conceivably have seen eye-to-eye on matters of practice and faith, when, in point of fact, they did not.
The actual reasons for her hiring came down, no doubt, to her more than impressive CV and the sense of fellowship kindled by the two women having been born only a bay-width apart—applicant in Berkeley, headmistress in the City, as it was then still sometimes obnoxiously called by residents of Orinda—and in roughly the same temporal locale of the bygone century. Then too each well knew the correct usages, the who and the whom, the to you and me, the easy ones that get you hired, your saying “This is she” when Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian called to schedule an interview.
There were also the subtleties: that Miss Vandenburgh, having been raised as an Episcopalian, not only knew how to properly cross herself and that you did it all the time, but also her age, that with her great silver shock of outrageously curly hair she’d presumably outgrown the need to be dangerous.
This was in the Time Period of Those with Low Self-Esteem, and Miss Vandenburgh, for her own secret reasons, was one of these, as she was going through a bad patch having become the kind of writer who wasn’t writing. Writing was all that had ever kept her whole and she taught it to others with a missionary zeal. Both as habit and as practice, writing was maybe first among her several true religions.
This was during an Era when the Very Driven, High-Achieving Two-Parent Parents of the Silicon Valley, newly rich and wanting everything for their children, would pay a huge heap of money for a proper private school education involving discipline. Too, all around Saint Anonymous one felt the fragrance of sanctity, that nuns dressed like nuns, that the children wore meticulous uniforms. Their uniforms were blue plaid, girls in jumpers, aside from the dress of a small group who were allowed to vehemently express their individuality by their wearing of distinctively pink and sparkling shoelaces. These were the Power Girls.
The children entrusted to Miss Vandenburgh were in middle school. Her classroom was one door away from the office of Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian of whom everyone at Saint Anonymous was justifiably terrified. Being terrified of a nun was part of what it was to live then in the Land of Children, as being terrified of a nun told of some dimly imagined Yesteryear, hearkening back to how it was rumored to have been in that murky place known as History.
Aside from Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian, who was purportedly terrifying, Miss Vandenburgh tended to adore the nuns, many of whom were extremely small of stature and were properly habited as traditional Dominicans. Miss Vandenburgh had never seen a group of tiny people work so diligently, as if they were there establishing, in the shadow of this historic mission, an outpost or settlement in the most lawless of places, which is, in truth, one of the greatest strengths of another of her own true faiths, that of being a long-in-California, generational white person Californian.
Back in the 20th century, where she was from, she’d run home to her mom to say, “They say I’m going to Hell,” for whatever she’d just said in her native idiom, likely, profanity, her mother instructing, “We don’t go by that, Jane,” she said, with aristocratic confidence, “Hell’s for the lower classes.”
So there was an archaic feeling to the life of these nuns, some of the small ones being so old they seemed to be growing ever smaller still. Some had come from such faraway places as Peru or the Philippines or the shores of the Malabar Coast to live out these last days of theirs in the comfort of sisterhood, Saint Anonymous being the Mother House of the Dominicans. All of which basically appealed to Miss Vandenburgh in a cinematic way, as did all the various Benetton hues of the children in the Land of Children, who were not to be called “kids,” she was told, as this tended to liken them to animals.
This was in the Era of ADHD, a malady with which a large-ish sum of these children had been likely improperly diagnosed, when what may have actually been wrong with them was that they were children. The nuns’ strict discipline and the huge amounts of schoolwork required of them was serving to organize them internally along lines of habit and practice, resulting in a culture in which the children were even terrifyingly well-behaved.
Those with ADHD tended to cluster about Miss Vandenburgh, recognizing her as their kindred.
She was to teach reading and writing to sixth, seventh, and eighth, hired as a maternity replacement on a many monthslong emergency basis in that the real Language Arts teacher, a layperson who’d suddenly not only married but then somehow, even semi-miraculously, popped up astonishingly pregnant, in that she was of such Advanced Maternal Age that she was placed on immediate bed rest, all of which put Miss Vandenburgh in mind of such procreant feats accomplished by Biblical characters like Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin and mom of John, and Sarah, wife of Abram, as she thought to remark to Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian, who simply stared at her coldly.
It was then she remembered that Catholics do not actually read the Bible.
The books the regular Language Arts teacher had chosen and had preordered months before were predictably terrible in that they came from the imaginary category of reading known as YA, these being books without offensive themes or language. They didn’t have YA where Miss Vandenburgh was from but she came to know it wasn’t a category of literature but of marketing, one of the newer terms, together with thinking outside the box, of the world she now found herself in, a term Miss Vandenburgh found to be triggering.
She glanced at the books wishing, hoping to find anything worth reading, feeling her soul bristle and resist as each of these works worked to reassure the children—who were presumed to be damaged or lost—that life was mild, pleasant, nice, a credo not only patently false but made for a worldview that lacked surprise.
And since it was only reading and writing that, at base, had ever much mattered to her, aside from the matter of children, she was incapable of acting as if this crap was the holy writ, which was where she and Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian began to dramatically part ways. There was that. There was also the matter of discipline.
Miss Vandenburgh thought these children were much too well-behaved to be successful at being Californians. She had 105 students in three sections of 35, classes that should, on paper, have been many too many to teach reading and writing to, yet none of these children, even those more-than-merely several who’d been diagnosed with ADHD and some on the cusp of adolescence, was acting out.
None was acting out, that is. Usage, by which you can and do identify your people, your saying, No one is acting out, being the kind of grammatical error that will get you too quickly embraced by those like Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian who believe in perfect agreement and correctness.
Miss Vandenburgh was in fact very good at the teaching of writing; she simply taught others what she’d first taught herself. You took the one simple assignment that worked in any Time Period, with any Cohort or Age or Affinity grouping. This was a Five-Paragraph Essay titled “Where I Am From.” Sometimes people’s paragraphs turned out to be a hundred pages long, by this you would know the novelists.
She’d taught this essay with great success to second graders at a charter school in Oakland called Think College Now. At TCN she’d been called, endearingly to her, Miss Band Da Bird.
What happened to the five-paragraph essay when taught to a second grader of nebulous immigration status, and only then embarking on the adventure that was the American language, was that it broke apart, turned to spangled light that beamed out from itself and ever out.
This assignment is easy. Anyone can honestly do it. All it requires is knowing that the word essay means only to try. All you need to do is to tell the story of how you physically got here, which means naming who your own people are, what they eat, and how they speak. When all these stories are told in a classroom, the song erupts as naturally as song will from a tree full of starlings. We are meant to sing like this. We are a musical nation.
And in a place like California, where everyone’s parents, aside from those of the headmistress Sister and her Language Arts replacement, have arrived here from someplace else, it becomes a musical collaboration, so powerful and loud it starts to be Dvořák’s New World Symphony.
The trouble, as Miss Vandenburgh already knew, was she was asking them to tell the truth about where their bodies had come from, that is, Who I Am in the Truth of My Flesh, when what Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian had done, in abjuring the flesh, was rather preferring to not be reminded, particularly the messily human stories of lay teachers getting pregnant at an embarrassingly Advanced Maternal Age, a feat, though miraculous, that had entirely fucked up, Miss Vandenburgh saw, this hitherto well-ordered Catholic school. The curriculum had nothing at all to say about these children learning the truth about their real selves—their parents were from everywhere—their hue, their gender, their child’s physical bodies. Which was actually right about where Miss Vandenburgh, in fact, had always natively lived, there in a place redolent of dirt and sweat and pencils.
She understood that she ought to probably know the answer to important things concerning what the initials in TED Talk stood for or what did Salesforce actually do, or how to accrue, by means of tech, massive amounts of completely ridiculous wealth, as this was the Time Period of Money’s Becoming Truly Stupid.
But on such abstract subjects as tech or money, Miss Vandenburgh tended to become distracted. This distraction was no doubt part of the reason for the foundering of her promising academic career in which she’d once held the position of Assistant Professor in a distinguished public university that had started out as an ag school. She’d applied but decided not to go there because of a latent worry of becoming the wife of a large-animal vet.
Miss Vandenburgh loved teaching there because the job required that she travel there by train from Berkeley and spend two nights each week in a cheap motel a few blocks from campus. As she trundled her wheels from the train station to her office, she’d raise her face to a warm and beautiful wind that still smelled faintly of cow shit.
She wanted to teach the children of Saint Anonymous how to say the words cow shit aloud, to name this as the holy, healthy scent it was in the country of her own childhood. She’d teach them in the way Anne Sullivan had taught Helen Keller by tattooing the word water into the child’s hand. These smells, this sunlight, belonged in the Land of Children. About this she and the headmistress fundamentally disagreed.
If that needed to be mentioned—and Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian was not convinced that it did—the operative term would be manure.
OK, Miss Vandenburgh would say to her sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, let’s figure this out, shall we? How do we get from a word like cow shit—and here she held the weight of a large but fictional plop in one hand, to manure, holding that imaginary weight in her other, and those with ADHD, usually boys, were off, come alive with the challenge of finding synonyms, then looking each word up to find out from whence it derived. They were digital natives completely at home in the arboreal and went eeeeking arm over arm through the electronic canopy, completely adept on their Apple-provided laptops looking up the words like muck and scat. Someone, a girl, told Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian they were having a unit on excrement. This student being one of the Power Girls, whose brightly shining hot pink shoelaces were universally coveted and who was adamant in her loyalty to their bedridden teacher.
Naturally, she told them, people will be offended, because language that’s easy for me to hear may for you become a cudgel, because of differences of who we are in our physical bodies. Words often have a different effect on boys and men than on girls and women or others on the less dominant side of things. These differences being neither bad nor wrong. These differences are simply differences.
Language for Miss Vandenburgh and those students who were not dismayed was simply interesting. And this is not one effect but is highly nuanced and individualized and has everything to do with a part of the Five-Paragraph Essay titled “Where I Am From.”
Because she was secretly teaching to the girls, saying that if they wanted to be writers—and she was not suggesting that they should—that nothing, that is, no language at all, should be sanctioned.
They didn’t know what the word sanctioned meant, hadn’t heard the word, yet had felt the act of sanction already used against them. This happens when one person says a word that claims another’s body. Sanction, she said. Look it up and read down through all the meanings and see how something mild or even holy—the word zounds—one moment might become, in the next, illegal.
Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian was simply furious. These were not their spelling words, this was not the middle school Language Arts curriculum at Saint Anonymous. Miss Vandenburgh did not care if they fired her. She had no status to lose. She was an emergency hire as a Language Arts maternity replacement, and was entirely disliked. It maybe had to do with her refusing to own or wear an ugly Christmas sweater and failing to understand that participation in Secret Santa is reciprocal and required.
But this, her out-of-time-and-place situation, had no dismaying effect on her relationship with her students, who believed Miss Vandenburgh to be smart and interesting, as she had not encouraged them to like her though they couldn’t seem to help it. The boys liked her first, then a few girls too came around as they felt their warrior spirit within the breastplate of their chests and were still not very far removed from the perfect people they had been when they were nine years old.
Miss Vandenburgh believed that the most perfect human person was probably the nine-year-old girl, who was by her very nature fair-minded and articulate, who loved easily, who was as completely at home in math and science as she was in any and all sports, any arts, and all languages, was not yet prissy but meticulous, and hadn’t yet become, at heart, either a bride or a princess. The nine-year-old girl wouldn’t invent war as this simply would never occur to her.
But as it happened there had been one good book assigned by the bed-rest teacher of Advanced Maternal Age for whom the students prayed specifically every morning as Miss Vandenburgh stood with the entire assembly to recite these prayers in an abstracted “as if” manner adopted in her youth, whereby she’d simply move her lips as if talking to herself but barely listening as she had other more pressing things on her mind. A couple of prayers did seem immediate enough to hold her interest, the Our Father being one of them. There’d never been all that much wrong with the Our Father, Miss Vandenburgh decided.
There was also the Creed, the saying of “I believe in One God the Father Almighty Maker of Heaven and Earth” and so forth, most of which she still needed to entirely puzzle over. She was raised in a household where one knew snatches of prayers and sacred language, who unquestioningly performed the bodily rituals, the knowing when and how to genuflect, how one properly crosses oneself as she brought her right hand at the end back to the place in the middle of her chest where lay her bold heart beneath her warrior breastplate to remember it as a sign to herself that a perfect nine-year-old girl still resided happily within her.
She’d stand in the morning air on the shore of the Silicon Valley, as the last of the Two-Parent parents dropped off their children, almost late but not, as being late was not allowed, and think about the nuns dying in the Mother House back on the oak-covered hill behind the mission, another place that floated Off Gravity as it had been named for a city in which it did not sit. The history of a mythical place named for the stepfather of God might be something you’d want to research had you the digital tools available to these miraculous wonders who would soon inhabit the future and yet still then lived in the Land of Children.
But Miss Vandenburgh had had a run-in now with a person named Bob whose role in this school was that of Solo Man. He’d been a football player involved in something famous you can find on YouTube that’s called the Play when he was a linebacker for Cal, or maybe wide receiver. Miss Vandenburgh’s parents and grandparents had all gone to Cal, so at first it seemed that she and This Bob, maybe a tackle or running back, might find a Go Bears commonality, but he yelled at children on the playground and loudly corrected laywomen—women who were not nuns. He respected only nuns and when in the presence of the terrifying Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian Bob became cowering and servile.
His role in this school was nebulous, his job being IT, evidently, also hauling things and barking corrections. He wore cargo shorts and appeared suddenly, without notice to climb the ladder he’d dragged noisily into Miss Vandenburgh’s classroom, where he stood fiddling with a flickering light fixture as she and her eighth graders were discussing something someone had turned up on Wikipedia.
We do not use Wikipedia, the Solo Man boomed down from his ladder in the voice of God.
We do, said Miss Vandenburgh.
It’s worthless, he yelled. It hasn’t been written by experts.
See, Miss Vandenburgh told her students, people always seem to want their truth to be authorized by experts. But here’s the truer question: Who decides who’s the expert if this is not you?
The Bob of Some Play Famous in Its Day told Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian that while their real teacher was on bed rest and rapidly now coming up on her due date, Miss Vandenburgh was teaching with adulterated research tools. Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian was so furious with the maternity replacement that her pale blue eyes went into a kind of shimmying spasm, a manifestation of an anger so extreme Miss Vandenburgh had encountered it only once before in her now long life, knowing it then as now as a sign of truly psychotic rage.
Yet among the assigned books was one real book that happened to be a real book. This book was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. The main trouble with this book was that it was both long and hard.
It was, in fact, too hard said the parents of several of the brightest seventh graders, including those of the Power Girls, who’d arrived in their giant black four-wheel-drive vehicles stopping in on their way to important, if incomprehensible to Miss Vandenburgh, jobs. The girls didn’t like the book as this was a book for boys.
Good books are for everyone, she said. I can teach them all to read this book, she told Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian with supreme confidence, and in so doing teach them they can do anything that’s difficult.
What she was thinking was that all anything good was as a pomegranate, maybe ugly or rough and leathery looking on the outside, but you could split it open and inside, all this world of gleaming complicated seeds and skin and fruit.
A child could do it, she thought. Even I can do it, she told herself.
Because Treasure Island tells a story in an invented language it was even hard for her, as she probably had long undiagnosed learning issues that had always made concentration difficult, which is why she so well understood the problems of that certain class of dreamily distractible child. She thought this way: We’ll make a ship’s cabin of this book, so it came to pass that her classroom was transformed into a pirate ship of a certain vague-ish time period and the ADHD boys and a couple of girls clustered closely around her as she offered up the trick of learning language. This is an aural skill, that is, something that must be both said aloud and heard.
And they equipped themselves with a magnificent recording and one of the worst of the ADHD boys whose name was Kyle was responsible for turning it off and on as they read along stopping whenever anyone didn’t know a word or was uncertain of a reference or term in order that they, together, could research it.
The book was so long and wide and hard it was as an ocean to them and covered history as water covers the earth.
They were learning the other side of the story, that it was a counterhistory of those who were nationless outlaws, as pirates were then, as are the rich-beyond-dreams-of-avarice rich of today, stateless persons responsible to no one who lived on no street and in no town and upon no land, obeying no nation’s king and so wore their riches in the most vulgar way as barbarian display. They had no common currency and were usually men and often violent, hence their amputations and eyelessness and otherwise mangled and damaged bodies.
They were together doing the Five-Paragraph Essay of “Where a Pirate Is From.”
Women were pirates too, at times, but they tended to not survive as women and girls, because of physical vulnerabilities inherent to their species. They demanded protection of bonded societies, hence the appearance of several secret uniforms for girls and women, hence the Christmas sweater or the habit worn by the tiny ancient Filipina nuns whose bodies had become as twisted as pretzels and were cared for by their more able-bodied sisters up in the Mother House as if for their own newborn children.
See, Miss Vandenburgh said, all you ever need is one good book and you follow one thread out and discover the history of everything.
The baby was born, the teacher with Advanced Maternal Age was coming back, Saint Anonymous School was about to be liberated from the scourge that was the tenure of Miss Vandenburgh, who simply did not fit in.
She’d shown up in their settled-down place and displayed her own pirate nature. She wanted the children to know it didn’t necessarily matter that others did or did not like you, which is simply harder to endure if you had been born different from the presiding norm, which included being the worst of the ADHD boys or a girl who wasn’t necessarily popular.
And on the last day of her tenure she saw she’d accomplished what she’d probably been sent for, as they’d finished Treasure Island and had learned not only to speak like a pirate but that this was an invented language made up by a writer who’d been writing to them from the distant past and across the waters and into the Land of Childhood, where it was acceptable to sometimes misbehave as this was how you had adventures.
The children of Miss Vandenburgh’s Language Arts organized a celebratory party for her in thanks. They did this themselves without parental help or the support of the staff and colleagues, and at this party they served imaginary food and drinks and played the imaginary games they’d made up, one of them based on the one she taught them called Going to Whirl a Walmart. This is when those who belong to the Church of Stop Shopping, this being one of Miss Vandenburgh’s several new religions, will show up as a flash mob and go up and down the aisles of a megastore, buying nothing.
They do nothing that’s actually illegal, yet this behavior is sanctioned: The members of the Church do not know one another until they spy another someone with an empty shopping cart and recognize the other’s pirate nature. That’s when they get organized as a society by saying not a word and getting in line.
In real life the line of empty shopping carts grows until it blocks the aisles so real shoppers can no longer shop. This is when it becomes the kind of activist behavior called civil disobedience and this is when they tend to call the cops.
It is important, she was imparting to her students, to hold in your heart the bravery of the nine-year-old girl who is ever willing, for good and righteous reason, to be arrested.
So the children of Miss Vandenburgh’s sixth, seventh, and eighth grades got up from the lunchtime party, none of them—not one—asking permission, and one by one left, going out into the schoolyard and pushing their imaginary shopping carts this way and that into which they were putting nothing.
Then, without her prompting, they began to find one another and began to whirl the first grade and then the second, going up and down the aisles and then leaving without a word and what was happening was they were whirling every classroom in Saint Anonymous and what was Sister Mary Xavier Sebastian or even Bob to do, expel what became essentially the entire middle school now going room to room?
And Bob, as Solo Man, had barked at Miss Vandenburgh just one too many times in his big football voice, telling her once too often in the teachers’ room to move your beverage away from that laptop! as this was the property of Saint Anonymous, and she was, in thought, word, and deed, in her very person even, essentially dangerous.
That day she had, indeed, forgotten to return the laptop, as it was in her own perfect nine-year-old nature to be distracted, and so in a scene that was in her own mind as beautiful as anything that might be shown in the Play, she rolled down the automatic window of her car as she was departing the parking lot of the school that final time and yelled, “Hey Bob! Here catch,” then sailed the laptop out the window on the passenger side of her car, where it flew over his head and out of the reach of his flailing hands.
And in the story the children of Saint Anonymous would tell of the laptop, there began to be a poem about the angel bird with silver wings flying “forward with a reckless, shining wobble” taking their electronic grades and soaring away.•
Jane Vandenburgh is a native of Berkeley whose novels include Failure to Zigzag and The Physics of Sunset. Her books of memoir and personal nonfiction include The Wrong Dog Dream, A Pocket History of Sex in the 20th Century, and Burial Practices, forthcoming in 2026.
