Preschool

Out of the nest, into the ring

Usually there were outdoor activities, but often we stayed inside. Lots of finger painting and construction paper and paste, which some kids said tasted pretty good. This was at the in-home preschool I attended with Linda before kindergarten. I guess it was a daycare of sorts, but we didn’t think of it that way. It was a few blocks from where we lived on Westmore Way—I think it was a couple of blocks across Duluth Street, on Wolfberry. I remember the teachers in a fuzzy pastel way—in my mind’s eye they look the way adults sound in Peanuts cartoons.

Linda’s parents and mine were best of friends when we were small. My mom drank coffee with Kathy and my dad jogged and did car things with Dean. Mom and Kathy took turns dropping us off at the preschool.

One rainy day the teachers brought out two pairs of leather boxing gloves, one red, the other black. They had thick cream-colored laces. They seemed really big and one of the teachers helped lace the red gloves onto my fists. The children and teachers formed a circle around me and a boy who wore the black gloves. They must be big enough and cushy enough that we could safely slug at each other, I was trusting.

One of the teachers said, “Go ahead, Steven,” so I took the first swing, made it a roundhouse with my fist clenched inside the big soft red leather glove. The boy, toe-headed and a little bigger and taller than me, caught my punch on the left side of his face and I was surprised when the big soft boxing glove didn’t really seem to protect my fist or his face much at all. The boy’s head snapped back and he went to the floor, stringy snot and blood smearing the black gloves he pressed to his face.

Both teachers rushed into the circle, one to the boy bleeding and crying on the floor, the other to me. She pulled my shoulders to break up the fight that was done already and that I had never wanted, and I was being scolded for doing what I’d thought they wanted me to.

All the kids stood, frozen in the circle around me. They stared at me or at the boy curled on the floor. Wide-eyed, they all looked afraid—even Linda—and they couldn’t see that I was frightened, too.

In the spring there was a graduation ceremony. A small arched bridge of wood was positioned under the big tree in the garden area. Folding chairs for an audience of parents. The teachers handed out two styles of caps made of construction paper. I thought there must be one kind of cap for the girls and another kind for the boys. Linda got one of the yellow caps that was just a ring of construction paper like a crown with a big paper square glued on top. I was given a powdery blue cap that was a pointed cone made of a single large sheet of rolled construction paper. It was too small to balance on my head but it had two strings at the wide end, and one of the teachers tied them into a bow under my chin.

Another boy was holding a cap like Linda’s and I told him he had a girls’ hat. He looked confused, asked one of the teachers, and she said he had the right one, so now I felt confused and wondered why some of us had to wear dunce hats instead of the nice ones. Then Linda told me that just the kids who were going to kindergarten next year had caps like hers. They were going to walk across the bridge. The kids wearing the hats like mine had to stay on this side of the bridge. But I wanted to have a hat like Linda’s. I wanted to walk across the bridge with Linda and go to kindergarten with her and the smart kids.