This Is a Piece of Chalk by Lisa Meltzer Penn
Alison remembers a school exercise set while the PE teacher was playing substitute in her sixth-grade Composition class.
At first bell, the door at the end of the hall swings open and I am swept in a crush of other middle-schoolers into sixth-grade Composition class. Room 11 is half the size of a normal classroom, like a stage magician's lovely assistant climbed into a box and was sawn in two, leaving us with the bottom. Presto change-o. I imagine the top half someplace else with the assistant smiling and waving at the audience. Elementary school has been disappeared and Language Arts divided into Literature and Composition.
I greet the teacher and slip between rows of narrow half-desks bolted to plastic chairs just big enough to hold a sixth-grader and her black-and-white composition book. He looks up as I pass. "Good morning, Alison." I slide into my seat in the back just before second bell. We are twenty-four magician's rabbits back in our hats.
At the front, Coach Wilson clears his throat. Most periods he is a PE teacher, buoyant and at ease roving the wide-open gym. Later in the day I'll have him again for PE, where we'll run skill-building drills on the court: dribbling a ball, counting out steps, leaping for the basket. The girls' group is learning how to do a layup. It takes time and practice, Coach says. The hand and foot work will eventually become muscle memory.
The principal recruited him at the last minute to cover our Composition class until they could find someone to replace Ms. Russo, who didn't show up the first day of school. We heard from the seventh graders she'd gotten married and moved away.
Coach clasps the day's lesson plan as if it were a playbook and looks around the room. He's composed of broad shoulders, thick neck, a bristly salt-and-pepper buzz cut, and the smell of coffee and Certs breath mints. The walls press in on him. He looks too restless to sit in the swivel chair behind the teacher's desk.
It's questionable whether I should be in this room, either. We're a hodge-podge of regular, remedial, and advanced sixth-graders, with one or two older kids thrown in who didn't fit in other classes or had to repeat, including my friend Tara's brother Theo. Theo sits in the desk in front of me where his thick messy hair blocks my view.
Coach pops a Certs into his mouth and grabs a stick of chalk from the metal ledge of the blackboard. "All right, class." He holds the chalk high above his head, as if about to give us an on-court strategy. "Today, we're learning how to write an essay." He examines the chalk in his hand. "We'll use this as our topic. Take out your composition books. Write: 'This is a piece of chalk.' That's your topic sentence."
Some of the boys groan.
"This lesson will demonstrate how to structure a five-paragraph essay, beginning with a simple paragraph version."
I see Coach Wilson's eyes tracking left to right over the lesson plan and guess that he is reading straight from Ms. Russo's notes.
"We'll write a topic or thesis sentence, followed by five supporting sentences, each describing a different aspect of the subject from one of the five senses, and wind down with a concluding sentence that restates the opening."
While he's talking, the heating system kicks into high gear and pumps in enough hot air for a full-size room, like a bellows trying to expand the desks, the chairs, the language arts, and all our young minds to full capacity. I turn around to crank open a window a couple of inches and release some of the excess heat. When I face front again, cold air from outside whispers around the base of my neck.
On the blackboard, Coach Wilson uses the subject of our practice essay to write:
Of all the subjects we could explore, we're writing about chalk. I doubt that was the example in Ms. Russo's lesson plan. But she doesn't exist anymore. They said she's Mrs. Bronsky now. Presto change-o.
Coach Wilson perches on the edge of the desk that used to be hers. "Now, say you want to describe this piece of chalk to a friend who isn't in the room and has never seen chalk. Use all your senses. What does it look like, what does it sound like, how does it feel and smell and taste?"
He hands the stick of chalk to a kid in the front row and picks up another one. "Let's begin with sight. Tell your friend what a piece of chalk looks like."
Theo's shaggy head jerks up and down like he can't wait to get started. In the seat beside me, Janice rolls her eyes and mouths, "Spaz." Janice is an instigator. She acts friendly only when she wants to cheat off your paper. I don't respond.
Instead I conjure up Tara, who I wish were next to me. All right, Tara, I think, let me tell you about this ordinary, usual, everyday piece of chalk.
This will not turn out to be an ordinary or usual day.
A piece of chalk is chalk-white and dust-dry. It's formed into a cylinder, the same on both ends except where one end is sharpened more than the other from pressing against the blackboard. It is approximately the size, shape, and color of a cigarette, which could be smoked instead of written with.
What else is there to say about a piece of chalk's appearance? The sample piece is traveling around the room. It's about four inches long and fairly new from the box. By the end of this lesson, Coach Wilson's piece at the blackboard will be half worn away. Chalk has a job to do. It's a writing utensil. It's made from limestone, ground white dust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Chalk dust gets all over your fingers. It floats through the air and makes you sneeze.
"Just write what you see for now," Coach reminds us.
When the school year began in September, he wrote his name in chalk across the top of the blackboard. Coach Wilson. He drew a box around it so it wouldn't be erased or washed away by the janitor at night. It's been up there over a month.
Every time you make the chalk say your name or draw a diagram or write a sentence, it gives away another piece of itself.
He scratches his chalk along the blackboard, writing the next instruction:
Coach consults his lesson plan again. "Moving on," he says. "What does a piece of chalk sound like? Pass the chalk to the next person, please. Don't hold onto it."
A kid in the second row tilts his head to the sample chalk like it will whisper what to write in his composition book.
A stick of chalk is made of powder formed into power, the powder finer than grains of sand. Though grains of sand don't have legs to walk or mouths to talk, I read that sand dunes can migrate across a desert and sing as they go. If you were to slide down a sand dune, causing friction with your body, the dune might sing for you. Chalk sounds like a thing with no mouth trying to learn to speak. It's not exactly singing. It's not exactly meaning. Like the long wails of trains in the distance when I'm lying awake at night, the dog sprawled at the end of the bed, sighing.
My seat has a view of the whole classroom - all backs of heads and limbs. A girl is drumming the piece of chalk against the black and white cover of her composition book, a muffled thumping.
If a piece of chalk fell to the floor, and no one was there to hear it, would it still make a sound?
"What does it feel like?" Coach Wilson asks, the top of his head like a bristly eraser. He furrows his brow while posing this question, like this is important to consider. Or maybe he means the feelings of the chalk, as if the chalk itself might weigh in on this lesson. I furrow my brow like Coach's and write: How do you feel about all this, Chalk? Anything to say?
Last year, in elementary school, we watched a movie about a boy named Kevin who was blind. It showed how he found his way around his house, arranging everything in the same place every time, and tapping the floor before him with a white-tipped cane, feeling his way.
After the movie we took turns wearing a blindfold and being led around the classroom by a buddy. I was fascinated by the soft cloth folded over my eyelids, a comforting sensation of being safe and tucked in. And we read about Helen Keller, who couldn't see or hear. To simulate the loss of one of two senses, we chose either to learn Braille or sign language. (Helen had to have someone sign into her hand, a combo of the two.) Most of my classmates voted for sign language. I went with the smaller Braille group. Reading and writing had always come easily to me, but to my surprise, I found it nearly impossible to interpret the pattern of raised dots beneath my fingertips. Even when I cheated and looked I couldn't make sense of the tactile alphabet.
Coach looks around the room. "Come on now, class, you can do this! What does the chalk feel like? Someone give me an example."
Next to me, Janice gets the chalk, barely touching it before passing it like a hot potato to me. It's dry on my fingers. This is the driest assignment ever. Chalk is the driest thing there is. The finger marks of every other kid in this class are on it. Like I'm holding all their hands, leading them blindly about.
I raise my hand. I don't want to but it's habit, and no one else volunteers.
Coach calls on me. "It's cool and smooth along the edges," I say. "Until you get to the ends, the writing surface, where it's rougher."
"Perfect, Alison. Thank you. Everybody, write your impressions in your composition books."
Chalk is made from dust, white dust. It's dusty. We'll all be dust someday. The chalk smells... chalky. Yes, that's true. How does it taste? Forget it, I'm not tasting chalk. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I wouldn't have expected touch to be the hardest part of this exercise. It's the most basic, the one I could do with my eyes closed. Okay, then, I'll close my eyes. Hopefully no one is looking my way.
The stick is very lightweight. The sharp edge fits in the groove of my lifeline. My lifeline is long. The chalk is a white-tipped cane. The ends are round, the sides smooth. Chalk grounds you, increases friction so you don't slip. Pool players use it on the tips of their cues. Gymnasts coat their hands with chalk. I tip it around the bowl of my palm.
"And smell," Coach Wilson says. "That's the oldest sense, the most primal." The word glistens on his lip. "What does a piece of chalk smell like? Write it in your book. Compose it."
There are some smells that take up happy residence in my nose. The earthy aroma of the coffee my mom brews every morning. My grandmother's chicken fricassee. Baking apples. The crisp scent of fall leaves.
Others get stuck inside. If you clapped two erasers together like applauding hands, you would get a cloud of dust that gets in your eyes and nose and throat and makes you cough. If you went up to my grandparents' attic with its shelves of dusty old books and crumbling letters, the winter coats stored in mothballs, the cobwebs in the corners, the particles of those things would lodge in your sinuses and brain, stinging your eyes for days. Even so, when we visit I still ask permission to go up to the attic.
The chalk hardly smells like anything. Just salt and a whiff of earth.
Coach takes up his piece of chalk and writes Taste on the board. The chalk scratches along the black expanse, eating itself as it grinds along, writing its own death sentence.
"What would a piece of chalk taste like?" he asks. "Describe it to your friend."
He looks up and catches our expressions. "You can just use your imaginations for this one."
I tap Theo on the shoulder. "Here," I say, holding up the chalk. "Your turn."
It's in his hand when I let go, but he hasn't grabbed it all the way and it slips and breaks into three pieces: beginning, middle, and end.
"Oops," Theo says.
"That's all right," Coach Wilson says. "One thing we have is more chalk." He walks over with a blue stick and hands it to me again.
"Lick it!" Janice hisses. "I dare you."
Janice is instigating. We're on taste, not sound, so I pretend not to hear her. Then, without exactly deciding, I take her dare. I break off a piece of the new blue stick, which hasn't touched the floor or everyone's hands, and pop it on my tongue.
It's a little salty, how earth must taste. Calcium carbonate, the elemental name whispers as the chalk changes on my tongue, becoming less taste than sensation, less dry than drying out. Like I'm a desert sand dune, a camel walking down my spine.
"Mmmm," I say, and pass the rest of the blue stick to Janice. "Try it yourself."
Janice laughs loudly. "You ate the chalk?" Then for everyone else's benefit, "Alison ate the chalk."
She flicks it away from her.
The brittle stick arcs up in slow motion. A breeze comes through the open window and gives me a chill. Coach Wilson says something I don't hear. The chalk reaches the top of its arc and pauses.
All at once time catches itself and the chalk hits the floor with a clatter and rolls between Theo's feet. He startles. His arms fly out and punch the air to protect himself from any further projectiles. I hear myself take a sharp breath as his hand bangs the half-desk in counterpoint, using a different toolkit than words and paragraphs.
I have no idea what's happening. What I can't see and don't know at the time, what Tara will explain later, is the bolt of electricity that's begun cycling wildly through his brain in a relay race of the senses: first blocking out his sense of sight, then passing the baton to sound, so he can't even hear the strange noises he's begun making, then touch, then smell, then taste. One by one they disappear, then pop back before the next goes dark.
It must be a magic trick. The moment stretches out and out, until at last Theo kicks the chalk away. He falls out of his half desk, a rabbit loosed from its magician's hat.
Coach Wilson grabs the wall phone and calls the office. Then he gets down on the floor with Theo and while he's trying to cradle his head, Theo punches him in the face. Coach catches his arms and holds them down.
The noises don't sound human. Theo's eyes are stretched wide. The smell of chalk fills the room and I realize I'm clutching my piece to my face. "Don't hurt him," I squeak out with my dust-dry tongue.
The school nurse bursts through the door, and the two of them hold him until he stops fighting and his eyes stop rolling back in his head.
"It's okay," the nurse reassures us. "Theo has epilepsy. He had a seizure but he should be okay. Probably he won't even remember this."
But it's not okay. He was a wounded rabbit kicking and flailing against its fate. Now he's chalk white and still. He looks dead. The idea that he won't remember makes it worse. We'll remember. What will we tell him?
Two paramedics arrive in the door and instruct the other side of the room to make way. Janice drags her half-desk away from me and the stretcher barrels toward the back, splitting the room down the middle. We are halved again.
Tara never said anything about her brother having epilepsy. Maybe it's something you don't talk about before it happens. What do you see, what do you hear, what do you smell and taste and feel? Describe it to someone who's not in the room.
Tara will describe a snow globe all shook up. The room around Theo stilled. The electric seizures flying through his brain from one sense to another - blind and then deaf, then without the sense of smell, then taste, and his arm hitting the half-desk without feeling it. And hitting Coach Wilson in the face, giving him a black eye. She'll even explain the quick jerk of the head that signaled what was coming, before the chalk ever made its way to him. She'll explain it all. The senses gone dark, quiet, unfeeling, blank, and tasteless. Time crunching in on itself.
Years later, this is what I will remember of sixth-grade language arts: Coach Wilson's lesson about chalk, the chalk falling and breaking, Tara's brother losing his senses, and everything being erased.
The end of period bell rings.
The next day Theo's desk is empty.
Then it's the weekend.
By Monday morning's first bell, the lesson about writing a paragraph has been wiped from the board. In fact, the whole board has been washed clean, including Coach Wilson's name with the box drawn around it. The dust from the ledge has been cleaned away. New pieces of white chalk are lined up end to end in the groove, ready to be transformed.
At the second bell Theo comes through the door to Room 11 and slides back into his desk in front of me. He's gotten a haircut. I can finally see around his head. Nobody mentions what happened the last time he was here. Even Janice is oddly silent, as if the incident really has been forgotten. Like we're all erasers. Like we could all be erased.
The heat kicks on. The room is trying to expand again. And a new teacher stands in the front. She writes her name on the board before turning to face us. "I understand you've been writing about chalk." She arches an eyebrow on the last word. "Let's finish up that lesson and move on to your own essay topics."
We began with a topic sentence. This is a piece of chalk. Here's how it looks, sounds, feels, tastes and smells. The final section is supposed to restate the topic sentence. I should wrap it up with, "Now we know what a piece of chalk looks like, sounds like, feels like, smells like and tastes like, and that is what a piece of chalk is and how we experience it in the world."
But why end up exactly where we began? Wasn't the chalk meant to write its way to something new?
I believe there's a sixth sense in the sixth grade, at least here in Room 11. A sense Coach Wilson never thought to ask for and wasn't in the lesson plan: what that piece of chalk or a pencil or a pen can write. Not about itself but about inhabiting your own five senses and your life.
In Coach's gym class it's the measured steps and rhythmic bouncing of the basketball coming together in one smooth perfect motion when you go airborne. In Room 11's Composition class, it's coded in the scrapes and taps. Smooth on the paper or the blackboard if you're writing cursive, a series of taps if printing. Chalk, chalk, chalk. It has an almost metal tang. A new stick from the box. Passed around to the whole class, held by each hand, sniffed by each nose, held to an ear, licked, a jumping-off point for something other than what you thought. What disappears. What joins back together, sometime, somewhere.
Any conclusion must mirror its beginning.
This is a piece of chalk. A piece of chalk is white, and tube shaped and dull-finished. A piece of chalk makes a clanging sound when it hits the floor or gets tapped on a desk. Tap it against another piece of chalk and it's a little cymbal making music. A piece of chalk feels dry and smooth. The edge where it breaks is sharp. A piece of chalk smells salty like the earth. A piece of chalk tastes... well, we aren't really going to taste it anymore, we'll just imagine that one. Dry on the tongue, like dirt.
A piece of chalk falling to the ground can set off a change, a transformation. It can turn all the senses to fireworks in your brain, like magic. It can propel you forward.
When the chalk has written its own demise.
When the classroom is gone, lost to the snow globe of time.
When the stage magician waves his wand and you are somewhere else in time, no longer the precocious student, no longer an eleven year old in Room 11. You, too, are transformed, divided, expanded, and propelled into your smiling, waving future. And now, presto change-o, it's time to step back out of the box, lovely assistant.
A stick of colored chalk rolls to a stop between your feet. You are on the driveway with your own children. You lean down, pick up the chalk, go down on your knees with them, and begin to write.
This is a piece of chalk.
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I greet the teacher and slip between rows of narrow half-desks bolted to plastic chairs just big enough to hold a sixth-grader and her black-and-white composition book. He looks up as I pass. "Good morning, Alison." I slide into my seat in the back just before second bell. We are twenty-four magician's rabbits back in our hats.
At the front, Coach Wilson clears his throat. Most periods he is a PE teacher, buoyant and at ease roving the wide-open gym. Later in the day I'll have him again for PE, where we'll run skill-building drills on the court: dribbling a ball, counting out steps, leaping for the basket. The girls' group is learning how to do a layup. It takes time and practice, Coach says. The hand and foot work will eventually become muscle memory.
The principal recruited him at the last minute to cover our Composition class until they could find someone to replace Ms. Russo, who didn't show up the first day of school. We heard from the seventh graders she'd gotten married and moved away.
Coach clasps the day's lesson plan as if it were a playbook and looks around the room. He's composed of broad shoulders, thick neck, a bristly salt-and-pepper buzz cut, and the smell of coffee and Certs breath mints. The walls press in on him. He looks too restless to sit in the swivel chair behind the teacher's desk.
It's questionable whether I should be in this room, either. We're a hodge-podge of regular, remedial, and advanced sixth-graders, with one or two older kids thrown in who didn't fit in other classes or had to repeat, including my friend Tara's brother Theo. Theo sits in the desk in front of me where his thick messy hair blocks my view.
Coach pops a Certs into his mouth and grabs a stick of chalk from the metal ledge of the blackboard. "All right, class." He holds the chalk high above his head, as if about to give us an on-court strategy. "Today, we're learning how to write an essay." He examines the chalk in his hand. "We'll use this as our topic. Take out your composition books. Write: 'This is a piece of chalk.' That's your topic sentence."
Some of the boys groan.
"This lesson will demonstrate how to structure a five-paragraph essay, beginning with a simple paragraph version."
I see Coach Wilson's eyes tracking left to right over the lesson plan and guess that he is reading straight from Ms. Russo's notes.
"We'll write a topic or thesis sentence, followed by five supporting sentences, each describing a different aspect of the subject from one of the five senses, and wind down with a concluding sentence that restates the opening."
While he's talking, the heating system kicks into high gear and pumps in enough hot air for a full-size room, like a bellows trying to expand the desks, the chairs, the language arts, and all our young minds to full capacity. I turn around to crank open a window a couple of inches and release some of the excess heat. When I face front again, cold air from outside whispers around the base of my neck.
On the blackboard, Coach Wilson uses the subject of our practice essay to write:
TOPIC SENTENCE
This is a piece of chalk.
Of all the subjects we could explore, we're writing about chalk. I doubt that was the example in Ms. Russo's lesson plan. But she doesn't exist anymore. They said she's Mrs. Bronsky now. Presto change-o.
Coach Wilson perches on the edge of the desk that used to be hers. "Now, say you want to describe this piece of chalk to a friend who isn't in the room and has never seen chalk. Use all your senses. What does it look like, what does it sound like, how does it feel and smell and taste?"
He hands the stick of chalk to a kid in the front row and picks up another one. "Let's begin with sight. Tell your friend what a piece of chalk looks like."
Theo's shaggy head jerks up and down like he can't wait to get started. In the seat beside me, Janice rolls her eyes and mouths, "Spaz." Janice is an instigator. She acts friendly only when she wants to cheat off your paper. I don't respond.
Instead I conjure up Tara, who I wish were next to me. All right, Tara, I think, let me tell you about this ordinary, usual, everyday piece of chalk.
This will not turn out to be an ordinary or usual day.
SENSE #1: SIGHT
Write what you see.
A piece of chalk is chalk-white and dust-dry. It's formed into a cylinder, the same on both ends except where one end is sharpened more than the other from pressing against the blackboard. It is approximately the size, shape, and color of a cigarette, which could be smoked instead of written with.
What else is there to say about a piece of chalk's appearance? The sample piece is traveling around the room. It's about four inches long and fairly new from the box. By the end of this lesson, Coach Wilson's piece at the blackboard will be half worn away. Chalk has a job to do. It's a writing utensil. It's made from limestone, ground white dust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Chalk dust gets all over your fingers. It floats through the air and makes you sneeze.
"Just write what you see for now," Coach reminds us.
When the school year began in September, he wrote his name in chalk across the top of the blackboard. Coach Wilson. He drew a box around it so it wouldn't be erased or washed away by the janitor at night. It's been up there over a month.
Every time you make the chalk say your name or draw a diagram or write a sentence, it gives away another piece of itself.
He scratches his chalk along the blackboard, writing the next instruction:
SENSE #2: SOUND
Write what you hear.
Coach consults his lesson plan again. "Moving on," he says. "What does a piece of chalk sound like? Pass the chalk to the next person, please. Don't hold onto it."
A kid in the second row tilts his head to the sample chalk like it will whisper what to write in his composition book.
A stick of chalk is made of powder formed into power, the powder finer than grains of sand. Though grains of sand don't have legs to walk or mouths to talk, I read that sand dunes can migrate across a desert and sing as they go. If you were to slide down a sand dune, causing friction with your body, the dune might sing for you. Chalk sounds like a thing with no mouth trying to learn to speak. It's not exactly singing. It's not exactly meaning. Like the long wails of trains in the distance when I'm lying awake at night, the dog sprawled at the end of the bed, sighing.
My seat has a view of the whole classroom - all backs of heads and limbs. A girl is drumming the piece of chalk against the black and white cover of her composition book, a muffled thumping.
If a piece of chalk fell to the floor, and no one was there to hear it, would it still make a sound?
SENSE #3: TOUCH:
Write what you feel.
"What does it feel like?" Coach Wilson asks, the top of his head like a bristly eraser. He furrows his brow while posing this question, like this is important to consider. Or maybe he means the feelings of the chalk, as if the chalk itself might weigh in on this lesson. I furrow my brow like Coach's and write: How do you feel about all this, Chalk? Anything to say?
Last year, in elementary school, we watched a movie about a boy named Kevin who was blind. It showed how he found his way around his house, arranging everything in the same place every time, and tapping the floor before him with a white-tipped cane, feeling his way.
After the movie we took turns wearing a blindfold and being led around the classroom by a buddy. I was fascinated by the soft cloth folded over my eyelids, a comforting sensation of being safe and tucked in. And we read about Helen Keller, who couldn't see or hear. To simulate the loss of one of two senses, we chose either to learn Braille or sign language. (Helen had to have someone sign into her hand, a combo of the two.) Most of my classmates voted for sign language. I went with the smaller Braille group. Reading and writing had always come easily to me, but to my surprise, I found it nearly impossible to interpret the pattern of raised dots beneath my fingertips. Even when I cheated and looked I couldn't make sense of the tactile alphabet.
Coach looks around the room. "Come on now, class, you can do this! What does the chalk feel like? Someone give me an example."
Next to me, Janice gets the chalk, barely touching it before passing it like a hot potato to me. It's dry on my fingers. This is the driest assignment ever. Chalk is the driest thing there is. The finger marks of every other kid in this class are on it. Like I'm holding all their hands, leading them blindly about.
I raise my hand. I don't want to but it's habit, and no one else volunteers.
Coach calls on me. "It's cool and smooth along the edges," I say. "Until you get to the ends, the writing surface, where it's rougher."
"Perfect, Alison. Thank you. Everybody, write your impressions in your composition books."
Chalk is made from dust, white dust. It's dusty. We'll all be dust someday. The chalk smells... chalky. Yes, that's true. How does it taste? Forget it, I'm not tasting chalk. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I wouldn't have expected touch to be the hardest part of this exercise. It's the most basic, the one I could do with my eyes closed. Okay, then, I'll close my eyes. Hopefully no one is looking my way.
The stick is very lightweight. The sharp edge fits in the groove of my lifeline. My lifeline is long. The chalk is a white-tipped cane. The ends are round, the sides smooth. Chalk grounds you, increases friction so you don't slip. Pool players use it on the tips of their cues. Gymnasts coat their hands with chalk. I tip it around the bowl of my palm.
SENSE #4: SMELL
Write what a piece of chalk smells like.
"And smell," Coach Wilson says. "That's the oldest sense, the most primal." The word glistens on his lip. "What does a piece of chalk smell like? Write it in your book. Compose it."
There are some smells that take up happy residence in my nose. The earthy aroma of the coffee my mom brews every morning. My grandmother's chicken fricassee. Baking apples. The crisp scent of fall leaves.
Others get stuck inside. If you clapped two erasers together like applauding hands, you would get a cloud of dust that gets in your eyes and nose and throat and makes you cough. If you went up to my grandparents' attic with its shelves of dusty old books and crumbling letters, the winter coats stored in mothballs, the cobwebs in the corners, the particles of those things would lodge in your sinuses and brain, stinging your eyes for days. Even so, when we visit I still ask permission to go up to the attic.
The chalk hardly smells like anything. Just salt and a whiff of earth.
SENSE #5: TASTE
Write what a piece of chalk tastes like.
Coach takes up his piece of chalk and writes Taste on the board. The chalk scratches along the black expanse, eating itself as it grinds along, writing its own death sentence.
"What would a piece of chalk taste like?" he asks. "Describe it to your friend."
He looks up and catches our expressions. "You can just use your imaginations for this one."
I tap Theo on the shoulder. "Here," I say, holding up the chalk. "Your turn."
It's in his hand when I let go, but he hasn't grabbed it all the way and it slips and breaks into three pieces: beginning, middle, and end.
"Oops," Theo says.
"That's all right," Coach Wilson says. "One thing we have is more chalk." He walks over with a blue stick and hands it to me again.
"Lick it!" Janice hisses. "I dare you."
Janice is instigating. We're on taste, not sound, so I pretend not to hear her. Then, without exactly deciding, I take her dare. I break off a piece of the new blue stick, which hasn't touched the floor or everyone's hands, and pop it on my tongue.
It's a little salty, how earth must taste. Calcium carbonate, the elemental name whispers as the chalk changes on my tongue, becoming less taste than sensation, less dry than drying out. Like I'm a desert sand dune, a camel walking down my spine.
"Mmmm," I say, and pass the rest of the blue stick to Janice. "Try it yourself."
Janice laughs loudly. "You ate the chalk?" Then for everyone else's benefit, "Alison ate the chalk."
She flicks it away from her.
The brittle stick arcs up in slow motion. A breeze comes through the open window and gives me a chill. Coach Wilson says something I don't hear. The chalk reaches the top of its arc and pauses.
All at once time catches itself and the chalk hits the floor with a clatter and rolls between Theo's feet. He startles. His arms fly out and punch the air to protect himself from any further projectiles. I hear myself take a sharp breath as his hand bangs the half-desk in counterpoint, using a different toolkit than words and paragraphs.
I have no idea what's happening. What I can't see and don't know at the time, what Tara will explain later, is the bolt of electricity that's begun cycling wildly through his brain in a relay race of the senses: first blocking out his sense of sight, then passing the baton to sound, so he can't even hear the strange noises he's begun making, then touch, then smell, then taste. One by one they disappear, then pop back before the next goes dark.
It must be a magic trick. The moment stretches out and out, until at last Theo kicks the chalk away. He falls out of his half desk, a rabbit loosed from its magician's hat.
Coach Wilson grabs the wall phone and calls the office. Then he gets down on the floor with Theo and while he's trying to cradle his head, Theo punches him in the face. Coach catches his arms and holds them down.
The noises don't sound human. Theo's eyes are stretched wide. The smell of chalk fills the room and I realize I'm clutching my piece to my face. "Don't hurt him," I squeak out with my dust-dry tongue.
The school nurse bursts through the door, and the two of them hold him until he stops fighting and his eyes stop rolling back in his head.
"It's okay," the nurse reassures us. "Theo has epilepsy. He had a seizure but he should be okay. Probably he won't even remember this."
But it's not okay. He was a wounded rabbit kicking and flailing against its fate. Now he's chalk white and still. He looks dead. The idea that he won't remember makes it worse. We'll remember. What will we tell him?
Two paramedics arrive in the door and instruct the other side of the room to make way. Janice drags her half-desk away from me and the stretcher barrels toward the back, splitting the room down the middle. We are halved again.
Tara never said anything about her brother having epilepsy. Maybe it's something you don't talk about before it happens. What do you see, what do you hear, what do you smell and taste and feel? Describe it to someone who's not in the room.
Tara will describe a snow globe all shook up. The room around Theo stilled. The electric seizures flying through his brain from one sense to another - blind and then deaf, then without the sense of smell, then taste, and his arm hitting the half-desk without feeling it. And hitting Coach Wilson in the face, giving him a black eye. She'll even explain the quick jerk of the head that signaled what was coming, before the chalk ever made its way to him. She'll explain it all. The senses gone dark, quiet, unfeeling, blank, and tasteless. Time crunching in on itself.
Years later, this is what I will remember of sixth-grade language arts: Coach Wilson's lesson about chalk, the chalk falling and breaking, Tara's brother losing his senses, and everything being erased.
The end of period bell rings.
The next day Theo's desk is empty.
Then it's the weekend.
By Monday morning's first bell, the lesson about writing a paragraph has been wiped from the board. In fact, the whole board has been washed clean, including Coach Wilson's name with the box drawn around it. The dust from the ledge has been cleaned away. New pieces of white chalk are lined up end to end in the groove, ready to be transformed.
At the second bell Theo comes through the door to Room 11 and slides back into his desk in front of me. He's gotten a haircut. I can finally see around his head. Nobody mentions what happened the last time he was here. Even Janice is oddly silent, as if the incident really has been forgotten. Like we're all erasers. Like we could all be erased.
The heat kicks on. The room is trying to expand again. And a new teacher stands in the front. She writes her name on the board before turning to face us. "I understand you've been writing about chalk." She arches an eyebrow on the last word. "Let's finish up that lesson and move on to your own essay topics."
CONCLUSION
Write a concluding sentence that restates the opening.
We began with a topic sentence. This is a piece of chalk. Here's how it looks, sounds, feels, tastes and smells. The final section is supposed to restate the topic sentence. I should wrap it up with, "Now we know what a piece of chalk looks like, sounds like, feels like, smells like and tastes like, and that is what a piece of chalk is and how we experience it in the world."
But why end up exactly where we began? Wasn't the chalk meant to write its way to something new?
I believe there's a sixth sense in the sixth grade, at least here in Room 11. A sense Coach Wilson never thought to ask for and wasn't in the lesson plan: what that piece of chalk or a pencil or a pen can write. Not about itself but about inhabiting your own five senses and your life.
In Coach's gym class it's the measured steps and rhythmic bouncing of the basketball coming together in one smooth perfect motion when you go airborne. In Room 11's Composition class, it's coded in the scrapes and taps. Smooth on the paper or the blackboard if you're writing cursive, a series of taps if printing. Chalk, chalk, chalk. It has an almost metal tang. A new stick from the box. Passed around to the whole class, held by each hand, sniffed by each nose, held to an ear, licked, a jumping-off point for something other than what you thought. What disappears. What joins back together, sometime, somewhere.
Any conclusion must mirror its beginning.
This is a piece of chalk. A piece of chalk is white, and tube shaped and dull-finished. A piece of chalk makes a clanging sound when it hits the floor or gets tapped on a desk. Tap it against another piece of chalk and it's a little cymbal making music. A piece of chalk feels dry and smooth. The edge where it breaks is sharp. A piece of chalk smells salty like the earth. A piece of chalk tastes... well, we aren't really going to taste it anymore, we'll just imagine that one. Dry on the tongue, like dirt.
A piece of chalk falling to the ground can set off a change, a transformation. It can turn all the senses to fireworks in your brain, like magic. It can propel you forward.
When the chalk has written its own demise.
When the classroom is gone, lost to the snow globe of time.
When the stage magician waves his wand and you are somewhere else in time, no longer the precocious student, no longer an eleven year old in Room 11. You, too, are transformed, divided, expanded, and propelled into your smiling, waving future. And now, presto change-o, it's time to step back out of the box, lovely assistant.
A stick of colored chalk rolls to a stop between your feet. You are on the driveway with your own children. You lean down, pick up the chalk, go down on your knees with them, and begin to write.
This is a piece of chalk.
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