6
Among the traditions and institutions of Amesville High School Mrs. Norberg of Room 113 was one of the most awful — in, as Boadicea liked to say, the original sense of the word. Some years before, in a tight three-way contest, she had been elected to the House of Representatives on the ticket of the American Spiritual Renewal Party. In its heyday the A.S.R.P. had been the rallying point of the Farm Belt’s most diehard undergoders, but as their first fine vision of a spiritually awakened America faded, and especially when the party’s leaders were proven to be as venal as run-of-the-mill Republicans and Democrats, its members returned to the G.O.P. or became, like Mrs. Norberg, lone voices crying in a wilderness of political error.
Mrs. Norberg had taught American History and Senior Social Studies at the time of her election, and when she returned to Iowa after her single term in Washington she taught the same subjects, and she was teaching them still, though recently she had added to the stature of her legend by having spent a two year so-called sabbatical in a rest home in Dubuque, where she was taken (much against her will) after having been inspired one day to cut off a student’s hair in the school lunchroom. Her students referred to this as the Iceberg’s second term of office. They knew she was crazy, but no one seemed to mind all that much. Since Dubuque her frenzies against gum chewers and note passers were much abated, and she limited herself to a teacher’s conventional weapon, the report card. On an average, twenty percent of each year’s graduating class failed Social Studies and had to take a make-up class to get their diplomas. All her known enemies were failed, of course, but so might be, it seemed, anyone else. Her F’s fell, like the rain, on the just and unjust alike. Some even claimed that Mrs. Norberg drew names out of a hat.
This would have been alarming enough with regard only to its gross injustice, but Boadicea had a special reason to dread the Iceberg’s class, in that it had been her Uncle Charles who had taken away Mrs. Norberg’s seat in the house. When she had expressed her misgivings to her father, he was dismissive. A majority of the people one had to deal with, Grandison declared, were lunatics. One of the chief reasons for Boadicea’s attending a public high school was precisely that she might come to terms with this unpleasant truth. As to the possibility of failing, she need not worry: Grandison had already arranged with the principal to correct any grade she received that was less than a B. All she had to do, therefore, was go to Room 113 for one hour every day and sit. She might be as reticent or as outspoken as she chose — it wouldn’t matter. But as to getting rid of Mrs. Norberg, that was not to be thought of. Incompetent she might be, or even bananas, but she was also the last certified undergoder on the high school’s faculty, and any attempt to dislodge her would have raised a major stink throughout the county and possibly across the state. In three years she would retire: till then she had to be endured.
Given such guarantees — a virtual suit of armor — Boadicea soon became the official gadfly of her class. Mrs. Norberg seemed rather more grateful than not to be supplied with a combatant who could be relied on to hold — and express — opinions that she would otherwise have been obliged to set forth herself before she could trounce them, never a very satisfactory arrangement for someone who delights in controversy. That these aberrant ideas possessed much more force and cogency as expressed by Boadicea than by the Iceberg’s usual straw-men seemed not to trouble her. Like most people of strong convictions, any contradiction registered on her consciousness as so much nonsense. Faith is a selective kind of blindness.
So it was that whenever Boadicea would be holding forth on any subject, from the reasonableness of a graduated income tax to the unreasonableness of her Uncle Charles’s recent demagogic vendetta against the A.C.L.U., a fixed smile would settle on the Iceberg’s colorless lips, her eyes would glaze, and she would knit her fingers together in a thorny little clump of self-restraint, as who would say: “Though my duty be painful, I shall perform it to the last drop of my blood.” When Boadicea wound down, Mrs. Norberg would unclasp her hands, give a little sigh, and thank Boadicea ironically for what she was sure was a “very interesting” or “very unusual” point-of-view. If this seemed insufficiently withering, she would ask others in the class what their thoughts on the matter were, calling first on anyone she suspected to be a fellow-traveller. Most students, prudently, refused to be trapped into any opinion, pro or con, but there was a small contingent, eight of the thirty-two, who could be relied on to parrot Mrs. Norberg’s established prejudices, however silly, however blatantly contrary to fact. It was always one of these who was allowed to have the last word, a strategy that had the desired effect of making Boadicea seem, even to herself, a minority of one. Also, it tended to diffuse her animosity and deflect it toward the eight reliables, whose names became a kind of baleful litany for her: Cheryl and Mitch and Reuben and Sloan, and Sandra and Susan and Judy and Joan. All the girls, except Sandra Wolf, were cheerleaders, and all, without exception, were mindless. Three of the eight — Joan Small and Cheryl and Mitch Severson — came from the wealthier farm families of the area. The Seversons and Smalls were scarcely comparable to the Whitings, but they did qualify as “gentry” and were invited as a matter of course to all the larger functions at Worry. It distressed Boadicea to find herself at odds with three of the people she was expected to be on friendly, or at least neighborly, terms with, but she couldn’t help herself. There was no need for them to suck up to Mrs. Norberg so egregiously. Their parents weren’t undergoders, not in the benighted way they were. Fanaticism on the scale of the A.S.R.P. was a relic of the past. So why did they do it? Assuming they weren’t just boot-licking. And for that matter, how did you explain someone like the Iceberg herself? Why were people like that so bent on patrolling people’s most private thoughts? For that’s all the old undergoder dread of music (etc.) amounted to. They couldn’t bear for other people to have experiences they were incapable of. Resentment. Resentment and jealousy — it was as simple as that, though no one (not even Boadicea) dared to come right out and say so. Things were a little looser lately, but not as loose as all that.
Like most well-seasoned teachers, Mrs. Norberg was a confirmed monologuist, and so Boadicea was not called upon every day to speak up for reason and sanity. Penance enough to have to be an audience to the Iceberg’s rambling reminiscences of her term in Congress (it was her special pride and unique distinction to have been present at every vote taken in those two years). These would shift, by the freest of associations, into (for instance) a cutesy-poo anecdote about the dear sweet squirrels in her back yard — Silverface, Tom-Boy, and Mittens, each of them a little philosopher-in-the-rough — and these whimseys would metamorphose, by imperceptible degrees, into diatribes against the F.D.A., the bête noir of the Farm Belt. All this — the memorabilia, the whimseys, the denunciations — would be set forth with an air of winking complicity, for it was the Iceberg’s underlying assumption that her students were sensible to their good fortune in having been assigned to her Social Studies class and not that of the wishy-washy liberal Mr. Cox.
Listening to these monologues and battering her wits against the woman’s impassive, impervious authority, Boadicea came to hate Mrs. Norberg with a hatred that would leave her, by the hour’s end, trembling with impotent fury. Literally trembling. Sheerly from a sense of self-preservation, she took to cutting classes, even though there was no way, with the bus drivers posted at the doors, to leave the building. She would lock herself inside a toilet and sit cross-legged on the stool, working calculus problems. She became openly sarcastic in class, and sneered when she was sneered at. She made a point, whenever a soliloquy commenced, of turning away from the Iceberg and staring out the window, though there was nothing to be seen but sky and clouds and the slow curve of three suspended wires. Mrs. Norberg made no other response to these provocations than to move Boadicea to the front row, where, if Boadicea chose to divert her gaze, she would simply interpose herself between the viewer and the view.