Story Focus: "Watermelon" by Mary Miller

I was a choir geek in high school. Our show uniforms luckily bore no sequins (I'm not as partial to wearing sequins as Tim Jones-Yelvington), but none the less, every year the show tuxedo, the bright red and black stripes of the vest shimmering, the jazz hands, the choreography. It was really nothing like you see on Glee, and for that, I'm glad.

My choir teacher was the stereotypical effeminate male choir teacher. He was not afraid to get involved in the lives of his students, to care about them, to invite them over for voice coaching. In high school, my shoes tended to be on the shaggy side. I would wear Chuck Taylors until the canvas was in tatters. Not because I was poor (though we were), but because that shit was punk rawk in the mid-late 90s. I remember once my teacher, we'll call him Mac since his last name was particularly Scottish, quietly took me aside one day after class and asked me if I needed new shoes.

"Oh. No," I said, "I actually have a new pair at home. I just like these."

Mac looked doubtful, so I wore them the next day to prove the point, and promptly returned to the old and tattered pair until they completely fell apart.

That's just the kind of guy Mac was. But of course, when you have that kind of guy teaching at a high school, you get the stories. I was once told buy someone that they'd gone over to Mac's house for something and saw him in the pool implicatingly close with a boy. I was told by another someone to keep my guard up during my conversations with Mac in an independent study class I had with him for music theory.

You get stories like Mary Miller's "Watermelon" in They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, that begins:

Mr. Fuller was the new choir teacher. He had a round face and a love of boys.Before we sang, he had us lie on our backs and breathe in the icy waters.Feel the waves lick your neck, he’d say, the sting of peppermint in theback of your throat. Your boat’s collapsed and you didn’t think you’dneed a life preserver. Feel the pressure build. It builds and builds, likewhen you love someone so much your heart could burst, your heart could fucking burst under the weight of it.

After he drowned us, he’d make us form a train and rub each other’s shoulders. This went on for months and nobody saying anything.

Miller never goes so far as to say any concrete details about Mr. Fuller, and the story takes a turn to focus more on the relationship between the narrator and another troubled boy. But it's the implication in that last line that brings back all these memories of high school and Mac and how he straddled the teacher/student relationship. "Straddled" was probably a bad choice of wording there.

Mac saw my mother's obituary in the paper a couple days after she died. He made the hour drive to the parlor where her body was shown. He hugged me. He hugged me then, and he hugged me in high school--important moments like after not placing with a solo at Regionals, my breakdown in the hallway after, like after graduation. I never thought anything of it then, and I don't now. Before he left the showing, he extended his hand to shake, and when I took it, there was a $50 bill in it.

"Don't spend this on bills," he said. "Don't spend it on groceries or tuition or anything responsible. Spend it on something that'll help you forget for awhile."

He hugged me again, gave again his condolences, and left the parlor. That's the last time I saw Mac. With the money, I did what you'd expect me to do, what he probably expected me to do. I got to forget everything for a night, and I'll always thank Mac for that.

I know you're probably thinking it. You're probably thinking I'm going to turn this post on its head and tell you next how I saw him in the news a year or 2 later, accused of sexual misconduct or something of the sort. But that's not what happened. Mac is still alive, and perhaps retired now. I could pay him a visit. I probably should. Mac meant a lot to me when I needed a mentor to mean a lot to me.

I'm not sure why we were so cruel in high school, to ourselves or to those who truly want to help us become more than who we were then. I'm sure if Mac is still teaching, he still gets all the same stories told about him in hushed tones. I hope he never hears of those stories. I hope he never finds this post. I hope he stays the way he is, and continues to affect the lives of students like he affected my life, students willing to believe in him more than in the cruelty of classmates.