A field trip

short fiction

Winslow Anderson

When we lived in Greenwich, which has excellent public schools, I went to one. But the summer before fourth grade we moved to Bairdsville, a country town near Danbury. My parents didn’t approve of the school system there so I was sent to private school back in Greenwich. This pleased my mother, who was happy to be at our new house in the woods but missed the stores on Greenwich Avenue. In Bairdsville there was nothing but a feed store and a pizza parlor. She shopped in the afternoons, then picked me up at school.

At Cranberry, my new school, the boys had to wear a coat and tie. Now you hear “jacket and tie”, but we always said “coat and tie”. The girls had their own rules, skirts or dresses with tights and leather shoes. The school believed that fourth graders were old enough to dress like ladies and gentlemen and that wearing a tie helped us to concentrate. Now, I’d ask why girls didn’t wear ties too, but I never thought of that particular crack. With a coat and tie, we were told, you also had a place to put your pen. You can imagine the havoc that resulted, the hanging shirttails and loosened ties, the coats flung on floors and the terrible ink stains. But we all started the day well-dressed.

In eighth grade five girls and five boys were chosen to be honors students. We had all our classes together. The other students were placed according to their ability in each subject they might be in Math 1 and English 2. But that year, ten of us rose above. We were declared tops in all subjects. Of course, we weren’t. There were plenty of kids who were better at science or Spanish or history than some of us. What united us was our bookishness, our self-discipline. At the meeting before school started we heard that we were not just the best scholars, we were so much better that we were somehow different.

We were special. A few of the girls realized instantly that being labeled a brain might not be the best thing socially. They spoke up. They were told to get used to it — they were different from other people. They should embrace their high status. The teachers said that because we were together all the time we would have lots of field trips.

And we did. We had fun that year. The ten of us got to know each other in classes and on the field trips — to museums, colonial houses, Newport, Boston and New York. Classes were challenging and the program suited our eagerness to learn. But there was awkwardness with the other kids. Some of them seemed to resent us, and we felt the peer pressure on girls, to be dumb and sociable, on boys, to be dumb jocks.

In the spring our history teacher planned a field trip to Bridgeport, an architectural tour. We were told we’d be going to a very poor neighborhood to see Victorian architecture. We had been to Newport; now, we would see more typical Victorian homes.

Marianne asked, “Couldn’t we just this once not wear skirts and tights and the boys wear coats and ties? It’ll be so embarrassing to go into the slums this way.”

Ms. Padoga looked alarmed in a way we’d never seen before. She rushed out of the room. When she came back, breathless, she said the headmaster would speak to us at noon. We were to go to his office. Then she moved on to the lesson.

When we went to the headmaster he was red in the face. His face bulged over his collar as he told us, “Of course if you go into the slums it’s particularly important to wear a coat and tie, to show the difference between you and them. You always represent your school, but especially when you go out in public. It Doesn’t matter so much if we wear ties here, and just to prove it, we’ll have a casual Friday this week. But you must never,” he roared, “go out in public without a coat and tie. If you’re going out to IHOP after school, I expect you to keep your tie on. I’m going to inspect your attire before your next field trip, so be sure to dress with care.”

We didn’t. As usual, we agreed that grown-ups were crazy, and we dressed as usual. At inspection, the headmaster criticized two of the girls. One had writing on her shirt, the other had a shirt that was too low. They cried. The writing was discreet, a brand name written with tiny beads near the collar. The racy blouse was a gift from the girl’s grandmother. She was forced to put on a boy’s blue blazer. The next day their parents were irate. They made such a fuss the headmaster was forced out at the end of that year.

Our tour guide in the slums was aesthetic, high-strung, close-cropped, and unsmiling. He spoke rapidly. “What you’re about to see is some really, really beautiful architecture, especially the Italianate Victorians, some of which have fallen on hard times. We’ve been trying to establish a historic district here, but it’s an uphill battle, ha, ha.” We were standing at the top of a steep hill.

The street was very, very junky looking. We looked at each other and giggled. There were big ugly multifamily places and a lot of tattered-looking little houses. An air of dinginess hung about the place, and though it wasn’t trash day there was lots of rubbish around.

But right away our guide pointed out two little houses which, when you looked closely, were really very pretty.

“These are fairly intact examples of the Italianate,” he said with satisfaction. We moved down the hill.

Two women drinking Sprites were standing by the door of a big, ugly building covered with tan vinyl siding. Our guide paused a few feet before them.

“Here we have an example of how vinyl siding, neglect and bad decisions can ruin a once-beautiful piece of architecture. This was a splendid Victorian home, the home of a manufacturer, but see, they’ve closed in the porches and affixed this ugly, inappropriate entryway onto the front, and covered it all with this vinyl siding you see here. Very, very bad.”

The blonde lady said, “Oh, yeah? What’s the matter with it? You big snob.”

“Some of the residents here,” the guide said, raising his voice, are uncooperative.”

“This is the historic district guy I was telling you about,” she said to her friend. “Isn’t he the limit? Talking about the house right in front of us. - Get out of here! Get out of here!”

“Yeah, get out of here,” her friend yelled..

Too angry to speak, our guide compressed his lips and motioned us away. We followed. One of the ladies threw a Sprite can after us. “Just keep walking, kids,” Ms. Padoga hissed.

We went past an empty lot and a bleak multicolored brick place. The next house was the darkest I’ve ever seen. Set back between two larger buildings among hemlocks, with black, peeling paint covered with mold and lichen, it sat in shadows. Our guide motioned us off the sidewalk onto the small front lawn.

Through the hemlocks we could see a rotting, screened-in porch, at about ground level. Dimly we made out an old woman in a house dress, half-capsized on a sofa with a bottle in her hand. Our guide described the house, how it had once been beautiful but was now, as we could see, rotting away.

“What a shame it is!” he exclaimed.

“This was once the house of Simeon Thompson, a famous Presbyterian minister.” We were all embarrassed. The woman who lived in the house was sitting a few feet away, only the tree trunks separated us.

Halfway through his speech she began emitting drunken comments, at first incoherent, then recognizably mocking.

“Example of early Victorian,” she said, taking a swig. “Gothic ornamentation.” Our guide merely rolled his eyes. She sat up and we had a vision of wretchedness: a craggy, sad face, with stuffing coming out of the sofa.

“You’ve got to stop drinking, Martha,” our guide said.

“Aaaa,” said Martha.

We saw six or seven more houses. At the last house, a fine example of the Arts and Crafts influence, we were standing around the front stoop when the kid who lived there came home. He came down the block to his house, swinging his baseball bat, wearing jeans, a t-shirt, with a big grin. He was about my age. It was the sort of sight that must have inspired Norman Rockwell. He was out of school and had already played a game of baseball. Because I was in private school I had to stay until 4:30, and even later for field trips.

He grinned and swung his bat until he was just a few feet away from us when he seemed to notice us and immediately got scared and bashful. His face fell, his eyes fell, and he scurried past us to get inside. We had to move to let him in. Our guide went on. But I couldn’t hear him. The sound of envy crept up the back of my neck and roared like the sea in my ears. Here was this kid, this nameless public school kid with his bat and his tiny home, and I envied him. I envied him because he was happy, at ease in his jeans with a free afternoon before him, baseball to play and a plate of cookies waiting when he went inside. I was stuck in my dorky coat and tie with this terrible snob guiding me and I was an honors student from Cranberry with five hours of homework ahead of me. But it was more than that. He could keep hacking off, playing baseball all afternoon and getting C’s, or he could start working hard to become an honors student. Alternately, he could get serious about baseball and be a star athlete at the high school. But I had already been defined.

He could dress in jeans, or a coat and tie; he could care, or not care, how he represented his school. He could know he lived in a pure example of Arts and Crafts, or choose not to know. He could be for or against the historic district.

We, of course, were for it. No matter how repulsive our guide might be, it was assumed that we were preservationists. This, with our coats and ties, was what made us different.

He would go to college, or not; getting into any college would be a triumph. He would work in a tool shop, or be a teacher, or a businessman, or anything at all, and his family would be proud. His first marriage would end in divorce, but that was OK, they married for love. He’d find true love the second time around. He’d fix up the Arts and Crafts home to its former glory. Then he’d buy an Italianate Victorian down the street. I could marry, too, so long as I wasn’t foolish. I could do anything, so long as you had to wear a tie.

If he wanted, he could put on airs and be as snobby about his neighborhood as our guide. But how do you take off airs? Already in eighth grade I wondered, and I’ve spent a lifetime trying to figure that out.