Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Three Nov-Dec 2026.
I must not, story by Tim Tomlinson.
Kindergarten was held on the North Country Road in an old converted chapel that had a vague resemblance to The Alamo. A bell tower capped the front façade. The exterior walls were salmon-pink stucco. A narrow, shamefully unkempt front yard led to the arched entranceway where Miss Elgar greeted us with gentle pats on our heads. Miss Elgar was a large woman with great thick white calves sticking out from her dresses and soft white doughy ankles pressing over the sides of her shoes like the crowns of cupcakes.
Inside, we hung our coats on hooks lining the vestibule. Above the coat hooks, narrow compartments held our Rest Time blankets. The classroom occupied the space where pews once lined the floor. In one corner, a semi-circle of pink plastic desks, with pink plastic chairs attached, faced a pair of tripod easels on which enormous pads rested. One pad was yellow and ruled with thick solid green lines and narrow dotted green lines – these were for letters and numbers. The other, plain white, was for drawings and finger paintings. The sheets folded back over the top. It was fun to go behind the pads and look at last week’s house, yesterday’s driveway, the morning session’s family, the daddy bigger than the car, and the mommy, unsmiling, holding the hand of the little boy whose eyes rested on the dog or the wagon or the bicycle.
Out back the recess yard featured a sandbox, a seesaw, a glider, and swings. Beyond the swings, woods sloped down into a forest we imagined must once have hosted great battles, its trees filled with snipers or camouflaged forts that housed runaways.
Miss Elgar often remained by the sandbox. It was easy to dawdle near the woods and observe her seated on the edge of the sandbox, her knees akimbo; or bent at the waist officiating a sandbox altercation, her dress rising sometimes to her garters; or gently pushing someone on the swings, soft breezes billowing her skirts and slips over her fat-thick knees.
Often we played “The Alamo,” we were Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie and Colonel William Travis and the rest of that motley crew of fringe-jacketed, coonskin-capped “Texicans.” The John Wayne movie, currently at the Drive-in, provided many of our lines. “That don’t change the truth none,” we might say, completely out of context, or “Step down off your high horse, mister.”
When we could get the girls to play, they played the Mexicans – appropriately, since they were despised, and since the Mexican leader, Santa Ana, was in possession of an odiously feminized name. In our recess recreations, we, the Texicans, rewrote history a bit. We won, but at great costs, which we would acknowledge with flourishes like pronounced limps or erratic gasps. Defeat – the defeat we knew was our debt to history – would not occur until every girl was down, and recess officially over.
“That’s not the way it ends,” the girls would complain.
True, we’d agree, but Miss Elgar had blown the whistle. We could only promise to expedite the siege, the subsequent massacre and the enemy victory at the next recess opportunity.
Snacks were milk and cookies, milk and Ring Dings, milk and Scooter Pies. Some kids—the spastics—ate apples or bananas or oranges, the fruits’ acidic odors curling our nostrils and corrupting the purity of our high sugar experience. At least we learned which houses to skip at Halloween.
After snacks, we grumbled about the twenty minutes Rest Time. We’re not tired, we told Miss Elgar. Rest Time is not Nap Time, Miss Elgar explained. No one was required to sleep, she reminded us, and of course, she understood that none of us was even remotely tired. We could use the time, she suggested, to think of nice things to do for others: family, friends, or maybe workers with whom we might come in contact – a mailman, perhaps, or Darryl the school custodian. Under protest, we retrieved our blankets from the vestibule and found places to spread them on the floor.
My fuzzy wool blanket was blue, my favorite color. I held it in both arms and pretended to look for a space on the floor while secretly watching where Miss Elgar chose to sit. When she sat, I’d find a spot that would afford an unobstructed view up her dress and between her knees. Her knees were fat, her thighs fatter. Against the wooden seat, they spread wide and flat and forced her knees apart while the thighs squished softly together. You could imagine your hand up there, or your ears, lost in the thick fleshy rolls. Between her legs, above the dimpled knees and the fleshy sacks of her thighs, snaps fastened her stockings to a girdle. Soft white flesh squished around the elastic. Sometimes she would rearrange the elastic where it dug pink grooves into the flesh. What would it feel like for Miss Elgar, I wondered, if over those pink grooves I lightly trailed my fingers?
Those were my targets, the thighs, the pink grooves. I stared hard all through Rest Time, eyes wide open, thrilled to find my targets, but still, always, oddly unsatisfied. I guessed I really didn’t know what I was looking for exactly, but I did know I wanted to see it. I was always disappointed when Rest Time was over.
One day my mother asked me if I liked Kindergarten.
I told her it was OK. I told her about the Alamo, how the girls were the Mexicans, how the spastic kids ate fruits at snack time.
“What about Nap Time?” Mom asked. She was ironing. From an ashtray on the ironing board, smoke climbed from the end of a Chesterfield. Chesterfields came with coupons she saved but never redeemed.
There is no Nap Time, I told her, there was Rest Time. Only the kids who ate fruit fell asleep, the rest of us rested.
“What about Miss Elgar?” she asked.
I told her Miss Elgar didn’t take Rest Time, she was the teacher, but that she watched us when we rested.
“No, of course,” she said, “but do you like her. Miss Elgar?”
I said, “She’s OK, I guess.”
“You don’t think she’s pretty?”
“Pretty? She’s fat!”
“But you don’t like her as, say, a girlfriend?”
I said, “A what?”
The next day, I spread out on my blanket and faced the direction opposite Miss Elgar. When the room grew quiet, I turned to find her fat fleshy knees, but she was gone. I craned my neck in every direction and located her, finally, directly behind me. She saw me looking. Did she see how confused I was? Did she see how disappointed? She folded her hands together like a prayer and tilted her cheek against them. She encouraged me to do the same.
Every Rest Time following I turned to face an empty chair. Never again was she seated where I could see her, see her thick white fat thighs grooved pink from elastic.
The leaves fell and the drive-in closed for the season and when it got cold we remained inside and played games that I never really enjoyed. Later, it was not uncommon for me to be the last person to wake from Rest Time.
In first grade Rest Time was only ten minutes. Miss Thornhill wasn’t fat like Miss Elgar, she was skinny. Her legs looked like two straws held together with ping pong balls. And she looked old, with skin like a baseball glove that had been left in the rain. She wore her hair in a braid pinned in a circle around her head. It looked like the scalloped edge of a Scooter Pie. When she sat at Rest Time, her thighs didn’t touch as far up her skirts as I could see. Maybe they came together at her neck.
In Kindergarten Miss Elgar taught us words. In first grade Miss Thornhill taught us how words went together. She taught us sentences. She taught us writing:
I
I must
I must not
© Tim Tomlinson
Tim Tomlinson is the author of Listening to Fish: Meditations from the Wet World, a hybrid collection of poetry, prose, and photography concerned with the splendors of, and the perils facing, the world’s coral reefs. His other books include This Is Not Happening to You (fiction), Requiem for the Tree Fort I Set on Fire (poetry), and the chapbook Yolanda: An Oral History in Verse. He is the founder and director of New York Writers Workshop, and editor/co-author of its popular text, The Portable MFA in Creative Writing. He teaches in NYU’s Global Liberal Studies, and at the Deledda Master in Creative Writing, Sardinia
Yeah, we know every kid’s an artist, but there’s also a bit of Walter Mitty in every kid too. One of your best offerings, fave bit is:
“ into a forest we imagined must once have hosted great battles, its trees filled with snipers or camouflaged forts that housed runaways”.