Wednesdays were spent with a young, recently married Catholic couple who taught the class jointly. It was awful. There was no Good Nun/Bad Nun happening with those two—they were Bad Nun/ Bad DudeNun. The husband would lead the lessons while the wife circled the room, watching with the darting, forward-seeing eyes of a bird of prey, or while she sat in a folding chair in the corner, her oversight seeming less predatory but somehow just as ubiquitous. In a flash, she’d interrupt her husband’s lesson, point her finger at an inattentive child doodling skateboard graphics or skulls in his notebook, and screech his name. Her husband would descend upon the kid, usually with a stern warning to knock it off. It seemed it was always Jamie getting yelled at. Buck-toothed, freckle-faced, red-haired Jaime, if you can imagine such a child ever being persecuted in a parochial setting. During one of the last classes of the year, Jamie’s infractions had either crossed a line or accumulated too greatly in number because the husband ordered him to stand, and, when he obliged, the husband grabbed the folding chair in which Jamie had been sitting and threw it halfway across the room. Then, in an amazing show of force for a man with arms as scrawny as his, he threw Jamie and his few dozen pounds of freckly flesh right into it. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and so on and so forth, we were learning. In the fifth grade, I was placed in a class instructed by a woman who by day served as my elementary school’s librarian, Mrs. Kakoski. Mrs. Kakoski was perhaps the holiest of all my CCD teachers. She might have even been holier than the nuns who’d taught me before, and she was definitely holier than that crabby lady and her abusive husband. Mrs. Kakoski lived the absolute word of the Lord, though she always managed to separate her Church and her State when she instructed me on how to properly shelve and align books in the library on the days I’d stay in from recess to avoid the mean sixth graders on the playground (strike that) when I’d stay in to help her
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