Mrs. Bleeker vs. the Assistant Principal
- Apr 7
- 11 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
By Barry Peters
The cutting board is covered with cucumber skin and tomato guts when Mrs. Bleeker’s phone hums. The ID flashes RMS: Rutherford Middle School.
Principals only call her at home when a student dies. It’s happened twice in her twenty-six years of teaching.
“Good evening, Mrs. Bleeker. It’s Mr. Norton.” He sounds … chipper. “Have you had a chance to review your evaluation?”
Mrs. Bleeker breathes deeply; her students live on. She picks up the knife and slices, speaking into the phone as it lies on the counter next to a moldy onion.
“Yes, I have.” She’d read the evaluation in the online system before leaving school. Mr. Norton wrote that she was an accomplished teacher, though she might consider using more technology in her classroom. So why is he calling her at home?
“Do you have any questions?” he asks.
“No,” she says, running a paper towel along the edge of the blade.
“Could you sign it electronically?”
“I will. Yes.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Bleeker. Have a good night.”
A simple clerical matter that could have waited until morning. What is it with these people? Mrs. Bleeker spins a pepper, gouges its top. She pictures Mr. Norton, who’s been an assistant principal for all of two months, strutting down the hallway in his blue button-down and pencil-thin Banana Republic slacks, tasseled loafers echo-pocking the tile corridor. And that gelled hair—for God’s sake, it’s a public school, not a corporate office. And what business does Mr. Norton have evaluating her? He can’t be thirty; she was teaching social studies before he was born. Before he was in preschool, anyway.
Mrs. Bleeker pauses mid-chop, realizing she doesn’t know Mr. Norton’s first name. Here in North Carolina, the teachers and principals call each other by their last names, even away from the students. The men are Mister, the women Miss or Mrs. It’s 2024 and there’s not a Ms. in the staff directory. Worse than that, in her own thoughts she often calls herself Mrs. Bleeker instead of Liz. As the students scrawl on their desktops, WTF?
She opens her refrigerator and grabs the Lite Italian. It stands next to an expired bottle of Thousand Island that she keeps as a reminder. She’s fifty-three and proud of her body; she’s not emaciated like Stewart Norton—Stewart, that’s his name—but she keeps the weight off. It hasn’t been easy these past few years, physically or emotionally, since Phil left. She walks the two steps to the dining table, puts down her salad, opens the vertical blinds. The late-afternoon October sun reflects on the glass office building across the parking lot from her townhouse. She eats in the bright quiet—no music, no news, no streaming series. After teaching all day, the silence is good. She’ll need noise later, after dark.
But it’s already started: she can’t stop thinking about Mr. Norton calling her at home. All the administration, including Miss Crutchfield, the head principal, are basically children. They did their five years of teaching in the classroom, the bare minimum, then became admin so they could make more money and not have to deal with thirty students all day. She can’t imagine they liked teaching or were very good at it. A couple years ago, one assistant principal said his favorite part of the job was being an educational leader. His big advice after observing her lesson on freedom of speech: don’t let the students talk too long; it takes time away from covering the state standards. WTF, indeed.
Mrs. Bleeker—Liz—forks the remains of her salad. Maybe she’ll talk to Mr. Norton tomorrow, tell him that calling a teacher at home for a trivial matter is inconsiderate. In fact, it’s rude, Mr. Norton. Teachers have private lives.What should she say if Mr. Norton takes offense? She tells herself not to, but she can’t stop rehearsing the conversation. His potential arguments, her possible rebuttals.
She rinses her bowl and silverware, sits on the settee. Technically it’s a loveseat, but she prefers her grandmother’s word for the small sofa, her first purchase after the divorce. Then she turns on her laptop and logs into WagerAmerica. Mrs. Bleeker plays poker. It’s going to be a long night.
*
At lunch the next day, Mrs. Johnson—Daphne—isn’t surprised about the assistant principal’s intrusion. “He’s called me at home three times this fall. Friday night, he wanted to know if I saw somebody steal Bailey Howell’s phone at lunch. Klay and I were watching a movie; he told me to hang up. Mr. Norton probably heard him.”
Liz hadn’t been sure about telling Daphne. A minor inconvenience, Daphne might say. Don’t be so sensitive. But after closing her computer last night, after almost breaking even, Liz couldn’t stop thinking about Mr. Norton. She’d sleep for a while, then wake up talking to him in her head.
Mr. Norton, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to call you at home, would it?
I’m only trying to help, Mrs. Bleeker. Perhaps you should become familiar with the clicker technology available in the media center.
It couldn’t be healthy for her subconscious to write dialogue while she slept.
Maybe Mr. Norton called other teachers at home. She had to do research. That was one of the commandments of her life, a practice that saved her several times after Phil came home on a Friday night—October 4, 2012—and made his announcement.
She considered asking Daphne, who was in her third year at RMS after raising her children. Liz always kept the conversation light with her, as she did with everyone. Maybe it was time to open up.
Alone in the tiny lunchroom, Liz tells her about the call and her subsequent insomnia. Daphne picks a blueberry from a plastic container and holds it in dramatic pause. “Are you really going to confront him?”
“I’ve thought about it.”
“What about Miss Crutchfield?” Daphne asks, clipping her syllables with the same affected enunciation in which their principal conducts faculty meetings. Daphne is mocking Miss Crutchfield; Liz knew there was something she liked about her.
“I don’t want to snitch.”
“Well,” Daphne says, popping the blueberry, “then I guess we’re stuck with phone calls at home.”
*
Liz believes in keeping her private life private, especially since the divorce. She still remembers, verbatim, Phil’s humiliating, clearly rehearsed speech: “You know I’ve been unhappy, Elizabeth. Well, not anymore. I’ve fallen in love with April Saginaw.”
In truth, Liz hadn’t been shocked. After Brandon and Michael, a year apart, had left for college, she and Phil had nothing to talk about other than how was work, what’s for dinner, and did you remember to give the dog his medicine. Poor Zeke—the old beagle had become the wobbly third wheel of their reeling marriage.
What angered Liz the most, and still does, was that Phil found his mistress at work, the entire reason she became marooned in the South. After Rutgers, Phil had talked Liz into coming with him to Raleigh, a burgeoning city of tech bubble promise. Research Triangle Park—while Phil chanted the name of the industrial development like a mantra, Liz thought of Raleigh as the Bermuda Triangle, the black hole where she had disappeared from family and friends and everything North.
Phil’s career took off. They had five bedrooms in Pinecrest Hills, and she was able to stay home with Brandon and Michael until they went to kindergarten. After that the years swept by—teaching school all day, then ferrying the boys to sports and music lessons, followed by their homework and her grading. After the boys graduated, she and Phil planned to travel, and they did, but only to visit the boys at Penn State and UConn. Weeknights and weekends, she read historical fiction and watched movies on the bedroom TV; Phil watched ESPN in the basement until joining her when the games were over. She was usually asleep.
At QSystems, where he was a project manager, Phil was excited when a new hire was added to his team, a woman who’d moved back home from Texas to Chapel Hill after her own divorce. Phil spoke highly of April Saginaw at first, then stopped talking about her. That was the only clue Liz needed.
The divorce was monetarily sufficient; Liz had done her research. There was something in North Carolina called alienation of affection, heavy legal artillery that rarely needed to be fired because its mere existence was so threatening. The color drained from Phil’s face when Liz’s lawyer casually mentioned it at their first settlement meeting. Plus, Liz learned about stock options, dividends, certificates. She couldn’t retire early, but she could make some extra trips to the new casino in Danville.
The matter of her last name was a dilemma. Liz finally chose to keep it, avoiding the confusion and, she was sure, the judgment it would cause at RMS. She’d cross that bridge on the fat chance that she remarried. Besides, she told herself, Brandon and Michael were Bleekers for life.
Though Liz did change her first name. She’d been Beth as a child, until the summer before high school when she decided Elizabeth sounded more mature. Then, after the divorce, she began researching online dating sites. She only had one colleague to consult, Merry Hampton, a Language Arts teacher who had fallen from the grace of old money Southern Pines—thrice divorced, twice rehabbed, teaching school to pay her mortgage. Over weekly coffee, Merry guided her through the dark web of virtual matchmaking. Merry’s first commandment: Elizabeth become Liz; it was way sexier.
Despite Merry’s expertise, Liz’s foray into Partners4Life didn’t go well. She scheduled meet-ups at McCall’s, a semi-upscale bar/restaurant in the parking lot of a shopping center. She wanted people around. But the meet-ups rarely moved from bar to restaurant, and seldom were there second dates. She went out with one guy for several weeks, then he started playing golf both days of the weekend in addition to his Monday and Thursday night leagues. That decade was marked by other milestones for Liz. The boys’ weddings. The death of her parents. A reunion with her older brother’s family in San Diego. Grandbabies in Pennsylvania. Her fiftieth birthday.
Liz avoided loneliness, or took the edge off it, by intentionally putting herself around people. She went to the movies, the farmers’ market, even the mall on a crowded Saturday afternoon. Her first Thanksgiving alone, Merry introduced her to the Danville casino. Liz thought the slots were ridiculous but she loved the table games, especially 21 and Texas Hold ‘Em, with their mixture of chance and skill (mostly chance, she acknowledged to herself). And though she was reluctant to admit it, Liz liked the camaraderie that developed among strangers at a friendly table, including the cynical inevitability of a bust for everyone.
Liz sometimes regrets never developing close friendships. When students ask about her family, she responds personal question! and puts up her palm like a shield. That’s basically her response to the other teachers, too. What the hell, she thinks, waiting for the dealer to finish changing cards and the waitress to bring her a second gin and tonic. Let them think I stay home all weekend with a herd of cats.
*
Three weeks later her stylist, Danielle, is applying the dye when Liz’s phone rings.
“Would you?” Liz nods to the counter.
“Sure.” Danielle picks up her phone. “It says RMS.”
“Let it go,” Liz mutters. She tells Danielle how Mr. Norton won’t stop calling. Last week he asked Liz to make a presentation at the next professional development day (she declined). Sunday night, he informed her that Johnny Day, her co-teacher, would be out sick in the morning. Would she help the substitute start his class?
“What a prick,” Danielle says. “I’d tell him what to do with his phone.”
Danielle had begun doing Liz’s hair after the divorce—more precisely, after Merry said that Liz needed a new cut to go with her new first name. Another divorced transplant from the North, Danielle insisted that she forego the Southern turbo-bob and let her hair grow shoulder-length. The color was Danielle’s personal concoction: she called it Burning Redwood.
“Hot as fire,” Danielle said.
Liz laughed.
“You should see the women at the singles events.” Danielle said. “You’d clean up.”
After her dating life fizzled, Liz kept her monthly appointments with Danielle despite the one-hundred-fifty-dollar expense. She considered it therapy, a professional friendship with cut-and-dye benefits.
“I can’t believe he’s calling you after school,” Danielle shouts over the hair dryer. She pauses, turns the dryer off, points it at the mirror like a gun. “You go in there tomorrow and tell him to fuck off.”
“Okay,” Liz says. “I will.”
First, though, it’s Thursday night, so she’s going to McCall’s for dinner. Duke and Virginia are playing, and she’s got the Blue Devils and the points.
*
Liz was surprised when last summer, after much shameless moralizing, conservative North Carolina legalized sports betting. She had little interest in sports—Brandon and Michael had done the obligatory Little League and taekwondo, and she took up jogging every summer for a week or two. But in the South sports were sacred, so she decided to try gambling on football. It was something to do. And WagerAmerica had expanded its poker site to include every kind of sport imaginable. She could bet on cricket if she wanted to.
Watching games with fifty dollars on the line was fun, but she really enjoyed the research. She learned the strengths and weaknesses of the players, who was on the injured list, how well the teams played at home versus on the road. Yes, it was absurd to wager on twenty-year-olds who may have just failed an exam or been dumped by their girlfriends, but the games seemed more predictable than praying for a straight in Texas Hold ‘Em.
Before Kenny, her favorite bartender, brings her veggie quesadilla, Virginia returns the opening kick for a touchdown. Damn. C’mon, Duke.
Then she hears her name shouted across the bar: “Mrs. Bleeker!”
Mr. Norton is standing at the entrance with his hand in the air and a big smile on his face. She almost doesn’t recognize him in his hoodie and ballcap. He’s with three other young men, all dressed the same. Lacrosse bros, Liz thinks.
She half-waves, keeping her elbow on the bar. He comes over anyway.
“What are you doing here?” Mr. Norton asks, patting her on the back. Does he have no boundaries?
Thankfully, she doesn’t have a drink in front of her. But wait: Why do I feel like I’ve been caught? I’m fifty-three. I’m allowed to have a drink.
“Dinner,” she says.
His friends stand aside awkwardly. They look like overgrown high school seniors sneaking into a bar for the first time.
“These are my friends from college,” Mr. Norton says, as if she asked. “We get together once a month. Thought we’d check this place out. It’s nice.”
Liz glances at the TV. Duke has the ball.
“Mrs. Bleeker teaches at my school,” he tells everyone.
“Have fun,” she says, wondering if he’ll call her later with a question about lunch duty or Spirit Week.
They take a table at the far end of the room. He’ll probably tell everyone at RMS she was here by herself. She decides to eat quickly and sneak out.
*
Five minutes later, one of the bros comes up to the bar and signals Kenny. He turns to Liz and says, “I admire teachers. I’m in marketing myself, but I wouldn’t have made it without some really good teachers.”
Made it? He can’t be thirty years old. She looks at his left hand and sees the gold band. His wife must look forward to his Thursday night outings as much as he does.
He nods at the TV. “Do you follow football?”
“Not much,” she lies.
Kenny comes over, and the bro quizzes him about the local IPAs. He finally orders, then sits on the stool next to her. Don’t any of these children have manners?
“Can I tell you something?” he asks.
“Are you going to explain football to me?”
“No,” he laughs. “By the way, I’m Carson. That’s not an explanation, just my name.”
“Good.”
“Here’s what I like about sports,” Carson says, taking the beer from Kenny. “It’s not the winning and losing. I mean, don’t get me wrong—competition is important in our country.”
He’s lowered his voice as if he doesn’t want to be heard.
“Let me guess,” Liz says. “Sports teaches you about winning and losing. The secret to success in America.”
Carson looks surprised. “Well, sure. Absolutely. But it’s more than that. Sports brings people together. You know the wave? People think it’s cheesy. But I’ve loved it ever since I was a kid. Watching it ripple through the stands. Waiting, then timing it just right, standing up at the same time as everyone else. What a feeling, being part of that.”
“And then you sit back down.”
“True,” Carson says. “But there’s always another game. Always another wave.”
Up on the screen, Duke has tied the score.
“By the way,” Carson says, standing up, “Stew said you’re a great teacher. That all the parents want their kids in your class.”
Stew? Oh, Mr. Norton.
She gathers herself. “I appreciate your telling me that.”
Carson nods and retreats with his beer.
Virginia fumbles; Duke’s going to score again. There’s a shot of a small contingent of Duke fans who must have traveled to Charlottesville from Durham. They’re cheering like crazy. Across the room, the men are yukking it up. Maybe it’s a sign, Liz thinks. Maybe she’ll stay, at least until halftime.
Barry Peters lives in Durham, North Carolina. His fiction has appeared in Baltimore Review, Broad River Review, The Mackinaw, Witness, and the Sudden Fiction series.
