An Obtuse Angle
Mr. Creb and I fought during geometry class. He detested me because I sucked at math and was a Democrat. Between Pythagorean theorems and circumferences, we argued if Ford was better than Carter. I was no scholar in politics or geometry, but Mr. Creb had such a fixed personality that we erupted into spats where anger moved faster than helium at room temperature.
The class was both slightly astounded and relieved because he was extremely difficult to comprehend. He made geometry seem like Sanskrit translated into Greek but also transformed into circles, squares, and octagons. The hexagon was a conundrum, and we all nearly failed in the first quarter. Our parents were not expecting the “F” in geometry, but Mr. Creb did not give a shit.
Mr. Creb and his wife, Veronica, were good friends with my parents because my dad taught English in the same high school. Mr. Creb was the head of the math department. Like the history department boss, who was two floors below him, he absolutely frazzled, crazed, and scared both his students and colleagues. He and Veronica, who was a marigold in his garden of weeds, attended community college classical music gatherings or a movie with my folks. They saw Funny Girl, for which Mr. Creb gave a critique, “Barbra Streisand is too masculine for my tastes.” He mentioned this snidely to my mom who was not a feminist in the traditional sense, even preferred the noun “girls” over “women,” but invariably thought “James,” his first name, was a beast and not a connoisseur of other humans.
Mrs. Creb had a Mozart-like brilliance and was soothing in her appearance to me and my brothers. Only after I started quarrelling with James, her beloved, did Veronica turn her laughter inward and glance at me with the adjective “vile.” A Mrs. Creb mad at you—a Mrs. Creb who was not now Utopian kindness, not now the lunch lady who gave you more potatoes than other kids, who didn’t tie your shoes when no one was looking, who didn’t acknowledge you with a blink—that is a humiliating situation. You have turned Mother Theresa into Mussolini, in lieu of the fact that her husband, James, was judged and misrepresented by you, a morally incompetent adolescent. Indeed, Mr. Creb, who lectured and yelled at us in a green brick room that smelled of old molasses, could not tolerate “my poorly constructed math theorems and mumbled stupidities,” as he wrote in my report card.
Eventually, James and Veronica quit socializing with Dad and Mom, who had to see What’s Up, Doc? with a couple who taught biology, and “were not as glib or scintillating as the Crebs.” This “biology couple” met in Minnesota, before getting their teaching degrees, and put mayonnaise on ham. My parents preferred the Crebs, who used imported marmalade from London, Ontario.
“You have ruined our 10-year-old friendship,” Mom said, but was less enamored of Mr. Creb when he dragged me verbally, not physically, in front of our geometry classroom. It was like he was sticking me in a botulism-tainted can of SpaghettiOs that would explode in the cabinet. Yet nothing, of course, was as demeaning as the “D+” that appeared on my report card.
We’d meet after school, where we didn’t understand what the fuck he was saying. He’d giggle at our inability to follow what he considered “his logic.” Mr. Creb also uttered, without reluctance, “Girls are bad at math.”
He was hindering our ability to analyze a circle—we just didn’t get it. Especially when he would take his hand, during tutorials, and put it on his penis. He did this with all my classmates, including a dear friend, Harry Martinez, who was normally an “A” dude until he took Mr. Creb. That was the first “D” that Harry Martinez received. “It’s truly D Day,” Harry whispered. Harry thought the D was equally as disturbing as Mr. Creb fiddling with his pecker while giving us a correct interpretation of the isosceles triangle. Back then you did not complain to the authorities about math teacher phallic indiscretions. Indeed, they had barely instituted a policy that the schoolteachers should stop slapping us—though my friends in parochial school got hit with rulers.
Only our buddy Arnold, a much better student, was able to get a B+ and an A- from Mr. Creb. Arnold was an honors student who let his dog lick his feet while cramming for a test we knew we’d fail. Arnold got nothing for free. His mind was glued to the books, and he rarely went to the movies and never smoked pot, which my brothers had been inhaling since sixth grade. No, since sixth grade Arnold had been getting As and an occasional B+. The first semester of sixth grade he was pissed because I received all As and he got a B+ because his interpretation of Holden Caufield was tepid, compared with mine, which our teacher thought could have gotten me a scholarship to UCLA.
Mr. Creb loved Arnold, whom he deemed melancholic, observant, and “a compact scholar compared with you Luddites.” Creb’s other pupils, like me and Harry, were feeble-minded twats who did not dig deeply into our homework and were stuck in the Purgatory of uttering incoherent and nonsensical responses to his Talmudic inquiries.
Mr. Creb spent hours with Arnold, me, and Harry, but only Arnold received a grade above a C, which was better than failing, though we did not fail. Harry got a C, and I received a D+, and though I don’t blame this insidious grade for my not getting into Honor Society, I blame Mr. Creb for causing my math ego to shift downward. I previously loved math and knew how to measure circles in sixth grade, and memorized calculations in my head, which were at the tip of my tongue in fourth grade when the math instructor, Mr. Lemon, threw questions.
There was a Berlin Wall between me and Mr. Creb. It grew in width from the beginning of the semester to the end, where I ignored him when he sneered in the hall. I never said hello, and knew I ruined my parents’ relationship with him and was on Veronica’s shit list. I could not exorcise self-hatred from my contemptuous attitude toward Mr. Creb who, like me, had the self-esteem of zero and the circumference of -3.14. We would forever be parallelograms at war, and he’d never comprehend the revulsion I felt when he retreated nervously to his notebook where he decimated me with a stroke of a pen.
Eleanor Levine's poetry collection, Waitress at the Red Moon Pizzeria, was published by Unsolicited Press (Portland, Oregon). Her short story collection, Kissing a Tree Surgeon, was published by Guernica Editions (Toronto, Ontario, Canada). Her novel, The Golden Kernel, was accepted by Main Street Rag Publishing (Edinboro, Pennsylvania).