The End of the World as We Know It by Robert Goolrick

Author:Robert Goolrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2007-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Butter Day

The thing about Butter Day was you had to bring your own cream. Every child brought a pint of heavy cream on Butter Day and we couldn’t have been happier about it.

In kindergarten and first grade, we went to a little one-woman private school and we had many little festivals and ceremonies to break up the monotony of learning how to read and add and subtract, but Butter Day just about took the cake. It didn’t come on any particular day—it came when Mrs. Lack-man wanted it to come—and so it was more sort of like the first snowfall or a hurricane than, say, Washington’s Birthday, which we elaborately celebrated. She would just, one day, tell us all to tell our mothers that we needed to bring a pint of cream, heavy whipping cream, the next day, and we would know it was on.

Of course, as kindergartners, we had no idea what was coming, but, by the time we were in first grade, when we heard the word cream, we knew. We just knew, because we’d already been through it once, unlike the babies in the other room.

The kindergartners sat on little chairs in one room, and the first graders sat at long tables in the other room, and Mrs. Lack-man was presumably supposed to wander back and forth, supervising both classes, but I got the feeling she didn’t really like the first graders anymore, so they were left largely unattended.

When I was in kindergarten, one of my classmates was a little red-haired boy who was the son of the farmer who lived next door to us, although that’s sort of misleading since there were ten acres separating our doors, but they were our closest neighbors. Every morning, he would stand at the end of their driveway and my father would pick him up and take us to school.

He was a funny kid, charming actually. But he had problems right away. Serious problems.

When you needed to go to the bathroom at Mrs. Lackman’s, you were supposed to hold up one finger if you had to pee, and two fingers if you had to do the Unspeakable Other. It was maybe the second day of school when he had to go to the bathroom, at eleven o’clock, and he held up one finger, but Mrs. Lackman avoided him and went on going over the alphabet. He violently waved his finger, but there was no way he was going to get her attention. She was moving through the alphabet like a freight train, and he just wasn’t part of her plan at all.

He peed in his pants. He peed in his pants and it dribbled on the floor, making noise, a wet noise like a tiny waterfall or a gutter spout after the rain has stopped, and Mrs. Lackman paused and looked at him and said to the whole class, “Now, class, look at what a little baby we have! Such a baby he can’t even control himself. Don’t we just

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