Teaching as Vocation and Trap

I. A Career Inside the Material

The editorial introduction to The Collected Stories and Poems of James Mulhern establishes a biographical fact that bears directly on how two of the volume’s stories should be read: Mulhern “has taught for more than thirty years, has served for over a decade as an AP curriculum consultant for the National Math and Science Initiative, and has read AP English Language exams for the College Board for more than five years running,” and the introduction goes on to observe “a teacher’s exactness in this work, a refusal to let a scene end a beat too late.”¹ This essay takes that exactness as its subject, arguing that “Peppermint Candy” and “Drenched to the Bone,” read together, form a diptych about the American teaching profession specific enough in its institutional detail — incident reports, I.E.P. paperwork, vending-machine break-ins, fire-drill choreography — that its authority derives less from invented plot than from documented working life.

The two stories share a structure worth naming before turning to either individually: both are narrated in the first person by a veteran teacher facing a disruptive incident inside the classroom, both incidents escalate into administrative process (an incident report, a suspension), and both stories end with the teacher alone, driving, privately reckoning with something the day’s official paperwork cannot capture. Where the two diverge is in what that private reckoning discloses about the narrator’s own moral condition — and it is in that divergence that the diptych does its most interesting work.

II. “Peppermint Candy”: Competence as Camouflage

Mr. Darnell, the narrator of “Peppermint Candy,” is introduced entirely through professional competence. When a student, Helen, vomits during a reading of Poe, his response is immediate, calm, and correctly sequenced: he grabs napkins, dispatches a student for the nurse, redirects the class, and manages a chaotic sequence of adults — a nurse, a janitor, a principal, a secretary — with unbroken procedural fluency.² The story’s middle section is, in effect, a documentary of institutional process: the incident report’s categories (“Burn, dislocation, puncture, concussion”), the secretary Valerie’s cynicism about the form’s real function (“No one looks at these things anyway. They get filed away in some drawer”), and the school principal’s pointed review of Helen’s I.E.P. and her allegation that Darnell called the student “a ‘rat’ and her mother… ‘a pain in the ass.’”² Darnell does not deny the remark; he defends it: “That sounds accurate… I believe my assessment is spot on.”²

This is the diptych’s first thesis about the profession: institutional competence and personal contempt for the people the institution serves are not opposites but can coexist within the same well-regarded teacher, the same calm hands that managed the vomiting emergency. The story’s final movement makes the coexistence literal and lethal. Darnell’s offer of a peppermint to the principal — “Would you like a piece of candy before you go?” — immediately precedes the story’s procedural reveal: he retrieves Visine from his desk drawer, reviews “the poisonous effects from tetrahydrozoline,” and confirms, in the same flat diction he used to complete an incident report, “the care I had taken to lightly rub Visine onto the candy before rewrapping it… I retrieved the peppermints from my desk drawer and placed them in my satchel. I would share them again another day.”² The vocation and the trap are, in Darnell, the same set of skills: the meticulousness that makes him an effective first responder to a medical emergency is identical to the meticulousness that makes him a careful poisoner, and the story offers no seam between the two.

III. “Drenched to the Bone”: Burnout Without a Villain

Jack, the narrator of “Drenched to the Bone,” is a gentler and more self-aware case of the same professional exhaustion, and the story is careful to root his classroom fatigue in a specific, undramatic personal collapse: a marriage ended not by betrayal on his part but by his wife Kate’s verdict that he has become unreachable — “You don’t ask me anything. You don’t listen… I don’t know who you are anymore.”³ He relocates to Florida and begins teaching at a new school, and the story’s central set piece — a ransacked vending machine, a fire alarm triggered by roofing tar, a psychotic break by a student named Mary Grace — unfolds as a single day’s accumulation of institutional chaos that Jack narrates with the weary, precise cataloguing of someone who has seen every version of this chaos before: “Bags of Lays potato chips, Doritos, Starbursts, Cheetos, Skittles, and other assorted healthy foods that we provide for our students… lie on the floor in a jumbled mess.”³

Where “Peppermint Candy” ends on cold competence, “Drenched to the Bone” ends on something closer to genuine reckoning, precipitated by the very student whose breakdown has just disrupted his classroom. Mary Grace, mid-collapse, delivers an assessment of Jack that the story does not allow him to dismiss: “You’re no better than Turd, Mr. McCarthy. I know you think that because you’re a teacher you know everything, but you don’t!”³ Sitting afterward at his desk, Jack allows the accusation to land: “Mary Grace, as deranged as she had acted, uttered a truth about me. I did think I knew a lot. I did keep to myself… I sit at my desk… preoccupied by what Mary Grace said, reflecting on my arrogance and self-centeredness.”³ The story’s closing gesture — Jack calling his ex-wife from a rain-drenched parking lot to say, simply, “I’m sorry. I should have paid more attention to you” — converts a day of classroom disaster into the occasion for a marriage’s belated postmortem, with the Bob Dylan line that gives the story its title (“the waters growing around you… you’ll soon be drenched to the bone”) arriving as the closest thing to grace the story permits its narrator.³

IV. The Diptych’s Argument

Read separately, “Peppermint Candy” is a chilling character study and “Drenched to the Bone” a melancholy one; read together, they make an argument about the teaching profession that neither story alone fully states. Both narrators are competent, even exemplary, in the specific, narrow, institutional sense that their schools reward: they file the correct paperwork, manage classroom chaos with practiced calm, and say the things administrators want to hear. Both narrators are also, by the story’s end, revealed to be profoundly cut off — Darnell from any recognizable moral feeling for the students in his care, Jack from the wife and the interior life he spent two decades failing to attend to. The stories differ crucially in whether that cutoff is presented as fixed or reversible: Darnell’s closing line, “I would share them again another day,” forecloses any possibility of change, while Jack’s apology to Kate, however belated, at least gestures toward the attention he has just relearned how to pay.²

What makes this diptych a biographically inflected craft achievement, rather than simply two well-observed stories about schools, is the specificity Mulhern brings to institutional process itself — the exact vocabulary of incident reports, I.E.P. meetings, and AP curriculum jargon that only someone who has spent thirty years generating and reading that vocabulary could render this precisely. The vocation of teaching, in Mulhern’s hands, is never simply a backdrop for a character’s private crisis, the way a classroom sometimes functions in fiction written by authors without direct experience of one. It is the trap itself: a structure of paperwork, procedure, and performed patience competent enough to let a Darnell hide inside it indefinitely, and demanding enough to let a Jack lose himself inside it by attrition, one overworked day at a time, until a fifteen-year-old girl’s breakdown is the only voice left in his life clear enough to tell him the truth.

— Silver Current Press

Notes

Works Quoted

All Essays The Unreliable Confession → Mulhern’s Transcendentalism