A drab drizzle unwelcomed Cecelia when she woke to the first day of fifth grade. To fight back at the doom that seemed to stretch to next June, she snatched up her gay new tartan beret, before she’d even gotten to the bathroom to brush her teeth -- confident that a bright nonchalance was the best attack on a future that included Ms. Hallsworthy for 8:15 roll call.
“I shall defend the erosion of vibrancy,” she declared to her teacher’s looming shade, as she seized an umbrella in the stand by the door. But she set it back to heed the call to breakfast, for necessary fortification, and she marshaled her lengthening thoughts for a more strategic campaign, while gnashing molars ground her oatmeal to gruel.
Her beret. A soldier’s cap. The flag of her uniform … also to shield her eyeglasses from a rain intent to dim her vision. She grinned, and closed the door behind her on a thinning courage, which faded fast.
I am not alone, she thought. Though it certainly felt like she was.
“How nice of you to join us this fine morning, Cecelia,” Ms. Hallsworthy droned, like a queen bee expectant to dine on the sacrifices of her students.
“Not such a fine day, really, Ms. Hallsworthy, don’t you think?” Cecelia winced even before she’d fully let fly her poor darts.
Sun Tzu’s voice, as she imagined it from the glorious pages of The Art of War, which she nursed nightly like a cup of hot cocoa at her bedside table, resounded: “He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.”
How she had failed her hero Sun Tzu, in the first confrontation of her new campaign. She steeled herself to receive the coming blows.
Ms. Hallsworthy banked a dark fire. She smoldered. Poison vapors leaked through her narrowed eyes, but her words were almost soft, almost a comfort. “We need to make the best of what we have.”
Had Ms. Hallsworthy been reading Sun Tzu? Was that possible? Still, she seemed to know it was not a time for her to fight.
With as little licking of wounds as possible, Cecelia tactically withdrew and opened her math book. “Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance,” whispered Sun Tzu.
I am not alone. Head down and eyes averted, Cecelia smiled at the seven times table.
But one thing about school never failed to boil her blood! And after a long, slow simmer she’d reduced this to a simple pudding: How am I supposed to know something if I can't imagine it?
This was her way of finding no sense at all in having to sit still all day (in the vigor of her youth!), and being told things she was supposed to then “know” -- without ever being asked to give an example (to make up a story!) of how these things could have anything to do with her!
Without seeing how these things could have anything to do with her life, she had reasoned, how could they have anything to do with her life?
And because she felt there was something to know, she’d sought guidance that encouraged her to look and imagine what was true for her. And though she didn’t understand all she had read, she knew that she knew what she did.
Which, apparently, did not yet include enough to choose her battles wisely, at least with Ms. Hallsworthy. Ms. Hallsworthy …
Sun Tzu spoke again: “The opportunity to secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.”
Ms. Hallsworthy …
Then an odd, new thought turned and tumbled through her mind. Ms. Hallsworthy was … not the enemy.
I am not alone, and Ms. Hallsworthy is not the enemy.
Cecelia looked up. Still math class. And Ms. Hallsworthy didn’t seem to have changed much, or at all, that Cecelia could see. But all was not quite the same.
Cecelia looked for the dark fire -- the essence that defined Ms. Hallsworthy, the lantern that had lit all she’d foreseen and had feared for her fifth year of school. The enemy.
Sun Tzu spoke: “Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of your opponent’s fate.”
She did see something … but more an ember, really, than a fearful fire … there in the space that seemed a space Ms. Hallsworthy might call her own.
Cecelia looked closely. It seemed to move, slowly, to float. But still there -- in the room, in a space that Ms. Hallsworthy might call her own. Or might not.
Then, as Cecelia watched, its last heat, its last light, lifted free. It expired, and was gone.
And what was left in the room, it seemed to Cecelia, was a space that we, here, might, or might not, as we chose, call our own.
And Sun Tzu said: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
In fact, Cecelia thought, that might be the only way to do it.