The Boy at the Back

He was the kind of teacher who kept a coffee can full of pencils on the corner of his desk, sharpened, points up, and if you needed one you took one without asking. His name was Mr. Doss. He taught sixth grade at Whitman Elementary in Loves Park, Illinois, in 1987, and he is the reason I can sit here and write this sentence.

Two things about me at eleven. I could read at a high school level. I could not, in any classroom, raise my hand and answer a question out loud. Not would not.

Could not. The distinction matters, though I did not have words for it then and would not have a name for the condition until I was thirty-four and a woman I was dating, a clinical social worker, looked at me across a kitchen table in Iowa City and said, casually, the way you might mention the weather, that what I was describing sounded like selective mutism. I went home that night and looked it up. The definition fit the way a key fits a lock you have been carrying in your pocket for twenty years.

The thing is, I talked at home. I talked to my mother in the kitchen while she made tuna salad with too much celery. I talked to my younger brother in the backyard about the rules of a game we had invented involving a tennis ball and the side of the garage. I talked, sometimes too much, on the phone to my one friend Brian Kostek, whose father worked second shift at Sundstrand and who therefore had a quiet house in the afternoons.

At home I was a normal noisy boy. At school my throat closed. There is no other way to describe it. The muscles at the base of the jaw and the top of the chest would lock, and whatever air I had in my lungs would stay there, and the word I had been holding in my mind a half-second before would dissolve like sugar in hot water.

Teachers thought I was shy. Some thought I was stupid, despite the test scores, because stupid is the simpler explanation and people prefer simple explanations. By fifth grade I had developed a system. I learned to nod.

I learned to write longer than required on every written assignment so the written record would carry me. I learned which teachers cold-called and which did not, and I learned to study the seating chart on the first day to figure out where the danger zones were. I sat in the back when I could. I sat by the window when I could not sit in the back.

I became expert at the small precise nothing of looking attentive while making myself, in some interior sense, smaller than the chair. Mr. Doss saw it on the second day. On the second day of school he handed out a worksheet, a getting-to-know-you thing, and one of the questions was: what is something you are good at that nobody at this school knows about.

I wrote, in pencil, that I could name every county in Illinois in alphabetical order. This was true. I had memorized them the previous summer out of a road atlas because my grandfather, who drove a delivery truck for a bakery in Rockford, had quizzed me on them once and seemed pleased when I got most of them. I had then privately learned the rest because his pleasure was rare and I wanted more of it.

Mr. Doss collected the worksheets at the end of the period. The next morning, before homeroom, he stopped me in the hallway. He was a tall man, maybe six three, with the long thin face of someone who had been an athlete in high school and had not entirely stopped being one.

He wore brown corduroy and a tie clip shaped like a fish. He was holding my worksheet. “Adams, Alexander, Bond, Boone,” he said, not looking at me, looking instead at a poster on the wall about the food pyramid. “Brown, Bureau, Calhoun, Carroll.”

I waited. “Cass,” he said. “Champaign. Christian.”

He glanced down at me. I was looking at his tie clip. “Keep going,” he said. I did not say anything.

He waited maybe four seconds, which is a long time in a hallway with sixth graders moving around you, and then he nodded once and walked off. That afternoon he called on me in class. I went rigid. The question was about the Mississippi River, something I knew, something I could have answered in my sleep.

I could not make a sound. The classroom got that particular quiet that classrooms get when a kid is failing in public, the quiet of twenty-six other children grateful it is not them. Mr. Doss looked at me for about two seconds.

Then he said, “Renner, write it on the board for us,” and turned to ask someone else a different question. I got up. I wrote the answer on the board. I sat down.

He nodded as if this were the most ordinary transaction in the world, which, for the rest of that year, it became. This is the part that catches me, even now. He did not announce it. He did not pull me aside and explain that he had figured something out.

He did not call my mother, which I know because she would have told me, eventually, in the way she told me everything eventually. He simply changed the protocol for one student, quietly, without comment, and went on teaching. For the next nine months I answered questions in writing. Sometimes on the chalkboard.

Sometimes on a slip of paper passed to the front. Sometimes in the margin of a worksheet he would then read aloud, attributing the answer to me by name. “Renner says the answer is forty-two, and Renner is right.” The other kids adjusted within a week. By October nobody thought it was strange.

By November I had stopped dreading school in the particular full-body way I had dreaded it for the previous four years. I want to be careful here. I am not going to tell you that I started talking. I did not start talking.

I did not, in fact, speak out loud in a classroom in any sustained way until my second year of college, at Missouri, in a seminar on John McPhee where the professor used a method that flat-out required it and where, for reasons I still do not entirely understand, the muscles did not lock. What Mr. Doss gave me was not a cure. He gave me one year, at a specific developmental hinge, in which the daily fact of school was not a daily humiliation.

He gave me a place to put my mind down without losing it. The cost is harder to talk about. What I keep coming back to is what those four prior years did to the part of me that was supposed to learn how to be in a room with other people. I missed something.

I missed the apprenticeship of speech that the other kids were serving without knowing they were serving it. They were learning, in homeroom and at recess and during the dumb little oral reports about the state bird, how to begin a sentence in front of strangers and trust that the next word would arrive. I was learning the opposite. I was learning that the next word would not arrive, that my body would betray me at the moment of greatest exposure, that the only reliable surface was paper.

I became, by necessity, a writer. That is not the redemptive sentence it might appear to be. I would have preferred, on balance, to be the kind of person who could simply answer a question. The notebook in my coat pocket, the one I carry now on the river path each morning, is a thing I love.

It is also a callus. My mother knew, of course. Mothers know. She did not know what to call it either.

She and my father, who worked at Barber-Colman until the layoffs in 1985 and then at a smaller machine shop on Harrison Avenue, had been to one parent-teacher conference in second grade where the teacher, a Mrs. Trager, had said the words “painfully shy” and recommended he be encouraged to speak up at home. My parents looked at each other across the little plastic chairs and did not say what they were thinking, which was that I never shut up at home. They thanked Mrs.

Trager and left. On the drive back to the house my father said, in his way, that the woman did not know her elbow from a hole in the ground, and the matter was not raised again. There was no diagnosis available to us in any practical sense in Loves Park, Illinois, in 1981. The pediatrician we saw, Dr.

Bellini, was a kind man who treated ear infections and gave out lollipops and would not have known the term selective mutism if you had written it on his prescription pad. The school had a counselor who came in two days a week and dealt mostly with kids whose parents were getting divorced. My parents were not getting divorced. By the standards of the neighborhood I was a quiet boy with good grades and clean fingernails, and that was a problem nobody had time to solve.

So I was not solved. I was managed, by myself, with a set of small private workarounds, until Mr. Doss. His first name was Raymond.

I did not know that the year I was in his class. I learned it later, when my mother saw his obituary in the Register Star in 2003 and clipped it for me because she remembered, and she sent it to me in Cleveland in an envelope with a Post-it note that said only, “Thought you’d want this.”

He was sixty-one when he died. Pancreatic cancer. The obituary said he had taught sixth grade at Whitman for thirty-four years, had coached freshman basketball for twenty of them, and was survived by his wife Marian and two daughters. It said he liked to fish at Pierce Lake.

It said donations could be made to the school’s library fund in his name. I did not go to the funeral. I should have. I was working on a piece about a tier-two automotive supplier in Sandusky and I told myself I could not get away, which was true in a small sense and false in the larger one.

The truth is I would not have known what to say at a wake to a woman I had never met about a man I had known for one year when I was eleven, and the prospect of standing in a receiving line, mute again in a different way, was more than I could face. I sent a check to the library fund. It was not enough. Let me back up.

On a Tuesday in March of 1988, late in the school year, Mr. Doss kept me after class. He said it casually, the way he said everything. “Renner, give me a minute after the bell.” The other kids filed out.

He sat on the edge of his desk and uncapped a thermos of coffee, and he looked at me for a while without saying anything, which, in any other context, would have been my own preferred mode of communication. “You’re going to junior high next year,” he said. I nodded. “You know how it works over there.

Different teacher every period. They don’t know you.”

I nodded. “I can call ahead,” he said. “I can write something. I can tell them what we do. The thing in writing. The board.”

I waited. “Or I can not,” he said. “Some kids, it helps them to start fresh. New building, new face, maybe they find a different way.”

He took a sip of his coffee. The thermos was the old kind, plaid, with a screw-on cup. I remember that. “What do you want,” he said.

I had a piece of notebook paper folded in my pocket. I always did. I took it out and uncapped a pen and wrote on it. I wrote: I don’t know.

He read it. He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Let me put it different.

If I do nothing, what happens.”

I wrote: same as before fifth grade. He read that. He did not say anything for a while. “Yeah,” he said. “I figured.”

He took another sip. “I’ll write something,” he said. “I’ll send it to your homeroom teacher next year. Whoever it is. I won’t make a federal case of it. Just so they know.”

I nodded. “Renner,” he said. I looked up. “You’re going to be all right,” he said.

“I’m not saying that to make you feel good. I’m saying it because I’ve taught a lot of kids and I can tell. You pay attention. People who pay attention are all right in the end.”

He stood up. “Go on,” he said. “Bus is leaving.”

I went. That conversation is, to my recollection, the longest exchange we ever had. I have thought about it many times in the thirty-seven years since. I have thought about it on the river path here in Iowa City, walking past the old power plant and the boathouse, and I have thought about it in the bathroom of a Holiday Inn in Lima, Ohio, the night before an interview with a man who had laid off four hundred and twelve workers.

I have thought about it the way you think about a sentence whose grammar you cannot quite parse but whose meaning is somehow exact. What I think, mostly, is that he was the first adult outside my family who saw me without requiring me to perform being seen. He did not need me to thank him. He did not need me to articulate anything.

He did the work and got out of the way. In the seventh grade things got worse for a while and then leveled off. The note he sent ahead helped with one teacher, a Mrs. Pankow who taught social studies, who quietly adopted the same protocol.

The other teachers did not get the memo or got it and ignored it. I survived. I learned to fake my way through oral presentations by reading from a script and staring at a point on the back wall, which mostly worked, though once in eighth grade I froze in the middle of a book report on The Pearl and stood there for what felt like a full minute, the script shaking in my hand, until the teacher mercifully said I could finish tomorrow. I did not finish tomorrow.

I turned it in written and she gave me a B. High school was easier because high school is bigger and you can disappear. I took journalism my sophomore year because the teacher, a Mr. Galloway, ran the class like a small newsroom and most of the work was reporting and writing rather than speaking.

I learned to interview people on the phone, which, oddly, I could do. The phone was a kind of writing. The phone gave me a pause button. I could say “hold on” and write down what I wanted to say next and then say it, and the person on the other end would just think I was being thorough.

By senior year I was the editor of the school paper and I was, in the narrow context of that windowless room off the band hall, almost a normal person. I want to tell you something about my father here, because it is relevant and because I have been circling it. He was not a talkative man either. He came home from the shop with grease worked permanently into the creases of his knuckles, and he sat in the brown chair in the living room and read the paper, and he did not say very much.

He was not unkind. He was simply quiet, in a way I now understand was probably his own version of what I had, untreated and unnamed and absorbed into the general fact of being a man in a Midwestern factory town in the second half of the twentieth century. He did not have a Mr. Doss.

He had a foreman who yelled and a father who drank, and he did the best he could with those materials. When I was a senior in high school and had been accepted to Missouri on a partial scholarship, my father, who had not been to college and who did not entirely trust the idea of journalism as a profession, came into my room one evening and stood in the doorway. He did this maybe twice a year. He said, “Your mother tells me you got into that school in Columbia.”

I said yes. He said, “Good.” He looked at the wall behind my head for a while. He said, “You know how to do the thing where you write it down.”

I did not know what he meant at first. He said, “When you can’t say it. You know how to write it down. That’s good. I never figured that out.”

He nodded once and went back downstairs. To put it less politely, that is the most my father ever told me about himself in one sitting. He died in 1999, of a heart attack, in the parking lot of a Menards in Machesney Park. He was fifty-eight.

I was twenty-three and three years into the Register Star job and I went home for the funeral and stood next to my mother and shook a great many hands and said very little, which was, I think, what he would have wanted. There is a thing that happens when you have spent your childhood unable to speak in certain rooms. You develop, over time, a relationship to silence that other people do not have. Silence, for most people, is an absence.

It is the thing that exists when speech stops. For me silence was, and is, a positive presence, a substance with weight and texture, the medium in which I lived for the first two decades of my life. When I walk the river loop in the morning, before the campus wakes up, the silence on the path is not empty. It is full of the river moving and a crow and a runner’s shoes on gravel and my own breath and a great deal of other material I do not yet have words for, and I am taking notes on it, and I am at home.

I do not think I would have this if I had been a normal talkative kid. I do not think I would be a writer. The thing is, I cannot say whether the trade was worth it, because I do not have access to the other version of myself and I am suspicious of anyone who claims to. I can say only that the trade was made, mostly without my consent, by a body that decided, very early, that it would not produce sound in certain conditions, and that everything I have built since has been built on the foundation of that decision.

Mr. Doss did not fix me. I want to say that again because I think it is the part most people get wrong when they write about teachers. He did not fix me.

He did not unlock me. He did not, by any measure, change the underlying fact of what my throat did when a teacher said my name. What he did was smaller and more useful. He noticed.

He made an adjustment. He did not make me thank him for it. He treated the adjustment as obvious, which is to say, he treated me as obvious, as a person whose situation was legible and could be accommodated without ceremony. I have tried, in twenty-five years of writing about people who make things, to apply this same standard.

When I sit in a break room at a stamping plant in Belvidere and a man across the table from me is reluctant to answer a question, I do not push. I write down what he does say. I write down the things in the room. I write down the sign on the wall about hearing protection and the way he holds his coffee cup and the fact that he is wearing the same kind of boot my father wore.

I try to let the reluctance be part of the record. Reluctance to speak is, more than anything else, the thing I trust. It usually means the person knows something they have not yet figured out how to say, and if you wait, sometimes they figure it out, and if they do not, the waiting itself is the story. I have not written about Mr.

Doss until now. I started this piece three times over the past decade and stopped each time because the shape of it kept wanting to become a redemption story, and a redemption story would be a lie. There was no redemption. There was a boy who could not talk and a teacher who saw it and a year in which the boy was, for the first time, not punished for it.

That is the whole thing. The boy grew up and became a man who can mostly talk now, in most situations, though there are still rooms where the old machinery kicks in and I find myself, at fifty, nodding mutely while someone waits for an answer I cannot produce, and I go home and write down what I should have said. Last summer I drove back to Loves Park. I had not been in seven years.

My mother lives in Rockford now, in a one-bedroom apartment near the hospital, and I had taken her to lunch and then, on the way back to her place, I made a detour and drove past Whitman Elementary. The building had been renovated. There was new siding and a different sign out front, and the basketball hoops in the back lot had been replaced with the kind that fold down hydraulically. I sat in the car across the street for maybe ten minutes.

It was a Saturday. There was nobody there. I was looking at the window of what had been Mr. Doss’s classroom, second floor, third from the left, and I was trying to remember if the radiator had been under the window or against the back wall.

I could not remember. This bothered me more than it should have. I did not get out of the car. There was nothing to do.

I drove my mother home and helped her carry in the groceries from the trunk, and I drove back to Iowa City that afternoon, and I did not write about it for another year, which is now. The part that catches me, finally, is the thermos. I do not know why. I have been turning it over for thirty-seven years.

The plaid pattern. The screw-on cup. The small ceremony of him uncapping it and pouring and taking a sip and looking at me with no particular expression. It was an entirely ordinary object on an entirely ordinary afternoon, and a man I barely knew was offering me something he could not name and I could not name either, and the offering had the form of a cup of coffee being poured while he waited for me to write down what I wanted.

I want, for the record, to have said something then. I want to have said thank you. I did not. I wrote I don’t know on a piece of notebook paper and folded it and handed it to him and let him decide.

He decided. He wrote the note. He sent it ahead. I have been trying, in my way, to send the note ahead ever since.