When I told my brother I’d drawn Mrs. Sugimoto as my first grade teacher he just shook his head. “Good luck,” he said. It was a typical reaction. She was barely five feet tall but everyone was afraid of her, even Mr. Schroeder, the gym teacher. She had horn-rimmed glasses and wore her black hair tied back in a bun so tight you’d have bent a knitting needle trying to get it in there. When she spoke each syllable came out in loud, rapid fire succession, like a machine gun dug in on Iwo Jima. Perhaps it was her Japanese accent but everything she said, whether she was praising or scolding you, sounded exactly the same.
Her favorite expression was, “Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.”
“Mrs. Sugimoto? Where’s the bathroom?”
“It’s on your head, Robert. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.”
“Mrs. Sugimoto? When can I go home?”
“When you turn seventeen, Rebecca. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.”
Needless to say, when dealing with Mrs. Sugimoto you chose your words carefully.
This was back when teachers could spank you without fear of a lawsuit. Mrs. Sugimoto prefered pinches or the application of a knuckle to the scalp (in some regions of the country this is known as a noogie but in Cleveland we called it a Dutch Rub). You could count on one if you threw chalk at someone or made a lot of noise at nap time. One time the whole class was punished for laughing at Maxwell Sawyer when he wet his pants. For reasons I can’t remember, he joined our class two weeks late and when Mrs. Sugimoto led him into the classroom and said, “Class, this is Maxwell Sawyer,” he recoiled in fear and peed himself right there on the spot. The whole class roared. Until we got “The Look,” then we stopped. It was too late though, we were all in big trouble and we knew it. She took Maxwell—now in full wail—by the hand and walked him to the door. “Come Maxwell,” she said, “we’ll get you a new pair of pants.” Then, turning back to us, “And when I get back we shall see how much you laugh.”
When she returned we had to all line up for a pinch on the arm. Maxwell, wearing a fresh pair of pants that his mother had packed for him that morning (apparently wetting his pants was a familiar part of his M.O.), felt more at ease now that the whole class was crying.
Peeing wasn’t my problem, it was pooping (around my house we called it “doing a biggie”). I was afraid to do it at school because there were no doors on the bathroom stalls. What if someone saw me? One day, when we broke for recess, I really had to go. Mrs. Sugimoto, needing no explanation, took me by the hand and led me to the boys room, checking to make sure it was empty. “Go ahead, Paul, I’ll be right outside.” But apparently she became distracted by some other crisis because after I’d settled on that big, cold pot (every inch of the bathroom was cold, gray marble), Tommy Donahue slipped in and, cackling like some insane monkey, started doing jumping jacks right in front of me. Horrified, I felt the turd retreat back inside me like a turtle pulling back into its shell.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a hand entered the frame and grabbed Tommy by the collar. In an instant he vanished. Later, she apologized to me for having allowed Tommy to slip past her. It wouldn’t happen again, she promised.
There was a derogatory nickname for Mrs. Sugimoto going around, apparently coined many years before by a former student. “Mrs. Soggy Tomato.” It was whispered in the halls but of course no one dared say it to her face. I was appalled when I heard it. Yes, Mrs. Sugimoto was tough but she hardly deserved that sort of ugly character assassination. I was certain that if she ever found out about it she would be devastated. I was therefore stunned when on St. Patrick’s Day she showed up wearing a nametag shaped like a shamrock on which was written “Mrs. Soggy Potato.” (It took us a little while to get the joke—potato, Irish, get it?) She knew! She knew! Yet somehow she managed to smile and laugh it off.
Eleven years later, when I was a senior in high school, I ran into Mrs. Sugimoto in a dark alley, not a figure of speech dark alley but an actual one that ran between Bonn Drug and Meyer Miller’s shoe store. There was something familiar about the fast, purposeful stride of the little woman headed towards me but it was too dark for me to make out who she was. As I turned sideways to let her pass she barked, “Paul, you need a haircut!”
“Mrs. Sugimoto? Is that you?”
“No, it’s the Easter Bunny. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.”