There’s a magical place in New York City. When I’m there, it’s hard to remember that I’m still within the city limits. The weather is often different there than it is anywhere else in the city. There are rarely any taxis. There are a couple of subway stops, but they’re run with the kind of dreamy inefficiency better suited to a sleepy Italian village than the NYC MTA. The people there sound like they’re from Brooklyn or Queens (or both) but dress like they’re going surfing, because they often are—the beach is never more than five minutes away. This Brigadoon-ish place is a spit of land that launches itself off Queens into the Atlantic Ocean, where it curves around Brooklyn. If you’ve ever flown out of JFK, you’ve probably seen it from the air. It’s beach and boardwalk, skyscrapers and marinas, the cold swell of the November ocean, and the bright heat of a July day. Although it’s made up of many different neighborhoods, everyone just calls it Rockaway.
It’s better known than it once was, thanks to the national coverage of the devastation Hurricane Sandy wrought there, as well as the subsequent rebuilding and rebirth of its shoreline. But until 2012, if you had heard of Rockaway and you weren’t from there, you were a Ramones fan, or you remembered that a jet crashed there almost exactly two months after 9/11, or you were a New Yorker who liked going to the beach. When I first went there, in 2004, I had only vaguely heard of it, even though I’d lived in Brooklyn for about four years by then. If pressed, I would have guessed that Rockaway was in Connecticut, because everything New York–adjacent whose location I didn’t really know turned out to be in Connecticut.
There was a Catholic girls high school in Rockaway Park on Beach 112th Street—in that name is everything that makes Rockaway special—that needed a substitute English teacher, so the principal, Geri, called me in for an interview. Even though I wasn’t keen on teaching in a Catholic school, and especially not a single-sex one (especially one in Connecticut), I desperately needed a job, and it was the Friday before Labor Day weekend, which meant classes were starting in five days, so I was almost out of time… so off I went to that enchanted place.
I’m overselling Rockaway, I know. It’s just as dirty, oily, and smelly as any other part of the city, and while it is beautiful in places, the trash still piles up next to rickety old buildings, the smell of pee is somehow pervasive, and strangers yell at you for no reason. It is New York, after all. But for me, Rockaway is magical because I got that job, and it changed my life.
Stella Maris High School was the school on Beach 112th. The name means Mary, Star of the Sea, perfect for a school so close to the Atlantic Ocean that the faculty parking lot bumped up against a sand dune. The building dated from the 1960s. If you google it, you’ll see that it’s a classic boxy design from that time, as school-ish as can be. Stella, as everyone called it, as if she were a friend, had long served the Catholic daughters of Rockaway Park, Far Rockaway, Belle Harbor, Roxbury, and Breezy Point, all the communities on that spit of land. Its reputation was of a good, safe, tight-knit school at a relatively low price, the tuition at least half of what private schools in Manhattan cost. At its high point, longtime faculty told me, Stella had been so crowded that they had to convert the teachers’ lounge into a classroom, had to ask some of the nuns from the attached convent to teach.
By the time I got there, those days were long gone. The school was on its last legs, the cost too much for the Sisters of St. Joseph to bear any longer, or so they said. Like much of the Roman Catholic Church in America, the Diocese of Brooklyn was in crisis, combining and closing churches and schools. Fewer parents wanted their children to attend a Catholic school, and there were fewer nuns and priests to teach for free—in fact, while I was there, no priests taught at the school at all and only a half dozen nuns did, all of them over the age of fifty. Every year that I was there, the diocese and the Sisters warned that the school’s enrollment had to soar, even though it wasn’t really that bad: four full classes of freshmen every year. But all things mortal must pass eventually: Stella Maris closed in 2010, two years after I left.
I miss Stella. It was the best school I taught at before I came to Pitt. There are so many things I want to remember, I can write her an alphabet.
A Is for the A Train
I took the A train to get to Stella. Perhaps the best way to illustrate my gratitude for having that job is to tell you about my commute, which was so nuts, it had to have been an act of devotion. I had to leave my apartment before six, almost always in the dark or at dawn, and walk about ten minutes to the Seventh Avenue F train stop. I’d take the F to Jay Street, in downtown Brooklyn, and switch to the A train, making sure that I got the one heading to Broad Channel, which sometimes meant watching three trains go by before mine arrived.
Once at Broad Channel, an island in Jamaica Bay, I’d get out and wait on the platform for the S train. Often, students from Stella who commuted in from other parts of Queens or Brooklyn would be there, and we’d grimly greet each other, each of us unhappy with our lot in life, whether we were too hot or too cold. What was maddening about that particular moment in the commute was that the S train we needed to ride was inevitably already at the station, just off the main train tracks in a holding area, waiting. But the S shared a track with the A, and the A trains on their way into Manhattan got priority because, after all, who would be commuting to Rockaway at 7 a.m.? Sometimes we’d watch three or four As come through, while the S waited and waited until finally, finally, it would lumber out of its holding pen and pick us up.
From the Broad Channel stop the S train ran on a narrow subway-only bridge crossing over the rest of Jamaica Bay and then along an elevated track into and through Rockaway. That early part of the trip was both mysterious and beautiful at any time of the year, in the fogs of fall, the icy depths of winter, or the sharp, hard sunshine of spring and summer. Because the bridge wasn’t visible from inside the train, the view as we surged along made me feel as if we were flying somehow, just skimming over the water. The juxtaposition of being on a subway—the most urban mode of transportation—and yet seeming to glide through an almost uninhabited world of water and fog and seabirds stunned me every time. Even on the day I went to interview at Stella, running very late, I was struck by its strange beauty.
The subway let us out at Beach 116th Street, so the last leg of the trip was a brisk walk/near run of four blocks to get to Stella on time. Occasionally I arrived early enough to walk on the beach, or at least the boardwalk, before school, another beautiful aspect of that commute, which had me singing happy Springsteen songs in the sunshine and grimly sad ones in the fog and cold. But let’s be honest: I was only there early enough to do this maybe once a month.
It was my great luck that the commute was so beautiful because it was incredibly fricking long. If—if—everything ran smoothly, I could go door to door in about ninety minutes. But things rarely ran smoothly because of that S train mishegas. So I was perpetually nearly late, and fairly often actually late. To their immense credit, no administrator ever seemed to care as much about this as I did, but oh, it bugged me. I never wanted to seem ungrateful.
B Is for the Beach
Sometimes during lunch, I would walk out of the front doors of the school, up the sidewalk on the half block to the boardwalk, and then down the stairs onto the beach. When I looked out across the Atlantic Ocean, I would remember that when I’d visited the west coast of Ireland, someone had told me, as we looked across the ocean, “Here, we say the next diocese is Brooklyn.”
C Is for Colleagues
Stella was the first school where I had colleagues who weren’t all in their first few years of teaching. They were fantastic women—and two token, also fantastic, men—full of wisdom, and eager to share it. I stood out for many reasons, being not Catholic, not from New York, and new to teaching high school, and thus a great recipient for their collective knowledge about teaching. From them, I learned how to make a multiple-choice test, oversee detention, and determine whether anyone was reading the assigned book. I was also without a vehicle of my own, nearly unheard of that far east in the city. Before our first parent-teacher night, I innocently asked someone in the teachers’ lounge about the likelihood of getting a car service to take me back to Park Slope at 9 p.m., and a hue and cry was raised about my vulnerability to murder on the streets of what had to be one of the safest neighborhoods in the city. The other teachers immediately made sure I would never have to miss an event or, God forbid, walk around at night because of needing a ride again. Liz, the talented art teacher, chauffeured me around for four years, and was a delight about it throughout. It still boggles my mind that she would do that without any reward, but at least now her kindness is recorded in this book.
Excerpted from WHY DID I GET A B? published by Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Copyright © 2020 by Shannon Reed.
