| General Non-Fiction posted January 9, 2023 | Chapters: |
...24 25 -26- 27 
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An abomination, regardless of form
A chapter in the book A Fly on the Wall
On...Cheating
by Rachelle Allen
| Background Musings and conclusions I have drawn from everyday life. They are not presented in chronological order. |
January 8, 2023
I'm sixty-six years old, yet I still remember, as if it were this morning, the first time I ever saw someone cheat. It was Patty Stell, an unobtrusive, brown mouse of a girl in my first-grade class. We were all quietly working at our desks, practicing our printing. Our teacher, Mrs. Fisher, sat correcting papers at her desk at the front of the room, the graying crown of her head facing us.
Before we'd been given our pencils and sheets of lined paper, Mrs. Fisher had said, "Now, the reason first graders don't have erasers is because we want to encourage you to be very careful workers. Don't rush, because THAT is how mistakes happen."
About five minutes in, I noticed Patty Stell get up from her desk across the aisle from mine in the last row, tiptoe to the currently unused student teacher's desk even further back, open the drawer and grab out a slim, pink, rectangular eraser.
I was absolutely flabbergasted. Patty Stell? The quietest girl in the entire room? She was an eraser thief? How did she know just where to go? Did she do this often?
I watched as she brought it back to her desk and then sawed away at the graphite scrawlings on her practice paper. Mouth agape, eyes bugged, I looked toward Mrs. Fisher, whose head was still looking down at the papers she was correcting. All my classmates' eyes were on their papers, too. Only Patty Stell and I knew of the heresy being committed in the back of the classroom.
I heard the words of my teenage siblings reverberate in my ears: "No one likes a tattletale, Shelley!" They grew louder as I watched Patty Stell finish with the pilfered eraser, and they deafened me as she sneaked a quick look toward our teacher, tip-toed back to the student teacher's desk, and returned the rectangular slab of rubber to the drawer. My heart raced. My stomach flipped. I felt unwell the remainder of the day and never spoke to Patty Stell ever again. (Truth be told, I'd never spoken to her anyway. She was very quiet.)
With wide-eyed incredulity, I shared the incident that night with my eighteen-year-old sister. Her advice: "Well, she shouldn't have done that, but it has nothing to do with you. Keep it to yourself." I felt like a co-conspirator criminal, but I trusted my sister and kept quiet...well, you know, until now.
My next encounter with cheating was in ninth grade English class. The seating was arranged --unbelievable as it may seem in today's world-- from lowest-to-highest class averages. Dunces in the front row, over-achievers in the back. Our teacher, Mrs .Fuller, was in her last year of teaching and wasn't going to be spending it grading papers. She'd give us oral quizzes every day on the previous night's reading assignment, then tell us to pass our papers to the student on our left. (The students in the farthest-left desks had to deliver their test papers to the students on the far-right side of the room.)
She'd read off the quiz results, and we'd affix checkmarks across any incorrect answer on our classmates' papers. We'd then be instructed to return the quizzes to their rightful owners, at which point Mrs. Fuller would open her grade book and call roll. When she said your name, you shouted out your quiz score.
I sat in the last row. Doreen Myers sat in the second row. She used to hold her paper so that everyone who wanted to see her grade, could. She smoked and drank and was loose with boys, and it was reflected in her quiz results: never above a 50! But when Mrs. Fuller called her name, Doreen --because we never had to turn in our quiz paper-- always shouted back a number over 90. I found it supremely galling. But Doreen was tough and would've pummeled anyone who ratted her out. (Besides, "No one likes a tattletale, Shelley.")
Then one day, after the ten-week marking period ended and we were about to receive our new seating assignments, Mrs. Fuller had us turn in our quizzes. Suddenly, Doreen lost some of her swagger. In fact, I saw bona fide fear in her eyes.
I gaped at the boy across the aisle from me. He gave me a wicked smirk and whispered, "Guess Doreen won't be sitting back here anytime soon." He then held up a list of dates and her actual grade and the grade she'd shouted out to Mrs. Fuller.
Karma's a bitch, Doreen!
The next time I witnessed cheating, it was in a different form: by the boyfriend of my best friend at college. He took her to a basketball game, then left at halftime with someone else. I will never forget the anguish in her voice when she burst into my room with the news.
The following year, she'd transferred to another college, and my roommate, LuAnne, had taken up with the same lothario. The night before the dorms closed for Christmas Break, LuAnne had already driven home, but her boyfriend remained on campus to attend a party. Two of LuAnne's and my sorority sisters knocked on my door at 2 a.m. with the news that they'd seen the lothario first making out, then leaving, with another girl.
It was incumbent upon me, they said, because I knew LuAnne better than anyone else, to tell her the ugly truth. She needed to be saved from further humiliation, they said. I definitely didn't relish the thought of hearing anguished tones in yet another friend's voice, especially when it was caused by the same no-good louse. But employing the If-It-Were-Me-I-Would-Want-To-Know school of thought, I did the deed.
It changed our relationship forever. I learned the hard way that not everyone is like me. Not everyone WANTS to know the truth or be saved from further humiliation. Some people like to just pretend that everything's fine. They prefer to live in a land of Child's Wishful Thinking.
LuAnne told me that "that girl" had been flirting with Lothario Boy all semester and that she'd probably "gotten him drunk so that she could take advantage of him." She added that I was still holding a grudge against him because of what he'd done to my other friend.
My mother's assessment of this kind of 'logic' was always: Their mind is made up. Don't confuse them with facts. LuAnne ended up marrying the crud, and she's been cheated on for forty-plus years now. (Her husband brags about his latest conquests to a male friend of mine every year at Homecoming.)
I can't for the life of me understand what would motivate a person to turn a blind eye to cheating in any form. I find it the equivalent of allowing yourself to be considered weak and stupid. And lest you offer up the argument, "Well, you never know how you're going to respond unless it happens to you," let me share my ugly saga:
I was twenty-five, eight months pregnant and working eighty hours a week as the general manager of my husband's international dental laboratory. My father --my mentor and idol-- was 2800 miles away in Reno, Nevada, dying of inoperable lung cancer.
In the break room, one of the dental techs approached me. She was a 6' tall, hulking linebacker of a woman with a honeyed Southern drawl that belied her acidic, poisonous nature. She was known for issuing biting comments to other women, then, when they appeared upset, she would feign innocence and say, "Oh, Ah'm sorry. Did Ah hurt yer feelin's?" I loathed her. Catching sight of me from the side, she exclaimed, "Gol! Yer HUGE!"
My dancer's body has been a source of pride for me my entire life, so it was torture for me to be pregnant. But, instead of flinching, I turned to her, gave her a big, condescending smile and said, "Well, Cindy, I take solace in the fact that, at least with me, it's temporary. You'll be huge all your life." When she welled up, I responded with, "Oh, I'm sorry; did that hurt your feelings?"
She dashed out of the room to head back upstairs to the lab. Meanwhile, my office staff whooped and cheered. But a second later, my husband appeared, livid, and shouted, "WHAT DID YOU SAY TO HER? SHE'S UP THERE CRYING!"
And that's when I knew. I looked him dead in the eyes and said, with steely omniscience, "Hmm. I wonder why you didn't ask what she said to me first." He turned and retreated to the lab as my office staff quickly scattered to busy themselves elsewhere.
I couldn't have been more vulnerable: young, pregnant, married to my boss, far away from my dying father. Yet, that very night, I said to my husband, "I know you are cheating on me, and tomorrow I'm going to a lawyer to begin divorce proceedings."
I consider cheating the ultimate act of disrespect. It's flagrant mockery and an unquestionable lack of empathy, concern and, most of all, integrity. While there are people who are willing to accept cheating as simply "the way it is" in their lives, I refuse to volunteer for such a shameful dishonoring of my intellect. As Judge Judy would say, "Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining."
It baffles me how --or why-- anyone could accept any manner of cheating in their life-- in essence, to be more comfortable with a lie than the truth. But I've learned to chalk it up to: Everyone's priorities are different.
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#3 January 2023 |
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