Hiding our faces in our hands. Nothing so hilarious as the misery of someone not-you.

You’d have thought that Mr. Sandman would be detested but in fact Mr. Sandman had many admirers. Graduates of the middle school spoke fondly of him as a character, mean old sonuvabitch. Even boys he ridiculed laughed at his jokes. Like a stand-up TV comic scowling and growling and the most shocking things erupting from his mouth, impossible not to laugh. Hilarity was a gas seeping into the room that made you laugh even as it choked you.

Mr. Sandman was a firm believer in running a tight ship. “In an asylum you can’t let the inmates get control.”

A scattering of boys in Mr. Sandman’s class seemed to escape his ridicule. Not the smartest boys but likely to be the tallest, best-looking, often athletes, sons of well-to-do families in Port Oriskany. These boys who laughed loudest at jokes of Mr. Sandman’s directed at other, less fortunate boys. My goon squad.

He’d get them uniforms, he said. Helmets, boots. Revolvers to fit into holsters. Rifles.

They could learn to goose-step. March in a parade along Main Street past the school. Atten-tion! Ready, aim. He’d lead them.

(Would Mr. Sandman be in uniform, himself? What sort of captain’s uniform? A pistol in a holster, not a rifle. Polished boots to the thigh.)

Boys were goons at best but girls didn’t matter at all. When Mr. Sandman spoke with a rough sort of tenderness of his goon squad it seemed that we (girls) were invisible in his eyes.

“Girls have no ‘natural aptitude’ for math. There is no reason for girls to know math at all. Especially algebra—of no earthly use for a female. I have made my opinion known to the illustrious school board of our fair city but my (informed, objective) opinions often fall upon deaf ears and into empty heads. Therefore, I do not expect anything from females—but I am hoping for at least mediocre, passable work from you. And you, and you.” Winking at the girls nearest him.

Was this funny? Why did girls laugh?

It did not seem like a radical idea to us, any of us, that girls had no natural aptitude for math. It seemed like a very reasonable idea. And a relief, to some (of us), that our math teacher did not hold us to standards higher than mediocrity—(a word we’d never heard before, but instinctively understood).