Read Online Wait Until Tomorrow by Pat MacEnulty - Free Book Online

standard liberal approach is to send your child to public school for the diversity and all that, but maybe those other liberal parents did not have the same experiences I had with the public school system.
    I went to elementary school in Jacksonville, Florida, where every day felt like an interminable sentence. I was bored beyond redemption. When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher warned us as we were preparing to take a field trip to the zoo not to sit on the public toilets because some “fat colored lady” might have sat on the seat before we did. I was shocked. My mother had taught me that bigotry was unacceptable. Of course, schools weren’t even integrated at the time—a fact that hadn’t quite registered in my consciousness. By fifth and sixth grades I started getting into trouble—shoplifting, scrawling bad words on my desk. Maybe it’s the only way I could stand the tedium. Maybe those childhood traumas were beginning to make themselves evident.
    After sixth grade I went to the newly built Episcopal private school for the next three years. By then I was already on the path to ruin, but at least I learned a lot. In the seventh grade I memorized a huge section of Hiawatha just to impress our lovely young English teacher. In eighth grade, a teacher named Mr. M., who only liked a few of the handsome older boys, taught us “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot and changed my life forever. I had never known that such music or despair could be conveyed by mere words. He also made us read Great Expectations , and I’ve been a slave to stories ever since.
    My mother was fairly hands off when it came to my schooling as were most of the parents of the time. I think she found school superfluous to education. When she was in high school, she often refused to go to school on Wednesdays. Instead she took the bus to town and educated herself in museums and libraries or by going to the courthouse to watch trials.
    â€œFive days of school a week seemed a bit excessive to me,” my mother often told me.
    My mother did come to my elementary school once when I had refused to eat the cafeteria food. To this day I shudder to think of those grits that you could stick a fork into and raise up above your head like a dead jellyfish, or those cold foul-smelling little orange fish sticks. It was lunchtime when my mother came to speak to the principal.
    â€œI notice you aren’t eating the cafeteria food,” my mother said to the principal who had a deli sandwich on her desk. “Why would you expect a child to eat that garbage?”
    Â 
    Now Emmy’s in the eighth grade, and we have to figure out where she’ll go to school next year. This is almost like getting ready for college. Everyone signs up for open houses at the “big three”—the three powerhouse private schools where Charlotte’s elite send their children. I’m still holding out hope for public school, but some strange instinct draws her to the one school I would never have imagined for her. It’s a large private school where the “old money” families send their children.
    We take a tour of the campus. The “athletic center” is better than those at most colleges. The classes are small. The teachers,
top of the line. The fine arts building is state of the art. I try to keep my inner roughneck in check as we smile at the admissions counselors and the other moms whose every movement reeks of money and privilege and impeccable three-story homes.
    Not only does Emmy like the place. They like her. I realize that even though we are white, we are the diversity that the school seeks. Most of the other students have gone there since kindergarten. Emmy is fresh blood. She might as well be from another planet compared to those kids with their perfect hair and their trust funds. A few weeks after we apply she gets an acceptance letter and something even more startling—a