Robert Roth

Day Care Center

An excerpt from a book about a whole range of things.

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In the early 1970s I was working in a day care center on the Lower East Side. I was one of the very few men working there. I was a teacher's assistant at 29. The teacher was 23 and the teacher's aide maybe somewhere in between. The teacher, Ruth, who like me was Jewish, was extremely insecure and filled with all types of very aggressive repressive cultural attitudes. She often was very nasty to me. At nap time though when the children were resting and lights were closed her voice would soften and she would start talking very intimately to me. Talking about her insecurities and fears. She would talk about her sexual anxieties. As well as the abusiveness of her fiance who she underscored did what he did out of love. And who she in turn loved very much. She wanted reassurance that it was okay that she didn't want to have sex with him. This was not a conversation I in any way was looking for. But I reassured her that she shouldn't do anything that she didn't want to do. Once nap time was over and the lights were put back on, more often than not, she would flash out at me with anger and real nastiness. 

Maria, the teacher's aide, a Puerto Rican woman, certainly not the governor of the state (written right after sexual harassment charges were first made against New York governor Andrew Cuomo), a notch below me in the hierarchy, both of us near the bottom, whispered a sexually loaded question out of the blue. "Do you want to squeeze my juice?" I was double binded by the question. Any answer to it could have gotten me into serious trouble. She repeated it a couple of more times. Also she was married which further heightened my anxiety. I mumbled some combination of mishearing the question, being totally naive/clueless and not hearing the question altogether. I was extremely nervous about my job for many months afterward.

I was asked to give a lesson to the class. My friend who worked in an elementary school gave me one I could use. It was about the color red. I asked the children who were between two and three to go around the room to pick up red objects and put them on top of a red box I had placed in the middle of the room. I placed my own red, maybe burgundy corduroy jacket on top of the box. Chastising me Ruth said, “That's not red that's purple.”

A short while later, Maria pulled up the elastic top of her underwear over the top of her pants showing me and the class that her underwear was red. I blurted out without thinking, “Do you want to put it on top of the box?”

I ran into her on a bus a few years later. She was very happy to see me. Writing this now almost 50 years later, I don't think she was mocking me or even teasing me. Beyond that I still don't know what was going on with her.

While working there I was privy to conversations among women I had never heard before. I was more or less invisible at times. I remember one conversation in particular. Not the content but the feel of it. I was sitting by myself off in the children's book corner. The women sitting in another part of the room seemed to overflow with the need to talk. I heard them speak of their strategies in love, strategies in sex, their relationships with men, really a whole bunch of things that under normal circumstances I would never have heard. I think the women in the room were quite different from my women friends. Less political. But it was an eye opener. How little I knew. And how I realized more fully than before how guarded most women were around men. And how fortunate it was for me to have been rendered invisible so I could take it all in. 

It was a period of great transition. One time, again for reasons I couldn't fathom, the director of the day care center said to me about herself, “I'm a man during the day and a woman at night.” 

Shortly after that I was fired for not projecting a strong enough male image.

Robert Roth is author of Health Proxy (Yuganata Press, 2007) and Book of Pieces (And Then Press, 2017). He is also co-creator of and then magazine since 1987.

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