Why I was expelled from Miss Bouton’s nursery school

From time to time, I share with you some personal stuff on the assumption that after more than two years of receiving my daily letters, you have every right to know a bit more about me.

Some of you have asked about my education.

It did not get off to an auspicious start. I was expelled from Miss Bouton’s nursery school for excessive sarcasm. I was four years old.

I remember Miss Bouton as a scarecrow of a woman — tall and angular, with a thin nose, sharp chin, and arms and shoulders like the sawed-off limbs of a tree. She seemed very old, and she spoke in a high, raspy voice. She rarely smiled. Her orders — and that’s all I recall her emitting — sounded like the barks of an angry animal.

Miss Bouton ran the only nursery school in South Salem, New York. She lived in a farmhouse with her brother, Billy. The nursery school occupied the largest room on the main floor. Next to the farmhouse was a barn where Billy fed the cows and slopped the pigs.

The Bouton family had lived in South Salem since the Revolutionary War. One of her ancestors had served under George Washington and received a large parcel of land on which the farmhouse still stood. The main road was Bouton Road.

The room smelled of antiseptic. A potbellied stove kept part of it warm, but the rest of it, where I sat alone on the floor with wooden blocks, was cold. The hook rug covering most of the floor chafed my arms and legs.

A Christmas photo shows 12 of us — five three-year-olds and seven four-year-olds — standing in front of a scraggly tree. I’m a head shorter than the other four-year-olds, mouth agape, clearly miserable.

My mother, Mildred Reich, was an artist, a painter, a lover of beautiful objects and deep conversation. She had been trapped in a little house in South Salem with a demanding little boy who wouldn’t leave her alone. Miss Bouton’s nursery school was a godsend.

I didn’t understand this at the time, of course. All I knew was that she dropped me off at Miss Bouton’s at 9 am in the old Nash Rambler whose brakes didn’t work well. I had to endure it until 3 pm, when she rescued me. It felt like a punishment, but I had no idea what I had done wrong.

I always tried to please my mother and father and every other adult — to do and say exactly what I thought they wanted. If I didn’t, I feared they’d abandon me — as did my mother every day from 9 to 3.

My life was conditional.

Looking back, I’m grateful to Miss Bouton for opening her farmhouse to pre-schoolers, for giving Mildred Reich some freedom, and for coping day after day with 11 screeching, yelling, often wild little people, along with one runt who played alone and felt rather sorry for himself.

At the time, though, I disliked her intensely.

Miss Bouton’s lunches consisted of lukewarm beef stew and a vegetable, usually lima beans. The stew and beans were spiky and hard, like Miss Bouton. She prepared lunch during morning nap time. When she served it to us on a little table in the center of the main room, she smelled of it. In my mind, she and the stew and lima beans blended together into a sharp, fearsome, indigestible problem.

Each day, I could barely eat her lunch but managed it because I didn’t want to offend her.

One day, I simply couldn’t.

She asked me why. Not wanting to insult her, I stayed silent.

She fumed, telling me that it was good food and she had spent time preparing it so the children would have a nourishing meal.

I didn’t say a word, but I wouldn’t touch it.

“Eat some!” she yelled. She was probably far more gentle, but my four-year-old mind remembers her yelling.

I stabbed at a tiny bit of stew with my fork and put it into my mouth.

“What do you think?” she demanded.

I said nothing. I could not bring myself to swallow it.

“What do you think of my lunch, Bobby?” she demanded again.

It was at this moment that, according to my mother’s account, I spit out the bit in my mouth and told her, with all the energy I could muster, “It’s delicious!”

Soon thereafter, Miss Bouton phoned my mother and told her that she was expelling me because I was excessively sarcastic.

My mother was devastated. In retrospect, I don’t think she was as upset that her perfect little boy was being expelled from nursery school as that her freedom had come to an end.

I was happy to be free of Miss Bouton, but I hated to disappoint my mother. I took my expulsion as further evidence that if I weren’t perfect, I would be abandoned.

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.