One Woman
A woman in her forties once taught English in a high school. The high school was a concrete building shaped in a circle two stories high. The stairs glistened. The maintenance person, Fred, did a good job of keeping everything outside spotless. And she kept her room dust free and gleaming. Her room contained the usual desks, 32 of them, four rows of eight facing the whiteboard. A blue couch rested in the back of the room beside bookshelves. The books contained young adult books of adventures and love stores and coming of age stories. There was a television up high in the corner. Last week it had stayed on all day. The students watched in horror as the towers fell. They would remember where they were on 9/11. They would remember trying to comfort each other.
The woman came to school dressed in a navy blue skirt with a navy blue jacket, looking less the wallflower than she ever had in her thirties. In fact, she was radiant. The sun had allowed her to make a pendant out of a bit of his arm; the moon had offered her a tooth as a setting in the pendant. It hung free in the dip of her throat. Occasionally she would touch it when her soft roar seemed to get stuck on her tongue, which didn’t happen often. The students could attest to that. The students pulled every sound she had out of her as she stretched in front of them, giving them Shakespeare and Whitman on a plate, breaking down words and meanings into sugar cubes that dissolved on their tongues.
Her roar replenished itself in the baths she took at night. Steam puddled in her ears, cleaning them of any ill begotten word that might have caught the inside curve of her lobe. The fish slept in their bowl, a light shimmied over the water’s surface and through the windows and doors of their castle nestled in the small pewter rocks. The bananas rotted on the counter. Alley cats had sex outside her front door. It was the end of another sixteen-hour day. She did not regret the length of her work. It kept her focused on giving. She wanted to teach teenagers more than she wanted a lover or a burgundy bedroom with dark wood floors. More than her friend’s Chagall in greens and blues that hung in her study. She would give the last eleven years of her life to any God that asked for them in exchange for a classroom filled with students.
She had a challenge, though. One she did her best to tie back with heavy string that would not fray. The day came that she needed help. Thinking that all people loved the opportunity to be of service, especially those paid to just that, she turned to Joan, the helper of teachers. Joan was a robust woman smelling of lavender and green things. She and Joan had dined together, smothering the sourdough with butter and marmalade that came before the meal. The smell of coffee opened there eyes even wider. This day, she let Joan know that she had schizophrenia in the same tone she used when explaining to friends how to bake a cake. Pre-heat the oven at 400 degrees.
This scared Joan. She could tell by the way Joan stiffened and leaned back in her chair, her face locked in a grimace. She explained to Joan that the reason she came to her was that she was getting signals from other realities. She just needed to ask someone other than her students if they heard them too. It was a way of checking whether she should take a day off. It was a way of learning the truth when her mind wanted to roam. All the sun and all the moon could not keep her from slipping into occasional psychosis.