something,” Luke said. He laughed. “All Allison ever did was print sports scores and gossip from the Turtle Grove crowd.”
Once we’d passed through the door, Luke took a sharp turn and headed down the stairs, while I went into the main building to my first class.
The teacher came in just behind me, and when I first saw her, I thought she must be a new student at Choctaw rather than a new teacher. This was the Miss Carver who would be helping me edit the
Wildcat
, a pale, thin young woman with reddish hair, the sort that always appeared brittle and unruly.
She took her place behind the desk. “I’m Miss Carver,” she told us in a high, clear voice, then drew a large plastic bag onto the top of the desk, opened it andpulled out a stack of papers. “I’ve mimeographed copies of the reading list,” she said as she stepped around the desk and began to distribute them.
When she’d finished, she returned to the front of the room and gave the class a quick, tentative smile. “This is my first year teaching, so I’ll probably make a few mistakes. I hope you’ll be patient with me.” The smile broadened, but awkwardly, as if unable to find its proper place on her face. “I’ll also be in charge of the school play at the end of the year, so from time to time I’ll be asking for ideas from you about what play we should do.” She continued on, talking quietly, outlining what she hoped to do in the coming months. She mentioned various books that we’d soon be reading, and I remember her saying that
Wuthering Heights
would be the first of them and
Ethan Frome
the last. These books were among her personal favorites, she told us, because they dealt so powerfully with what she called “doomed love.”
It was the sort of opening statement I had grown accustomed to over the years, teachers forever trying to convince their students that there was something to be gained from learning what they taught. Faithful to my “smart kid” image, I tried to pay close attention to Miss Carver, but after a time, my eyes began to wander about the room, first from one side of the blackboard to the other, then up the wall and along the molding at the ceiling and finally back down again, drifting up the row of desks at the opposite end of the room, cruising the listless faces of my classmates until they stopped at Kelli Troy’s.
She was not exactly transfixed as she sat in the back corner of the room listening to Miss Carver’s plans for us, but she was attentive and strangely serious. No one had introduced her, as they usually did with new students, and I found out later that Kelli had specifically asked not to be singled out. She was wearing a light blue short-sleeved blouse and a plaid skirt that fell just below her knees, a style of dress hardly distinguishable from the other girls inthe class. In fact, only one thing set her apart. On her finger she wore a slender wedding band of tarnished silver, which seemed a strange thing for a young girl to have.
I pulled my eyes away and concentrated on Miss Carver.
“I think that people can learn a lot from reading about what other people have gone through,” she said. “That’s the most important thing reading can do for you.”
No one in the class gave the slightest hint that anything she’d said was worth hearing, and in response, Miss Carver fell silent for a moment, her eyes lowering somewhat, as if she were searching for the key that might unlock us. In that pose, she looked terribly young, hardly more than a girl, frightened and unsure of herself, as if waiting for us to leap at her, to tear her limb from limb. Later it would strike me that a deep innocence had surrounded her that morning, that it was like the soft sheen I have since noticed in newborn skin, and that because of it, it would never have occurred to me that she was far more knowing than she seemed to be, more able to discern the hidden pathways and secret chambers within those she came to know, or that
Once we’d passed through the door, Luke took a sharp turn and headed down the stairs, while I went into the main building to my first class.
The teacher came in just behind me, and when I first saw her, I thought she must be a new student at Choctaw rather than a new teacher. This was the Miss Carver who would be helping me edit the
Wildcat
, a pale, thin young woman with reddish hair, the sort that always appeared brittle and unruly.
She took her place behind the desk. “I’m Miss Carver,” she told us in a high, clear voice, then drew a large plastic bag onto the top of the desk, opened it andpulled out a stack of papers. “I’ve mimeographed copies of the reading list,” she said as she stepped around the desk and began to distribute them.
When she’d finished, she returned to the front of the room and gave the class a quick, tentative smile. “This is my first year teaching, so I’ll probably make a few mistakes. I hope you’ll be patient with me.” The smile broadened, but awkwardly, as if unable to find its proper place on her face. “I’ll also be in charge of the school play at the end of the year, so from time to time I’ll be asking for ideas from you about what play we should do.” She continued on, talking quietly, outlining what she hoped to do in the coming months. She mentioned various books that we’d soon be reading, and I remember her saying that
Wuthering Heights
would be the first of them and
Ethan Frome
the last. These books were among her personal favorites, she told us, because they dealt so powerfully with what she called “doomed love.”
It was the sort of opening statement I had grown accustomed to over the years, teachers forever trying to convince their students that there was something to be gained from learning what they taught. Faithful to my “smart kid” image, I tried to pay close attention to Miss Carver, but after a time, my eyes began to wander about the room, first from one side of the blackboard to the other, then up the wall and along the molding at the ceiling and finally back down again, drifting up the row of desks at the opposite end of the room, cruising the listless faces of my classmates until they stopped at Kelli Troy’s.
She was not exactly transfixed as she sat in the back corner of the room listening to Miss Carver’s plans for us, but she was attentive and strangely serious. No one had introduced her, as they usually did with new students, and I found out later that Kelli had specifically asked not to be singled out. She was wearing a light blue short-sleeved blouse and a plaid skirt that fell just below her knees, a style of dress hardly distinguishable from the other girls inthe class. In fact, only one thing set her apart. On her finger she wore a slender wedding band of tarnished silver, which seemed a strange thing for a young girl to have.
I pulled my eyes away and concentrated on Miss Carver.
“I think that people can learn a lot from reading about what other people have gone through,” she said. “That’s the most important thing reading can do for you.”
No one in the class gave the slightest hint that anything she’d said was worth hearing, and in response, Miss Carver fell silent for a moment, her eyes lowering somewhat, as if she were searching for the key that might unlock us. In that pose, she looked terribly young, hardly more than a girl, frightened and unsure of herself, as if waiting for us to leap at her, to tear her limb from limb. Later it would strike me that a deep innocence had surrounded her that morning, that it was like the soft sheen I have since noticed in newborn skin, and that because of it, it would never have occurred to me that she was far more knowing than she seemed to be, more able to discern the hidden pathways and secret chambers within those she came to know, or that
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