Erudita's Blog

I squeeze my eyes shut: to block out the sun, to stop the tears that threaten, to clear my mind’s eye of my daughter doing nasty things.  But she is there behind my eyelids doing things I never imagined.  I push the wheeled cart harder and enter my daughter’s classroom.  I study its normalness.  It is silent in the late afternoon, the setting sun shining through the curtains I made for this, her first classroom.  The desks are skewed and I push them back into orderly rows. I study the family photos at her desk: Mike and Andee close up with the wedding veil floating out behind them, Andee in a bikini on water skis, Andee, Andee, Andee looking fresh and innocent. I wipe the dust from each and set it back.  I grab the garbage and flipping it upside down I hurl its contents into the wheeled dumpster and then slam the garbage can back down.  Flipping the lights off I push my wheeled cart out the door and into the waning sunshine.

This is the last classroom and I trudge toward the storage room, my keys jangling on my hip.  My thighs rub full and uncomfortable, and my mind circles back again to her, her thighs opened wide and inviting.  Again and again I replace that image with the soft-cheeked, pudgy blonde child she was.  I cannot, simply cannot align that innocence I have known with the woman they say Andee is.  I shake my head vigorously in protest as my mind reviews what I have heard. It cannot be true, must not be true, and yet is.  There is proof.  And day after day, more  boys come forward, proffering ever more lurid details.  Their faces are downcast but their voices hint at pride.

Andee teaches high school English.  It is what she always dreamed of.  She says it proudly.  I am an English teacher. I say it proudly too.  My daughter Andee, she is a high school English teacher. It is  a small school so she teaches junior and senior English.  She boasts she knows every student that passes through our one-school town.   My mind cringes at the thought that every young man in town has passed through her classroom.  And what?  Under her skirt and through her thighs? How did it happen?  How did it start, this inconceivable thing?   

I see her there at the front of the class, nouns and verbs on the whiteboard behind her.  She is not a sexy vixen lowering her glasses and sensually shaking dark hair out of a bun.  She is small and neat, with freckles and her sandy hair is pulled back into a ponytail.  She wears jeans and little t-shirts and blends in with the students.  She is proud of that.  I’m not gonna be stuffy and superior like other teachers she said.  I’m gonna talk to them on their level, I’m gonna be their friend. And I had smiled in pride.  She was going to be their friend.  She was going to be on their level.  Everything has so many meanings now.

I sigh and lock the storage room door and placing the giant ring of keys over my arm I walk back to my car.  A tan, four-door Honda, nine years old, parked under the mural of a puma. It is the school mascot, painted by students but still, pretty good.  I unlock the door and slide into the drivers seat and insert the key into the ignition but I don’t start the car.  The car ping, ping, pings and I cannot hold it back any longer.  My throat swells until I think it will burst and the parking lot is empty so I finally just let it go.  I cry hard sobs with my mouth open, rubbing the base of my palms into my eyes.  My head is tipped forward almost touching the steering wheel, but my saliva starts to come out my mouth so I wipe it away and instead tip my head back.  I cry like this a while, head way back, loud sobs coming out of my mouth and I then I am not sad anymore.  I am angry, angry, angry.  I shake my head back and forth and I scream noises but not words, stomping my feet and beating my hands on the steering wheel.  Through the tears I see a car pulling into the staff parking lot and I stop.  Just like that it turns off. I quickly wipe my face on my hands and start the car, backing out roughly and pull out past them staring straight ahead.

My mind rolls back and forth over my life, almost like sucking at a sore tooth.  Something nags at me. I compare the happiness I feel today with the unhappiness that preceded it.  Ten years of unhappiness followed by ten more years of suicidal unhappiness.  That is behind me now, but I never know if it is permanently gone.  I remember the depth of agitation; every nerve of my mind in agony, an agony that made each second stretch into the next as long and painful as possible.  I don’t think anyone ever wants to commit suicide, but rather than live in this pain, this ongoing pain, suicide begins to beckon.  Death takes on a friendly and comforting face. 

During those years, innumerable persons patted my hand and said various things within  a single significance.  “Don’t do it, Think of those you will leave behind, Don’t be selfish, and my personal favorite – Someday this will all be over and you will look back and be glad you stuck it out.” So many voices in union over something I don’t think they had even a glimmer of.  And the truth is, that I am glad to be alive today.  And simultaneously the truth is  that when I was in that moment, that never-ending moment of static pain, I thought that if only one person really loved me, they would let me go.  And I promised myself that if anyone ever cried out to me in this raw pain, I wouldn’t mouth those empty platitudes.  I said I would understand that if they said they couldn’t stand this, not one single minute more, I would accept that.

That moment is now.  My very dear friend writhes with this pain.  Not that she wants to die but that living has become too hard, has been too hard for a long time now.  Her words and anguish pour out the phone into my ear and I have no magic words. I listen mutely, and feel as I did as a little girl watching my father carefully thread a worm onto a hook.  Firmly gripping the flacid worm, he punctured its flesh with a hook that sparkled in the sunlight.  The worm, previously making soft movements began to coil and flail, twist and writhe. When I gasped, my father said not to worry, “they don’t feel pain like we do.”

I stare sadly at myself, at what I have done.  My image in the mirror is rather like a carwreck.  I am horrified, but cannot look away.  How did I get here?  Oh, I know how I got here.  Whatever makes me who I am got me here.  I who like to sit rather than move, I who like to eat rather than, well, rather than almost anything else in the world. 

I hear women blame their children or their jobs or lack of time or well, really almost anything.  But I will be truthful. I got here very much on my own. The real question is why I stay here.  Is it really a lack of will power?  I am beginning to think not.  I think I am afraid.

If left to imagine, to daydream about who I think I would be minus all this extra body, my mind runs wild.  While my body ages and decomposes almost before my eyes, my mind alone retains the sensation of youth and vibrance and well, sexuality.  I surprise myself with how sensual I am.  And that must remain hidden.  Mustn’t it?  No one wants to know that old women are just as sexual as young women, nay, as sexual as we imagine the most beautiful and glamourous of women to be.  It isn’t fitting.  I wonder what my daughters would think if they could see me as I see myself, deep within my mind?  No, no one out there wants a sensual grandma.  Except perhaps granpas? But we are here.  Hiding behind our decaying flesh, our minds ripe and juicy as peaches.

In self-examination, I circle back to fear.  Who would I be without the fat and the wrinkles? Perhaps I am afraid of her, of what she will do, this woman who lurks inside of me.  I have at last found happiness with a man.  But to gain him, I left the other: left him behind as refuse.  I felt bad, don’t we always feel bad?, but not bad enough to stay.  I had happiness waiting for me, calling to me and I left him crumpled and discarded and fairly skipped away to my new future.  I found happiness and picked it up and held it close and said it would be enough.  And it is enough.  I think it is enough.  Will it be enough?

If I were to shed this outer woman, the one who shrouds me from the world, Who would come out?  Who is in here?  I am afraid of her.  What if she is a woman who is never satisfied?  What if she thinks she needs more, that this life, and this man, are not enough? What then?  I don’t want to be that woman, and deep inside me, I am afraid that all my outer goodness and platitudes are only wrappings that covered her up.  Know yourself they say…I am afraid to know myself.  I am afraid I will not like her.  Is it not better to stay here, wrapped, shrouded, disguised as benign decomposition?

I am a peach, sitting on a long white counter. My skin sags, wrinkles and buckles.  My juice is all the sweeter for my maturity.  Liquid sugar, just before I go bad.

The weather is different today and my moods seem carried by it.  I’ve a new office.  An office with a window.  Below the window I have planted sunflowers and morning glories but those are still a long way off.  The sky is overcast but that is saying too little.  Although covered with clouds, the clouds are white and bright, suffused with light.  The mountain has snow on it – something unheard of here.  From my window I watch the wind whip the open handed fronds of a fan palm.  I feel wild and restless and accomplish nothing today.  Today is a day of being restrained behind a glass window and further restrained behind a desk.  My mind roves through my life.  And settles where?  On my children, my spouse, my aging self.  Life is so simple and yet oh so very complicated.  I look at old pictures of my children and realize that bit by bit, day after day I have watched something precious happen and like a butterfly wing, I cannot hold it in my hand for fear of rubbing the velvety coating off.  I cannot hold onto time or life or a child’s infant years.  It is fleeting at best.  I am wistful and sad.  And I vow that tonight, when my son is complain-whining his way through the evening, I will break through his truculence somehow and I will connect with him and hope that this will be one more in a series of memories he builds of he and me. Something for him to look back and hold dear and be wistful for – something when I am dead and gone.  I will not yell at my older son for jumping off the couch – not tonight.  Tonight I will grab his hand and urge him to leap higher.  And I won’t insist he sit at the table and practice writing his name again in preparation for kindergarten.  No not this night.  Tonight after the children are in their beds and their breathing is slow and regular, I will reach for the warmth of my man lying at my side.  I will pull him to me and into me and I will stop thinking about life and its meanings; I will be fully alive and in the moment. I will stop swimming and let myself be carried by the current of life.