The
six teachers who reside at Mrs. Wood’s
Boarding House are a homogeneous group, like
sisters or cheerful nuns who have lived long together in such an estrogenic
universe that they meld like wax. They
range in age and tenure by several decades, from gray upsweeps to waist-length
curls, from bouncing salt-and-pepper page-boys to one silky-white permanent
renewed at the Chat-n-Curl every six months.
They teach math, English-and-Latin-combined, Speech and Home Ec, as
well as all-the-Rs-plus- H-and-G in the lower grades.
The
two elementary teachers are oddly disparate---one sturdy and solidly planted,
her plain-spoken character and her sense of command quite suited to the rowdy
fourth-graders, most on that cusp between
innocence and naughty entendre,
and needing a firm hand and incisive voice.
Miss
Omar strides into the classroom in a gabardine suit---shoes solidly laced,
setting down her purse and taking up the day in both hands. She has no
need for call-to-order after about the first week, for a majority of her pupils
have heard from older siblings that she is a tough old bird, proved by
stern example in those first few mornings.
When
she wakes up, she is AWAKE, and cannot understand those who need the brace
of coffee and a bit of quiet to get going in the morning, though she matches
them cup for cup at the percolators.
And she’s never set an alarm clock in her life---she just KNOWS what time
it is, never missing an appointment, knowing without turning her head that the
Jenkins boy and Claude Ray Burns are setting their brogans for escape at
seven-til-three, instead of waiting for one-minute-before like everyone else
watching the clock. And until she went
off to college, she’d believed that everyone else could tell time like that,
startling onlookers occasionally with “It’s four-fifty-two---I’d better get
home,” with no clock in sight.
Miss Wanamaker's waist-length curls are the envy of every girl in the entire school,
and the Toni counter at Leon’s
Drugstore would grow dusty were it not for Miss Hazel’s assiduous
attention with the turkey-feathers, for it lacks for customers since all the
girls began to let their hair grow out about the third week of school. Then succeeded a run on the soft-curler rack
and the TAME aisle, once word leaked as to how she keeps her elegant
coiffure. She is thin and fine-boned
in her pale shirtwaist dresses and silky
blouses tucked into somber skirts. Her
manner is quiet and soft-spoken to her class of first-graders, calling them
“ladies” and “gentlemen” when she calls them to order.
The
effect her calm, orderly person had on those brand-new scholars bursting in,
fresh and still drunk with Summer in the first days, was a wonder of the
school, for the grubby barefoot boys soon attained an almost neat aspect, with
clean faces and fingernails, and the chattery, chirpy little girls stilled to rapt attention at the first soft words.
And
after her very first note-sent-home, introducing herself and asking that each
child bring a pencil, a tablet, and a handkerchief every day, there is a cloth
in every pocket, though some are obviously cut from an old sheet or dishrag,
unhemmed and ravelly, but folded into the small pocket every morning along with
Barlows and aggies and chunkin’ rocks and yesterday’s night-hardened nugget of
gum. They know better than to chew in
school, though Miss Wanamaker is still new to the game, holding out a scrap of
torn paper for the miscreants to spit the gum into, rather than the
seldom-needed, sternly-proffered bare hand of Miss Omar, who has become inured
to all sorts of grime and goo over the years, and who keeps a tiny bottle of
McKesson’s in the top drawer with the Jergens, for anointing her hands now and
then.
Miss
O has lived at Mrs. Wood’s for some seventeen years; Miss W is the
baby-of-the-bunch in her second year of teaching, and they both fit in
like family.
No comments:
Post a Comment