We Run the Tides(10)
In homeroom, I think even the teacher, Ms. Livesey, is looking at me strangely. Ms. Livesey lives in Berkeley, a world away. We know a lot about her because she’s one of the few teachers who talks about her life outside the classroom. She paints women with artichokes or avocadoes or guavas over their private parts, and sometimes she shows us slides of her “work in progress.” Last year she brought her twenty-one-year-old son in to talk to us about his time in the Peace Corps. She wears her black hair messy—not uncombed enough to elicit complaints from the parents, but just tousled enough to suggest she spent the night in the woods. We wonder if she shaves her armpits. We assume people in Berkeley don’t shave. Sometimes she has splatters of paint on her shoes and we know she’s been working on her canvases. It excites us to know she has passions beyond us, her students. It thrills us that her son is cute.
Sometimes classmates like to sit near my desk so they can cheat off my quizzes, but today no one wants to sit next to me. Ms. Livesey hands out a xeroxed form with nine squares on it. It’s a questionnaire intended to help us determine what level of information we would give out to a stranger, what we would tell a friend, what we would tell a family member. Clearly, it’s not a coincidence that this worksheet is being distributed for discussion today. The sheet is intended for an older audience—in the center is a box that says: “Things You Would Not Even Tell Yourself.” Ms. Livesey has Xed out the box, which of course only serves to make it more intriguing. What, I wonder, would I not tell myself?
Next is science. It’s our third day of the sex ed unit. On the first day our teacher passed around pads and tampons and told us to never douche because it interferes with the body’s natural ecosystem. On the second day we watched a VHS recording of a young woman giving birth without pain medication. (The woman was white and preppy and looked like she could have gone to Spragg.) We all covered our eyes and vowed to never have children.
The science teacher is named Ms. McGilly and we call her Ms. Mc., which she doesn’t particularly like. She doesn’t particularly like us either. She’s bone-thin with straight, gray-red hair, has a son our age and two young daughters who she’s told us she would never send to Spragg. We know she won’t be around long. She’ll go the way our music teacher went after she taught us the song “Little Boxes.” We liked our music teacher, who let us call her by her first name, Jane. She wore Western-style belts and brushed her brown hair in front of us until it glistened. (Ms. Mc. told us it was a disgrace to brush one’s hair in public.) One day Jane said to the class: “Don’t you get it? You girls in your uniforms and your nice houses are like the little boxes in the song. You’re all the same. They’re stripping you of your individuality.” That was the last we saw of Jane. For months we thought it was because she’d used the word “stripping.”
Today Ms. Mc. is passing around contraceptives. First a condom, which everyone decides smells terrible, then spermicide with an applicator, which is fun to slide up and down like a Push-Up ice cream treat, then a diaphragm that looks like a pink trampoline for a rodent. Next are the birth control pills. The orderliness of the packet—all the pills lined up perfectly in four rows of seven—reminds me of what Jane said about us all being identical. I punch out three of the pills and slip them into the pocket of my shorts. We all wear shorts under our blue skirts for P.E. class, when we drop our uniforms on the sidelines of the field or on the bleachers of the gym.
I spend recess in the library, and lunch alone in the cafeteria with the book I’ve checked out. I’ve read the book before but today I need the reassurance of a familiar plot. I wait for someone to sit next to me at the rectangular table, or for someone to talk to me as they pass by, but no one does. Across the cafeteria I see Maria Fabiola laughing. Even though she’s far away I know what her bracelets sound like as they spiral up and down her tan arm.
A lunch without friends is a lunch that’s too long. I glance at my Swatch watch frequently, and at one point am convinced it’s stopped though it’s still ticking as loudly as a guilty heartbeat. Through the pleated fabric of my skirt, I pat the pocket of my shorts, searching for the pills—I’m not sure what their purpose is. They’re like tiny Easter eggs I’ve collected. What does anyone do with Easter eggs except show off how many have been found, and then let them rot?
Toward the end of the lunch period, I’m scheduled to meet with Mr. London, the English teacher, to discuss the extra-credit reading he’s recommended for me. Mr. London came to Spragg soon after graduating college and he’s probably too young to be teaching eighth graders—there’s not enough of an age gap. At the start of the school year Mr. London assigned Jack London’s work, and someone asked if he was related to Jack London. He became theatrically vague about whether he might be related to the great writer, which didn’t fool me. Other students at the school like to make connections between things that have no roots in reality.
We meet in the Male Teacher’s Lounge, which is basically his private office because there are no other male teachers except for the P.E. teacher, Mr. Robinson, who uses the Sports Staff office as his lair. He even put an Australian flag on the door to mark his territory. The Female Teacher’s Lounge is crowded and smells like the shallow vase water of dying flowers. The Male Teacher’s Lounge always smells of burnt coffee—the scent of testosterone, I assume.