Chapter Four #2
Tense. Tense is the problem when you retire.
“Was,” he’d said. “I was a high school teacher.” I’d been retired twelve years but still felt more accurate in the present tense.
For one thing, this is the kind of math even English teachers understand.
I’d been retired twelve years from a job I started when I was twenty-two, meaning I had been a teacher for forty-three years of my life, whereas I had been not a teacher for only thirty-four.
And I didn’t remember the first five or so, having been only a baby at the time.
But second of all, as for my father before me, my job always felt closer to a calling.
Whereas he’d found his because of his name, I’d found mine—like my name—because of timing.
It had seemed to me, as a young woman, that my options (as a young woman) were I could be a teacher or I could be a nurse, and if that wasn’t quite true, it was a lot truer than it is now.
In books and movies, on TV, old women are retired spies, retired investigators, retired con artists, but real life wasn’t that exciting.
Isn’t that exciting.
I do not like blood, but I do like books, words, reading, learning, language, writing, and children. It was not a hard decision, but nor was it a job that was limited to school hours. Teaching isn’t that kind of work. So maybe it’s something you stop doing. But it isn’t something you stop being.
Of course that’s true of all sorts of things.
When you’re young, you are what you do. Before you’re a teacher because you teach, you’re a dancer because you dance, or a smoker because you smoke.
Before that, you’re a jumper because you jump, or a helper because your mother lets you lick the bowl when she’s baking chocolate cake.
But in one’s twilight years, the gap between doing and being widens.
At least—as there are more and more things I can’t do anymore—I hope so.
I laid a palm to my chest. “William Taft. English department. Forty-one years. And two before that back in Brooklyn at Canarsie High, RIP.”
“They shuttered the school because you left New York?”
“I don’t think that was why. Especially since it didn’t happen for forty more years. Which department were you?”
“Science. Which I suppose is why I didn’t realize car washing played such a significant role in the literary canon.”
“I was also the advisor for The Willie,” I explained.
“The willie?”
“School literary magazine.”
“Oh, I see. For William Taft. In England, ‘willie’ has another meaning.”
“All over the English-speaking world, I think. It was named before my time, but I assume that’s why the students chose it.”
The Willie had been allotted eighty-five dollars a year, which had to cover printing costs as well as pizza, the cornerstone of any successful high school club.
When I complained about insufficient funds, my principal said we could have an extra twenty bucks if we changed the name, which he claimed was “stealthily randy.” I’d argued that high school students were, in my experience, openly randy, but the truth is twenty bucks wouldn’t have made that much of a difference anyway, not even in 1975.
“The Willie’s budget was a pittance.” I fished wax and polish out of my supply bag. “So we held bake sales. We held raffles. But mostly, we held car washes.”
“I can see that poets washing cars would be a moneymaker.” He upended one of the buckets and stood on it to reach Father Frank’s roof. “We sold magicians.”
I stopped mid-buff. “You sold magicians?”
“Rented them, really,” he clarified. “To earn money for our similarly underfunded chemistry club. For a small fee, a student would come to your child’s birthday party or Scout meeting and conjure purple smoke, light water on fire, explode fruit, that sort of thing.”
“Sounds sticky.”
“Less messy than car washing, ironically.” He was soaked to the skin, hair triangles wilted against his scalp, shoes squelchy with dirty water, but I was distracted by his correct identification of irony, a skill far rarer than the ability to wash a truck. Or explode fruit.
“What was it called, your chemistry club?”
“Chemistry Club,” he said.
“No second entendre there.”
“Nor really a first.”
“See, this is why you need poets.” I switched rags. I had an endless supply of spent Willie tees. “They’re good at finding words with two meanings, of which one is a good name for a student organization and the other is stealthily randy.”
“What would you suggest?”
“I’m not very well versed in chemistry terms,” I hedged. “Mortar and Pestle?”
He grinned at once but tilted his head shoulder to shoulder. “Yes, but we don’t use them as much as we used to. How about Wetting Agents?”
“Eww.”
“Atomic Unit?” he offered.
Hard to argue with. Which made me think of “Hard Acid? That’s a thing, right?”
“Not bad.” His eyes sparkled like the chrome of the undented bumper. “Wait. I’ve got it.”
I put down my rag in anticipation. “Manometer!” He flipped out his hands like Ta-da and splashed car polish everywhere. Darcy had offered me fifty dollars to put the extra bottle of polish in the donate pile. Now I was glad I had turned her down.
“Compelling, but I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s a U-tube”—he drew it in the air with a finger, and I saw his point already—“used to measure pressure in various pipelines, tubes, orifices—”
I held up a hand. “Enough!” We were giggling like high schoolers (speaking of irony). “Of course, if you’re a teenager,” I pointed out, “really anything said in the right tone can be stealthily randy.”
He dropped his voice to a sultry whisper. “Bohr Model.”
I cocked my hips and fluttered my lashes. “Noble Gas.”
With breathy pauses, he purred, “Poly. Atomic. Ion.”
My memory’s not what it used to be, but that wasn’t the reason I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed so hard. When we caught our breath, we declared the truck clean—it really did look brand-new—and snuck away so when Father Frank came down, he would be what Moth termed “chuffed.”
The elevators at Vista View are glass, as if we’re in a James Bond film instead of the opposite. They’re slow and overused—few can take the stairs here—so we had to wait, damply, but one arrived finally, and we got on it.
As we ascended, Moth said, “While we’re on the topic, you are going to prom, are you not?”
“What do you mean?”
“Senior prom. Day after tomorrow,” Moth said. “You look confused.”
“Because we were reminiscing about high school, not enrolling in it.”
He grinned. “Wrong sort of senior, Sarge.”