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Like A Paintbrush
by Robert Louis Bartlett We are a community, at least for an hour each day. We function like a small community, within a framework of set rules and mutually understood social conventions. Like any other place with rules, we obey for the sake of the general good though at times we feel regulated to the point of subjugation, some of us more so than others. Our behavior has been conditioned for twelve years,however, and we are mostly used to abiding by the established order of things. Here, in first-hour English, Mrs. Dorothy Clay is the law, the picture of authority in her plain, below-the-knee dresses and pinned-back, salt-and-pepper hair. She is tall and has rigid posture, standing or sitting. Large, dark crescents under her eyes (magnified by her thick, wire-framed bifocals) suggest a library of books read, thousands of pages of homework and tests graded. She sits behind her desk judge-like, keeping students in line with decades-practiced looks: angered glares, skeptical once-overs, rare flashes of approval. Versus a more genteel and academically-inclined group Mrs. Clay would have preferred, we are a collage of diverse backgrounds, temperaments and abilities she inherited from the junior-class-pool and the objects of her constant surveillance. As in any community, we have our neighborhoods. Mrs. Clay, unlike many teachers, hasn't arranged us according to an alphabetized or boy-girl seating-chart; she rightfully feels her control over us is strong enough and it doesn't matter to her how we've placed ourselves, thus the demographics of the class have evolved naturally as they would have in any town. There is the neighborhood of affluence near the windows, with a nice view; the working-class middle-section com-prises the largest group of students; the slums are situated in the corner near the closet, farthest from the affluent. The rich kids near the windows, for instance, flaunt a self-created status as if it were expensive, exotic silk, beyond our grasp. As the children of professionals and business-owners, all they know is they were born to position. They are, generally speaking, attractive, which I understand they attribute to breeding (though I theorize good looks are more a result of prosperity, healthy diet and medically-insured lives not fraught with addictions, beatings and long-term sickness). By contrast, the working-class kids measure their value by what they actually accomplish; many of them have jobs after school or on the weekends, making money they get to keep; others among them labor diligently at their studies and earn high marks in school; some of them manage both. They possess a deliberate bearing and an appealing, happy cockiness. The two of us that occupy the corner near the closet come from poor families. Poverty is a complicated, cramped way of life that doesn't allow much space for creating an identity, in class or elsewhere. I'm the fortunate one of us, I suppose--I have a second-shift job at a laundry and the wages I earn are ultimately used for necessities (I give my checks to my grandmother and let her decide which bills to pay), but I get no great joy from my employment. I'm tired during the day and don't do well at studying or testing; my grades are, at best, average. I do, however, catch a few minutes here-and-there at the laundry to read, after the crimson and yellow-splotched sheets have been loaded into the washers, when the large dryers are humming and tumbling and the celing fans are working properly, spinning slowly and rythmically--then I read books by Oates and Stevenson, Atwood and Steinbeck, Anne Tyler and the Brontes. For years customers at the laundry have left behind their old paperbacks and there are more than a hundred of them in the storeroom. Every book enlightens and lifts me with fresh understanding; after I finish a novel I feel one step closer to the doorway of my escape, ushered there by the stories of other people in far-away places. My neighbor in the slums is Terri Ann Alford. She is the student that sits in the very back corner of the room, closest to the closet, at my right. Her striking looks are easy to take notice of; she is slim and pale; her skin seems especially light when it is offset by her turqoise-blue skirt, her favorite. Her eyes are radiant, green dimes, unlike any hue of green I have ever seen. The only jewelry she wears is a rhinestone heart that dangles on a chain around her neck. Her hair is brown-orange, collar-length; it's thick and cut straight across at the bottom. When she moves, her hairs move in unison like the soft, glossy-sienna bristles of a wide paintbrush--the kind my late father, a house-painter, used to use to change gray rooms to lemon and burgundy and Navajo-white. On the days I'm tired, it's easy for me to get lost staring at Terri, to become dream-like watching the fluoresent light reflect off her beautiful hair. About a week before Thanksgiving (we were studying /King Lear/), Terri told me about her own, long-gone father, whom she called "a right bastard from Philadelphia." She recounted his drunken rages, how he had back-handed her when she was very small; he regularly struck her mother, too. One day he abandoned them, never to return. He was the sole bread-winner (and not a very good one at that); when he walked out he left behind mammoth debts that hung over his family "like the executioner's axe," Terri said. Mrs. Alford is no longer able to work, in poor health and on oxygen; on the days Terri isn't in school she's caring for her mother or accompanying her to doctors' offices. I saw them go past the laundry late one afternoon as they rode the bus--a bent-over old woman cradled in the arms of her protective daughter--and I thought: Terri Alford is the strongest person I know. Though her attendance in English is erratic, I happen to know it's Terri's favorite class; she is especially interested in poetry. She is amused with Dorothy Clay and has given her the nick-name "Big Dot;" I broke out laughing the first time she whispered it to me, her mouth still as a ventriliquist's. For my outburst that day I received (predictably) a stern, three-second x-ray from the piercing eyes of our statuesque teacher. (Terri has always communicated in discreet subtleties. I've learned, over time, to watch and listen to her closely. Soft utterances, the slightest movement of an eyebrow, comical pouts, cynical grins with only one corner of her lips upturned . . . these little things can mean volumes coming from Terri.) In January, on a snowy, dark-violet Friday morning, Terri slipped on sidewalk-ice on South Archer Drive, the street where we both live. Though she hurried into her seat I saw that her bare, white knees were scraped and bruised. She tugged self-concsiously at the frayed hem of her turquoise-blue skirt until I gently spread my jacket across her lap and down over her thin legs. "If anyone asks," I said quietly, "just tell them you're cold." One of the girls in class--Wendy Fenn from the working-class neighborhood--must have caught on; she approached Terri after the bell and walked her to the girls' restroom. When I saw Terri at lunch, I could see face make-up daubbed on her injured knees. Since that day, though I have not seen them speak to one another or interact, I sometimes catch Wendy stealing a look at Terri and she sneaks her back a sly wink. The window-side of our class has an eastern exposure; on cold, clear mornings it's the part of our old, brick room that warms up first. By mid-February it was obvious that the best location in first-hour English belonged to the affluent neighborhood's residents, thawing in their prized real-estate. On Valentine's Day, Terri was the last to arrive in class. Sniffling and shivering, she was visibly ill and in discomfort but compelled to attend for the scheduled exam on The Great Gatsby. Referring to our chilly corner she groaned, "this is bullshit," so loudly I was surprised Mrs. Clay's bat-radar didn't pick it up. Terri rose and trudged to the only available window-seat (unoccupied since Amy Riley had moved to Nevada), slammed down her books and sat. "Hi, neighbor," she crowed in a hoarse voice, beaming a feigned, soccer-mom smile in the direction of homecoming-king Marcus Beal; he didn't respond and she rolled her eyes upward. She glanced at me and playfully stuck out her tongue, rubbing her arms and shoulders in the sunlight and melodramatically mouthing the words "sooo nice and warm." Terri was out of place that day, sitting by the windows . . . because she looked grand and defiant while the well-off kids seemed small and frail around her, none of them with so much as a clue as to what her life, her struggles were about. She gamely fought through that hour, hacking, teeth chattering. When she left she handed me a note written in red pencil: "It wasn't as warm in the sun as it is next to you. Happy Val-Day. Love, T." One day, in March, Terri was asked to recite a poem she'd written. There were murmurs as she nervously stepped to the front of the room (imagine the mystery-woman of a town taking the podium at a city-council meeting). She held her head down as she walked, shrouding her face with her thick hair. I heard suppressed giggles--Terri's clothes are second-hand and worn in places; I looked in the direction of the window-seats and said, "shut the hell up," which brought a swift admonition from Mrs. Clay regarding "the use of harsh language in the classroom." I locked eyes with star-running-back Seth Filmore, the one I suspected of giggling and the son of a d.u.i.-attorney; he looked away first and I proudly took this to mean I'd won the moment. Terri then read her poem--a stark, chanting lament about a young family that had fallen apart. When she finished, the working-class kids clapped as enthusiastically as I did. Their applause filled the room with a full, bright sound and I appreciated them, from then on, even more. Only this week, Terri and I have devised a plan we're going to tell her mother and my grand-mother about tonight. We think the four of us should try to find a place to live together, pool our resources and try to improve our way of life. I'll continue to work at the laundry; Terri has been promised a cashier's job at the hardware store on Evans Road. My grandmother gets a little social-security and Terri's mother receives a disability check. These four incomes in one house-hold might afford us the chance to attend community-college and provide a nicer home for our families, in a neighborhood all our own, a place away from South Archer Drive where our gray existence can be transformed to lemon, burgundy and Navajo-white. Terri warns me that her Scots-Irish, Appalachian heritage tends to make her headstrong and intense but I told her not to worry; I have seen her at her worst and also her best and I know we'll go well together. There is a current of affection running between us that we both acknowledge though we haven't explored it in a physical way. After school today I'm going to ask her for a kiss, our first; I have a spot picked out, on the roof of my building. I'm going to invite her up there at sunset, when the gold rays on the horizon are shooting over the spring sky like rockets. My father, I'm sure, would approve. He was a man that lived with a broken heart after my mother left him behind. A year before he died, when I was six, we moved to South Archer Drive to live with my grandmother. On one typical Saturday, we'd returned from painting a house (a mansion, really) situated in a very nice neighborhood (always nice neighborhoods). In the half-light of dusk, in front of our building, we sat on the tailgate of his old truck, eating ice-cream . . . he told me he hoped I would "have some happiness with someone. Someday." "Maybe it will be that pretty, little gal there," he said, pointing to a girl my age playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. I'd never seen her, but . . . her auburn hair and fair complexion were difficult not to notice. From my window, I watched her door the moonlit night her father left yelling and cursing. I watched her in second grade, third, fourth . . . a quiet, lonely girl; a little sylph that drifted up and down South Archer and in and out of my daily thoughts. She hardly acknowledged me then. . . tepid, half-hearted smiles; passing looks on the street; discreet subleties. Those contacts were enough, though, all those years. Like small flowers I was allowed to pick from a perfect field, one at a time. When I hung the chain with the rhinestone heart on her doorknob last year, covert as I attempted to be, I think she may have seen me and now suspects how I've always felt . . . that she would be the one that would change my life, the person to bring the colors back into my world, our destinies beginning the moment my father pointed her out. It is the sweetest fate that we've ended up next to each other in English. In this neighborhood of our own making. Terri sits next to me now, pensively drafting another poem; every so often she lifts her pen to her mouth or breathes deeply. With each movement her perfect hair shudders like it did that first day and it does something to my heart. It glistens in the light and becomes every color at once. |
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