A Memory
Miss Christian,
Photo by Max Ovcharenko on Unsplash
my first-grade teacher,
had a pockmarked face.
Mommy said the scars
were from picking scabs,
an object lesson against
a besetting sin
of my own.
Miss Christian had a wooden pointer,
its appearance
even more fierce
than her face.
She used the pointer to direct our attention
to the board
and whenever she deemed necessary,
to spank.
I was the only child in my class
who lived too far from school
to walk home for lunch.
So when the rest of the class
escaped into the bright midday,
I sat alone before
our teacher’s
pocked gaze,
nibbling my lunch.
(My lunch box was metal,
the kind the men carried,
day after day, to the mill.
Daddy had painted it a bright yellow,
and Mommy decorated it with stickers.)
The day came, though,
when another girl
stayed behind
at lunchtime, too.
Just that once.
(Her lunchbox came from the store,
oval, imprinted with a train design.
How I’d longed for such a lunchbox,
though Mommy said it was nicer
to have my own special one,
different from all the rest.
I, different from all the rest.)
The other girl and I,
with our two different lunch boxes,
ate in silence before Miss Christian,
sliding sympathetic peeks across the aisle
at one another.
But, wonder of wonders,
once we’d finished,
our teacher told us we could gather,
one by one by one,
the shiny tinsel
that had dripped
onto the floor
from the class Christmas tree.
Delighted, we scrambled the floor
for treasure.
“That’s enough,” Miss Christian said,
after too short a time.
Too little by far.
“Sit.”
And so we went obediently to our desks,
though there was tinsel yet …
just beyond our reach,
waiting,
calling.
And then Miss Christian
left the room,
stepping
just
around
the
corner
to chat with another teacher.
We knew she was close.
We could hear their voices.
But since we couldn’t see her,
surely we were invisible, too.
We gazed at the tinsel
begging to be gathered,
then at one another.
We giggled.
Conspirators,
almost friends,
brave in company.
I hadn’t known how brave
I could feel
in company.
Then we rose as one,
tiptoed the few feet to the prize—
one more Christmas-tree ice cycle each—
and scurried back to our side-by-side seats.
Even as we settled, though—
safe, surely we were safe!—
Miss Christian bellowed
through the doorway.
(I understood only much later
she had been testing us,
watching our reflections
in the door’s glass pane.)
Curiously,
even being spanked
with a wooden pointer
lost some of its sting,
the indignity shared
with a companion.
What remains?
The memory of those pockmarks.
I’ll bet my mother was right.
Miss Christian picked.
