Blackned

 

                                                          Marilyn Horan

                                                    Blackened

During my thirteen years in Catholic schools I heard nothing about avoiding patent leather shoes or sprinkling baby powder in the bath water to obscure our own bodies as a way to avoid the impure thoughts that our nakedness might engender. The Sisters of Saint Joseph never claimed that the Blessed Virgin cries when a girl whistles or that tweezing eyebrows and shaving legs were signals to boys that you wanted sex. Had the good sisters said such things I could have regarded them as silly and naïve when, in fact, they were cruel taking every opportunity to demean and humiliate through public castigation followed by demerits and detention for any of many violations of petty rules, usually concerning dress code.  Not only fear that shot through me with every encounter with a sister; it was fury as well.  Who were these unfeeling harridans and crones to speak to me like that? Their regimentation and scrutiny made me feel like an incarcerated innocent or marine in bootcamp. Sister Gerard Piccata, in a wilder than usual rage, ripped earrings from a girl’s lobes so that blood ran down both sides of  her neck. One hundred and forty girls arrived at school ten minutes late because of subway delays during a blizzard and we all had got the usual detention, demerit, and dressing-down.  When graffiti, written in blue crayon eye shadow, was found on a bathroom door, the principal, Sister Leticia, screamed over the public address that all activities desist, every girl must empty her purse, schoolbag, and waistcoat pockets, and anyone having a blue crayon was to be sent to her office immediately.  No activity was to resume until the culprit was identified, even if the FBI had to be called in to do handwriting analysis. At the mention of a cherry pie during an assembly honoring George Washington, Sister Leticia barreled down the middle aisle of the auditorium, arms flailing, swishing as only a nun swathed in yards of pleated and starched black fabric could, her huge brown wooden rosary beads clacking furiously.  She shrieked repeatedly, “I will not have our national heroes debunked.”  Of course, these incidents became prime fodder for hooting derision at reunions, but we could only laugh at them from the distance of years.  Privacy, creativity, individualism, humor, and basic civil rights were denied us Bishop Kearney High School girls.

I hated these repressed women of God, these brides of Jesus, or of Frankenstein I said often. I thought myself superior to them.  They were crosses to be borne until I graduated, and developing a good defense by becoming offensive, I passed around satiric poems and caricatures of them to the class.  I learned each nun’s idiosyncrasies and imitated them to my classmates’ screaming laughter.  When we girls were being prodded up or down the stairs to or from lunch, I mooed cow-like keeping my lips sealed and my identity a secret.  My lunch mates picked up on it so that we mooed in unison and sounded like what we were treated as—a herd of cattle, prodded en masse to feed at the trough.  I rolled my eyes, sucked my teeth at the nuns, and make remarks sotto voce that cracked up the rest of the class.  The older I got the more I countered everything the sisters said.  I became contentious and supercilious, so much so, that I like to believe the Josephites became a little afraid of me.  My resentment was evident in everything I did or uttered: I spoke disrespectfully, snorted when the teachers said anything I disagreed with, and shot baleful looks at any of them who dared make extended eye contact with me.  Besides finding me amusing, my classmates admired my bravado and I achieved something of an outlaw status.

            But pride is the mother of humiliation, or at least its aunt,  and the greater the pride the deeper the potential for humiliation.  For all my swagger and seeming impenetrable haughtiness, I was humiliated one day.  A surprise chemistry quiz caught me so unprepared and panicked, that I hugged my stomach, grimaced with phantom pain, and asked if I could go to the nurse’s office.  Surprisingly, Sister Emiliana let me leave.  Once I was in the infirmary, Sister Hyacinth the nurse, barked, “What’s wrong with you, young lady?”  I told her I had horrible cramps.  She ordered me to lie down on the medical table and told me to take off my shoes.  I resisted; she insisted.  When I removed my shoes I lost my pride and dignity and reaped a ton of shame that causes me to cringe still:  the bottoms of my feet were black with dirt I had accumulated while walking barefoot around my house the previous afternoon and night.  My feet were not just a little dirty, they were shiny black with ingrained dirt—dirt that said not only was I a slovenly girl, but that I came from a shabby home and had negligent parents as well.  I lay on the table, paralyzed with meekness and misery, aware that from that moment on, all the despised nuns, who I imagined gossiped about us students, had it over me. Even as I was being carried around the gym on the shoulders of my classmates after my victory in a basketball game, even when I was publicly awarded a New York State Regents Scholarship, even during graduation when the new principal commended me for being both an athlete and a scholar in front of the whole audience of my peers and their parents and guests, I knew in my heart that all the other nuns looking on would only sniff and think to themselves, “That’s the girl with the filthy feet.”

Going Home

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Marilyn Horan

                                                                     Going Home

                        My father’s illness came on suddenly at age 59.  Not one to visit doctors, Dad’s symptoms could have been evident for months, but he did not reveal them until they were hard to ignore:  swollen glands, lumps under his arms, bloated ankles that made it difficult for him to put his shoes on.  He had been admitted to the Brooklyn Veteran’s hospital and I thought he would be out as soon as some tests were completed. I went to see him on each of the first two nights after my part time job at the Dime Savings Bank was over. On his third night there I visited him as usual and I sat in the visitor’s lounge practicing my sales pitch for Avon cosmetics, using my father as the customer prototype.

                         I had him choose a lipstick shade from the color chart holding it up to his pale skin to see if it was flattering to his complexion.  Next, he picked a nail polish to match.  Finally, I went on to describe perfumes he might like, having him sniff the three samples I had in my demo box.  He played my straight man, and I giggled at the mock seriousness that included his nodding his head, saying, “Hmmm…” as though weighing his choices and taking my expert advice to heart. 

                        The silliness of it was heightened by the contrast to the depressing atmosphere of the hospital, and deepened by the underlying fear that my father, who had never missed a day of work in his life, was ill enough to be kept in a hospital.  Just that afternoon, our long-time neighbor Elena took me aside and said, “Marilyn your father is sick.  I mean very sick.”  Ice shot through my veins.  That was not something my mother had told me, and I was denying that Elena knew anything, despite that her sister was a nurse’s aide at the V.A. and knew what was happening.

                        In the lounge that third night my father’s voice was a little hoarse, but otherwise he seemed normal, and was convinced that he would be home soon.  My mother sat with us, preoccupied and worried.  When visiting hours were over, Dad kissed Mom and me as he waited for the elevator doors to open and I promised to see him the next day after my classes at Brooklyn College were finished. 

                        When I got to the hospital the next evening, I was told that my father was very ill, and that he could not have any visitors.  The duty nurse was not available.  Shaken and

            terrified, I went to sit in the visitors’ lounge where I encountered a man wearing rumpled brown and tan striped pajamas and a pale blue bathrobe.  He was agitated and wet with sweat.  His week-old beard and his colorless, sparse hair stood up straight in patches and contributed to his wild look.  He saw me and came over.  His eyes, their whites yellowed, blinked and twitched in his red face as he told me how years ago he had fallen onto a hot radiator and got wedged and could not get off.  He described the smell of his own flesh burning and the unforgettable pain and torment of lying powerless on that radiator.   At 21, I was sympathetic and respectful to the level that I felt unable to leave the lounge,  that listening to this man’s story was a necessary kindness.  He was suffering and I pitied him.

                        After listening to his litany of repeated phrases of torture and pain, I excused myself and asked at the nurses’ station if there was any news about my father.  The head nurse was finally there and responded to my query.

                        “Your father has a temperature of 105 degrees,” she said, avoiding my eyes.

                        “But how could that be?  I was just here with him last night and he was fine,” I said.

                        “You’ll have to talk to the doctor.  I don’t know what happened.  All I can tell you is that he has taken a turn for the worse.  The doctor is with him now and your father is being put on an ice mattress to help bring down his fever,” she said.  “The leukemia has weakened his immune system and he has a serious infection.  Why don’t you go home?”

                        Go home? I felt cold, filled with panic and dread.  In the back of my mind I thought that maybe my father had been used for some medical experiment, or had been mistreated and the hospital was trying to cover something up.  Powerless, so I went to sit again in the smoking lounge.  I noticed with relief that the man in pajamas had left. 

                        After a half hour I sneaked down the hall and looked into my father’s room.  Through the door’s small rectangle of glass I saw him, nude and stretched out on his bed, his arms and legs straining against the grips each of the nurses, orderlies, and a couple of doctors had on him.  He was banging his head into the mattress in a frenzy. I could only see his mouth open but couldn’t hear his screams.  He was bucking up from the mattress, his muscles and tendons strained and taut, white and vulnerable,  I didn’t know if he was having a seizure or if he was consciously fighting off these people who were subduing him.  I didn’t want them to hurt my father, and would have burst into the room to save him if I thought for a minute that I could, but I wasn’t able to stand there for one more second witnessing my father’s desperate battle.

            My dad had a sad, fatherless, poor life.  His mother, an immigrant from Ireland was stranded in New York City in 1921 with four little boys, my father, Charlie, the oldest, Donald, Johnny, and Francis. Grandma was desperate.  Her 31-year-old husband had fallen from a ship while working in New York harbor and drowned, leaving her and her children little hope—no money, no support, no relatives.  She resorted to cleaning houses and offices—a job she continued into her 80’s. Grandma took my father, eight years old, to an orphanage for placement since he was the oldest and least in need of a mother’s care.  Standing at the director’s desk at the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, and ready to sign him over, Grandma noticed his hands shaking badly.  She changed her mind on the spot.  “I’m sorry.  I can’t,” she said and walked out holding my father’s hand.

                        Daddy and Donald went to school and a Mrs. Mundy cared for the younger children while their mother went to work as a washerwoman.  At the age of three, Francis, the youngest died.  After sixth grade, my father dropped out of school and started getting jobs where he could in the midst of the Great Depression. The story of my father’s almost being put in an orphanage haunted me, and no matter his faults or weaknesses, despite his frequent distance and silence, I could always recall that image of his shaking hands, and I could pity and love him.

                        Despite his knocks in life Daddy had a good sense of humor, much of it self-deprecating.  He loved puns and riddles.  He liked to repeat stories such as the one in which a dog urinated on his leg as he waited outside of church, “Minding my own business,” he said, as though if he weren’t minding his own business the dog had a right to pee on him.   He often related the time that his friends’ set him up on a blind date but when he got to the girl’s house, he found her laid out in a coffin.  He was tall and gaunt and at wakes he used to say that he had to stand up and move around or the undertaker would think he was the corpse, escaped from the casket.  All my cousins liked my father because of his amusing,

            easy-going demeanor a direct contrast to their own parents, my mother's people, who spent so much time arguing among themselves that they had little time to entertain us children.

                        In 1969 at 18 I won a local Miss Polonia contest, one I was eligible for since my mother was of Polish origin.  My father, posted a picture of me from The New York Daily News that he glued onto a piece of cardboard with the words:  “Yes, Sir. That’s My Baby” under it.  The men he worked with and for whom he was a maintenance man and a sometimes go-fer, laughed at his posting, refusing to believe the “beauty queen” was his daughter.  He came home with the poster that night and hung it in the furnace room where it remained pinned on the dirty wall.  He also got drunk that night and cried.  We were all so sorry for him, but short of dressing up in my gown, tiara, and sash and going to his job, there was nothing we could do except tell him he worked with a bunch of cruel assholes. 

                        In order to help improve his working situation, I bought him a workbook to prepare him for taking the test for the U.S. Post Office hoping he could change jobs and get one where he made a better salary, and didn’t wear an imaginary “Kick me” sign on his back.  Lest one think that my father was illiterate or uncultured, relatives on both sides of the family often said, “Charlie always had his head buried in a book.”  He loved movies, literature, opera, and even  radio music of 1972, the year that he died, and I can’t hear America’s “A Horse with No Name” or Anne Murray’s “Snowbird” without crying.  He gardened and planted carrots and carnations.  He built me a desk from scrap wood for my portable typewriter that got me through college.  He bought me 45s that I liked.  Because we were so poor, I felt privileged when he brought home Bobby Darin’s “Artificial Flowers” or Patti LaBelle’s “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman.” When I got to college and had to memorize four major pieces of classical music, Dad went to the library, researched the music, borrowed the records and taped them for me to listen to at my leisure.  We shared coffee and cigarettes in the mornings during the time he had just gotten home from work and before I left for school. 

                        Terrified after the sight of my father’s struggling, I ran down the corridor, back to the lounge, sorry that I had even looked, knowing that I would never be able to erase the vision of my naked, struggling father from my mind. After two hours, I found the courage to go and look again and saw my father sleeping, not knowing for sure,  but suspecting that he had fallen into a coma.  I spent the rest of the night in the grim visitors’ room waiting.

                        At about five in the morning, my brother Bob, then 24, came into the lounge and I filled him in on the details.  He barely said a word, just hunched his shoulders, and dug his hands into his woolen coat.  The man in the brown pajamas and blue robe appeared again.  He was talking out loud to himself and gesticulating.  Bob and I started giggling and that soon turned into convulsive laughter that we could not control so we went out into the corridor to regain our composure.  When we exhausted our laughter and achieved calmness, we resumed our seats.  The burn victim sat across from us. He continued his story of the radiator, repeating many of the same details, not seeming to mind, or notice, that we had left in the middle of his story.  I smiled at him, biting the insides of my cheeks to stem the inevitable snickering.  I tried to look concerned—affected a look of intense interest and sympathy—but it didn’t last long.  As I began to laugh again, I apologized to him saying,

                        “I’m sorry.  We’re really not laughing at you.  I don’t know what’s come over us.  We’ve been up all night drinking coffee and smoking and our father…”

                        “Have you ever smelt human flesh burning?” he said. Can you even imagine what it’s like, how it feels to lay on a radiator for a full half hour with no one around to help you?  To hear you screaming?”

                        “No!” I said.  “No, I’ve never experienced either.”  In an aside to my brother added, “Yet.”  We both laughed, but the old vet in the blue pajamas did not notice.

                        It finally was apparent that this man was stuck in his story and could not get out.  But I was no longer ashamed of my amusement at his expense. I began to resent his trying to pull us into his misery, especially when we had our own looming calamity.

                        I fled to the window.  From where we were on the eleventh floor, I could see the shimmering Narrows, sparkling and beautiful in the early morning light.  The Verrazano Bridge was towering and silver against the clear March sky whose blueness promised warm spring days.  Imagine, I thought, there are people in the cars on that bridge, right now, who are going about Saturday business—shopping, visiting, running errands—as though something terrible was not about to take place.

An Education

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Marilyn Horan

                                                                                   

An Education

            One of my biggest regrets in life was never having never gone away to school.  So in the spring of 1994, I decided to apply to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury, Vermont, thinking it would give me an abbreviated taste of what I had missed by attending Brooklyn College in my home borough.  Lacking confidence as well as the requisite body of work to qualify for admittance, I applied to Middlebury as an auditor.  I could attend workshops and classes, stay in the dormitory, eat in the students’ cafeteria—I just would not have my work discussed and evaluated by fellow students and visiting writers.  It was fine by me.  It would be a short introduction to the work and techniques of others, readings by famous authors such as John Irving, an opportunity to be independent from my husband for a while, and most importantly, to feel what it was like to attend school in another state, to meet with people from all over, to spend 14 days engaged in intellectual discussions and social interactions—all that sorority like, free-wheeling fun I’d missed.  

            My husband, Frank, drove me to the campus and we carried my luggage to my assigned room.  While I never considered myself a clean freak, I did have certain expectations of cleanliness and order beneath which I would not drop. This was the first sign that perhaps, at 42, I was too old for dorm life. The dirty socks strewn on the floor, and the untied sneakers were the first signs that my roommate was a slob. Her running shorts and panties lying, crotch up, greeted me as I entered what were to be our shared lodgings, and solidified my judgment of her. Huge black flies were zooming around the dorm room, whose wide-open windows emphasized the lack of air conditioning.  Shabby chenille bedspreads covered, but could not camouflage mattresses that sank in the middle and probably stank all over from years of absorbing human leakage. I decided to get out of there immediately.  Unless you count my sister and my husband, I had never had to share a room, let alone bathrooms and showers, with anyone and was not about to start at this age. This scene shattered my idealized vision of dorm life.

            “I’m going home with you,” I said clutching my husband’s arm.

            “Relax,” he responded, understanding after fifteen years of marriage that I was sometimes impulsive, and difficult to relax.  “We’ll find you a hotel or inn.”  So off we went to the housing desk whose manager found me a peaceful and clean room at a small bed and breakfast about a mile away. On the way to my new digs, we rented a used car, a wreck, that I drove to the Bide-a-Way Inn with a suspension that could only have passed inspection accompanied by a bribe, and whose moist insides reeked of booze, mold, and floral spray.  I relished the solitude and cool air of the bedroom, kissed my husband good-bye, and prepared to spend the next two weeks writing.  As an English teacher, I spent so much time talking about writing and marking essays, but never had time to do any myself.  This was my time to bloom.

            I drove to the Middlebury cafeteria for lunch where I introduced myself to a few people.  One woman about my age, Kiki from Alaska, said she had seen me at the B&B where she, too, had rented a room.  The best way to describe her was like a mushroom with a long stem.  She was thin and bony with a Beatles’ haircut only much more puffed out.  Her skin was wrinkled like leather that bespoke a life lived outside in nature or inside smoking lots of cigarettes.  The bones of her arms looked like femurs rather that ulnas or fibias—all wide bone and little skin.  Her rough hands were sinewy with knuckles like marbles; hands that had done a lot of hard work. She had a ring full of keys on her jeans and walked like a cowboy.  We talked for a while before joining our writing groups and agreed to meet at the evening’s meal.  At dinner we enjoyed the company of a fortyish man, Jackson, who hailed from Texas.  Conversation centered on our backgrounds, jobs, home states, interests in writing, favorite authors.  After eating, we continued our chitchatting, made more fun and interesting by the addition of the wine we drank with abandon at the “barn,” a big, informal space with a bar and music.  So this was what I missed by attending a local university—meeting people from all across the country, having semi-intellectual talks lasting into the early morning hours, laughing it up, and, oh yeah, getting drunk. As I got up to leave the glorious new world I had discovered, my inebriation was obvious to me and everyone else sober enough to notice or care. I almost fell the minute I rose from my seat and Jackson said something like, “Whoa, thar, Murrlin.  You caint be drivin’ in yur kindishin.” 

            “Don’t worry, Jackson,” Kiki said.  “I got her. I’ll drive her home to our place.  She can get her car tomorrow.”  With that I was carefully escorted by Kiki and Jackson to the auto, and I was grateful to my new found buddies, one from either end of our great United States—a country that allows a woman in her forties to experience all the joys and of college away from home.  No husband to cook for, no dogs to walk, no papers to grade.  This was about me, me, and more me, and I loved it.

            I went to my room across the hall from Kiki and got settled into my pajamas when I heard a knock on my door.  It was Kiki, also in bedclothes. She invited me into her room to have a nightcap and to look at the 400 page memoir she had written about growing up in Alaska. The clean Vermont air blowing in my face on the drive back had invigorated me, so I accepted, enjoying the idea of a mini pajama party.  Kiki handed me a tumbler of wine and pointed me to the love seat.  Once I was settled, she handed me the tome about her life in the 49^th state during the 50s.  As she did so, a magazine fell out of her Alaskan tale.  She picked it up, laughed and said, “Oops!  Look at this, will ya?”

            It was a sex toy/lotion/outfits catalog.  She sat next to me on the small sofa and murmured that she didn’t know how that got in her book.  She opened the catalog to the pages of dildos and asked me if I had any of them, or any of the vibrators and gadgets that appeared as she turned the pages. Through the thick fog of alcohol and waning literary exhilaration came the realization that I was being set up for seduction.  I froze in my seat, gulped down the wine, and said it was getting late.

            Kiki asked me what I was so nervous about as she began to massage my neck.  I had never been in a sexual situation with a woman before and didn’t know what to do:  flight or flight.  I chose flight, and jumped up as if electrified and headed for the door.  She followed me saying, “What’s the matter?  I didn’t mean anything.  What are you so nervous about?  I was just trying to relax you.”  Being insecure I wasn’t sure if she really did just want to give me a massage.  Being polite, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.  She was, after all, paying me a compliment in a way, by being either attracted to me or by wanting to take away my stress.

            “No, no.  It’s okay.  I am relaxed,” I said.  “But I am exhausted and must go to bed now.”

            “Here,” she said, “Let me walk you to your room.”

            Kiki crossed the hallway opened my door and told me to just lie down and go to sleep.  Great, I thought, I’ll just pretend to go to bed and she’ll leave. I got under the blankets, lay down on my front, and the next thing I knew she was sitting astride my back, massaging my shoulder blades under my pajama top with her incredibly powerful fingers, gripping me around the waist with her equally powerful knobby knees.  This went beyond a friendly massage.  She had me in a position that more than suggested she was trying to immobilize me.  “Jesus Christ,” I thought, “How do I get rid of this psycho?”  I could buck up like a bronco and fling her sinewy body across the room.  I could start snoring and maybe she’d disappear.  I could tell her to get the fuck off of me.  I started to blame myself for letting it get this far. I should never gone into her room, I should have said the catalog insulted me, I should have told her her behavior was inappropriate, I could have laughed and said thanks but no thanks. Instead, I just began crying, sobbing really.  That seemed to dampen her ardor not a bit. She continued the massage, getting rougher, her voice demanding:   “If you’ll just be quiet and relax, you and I could have some fun.  You never know until you try.”  “Stop!  Stop!” I said.  “I don’t want to do this.”  She dismounted and I began wailing, partly from guilt, partly from rage, and partly because I saw it as the only way out of this situation. I said I never should have come for this conference, I missed my husband, I was going to leave the next day, I was not cut out for college away from home, I couldn’t write anyway.

            “Calm down,” she said, looking annoyed at what she perceived as an overreaction and a complete rejection.  It was incomprehensible to me how a person, practically a stranger, had the nerve to try to seduce me by showing me pictures of dildoes.  It was ridiculous. The minute she left, I got up from the bed, secured my door with the tiny latch, and shoved the dresser in front of it, and wedged a chair under the doorknob.  In the middle of the night when I needed to use the bathroom, I had to first do lots of furniture moving.  I unplugged a lamp to be used as a blunt instrument should my would-be inamorata need to be further discouraged.

            The next morning I called a taxi and left the inn really early, hangover and all, to avoid meeting Kiki.  Once I got to the cafeteria I saw Jackson and told him the whole story.  He laughed and said, “I knew she was going to try to put the move on you.  She was flirting with you the whole of last night.” 

            “What?  Flirting with me?” I asked.

            “You mean to tell me a sophisticated lady like you from New York City can’t spot a woman in comfortable shoes?”  That description was Jackson’s way of saying lesbian, and he used it often during the rest of the week.

            I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I should have stayed with my original roommate, the messy girl.  That situation might not have been so physically comfortable, but at least I wouldn’t have to barricade myself in my room at night.  The longer I stayed on the campus, the more obvious it became to me that casual sex between the attendees was part of the experience taken for granted.  And the truth is that once Kiki knew that I was not interested in sex with her, we gradually became dinner buddies, although always accompanied by Jackson, who, himself tried his luck with me, but failing that, took on a challenge to change one of the ladies who wear comfortable shoes into a heterosexual.  He swore he was successful

Dinnerexia Nervosa

 

Marilyn Horan                                                 

Dinnerexia Nervosa

            Last Sunday night my husband and I were invited to go to a “Help Us Clean out the Refrigerator” dinner hosted by neighbors who were leaving their Brooklyn home for their winter residence in Florida.  The concept was not the most appetizing idea for a meal and reminded me of the time our next-door neighbors volunteered to give us the contents of their refrigerator that they needed to clean in preparation for the Jewish holidays.  That “present” consisted of plastic bags filled with a variety of vegetables and fruits in all stages of decomposition and decay, papery onion skins attached to the whole mess.  It was obvious they had simply dumped the crisper drawers and left it to us to decide what, if anything, was salvageable.

            This clearing out the icebox party turned out to be much better than I expected. We had butternut squash soup, roast pork, sliced steak, stuffed cabbage, oven-browned sweet and white potatoes.  The defrosted and stale bread was the only disappointment. Dessert consisted of fat-free vanilla pudding topped off with almond ice cream.  The only dissonant notes at the event came from the other women there, one forty-five years old and one in her seventies, anorexics, friends and cohorts in their mutual disease.  As the three men and I ate heartily, both women ate like sparrows.  The only utterances from the younger woman involved food:  “Oh, I can’t possibly eat that much.”  “I’m stuffed already.”  “I have to go to the gym tomorrow and work this off.”  I guess by “this” she meant the one-eighth of a cabbage roll, one inch piece of steak, and a slice of sweet potato.  All the while she was running her hands down her sides of her tight green sweater.  She was the color of and as flat as Gumby. “I’m down to ninety-six pounds,” she said mischievously, looking right at her husband.  The older woman, thin to the point of skeletal and painful to look at, remarked at some point that she had been a Playboy Bunny years ago.  She simply went about preparing the food, a slight almost beatific smile on her face. Bunny ate as little as she could privately, in contrast to Gumby who beamed with delight at the tiny amount of food on her plate. Bunny remarked that she was considering going back to eating meat soon, but would have to start with a little piece of chicken so she wouldn’t choke in disgust.  Bunny’s husband chortled, “That’ll be the day.”

            Gumby’s husband, our much beloved friend, pleaded with his wife to eat a little more.  “Marilyn,” he said addressing me, “don’t you think she should eat more?  Tell her how skinny she looks.” 

            “Gumby,” I replied, “has a mirror and knows what she looks like. Obviously that’s how she wants to look.  “Gumby,” I asked, you weigh 96 pounds now at 5’4”.  How much would you be happy weighing?”  She just put her hands together on her chest and tittered like a child, smiled shyly over at her husband, and said she didn’t know.

            I was not going down that road with Mr. Gumby.  He knew I liked him and always took his side in every one of their marital disagreements:  having children, going back to college, spending money, whose family to spend Christmas with, and so on.  This time I would not bite.  I would not become the object of their arguing, a distraction when her not eating herself to the grave was the real issue.

            “I must tell you, Bunny,” Gumby enthused, “you are my role model.  I mean, you went from being fat, smoking, drinking to losing all that weight, leading a healthy life, teaching yoga.  You really are my heroine.” 

            “Yeah,” I added, “you also stopped sleeping around with any man who asked you.  You’re no longer the neighborhood whore.”  But I pronounced it “who-a” to get more of a laugh, which I did.  I always resort to humor to avoid sticky tar pits.  But really I wanted to laugh at both of them or slap them silly.

            “Please!”  I wanted to scream.  “Are you two completely nuts?  Gumby, Bunny is your role model for what?  Self-hatred?  Suicide?  Sickness?  She and you are so clearly trying to control your aging by controlling your food.  Neither one of you looks pretty, only pathetic, and your self-satisfied smiles, sometimes so knowing and secretive disgust me.”

            What is particularly disappointing is that Bunny is a woman I, too, have long admired.  When I first met her twenty years ago, she was studying for her PhD in psychology and was a drug and alcohol counselor and aspiring psychotherapist.  She had been a nurse in her earlier days and she talked to me about things other than how I looked or where she was teaching yoga, or about the rock-climbing wall she had installed in her house.  She was more outgoing and sociable.  Now she looks likes she is shrinking not only in body, but also in presence.  She seems to be willing her body away as though she could become airy and incorporeal.  She clearly wants to disappear.  “Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt/Thaw and resolve itself into a dew.”  Like Hamlet, I imagine, she wants to effervesce into nothingness.

            So it’s a sad situation for Bunny and her husband, but it seems sadistic for her to have taken Gumby under her fragile and brittle wing to instruct her in the ways of starving to death in a seemingly noble and admirable way.   Yes, they are avoiding middle and old age spread, the spare tires around the waist, the Ethel Merman wings of fat hanging off their upper arms, but they risk osteoporosis, kidney failure, wasting away of muscle, confused thinking, blotchy skin, depression, sensitivity to cold, yellowing skin, and of course, death. 

A New York City Schoolteacher

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Marilyn Horan

                                                In the Classroom           

            In 1977, when the citywide financial crisis was easing, I was finally offered a job teaching English in a New York City school, Bushwick High School, a place with a bad reputation in a dangerous neighborhood.  I had been on the eligible list for five years waiting for an appointment by the Board of Education, and spent that time teaching in an all girls Catholic secondary school.  Except for the first year, which was brutal—teaching Afro-American Literature to a fiercely resistant all-white class of seniors who ridiculed me daily—I loved teaching.  The nuns who ran the school treated me with respect and care.  They provided me with excellent gourmet lunches each day served on white tablecloths, bought me presents for my birthday, and, in general, valued me as a member of their congregation.   However, the pay was low and taking the public school job would double my salary almost to the dollar.  Having recently broken up with a long time boyfriend and needing to pay the rent on my own, I called my Uncle Alfie for advice.  He didn’t hesitate for a moment and told me to accept the offer because it provided health benefits, a much improved salary, a retirement plan, in a word: security.  So, terrified, I reported to my new employment, shaking all over.

            The atmosphere at the public school could not have been more different from that of my previous job.  Upon meeting my chairperson, an unsmiling and unhappy man, I was given five remedial English classes, and a professional assignment which consisted of sharpening three thousand pencils, filing papers, addressing labels, and so forth.  There was a cold, almost military atmosphere about the place, and although my colleagues were mostly friendly, my supervisors, including the principal, were impersonal.  It was as if they were all in the same miserable boat, and I, as the newcomer, was not allowed on board but had to tread water while hanging on with one hand. The first time I handed in my grades I had labeled a set “English 3.”  My department chairman practically threw the sheets back in my face and told me to identify them correctly, “English 3F,” with the admonition to, “Get it straight.” He insisted also that his name, Mr. Kass, and the title “Assistant Principal” be typed on every sheet or test I distributed to my classes.  I got my revenge by occasionally leaving off the K from his name, or abbreviating his title “Ass. Principal.” 

            The students were, for the most part, sweet and responsive, but only after they put me through a crucible.  More than anything else, the kids wanted to know if I was their “real” teacher; if I was going to stay.  Turnover in more difficult schools was great, and the teenagers wanted consistency and a guarantee that going I was going to be loyal to them, by persisting despite their sometimes disturbing antics.  For example, one skinny, homely young man with what appeared to be only one or two teeth, Jerome, in my homeroom class insisted on calling me “ugly” every chance he got.  Sometimes he would do so while polishing a knife with a rag or rolling what looked like a joint from his seat in the back of the room.  “You ugly, Miss,” was his daily greeting.  “Where you come from, Miss?” and “You ever teach before, Miss?” were some of his other comments.  I was afraid of him and had to call upon every nerve in my body to not tremble or show fear in front of him.  One day I had an epiphany.  I realized that, more than anything, Jerome wanted my attention.  I had nothing to lose and in a moment of rash bravery I said to Jerome, “You keep telling me I’m ugly, Jerome.  When is the last time you looked in the mirror?”  The whole homeroom responded with a roar of appreciative laughter, hands clapping and feet stomping, and Jerome burst into a big, mostly toothless, smile.  I felt triumphant.  I had broken down the barrier of fear and created a path of communication with Jerome and the rest of the class that lasted all year.  Jerome never tired of kidding around with me and I answered his questions with crazy answers such as:

             “I came from Riker’s Island.” 

            “Why you was there, Miss?” 

             “Because I killed someone.” 

             “How you killed him?” 

             “How do you think I did it?”

             “You chopped off his head?”

             “How did you know?”

            “Why you did it, Miss?”

             “Well, he was in my homeroom and kept asking me annoying questions.”

            To those who never taught in a school, these exchanges might seem cruel or unprofessional, but learning to disarm students with a sense of humor was the most important skill I developed during teaching.  I could not have survived the two and a half years there without getting into the students’ give and take, playing the dozens, trying to relate to young people who needed a connection.  I looked forward to homeroom every day as a safe haven.  The kids became mine and I became theirs.

            This is not to say that everything was rosy at Bushwick.  Crime was a constant threat to my possessions and to my well-being.  One day as I was standing at my desk, explaining an answer to a student in my English class during the three-minute break, I noticed an unfamiliar young man standing there. I told him I would be with him in a minute.  He then grabbed my hair with one hand and ripped a gold chain off my neck with the other and ran out the classroom door.  The students were shocked and nobody moved for a few seconds, when a large, burly girl, jumped up, cursing, “Don’t worry, Miss.  I’ll get that mother fucker,” and ran after the thief.  She returned a few minutes later, out of breath and unsuccessful in her attempt.  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll see him around the neighborhood.  I’ll fuck him up.”  “Thank you,” I said, still in shock from the assault. 

            When I reported this to the principal, he said, “This is your fault.  You shouldn’t wear jewelry to school because you make yourself a target.”  Lesson learned.  “the princple he sit on he fat ass all day smoking herd,” was the beginning sentence of a student’s letter--a response to a prompt on a NY State literacy test.  When one of the English teachers read the essay aloud during a group marking session, the entire department cheered, agreeing with everything the unfortunately dyslexic student said.  Intense dislike for the administration created a strong sense of camaraderie among the teachers and was fodder for many a raucous and hilarious lunch period.           

            Another time in the middle of the lesson, I reached down to get a book from the desk drawer.  There between my feet was a hand.  I jumped. I looked over the desk and all I saw was gigantic tumbleweed of black curly hair.  What the heck was it?  I couldn’t imagine.  “Class,” I said pointing to the hair, “what is that?”  Suddenly the mass of hair, a huge Afro, jumped up and revealed a skinny little kid, about thirteen, under it.  He looked at me long enough for me to see his severely crossed eyes.  He sprinted out of the classroom in a flash, leaving my students and me stunned, mouths open.  What the heck just happened?  We later found out that this kid had already stolen another teacher’s purse using the same technique of sliding down the aisle on his belly, slowly and stealthily, reaching under a desk to grab the purse, all the while unnoticed by anyone.  I later had to identify him and testify against him, frail and cross-eyed and scared, in court.

            While I was tutoring remedial reading students for an important upcoming state test, someone slashed all four of my car tires.  I was distraught and questioned deeply my decision to be a teacher.  All of my dedication and this is what I get?  The next day, as I walked down the hallway, I heard, “Psst…Ms. Horan,” and a student told me the name of the tire cutter.  I walked another few steps and again, “Psst…Ms. Horan,” and again I was told the name of the guilty one.  This happened about six times before I got to my classroom at the end of the hall.  I felt that I had allies in the school; I had students who cared about me.  The slasher was brought down to the dean’s office, handcuffed, and taken to the local precinct.  The police officer who remained to take my statement, kept shaking his head saying, “I don’t know how you manage to come back day after day to this job.  I wouldn’t do it for a million dollars.”  This same sentiment was expressed to me by a Vietnam vet and by a Navy jet fighter pilot.  By the way, all of the sixteen students who attended the tutoring class passed the state examination and I felt great satisfaction.  The students did, too.

            Throughout the years all my stories of work were much more interesting than the stories other had to tell about their jobs.  People always asked me to tell them what crazy/fun/scary things happened in school since they last saw me. They still ask me to repeat my "stories," and the fascination others have for what I did on the job suggests to me that other people's jobs are really boring.  In addition, I took pride in the fact that I persevered in a profession most people wouldn't even consider or without a SWAT team on hand.   I felt especially proud and maybe even a little bit swaggering with "toughness" that I had a job that would make others quake in their boots.

            Additional reasons that being an English teacher was satisfying are:

1.  People, especially teachers in the lounge, always ask for your help when they are stumped on a crossword puzzle. 

2.  Secretaries and other school personnel seek your advice about grammar, word usage, and spelling.  “Affect/Effect” is the number one stumper followed by “use to/used to,” “than/then,” “a lot/a lot.”

3.  Whenever acquaintances or friends write to you, at the end of the letter they apologize for their spelling and grammar, knowing you are always on the lookout for mistakes. 

4.  When people speak to you, they often ask you to excuse their accent, Brooklyn or otherwise.  Sometimes they blush and stammer and self-correct their pronunciation.

Being an English teacher can sometimes be a heady experience.

            It never failed that throughout my 36 years in the classroom when I asked my students how many of them were considering teaching as a career, the class would laugh and hoot derisively.  “Yeah, we want to work for crappy salaries and get insulted by snotty teenagers,” they said.  So I liked to ask them what they wanted to be when they grew up.  It’s amazing how many future brain surgeons, lawyers, professional ball players, actors, and rocket scientists were sitting right there in front of me just biding their time, chewing gum, applying more lip gloss, and playing video games until their fabulous, glamorous, wealthy, and exciting new lives started. They didn’t realize what I knew: teaching is a great job.  I made a decent salary, had and still have great benefits, and am currently enjoying the pension for which I worked decades.   I helped many students both in and outside of the classroom, spent countless hours discussing literature and its lessons with young people, enjoyed the adolescent sense of humor, made lifelong friends, and, as a bonus, even met my husband. Uncle Alfie didn’t steer me wrong.

Bed Jacket

 

Marilyn Horan

Bed Jacket

            I have never personally known anyone who owned a bed jacket. They are anachronisms.  Years ago, at least in the movies, wealthy, glamorous women of leisure wore them during long periods of convalescence.  New, young mothers wore them in real life during their extended stays in the hospital after giving birth. Besides making breast-feeding easier, they created an aura of prettiness and daintiness, making visiting hours more cheerful.

            I bought my mother one of these bed jackets.  It was a feminine item:  pale mint green of a fuzzy-lamb-like fabric, with appliquéd flowers on each flared sleeve, edged all around in satin and fastened with one smooth white pearlized button.  Mom had been in Lutheran Hospital for the second time in two months.  The cause was a stroke that paralyzed her right side.  Her frailty was touchingly obvious.  Her shoulders, always rather small, seemed tiny, bony, curved and vulnerable.  Her broken and poorly mended collar bone, the result of a car accident four years earlier, stuck out jaggedly under the freckled and thin skin.  The flimsy hospital gowns that were put on her looked institutional and depressing.

            Some housecoats, really lightweight cotton dress robes that my mother had brought from home, were dilapidated, although a couple were those she retrieved from a bag of my recently deceased aunt’s clothing meant for the Salvation Army.  One of these wrappers was faded orange color and the other was a harshly stiff, unrelentingly cheerful red and white check fabric with a large clown-like collar and big patch pockets that even my aunt thought better of wearing, as the still attached price tag proved.  My mother’s keeping them attested to her self-effacing, infuriatingly modest attitude.  She rarely bought anything for herself and when she did, it was always the price rather than the quality that determined her purchase.  Her frugality and thrift, also characterized by me as miserliness and cheapness in my less charitable moods, colored everything she did. A victim of the Great Depression and penniless immigrant parents with six children, all of who were out of school and working by the time they were twelve, my mother’s attitude toward money was intense and unchangeable.  Unfortunately, those same circumstances that made her acutely aware of the value of a dollar also made her feel unworthy of anything but the barest minimum, an attitude that angered me and made me feel responsible.  I tried to counter her self-abnegation, and maybe my own, with no success.

                 The hospital robes and the inherited ones she wore in the hospital made me, above all, feel guilty.  How could I let my mother, sick and pathetic, shocked by her own limited ability to move or talk lie in a hospital bed in castoffs?  So, I went to the lingerie department at Macy’s to get her a presentable, new robe.  There in a corner of the department hung bed jackets.  At first glance they looked ridiculous—short and girly.  But the idea began to grow on me.  They were practical; they did not bunch up in bed the way a longer robe would have.  They were light and unemcumbering, yet warm and cute.  I bought one.

            Consciously or not, I knew from the minute I bought it that my mom would not want it and that I would wind up with it.  That’s why I got the large rather that the medium.  I knew her policy of self-denial, her refusal to have or wear anything not essential or too expensive.  Once before I had bought her a lovely nightgown and matching outer garment and she had kept it in her drawer wrapped in tissue paper for years, telling me that she was saving it for a special occasion.  It was only when I became exasperated and told her to renounce her crown of thorns that she relented, to please me, and wore it the next time she stayed at my house.  She looked uncomfortable in it, stilted, afraid to ruin it with coffee or wrinkles.  She kept looking at me for reaction and complimented me several times on my good taste.  I felt regretful, not only that I had bought such a “nice” thing for her, but that I had used accusations of martyr to shame her into wearing it.  Guilt works, though.  When she discovered that she had a recurrence of cancer a few months later, she took out a set of earrings and a bracelet that I had bought her about twenty-five years earlier and about which I had forgotten.  When she did put the bracelet on, the clasp broke—brittle from age—and the jewelry fell and shattered across her linoleum floor.

      This time though, I thought, she, weakened by illness and worn down from weeks in the hospital, would give in and wear the charming item.  She would not.  Her roommate, whose shaved and stitched and lumpy skull, the result of brain surgery, remarked to my mother that maybe she was pregnant and should go to the maternity ward where bed jackets are, or were, the accepted costume, certainly not here in the ward of dying old men and women. They both laughed heartily and I felt ridiculed.  My mother said nothing about the garment and I mentioned it when I visited her, but it just hung, tags attached, in the narrow hospital closet. Perhaps it was too fancy for her, an object whose main purpose was decorative and therefore frivolous.  Maybe she wanted to maintain her humble look and the accompanying pity it aroused in visitors. It could have been she just thought the jacket was stupid or inappropriate, although she kept telling me how beautiful it was when I referred to it, and how I should take it home and wear it myself.

     So I took the jacket, stagnant after weeks of absorbing food odors and the stench of bodily functions in the sealed-window hospital, and made it my own.  I wore it to bed for a few nights, thinking I could read in comfort, not having to tuck the blankets under my chin to ward off the cool drafts that arise after the heat goes off.

     But the bed jacket was less than satisfying to me.  The first time I wore it, it felt dirty and reeking of hospital smells despite the washing I had given it.  I felt sullied.  My husband looked at it askance, but said nothing the first time I had it on.  By the third wearing, he laughed at it, at me, and said I looked silly.  Besides, he went to bed much earlier than I did, so I could not read in bed at night anyway.  All of this made the bed jacket superfluous, frivolous, and foolish.  My mother did not want it, my husband did not like it, and even though I thought it would make my mother, and then me, feel pampered and elegant, it just made me sad.

10 Reasons to be an English Teacher

 

Marilyn Horan

Rosie the underappreciated secretary in Bye, Bye Birdie laments to her boss and long time love interest, Albert, a “music business bum,”: “An English teacher is really someone/ How proud I'd be if you had become one/ It could have been such a wonderful life.” Other benefits of being an English teacher according to Rosie are having a little apartment in Queens and a summer vacation. “We would know what life means/A man who’s got his Master’s/Is really someone” she continues in her fruitless attempt to get Albert to change professions.  While the song is tongue-in-cheek, listening to it in the theater made me feel proud of having been an English teacher for more than thirty-five years.   Here are the top ten reasons why.

1. You are the font of knowledge. Teachers in the lounge, always ask for your help when they are puzzled by a crossword clue.

2. You are the word wizard.  Secretaries and other school personnel seek your advice about grammar, word usage, and spelling.  “Affect/Effect” is the number one followed by “use to/used to,” “than/then,” “a lot/alot.”  

3.  No matter how old a person is, to him you are the strict authority on language.  Whenever acquaintances or friends write to you, at the end of the letter they apologize for their spelling and grammar, knowing you are always on the lookout for mistakes. 

4.  People apologize to you often.  When people speak to you, they often ask you to excuse their accent, Brooklyn, Long Island, foreign or otherwise.  Sometimes they blush and stammer and self-correct their pronunciation. 

5.  The pen truly is mightier than the sword.  The red pen is even mightier. You can wound with a red pen.  The size, severity, and bloodiness of the wounds inflicted depend upon how many essays you have to grade by Monday morning and how many times the students ignore the rules for writing you have established, day after day after day.

6. English teachers are the Renaissance men and women of the school.  Having read voraciously throughout your life, plus completing all those English, American, and Comparative Literature classes, you are well versed in many areas of knowledge.  Wear your crowns proudly.

7.  What other job can provide you with the opportunity to discuss poetry for fifty minutes every day for a week with students who start out hating it and end up writing it, sometimes even producing poems that do not have the words “blue/you,” “love/dove/glove”?

8.  English teachers are unflappable.  Teaching the forms of the verb “lie” and “lay” and hearing the class snicker is so much fun. Peals of laughter follow as various students use the past tense of “lay” in suggestive ways, and the class is super charged to witness your shock.  This is your turn to prove that you are not thrown off by any question about grammar, and, in fact, despite your age, lack of coolness, and the strand of pearls you occasionally wear, you can still get excited about something and that something, young men and women, is proper usage.

9.  Students always remember their English teachers, even if it is in direct proportion to the perceived difficulty and boredom factor of the books she made them read.  Former students on Facebook will sometimes ask, “How’s the old Scarlet Letter?” or “Anytime I hear about The Scarlet Letter, I think about you.”  In a diner, at the movie theater, at a school reunion, the first response to seeing me is: “Ms. Horan!  The Scarlet Letter!  I hated that book.”  Even though these reluctant readers insult my beloved Hawthorne work, at least they remember me.

10. Begetting more English teachers is the greatest reward.  These days most college students go for a degree in teaching history. When I hear that a former student is going to teach English, as I did just the other day, I feel great. Creating writers is even better, and I still beam with happiness about a book written by a former student who thanked me for spurring her on to a writing career.  All right, I admit that the best accomplishment for me as an English teacher would be that I get to use my skills to become a great writer myself, now that my work with students is over.

So, if there is anybody out there thinking about a career, remember that an English teacher is really someone.