excerpt
Rita McCrae
SHE TRANSFERRED INTO our school halfway through the year.
I remember how she stood at the front of the room, clutching the battered
pigskin briefcase to her chest. The brass catch was loose and the scuffed
flap curled up at the edges. There was something about her shyness,
the vulnerability of her knobbly knees, the way she carried her slender,
energetic body, something that drew me and held me and wouldn’t let me
go, even before I discovered the grey-blue eyes under a storm of auburn
hair and the wide, sensitive mouth. As the days passed in their familiar
boredom, I felt an increasing need to occupy the vacant desk on her left,
back in the middle of the alphabet. But that was the problem right there.
In grade one, Sister Angelica told us that the ABC’s were the roots
of the tree of knowledge. She was very enthusiastic and it sounded much
like one of those catchy little sayings you could keep impressing people
with for the rest of your life. Unless, of course, they’d heard the story
about the apple and the snake and how we got kicked out of the easy life
and had to wear uniforms and go to school every day and haul a shoe shine
box around the Jersey side of the Hudson Tubes, or deliver papers on roller
skates, or even invent some legitimate sounding educational expenditure
so we could go to the candy store and act important. I believed her though,
in spite of all the evidence. It was her soft voice, I think. Or the way she
would touch us lightly on the shoulder or brush the hair out of our eyes
with her long white fingers and thank us when we turned in our tests. I
remember this because it was the last time I got an A in penmanship. Even
though I knew that the ABC’s had come to Jersey City via the Canaanites
and the Phoenicians and the Greeks and the Romans, by my second report
card, I was flunking that most mysterious of subjects because my essays
looked, even to me, like an Arab had scribbled them off while riding a bad
tempered camel in a sandstorm. This bothered me for a long time. Then
one day I figured it out. I hated the alphabet. That’s why, when I tried to
write, my fingers would tighten up and go too fast. But was it the ABC’s
that gave me precocious arthritis or the way the roots of all knowledge
meant I had to present myself every day at the front of the class?
Mayanaam
vequinox
Manolis 