Old School Teacher

Old(er) with short, flippant brown hair, divorced and (currently)
living alone, a smoker in her free time, she was the first teacher to
show me the world. Her movements were jaunty, just like her vigorous
hips that would slash the hair with their odd boniness through her
fleshy khaki pants. Her idea of punishment was to award the
rule-breaker with a clothespin labeled with the shuddering word of,
"Oops!" The poor, pathetic rule-breaker would carry that mark like a
Hawthorne character, yet without the same pride and strength. Their
features would droop to their knees; their ruddy fingers would even
slouch noticeably, and their eyes..oh their eyes..they would spit out
gushes and gushes of hateful tears, that they would then attempt to
hide by complaining loudly about the dust in the room.
I always knew when they got it, even if I could not see the mark on
their clothing. Miss Brinkley was the only woman I ever met capable of
making seventeen boys cry like wrinkly infants in the presence of their
peers. She seemed so tall to me then, capable of assuaging and removing
every wrong just by placing that clothespin on whomever was
terrorizing. The terrorized, like myself in certain situations, would
look up gratefully; the sun behind blackening her expression except for
the wrinkles around her eyes, and for a moment, until she bent down to
offer a hand to hoist the victim up, she would resemble a god, a
superhero, illuminated by a golden orb simply because she was worthy of
it.
Once I graduated from her class, times became different. The bullies
were left unpunished by Herculean clothespins. No one was there to
reach down and offer a hand and block the sun for a moment. It was
almost as if she had never existed, that her clothespins were figments
created in a too-dusty classroom that 25 school children only pretended
they had a class in. I would pass her dingy trailer every day on my way
to a new trailer, and I never once saw a student open the door and come
out smiling as I remember I had once done.
Unforeseen by only myself, she had left. Quit suddenly, packed up and
headed out, maybe dragging a brown, dingy suitcase behind her, shaped
like the trailer she once spent 7 hours a day in, teaching me how to
live. In the moments I remember of her most, she is pontificating on
the rich, red clay of North Carolina. Her eyes are glazed in the way
only truly beautiful memories can make them. She is describing to us
the elated feeling she always receives when, after a good storm, she
would stomp out in her giant, yellow boots, force a shovel into a
ground and wait for the worms to wiggle up to the surface where she
would admire them in the waning moonlight.
My desk was in the back of the room because I liked being near the
window and from where I sat, she looked beautiful. Trapped in a moment
she could never recreate except in her own lazy, jumbled, Chicago
accent, her fingers would reach forward, grasp nothing, and then pull
back to clutch fervently at her pink sweater. Her stumpy fingers would
claw at a bright gold bird pin above her left breast, forgetting even
the state of her dingy trailer and mangled life scarred by a cheating
husband and a flown daughter, and she would smile. She would smile like
a baby smiles in its dreams, content, warm, at peace with absolutely
everything.
In moments of reprieve, I still think back to the school year I had
with a woman chased by her past, and yet also rewarded by it. In her
determined way, she conquered every bit of evil around her, but,
unfortunately for her, as well as I, none of her conquered stayed
conquered. Her rules evaporated as soon as summer hit and all the boys
she made cry with her clothespins, drudged up immediately old wrongs
and went right back to bullying.
The day before she left, I was told, as she was packing up her things,
a rock came through the window and landed right on her desk. The boys
she had once bettered through her diligent and good nature, turned on
her the moment they knew she was most vulnerable. She did not leave
walking slowly, looking back every now and then; Miss Brinkley ran
because she knew the cruelty of people and humanity itself could never
be fixed they way she wanted it to. Her clothespins did not work in the
real world.