A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [162]
“If they’re sick I have them lie on a cot,” I said. “Theresa says that when she was in school the nuns used to warn the girls not to go on a date to a restaurant where white tablecloths were used, because it would remind a boy of bed sheets and drive him wild with desire. Do you suppose a cot is suggestive to a six-year-old boy?”
Rafferty rolled his eyes and threw his head back as if he was gargling.
“I really don’t do much,” I continued. “I’m only a nurse. I can take temperatures and look down someone’s throat and see if it’s red, and then if they say it hurts I send them home. If the parents are at work the children spend the day on the cot or return to class. During health week they all come in and get weighed and measured. The scale is one of those massive upright contraptions with ominous black weights waiting to fall on someone’s toes. I don’t know, maybe everything is frightening. Last year for health the eighth-grade science teacher wanted me to come in and talk to the class about how AIDS is transmitted, as if the uniform gives me the authority to speak about disease. Sometimes I’m in a hurry; I have a lot to do in the three hours I’m there and I’m sharp. I tell them to hold still, to be quiet, to watch their manners. Maybe anything can be misconstrued, so that one thing eventually becomes another, I mean in such a way that it’s completely changed.”
Down in that barren cubicle it seemed that Rafferty would sit across from me and listen for as long as my mouth opened and shut. “Maybe it isn’t possible to move an inch without being misunderstood. That must be a relief in law, that for everything there is a rule.”
He laughed out loud and then said, “Yes, right, Alice, a relief, all those rules, oh, absolutely.”
“But you see the entire spectrum in school,” I went on. “That’s what’s good about it. We have the undeclared lesbian gym teacher, the homophobic principal, the bleeding-heart liberal teaching social studies, the right-wing Christian sneaking in his stuff in earth science—”
“But can you think of anything specific?” Rafferty prodded.
“Yes! Yes—I can think of thousands of specific things, some I did, some I dreamed, some I feared. I lie quaking when I remember certain days. I was walking down the hall last spring, and the gym teacher, as a matter of fact, Miss Orin, called me in to take a look at a girl’s back, a junior-high girl who was changing in the locker room. Miss Orin was concerned about this girl’s spine. She was having them parade around for some kind of posture exam but you have to understand, I’m an LPN: I don’t know anything! I just ran my hand down the girl’s back, the way I would if it were my daughter, to see if I could feel ribs in the wrong place. I only know about scoliosis because I was evaluated for it when I was a teenager. My father may have thought that I was so isolated and withdrawn, like a Victorian heroine, that I probably at least had gout. I remember leaving the locker room, feeling the girls’ eyes on me, knowing that they were going to start whispering about the homo gym teacher, the homo nurse. Junior-high girls are like savages, you know? I tried to wave my left hand with my wedding ring around, to remind them that I’m Mrs. Goodwin. But I knew they’d talk about us all the same. Sometimes I used to have the urge to crack up in front of those girls, to rave about the passionate crushes I’d had on women teachers when I was young, but how as I grew older it was the dear, ecstatic act of copulation that spurred me on—Do you