In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [30]
Enlightenment came via my teacher, Mrs. Nichols, a young and beautiful woman who sang opera and demanded that we sing with her, her high soprano voice rattling the windows in their panes. She seemed especially fond of Handel’s Messiah, and we belted out hallelujahs no matter the season. Blond beehived hair, red nails that clicked like beetles against our chairs—we could hardly believe she lived in our town. As eccentric as she was, there were still some things she would not tolerate in her charges: a clumsily held pencil (she would sneak up behind us, jerk the pencil from our hand, rap us sharply on the head, then slide it back into our quickly corrected grasp), a messy desk and, oddly enough, given her own propensity for adornment, pierced ears. She held to her own kind of fundamentalism, a code that dictated her expectations of our demeanor.
We sat one drowsy afternoon, warmed by the popping steam heaters working to keep at bay the below-freezing temperatures. (Even in winter the girls were forbidden to wear anything but dresses, except during the periods of bitterest cold, when, with a special dispensation announced by the principal, we were allowed to don pants under our skirts. My church’s rules governing modesty seemed little displaced.) We nodded over our Idaho history books, which were hopelessly outdated, with no sympathy for what stood in the way of Manifest Destiny. Lewis and Clark were nothing short of rustic gods adorned in their buckskin and high leather boots. I tried to focus on the illustration of Sacajawea pointing toward the west with a sweeping, grand gesture, as though she could see every bend and bog that lay ahead. She was beautiful—slim and burnished atop her rocky pinnacle—and the aura radiating out from behind them left no doubt that the three were ushering in a golden era.
We did our best to stay awake, knowing that at any given moment our teacher’s displeasure could take new and startling forms. When she stopped at the desk next to mine, I closed my eyes and flinched, the dates of gold discoveries and town settlements swirling through my head: history was a whirlpool, and I was hopeless in the face of chronological sequence. My mind worked in other ways. I could recite the story of Polly Bemis, the Chinese girl bought and lost in a game of poker. I could tell you the shade of her red dress, the way her hem swept across the rough-cut floor, how the room smelled of bacon grease and the sweat of men just come in from the mines, the light sifting through the warped logs like gold dust, falling across her arms as she went silently about her chores.
I had already worked my way to the part in the story where the man who owns Polly loses the bet and she sees her life pass into the hands of another, when I heard Mrs. Nichols’s voice rise. She was standing over Julie, whose eyes had widened in fear.
“Stand up!” Julie stood. The teachers movements were swift and I thought for a moment she had cuffed Julie along the sides of her head. Julie gasped and covered her ears, and it was then I saw the small gold hoops Mrs. Nichols held in her palm.
Perhaps, like the crimson hue of Polly’s skirt, I have only imagined the blood that pearled and dropped from Julie’s torn lobes. Mrs. Nichols took her by the shoulders and marched her out of the room, and none of us dared even look up. We never doubted the teacher would win, that her rule—“No pierced ears in my classroom”—as well as her actions would be supported. We knew the laws that governed us, and few were prepared to face the kinds of punishments meted out for disobedience.
I also knew that there was some exciting stigma attached to having holes punched in one’s ears, and