What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [94]
“You know, you are so lucky that you weren’t born when I was born,” the youthful sixty-eight-year-old told her pupils at Banyan Elementary School in Tamarac, Florida. Her students were on notice—and delighted. They could tell she was about to begin one of her far-fetched tales. “Because,” she picked up, “when I went to school our seats were bolted to the desks, and the desks were bolted to the floor!”
“Oh, no they weren’t!” the children shot back serially, certain that “Mrs. G” was making it up. After all, she always seemed to have another apocryphal story to tell them, such as the one about the time she raced her hot-pink stock car at Raceway Park in Chicago or the one in which she was a fashion model.
One day Nancy decided to put an end to doubt and dug up her old photographs. The children were amazed by her feminized Monte Carlo stock car and wowed at the sight of her modeling a cranberry evening gown at a fashion show in Chicago, where she lived before moving to Florida. Then, too, there was the framed black-and-white school photograph of her seated in a sixth-grade classroom in 1950. And yes, the desks were bolted to the floor. Nancy’s second graders could even recognize the pretty, erect eleven-year-old girl at the center of the picture as a younger version of their effervescent teacher, though her hands were folded tightly and placed firmly on her desktop instead of flying around like wild birds as the students were used to seeing them do. What the children could not see in the picture was that as she sat in that Southside Chicago classroom fifty-seven years earlier, she knew she would become a teacher. What she did not know, however, was how long it would take for her to realize that ambition.
She was born Nancy Andjelic. It would matter little that she had excelled in every possible way to ensure that her dream of teaching would come true. When she graduated from Bowen High School in 1957, Nancy was class vice president and salutatorian. She also had a reputation as one of the school’s best athletes, in particular as a power-hitting member of the girls’ softball team (in an age when girl athletes were not as common as today). In senior class voting she won seven of nine superlative titles. School officials had to intervene and divvy up her stockpile among other graduating seniors, crowning Nancy simply “Most Popular.” In addition, she worked after school at Ernie’s, the local soda fountain, for $10 a weekend, and at the Chicago Public Library for four hours every day after school and on Saturdays.
At the end of her junior year of high school, she went to her mother, Agnes, a beautician who had recently added a gift shop to her hair salon, and her father, Joseph, who worked as a painter at the General Mills plant for forty years. As girls did at the time, she asked her parents, both native-born Americans of Croatian parents, for their permission to apply to college. “They looked at me as if I was nuts,” she recalled.
“You don’t need to go to college,” her mother said. “You’re going to marry Jimmy and he’s already in college.”
“In those days, that was it. The book was closed. You didn’t question. You didn’t say, Huh? Why? How come? Nothing. I was destroyed, just destroyed. The door was just shut,” Nancy told me. Disappointment flared anew in her voice, and her face froze with hurt as the inequity of the scene replayed itself in her mind. “The Monday after I graduated from high school, I went to work at the public library, as assistant librarian, and I worked there until just before my first baby was born.”
Nearly fifty years after graduating from high school, at five feet, eight inches tall, Nancy Gagliano was still a striking presence as she circled her seventeen students in their low-slung seats. She conveyed a veteran teacher’s energetic authority as she hurried them to open their reading books. Dressed in sharply creased navy blue pants, a red blouse with a