a sister who is the new Marcia Brady. It gets to you. Really, so much more than you’d think.
Maybe it was all the thinking about being Jan Brady, something I try most of the time not to think about, but as I look at my watch, even though I thought I was going to be early, I am just barely on time. Finally inside the building, I dig in my dripping wet bag for the registration piece of paper I got in the mail. Everything is wet. I think how I hate the rain. And while that thought for me is so very true, I imagine it also must be so very unoriginal. I worry sometimes that a lot of things that are mine are that way. I locate the piece of paper and pull it out to double-check that my classroom is 502. It is. I dive through the elevator doors right as they close.
chapter twelve
How Awful Would It Be If This Thing Stopped?
I see room 502. The door is shut. I have that feeling in my stomach: that feeling that not only have I just done something wrong, but that also, I am about to. It’s a very high school-oriented feeling for me, and I can’t help but think, Why have I done this? But the reasons, I know, they are many and vast. The only choice I will let myself have is to turn the handle on the door and walk in.
I pause for a minute, just inside the door, and smile an apology to the teacher as she stops saying what she was saying and looks over at me, as does everyone else. The teacher smiles at me, really pretty nicely and I think that’s good that she did that, so at least I don’t instantly hate her.
All the chairs are organized in a horseshoe shape around the room; I sit down quickly and soggily in an empty chair, right at the end of the horseshoe. The moment I am situated, the moment I have wriggled out of my coat as inconspicuously as possible (not very), I realize I have chosen poorly. This is a bad chair. I don’t like this chair, how it is right on the end, so vulnerable. I stare at the surface of the desk part of my chair. The chairs, they’re all the kind of chairs with desks attached to them. Immediately, I start wondering if I’ve missed all the important stuff and will never quite catch up or (much better) if maybe I’m actually so late that I missed the whole introducing of oneself part. I look at my watch; I am only about four minutes late.
“Okay, so, I’m Beth Anne,” the teacher says and what I have just suspected crystallizes into clearness in front of me: I have not missed the introductions, or more importantly, I have not missed mine. I take a breath, I remind myself for what seems like the millionth time that there’s not going to be some sort of escape hatch that opens up for me at the last minute, that I’m really here, that I’m in for the long haul. Or at least for the next six weeks. I breathe out and move my head from side to side slightly, trying to relieve the mounting tension in my neck. I wonder how it can feel like it’s been such a long night already when it hasn’t even really started. I look to the blackboard just to be sure there isn’t any math there. There isn’t.
Beth Anne Nelson is written largely across the blackboard. Underneath it, slightly smaller, she has written, Overcoming Presentation Anxiety! The exclamation point, justifiably so, causes me concern. Yet the writing is so loopy, in such a big, sweeping script that it makes me want a drawing of a flower, or at the very least a smiley face, to follow it. I look to the woman standing before her girlish handwriting on the blackboard. She’s wearing a long, flowing skirt and a necklace of large brown shellacked beads. She wears her graying brown hair behind her in a long braid. I think her eyes seem kind. I wonder if what she is going to teach over the next six weeks will indeed unlock the secret of how to be normal. It’s a secret that’s been kept from me for so long. I tell myself I will pay attention to every word; I tell myself I will try my very best to embrace this.
But first, I have to check out my
Maybe it was all the thinking about being Jan Brady, something I try most of the time not to think about, but as I look at my watch, even though I thought I was going to be early, I am just barely on time. Finally inside the building, I dig in my dripping wet bag for the registration piece of paper I got in the mail. Everything is wet. I think how I hate the rain. And while that thought for me is so very true, I imagine it also must be so very unoriginal. I worry sometimes that a lot of things that are mine are that way. I locate the piece of paper and pull it out to double-check that my classroom is 502. It is. I dive through the elevator doors right as they close.
chapter twelve
How Awful Would It Be If This Thing Stopped?
I see room 502. The door is shut. I have that feeling in my stomach: that feeling that not only have I just done something wrong, but that also, I am about to. It’s a very high school-oriented feeling for me, and I can’t help but think, Why have I done this? But the reasons, I know, they are many and vast. The only choice I will let myself have is to turn the handle on the door and walk in.
I pause for a minute, just inside the door, and smile an apology to the teacher as she stops saying what she was saying and looks over at me, as does everyone else. The teacher smiles at me, really pretty nicely and I think that’s good that she did that, so at least I don’t instantly hate her.
All the chairs are organized in a horseshoe shape around the room; I sit down quickly and soggily in an empty chair, right at the end of the horseshoe. The moment I am situated, the moment I have wriggled out of my coat as inconspicuously as possible (not very), I realize I have chosen poorly. This is a bad chair. I don’t like this chair, how it is right on the end, so vulnerable. I stare at the surface of the desk part of my chair. The chairs, they’re all the kind of chairs with desks attached to them. Immediately, I start wondering if I’ve missed all the important stuff and will never quite catch up or (much better) if maybe I’m actually so late that I missed the whole introducing of oneself part. I look at my watch; I am only about four minutes late.
“Okay, so, I’m Beth Anne,” the teacher says and what I have just suspected crystallizes into clearness in front of me: I have not missed the introductions, or more importantly, I have not missed mine. I take a breath, I remind myself for what seems like the millionth time that there’s not going to be some sort of escape hatch that opens up for me at the last minute, that I’m really here, that I’m in for the long haul. Or at least for the next six weeks. I breathe out and move my head from side to side slightly, trying to relieve the mounting tension in my neck. I wonder how it can feel like it’s been such a long night already when it hasn’t even really started. I look to the blackboard just to be sure there isn’t any math there. There isn’t.
Beth Anne Nelson is written largely across the blackboard. Underneath it, slightly smaller, she has written, Overcoming Presentation Anxiety! The exclamation point, justifiably so, causes me concern. Yet the writing is so loopy, in such a big, sweeping script that it makes me want a drawing of a flower, or at the very least a smiley face, to follow it. I look to the woman standing before her girlish handwriting on the blackboard. She’s wearing a long, flowing skirt and a necklace of large brown shellacked beads. She wears her graying brown hair behind her in a long braid. I think her eyes seem kind. I wonder if what she is going to teach over the next six weeks will indeed unlock the secret of how to be normal. It’s a secret that’s been kept from me for so long. I tell myself I will pay attention to every word; I tell myself I will try my very best to embrace this.
But first, I have to check out my
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