Read Online 14 Stories by Stephen Dixon - Free Book Online Page A

opened up. Visiting dignitaries used to be invited, and come.”
    â€œNow the kids buttonhole me for quarters and cigarettes if I see them outside. And one last Sunday cursed me out to his friends when he saw me entering this nice neighborhood bar. ‘Hey look, there goes my wino teacher drunk.’”
    â€œThe last week shouldn’t be too bad with most of them cutting or out on class trips. And if you think it’s cuckoo now you should’ve seen it last two days last year. Hundreds of them across the street and with smaller forces in back in case we tried to escape, and they battered us with raw eggs and ice-cream balls.”
    â€œHow’d they manage to throw ice-cream balls?” But three o’clock’s come. We line up behind the teachers and paraprofessionals to place our room keys on the key rack and clock out for the day.
    At home on my bed I fantasize about Judy Louis. It’s the following morning and I see her walking on the opposite sidewalk on her way to high school. She’s wearing a short skirt, man’s white T-shirt and on her shoulder is one of her leather bags. I cross the street to buy one of my special candies but more to see her up close. No, better it’s the day after tomorrow. Friday, around quarter past three, whole weekend ahead of me, and I’m leaving the same grocery store I saw her approaching that time with her girlfriend. It’s a hot day, near ninety, though the humidity’s quite low. In my grocery bag are two six-packs of ale and beer, items I buy in that quantity almost every Friday on my way home from school along with my once-a-week loaf of unsliced black bread and a hard cheese. The store’s front door is closed, as just the other day I overheard the dairy man yell to a woman to please don’t be keeping it open as they don’t want to be air-conditioning the whole outside. But I keep the door open for her and as she passes I say “Hello, Judy.” She stares at me, surprised I know her name. I say I didn’t want to startle her, but I used to teach at 54. She says “I’m sorry, I don’t recognize you, what did you teach?” The dairy man might say “One way or the other, in or out, but shut the door.” I say to her “Would you mind? In’s more comfortable,” and step into the store, switch the package to my other arm. “You wouldn’t remember me as I was a per-diem sub, but I had your class a few times. Right now I’m a typing teacher for a month—remember Miss Moore?” “Oh God—Miss Moore. Two years and I almost forgot. I had the other one—what was her name—with the very correct manners and bawdy asides and horselaugh?” Or else she could have had Miss Moore and recalls the story I’ve heard about how she got order in the class. “She’d stand halfway up the middle aisle tinkling by the end of its ivory handle this little bell, which she said she got in India forty years ago, till eventually everyone stopped what they were doing and stayed silent till she spoke. ‘Class,’ she’d say, if she didn’t say children. ‘As much as I love each and every adorable one of you, I estimate you took a minute twenty seconds of your Friday free time away by just now taking a minute twenty seconds too long.’ But I actually learned how to type with all my fingers from her, so you could say if it wasn’t for Miss Moore I wouldn’t have my part-time job.” I ask what she does when she isn’t working part-time and she says going to a special city school for theater and dance or even rehearsing a small part with a theater or ballet group. I mention the regularity of my seeing her and she says lots of times she’s wondered herself where I’m off to every morning and finally decided it was a graduate school I attended, because of all the books I carry, or some other kind of school I teach at, though