Read Online Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay - Free Book Online

lips, small teeth. She was outstandingly beautiful. Mrs. Graves reminds me of Emma Bovary. Wilda.”
    “Is that Mrs. Graves’s name?” Connie said. “Wilda?”
    “La brunette
.”
    “You speak French.”
    “Bad French. Very bad.”
    “You could teach me.”
    He raised his eyebrows, and she explained what it had been like trying to teach French without being able to speak a word, and he allowed that he would be honoured to teach her whatever he knew.
    After a second’s hesitation, she ventured, “And how much would the lessons be?”
    That drew a smile. “I don’t have any material in French, you know, except for the Eaton’s catalogue.”
    And so Connie would learn the French words for various hats and dresses and fabrics and shoes.
Toile
and
chiffon
and
tweed importe
and
flanelle
and
crepe de chine
and
chambray
or cambric, the smooth cotton that took its name, he told her, from Cambrai, the town in northern France that manufactured it. She learned a peddler’s poetic and utilitarian French, and it suited her.
Un chic ornement de metal embellit le collet. Une valeur remarquable. Le dernier cri du chic
. Galosh, it turned out, came from the French
galoche
. Every child’s pleasure, sloshing along in the spring in unbuckled galoshes, long underwear folded just right to keep young legs from being rubbed sore, was steeped in an old French word.
    Oscar had true European charm. He offered her nuts and candies. His hands were olive skinned and shiny, large hands for such a small man. Against his protests, she paid him twenty-five cents a lesson.

    Her gift was the ability to step back. She saw not a principal with a specialty in French, but a thwarted man mountinga little production to give his theatrical bent an outlet, and to give himself time with Susan, who displeased him as much as she pleased him, that’s what Connie saw. Females displeased him as much as they pleased him.
    Girls were never strapped, it was an unwritten rule, but one girl Parley picked on more than once. A big, well-formed farm girl with a wide, damp face, Sarah Wilkeson, the oldest of a large brood, who often arrived late to school. Parley wielded the strap on her large open palms and she lost control of her bladder. Her humiliation seemed to relax him. He told her to find a cloth and get down on her hands and knees and wipe it up. The whole time he watched her.
    Connie heard about it at recess and took Sarah downstairs into the basement to the box that contained a few mismatched mittens and unclaimed items of clothing. She helped the girl change out of her soggy drawers and felt herself become an island of sanity in the girl’s grateful eyes. It was a lesson in emotional geography. Parley was the volcano that rearranged land and air, and she was the outlying island born as a result.
    The next day, teaching synonyms, she asked her class for all the words they knew for “punish.” They took turns going to the blackboard and soon they were standing in a cluster, adding more and more words until they filled the board from top to bottom.
Spank, belt, thump, smack, whack, swat, slap, strap, hit, strike, kick, whip, lash, cane, burn, twist, punch, break, knock, rap, bend, shake, poke, pound, thrash, slam, crack, crush, beat, choke
. When Parley came into her classroom at the end of school to work on the play, he stoppedshort and scanned the words she had chosen not to erase.
    “English,” he said, “has a monosyllabic soul.”
    Even with the standing mirror, he could not make the murder scene work. Susan, in dressing gown and slippers, her long hair tied back with a ribbon, sat at a bountiful breakfast table. By now Tess’s father had died, and with the family facing eviction, and no one else to turn to, Tess had allowed bad Alec to come to the rescue, meaning she had become his mistress.
    A knocking at the door and
Tess
goes to answer it
. Angel Clare
enters, hatless, weary, ill, back from Brazil. He puts his arms around her and she steps