Read Online One More Theory About Happiness: A Memoir by Paul Guest - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Paul Guest
Ads: Link
that. Thank you.”
At first, this satisfied her, but only for a while. Soon, Ricky Van Shelton hardly mattered. And Elvis was a footnote. Older than me by a few years, she would sit in the rear row, to my left, and flutter until we reached school a few minutes away. I don’t know what was wrong with her, or what had happened to her, if she had been born impaired or, like me, in some way, injured, frozen in time. She was breathless, already sexual, though she was unaware. I stared ahead or at the roof of the short bus while we bounced about and she glowed.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” she began to ask me every morning. At first, uncomfortable, I said no, which again was the truth.
“I would be your girlfriend,” she said, so plainly that it hurt. Her eyes were large and dark and her hair a knotty, untended brown. “If you wanted me to be your girlfriend.”
That word was fraught for her. Girlfriend . However much she understood of herself, she knew that there could be more. She knew desire.
Finally, after weeks of her eyes, her sad entreaties, I began to tell her that I did have a girlfriend, one who was very sweet. The same grief always took her face and changed it, and when I lied to her I longed for what I said to be true.
“That’s OK,” she would say, turning to the windows. “I’d still be your girlfriend, if you wanted me someday.”
I had not wanted to return to school two days after my discharge from Shepherd, but I did. Two weeks, I’d asked for. Time enough to return home and make sense of living with my family again. Time enough to prepare myself for a new school, junior high, with new teachers and new students. It loomed large in my mind. But my parents insisted, and had already made plans for my enrollment. I didn’t struggle with it. There were no arguments. Despite my desire for two weeks’ respite, I knew it was the best thing I could do. November had come already. The air outside had begun to chill and become faintly brittle at night. The school year would soon be half over. Too late to salvage. I’d lose time, be held back, and that loss would be greater than the two weeks I wanted.
The junior high was old, built on a hill. Two stories but no elevator. Between classes, in rain, in sleet, I had to rush in a circuit around the campus, up a road, and back into the building. For two years I did this every day.
The school system provided a paraprofessional to write for and otherwise assist me: to help me at lunch and empty the catheter bag I wore around my calf, inside my jeans, when it filled up with urine. Her name was Louise. She was funny, outgoing, and had a gift for knowing when I needed her help and when to be transparent, to hang back, without inserting herself into my new life. It was only some years later that I realized how crucial that was, how lucky I was to work with someone like her.
I had harbored amorphous worries about my return to school. Beyond the early hormonal waves of fear which swamp every adolescent, when fitting in is everything, I fretted over what it would be like to enter class that first day, to be regarded by so many strange faces, how it would feel to join an already defined group. A class. A school. More than anything, I wanted to be invisible.
Those fears, multiplying in my blood, viral in their growth, were quashed by the teacher of my first class. I satthere before class began, before the haranguing clatter of bells in the hallway, while students who I didn’t know filed into class, falling into their desks like surrender. When the hallways were empty, of students and noise, but before class began, she came to me, kneeling to make eye-level contact, usually a gesture I hate because it changes nothing that is different between us, and quietly said, “It’s good that you’re back and I’m glad you’re in my class.”
That was it. Nothing unctuous. Nothing grabby or glad-handed or intended to inspire me or notify me that I was an
At first, this satisfied her, but only for a while. Soon, Ricky Van Shelton hardly mattered. And Elvis was a footnote. Older than me by a few years, she would sit in the rear row, to my left, and flutter until we reached school a few minutes away. I don’t know what was wrong with her, or what had happened to her, if she had been born impaired or, like me, in some way, injured, frozen in time. She was breathless, already sexual, though she was unaware. I stared ahead or at the roof of the short bus while we bounced about and she glowed.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” she began to ask me every morning. At first, uncomfortable, I said no, which again was the truth.
“I would be your girlfriend,” she said, so plainly that it hurt. Her eyes were large and dark and her hair a knotty, untended brown. “If you wanted me to be your girlfriend.”
That word was fraught for her. Girlfriend . However much she understood of herself, she knew that there could be more. She knew desire.
Finally, after weeks of her eyes, her sad entreaties, I began to tell her that I did have a girlfriend, one who was very sweet. The same grief always took her face and changed it, and when I lied to her I longed for what I said to be true.
“That’s OK,” she would say, turning to the windows. “I’d still be your girlfriend, if you wanted me someday.”
I had not wanted to return to school two days after my discharge from Shepherd, but I did. Two weeks, I’d asked for. Time enough to return home and make sense of living with my family again. Time enough to prepare myself for a new school, junior high, with new teachers and new students. It loomed large in my mind. But my parents insisted, and had already made plans for my enrollment. I didn’t struggle with it. There were no arguments. Despite my desire for two weeks’ respite, I knew it was the best thing I could do. November had come already. The air outside had begun to chill and become faintly brittle at night. The school year would soon be half over. Too late to salvage. I’d lose time, be held back, and that loss would be greater than the two weeks I wanted.
The junior high was old, built on a hill. Two stories but no elevator. Between classes, in rain, in sleet, I had to rush in a circuit around the campus, up a road, and back into the building. For two years I did this every day.
The school system provided a paraprofessional to write for and otherwise assist me: to help me at lunch and empty the catheter bag I wore around my calf, inside my jeans, when it filled up with urine. Her name was Louise. She was funny, outgoing, and had a gift for knowing when I needed her help and when to be transparent, to hang back, without inserting herself into my new life. It was only some years later that I realized how crucial that was, how lucky I was to work with someone like her.
I had harbored amorphous worries about my return to school. Beyond the early hormonal waves of fear which swamp every adolescent, when fitting in is everything, I fretted over what it would be like to enter class that first day, to be regarded by so many strange faces, how it would feel to join an already defined group. A class. A school. More than anything, I wanted to be invisible.
Those fears, multiplying in my blood, viral in their growth, were quashed by the teacher of my first class. I satthere before class began, before the haranguing clatter of bells in the hallway, while students who I didn’t know filed into class, falling into their desks like surrender. When the hallways were empty, of students and noise, but before class began, she came to me, kneeling to make eye-level contact, usually a gesture I hate because it changes nothing that is different between us, and quietly said, “It’s good that you’re back and I’m glad you’re in my class.”
That was it. Nothing unctuous. Nothing grabby or glad-handed or intended to inspire me or notify me that I was an
Similar Books
