face remembered its supplicatory smile. There were three desks, which seemed like two more than necessary. Celia saw a bottle of nail polish on one, a paperback on another. Forms were shuffled, phone receivers picked up and replaced in a show of busyness. Finally, as if it had only just occurred to her, the nail-polish secretary turned toward the long, narrow counter that represented the length and breadth of her domain. Once Celia had signed in, cries of “Oh, you’re Noreen’s daughter!” were followed by mutual visual inspections. Two of the secretaries wore the hoop earrings, acrylic nails, and hand-drawn eyebrows of blue-collar Jensenville; the third, the French manicure and gold studs of the hillside middle class. The younger two still wore their hair long, but once they hit menopause they too wouldgo short like the secretary with hair like Celia’s mother. Celia’s appraisals were no less mercenary than the secretaries’ raking stares. This was what high school did to people.
The older one said, “Back to visit your mom?” in a voice that evoked a smoke-damaged June Cleaver. A voice like that had logged Celia’s late arrivals but she couldn’t tell if this was the same one. In high school she’d never bothered to discern individuals among ambient personnel over thirty. Celia nodded, and gazes returned to desks in a collective vote of disappointment. Barring the dispatch of a behavior problem to the vice principal, it looked as though the day’s highlight would be confined to lunch from the new take-out place. Without ceremony, the daughter of Noreen from Guidance was granted an adhesive tag and ejected into the hall.
Celia had arrived in the middle of fourth period. The only visible students stared out from class election posters decorating the hallway. For a portion of a portion of a second, Celia was fifteen again and late to English. Then the feeling disappeared, and she was once again a thirty-two-year-old examining homemade flyers taped to a wall. The current crop of aspiring presidents and treasurers showed the same bluster that had passed for experience when Celia was a sophomore, but with more ethnic variation. One of Celia’s private embarrassments after moving to Chicago was a late-blooming awareness of her childhood’s uniculture. Born to a brick monolith, she had not known to miss windows.
The school’s guidance suite was at the far end of the second floor. As a freshman, Celia had climbed back stairwells to avoid passing it on her way to class. Even now, her internalawareness of the place remained her personal magnetic north. She could feel the assertion of that private compass point—lying to her left as she crossed the first-floor hallway, moving center-right as she mounted the stairs. Jensenville was small enough that a few of Celia’s classmates had been the children of teachers. Celia suspected they thought she had gotten the better deal, but to her teenaged mind a teacher was less embarrassing. It was the word
counselor
that did it, binding her to a mother professionally certified to dispense advice.
The guidance suite’s location above the music room had earned it carpeting. Tufted broadloom easily squelched the treble atrocity of Flute Choir—a concession to the chronic popularity of the instrument (so thin!) among dieting girls—but even deepest shag would not have muted the marching band. On rainy afternoons, or when the outside temperature dropped below 45 degrees, thumps and screeches radiated upward. The first thing Celia noticed was that brown carpet had been traded for blue. There were fewer cubicles, the school’s guidance personnel having dwindled along with Jensenville’s student population. Geometric lines of darker carpet color marked where the cubicles had been, a shadow grid of deeper blue compromised by fewer coffee stains and blots of trampled gum.
Celia’s arrival was met by anxious glances from two girls sitting inside the door, but their faces relaxed
The older one said, “Back to visit your mom?” in a voice that evoked a smoke-damaged June Cleaver. A voice like that had logged Celia’s late arrivals but she couldn’t tell if this was the same one. In high school she’d never bothered to discern individuals among ambient personnel over thirty. Celia nodded, and gazes returned to desks in a collective vote of disappointment. Barring the dispatch of a behavior problem to the vice principal, it looked as though the day’s highlight would be confined to lunch from the new take-out place. Without ceremony, the daughter of Noreen from Guidance was granted an adhesive tag and ejected into the hall.
Celia had arrived in the middle of fourth period. The only visible students stared out from class election posters decorating the hallway. For a portion of a portion of a second, Celia was fifteen again and late to English. Then the feeling disappeared, and she was once again a thirty-two-year-old examining homemade flyers taped to a wall. The current crop of aspiring presidents and treasurers showed the same bluster that had passed for experience when Celia was a sophomore, but with more ethnic variation. One of Celia’s private embarrassments after moving to Chicago was a late-blooming awareness of her childhood’s uniculture. Born to a brick monolith, she had not known to miss windows.
The school’s guidance suite was at the far end of the second floor. As a freshman, Celia had climbed back stairwells to avoid passing it on her way to class. Even now, her internalawareness of the place remained her personal magnetic north. She could feel the assertion of that private compass point—lying to her left as she crossed the first-floor hallway, moving center-right as she mounted the stairs. Jensenville was small enough that a few of Celia’s classmates had been the children of teachers. Celia suspected they thought she had gotten the better deal, but to her teenaged mind a teacher was less embarrassing. It was the word
counselor
that did it, binding her to a mother professionally certified to dispense advice.
The guidance suite’s location above the music room had earned it carpeting. Tufted broadloom easily squelched the treble atrocity of Flute Choir—a concession to the chronic popularity of the instrument (so thin!) among dieting girls—but even deepest shag would not have muted the marching band. On rainy afternoons, or when the outside temperature dropped below 45 degrees, thumps and screeches radiated upward. The first thing Celia noticed was that brown carpet had been traded for blue. There were fewer cubicles, the school’s guidance personnel having dwindled along with Jensenville’s student population. Geometric lines of darker carpet color marked where the cubicles had been, a shadow grid of deeper blue compromised by fewer coffee stains and blots of trampled gum.
Celia’s arrival was met by anxious glances from two girls sitting inside the door, but their faces relaxed
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