The Amazement Teacher

It seemed I had nothing to learn from my dottiest teacher ever. Bur she knew plenty about life, language and the roots of my smartass ways.

My teacher was astonished by life. So was Austrian painter Maria Lassnig in this self-portrait.

Mrs. Wight had been teaching senior English since the dawn of time. Unlike other women teachers at my school, she didn't seem to own a pencil skirt or a Peter Pan blouse. Her calf-grazing dresses, made of a luminescent knit and often worn inside out, looked like nothing you could buy in any store. If she wore a bra underneath, it must have given up the ghost during the Truman administration. She had a permanent slump in her shoulders, a circle of bright pink rouge on each cheek, and sunken eyes that watered as if she'd been weeping for the world.

Long before senior year, I saw kids roll their eyes at Mrs. Wight. Overdue for retirement, they said. Can't even get her dress on properly. I nodded along, an outsider looking for her place. To defend weird old Mrs. Wight would be to flaunt my own weirdness.

If you wrote at our school, you couldn't avoid Mrs. Wight. She oversaw the literary magazine, where I resolved to make my mark.

So what if I was only a freshman? I'd won a national writing contest. My parents quoted Yeats and Milton at the dinner table; my mother had a doctorate from Radcliffe. Red pen in hand, she slashed away at everything I wrote until the margins ran with blood. The Maynard family had standards. I'd show those high school editors the Maynard treatment. I just needed to make an example of some hopelessly misguided student writer. At a staff meeting in the school library, I chose my victim. I'll call him Michael Furey. He wasn't present but his metaphors would suit my purpose. They exploded and cascaded every which way.

Michael intrigued me, not that I'd have let on. Two years ahead of me, he seemed unaware of my existence. He inhabited a world of his own that he lugged around in a bagful of books. Hair flopped in his eyes. His expression oscillated between delight, skepticism and bemusement. Our school’s one approximation of an angel-headed hipster, he hung out with an older crowd that listened to a tousled prophet named Bob Dylan, read the Beats and smoked in coffeehouses. No boy had ever shown the slightest interest in me, and this looked like a permanent state of affairs. Michael would pay for the indifference of his gender.

What did I love? Did anything set me on fire? My sputtering flame was the hope that a kindred spirit would set me free from loneliness.

I brandished Michael's poem and whooped with scorn. Who did he think he was, the second coming of Jack Kerouac? I was declaiming a particularly overwrought passage when Mrs. Wight grabbed me by the back of my jumper, hauled me into the corridor and looked down at me from her full height like Queen Boudica charging the Romans. "Don't you ever, ever talk like that again about someone else's writing! He's in love with words, and it's a beautiful thing! We should nurture joy in language, Rona. Not try to put it out."

What did I love? Did anything set me on fire? My sputtering flame was the hope that a kindred spirit would set me free from loneliness. I didn't dare hope with all my heart. As the daughter of an alcoholic father, prone to rages and dogged by unspoken regrets, I had quietly concluded that hope gets you nowhere. If it doesn't make you bitter, like my mother, it makes you weary and sad. Might as well keep your expectations low.

In the tiled hallway I looked up at Mrs. Wight in mute amazement. I was rarely at a loss for words. Or amazed, for that matter. But Michael Furey, for all his youthful excesses, knew something about words that had escaped me—how to revel in them, kick them up and make the fine mess that might be the start of something good. He didn't fear anyone's laughter. Didn't picture my mother mocking him with her red pen. How she hooted at the seventh-grade assignment in which my favorite sentence began, "He whirled a snowball..." No, no, no, my mother insisted. A snowball whirls; you cannot whirl a snowball. That would violate the laws of language. The word I wanted could only be "hurl." I fought for "whirled." To my mind it conjured the spiraling snowball. But my mother had to have the last word, and it was the correct, predictable "hurled."

I wanted what Michael Furey had, this loping boy bent over with the weight of his books. Michael could listen to the voice of his own desires. I couldn't. Instead of living life, I defended myself from it. I wouldn't stop at cruelty if I thought it could gain me an advantage. Aside from my father in his cups, no one ever yelled at me. My father yelled over trifles; his anger felt undeserved, and I yelled back. I deserved the tongue-lashing from Mrs. Wight.

I remember one other correction from her, beside the first sentence of a paper for senior English: "I was born guilty." Anguish interested me; joy did not. By declaring my anguish, I had joined the ranks of all suffering souls who wrote in garrets. So I thought. A more rigorous teacher might have called me out for posturing. Mrs. Wight wrote, "No, you WEREN'T!"

I’m still reading her crumpled face. I see wonder at our innocence. Grief for the losses we’d bring upon ourselves.

I didn't think much of her teaching. She couldn't mesmerize a class with the power of her perceptions. Unlike teachers I admired, she didn't perform her subject. If she ever cracked a joke, I must have been absorbed in a doodle. She had a way of drifting off on tangents. We'd been discussing The Brothers Karamazov when Mrs. Wight went silent and searched our faces as if we were all the kids she'd ever taught, and any still to come. We waited for her point about The Brothers Karamazov. (Did she have one?) At last she said, "None of you have done anything irreparable yet."

About sixty years later, I'm still reading her crumpled face. I see wonder at our innocence. Grief for the losses we'd bring upon ourselves. Love that we didn't have to earn by fulfilling parental expectations or making the honor roll. We were no more or less loveable than any other class of high-school seniors. We spread rumors, bullied one another, let ourselves be riven with envy of the popular, the pretty, the athletically gifted. We raided the parental liquor cabinet. Laughed at a teacher whose affection we couldn't shake.

She must have noticed me carrying Dylan Thomas's poems around, so she invited me to read one to the class. Instead of a crowd-pleaser like "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," I picked the more mysterious "There Was a Savior." I'd been trying to crack the poem's code but it continued to elude me--especially the last line, about the "unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks." Those words sent a shiver through me, as if they were a personal message from a poet who died in 1953. I longed for someone to throw his arms around me. What kind of love is armless, yet breaks all rocks?

Mrs. Wight wrote in my yearbook, "To unforgettable Rona—may  life be good to you." An A student and a favorite of hers, I thought she'd never written this to any other student, but how could that be so? She'd seen what can happen to the young—the pregnancies, the shotgun weddings, the car crashes. Young people break their necks diving into shallow water. Some take their lives. In my small town three young men roughly my age were diagnosed with schizophrenia. One of them was Michael Furey. He died in residential care.

What Mrs. Wight really taught, I realize now, was love. Both reading and writing are acts of love, if you let them amaze you. The love that breaks all rocks.

Who opened your eyes to something vital you had missed? Doesn’t have to be a teacher. Has anyone ever changed your life by calling you out? I’m listening—and I love a good story.