My public school beat-down

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 23:30:00 +0000

Two years ago, I accepted an offer to teach seventh grade English at an urban middle school. I remember following a woman into a little office to sign papers, papers for a regular job not headquartered in the spare room in my house, a regular job with a designated lunchtime and human beings. The last time I did such a thing was in 1986. When the woman left to photocopy my signature, I translated the salary I was to receive on the back of her business card. It seemed low. It was low. But I had not arrived in that spot -- a table pressed into the corner of the Dallas Independent School District personnel office -- because I intended to make lots of money. I was going to change lives, I reminded myself. You do not make a lot of money when you change lives.

“Are you ready to start today?” asked the woman, returning.

“Today, gosh. That’s fast.”

She waited. I could be ready. Yes. I could be ready. She checked her watch.

Not an hour later, I clicked up the metal steps into Portable Room 1464. Twenty-five 13-year-olds whipped their heads around, like ballerinas doing chaine turns.

What not to wear after the divorce

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 01:00:00 +0000

The wallpaper in our new kitchen in our new town was a brick red, with ocher chickens on it, and peculiar little men. Tiny men, hunched over, farming, maybe. I agreed to live in the house on the condition that I could eradicate the itsy male people, slather texture over their bodies and paint them into nothingness. One day, while perusing the phone book for a person who would do the honors, I had the crazy good fortune to discover that Loehmann’s had an outpost within city limits. Yes, Loehmann’s, Chas E. Loehmann’s. The Big L. Lo’s. The department store of my New York youth, right in Texas, the place where I had wound up.

I should back up. There is that bench that rings the perimeter of the store’s dressing room and is attached, somehow, to the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that comprise the four walls. I spent half of my childhood on that bench, a receptacle for my mother’s sartorial decisions. Picks piled on my lap. Possibilities dangling on my head, from the hook above.

Salon.com > Pamela Kripke

My public school beat-down

What not to wear after the divorce