English Teachers

There was the one who always picked the same girl to be Juliet. He read for Romeo. Called her “statuesque.” Looked out at the row of bare knees under our desks and told us in Charles Dickens’s time, the sight of an ankle could drive a man crazy. (I was the only girl who chose to wear the uniform pants instead of the skirt, and I felt invisible. I wanted to be.)

There was the popular one. Girls would come back to visit him years after they graduated. In my class, his favorite had blond hair and big tits. He had her sit right in front of him. One time we were watching The Crucible and, in the scene where Winona Ryder’s character, who is having an affair with an older man, is whipped, he leaned forward and whispered to her, “Bet you wouldn’t like that.” She and I were the only ones who heard him. (Men forget you have eyes and ears if they don’t see you as a body.)

There was the one who was caught. Arraigned years after we graduated for improper relationships with students at the pizza place he owned. My friends and I laughed when we heard the news, quipped, “Isn’t it strange that the most surprising bit is the fact that he also owned a pizza place?”

And there was the last one. He didn’t play favorites, and he kept his distance. He taught us about Maria Goretti, who was stabbed when she was our age because she refused to fornicate, then was canonized for her purity. In his classroom, he kept a statue of Mary, trampling a serpent under her bare feet. Our virginity was precious, he told us. “No one wants gum that’s already been chewed.” I imagined the cuts on my legs were the imprints of sharp teeth. (When he led us in prayer at the beginning of every class, murmuring, “Blessed be the fruit,” I wondered if he was like the others, hungry.)