Wellspring: A Series of Short Stories About Appalachian Women

PINK GINGHAM BOWS

We loved her in ways we shouldn’t have; and she knew it, which made her love us in ways she shouldn’t have, which caused all the problems — problems that none of us could have anticipated and yet each of us, in our hearts, knew possible.  It was very much like the gathering of a storm.  But we were drawn to her and she was drawn to us like ants to sugar, and even if either of us had chosen to put blinders on like horses at a race track, the pull was stronger than either of us could resist.  But like she always said, “Erase the word should from your vocabulary and see what happens.”  And like the dutiful and vulnerable students we were—students who vied for her every attention—we obeyed, like a fresh litter of gentle but very hungry puppies.

            We each knew — everyone, in fact, knew — that this mutual attraction would lead to nothing redeeming — would, instead, lead to an eventual devastation that would leave us all in shards, as cutting as fine crystals of glass.  And while it might have very well begun innocently enough, as time went on and we became nervously aware of its potential danger, we kept on doing it, as if we had suddenly turned into well-oiled automatons.  We took turns adding to it a smidgen here and there, like a shopping list for the delectable fare to be offered at a dinner party.  And once it picked up momentum, we couldn’t stop it.  It took on an intoxicating life of its own.  And we really didn’t want to stop it.  But in our subconscious, we knew that we should stop it.  She knew it, too.  And in looking back, there was no effort made to stop it.  And there it was again, that same word that kept resurfacing, that kept getting tossed to the side, as if a mere crumb from a crusty piece of French bread.  There was no eliminating it; it kept reappearing, like a fine coating of coal dust after an overloaded coal truck passed by the line-up of houses in this stagnant Appalachian town. 

She didn’t think the word should should have ever been invented in the first place.  She often quoted a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in trying to explain to us why the word was pointless:  “If you want to use the word, all you will end up doing is ‘beat[ing] on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’”  She detested the past, unless of course it pertained to American literary classics.  And she was right about Fitzgerald’s reference, as it applied to the mutual, growing attraction of each of us to the other.  But then she was right about everything, until the day she was wrong; and so were we.  It was a day that arrived that awakened in each of us the awareness as to just how wrong we had all been from the very beginning.  But until that moment was birthed, we had the time of our lives.

Every student entering the junior class of thirty students that year at our small, private school noticed her the day she walked into the building for the first time as our new English teacher.  Up to that point, none of us — and I mean not a single one of us — had ever liked our English teacher.  Unyielding, structured, and as dry as toast were just a few of the chosen monikers we hung around their necks like wilted daisy chains. 

We had all attended Cliff Top Montessori and St. Joseph’s Elementary School.  We had been together since the first grade, and we may as well have been living together in one big farm house on the outside of town, surrounded by acre after acre of lush woodlands, our parents practically living together in near-Bohemian style as it was, making sure that we received the best education their respective parents’ money could buy, which they convinced themselves they had accomplished, bringing to each of us opportunities and experiences that we never, in our innocent youths, dreamed possible.  And yet, the common thread that bound us one to the other was the single wall in each of our bedrooms that truly belonged to us to create song lyrics and Jackson Pollock-like art and poetry and stories.  And now, many years later, as we have all moved to the far corners of the world, that is the one gift that we chose to pass on to our own progeny. 

We seldom reconnect, afraid that if reunited, we could somehow bring her back, but separately we’re safe, grown smart enough to stay clear of her intoxicating presence.  And in retrospect, completely disengaging from one another was probably the best thing that could have happened to any of us, including her.  She was that influential in our lives, and also in the end, that destructive.  Even our parents, in their deepest, darkest, most private moments had to admit that it all went wrong.  And it would be something that would remain with us forever, both a curse and a blessing; a curse that hadn’t yet and probably never would be lifted, maybe even one we didn’t want lifted, like living with it was both a cloak and a dagger, all at the same time — something that we wanted to let loose, but something that we kept holding on to tighter every time we felt our hold relax.

Emily and I noticed it at the same time:  that slender, pale pink gingham flat bow that she wore in her hair, parted slightly off center on the left side, a few wisps of straight-cut bangs lightly touching the tops of her eyebrows, her honey-colored bob emitting what seemed like rays of light, nearly blinding.  The childlike bangs were cut as precise as an edge of notebook paper.

Why we loved her without reserve was a mystery.  A mystery then and still a mystery over twenty years later, after having graduated college, married (and divorced), with high school-aged broods of our own.  Our small Catholic high school was the only one in this rural area of Appalachia.  We flew on the wings of our coal baron grandparents, who scooped up their own offspring to navigate their own paths.  We drove BMWs and Hummers, and we came out miraculously unscathed by the crashes that came in waves from drunken stupors.  The girls carried Louis Vuitton monogram canvas Speedy 35 satchels; and all of us wore nothing but Ralph Lauren, when we escaped from the confines of our nondescript school uniform of navy cords, navy cotton skirts, and white Oxford cloth, buttoned-down collared shirts.  Denied anything that would identify us individually from 8:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. five days a week left us to make life-long friends with Clairee Belcher from Steel Magnolias, her words ricocheting off the concrete walls of our school’s hallways and classrooms:  “The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize.”  But she — our new, enigmatic English teacher — shared none of our materialistic commonalities, which simply added to her mysterious, intoxicating, inexplicable pull.

She wore Birkenstocks, with a pair of ankle socks, every day.  The socks were never the same, and not a single one of us owned a pair of ankle socks.  The thought never occurred to us to even consider ankle socks.  Hers had everything stitched on them from baby chicks to paintbrushes, peace symbols and evergreen trees to mushrooms. 

“How in the hell can we be so enamored of ankle socks?” Anna exclaimed one day at lunch.

“Ya got me,” we chimed in unison.

“She’s both sophisticated and yet very much childlike,” Chris observed, as he tossed a handful of peanut M&Ms into his open mouth, which is what he ate every single day for lunch.

Much to our approval, she never wore what we called “teacher jumpers.”  Instead, her wardrobe was entirely from a line called Blue Fish.  She added to her line-up every summer from a shop in Soho and one in Charleston, South Carolina.  The fact that she spent summers in New York City (where every single one of us wanted to land) and the winter breaks in South Carolina simply added to the allure of these free-flowing, tunic-style dresses made from organic cotton and linen, hand-painted with daises, insects, and yes, fish of every kind.  Each piece touched just the tip of her ankle socks, and she wore them with such confidence that we secretly wanted to sneak into her closet and play dress-up, knowing perfectly well that we could never pull it off.

She lived two blocks from the school, and as we sat at our desks every morning (although she often let Liam sit on the floor, because he wanted to and allowed Jessie to perch on the back of his desk again because he wanted to) before class started we watched her round the corner with a hurried step because she was always late, abhorring mornings as much as we did, her damp tresses catching the early-morning breeze, her brown leather crossbody swinging to the sounds of the church bells.  She was Audrey Hepburn running through the streets of Rome in Roman Holiday.

The summer before our senior year, a few of us traveled with her to New York City, where she had chosen to wake early one morning and quietly steal away from our rooms at The Plaza to John Barrett’s Salon in Bergdorf-Goodman across the street.  She left a note for us to order breakfast.  When she returned, her bob had been dyed a color very close to orange sherbet.  We bellowed with approval.  She simply shrugged her shoulders, opened wide her arms, and gathered us in like too many inflatable parrots won at a game along the state fair midway.  And even though we were more than a bit surprised that she didn’t discuss this decision with us beforehand — for while she talked about sentence structure and the components of a well-written essay and her undying love for the classics, she talked with us most assuredly about life — we were instantly struck dumb by her unilateral decision.  Instead of voicing our disapproval, we accepted her embrace by enveloping her too into a gentle, but firm grasp and taking turns planting long-awaited kisses on her fair cheeks.  And in looking back, perhaps that was the denouement that changed the course of so very much.  That and a flat, cotton, pink gingham bow that invited more than any of us could have ever imagined.  It was both magical and threatening.

After the start of the new school year, we drove by her apartment one evening to pick her up for dinner and a movie—something that happened with greater frequency than it should have happened.  As she descended the stairs from the front entrance of her building, Erica said, “If she wasn’t so damn cute, I’d have to hate her.  But look at her, she’s just fucking cute!”  And we all agreed.

By spring, she had grown quite ill.  One early morning, after announcements, her students were gathered in the library, as she announced that she would be resigning, as a hush and a stillness drew everyone to a quiet center that was unwelcome, unfamiliar, and unsettling.  And while our little community mourned her departure, upon reflection many years later, it was her style to leave with quiet exactitude and dignity.  Anything else would have disappointed us.  And while she wanted to stay and stay forever, she couldn’t.  She would never jeopardize her students’ acquisition of knowledge or bear their witness as she fell into an eventual decline in body and in spirit, fearful of taking them along for the ride.  But perhaps the single most important reason for her withdrawal was her determination to avoid the early theft of childlike innocence that was still very much a part of each one of her students and a part of herself.  After all, she had instilled in them a beauty that while assured to fade over time just might linger, just might prevail—a complete belief that anything is possible.  For in the end, what became undeniable to everyone was that she too loved us in ways she shouldn’t have. 

It was rumored (again, never confirmed) that she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown — too many losses in too short a time.  Her recent engagement to our theology teacher, Miss Brown, had been broken, her parents had been killed in a skiing accident, and her only sibling had committed suicide, leaving a note for her that she read and set fire to on the rooftop garden terrace of her apartment building, where the building super escorted her, until the fire had been extinguished, knowing that it was the one thing he could do to offer her some measure of peace.  It was rumored too that he had been in love with her and that she knew it, but could not reciprocate his affections.  We knew we shouldn’t have yearned to know the contents of that letter, but ashamedly we did. 

And as I remember her steadfast resolve and her resilience and her insistence on the truth, the sign-song melody of the birds in the trees above makes me giggle like a child, recalling the day we helped her sneak into her no-pets allowed studio apartment three arrestingly-beautiful finches.  The apartment was so sparsely furnished that we wondered if she was planning to move, but we said nothing.  We were just happy to be there.

There was a single bed dressed in the most luxurious of white, Egyptian cotton sheeting, with a few standard-sized pillows and a European-sized pillow and a single boudoir pillow, each covered with the same Egyptian cotton fabric, her initials in a deep salmon thread in the center.  At the foot of the bed sat a simple, four-legged, flat top writing desk with a simple, slender, brass-like lamp topped with an eggshell-colored, linen shade.  There was an easel that held each month’s calendar, with the month etched in gold-tone lettering.  Writing implements of every kind were housed inside a floral, decoupaged vessel, and a stack of leather bound, Smythson journals placed with intention in the center.  The table was painted the color of bright green Easter basket straw grass.  At the base of the journals were the texts we used for our creative writing class:  Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.  The Shaker-styled, straight-backed, birch wood desk chair looked rigid, uncomfortable, and yet perhaps so very necessary to penning journal entries that gifted clarity, but not until the harsh realities of life’s difficult adventures were revealed first.

Two flamingo pink, leather, nail-head trimmed chairs sat at the far end of the room, a luxurious Stark floral carpet anchoring it all.  It was both fairy-like and devoid of anything that would identify its inhabitant.  And suddenly, we realized we didn’t really know her at all; only what she chose to show and tell, like a game learned in nursery school.

After we set up the elaborate, Victorian-styled bird cage and lifted the front latch and released each finch into its newest confines, pressing inward on the what looked like exact replicas of paper takeout containers from a Chinese restaurant, we added a few bird toys for their amusement and left, without a word.            

She had named the finches after the characters in her favorite novel, To Kill a Mockingbird:  Atticus, Boo, and Scout, and we coveted each one of those, too.  And what remained in the end was the challenge to each of us to live life. To simply, and with fevered abandon, live life.