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Show The spring before we moved, I suddenly stopped going to school. One day I raised my hand in class to say that I wasn't feeling well and within the hour my mother had come and taken me home. Good girls, I quickly learned, could lie to great effect. Only utter a few words, and I was excused to the cool, dark cave of the nurse's office and almost as easily transported home. My mother was but a few words away. I remember how much I loved to lie in that room waiting for her to come. Down a short hallway but still within the main office, the sick room hovered perfectly between solitude and communion. Alone on the bed in a cinderblock room that reminded me of our basement at home, I would listen to the chatter of the secretaries in the office, answering the phones, making announcements on the PA system, shuffling papers, and collecting attendance. Accompanied by the purpled fumes of freshly dittoed pages, the quiet hum of the office was like the surf, incessant and devoted. The first time my mother appeared it was as if by magic. My simple words had summoned her back to me. And in that moment, having been guided gently on the shoulder by the nurse and brought into the light of the main office and to my mother, I learned that language could cast a spell. The distance between home and school could be transgressed. I only had to say that I was ill. So the next day I raised my hand again. And again, I was sent to the nurses' office to lie on the bed and again my mother appeared, shaking her head in concern, carrying Bryan in her arms. At home, she put me to bed and left me to rest. My temperature was normal. I had no cough, no runny nose. When pushed, I complained of a stomachache. Safe in my room I listened to the muffled house sounds, the kitchen faucet turning on and off, my father calling home, pots and pans being shifted in the |
