Back outside the payroll secretary's office – now crowded with teachers scurrying
about or holding one-on-one conversations – Radix discovered two more new recruits,
two women, arms folded, faces sullen. They had chosen not to wander around; they sat
with their feet tucked in so as not to be in the way of teachers already appointed and
with things to do.
They saw Radix who looked adrift and miserable, and they concluded correctly that
he was one of them; sent by the Board, ignored by everyone around, awaiting someone's
approbation. The older woman lit up a cigarette and shook her head sadly, indignantly.
Radix informed them he too had been told to wait.
"I'm a transfer," the older woman said. "You'd think they'd have my name on some
separate transfer list. I don't understand why I'm being treated this way."
The other woman, about twenty five, her hair cut short, her blue eyes at that moment
bright but confused said, "It's been like this since I applied…terrible!…The Board treats
you like shit…I get here, and that secretary lady, that little horse face…bitch…in there..
treats me this way."
The older one, speaking like a veteran of many encounters with principals and payroll
secretaries, whispered harshly, "I'll tell you what's going on here. They don't like new
people…they just…don't…like…new people coming in."
"I didn't ask them to send me here," the young one pleaded. "I wanted a school in Man-
hattan. I live in Manhattan. Instead they send me all the way out here."
The older one gripped and pulled hard on her cigarette. The skin on her wrist was
mottled the veins green and bulging. Her face looked tired, ravaged; but her body was
trim and shapely. Sometimes unconsciously she smoothed her stomach and let her hands
slide up and down her thighs.
Radix stood nearby and listened, holding himself apart; not yet ready to enter what
seemed an outpouring of justifiable anger.
As it turned out the younger woman was sent back to the Board. The older woman
was asked to stay on. Her name was Mrs. Turkles. Radix would hear that name on the
school's address system being told, with some irritation in the speaker's voice, to report
to her class.
They met infrequently, but whenever she saw him in the hallway she'd buttonhole
him, forgetting for the moment where she was going; and with a stricken face she'd
explain what a miserable time she was having at the school.
She'd stand looking up in his face, blocking out hallway clamour. Her new boss, she
told him, leaning forward, bringing her lips close to his ear, was an egregious asshole;
he showed no respect for the years she'd put into the system. One day she pulled him
aside by the arm and said, "Look at me! What am I doing here? I have no life." Then she
dragged herself away, looking back over her shoulder at him.
(from "Ah Mikhail, O Fidel!" a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 