Free Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) by Tracy K. Smith Page A

mixed with the most futile kind of retroactive fear. What if the boys and girls all those years ago hadn’t liked her? What if they’d called her names behind her back or defied her outright? I longed to protect my mother from whatever pranks and fits those kids had been capable of, but of course I was too late, and so it was a relief when my thoughts returned to the present. At least in the here and now, I’d be able to see for myself if she was happy or sad, proud or harried. My mind was also eased by the fact that her students this time around were grown-ups. A grown-up would never misbehave the way a kid would.
    I tried to imagine my mother standing at the head of a classroom on her first day, writing her name— Mrs. Smith —on the blackboard as a way of saying, Let’s begin , to the roomful of new faces. I envisioned her walking up and down the aisles of desks, making sure that each head was properly bowed over the task athand. Of course she was a lovely teacher, gentle, kind, and playful just beneath the surface. I never knew exactly how to imagine her adult students then, those men and women hungry for reading and math, eager to grow and to change. I see them now as nervous but trying to seem merely hardened. I see them as men and women who were poor, wanting to stand up finally to their own past resignations and defeats, to get out from under the fact that they’d never been taught to claim a genuine space for themselves or envision a big enough goal. I can see them now in a way I couldn’t then, and still I wonder how they saw her. Did she put them off, the way she’d put that woman named Maggie off, as impossibly upright? Or was there someone in whom she inspired devotion, someone for whom the sound of her voice or the smell of her perfume was all it took to make a problem go away?
    Working gave my mom new stories to tell. She said that when her students didn’t want to do the assignment, they leaned back in their seats, sucked their teeth, and said, “Mrs. Smith, I ain’t stud’n you.” During a mock job interview, a student named Ray had prefaced his response to the question “Tell me a little bit about yourself” by saying, “Well, I was recently locked up for a few years.” Mom would come home grinning about one of her students almost every night. Some of them sounded like children in adult bodies. But there was tenderness in her voice when she talked about them, too. I suspect she knew that her job at its most fundamental was really about mothering those people whose place in life was tenuous, people like Ray, who had started to believe the voices telling them that they were no more than the sum of their failings. That’s not the most important thing about you, Ray , I could imagine Mom saying, once the laughter in the classroom had died down.
    In the afternoons when Mom was teaching, I was fetched fromschool by a spry white lady named Mrs. Kureitza, who pulled up in an old blue Cadillac and drove me to her shipshape trailer in a retirement “village” in the middle of town. I wasn’t sure where my mother had found Mrs. Kureitza. Maybe she bought her Mary Kay products from the same lady my mom used. That would have made sense, judging from the way Mrs. Kureitza was so tucked in and teased, with an alert expression that had partly been penciled in. She was skinny and wore close-fitting double-knit pants. She’d give me a plate of saltines spread with peanut butter, or a bowl of Jell-O, and I’d breeze through my homework at the coffee table in her living room. At the same hour every day, she and I would walk to her son’s house so she could make his bed and put a chocolate mint on his pillow while he was at his job. Once or twice, she was dropped in on by one of her boyfriends, old men who visited for just a few minutes at a time, never staying, wearing shirtsleeves or cardigans and calling her Louise.
    When Mom took the adult school students on field trips, she was reminded of their