Free A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer Page B

seen only pictures of him. We had to remake our life together.
    We moved to Perryville, about thirty miles from Atkins, where Larry got a job teaching physics in the high school. I was doing my practice teaching in the art department at Subiaco Catholic Boys’ Academy, fifty or sixty miles in the opposite direction over winding country roads, and it was just too tough a commute for me, so before we had time to even hang curtains, we moved back to Atkins, which was in the middle, and we each had a commute. I dropped the baby off with my mother—bless her sweet heart—in the morning and picked him up in the afternoon. Matthew had big serious brown eyes, and he was precocious at everything. He walked at ten months, and I took him off the bottle at a year, as he was eating and drinking from a cup. I was so harried I wanted to make things happen as fast and as easily as possible. Looking back, I’m sorry I did that. Babyhood goes by so quickly that I wish I had just taken the time and let him be a baby instead of pushing him to be a big boy.
    Being a working mother, I never got enough sleep. I remember rocking Matthew all night and crying, saying, “Please, Matthew, just go to sleep for an hour. Let me get just one hour’s rest before I have to go to work.” Sometimes we had to put him in the car in the middle of the night and drive him around so he would go to sleep. But while he wasn’t a great sleeper, he was a great eater. He could eat four eggs at a time if I would give them to him. Once, though, he was taking such a long time getting the eggs down that I lost patience and, late for school, started rushing him, cramming in the spoonfuls as he slowly and carefully chewed and swallowed. After he ate the whole plate of eggs, heleaned over and spat out three paper clips. I nearly fainted, thinking of how close I had come to choking him. I tried to have more patience after that.
    I finally lost the weight, my hair grew back, and life settled down a bit for us. After graduation, I got an art teaching job in Clarksville, which was about twenty miles from Atkins, and Larry decided he wanted to do something other than teach that brought in more money, so he got a job selling insurance, which put him on the road a lot.

    Baby Matthew and Larry.
    It was during this time, when I was all by myself, exhausted from lack of sleep and harried from working, taking care of the baby, and dealing with the minutiae of life, when a little voice whispered in my ear, telling me I had missed the parade.

Nine
    I n Clarksville, I was assigned to teach lower-school art in the morning, then a seventh-grade English class before lunch, and in the afternoons I drove to the high school, where I taught art. The only thing I enjoyed was the high school. English class was my least favorite. Seventh graders are at that curious age when they are still children but hormones are hijacking their bodies. Some of the boys had a crush on me, some saw me as the enemy; some of the girls were bored, some thought I was cool. Nobody had the foggiest idea what a noun or verb was, and none of them wanted to find out. I was also from time to time a surrogate mother to them. One girl was quietly crying during class, and when I asked her to stay after and talk to me, I learned she had kissed a boy, he had put his tongue into her mouth, and she was terrified she was pregnant. I gave her a quick lesson on how the body reproduces, and she was much relieved.
    I was only four or five years older than some of my high school students, and it was difficult to maintain the teacher-student relationship. I have former students who became lifelong friends whom I still see today, thirty-seven years later. For most of them, art was a blast, a break from “real” classes. I would do a demonstration of, say, printmaking and pass out the supplies, then they would start their own versions, with me walking around the room making suggestions when they needed it but never actually laying