Free A Terrible Beauty: What Teachers Know but Seldom Tell outside the Staff Room by Dave St.John Page A

her mother,
cheeks hot with anger, would beat on the wall with her spoon,
dressing the energetic lovers down in words Solange heard in the
markets, but never at home, and certainly not from her mother’s
mouth. Her laugh of delight silenced by her mother’s hard look, she
went back to her book.
    At meals, four brothers, all older, crowded into the
small room, moving in chairs from the hall. Towering over her, they
gave her a pet or a pinch—she was the baby and they tolerated her.
To Solange they were strangers, busy with lives of which she
understood nothing.
    Much better were the quiet afternoons in Mae’s steamy
kitchen.
    Now, like black beans scattered across the table from
hastily ladled feijoada, they were cast wide across the world. One
here, one there, each busy with families of their own, children of
their own, some of which Solange had seen only in pictures sent in
Christmas cards.
    Mae, they left to Solange. After all, who better than
the youngest daughter? Who better than she? Who better than one
with no family of her own to take care of Mama? Solange smiled
bitterly into the dark.
    Let them go, all of them. She would never ask them
for a cent.
    She would show them what the baby could do. Now, like
in the old days, it was just Solange and Mae. The flesh of her
mother’s meaty arms wasted away to sagging wrinkles, back humped,
now, her eyes were as sharp as ever, perhaps sharper.
    A vague thought tickled at the back of her mind—what
was it? What was she forgetting? Though she strained to remember,
nothing came. She would have to drive home and see her this week.
Take her bags of pigs feet, linguica, tea and the cheap orange
jelly candies she loved so.
    Though Solange paid the bills, her mother refused to
take any money, so whenever she visited the little trailer on its
weedy acre, she would sneak a few tens into the pickle jar on the
shelf by the sink as she rinsed the dishes. When Solange suggested
she get her an apartment in town, her mother set her lip
stubbornly, dark moustache bristling.
    Unconsciously, Solange’s fingers felt at her upper
lip in the dark.
    Reassured by the silkiness she felt there, her hand
slipped back under the covers. Mae wanted only her chickens, her
garden with its peppers and tomatoes, and the skinny mongrel,
Pepino.
    Ah, Mae— if only life t were as simple now as it was
in your kitchen.
    Exhausted, aching for sleep, she willed her mind be
still.
    It refused.
    • • •
    Patti O’Connel brought her Volvo wagon down the on
ramp onto 1-5 just as the sixty-foot tractor trailer swept by in
the fast lane, rocking the car in its wash. Accelerating into the
flow of cars on the rainy highway, she watched as the speedometer
passed seventy, then eighty. She was late—doubly so, having called
to postpone her presentation once already. She would play hell
making even the later one, now. She glanced at the sleeping two
year old strapped in the car seat beside her and reached over to
brush a strand of hair from her perfect face. Smiling to herself—
she glanced over her left shoulder and, giving the signal time to
blink only twice, moved into the fast lane.
    Topping eighty-five, she came up close behind the
eighteen wheeler, mirror-polished stainless double doors reflecting
a fun-house view of her car, lights on bright, white lines flashing
by.
    The truck’s black lift gate, a 480 pound, eight by
six foot sheet of three-eighths diamond plate, hung on one hinge
pin, buffeted by the wind, a single quarter-inch retaining chain
the only thing keeping it upright. The day before a fire safe had
tipped off its pallet onto the ramp, shearing off one of the
inch-thick pins and putting a stress crack most of the way through
the other.
    Patti looked down at the dashboard clock and pressed
the accelerator. Why wouldn’t he move? Dear God, don’t let her be
late, not after all she’d done to get them to listen. If she could
just get past this guy, she could drop Nikki at her sitter and just
about