Miss Tina

As soon as she opens her eyes, she knows it’s going to be a good day.

                It’s not always like this.

                Some days, she wakes to a medication fog she’ll never really wake from all day. Some days she wakes after never really having slept at all. Her doctor gave her a new drug recently. It’s supposed to help with pain but it keeps her awake at night, sends spasms of movement through her arms and legs till she has to get out of bed. “It’s like a seizure or something,” she says, with that half-shrug—“like a seizure” isn’t exactly new to her. She’s matter-of-fact, discussing all this. “Like a seizure” isn’t the worst thing.

                But today isn’t one of those days. Today the stairs are stairs, not Mount Everest, and that’s good, because she’s got plans. The 4H club she runs at City View Charter school is going to meet today—they’ll build greenhouses out of plastic bottles, create art from found objects, learn respect for the world and for each other. “Did I tell you about Mr. Ryan?” she says, and then she does. “I met him in the hallway yesterday…” Mr. Ryan, it turns out, isn’t one of the teachers—he’s a kid who thinks he’s the only person in the world. “But I ran into him yesterday and he said, ‘Good morning, Miss Tina, how are you?’ It was a miracle. He actually acknowledged another human being.” She laughs. “I’ve only been hitting him over the head for a year…” She says it’s a little thing. No one’s going to notice that this third-grader has finally learned to ask “How are you?” But in her eyes, there’s also a hint of pride.  

                So today she won’t think about the diagnosis, the nerve disorder called fibromyalgia that’s going to be with her the rest of her life, that weighs her down some days like a ton of bricks or maybe just her body exploding. To the 4H kids she’s loud, fun, crazy Miss Tina, as generous with praise as she is quick to flare up, to shout across the playground, “Hands off each other, now. I said NOW.” To the regulars at the Goodwill bins, her next destination, she’s the woman who buys shoes for resale and always has time to tell a quick story or listen to someone else’s. She’s a footwear expert, a creative mind, a mentor for kids, a writer. She goes until she crashes. When she crashes, she buys fast-food and spends the whole day in front of the TV, or she doesn’t get out of bed at all. Some days, she doesn’t know where it’s all going.

                “I’m all over the place,” she says. She’s standing in her basement room, overflowing with art supplies, shoes for resale, dirty dishes and stale food that have been down there for weeks. Half-finished projects cover every surface, interspersed with knickknacks—“It just looked so cool!”—that she’s picked up at the Bins.

 “What I fear most is that people will think I’m ridiculous.” She half-shrugs again. “Am I?”

Let's Talk About Dance--Or Not

They’re in the dance studio, talking about tongue piercings.

            Ethan says, “Mine fell out.”

            “Oh my god! That’s what I’m always afraid of.” Tasha pauses to tie up her hair into a ballerina bun. “Did you swallow it? I always feel like I’m going to swallow it. It’s like you have this little piece of candy stuck to your tongue all the time. Or like when you’re swallowing pills—Tylenol—you feel it in your mouth and you’re like, oh my god, I just swallowed it.”

            Ethan’s putting on his ballet shoes. He dumps his sweatshirt on the pile of backpacks, shoes and other belongings on the carpet next to the dance floor. “Yeah,” he says, and sticks out his tongue for inspection.

            “There’s no hole. You just let it close up?”

            “You can see it. I can see it. You have to know where to look. The back like fell off so I couldn’t put it back in.”

            Annabelle’s sitting on the floor, tying her slippers. “Why would you even do that?”

            Ethan shrugs. The mirrors behind him reflect his gesture: expansive, grandiose. “I can’t believe it fell out. Like, I got it a couple months ago.”

            “Did it hurt?”

            “I was sore for, like, days. It sucks. You can’t eat anything. Can’t eat shit.” Ethan hops across the dance floor to lean on one of the barres. “And oh my god the itch!” He writhes, hands to his mouth, makes a face like he’s coughing up something awful. “And you can’t get in there…”

            “My tongue swelled up. It was disgusting,” Tasha says. She’s at the other barre now, stretching. “And it gets all tingly, like numb or something. Like tattoos?” She has tattoos. Her pink ballet slippers half-cover up the writing on her feet.

            “I’m gonna get another,” Ethan says. He lines his feet up parallel, puts his hands on the barre, gets ready for the first dance of the day.  

Talking to a Future Professor at a Utah Dinner Table

            The woman sat down next to me at the round banquet table, tucking her skirt under her and placing her punch glass on the table as she sat. She wore her dyed-blond hair gathered up at the base of her neck. Round dark earrings glinted in her ears. She wore a dressy white blouse, nice without calling attention to itself. Her lipsticked mouth looked a little hard, till she smiled.

            “I’m Rose,” I told her.

            “I’m Harmony,” she said, and held out her hand.

            She settled herself at the table. It was the opening night of the National Undergraduate Literature conference at Weber State in Utah, a banquet featuring readings by a one-time Poet Laureate. Harmony didn’t see nervous though. She sipped from her punch, surveyed the room, listened to the conversation of the three girls sitting across the table. She listened.

            Harmony’s in her thirties, older than most of the students in the room, though certainly not the oldest. She started her undergraduate degree ten years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, but the campus was too big and she became a number there, not a student. She left college and got married instead. Now she has three kids. Her face changes when she talks about them, a smile lingering at the corners of her mouth as she lists their ages and names. The smile stays when she mentions her husband.

            She is a fiction writer. She plans to be a professor. She already has the confidence, the poise. She still has another year to go before she graduates, she says, but she’s already started looking into grad school. She wants a school where she can get both her Masters and her PhD. She doesn’t want to move the family more than she has to.

            “They’ll go with you, wherever you get in?” I ask.

            Her husband will relocate to wherever she needs to go, she says. The kids haven’t quite put it together. “They know I’m looking at different schools, and they know these schools in different states. Right now, though, I commute to school from home. I don’t think they’ve realized I won’t be able to do that if school is across the country.”

            A long-term program, then, it had better be.