Content area
Full Text
1.
She would long remember: she'd taken no notice of him at first. Kethy, Arno C. One of thirty-two names on the computer printout. After the name was an asterisk and at the bottom of the page the asterisk was decoded: Special Student, Night Division. But most of the students enrolled in Composition 101 were in the Night Division of the university. They were all adults; some were conspicuously older than their twenty-seven-year-old instructor E. Schegloff who was a petite, smiling, tense woman looking much younger than her age. Her voice was husky and tremulous. "I realize that my name-Schegloff-" she pronounced it slowly, as a spondee, "-is difficult to pronounce and yet more difficult to spell, but please try. Any reasonable approximation will do." Was this meant to be humor? A few of the more alert, sociable students in the class laughed appreciatively while the rest sat staring at her.
Erma Schegloff would wonder afterward, with a stab of chagrin, if Kethy, Arno C. had been one of those staring at her in silence.
I am not what I appear to be! I am so much more.
To be a young woman of hardly more than five feet in height, weighing less than one hundred pounds, is a disadvantage like disfigurement. Erma Schegloff s size had always seemed to her a rebuke to her ambitions and pretensions. Hadn't her parents reproached her years ago when she'd told them she hoped to teach? You! You're not strong enough! Too shy! Used to stammer! She wore leather boots with a medium heel to give her a little height and a little authority. Temporary height and spurious authority, but wasn't that often the case, in civilization? Her face was a striking, sculpted face like a cameo; plain and fierce as that likeness of Emily Dickinson, waif-woman with a secret, implacable will. Erma parted her fine dark wavy hair severely in the center of her head, Dickinson-style, and brushed it back and plaited it into a single thick bristling braid like a pony's mane thumping between her delicate shoulder blades. Her eyes were large and intelligent and inclined, when she was excited or nervous, to mist over. In the early morning, walking in the cold to the university...