*from the archive and oh maybe the early 2000s? who knows at this point, but, in increments I will share and, knock wood, you will enjoy, this old-ish story. Mildred Jensen was an actual math teacher I had in middle school, she was tall and leggy, but everything else is entirely fictional here. I really liked her, a lot, even if – at the end of her career when I had her as an instructor – she was showing not only her age but the age of some of her ideas (boys are better at measuring things, for one).
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Mildred spent her early long summer vacations back at her family’s farm; she loved having something useful to do. She also spent time furthering her studies, getting her Masters finished not long past her twenty-seventh birthday. She could have visited some of her old college classmates or newly wed colleagues, yet felt uncomfortable in the kitchens of her married friends, holding babies for a moment or two, or feeling her hands hang uselessly by her side. The farm was easier, familiar; they always needed help. Her parents were getting older, getting on, and her baby brother was a baby no more, had taken – right out of high school – a wife, a nice girl from a farming family several towns over he’d met at the county fair, showing cows. Mildred enjoyed her new sister-in-laws company, for although the girl – woman – was not nearly as bright as Mildred was herself, her cares were cares Mildred understood, the cares of a farmer’s wife.
Mildred admitted to her family that she missed them, missed the pace and closeness of the farm; working and living in a village was different, and good, but she missed the animals, too, their silent sweetness, their slow paced calm. She wondered, too, if she would ever be able to afford, on her own, a house, a place where she could plant flowers – iris, daffodils, peonies, roses, and have a kitchen garden, too, like the one her parents had at home. Her brother was a sweet, hard-working young man, very much in love with his sweet, silly bride. They were expecting already and made much of telling this to Mildred, the future aunt and dedicated career woman. She was glad for them, glad for her parents, who longed for grandchildren to fill the empty bedrooms of their missing sons.
Entering her forth decade, Mildred had to admit to herself that she yearned for something more. Her students needed her, no question, and there were those among them she really enjoyed, farm kids, especially, the boys and girls who came into town in hand-me-downs that reminded her of the shirts and dresses she used to wear herself. She knew the families now, chatted with former students and parents while chaperoning basketball games, class hops, and the senior play. She had by this time taught whole family groups of several siblings and cousins, branches of a single clan; the knowledge gained through this kind of contact over the years was good, and deeply rewarding in its own way. She was respected in the community for her combination of good sense and steel, her humor, high standards and warm heart; her students did well and several were recognized in state testing as showing ‘superior skills in math’.
At thirty-four Mildred met a young farmer and thought nothing of it; she was standing in her classroom late one early fall day; the school was having an open house for the parents and community. He was slim and shy, the much older brother of a student, one of those kids to whom she had taken such a shine. He admitted to her he’d never done well in school, felt tied to his desk against his will while he itched to get away. They laughed together over this; he’d had dropped out of school and was, it seemed to her, embarrassed by this, admitting that he was a stranger to her because of this ‘early exit’. He’d gone to serve overseas, in Europe, felt lucky to have lived through it all. He thanked her for her kindness to his brother, the ‘smart one’ in his family, the one he hoped might go on to college, as he had not. He had hopes for the boy, the youngest of the bunch, as he showed such aptitude for machinery, for building things, for fixing things though yes, he said ‘they’d miss him terribly on the farm.’ He lingered for a while, disconcerting Mildred, as he had so little to say, but his brother was in the building somewhere, sure to come and take this fellow off and away; perhaps he was showing their father, a widower, the new science labs. “Perhaps,’ his brother said, still leaning against her desk. She walked to the door and pointed the way, standing in the gleaming marble hallway, plucking at her sweater nervously with her left hand, wondering what he was hanging around for, the gangly fool.
After that it seemed Mildred kept running into this young man in town and that he always wanted to chat; the school secretary, a long time local, told her that he was twenty-six, younger than her kid brother, Mildred thought. She saw him at the grocer, the post office, and in the school, where he’d taken to stopping by for a chat, bringing her vegetables, taking his bother home by truck, sparing him a long bumpy ride on the bus. He was a quiet man by the name of Bill Gray; his family, he told her, had farmed in the valley to the north east of town for three generations; he was the fourth.
It took a married friend, one of those girls Mildred had tried gin and cigarettes with, now a full time mom who liked to reminisce about the good old days of her carefree single years, to point out that the young man was interested in Mildred, ‘In’, she whispered in her ear with relish ‘a romantic way’. The woman laughed to see the stunned look on Mildred’s face, adding ‘Oh well, I wouldn’t let it worry me if I were you. Tom says he’s not the marrying type.’ Here she took a drag on yet another cigarette, the end stained red with her lipstick, ‘He was in Tom’s brother’s class, and has always been a little scared of women, so Tom says, and Tom usually knows. Tom’s terribly clever about people, you know.’ Mildred didn’t know, and she also didn’t know if she were more horrified by the thought that Bill Gray might be interested in her romantically (and what that might mean for her), or by the way in which her once lively friend kept quoting her husband of seven years. Is that what happened to intelligent women when they married? Surely she would never know, herself, personally, first hand. But back to what she should do about this Bill Gray, if in fact he were interested? But he can’t be, she thought. She was at least four, almost five years his senior! Mildred put it out of her mind, no use making a fuss about stuff and nonsense, as Grandma Jensen used to say. And it was just not possible. Unlikely. Improbable. Tom would know, and at this last thought before she closed her eyes to sleep, she snorted softly with laughter into her pillow.
Bill Gray was interested, inviting Mildred to his family farm for Easter supper; one fine spring day, hat in hand, he’d shown up once again at the door of her classroom, holding a bunch of lemony daffodils wrapped at one end in a damp cloth and gripped tight, almost as if his life depended on it, by his large, work-roughened hands. Looking at him Mildred found she was unable to say no, taken aback by the invitation and his halting words, the hopeful stance, the nervousness of him, the vulnerability. And so she said, simply, ‘Yes’. He would call for her at three, he said, smiling slightly while sidling out her classroom door, and with his father’s car, not the truck with which he believed she was familiar. And then he was gone. What just happened, Mildred thought? What was that? Am I familiar with his truck? Had he seen her, looking out her classroom window, as she and his brother drove away. She blushed to think it could be so. Had she really said yes/ And did he know, how could he know, where she lived?