The Whale Belly

At the vaccination site where I volunteered, I was tasked with prefilling a card with the initials of the vaccine, the date, the site of the vaccination, and some other code that I never bothered to ask about but will never forget. I wrote this information over and over, perhaps a thousand times. And at some point it was automatic. I drifted off and would come to and not know where I went, nor what I had been doing, nor for how long. I checked back over the cards and they were all accurate, and all in my shitty handwriting.

My has always been pretty bad. I remember in the sixth grade I would lose points on spelling because all my lowercase G’s looked like S’s that were melting over the lines of the ruled paper like Dali clocks. And I remember this one time my sixth grade teacher made us take a spelling quiz and then grade each others papers. This wasn’t a normal thing, but she was trying something out, which I get, because that’s all I ever did when I taught kids. I tried things out and they never worked. Amy Tan was grading my quiz. Not that Amy Tan, but the Amy Tan I went to school with, who didn’t like me very much because I was fat and foolish, at least that’s the impression I got from the expression of disgust she cast every time she looked at me.

“If the paper you have has an error, raise your hand,” my teacher said.

The teacher, Mrs. Hibbits, said each number and its corresponding word, and then spelled it.

“Number four, ‘jagged,’ J-A-G-G…”

Amy Tan’s hand shot up and I looked over in surprise and saw her hand in a rigid Nazi salute high above her disgusted face. Mrs. Hibbits asked Amy Tan to read out how I spelled jagged, and she said “J-A-S-S-E-D.”

“Those are G’s!” I protested, but judging by Amy Tan’s face she was not convinced at all. She saw nothing out of order with a fat fool thinking S’s make G sounds. Mrs. Hibbits didn’t seem to think I was quite that illiterate, but she said that if they were supposed to be G’s then they would look like G’s. She was sick of sloppy penmanship, and this was her opportunity to drive the lesson home. Now that I think about it, I wonder if that words was thrown in for that very reason. Oh, Mrs. Hibbits!

I don’t know if I cried that time, but Mrs. Hibbits would make me cry several times that year, shocking moments that neither of us anticipated nor understood afterwards. I don’t remember any of the circumstances, but I do remember being alone with her in her classroom and wailing uncontrollably, and Mrs. Hibbits leaning away from me and saying “there’s no reason to be sobbing!” I also remember being utterly attracted to her because she wore thick red lipstick and almost all of her blouses had an empty circle cut out around her cleavage. It didn’t matter much to me that she was old and not in very good shape. I was roaring towards puberty and everything was sexy and devastating.

By high school mostly everything was on computers and I was saved from the public humiliation tied to my handwriting. But I always wished I had better penmanship, and just a few years ago, as I was entering into doctoral studies, I decided that I would learn to write in cursive. And I did, but it also looks mostly like shit.