GLASS SOUP, Jonathan Carroll [important of reading books .txt] 📗

had already asked that question one minute ago. Was she crazy? Was all that beauty wasted because she had scrambled eggs for brains? Or maybe she just hadn’t heard his initial response. Was that possible? Maybe she’d been distracted or thinking about something else when he had specifically said—

He stared at her, not really knowing what to say now. And as he stared, something dawned on him. He knew this woman. We rarely forget great beauty but sometimes it does happen. He ignored her question now because something in him kept saying I know her face. But where did he know it from?

The bus suddenly jolted to an abrupt stop, knocking Haden way off balance. He turned to see what had made the driver slam on the brakes like that. Through the front windshield he saw a school class of young kids being shepherded across the street by a middle-aged black woman wearing a vibrantly colored dashiki and an Afro haircut that made her head look like a round, carefully trimmed hedge. When all of the kids had crossed the street and were safely on the other side, the woman raised a hand and wriggled her fingers in thanks to the bus driver for stopping. At first Haden didn’t recognize the woman, her Afro hairdo or dashiki; it was her wriggle. He knew that wriggle. He had lived with it for almost a year at one time in his life. Seconds later he was absolutely sure of her. He knew the wriggle, knew the gesture, and now he knew the woman who made it.

Whipping his head around, he looked at the beautiful blind woman. He knew her too. What the hell was going on here? Why was the world too familiar to him all of a sudden?

Back a few rows in the bus, Donald Duck looked across the aisle at the cassowary and slowly raised an eyebrow. The cassowary saw it and shrugged.

“Mrs. Dugdale!” Her name fell on top of Haden’s head like a brick dropped from the roof. “She was my teacher!”

The octopus bus driver looked at him. “Who was?”

Haden pointed excitedly through the windshield in the direction of where the children had just gone. “Her—the black woman who just passed with all those kids. That was my teacher in third grade!”

The driver looked in the rearview mirror a moment at the passengers. At least half of them had slid forward in their seats expectantly, as if waiting for something important to happen.

The driver feigned indifference. “Yeah? She was your teacher. So what? Too late for me to run over her now.”

“Let me out. I’ve got to talk to her.”

“You can’t leave now, Simon. We just started a tour.”

“Open the door, I gotta get out. Open the door!”

“They’ll fire you, man. If you walk out like this on a tour, you’re history. Don’t do it.”

“Fleam, we’re not having a discussion here, okay? just open the damned door.” Haden was a big man with impressive muscles. Fleam Sule was only an octopus and wasn’t about to argue. However he couldn’t resist flinging a last warning at the other’s back as Haden walked down the steps to the street: “You’re in trouble now, Simon. As soon as I tell them about this back at the office, they’re going to fire your ass.”

Haden wasn’t listening. He didn’t even hear the door hiss shut behind him or the bus pull away from the crosswalk. He certainly did not see all of the passengers flock to one side of the bus to see what he was going to do next. Even the beautiful blind woman was there; her cheek pressed to the cold glass, listening intently as someone described to her what Simon Haden was doing at that very moment.

He hurried after Mrs. Dugdale and the children. It was amazing that he had abandoned the tour and even more, his chances with the gorgeous blind woman. But the moment he realized who was leading those kids across the street, Haden knew he had to talk to her.

Because her third grade class had been so important to him?

Hell no.

If he’d been forced on pain of death to remember one nice thing about that year in Mrs. Dugdale’s class, all that he would have been able to come up with was she kept a goldfish in a large round bowl on her desk that was soothing to look at.

Then was it because Mrs. Dugdale herself was one of those memorable teachers who by example change our lives forever?

Nope.

The woman yelled at students or threw chalk at them whenever she felt their attention was wandering, which in her class was most of the time. Her idea of teaching was assigning individual oral reports on what was grown in Surinam. If you were bad (and most everything was bad to Mrs. Dugdale), she made you stand interminably in a corner against what she called “the Wall of Shame.” In other words, she was like too many teachers you had in elementary school. Haden had endured her moods and mediocrity and morsels of knowledge for a year and then he moved up to fourth grade.

But there was one thing about her that he had never forgotten and it was why he was running after her now. In fact this one thing had played a significant role in forming him. It was one of those rare childhood moments that we can look back to and say without hesitation right there—that X marks the spot where something in me was changed forever.

When he was a boy, Haden had one great friend who happened to have the unfortunate name Clifford Snatzke. But Cliff was so utterly typical that he blended into life with only that unusual name to distinguish him from X zillion other boys. For a while, until girls eventually became both visible and scrumptious, the two boys were inseparable. In Mrs. Dugdale’s class they sat next to each other which made the time with her slightly more pleasant.

Right before