I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl by Kelle Groom

Author:Kelle Groom
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2011-08-21T05:00:00+00:00

3.

I kept dropping out of school. Wouldn’t do the assignments, wouldn’t show up. When I was close to meeting the requirements for my bachelor’s degree, I just stopped going completely. Got 3 F’s. Grade point destroyed, figured I’d never go back. But the teacher from my first creative writing class, the one who had showed me the boy’s story, he’d visit me at the health food store. When I’d been twenty and drinking every day, late for classes, absent for weeks, he had been my only friend at school. I’d sit on the couch in his office with the naked female mannequin and wall-sized collage of models from magazines, and be calmed. He was fond of me like a troubled character in a novel, pulling for me. In the health food store, the owner would say, “You may be book smart, but you sure are stupid.” For years my teacher comes in, buys vitamins, says, “Come back to school.” So, I do.

In 1989, right before I graduate, another teacher tells me I’ve won a departmental award, for outstanding undergraduate poet. He’s smiling. I ask, “Are you sure?” There’s a ceremony. For the first time, I stand up in front of people and read a few poems. I have to rest my hands on the podium because they’re trembling. My voice shakes. But it doesn’t seem to matter—everyone quiet, listening.

I decide to go to graduate school even though, with work, I can take only a couple of classes at time. UCF accepts me into its new program in creative writing. A woman, Pamela, from one of my undergraduate writing classes, stops in at the health food store. She’s always in a rush, blond hair flying, fast talking. I know she works for UCF’s tutoring center and admire her for this, her good job. Once I’d worn a nicer dress to work at the store, and my coworker Lana said, “You could be a secretary in that.” I’d been a kind of secretary for the Weapons Department in Spain, but hadn’t applied for that job, just checked a box. Neither Lana nor I knew how to find work as a secretary, how to get a sit-down job. At the UCF tutoring center, there’s a woman whose job is parallel in responsibility to Pamela’s. “She hired an assistant,” Pamela says, scanning the vitamin shelves. “I don’t have an assistant.” It’s 1990. I know a door is opening. But I have to try, I have to speak. “I’d love to tutor,” I say. It happens so fast. “Well, if Kathy can hire someone, so can I,” Pamela says.

After that, I work at the health food store only on the weekends. At the center, I provide tutoring in writing to Pamela’s ESOL students. It’s more money, $6 an hour, and everyone in the office is kind. It’s an atmosphere of helpfulness. I love working with one person at a time, the pace of it. It’s such a relief to have a skill, to know what to do.

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