The Fermata Read Online Free PDF Page A

down a stick every fortnight, so full were her lips. She also had one of those wide soft tongues that just naturally like to rest a little way out of the doorstep of the mouth, beyond the teeth. (Not that it lolled!) She always smiled with her mouth open. She wore long, droopy, soft-looking navy-blue cardigan sweaters over sleeveless dresses. I listened to her with great attention as she described the system of locks on a nineteenth-century canal and the Indian technique of manufacturing a dugout canoe. In sharp contrast to Mrs. Blakey, my talented and demanding third-grade teacher, whose loose arm-flesh flapped around in chaotic rhythms as she wrote on the board, Miss Dobzhansky’s chalkboard arm was revealed to be fine and firm, gracefully fitted at the shoulder with a flame-shaped muscle, when in the afternoons she removed her sweater and draped it over the back of her chair.
    I didn’t feel lust for her, really. In fact, that word,
lust
, is too abstract and intransitive and preacherly to apply even now to my feelings for Miss Dobzhansky or any other woman. I never “lust for” or “after” a woman. I want to do specific things: have dinner with, make smile, hold hips of. I didn’t even, inthe beginning, imagine that I wanted to see Miss Dobzhansky in a state of undress. What first made me want to stop time was that after Christmas break she changed the original seating arrangement of the class. I had been in front and now I was all the way in the back. A kid who wrote words backward sat at my old desk. I understood her reasons, but still I was a little hurt. And I noticed then that I couldn’t see the chalkboard as well as I had.
    It was not a question of my being unable to read the words or decipher the figures. It was merely that I could no longer tell at a glance, as I had been able to in my former seat, whether Miss Dobzhansky was using a piece of newly broken chalk with a sharp edge that sometimes briefly left a faint second parallel line, or whether she was holding a more rounded piece that she had used before. I wanted to know exactly what was going on on the surface of the chalkboard—I felt I was missing out on the physical reality of her writing, as opposed to what it meant. When I was in front, I had been able to monitor the chalky ghost of a word she had several times erased; now that was almost always impossible. Two other kids had already gotten glasses, and I knew that glasses would help me a little, but what I really wanted to do was to stop the whole class, the whole school, the whole school district, for a few minutes whenever I needed to walk up to the board and inspect its surface at very close range.
    My big Christmas present that year was a figure-eight race-track and one blue and one brown race car that drove around it and occasionally flipped off. I played with it for a week or two. The problem with it was that there weren’t enough segments of track to make an asymmetrical race-course, and I strongly preferred asymmetry in race-courses. Soon the track got dusty and the cars began to halt suddenly when theirbushings lost contact. I pushed it under my bed and thought instead about meat thermometers and toads who can hibernate for years in dried desert mud.
    But after Miss Dobzhansky had moved me to the back of the class, I woke up in the middle of the night and let my arm drop to the floor between the bed and the wall. I was in the habit of doing this fairly often; I did it to prove to myself how nonchalant I was, how certain I was that there were no crustaceans under the bed. This time, though, my hand brushed against something warm. It was the transformer for the race-track. It was still plugged in, still on, still transforming. I got out of bed and pulled the track out. The transformer had, a red faceted light that glowed faintly. It also had a chrome toggle switch. I turned on the light in my room, so that I could see better, and held the transformer. It was very heavy, with rounded