Jane Otto

The author’s teacher, Annette Harvey, was a dead ringer for Petula Clark, above.

Word Count 898

Most of the teachers in our high school were as dilapidated as the creaking floors of our classrooms. One day, an American History teacher appeared, wearing a mini-skirt as short as mine. We were lucky to have Annette Harvey for Home Room, which meant that we were in the company of a dead ringer for Petula Clark for an extra hour.

Although she wouldn’t divulge her age, I quickly sussed out that hers was a body like mine, a new continent, begging to be discovered. My braces were off, pony-tail swapped for a cropped Mia Farrow cut, charcoal lining my eyelids. Everything about her was a tutorial for the bait and tackle of desire. Dangly earrings danced below her tousled coif as she referred to Thomas Jefferson as “TJ” . . Even her handwriting was sensual, rendered in calligraphic strokes that took their time at the blackboard. Her legs were endless columns of smoothness, her arms taut and breasts pert beneath a baby doll dress. When in front of the classroom, she taught not from behind her desk but sitting on top of it; one leg crossed over the other, begging speculation.

By Homecoming, our questions had become bolder. The quarterback asked whether there’d been a panty raid on Miss Harvey’s college campus. (She’d had to explain what that was for most of the girls.) When her crossed leg kicked a little faster in response to, “Have you ever gone all the way?” we knew we had the upper hand. (“I’ll never tell,” she sing-songed.) After that, Doug Morrelli christened her Miss Harlot. After Homecoming, Lisa Lindley, the head cheerleader and Homecoming queen, reported that the quarterback (her counterpart in the royal court) seemed less interested in her. She confided this tearfully in the girls’ bathroom, as she twisted his titanic class ring.

After that, we cruised Miss Harlot's rental on Main Street rather than going to the library, as we’d told our parents. Each night, we’d slow to the pace of a funeral procession, where we’d spot the quarterback’s red Mustang in Miss Harlot’s driveway, parked in front of her convertible, partially obscured by dormant, overgrown lilacs. Sometimes the Mustang, other times Doug’s mom’s paneled station wagon. There were others, which served as evidence for why the most desired boys in our school chucked the push-pull tango in the back seats of cars for a teacher. Meanwhile, my friends and I necked with a pillow or the fleshy crook of an elbow.

Toward the end of the first semester, the principal took to dropping into our classroom, taking a seat near one of our desks, or leaning against the heat registers by the blackboard, so that his lighthouse beam could sweep the room. We knew he was checking up on her, on us. There was far too much laughing in that classroom for any real learning to be going on. Miss Harlot rarely frequented the Faculty Lounge and during lunchroom detail, often ended up perched on a bench with us. When the principal swung by, she took to standing behind her desk to teach. For the rest of the year, there were no fishnet stockings, nor an abbreviated, flippant reference to the plantation-owning third President of the United States or his enslaved lover.

In January, when we returned from winter recess, Miss Harlot returned with a diamond ring so big, there was speculation that her left arm might end longer than her right. Following spring break, she informed us that she wouldn’t be returning to school next fall. Doug Morrelli, always a leader, took up a collection from our Home Room for a farewell gift. Everyone chipped in, but when we began to throw out ideas about what we should buy—I suggested a blender, a piece of her sterling silver pattern—Doug informed us that he would take care of the shopping.

On the last day of school, he arrived with a silver box bearing white satin ribbons from The Vogue, the only up-scale boutique in our town. Everyone watched, rapt—Open it! Open it!—as Miss Harlot untied the ribbon, removed the lid, parted opaque tissue paper pages, and lifted a whisper of silk—a negligee thin and iridescent as dragon-fly wings.

~

Sometime in the summer before my junior year—the same summer I’d sewn a two-piece bathing suit from a Simplicity pattern and lined the top with my mother’s old push-up bra—she came to me with an article circled in The Daily Sentinel. “Wasn’t this your teacher?”

Three sentences told the story of Annette Harvey, a former District 51 teacher in her twenties, who succumbed to death in a single-car collision as her convertible sped along De Beque Canyon on Interstate 70. Nothing was said of her gifts as a teacher. She taught us everything.

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Jane was raised in Colorado and grew up in New York City. She recently completed a memoir in verse entitled “At the Home for Wayward Girls.” Her poems, essays and short stories have appeared in Nimrod International Journal, PANK Magazine, The Journal, and New Southerner.