My Chemistry Teacher

In her sixties, of Swedish descent, robustly built and amply breasted, the girth of her thighs bulging under her white lab frock like a Henry Moore sculpture, her feet secured in high laced black shoes with brutish square heels – the kind women wore in an earlier age. Threads of blond hair still visible throughout her gray hair loosely pulled back and coiled in a lazy soft bun stabbed with a few pencils for easy reach. Gold-rimmed oval glasses framed her pale blue eyes that never stopped blinking like a faulty neon light. And when she spoke or gave a talk as she did that morning, a nervous tic appeared to a side of her mouth. Yet nothing could have prepared the class that morning when, giving a short talk explaining stalagmite formations in a famous Kentucky cavern, she stopped abruptly to relate an anecdote and with a perfectly straight face informed the class that during the Civil War confederate soldiers, for relief and recreation, would used the cavern – in her words – God strike me dead – “to hold their balls there.” – What she meant, of course, were “soirées” not soldiers’ testicles. The effect on the class was like a lit match thrown into pure oxygen, the class exploding into pandemonium of uncontrolled laughter, the poor woman instantly realizing her wrong choice of words and frantically pleading for calm in the ensuing mayhem, her face pulsing like a dwarf red star near to exploding, her eyelashes fluttering wildly like two moths trapped behind her glasses.