1. Monday Morning

Monday morning for Marina felt like it used to feel to go to school as a little girl. She worked in a school, a marginal school for those real school had failed, but still a school. But the feeling was older, a repetition of her childhood Monday terror. Walking along the high wall of the police headquarters, down the Chinatown alley, she felt like a marble in a toy maze. She kept going, one foot in front of the other, and arrived out of body at the school. She took a deep breath, noticed her nausea, climbed the steps into Centro Libre, an old defunded and abandoned settlement house building that had been taken over by community groups. She nodded to the burly Latino man who had the morning front desk shift. Virgilio wore brown clothes that made him look like City Force and mimicked an image he had of a City Force security guard, grim and tough although he was supposed to be a welcoming greeter.
“City force beat you up one time too many,” she said. “You didn't have to turn into one.” He laughed. “Let's start over. Morning Virgilio.” He nodded, “I see you didn’t have time to iron your blouse today.” True. But it was a crushed brown silk she’d bought at the thrift shop last weekend and supposed to look that way. “Yeah, Virge. That’s because I have no wife at home to press my shirts.” Neither of them was ever completely sure if the other one was joking. Her words had an edge. She caught an image of her esophagus as a long stick of dynamite, waiting at all times to detonate.
Only Lula was in the classroom sitting at one of the round student tables, her usual table close to the door, and facing the bay window that faced an airshaft, and the avocado tree on a table beside it, planted by the class leader, Claraberta. Lula bent her head low, eyes close to the printout of the story the class and Marina wrote last week. Lula looked up. She'd had her hair straightened and shaped for church. Her big eyes lit up for a second and her full lips formed the smallest smile before she looked back down at the words. She wore her older Sunday dresses to school. This one was lavender taffeta with pleats in the top. She made the dresses herself. She looked sadder than Marina felt. Marina sat beside her. “How’s it going?” Lula raised her gaze. What was it about those eyes with their big brown pupils? What was behind them that Lula couldn’t talk about? What had they seen that they struggled so hard to make sense of print?
“What’s this?” Lula pointed to the large letters. Lula had no visual memory for words, or letters. “That’s your part of the story. Do you remember what you talked about?” Lula nodded. “I talked about when my father kicked my dog because I’d let the little pooch into my bed.” Lula smoothed the paper. She pointed to a word.“That word’s dog.” Marina squeezed Lula’s shoulder. “You got it!.” Lula’s shoulder tightened under Marina’s touch. She’d heard the door, the clicking heels, the scraping chairs. Now her moment with Marina was over. Marina knew Lula came in early just for these moments alone together. She’d survived her kicked dog, and kicked girl, childhood by going quiet. Marina wondered if she was quiet even in her Baptist church. When Alta, Gracia, and Claraberta showed up Lula gave up all the space and went far inside behind her eyes.
“Hola ticher,” Claraberta leaned down and kissed Marina on the cheeks. Gracia wiped the red lips off Marina's cheek with a tissue. “I did it,” Claraberta said. “ I read stories with my girls. When I got stuck on the words they helped me.”
Women arrived and found their ways to their habitual chairs. Later Marina would shake up the groups but for the first part of the morning, especially on Mondays, she let them ease into the day. Women sat in small groups going through their work folders, reading typed transcripts of their stories, writing words into their personal dictionaries, chatting and laughing loud at in jokes, drinking the café con leche Claraberta made as soon as she came in. Lula sat alone at her table until Ginny marched in clanking her boots and slamming her book bag on the floor.
Marina let the wave of nausea rise up into her throat. She tasted bile and remembered she’d forgotten to have breakfast. Neither she nor Machi were able to swallow any food on school mornings. But the terror now wasn't the chronic terror. It was terror of Ginny. Ginny was pissed. After adoring Marina, taking Marina to her home in the projects one afternoon to braid her hair (after she offered to do it as many times as Marina complimented her braids), she had become Marina’s enemy. Claraberta stayed late after class last Friday just to let Marina know Ginny was agitating the students against her, telling them that Marina was dirty, a sexual pervert.
And what had she been thinking when she’d included in the group story last week, the one Lula was struggling to read, the strand that Ginny herself had spoken? They were decoding two photographs, one of a woman, African heritage, tall, dressed for business in a suit; one of a gray haired black man in a robe. By reading the images they were reading their own minds, is how Marina explained the process to them. “As you read your minds and I scribe, and later you scribe, we create texts. You unlock the codes of print by harnessing your ability to read the world, to read visual codes, to construct oral texts, to create written texts.”
Ginny had told the story of her pastor who had gotten too friendly with a little girl in the church. Marina had just asked: Does Maryanne (they’d named the woman in the suit Maryanne) have children? Ginny had launched into the tale of Maryanne’s little girl who was around 11 and pretty and happy and whom the gray haired man (they’d decided he was a pastor) put on his lap, and bounced and touched.
What had Marina been thinking when she wrote Ginny’s words on the board? “Pastor Givens married SueEllen before she was 15.” She’d been distracted, obsessing about Machi who was fighting in school, about Ori’s new girlfriend Machi thought was about to move in, but truthfully, mainly obsessing about Hal who hadn’t called in a week. To the extent she thought at all, she thought the theme was charged and that made it more likely that the mysterious divide between story and print would be bridged.
So she had written it and Ginny had taken the typed text home and someone, her grandmother Claraberta said, read it and was horrified and took it to her own pastor who had said what was going on in the class must be devil’s work and wanted to know exactly what hellish sinning was going on in the class. Ginny, Claraberta told her, had been trying to lineup enemies against her, to get the other students to sign a petition to get her removed as teacher, and trying to get the other students to agree to go meet with Harold, Centro Libre's coordinator, to get the All Read program for women thrown out. So far it was breaking down along Latina, African heritage lines. And good thing, Claraberta said, that nobody liked or trusted Ginny who had gotten into fights with almost everyone, or the campaign would have prospered. As it was, there were few signatures on the petition.
These were literacy acts. What in the fuck was she to do? She’d better take it on in class.