First in a series
When I was 12 going on 13, and newly in the sixth grade at Delta Middle School, I had an English teacher by the name of Eileen Wilcox. She had the distinction of teaching Honors English (did we call it Challenge English?), and was one of those irrationally exuberant people who stick out like Roman candles in the non-explosive Midwest. Unmarried (odd enough for a teacher in that area), she insisted on being called “Miss Wilcox;” had her hair teased out several inches from her head; and enjoyed showing up to teach a group of teenagers with horMONES raGING in leather mini-skirts. “If I had legs like hers, I’d wear leather mini-skirts, too,” another teacher told me, years later. Miss Wilcox was, I should point out, a few years north of 50.
Now, it wasn’t like any of us had pictures of Miss Wilcox in our locker doors. No one talked about her as if she was going to be on 90210 any day now, or could do a cameo on Saved by the Bell. Still, looking back on it, it seems odd, somehow, that a teacher would waltz into class wearing a skirt that pretty much any female under her gaze would’ve considered for a moment, and then decided against wearing because it was too slutty.
The leather skirts weren’t the only example of recherche behavior on Miss Wilcox’s part, only the most blatantly consistent. She had a close relationship with Mr. Kennedy, a math teacher – no one really knew how close – and Mr. Kennedy was an avid amateur photographer. (He was also a bit of a fading folkie, and brought his guitar to class one afternoon to sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” and other songs. Likewise unmarried, he died alone in his house several years ago, aged about 43. Another interesting character.) The two were never seen together acting anything other than professional, but middle school being middle school, and kids being underhanded and nefarious as they are, word got around. (And without texts or cell phones! omg!)
I still don’t know who found the contact sheet, or who managed to get it into school, but Miss Wilcox and Mr. Kennedy apparently thought it would be fun to do a little bit of “glamour” photography. This sheet, filled with pictures about 1″ X 1″, showed Miss Wilcox in a bikini. Not content to stop there, the ante was upped by having Miss Wilcox, in a bikini, drape herself across a convertible. I think it was a Corvette; the pictures were tiny. I don’t know whose Corvette it was, or what space had been commandeered for this “Woman of Delta Middle School” photo shoot. The pictures were small, but the nimbus of Miss Wilcox’s blonde-dyed hair could be viewed easily across a distance of several cornfields, and we therefore had no doubt as to who was in the pictures.
I don’t remember a single thing she taught me. The books we read in that class, the sentences we diagrammed before we grew tired of diagramming sentences, it’s a total blur. Maybe The Cay, that woefully simplistic, and, now that I think about it, maybe a little racist, story about a simple black man who sacrifices his life for a white boy? Could we have gone into Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea? It seems possible. Still, whatever knowledge this woman had about English literature and writing hasn’t been retained by me. Or, if it has, it’s been subsumed and rewritten by so many subsequent lessons as to be wholly incorporated.
I think Miss Wilcox remarried while I was in high school, took her new husband’s last name, and then moved away. Google her and nothing shows up, at least, and there’s no way I’m going Googling for those bikini-convertible pictures. She’s lucky, I think, that her devil-may-care attitude was on display when it was, and before 13-year olds came to school armed to the teeth with cell phones and digital cameras, before the school was hooked up to the Internet. Parents would’ve been appalled as soon as they saw that contact sheet, and if the more industrious among them thought to investigate Mikey’s cell phone, they would’ve found all sorts of surreptitiously shot pictures of leather mini-skirts. Miss Wilcox would’ve been hounded from her post for corrupting the morals of the nation’s youth, sent forth to find work where leather mini-skirts were more the norm than the exception. Which would’ve been sad, because unlike her dull counterparts, you really did pay attention to her as she taught. You just didn’t bother listening to her.