But back to Janae, that’s Enola. She was my student and stayed after class sometimes to unload her stories, the things troubling her, which she said she never talks about and always holds in which is why she is suffering from some kind of depression and has a weight problem, although she’s always had that and has been teased and tormented her life long because of it, and this is just the way she talked, hardly stopping long enough for breath and certainly not long enough for me to say anything but oh my or wow.
She was--is, I'm sure--a sweet young woman, not obese but, as my mother would have said, heavy. She also enjoyed, although in this case that cannot be the right word, the particular body shape where the lower part is large. Even if Janae lost fifty pounds, she would look large below the waist.
Her first day of school—that’s kindergarten—the day all children look to with a mix of fear and happy excitement, someone actually put her into a trash can. She says this is absolutely true, hard to believe though it may be, and no teacher was nearby to save her from this humiliation.
She could not understand it—and neither can I. Her older sisters always talked about school as the best part of their day, which is what Janae went expecting. But such was not her experience. She was excluded from fun, from girls’ athletic teams, and was publicly ridiculed for her “lack of discipline and intelligence” by the PE teacher, a woman without a heart, obviously, and not much of a brain.
There's more, of course, but it's all in the past, you know.
Why am I writing all this? I do not know. What I originally thought was that the four names I began with sound like they come from the back woods part of this nation of ours. And couldn’t you write quite a story about them?
Apparently I can’t. At least I haven't so far.
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