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42 teachers When Miss Sokoloski, our first-year French teacher, leaned over her desk to get out our quizzes from the lower-right-hand drawer, we all leaned with her, even the girls, to see that softness and shadow under the scoop neck of her Jackie Kennedy two-piece suit. Dumb as we were we knew she was too sweet to teach French, too pretty as well. When she went to the board we studied declensions we never even knew that we had. When she cried one day because some of us cheated, none of us could say in any language, Romance or not, that it was because she was so beautiful. A year later she left and we figured she married, someone fluent in French who loved her like we did, tout de suite and tongue-tied. And when Mr. Burke, Junior English, who looked like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird and wore the same suit three times a week, slumped in his seat and would not speak when the PA announced JFK had been killed, he taught his best lesson, that we all lived somewhere between what was right and what was wrong, that beauty lived right in the middle, that teachers felt the same thing we all felt too, they just kept it inside like a test in a drawer. And we thought if only he could marry Miss Sokoloski, read poems all night and translate each other, but she was too pretty and he was too poor. My teachers, all dead now or pretty close to it, like Jackie, the Kennedys, and Marilyn Monroe, who knew everything once, except what they taught us, the tests that were coming, the things we would know. ...

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