Before leaving for work she stands at the kitchen counter and drinks a mug of scalding black coffee, trying to get her head straight. She showers, then changes into the most conservative ensemble she owns—a sleeveless ruched top, wool pencil skirt, gray blazer, red silk scarf. The priests do not approve. They frown as she marches through the halls in her platform shoes, but she is a brilliant teacher, and they pity her. This puts them on equal footing since she pities them, too, especially when she catches them lingering in the doorways, their eyes moving across her plentiful breasts.
At seven o'clock she drives to school. Already the bisecting vapor trails of a hundred jets obscure the sky like the crisscrossing telephone cables and the tangled grid of electric lines suspended above the neighborhood streets, corralling her within this gilded pen like some mindless beast of burden and inspiring her, as it does every morning with ritualistic inevitability, to light her first official cigarette of the day. She inhales a gratifying lungful of smoke, the one and only drag that tastes any damned good, the rest merely a form of habit and imprisonment like much else in life. The idea of ritual pleases her, however, because it suggests something communal, an agreed upon set of beliefs, values, collective grievances, and it gives her great comfort to know that all across the country millions of addicts are simultaneously taking that first puff with a fanaticism that is, if not exactly religious, then certainly sacramental.
For nearly thirty minutes she sits in the faculty parking lot with the engine idling. Fumes from the tailpipe threaten to kill her once and for all, making quick work of what the cigarettes will take another decade or more to do. Scanning the plaza to see if anyone is observing her and feeling not unlike the femme fatale in the final scene of a film noir, she removes the .38 from the glove compartment. A fine weapon. Short recoil, good accuracy. The Jesuits would be aghast if they knew of it, but Batya is prepared with a reasonable response. This neighborhood is a dangerous one. The streets are teeming with lunatics.
At the beginning of the semester she wrote a letter to the editor, arguing that teachers should have the right to carry a side arm into the classroom. Full-time faculty only, of course. Substitutes are clearly too inept, not to be trusted. When they read her op-ed, the priests laughed at her candor, thought she was joking, being satirical. No one took her seriously.
She checks her watch. Almost time. She flicks the smoldering butt out the window and slides the pistol into her purse. For a moment she stands in the parking lot, breathes the noxious city air tainted by the blast furnaces of the nearby steel mill. A flock of ugly blackbirds, common grackles, slide feverishly between the telephone lines and drop their heavy white payloads on the hood of her car before disappearing into the yellow sky. With fury and revulsion she stares after them but stops herself from taking aim and firing.
