You might have heard this, since it's one of my favorite high school tales, but I thought it would be good to write it down somewhere. It's more of a character sketch, so if you want a satisfying ending don't read it because you'll be hella disappointed.
Dr. Swoope was my geometry teacher. Her name was pronounced "swope." Before I ever saw her, I heard the rumors; she used to be a man. You could tell, everyone said, because her of hands. They were like catcher's mitts.
When I got to class the first thing I noticed wasn't her hands, it was her face. It appeared to have been shifted up and to the left, like a botched facelift. A facelift one might get when changing from a man into a woman. Her voice was gravelly, and it cracked. Her skin was yellowish, like a really sick person who tried to cover up her pallor with too much sunless tanner. Also she was six feet tall, and there were those mitts. If she knew anything about the rumors going around, she did little to dissuade us from believing that her name had once been Bruce.
That being said, I knew she wasn't a man. Most of us knew, but she didn't make it easy for us. One day, as I was copying notes during her talk about the Pythagorean Theorem, she stopped mid-sentence with an "Oh my god!" I looked up to see that she was looking at me. "Look at your hands, Addie. They are so small!" Everyone looked at my hands. "Make a fist, Addie. Make a tight little fist!" I did. She then yanked my hand up into the air, so everyone could she as she compared her fist to mine. "Oh my god," said Dr. Swoope. She eyed our fists for a few seconds, her mouth slightly agape. "It's like a grapefruit and walnut. This is fantastic!" I don't know why it was fantastic.
My class had a couple "cutest boy in school" types. These kids were definitely at their peak in high school and that gave them an air of bravado that I was alternately jealous of and maddened by. It was great to have a few of these types in class, though, because they had a knack for getting the teacher to go off on tangents. Dr. Swoope's tangents always involved her friend, Carlos. Carlos was a pilot who flew Dr. Swoope "down Boca" whenever she wanted. None of us really believed her. I think she sensed this, and one day she brought in pictures. "This is Carlos," she said, holding up a picture of a tanned man in a white linen suit. "This is my house in Boca." It was like she was presenting evidence. "You can see here the plane we take almost every weekend." Turned out, all this could have been true. Dr. Swoope was loaded.
She got to like our class quite a bit, mostly thanks to those boys who would call her things like "Señora Swoope" and "math lady." She started telling us things about her hobbies, what sort of decorations she puts of at Christmas, what she does when she's in Boca Raton, etc. Eventually she told us why she looked the way she did; she had been scalped in a snowmobiling accident. The accident, which literally tore her face off, had been the fault of the snowmobile company and she got a massive settlement out of it. We all felt really bad for Dr. Swoope, and never gave her any guff about going "down Boca" again.
In March, on Pi Day (March 14th) Dr. Swoope decided we should have a pie party. She assigned some of us to bring in pies, and others to bring in napkins, soda, plates, knives and forks. "Don't worry about the ice cream," said Dr. Swoope. "I'll take care of all the ice cream!" The day of the pie party arrived, I brought in peach. Dr. Swoope thought it was great that I brought peach pie because I was "southern." My mother was a pretty well known figure in my school district, and her accent is obvious and robust, so many of my teachers concluded that I, too, must be from "Tennessee or Georgia or one of the Carolinas."
Dr. Swoope had three shopping bags full of ice cream, and she began setting them on her desk. The first half gallon was Buttercrunch. Then another. Then another. She only bought Buttercrunch. I had a particularly hard time with this, because one time after church my older brother put a spoonful of Buttercrunch ice cream in his mouth, pinned me to the ground, and called it "buttcrunch" while letting it dribble all over my face. He used to be to so awful.
We were all pretty disappointed in the ice cream selection, but things were about to get worse. Dr. Swoope lined us up at the far end of the pie table. We were to go down the line, get a piece of of pie, and go to her desk where she would give us our scoop of ice cream. She was very insistant on "taking care of the ice cream." I was towards the end of the line, because I was kind of hoping she'd run out of ice cream before I got there. She didn't. Instead, I had to watch her scoop everyone else's ice cream with a regular spoon, claw it out with her scarred, yellow hands, lick her fingers individually, and do the same for the next kid. Now, Callahans aren't famous for our constitution (with the exception of my older brother who revels in making me and Parker dry heave using only words). I'm proud to say my paralyzing sense of guilt made me not only take the ice cream from Dr. Swoope, but actually push it around a bit on my plate to make it looked like I had eaten some before I threw it out. I didn't gag once.
