A Little Weary

As an art teacher, the crowning moment of my work is in the penultimate week of school: the art show week, the week where I take the prime examples of each individual student's work and display it.  It's quite a bit of work, and for me, because we have different students filtering in each day, it expands and consumes the whole entire week.  A different set of art up each day to be a focus of the flood of people rushing through my space and then taken down and replaced with the artwork of the next day.
For an introvert, the phrase "Flood of people" is similar to the phrase "approaching tsunami." But because this is art, my art, the art of the kids that I'm so very proud of, it's worth the sense of drowning, and my gracious colleagues are all so kind and willing to help me at the end of each day.
However, due to the timing, everyone is also bustling about grading, reviewing papers, filling out student reports and getting their final efforts pushed through the system.  Even I have to worry about this, I have to give my reports to the parents, too, and we work with a system where our reports are rotated through two or three other teachers.  The reports are due Friday, I didn't see them until Wednesday and that was only because I insisted and kicked up a bit of an email stink.  I figured I'd been overlooked and they were submitted without being sent to me, but what had really happened was that the teacher who had taken a good portion of them all at once a week ago found that she did not have the time to fill them in after all, which means that all three of us still have to rotate them around and fill them out. One scrambles to get this task done in time.  Monday was a panicked priority, and I prayed my reports were fair and accurate as I passed them off to the next person.
 Administration is looking for a better system already.  It is pointless to complain, so the travail must be expressed as an amusing anecdote instead.  My listeners sympathize consistently and it helps to know that I am not insane in this matter: my frustration was legitimate as I stayed up to get the next day's reports done in time to pass them on.
I overslept this fine, Thursday morning.
Thursday is the biggest day of the art show bombardment.  It encompasses the day with the largest attendance, the oldest students.  It overlaps with the long-spanned efforts of another teacher right next door, and it's her first time doing this, so she's very nervous.  This means she is vulnerable.  Hurting her feelings and convincing her that she'd done wrong would be easier than thought, and this sort of infamy cannot be countenanced.  So I try very carefully to use positive words, upward inflections, to smile more than I normally would, striving to be aware of the consequences of my every gesture because friendliness does not come naturally to me.  The families shuffle between our rooms like sand in the hourglass, while we work to make sure the balance of people is stable, that people can get in and out. 
Two or three children come to me begging for minor impossibilities, and my polite denials are wrapped in smiles and crinkly eyes to lessen the blow.  They are mostly gone after an hour, one or two families are still straggling and chatting.
The last to leave is ten minutes later than everyone else as the mother in question insists on taking photos of her increasingly drooping daughters next to every scrap of dust that pertained to them.
All of their work is in the next room, it will be no grievance to them if I begin taking care of the art in my neighbor's room, surely.  It's after 4, and there are still so many things to be done, not the least my appointment at 5.  All the kind people who meant to help me set up tomorrow's show have already had to leave and attend to lives of their own.  
And then I hear the quell of the mother's voice.  "Lookit, there's Miss E already taking everything down.  Awwwwww."
I have spoken often to this particular woman, who is painfully nice in her propensity to create impositions.  I never know if her habit of talking this way is supposed to be a biting criticism, as is the case with one of my older relatives, or if she has an intrinsic need to state the obvious repeatedly or feel unfulfilled, but my response must be the same either way.  I turn and smile.  "Sorry, I have tomorrow's show to set up, but all your things are in the next room, and I think you've already seen this."  Think?  I know they have.  I've been watching them float back and forth, alone, for the past ten minutes.   "Oh dear!" Her blue eyes go wide. "I'm so sorry to be in your way!"
Again, I have spoken to this woman many times.  One is legally obliged to reply, "Oh, you're fine." Instead of the more honest "no, you're not. You're nowhere NEAR finished pottering around, you just want my sanction so that you can keep doing it."
So, I explain that I'm just tired and I must hurry to get done, and she proceeds to explain...I dunno.  I don't know what she's talking about.  I don't even know why she's still talking.  I try to imagine that she has no idea that having to chat after a long, heavy series of days actually makes some people feel even more tired, rather than giving them fresh energy.  I imagine that she sees me drooping, and overwhelmed and thinks that she is helping me by assailing my brain with heavy smatterings of repetition, and I'm sorry I cannot validate her bizarre perception of the world by giving more enthusiastic responses.  She notices my inability to match her own enthusiasm and tries to engage me by mentioning the one place besides school where she'd noticed me enjoying myself: the local historical ranch.  I grunt, with an upward inflection, while I wrestle with the staples lodged in the wall.  I know she wants me to drop everything I'm doing and carry on a ten minute conversation with her.  She will eventually try to manipulate me into offering to tutor her daughters for free, but there simply isn't time for this.  
Desperately she begins to list alllllllllll the people who will be coming to that Ranch....slowly.....by last name....with a two second pause between each one.  Her vampiric presence saps me until I feel my knees getting weak, my heels burrowing into the soles of my shoes.  She bombards me with useless compliments and old information, and I respond with civilized murmurs until I can't tell one murmur from the next.  Her children beside her look as ready to fall over as I feel.  At last, we say our farewells and she departs, and I hope, very sincerely, that I wasn't rude.
My neighbor lets out a long puff of breath and says "wow.  She's always like that, isn't she?"
Thank God!  I'm not insane.  "I wonder if we're the only adults she's able to spend any time with, and that's why she latches on like that," I say. 
"Ya," says my neighbor, "but still....."
I'm not insane.  How glad I am, now, that I've tried to be kind to my neighbor.  This reassurance alone is adequate repayment.
 Her children are here and always politely willing to be of service. My boss comes up the stairs.  The help that I had despaired of having crawls out of the woodwork and props me up for the last twenty minutes or so of effort, and when it is done I double-check with my neighbor to see if there is anything I can do for her.  Being quietly helpful, feeling useful without having to measure my actions and reactions like a miser is a pleasant diversion for me, but she says she doesn't need any help.
"Do you want to set up tomorrow's show?"  My boss asks.  "I can stay and help for that."
"No,"  I smile, but I make sure my weariness shows.  "I'm knackered. My judgement will be too poor.  And it's only two classes tomorrow, I'll do it in the morning."
It's only 4:30 when I get into my car, there is still time to go to the bank before my appointment, though my dreams of dropping off the rent and the utility bill have evaporated.  I was polite and engaging at the bank, and I even managed to maintain consciousness all through my 5 o'clock appointment - I probably could have canceled, but I really didn't want to.  When it is over, all I want to do is sit and watch stupid tv shows until the universe stretches and contracts again into a more efficient order, but the dog, attention starved from my week of activity, wants nothing more than to be in my face, licking it and pushing against me incessantly.
I must have yelled at him, because suddenly he started sulking on the sofa.  Well, good.  Now my displays of affection can be on my terms instead of his.  I sit and cuddle him and rubbing his ears for some minutes, and then I remember that something I need from the department store has to be bought before tomorrow.  I drag myself over to the store and shamble in.
I'm fast when it comes to this particular purchase.  The store is well organized and clean and I know exactly what I need.  The moment I liked best was walking past the jewelry counter and watching all the bright gaudy things flash at me, friendly, twinkling eyes, giving pleasure and letting me pass unhindered.  
 I went to the check-out lane where a politely bombastic woman was demanding the sort of attention from the only cashier in the area that meant the cashier needed to guide them through the wastes of the store's stock, and possibly up mount Everest.  An apologetic glance at me and the cashier evaporated.  I turned and went to the other set of registers and stood, waiting.  The employees here are dressed like everyone else.  I cannot go about assailing strangers in the hopes that they have the power to check out my purchase.   My presence finally caught the attention of another cashier. She rings me up.  The normally 40$ purchase, thanks to a coupon and a sale, comes out to less than 15$ and I privately high-five my sense of timing.
Then the cashier asks if I have the store credit card, but since I only set foot in here four times a year, I don't.  
"But it only takes a minute to fill it out, and even if you don't get approved, you still get the savings. It would bring your total down to $11.46."
"No thanks," I reply "I'm too wiped out."
"Oh," the woman smiles.  Her blue eyes emphasize the gray line of her un-dyed roots.  I try hard not to stare, though it is the only feature of interest about her.   "Were you at Muldoon's?" she asks.
"What the hell is Muldoon's and why am I expected to care?" I check myself, blink.  She's staring at me expectantly so, thank God, I hadn't said that out loud.  I try to trace the communication glitch.   Muldoon's is probably a bar or a club or something.  My choice of words must have made her mistake my character, Lord only knows how.  No more idioms for this woman.  
"I'm just tired, you know?"
 "Oh, I see. So do you want to apply for the card? It barely takes any time and even if you're not approved, you get the savings? You want the savings?"
"No thanks, I really just want to get home." This woman, this wrinkly, wiry arrangement of flesh who has mistaken weariness for weakness on my part does not know how perilously close I am getting to dropping my facade of humanity. She does not know that it is not my will that shall give way first, but that little bit of self-control still restraining all the things that run through my head.  She doesn't know that she's wearing away at her own protection.  She pushes the @#$% card a third time. 2$ of lousy savings, does this pitch even work on normal people?
"I only takes a minute," she insists, "I mean, you may as well."  
A minute when, were it not for this discussion, I'd be on my way home already.  A minute, a bloody minute when I know perfectly well what kind of a number-writing, information sifting, finger-tapping wait filling out a credit card application really is.  LIES!  Why do normal people lie so much?
My own personal curse, my wit, congeals on my tongue: a poisonous vapor.  I look at the counter so that I will not automatically catalogue all the cruel, spiteful things I could list about her appearance, her character, her sales pitch in alphabetical order.  
I know it's her job to push this useless piece of plastic.  I know she has people at home who, somehow, love her.  She is made in the image of God and she must be respected as such.  So instead of screaming, "FOOOLISH MORTAL!!!! TAKE MY @#$% MONEY AND LET ME GO HOME OR BE DESTROYED!!!!!!!" I simply say, "no. thank you." a third time. It was her last chance.
I don't think she saw the murder in my eyes. She didn't seem to know that she teetered on the brink of her own personal apocalypse.  Maybe she's only allowed to try to force people into getting something they don't want three times before quitting. Whatever her motivation, she at last gave up her cause and let me buy the @#$% garment.  
I return to the house, trick the dog into thinking that I'd gone into the bedroom and lock myself in the bathroom. I can hear him squealing anxiously on the other side, but this is for his own good.
I inhale deeply the dank smell of my surroundings, barely masked by perfumed candles.  Yes.  Darkness.  Solitude.  This is where creatures like me belong.