(…and the Teacher of Desire)

There is one teacher I will never forget, but what Miss Murphy taught me wasn’t just alphabetical and to this day I still don’t know if she taught me the right things―it was sex education.

          In the 1960’s I attended a Catholic school run by nuns and Miss Murphy, who was not a nun, taught the Third Grade. She was much younger than my mother and the older kids talked about how she was sexy, but I only thought that with her round happy face, blue eyes and black hair she wasn’t ugly.

        The Mother Superior, leader of all the nuns, had been our Second Grade teacher and that year was fuzzy except for the Nixon-Humphrey presidential election and the way the Mother Superior treated me. She sat behind a huge desk mounted up high, and each day she called everyone’s name and students marched up to receive their graded homework. But when she called me she whipped the paper in the air or threw it on the ground. Maybe she didn’t do it every time but it felt like she did. My parents didn’t like Nixon but the Mother Superior sure did. One day she was giving the kids candy bars for saying, “Nixon’s The One!” So, I told my mother who pinned a “Humphrey for President” button on my uniform and took me to school. The button came off when I saw the Mother Superior’s angry face, and I’m still not sure if my treatment that year was political.

          Third Grade was all different. I felt a strange connection to Miss Murphy from the first day of school. Her face shined and her black hair looked so soft. Her blue eyes and face were always bright and under her blouse were pretty straps wrapped around her chest. She smelled like beautiful flowers and dressed in dark colors with knee-length skirts and shiny stockings that had a straight line in back like my Mom’s. She wore flat leather shoes the same as Jackie Kennedy, but Mrs. Kennedy had skinny legs, Miss Murphy had nice long legs and when she looked at me she smiled. I also noticed that she twirled her feet and crossed her legs over and over again and squeezed them tight. Sometimes from my seat I saw her skirt slipping up her legs, and where her stockings ended would be showing. She didn’t know it, or she didn’t bother to pull it back down right away. I was disappointed when she finally would. I didn’t know why looking at Miss Murphy’s legs and stockings made me feel so good, but they did. After long periods my little dickie got hard from sitting, though.