Donna D. Vitucci

Most Beautiful

Our desks arranged a two-row-deep horseshoe shape for John O’Connor’s striding through the mix of upperclassmen in Latin III, translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. Our teacher mocked and extolled the gods’ and goddesses’ exuberant jealousies, their efforts at crushing human hearts and shaping the world. He reveled in the amusement, for it had nothing to do with him or with us, not really. It was subject matter. It was the matter.

We were barely sixteen, Catholic girls in plaid uniform skirts and white blouses, adoring Joc, as we called him, our Jupiter come to earth and claiming us. He had a head of wavy gray hair and blue eyes twinkling toward later rheuminess. His nose was what dictionaries mean by the word proboscis. He wore sweaters of burgundy or earthen-brown that smelled of tobacco. His fingers and his fingernails holding open the text were more jaundiced than the sun-faded pages. Latin books hadn’t been replaced in years. Why should they? Latin, and the myths, never changed.

Kay licked the back of my neck. “To you,” she whispered, “for you, my most beautiful, I give the golden apple.”

When I turned around, my chin touched her open palm holding her own chin, the all of her leaning forward over the top of her desk to me. No apple, but I could easily imagine one there. “To the fairest,” she said. Appellation and apple over which goddesses fought.

She’d been calling me “Venus” and “Beautiful” all semester, flashing me her deep-dimples, her fleck-of-light hazel eyes. She was in love with me or teasing. Either way, she drew shy smiles out of me. I didn’t know what else to give her, or how.

Joc raised us up in the language of war incited by hotheaded love. “Oh that tricky Aeneas,” he said, when our hero plugged his ears to the sirens’ song, when his men were turned to swine. “Oh that crafty and embittered Juno, and alas, love-struck, doomed Dido.” Sight translator of the first degree, our Joc could recite stories of Rome’s inception the live-long day and keep us enrapt. First in Latin, then English, he set forth the puzzle and solved it for us, too.

We were a little in love with him, the way in which girls adored their fathers, the way fathers were beyond all reproach until first lovers rang our door bell and then displaced our dads. We overflowed with the need to love, as well as to abandon. Insensitive little nymphs, too sensitive about our own glories, myopic about acclaim in our little lives. Joc taught us, in a flip, backhanded manner, how punishment curled at the center of every story told by the gods, how every lesson was a magician’s lapel flower poised to squirt us. He declared the heart an Achilles’ heel, then he chuckled at his joke and regaled us with exploits of Trojan warriors until our eyes glazed over. We ached for love stories, not battles. How we ached!

Banquet, book, gold fruit of prophecy. A foreign language, a dead tongue, Kay’s tongue to my bare neck, in class no less! And me in the front row of desks! Joc wore an orange sweater. He burned like autumn in our midst. Brilliant to observe him in his furious teaching, tilting the direction of our weather vanes. He harvested the fruit, stripped leaves from the trees, left nothing for me and Kay to clutch at through the winter. We would be famished come spring, if we managed until spring.

Before Proserpina emerged from the underworld, shading her eyes with her hand once she stepped into the light, we would sleep on cold pallets and ache for the fire, for what little warmth we could wrest from the sly glances of one man who’d been time-tested, who would ever know more than we could acquire by simply reading.

“You need to experience the full of it in your bones,” he claimed, the text held aloft, as if we should adore it, or at least pay more attention.

Goofy gods. Were they extolling Latin or love? Half the class didn’t know what Joc was talking about. A classroom of January girls, newborn into the year, and none of us on the same page by review time. Half the class failed the semester exam. Would I be too blatant in saying I, too, lost my place?

Apple of discord, taste of despair, oh throat of ruin. I touched mine and felt weakness there, a muffle-ment, when I unwound my scarf and stuffed in my locker Kay’s Christmas gift that carried no meaning by the time I wore it.

A whole school full of girls, we were ready for love, we were ripe for it, but like the gods we were equally cruel. Some of us learned to turn our backs, even on what struck us most beautiful. Some of us suspended our emotions, drove them underground while we scrambled to save face. At school, I took on the visage of a statue. I translated without moving my lips. I ate the pomegranate seeds, all six of them, and learned to beat back the dark season called love.

Return to Volume 4.2

All files © 2005-2012 Blood Orange Review