Julie was having a really bad day.
The Department of Education had sent her a letter asking her to explain why her school was not following the new mandated curriculum. The new curriculum was differentiated. Each student was supposed to be judged individually. If a student excelled in one subject but was lagging in another, the student was not supposed to be treated like everyone else in the class, but had to be given special attention by the teachers.
Julie would not have any of that. She wanted everyone in Grade 1 to do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time according to exactly the same pace. She had majored in Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development for her education degree, but she did not like the flexibility of Piaget's model. Instead, she wanted precision, not the vagueness of a period of concrete operations that lasted for five years or a period of formal operations that lasted forever. If a child was 10 years old, that child was supposed to behave like every other 10-year-old. That was procedure. Period.
Frankie was also always texting her. He wanted to meet her after work. Her work, not his. He seemed not to be working at all. Julie did not really know how he made his living. She never asked. More precisely, she never had time to ask. They were always having sex, or even if they were talking, it was always she who was talking. His end of the conversation was always, except for that remark about killing her husband and his own wife, about sex itself.
"I've read Lady Chatterley's Lover," he once said, in a rare mention of something remotely literate, "and they don't talk about anything except John Thomas and Lady Jane."
"Stop texting me," she texted Frankie, but Frankie could not be stopped.
"Shall I stop fucking you?" he texted back.
Julie was annoyed and thrilled at the same time. The sexual talk was just so far away from her everyday life as principal that it served not as a comic relief, but as a reality check. She might have been a cold, untouchable principal on the outside, but in those secret moments with Frankie, she was what she really wanted to be – a sexually fulfilled woman.
Being conflicted in school and in her own body was too much for one day. Julie decided that she needed to talk to someone, to seek advice, to unburden herself. She did not want to go to a shrink. Manila was a small town. Everybody knew everybody else. There were very few reputable shrinks. It was going to be public knowledge soon enough that she was in a shrink's clinic, waiting for her hour of non-directive counseling.
I can see that priest, she said to herself. Everybody goes to a priest. After work today, she would go and talk to Father Romy.
YOU ARE READING
Love After Heaven
Storie d'amoreA murder victim gets a chance to return to earth to meet his wife and her lover. He still loves his wife, despite her complicity in his murder. But he returns to earth not as himself but as a priest! How can he and his wife come together again? What...
