Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
The Verb That Left Me
One small working verb a week goes out of a school secretary's usable speech over a winter term, and her office notebook grows flatter and plainer as they go.
- dated: "winter term"
- narrator: "Amabel Grey, school secretary"
- reliability: unreliable
14 September. Winter term, and the coal is in, and the boiler man came on Tuesday as he always does. The registers are mine again four mornings a week, and the milk straws are counted into nine hundreds by the dinner lady, who miscounts on Fridays and I make up at the till. A small thing wrong today, and I record the small things as I was trained to: a word went missing when I needed it, the little one for what a person does with keys and cups and registers. I finished the sentence without it. Nobody across the counter turned a hair, which is either a comfort or nothing.
21 September. The word did not come back. I have mislaid things before and I have always found them before cup day. This one is gone the way summer is gone, without a snag anywhere. A second one is loose now: the one for taking a thing up and taking it along. The milk came at nine and the crates stayed where they were set down. Mr Loxton moved them at the dinner hour and said nothing either, and I did not ask him what he was about, because I would have needed the word, and asking without it is like knocking on glass.
Third Tuesday of October. Coughs through the middle school and the office is a hat counter for tissues. Another word gone this week, the one teachers use over the register, and I find I just the rows and hand them up. My husband says my letters are shorter. He says it kindly. I looked in the class dictionary over break for five minutes and the page is there, and the space between quarrel and quite is narrower than the gap in my ear where the word used to sit, so the book is not to blame, and I have put the blame aside as I put the canteen forms aside, for Monday.
2 December. First frosting. The bell went at nine and at four and it was dark after, and that is the whole of it. The office went. I went. The heads went into the book and the book came out flat, and my hand wrote simpler because simpler is all that is left to write with. I filled in tomorrow's register this evening before today's was closed. It was easier than today's. It is always easier to write a thing before it happens, and I will mention that to no one, because mentioning takes the word for saying, and that one is loose too.
Last week of term. Presents on my desk, a tin of toffees, the registers shut and owing nothing. Set of prayers at three, the buses at half past, and then quiet to the tune of a whole school. Count over the winter: six gone, one a week, regular as the milk. If the count holds into January the next to go quiet will be the one for waiting, and the small one for remembering the week after, and afterward I will be left with is and has and was, which is not enough to run an office and not enough to run a life on. Which of those the winter means to take last, it has not told me.