Alaska (154 page)

Grady Scott was a fine, trustworthy man who ran a good hardware store in Heber City, and if he lacked the courage to stand up against his wife, he had the character to run his business and his life honorably. During these long interrogations of his daughter in the Brigham Young dormitory, he rarely intruded.

In her four years at college, Kendra dated only two men, and they were so similar that they could have been twins: slight of build, washy-blond of hair, hesitant in speech and awkward in movement. The first young man had asked her out three times; the second, seven or eight. But the evenings were so painfully boring and unproductive that Kendra deemed them hardly worth the effort, especially when her mother asked at least fifteen questions about each young man and ended up by actually driving the forty-two miles south to Nephi to investigate the parents of the second young fellow. Mrs. Scott was most favorably impressed with the couple, classifying them as 'the best of Mormon society, and that's high praise.' She gave Kendra vigorous encouragement to pursue her friendship with the young man, but both he and Kendra were so embarrassed by the entire procedure and so little interested in each other that what Mrs. Scott called 'Kendra's courtship' ended with neither a bang nor a whimper. In fact, it didn't end at all. It just sort of tailed off like a slow groan.

Kendra graduated at age twenty-one with a B-plus average in education, and her choice of four or five good public schools in which to teach, and now came the first crisis in her life, for one of the schools was in Kamas, Utah, less than twenty-five miles from home, and both the elder Scotts felt that this was where Kendra should teach, at least for the first five or six years of her career, because, as Mrs. Scott pointed out: 'You could come home for weekends.'

In an act of defiance which startled and alarmed her par-941

ents, Kendra accepted, without discussing the matter with them, a job at the school that was farthest from home, in Grand Junction across the state line in Colorado, but even this was within striking distance of Heber City, and during Kendra's first autumn in her new school, Mrs. Scott drove the two hundred and fifty-odd miles on six different weekends to discuss with her daughter the problems she was facing, the women teachers with whom she was associating, and whatever men in either the school or the town she had come to know. It was Mrs. Scott's firm opinion that the men of Colorado were much more dangerous than those in Utah, and she advised her daughter to steer clear of them: 'Why you turned down that nice young man from Nephi, I will never know.'

'I didn't turn him down, Mother. I never had the opportunity. Nor did I seek it.'

Aware that their child was developing headstrong tendencies, the bedside prayers in Grand Junction now began to take subtle shifts: 'Almighty God, keep Your daughter Kendra mindful of Your precepts, protect her from arrogant and hasty judgments, and with Your constant supervision, help her to remain pure.'

THE LIBRARIAN, Miss DELLER, HANDED KENDRA THAT copy of the National Geographic on a Tuesday morning, and during the next three days the little girl heading into the blizzard haunted the younger teacher. She did not turn the magazine over to her students, but kept it on her desk through Wednesday and Thursday, where she stared at it from time to time. On Thursday night she took it home with her, and studied it with great intensity before going to bed. On Friday she rose early, placed the magazine beside her mirror, and compared herself with that extraordinary child. In the glass she saw herself clearly and with neither exaggeration nor denigration; but whenever she compared herself with that child heading into the blizzard, she had to admit with great pain that she came off second best: I'm intelligent, always got good grades, and I know how to contribute to group projects.

I mean, I'm not a dope, nor a recluse, nor anyone sick in the head. And although I'm not a cover girl, I'm not repulsive. Men do stare at me now and then, and I think that if I gave them encouragement. . . Well, that's neither here nor there.

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Good complexion, good posture, hair sort of blah but I've got to get rid of those braids, no cavities, thank God, not overweight, no disfiguring blemishes. Not much of a smile, but maybe one could be engineered. And I am liked by my students, I really am, and I think by the other faculty members too.

And then, with the child beside her, she broke into convulsive sobs and uttered words which shocked her as she said them and appalled her when she remembered them later: 'I'm such a horseshit fucking failure.'

Recoiling as if someone had struck her across the face, she stared at herself in the mirror, clapped her hand across her mouth, and mumbled: 'What did I say? What possessed me?' And then, when her passion subsided, she knew exactly what she had said and what had impelled her: In comparison with that child I'm a shameless coward. Disgustingly, I've allowed my mother to dominate me. I believe in God, but I do not believe that He sits there with a magnifying glass watching everything that an elementary-school teacher in Grand Junction is doing. I've been afraid even to go out in my snowfall, let alone my blizzard.

She grabbed the magazine, brought it to her lips, and kissed the little Eskimo girl in her heavy clothes edged with fur: You've saved my life, little one. You've given me what I never had before. Courage.

Dressing hurriedly, she marched boldly to Terrence's Tresses, the leading hair boutique of the region. Plumping herself grimly in the chair, she said: 'Terrence, you've got to cut off these damned braids.'

In some shock Terrence said: 'But, mam'selle, no one around here has braids as lovely as yours,' but she rebuffed him: 'My mother uses them to strangle me.' Since this obviously baffled Terrence, she added: 'Whenever she comes to visit me she insists on plaiting my braids sitting me on a chair before her ... to reinforce my captivity.'

'But what will mam'selle do to replace them? What style, I mean?' and she said: 'We'll settle that later,”and as the scissors snipped away she cried exultantly: 'Now I can breathe.'

Shorn of her burden, she and Terrence studied a score of photographs showing varied styles, and finally he said: 'If I may be so bold, mam'selle, that Dutch-boy bob would be perfect for you, clean and neat like your personality,' and she 943

said: 'Go for it!' Deftly he applied comb and scissor and spray, producing a result which made Kendra look more sophisticated but at the same time more youthfully adventurous.

'I like it,' she said as she hurried off to school, skipped down the hall, and burst into the library: 'Miss Deller, I'm going to be very bold'

'Kendra! I hardly knew you. What a marvelous hairdo! But what about those lovely long braids?'

'Thanks, but my problem is something quite different, and I'm embarrassed, really I am, to bring it up.'

'Shoot! I'm a good listener.' Miss Deller had short bobbed hair and a brusque manner of speech and movement; she came, Kendra thought someone had said, from Arkansas.

Kendra sat down, took a deep breath, and said: 'On the weekends, some weekends, that is, you go over to that lodge in Gunnison, don't you?'

'Several of us do. Special rates to teachers. We come from all around Salida, Montrose.'

'What is it, exactly?'

'A kind of seminar. We invite lecturers from universities. People show slides of Arabia, Uruguay, that sort of thing. Sunday morning most of us go to church, and then we come home, refreshed.'

'Do you have to go ... with a man, that is?'

'Heavens, no. Some do. And sometimes a teacher from here meets a keen guy from Salida, but that happens as the dice happen to roll.'

Taking a deep breath, Kendra asked: 'Could I go? I mean this weekend?'

'Of course! Some of us wondered about asking you before, but we felt you were rather . . . What shall I say? Aloof, maybe.'

'I was.' She said thanks so simply and with her head so low that Miss Deller, who was eight years older, left her desk and put her arm about Kendra's shoulder: 'What is it, kid?'

'My mother. She comes on so strong, like maybe a neutron bomb, new improved economy-size.'

'Yes, some of us have noticed.'

'I want to go with you to Gunnison. I'll leave a note on my door that I'm off for the weekend.'

'Tell her you've headed to Kansas City with a truckdriver.'

'Now wait, she's basically a good woman.'

'I'm sure that every neutron bomb is convinced that it's basically good and that whatever it does is for the betterment of mankind. Tell her to go to hell. Don't ask, just tell her you're going. We'll be expecting you.”

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For just a moment Kendra feared that in asking for help from Miss Deller, she was getting in over her head. What did she know about the librarian? Was she, as her mother would have phrased it, 'a nice girl'? And what went on at the lodge in Gunnison?

But Miss Deller, as if she knew what Kendra was thinking, squeezed her shoulder and said: 'It's never as bad as you think it's going to be, except when it's lots worse.

If you ask me, Kendra, you better break loose.' Returning to her desk, she snapped her fingers and said: 'I do believe you had the right idea. Just leave a note. Do that four or five times and she'll stop coming over.'

At the lunch break that Friday, Kendra ran home and typed a neat note, which read: Dear Mother,

I've had to attend a school seminar in Montrose. Sorry. Very unexpected.

Kendra

After hurriedly packing two changes of clothes, she gathered up her snow gear and hurried back to school, where she taught with verve about Eskimos.

FOUR TEACHERS DROVE THE BEAUTIFUL HUNDRED AND

thirty miles of mountain road to Gunnison together Miss Deller, a woman science teacher, an assistant football coach and Kendra and they were a lively lot. The coach was married, but his wife had been to the Gunnison lodge and had small liking for snow sports or heady discussions, so she stayed home. After an analysis of what was wrong with the administration of the Grand Junction schools and a castigation of western Colorado politics, talk turned to national affairs, and all agreed that President Reagan represented a healthy turn to the right. Said the coach: 'High time we got some discipline in this country. He's on the right track.'

To Kendra's surprise, the other three were acutely interested in what a Mormon university was like, and since she had enjoyed Brigham Young she gave a good report, but the coach asked: 'Do they still discriminate against blacks? You know, you can't have a decent football team these days without them.'

'That's all in the past,' Kendra assured them. 'They didn't discriminate against me, and I'm not a Mormon.'

Fifteen minutes after arriving at the lodge, one of those things happened which proved once more how events that could have been set in motion only by chance had the power 945

to alter lives: a young man who taught mathematics in Canon City, a hundred miles to the east, joined the group Kendra was talking with, carrying six mimeographed papers stapled together: 'Hiya, Joe! I followed your advice, wrote to the department of education in Alaska, and by return mail got all this.'

'What is it?' Joe asked, and the man said: 'Information. Application blanks, if you will,' and the group showed such interest in his material that he sat down, removed the staple, and passed out pages of his document from Alaska. As various Colorado teachers began reading aloud details from the pages they had received, groans, whistles and cheers filled the coffee shop: 'My God! Listen to this! ”Three years experience in a good high school. Recommendations from university school of education. Rural school. You will teach all high school grades and subjects.”' At this reference to a system that had vanished fifty years ago in most of the world, the groans increased, and one man said: 'They want a miracle. Four different grades, eight different subjects, and I'll bet it's in one room.'

'It is,' the reader continued. 'Says so right here. ”One general room but not overcrowded,”'

and the protesting man groaned, but he was totally silenced by the next line: ' ”Beginning yearly salary, thirty-six thousand dollars.”'

'What?' The cry came from six different teachers, who started passing the incredible paper from hand to hand. Yes, the figure was accurate, $36,000 for a beginning teacher, with yearly increments thereafter to a level of $73,000 for high school, more for a principal. The Colorado teachers, and this was a superior experienced group, averaged $17,000, and for them to learn that in Alaska mere beginners earned more than twice as much forget the conditions was disturbing, and for Kendra Scott, whose salary as a novice was only $11,500, the differential was shocking.

But the single sheet which had wound up in her hands carried a message more profound than the level of salary. It came from an entity she had not heard of, the North Slope Borough School District, and it had been put together by a team of geniuses who had used all the tricks which cruise ship companies had found useful in luring prospective passengers:

You will fly to Seattle and board a sleek jet that will whisk you to Anchorage, where a representative of the Alaska education system will direct you to a modern hotel.

There you will join fellow beginning teachers for a seminar entitled 'Introduction to the North' with

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colored films. Next morning the same friendly representative will deliver you to the airport, where you will board a smaller jet that will fly you past snow-tipped Denali, on to the northern metropolis Fairbanks and then to Prudhoe Bay, where oil gushes out of the ground, providing Alaska with its millions.

From Prudhoe you will fly westward over the land of a million lakes, with an arm of the great Arctic Ocean at your right. You will land at Barrow, northernmost point in the United States. There you will spend three days visiting one of the finest high schools in the nation, after which a small, trim plane will fly you south to your school at Desolation Point, site of much Alaska history and an exciting Eskimo village whose citizens will be eager to make you feel at home.

By the time she reached the end of this paragraph, Kendra was so eager to fly off immediately that she quickly scanned the page for a phone number, and on the reverse side she found: Contact collect Vladimir Afanasi, Desolation Point, Alaska, 907-851-3305.