The Paramedic Who Knew My Name
The neighbor was already in the driveway. Dolores Vance, from next door, seventy-one, in a quilted coat over her nightgown. She had seen the lights. She did not ask what happened. She took one look at me and said, “Where are your shoes?”
I did not know where my shoes were.
“Marcus,” Dana called from the ambulance. “Let’s go.”
He stopped at the bottom of the back steps and turned around. “Somebody drives you,” he said. “Not you.”
“I’ve got her,” Dolores said.
He looked at me again. “He’s got a pulse and he’s pinking up. They’ll take him straight to the lab and open the blockage. I can’t promise you anything, ma’am, you know I can’t. But folks with a bystander who started compressions in the first minute do a whole lot better than folks without. You gave him the minutes. I’ll find you at the hospital, after I hand him off.”
He climbed in the back. The doors closed. They went out of the driveway with the lights going and the siren holding off until they hit Van Rensselaer Street, the way the good ones do.
I stood in the doorway for a while.
Then Dolores found my shoes. They were beside the recliner. I don’t know how.
I had better tell you about the name.
For thirty-eight years I taught third grade in a brick elementary school on the east side of Rensselaer, Indiana, the same school Gerald’s mother attended, in a wing that still smells of floor wax and wet mittens. I started at twenty-six with a degree from Ball State and shoes that hurt. I ended at sixty-four with a standing order for orthopedic inserts. In between I taught somewhere over nine hundred children to carry the one, to write a paragraph with a topic sentence, and to hold a pencil like a person and not like a dagger.
My name on the door was Mrs. Tillman, in black letters on a white strip. But nobody called me that. Every child who sat in my room, and every brother and cousin who heard about it secondhand, called me Mrs. Tilly. The first class I ever taught, in the fall of 1988, had it settled by the second week of October. I thought for thirty-eight years that it was one of those things that happens to a teacher, a name nobody gave you and everybody agreed on. At church I was Faye. Gerald called me Fayzie when he wanted something. But in the hall, at the drinking fountain, on the playground with a boot lace in my hand and a kid crying on the curb, I was Mrs. Tilly.