A Woman I Once Knew

Our sixth grade librarian had one leg shorter than the other by several inches. She wore a thick, black orthopedic shoe with a huge extended sole. Sometimes she’d try to match it with a plain black shoe on her other foot but this futile attempt at pairing looked more pathetic than if she had just worn a white sneaker or pink clog. She could walk without a cane but had to swing her upper body from side to side in wide swaths like an orangutan. Whenever anyone stared, she’d force herself to smile but one stretched so violently across her face and so perpendicular to her normal somber expression that it looked painful.

An old maid at 25, she was a librarian but couldn’t even walk quietly.

This was in another state.

Years later on a return visit I overheard a conversation in which her suicide was briefly mentioned. I didn’t interrupt to ask for details thinking that a kind of staring. Still the petty gossip in me can’t help but wonder: Was it in the summer, the constant isolation more unbearable than the taunts of skipping children? Was it in a garage with the car running, her bulky boot left on the gas? Or was it by hanging? Did she kick the chair away with her runt leg? Could her neck have broken at an angle that somehow allowed her feet to dangle in parallel?

Was she mourned?

And why do we all crave symmetry in a lopsided world?