Teaching high school English was my first job out of college. It was at a huge public school in a working class suburb of Boston, filling in for a teacher on maternity leave. I was only hired because the principal and the other guy who interviewed me, whose title I don’t remember but who called himself Dr., had delusions of snobbery and were impressed by the abstract idea of hiring an Ivy League graduate. I was so awkward and clueless, and so obviously green, that they must simply not have been paying attention.

The only part of the job that was bearable was actually teaching my students. They were such adorable little pumpkins that I just wanted to pinch their collective little cheeks. Well, you know, most of them anyway. I liked the subject and kind of liked figuring out how to run my classes. But even that was fraught with self-doubt and anxieties. I never felt caught up. The administration had recently instituted school-wide tests: all students taking a given subject would take the same test. I had no idea what would be on the test and was afraid to ask. My students were going to crash and burn and it would be my fault.

The only housing I could find was far away. I rented a room in Acton, one town away from historic Concord, from a woman who taught flamenco dancing and drove a cab. I had a car, but I was terrified of driving, especially in the snow. The car sucked and would often crap out on me. I had bought it because it was so pretty: a lemon-yellow Volvo station wagon. Tip: don’t buy a car that actually looks like a lemon.

I was so hapless I didn’t even have an ice scraper, so every morning I would warm up a pot of water on the stove and pour it over the windshield. One day I slashed a tire driving over a jagged piece of ice in the driveway. If it was snowing, which it seemed to do all the time, I took a cab to school, blowing the day’s pay. To get home on those days I rode the train, a twenty-five minute walk from the school in the snow. Since the only trains in the area were commuter trains, I had to ride all the way into Boston, and then take another train out to my own far-flung suburb. I don’t remember how long it took. At least a couple of hours.

All of this was arguably self-imposed by my own idiocy. But what I couldn’t help, and thought I should have been able to overcome, was my inability to sleep, which is one of the sources of my chronic fatigue. At the time, I thought it just sounded too improbable that I wouldn’t be able to get used to getting up early in the morning. Everybody does it, a lot of people don’t like it. It’s life. And yet no matter how tired I was I couldn’t fall asleep at night. I would be awake until one or two in the morning, and then have to get up at 5:45, because for reasons that baffle me and that I find sadistic, public high schools start the day at 7:30 in the morning.

I’m sure anyone reading this has had the experience of getting up way too early and utterly exhausted on a cold and still-dark morning. You leave the cocoon of a warm bed and feel cruelly prodded and stung by everything you come in contact with: the hard floor, cool running water, scratchy clothing. Every day I was a little more sleep deprived than the day before, and I wandered into school like someone in a dream, or on drugs.

I felt that my strangeness and sadness were plastered all over me, and the only way I could think of to conceal them was to never speak to anyone, which couldn’t have done much to make me seem more normal. I was intimidated by the stodgy normalcy of the other teachers. Their opinion of this weird, mute bird perched in their midst could not possibly have been good, I figured. They were always complaining about the students, who they thought were stupid and disrespectful, the administration, who they thought were meddlesome and demanding, and the pay, which I thought was a small fortune. One teacher told me that multiple choice was the key to all happiness: less work to grade. I was naive enough to be aghast.

I’m not sure if I dreamed this or something, but I could swear that when I went to the office, feeling sheepish and tongue-tied, as always, to ask about my paycheck, which I had not received after several weeks, the secretary there actually turned to another worker and said, “The little booger wants to know where her paycheck is.” Maybe I heard wrong?

Even my landlady felt sorry for me, so she invited me out one night to see a movie with her boyfriend. We saw Kiss of the Spider Woman, a real cheerer-upper about a gay prisoner in a South American jail.

It wasn’t long before I was too sleep deprived and too freaked out to continue. I think I was absent for a few days, probably under the delusion that I could recover my strength, and then finally told them I wasn’t coming back. The Dr. guy who had hired me said I had to come in to provide materials for the next teacher, even though when I had started it had been smack in mid-semester and I had received absolutely nothing. The teacher I was replacing had refused to even give me her grade book and attendance record, saying she needed them, which she obviously didn’t.

I went in to school one last time, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. I had to go into the classroom itself, I don’t remember exactly why, and the kids clapped when they saw me, which made me want to cry, but I just waved no, don’t clap, I’m not really here, and I left.

I parked my car at the train station and took the train to Providence, where I spent the weekend. When Bill and I went back, together, in his car to retrieve my car, it had been towed. It hadn’t been illegally parked, but the police had thought it best to tow it, for its own protection, because they saw some kids hanging around it, opening the doors, which I had left unlocked. Couldn’t they have just locked the doors and let it be? What if I had come back on the train, as I had originally planned? The train station in North Billerica was a small wooden platform, whose windy and snowy desolation was reminiscent of something out of a Russian novel. I would have been stranded, alone, in the middle of a frozen wasteland. The police did not apologize, since they had done us a favor by towing my car, and we had to pay the towing fee.