My sister is a writer. She writes terrible things about me. She thinks she is telling the family secrets, but we all think she’s hysterical. Everything is dark and gloomy in her stories, and there is always some gnawing pain that envelops the narrator. We think she should be on antidepressants. We know other families where it has helped.

As a sixth-grade teacher in a struggling seaside town with a drug problem, a high rate of domestic abuse, a seasonal housing crisis, and more than its share of strip clubs, pawn shops, and beer joints, I consider it part of my job to eavesdrop on my students. Oddly, they’re often relieved when I pull them aside and confess what I’ve heard. “Did you say you’ve been staying alone for two days?” I’ll ask. Or, “Tell me again what your mother’s boyfriend did to her.”

When I heard, I went to the newsstand to see for myself — her blurred blondness pictured ev…

This poem is excerpted from the anthology Passionate Hearts, edited by Wendy Maltz. © 1996 b…

From the outside, the house looked like many others on the street: weathered, traditional, lived-in. The paint on the trim had peeled like the bark of an overwatered plant, but the boxwood shrubs stayed neatly clipped year-round. The iron lawn furniture, placed in an uneven circle, suggested a large family. Pizza deliverymen were always surprised to learn the house was divided into six apartments.

Since my mother is Jewish, lots of people worry about me growing up the wrong religion. Our maid Picollo is one. She is a black slouch of a woman who walks half a mile from the bus stop when her husband can’t bring her on his way to work. She putters around like an army without shoes, and she doesn’t follow directions, because she figures, “If the lady don’t like it, she can clean her own house.”

Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do with myself, I tried my hand at teaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and English literature, but that isn’t what I do at all. I don’t teach English, I teach school — and I win awards doing it.