Hello Jennifer." The voice is a pleasant baritone with a firm base and just a few reedy overtones: a thoroughly commanding voice.

"Hello Mrs. Joy." The voice almost squeaks trying to fill the hall in the receding tones of Mrs. Joy.

"Hello Katherine."

"Hello Mrs. Joy."

"Hello Robert." They're so simple minded.

"Hello Mrs. Joy."

"Hello Polly." The children have an excuse, but the parents don't.

Mrs. Joy crosses her arms and lets them settle on the summit of her belly. She is in position at the main intersection of main hall of Gandy Elementary School. A massive, imposing, figure aggressively positioned so that every child has to step around her and then be greeted by name.

Mrs. Joy gives herself to a few moments of reflection and congratulates herself again on how thoroughly the children had learned their places. The first few days of school there had been hearty hellos. Now there was muttering that ended with something that sounded like Joy. Or nothing as a little body trudged past. Several parents had walked into the office to make appointments without even trying to talk. Mrs. Joy, as she refers to herself during these moments, is clearly the center of things and exercising her mastery of the familiar. Mrs. Joy cranes her neck to see her reflection in the window of the entry door and then looks away almost blushing with her recognition of her place in this school. Somehow the feeling of mastery is never as potent as the vision.

As the flush of control subsides Mrs. Joy ticks through her preparations for the day. Her dress hints at the cut and fabric of an old fashioned frock, but is light and cool. Her brown/gray hair is pulled back, but not severe. She is focused, but not self-important as she greets every child that enters the school by name. She has no time or words for parents during her daily vigil. This time is for her students. This is one of her small pleasures.

When the last child has straggled in Mrs. Joy walks toward her office rigidly enforcing her body with internal rules against the untoward movements that fat sometimes participates in. Her ankles and feet are still the ankles and feet of the body she had as a teenager and as she walks she imagines a light almost skipping step. The light-skipping feel requires attention.

As she walks Mrs. Joy glances at the mural taped to the wall of the main hall. The children had painted the twenty five foot mural for the upcoming spring celebration. The brown paper the mural was painted on is puckered from the water-based paint that has dried in patches of color so opaque and gritty that it makes her teeth hurt. When did it go up? Damn, two more days and a celebration before I can take it down.

The mural is of her, Mrs. Joy, greeting children as they frolic into school. The painting, like paintings of this sort, can be interpreted in time frame and sections. The section done first thing in the morning has clear outlines and the paint is only smudged in a few places. But that mass of wavery paint must have been done as the day was winding down. What the mass is, is anybody's guess, but it looks like a hole. Everything in the mural is as expected, except Mrs. Joy's face. Someone had done something with the face that makes Mrs. Joy take pause every time she forgets to not look as she walks by. Above the fat blotchy body is a head with dark shadows cutting into what should be Santa Claus cheeks and there is a canine cast to the nose and eyes.

People who do not understand the morning ritual that inspired the mural might suspect that it showed a dark wolfen face poised above a body that is herding children into a dark hole. The blocky, blotchy body seems to be dissembling so the wolf can follow the children into the hole.

Looking at this mural fills Mrs. Joy with a burst of searing anger. That little toad who painted the face had seen something, captured something that no one else even suspected. Everything else was luck of the draw, but the face is an invasion of one of Mrs. Joy's greatest pleasures. She feels invaded in her most private sense of self and her feelings are slapped on brown paper to be mocked.

Mrs. Joy pulls herself together and resumes her walk with a light skip-step, taking time to extend her ankle elegantly as she moves forward. She would never fall into that splayed heavy march of Mrs. Defrates. Nan Defrates! In a few hours Mrs. Defrates would come marching into her office with her whole body leaning into every step and bouncing with every footfall in an unplanned and unseemly display of body parts. But Mrs. Joy would not give in to the rule of fat. Her legs would stay close. Her toes would be pointed and her ankles and arches would move her forward with a quick flex and slow elegant recoil.

"Mrs. Joy?" The voice of Hannah Green, the school secretary takes her by surprise and ruins a step. "Jean Sims called. Her aide didn't show up today, but all the kids did. She wants to know if she can send some of her kids to Martha Sutler's room."

It always gives Mrs. Joy a little surge of pleasure to hear herself referred to as Mrs. while others are referred to in a familiar way. But in this case it is not enough pleasure to overcome her annoyance with a spoiled step and that bitch Jean Sims. Jean Sims, a second grade teacher, is like Defrates in many ways. Sims is young and slim while Defrates is old and fat, but like Defrates she is smart and well liked and infused with smugness about what is best for the children.

Mrs. Joy's response to Hannah Green is pithy and quick. "Well Hannah, tell Jean that we have to have a meeting with Martha Sutler before we can do anything like that." Before Hannah can reply Mrs. Joy turns away.

Mrs. Joy had dropped her first name after her first day as a student teacher. One of the children called her Miss Sumner and that was it. She was home. Her supervising teacher tried to continue calling her Anna. It was one of her first lessons in reversing control. The supervising teacher caved first. All Mrs. Joy had to do was ignore her and use her energy to create a palpable silence. A silence as big as the voice she could inflate in the masonry halls of Gandy. A silence that weaker people always filled and stumbled around in until they said the right thing, like Miss Sumner instead of Anna, so that someone else would help them out of the silence.

Later marrying Virgil Joy had earned the Mrs. that Mrs. Joy needed. Miss was better than a familiar name, but Miss was not solid. It rang with implications of youth or lack of it. Miss had no gravity that the bearer did not earn. Mrs. was rock solid and like her frock Mrs. has implications of conservative strength and a scent of familiar faith in institutions.

Virgil had been an annoyance. A boy at any age, he was so cowed and shaken by the world and what it demanded that any gesture directed to him above rebuke might be mistaken for affection. He would have married a waitress that brought him the right order, so when Miss Sumner unzipped his pants and rubbed his little thing on the second date a proposal came in short order. That was years ago and now his soft round face was one of the familiar images of home; chairs, tables, curtains, a toaster, and Virgil. Virgil hovered in the tail of familiar things that tracked Mrs. Joy's comet and Mrs. Joy could not remember the last time she engaged Virgil as a person. She shared nothing of her private self with him, and he was her most intimate acquaintance. How had that little bitch gotten in and put her picture on the wall?

As Hannah Green stumbles behind her, Mrs. Joy turns quickly so that Hannah has to draw up short to keep from running into her. Hannah hesitates and Mrs. Joy turns away again.

But Hannah does not retreat. "But Sims has 29 students and no aide. How can she come to a meeting?" This plea is delivered with the shallow breath of fear.

Mrs. Joy's head whips around so fast that Hannah starts to duck. Thinking about her student teaching days had been a good memory, not a memory to be sucked out of for someone like Jean Sims. Her response is crisp, "Have you talked to Jean Sims already?"

"I'm sorry. No I haven't. She sent a note. It's just that Mrs. Sutler only has twenty children when everyone is there and an aide to help her."

"Everybody has work and responsibility Hannah. If this is a real problem Jean Sims will find time for a meeting and Martha Sutler will find time for a meeting." Mrs. Joy modulates her voice from a brisk business like beginning reducing the volume word by word until Hannah Green is leaning forward at the edge of her balance to hear at the end. Then loudly, "Does Jean Sims have an answer?"

Hannah Green steps back in defeat, "I'll talk to Miss Sims."

Mrs. Joy refocuses her attention on walking to her office. Putting dents in Hannah Green's concern is easy, almost too easy, but somehow it still works as a small pleasure. Mrs. Joy walks from the main hall to the narrow corridor of the administrative office and checks the clock to see how long before Defrates comes in.

Nan Defrates makes small pleasures difficult. She is overweight and out of shape with chopped hair. But her look is unflinching. Her eyes connect in a clear unblinking look that does not challenge or even inquire. It is just solid. During their first meeting Mrs. Joy had ignored Nan initially, shuffling papers to pass the time. But the Defrates look leveled across the desk and gave no hints of purpose. It grabbed at Mrs. Joy's hands and face and made her drop papers.

Mrs. Joy had made an observation early in her life that if you met someone else's eyes on that person's terms it made you want to fill those eyes with words from deep within yourself: words that rightfully belonged inside.

When Mrs. Joy was in college she had talked to a psych grad student as part of orientation: some sort of screening process. She and the grad student sat in a small sterile room, just the two of them talking. Mrs. Joy stared into the quiet brown eyes of the other girl. She had not had many friends while she was growing up and this was a heady experience. The girl explained the process in a self-assured voice then fixed her eyes on Mrs. Joy and waited. Quietly at first and then finally working to a torrent of words Mrs. Joy tried to fill those brown pools with things from deep in her most private thoughts. Events, snatches, dreams, it could have gone on and on. But the girl stopped her with a sharp exclamation, "Oh my god, the isolation must have been horrible!"

Without a beat, in Mrs. Joy's eyes the girl's face flattened out, her eyes became flat sheets of color, and her mouth appeared as a red gash between her flat cheeks. That mouth moved with disturbing jerks. The girl was probably trying to recover, trying to apologize. But whatever words came out became interference, interference that could easily be dealt with and covered with Mrs. Joy's words.

Mrs. Joy remembered talking to the girl after the comment, saying something about how important a home is to a child. And she remembered continuing to talk until the interference was gone. And then continuing to talk until the girl's face lost all of its features in hazy dissolution and Mrs. Joy walked from the room in control.

Mrs. Joy had no desire to be in a room with Nan Defrates. Paying attention was tiring, especially with a beast like Defrates who counted every word. Nan Defrates was on a parent fund raising committee; one of the committees that Mrs. Joy was credited with using effectively to make Gandy Elementary a fine school. But Mrs. Joy could only think of her as an enemy. Mrs. Joy felt her committee members should be sleek , refined, and fuzzy on details, not some fat factory worker. Especially some fat factory worker who diagrammed every sentence as she heard it and then set about teasing out every inconsistency.

What made the tiresome experience of Nan Defrates even worse was that Nan Defrates was an education researcher for a think tank and she was always talking about some new theory or another. Theories that Mrs. Joy paid no attention too, beyond the barest lip service in college or when she had to sit on committees. Theories that she had no intention of discussing much less implementing now.

All this theory and discussion was too much. Mrs. Joy felt that she had made concessions. There were drawings and arts works by children on the walls and, while they always provoked cooing from parents, they did not hold a candle to the professionally designed posters distributed by textbook publishers or even better, bare masonry walls. And on a regular basis Mrs. Joy would listen to parental complaints about teachers. Those were dues and having to listen to discussions of learning theory on top of dues was too much. Nothing could be done now. Defrates was coming and she would have to listen just enough to respond to the flow of the conversation. With effort it could be reduced to a minor annoyance. Somewhere, somehow with Nan Defrates the discussion of fund raising would bleed into the basal reading series and on and on.

It really wasn't that big a deal anymore. The teaching staff was almost where she wanted it, no disruptions were entertained from that quarter any longer. Jean Sims, once a thorn, hardly came to meetings. Looking at the big picture Defrates was a minor annoyance, but still an annoyance and Mrs. Joy felt she was beyond these concerns. She had paid her dues, and earned her pleasures.

Mrs. Joy lowers herself into her chair, looks around her office, and settles in for a quiet wait. Mrs. Joy had carefully manipulated her schedule over time, rotating tasks and hinting to various people at various times a virtual blizzard of possible schedules. Mrs. Joy was comfortable that absolutely no one knew what she would be doing at any given time. And so she took pleasure in doing nothing: in sitting still; in avoiding all trappings of progress and achievement; in advancing no one's agenda, save her own: in doing spadework for her small pleasures.

Sometime later and long before she could see her, Mrs. Joy could hear Defrates stumbling and bumping along and the sound took all the pleasure out of the quiet office long before the body followed it in. Nan Defrates was prompt. Stomping her way to Hannah Green to be announced then stomping her way to the chair across the desk from Mrs. Joy.

Nan Defrates walked into the dead quiet room oblivious to its charms and with no respect for Mrs. Joy's mastery of inertia. Until Nan Defrates sat in the chair across the desk from Mrs. Joy and caused it to squeak as it pushed along the floor nothing had moved. Time and all its energetic allies had stopped for Mrs. Joy, but that pleasure leaked into the void where silence hid when this beast was afoot.

Nan Defrates paid no heed to the silence around her and made no effort to be still. She wiggled in the chair, perhaps to get comfortable, before fixing a level stare at Mrs. Joy. During these moments of disruption Mrs. Joy arrived at a decision that she would give Defrates nothing. She would push this exchange to the brink of insult to give Defrates nothing.

Nan talked first, "Hi. Have you read the report I sent last week?"

"I looked through it."

"Well? Do you agree with my conclusions?"

"Let's review your report."

"All right. This effort covers two book fairs and ongoing orders to date. We stopped taking book orders two weeks ago and there are now three outstanding orders totaling a little more than 12 dollars."

An opening with almost no risk, "How much more than 12 dollars?"

A few pages are shuffled and Nan Defrates begins reviewing a page of the report. As Nan concentrates Mrs. Joy slowly leans forward and begins to snake a pencil across her desk aiming at the back of Nan's report. As Nan shuffles her papers and looks up Mrs. Joy, who has not moved her torso as her pudgy hand went on its mischievous journey, briefly locks eyes and then looks down. There was no outward sign, but there was an inward sigh when she had to stop so close to a small pleasure.

"Twelve dollars and seventy seven cents."

"I guess that's not enough to worry about."

"No, I don't think so, and even with twelve dollars and seventy seven cents outstanding we have exceeded our goal on book sales by more than 200 per cent."

Another opening, "How much more than 200 hundred percent?"

Nan Defrates looks at Mrs. Joy with a look that, informed by experience, is both tired and confused just a few words into the meeting. Again a few pages are shuffled as Nan Defrates locates a page of the report to review. Mrs. Joy's pudgy hand picks up from its earlier aborted effort and quickly reaches its target lightly slashing a half moon on the clear white plane of the page. Mrs. Joy swells with her small pleasure, and, as if on cue, Nan looks up and begins to deliver her answer. "Two Thousand ----" Nan stops mid word.

Or maybe Mrs. Joy just quit listening mid word, because Mrs. Joy's attention is now on a flicker of movement reflected in the small window of the main entry door. It is a small window and almost the only thing outside of Mrs. Joy's office visible from Mrs. Joy's office. The flicker is small, but she caught it because it was where it shouldn't be. From her experience the flicker had to come from the front of the multipurpose room, and at this time no one should be in the hall, much less in the front of the multipurpose room.

Mrs. Joy starts to rise, and then remembers where she is and looks at Nan Defrates. "I'm sorry. I saw something that I should check into."

In a voice thick with sarcasm, "Don't let me keep you from your work."

The icy tone is not lost on Mrs. Joy who is already rushing from the office. A swell of embarrassment flushes her face and Mrs. Joy reviews, while still in motion, the distance from small pleasure to embarrassment. It is a distance she seldom travels. Distant memories of the red sting of embarrassment and the shrill voice that stung it across her cheeks have kept Mrs. Joy firmly in the familiar for many years and she can envision no pleasure in the novel. Still the pattern of her school has been tampered with and Mrs. Joy cannot stop.

The hallway is still, with no sign of anything or anyone who could have caused the flicker. Mrs. Joy asks herself if she really saw a flicker or if she just had to get away from the Defrates woman. Even if she didn't really see a flicker getting away was probably worth some congratulations as a small pleasure. But there had been a movement and it wasn't a bird, light, or wind in the leaves. It was something in her hallway.

Mrs. Joy walks into the multipurpose room and begins to look around. There is nothing near the source of the flicker, except the sealed door to the old lecture hall. The sealed doorway to the lecture hall is too much like Mrs. Joy's past to have escaped her attention and it is too much like her past for her to go in. The bright familiar tile walls of the multipurpose room house reflect her domain, but the description from the janitor of a steep narrow wooden stair behind the old door leading to a steep musty lecture hall from Gandy's distant past as a junior high houses nothing save a past that is best forgotten.

The door is thick with paint slopped over every sharp line until the doorness of the thing is sculpted into wallness with contours and drops of paint. A dozen wood screws prominently displayed along both sides of the door form a border. The old door appears solid, but when Mrs. Joy steps to the door to touch it lightly, it pops open and the wood screws shake dust from the board that has rotted to powder holding them in place all these years. Mrs. Joy notices as she watches the dust settle to the brown fleck linoleum of the floor that small footsteps in the dust lead into the stairwell.

Inside the door, the stairway is not dark. It shines with light filtered through time and the dust of the narrow shaft leading up. With one look around Mrs. Joy pops into the stairwell and pulls the door closed behind her as best she can. There is some pleasure in this turn; a pleasing image of disappearing into a secret chamber while that Defrates creature huffs and puffs in waiting spins through, but the pleasure cannot survive the cramped space around her. The dust, worn wooden steps, and cracked plaster walls close around her as her eyes adjust to the light.

There is no strong argument to continue. Mrs. Joy is a creature of the familiar. She owns the familiar and makes it her home and then finds her pleasure in its shadows. Novelty and speculation hold no allure and this stairwell is in that rank. But there is a nagging feeling that if she does not go up she won't hold sole title. Someone else will have an edge on her. There is in that feeling a glimpse of her childhood before she turned out the lights on those memories. A woman standing outside her door reminding her of her worthless efforts until she was able to make enough interference to cover the noise. There will be no pleasure in this journey; Mrs. Joy just wants to get to the top of the stairs.

Mrs. Joy manipulates her foot up to the first stair and quickly discovers that no amount of posturing can relieve the weight coming to bear on the step. And then with resolve Mrs. Joy tortures the treads that respond with groans and the quick shriek of wood moving against nails as she climbs.

The noise is all encompassing in the stairwell, but it gives no clue to any signal it might be sending out of the stairwell and speculation is difficult in this close unfamiliar place. When she reaches the last few stairs she can feel the noise from the stairwell rushing past her and filling the steep dark room that opens around her. Her noise is loud, but not alone. It is mingled with the noise of others.

The stairwell curls ladder like up to the floor of the room so that Mrs. Joy's eyes scan the room at floor level before she is in the room. There is only a small amount of floor around the stair well. A stage with a lectern towers to one side and steep aisles leading to rows of desks are to the other.

Mrs. Joy moves her shoulders into the room and be leaning back she can see up the steep rows of desks. Behind the desks there is a rounded areas that fills the room with light cut into colored patches. It is clearly the stained glass window above the main entry door.

Mrs. Joy moves her upper body into the room and she can see that there are boxes and dark shapes stacked near the window, and there is noise from that area; scuttling noises of little things trying to hide.

Mrs. Joy continues up until she can climb onto the floor. She dusts herself off and looks around to pick the best way up to the stack of boxes. She stands with her back to the lectern and examines the steep bank of desks and the four aisles leading to a walkway that rims the top desks. Behind the walkway is an open area that leads to the stained glass window. Almost half of the window is visible from Mrs. Joy's vantagepoint. The room has a swell of light of different colors above the old desks, but the desks, dark and dusty, seem to suck in any light near them. The aisles leading up between the banks of desks are bowed and scuffed from use and the center aisles seem to lead into a dark hole. The outside aisles with a suggestion of light are more inviting.

Mrs. Joy walks across the floor with only a few squeaks and begins to work her way up an outside aisle. The scuttling has stopped and the room is quiet except for the scuff of Mrs. Joy's feet and the occasional squeak of a board.

In the quiet room with the dust whorls spinning in golden patterns that defy gravity Mrs. Joy's mind is filled with disturbing bursts of opportunity. In this quiet room she can do anything that there is opportunity to do and no on can stop her or dispute her story of what happened.

Mrs. Joy moves with purpose to the stack of boxes, but the purpose is tinged with confusion. So what! So what if she has an opportunity to do anything she wants? She has always been happy with her small pleasures. Her small pleasures have kept her sealed and untouched by creatures like the Defrates. But the heat, the shimmering light, her movement forward, the feeling she is getting from little bodies cowering from her approach seduce her emotional governor and suggest that she can go beyond a small pleasure.

Mrs. Joy is close enough now to see that old curtains have been laid on the boxes. Above the dusty waves of fabric she can see two small faces floating between the boxes and the stained glass window. The girls bodies are pushed against the boxes and the patterns of light from the plate glass window make it hard to see the shapes clearly, but a splash of yellow shows one face with a cheek pushed against fabric, eyes squinted shut, and a jaw set in nervous fear. The other face is bathed in reddish light.

But the red face has ho attraction. The yellow face is the little bitch who painted the mural. No kaleidoscope of colored light, dust, fabric, boxes, and little girls can hide that trespassing soul. From a little pit of opportunity Mrs. Joy feels her moment approach. A moment that could lead to pleasure so free of disguise and negotiation that it would last, burned into her consciousness with an electric jolt of action, for the rest of her life as rich as pure as the moment it happened.

As though connected to that thought the little girl lifts her head and looks directly at Mrs. Joy and then backs away from the boxes until she stands with her back against the window. She spreads her arms for a moment as she bumps the window and light streams around her until her body in a silhouette against a multicolored aura.

Mrs. Joy begins to run the last few steps to the girl. She has no plan. She is filled with the sensation that she could drive the girl through the window and that action, free of consequence in this private world above the school, would yield a reward. That the girl would fall and look up at her as she fell with knowledge of the fear scarred child that haunted Mrs. Joy's private self and took comfort only in the moments of commerce with pain and confusion that Mrs. Joy could inflict, and solace only in deceitful and self aggrandizing pleasures that Mrs. Joy could create.

The little girl stands frozen and Mrs. Joy moves forward until a little arm comes out of nowhere and pulls the girl to the floor as Mrs. Joy hurtles by crashing through the window.

As Mrs. Joy falls to the ground she arches her back and pulls her legs together trying to push her dress down with her arm. And she reflects in her mother's voice as the child from her private self watches in terror. I should not have been greedy. I should have been satisfied with my small pleasures.