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Arlene is the third girl in the second row, with her desk up. You Don't Know Me"Who do you think you are?" the teacher demanded. "Your parents work hard to provide you with a nice coat, and you're tearing a hole in it?" Miss Twisted Face (I don't remember her name) glared at me, her helmet of steel wool hair blocking the sun. I cowered against the brick wall in P.S. 159's concrete schoolyard. She was screeching at me for pulling on a thread where my top button was coming loose. I remember the way my stomach gurgled and the sour taste of the bologna sandwich which was rising in my throat. "I'm sorry," I whispered. I knew she was making a terrible mistake, yelling at me instead of the girl who stole lunch money or the boy who punched smaller kids in the stomach. Who do you think you are? Many times since that winter day when I trembled in a Brooklyn schoolyard, someone has demanded an answer to that question. Sometimes they put the question more politely: Why should we hire you? Or: What do you know about wine marketing? When it became politically incorrect to mention age as a qualification, the question was veiled: Most of the students in our masters program are... recent graduates. So I was 48 years old, and the rest of the students were about 23. I learned to look my questioners right in the eye, state my qualifications and smile. Once in a while, the scared little girl would surface when confronted by a bullying executive vice president or a bearded professor emeritus, but I persevered. Seven years ago, when I retired from teaching college English and moved to California, the question returned, asked in a quieter way: occupation? I would fill in the blank with one simple, inadequate word: "retired." Now who did I think I was? Recently, I spent 90 minutes feeding a FAX machine, one of many helpers getting ready for the Sonoma County Volunteer Center's quarterly Hands Across the County, when good folks give up their Saturday morning to perform such useful tasks as weeding school gardens and sorting donated food into packages for the needy. There I stood with a stack of papers, doing a "menial" task. I was letting the schools and nonprofit agencies know who would be coming to help them, fully aware of who I was, with the good fortune to be where I was needed.
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