"L. Timmel Duchamp - Ms Peach Makes a Run for Coffee" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duchamp L Timmel)

Ms. Peach Makes a Run for Coffee
┬й1996 L.Timmel Duchamp

Ms. Peach hoarsely silenced the alarm. When she forced open her thickly gummed eyelids she saw that
sometime during the night the clock-radio had switched to battery power. Belatedly she noticed the white
noise scritching in her ears. Another hit on the generator, she conjectured as she searched for a working
station.

Dressing, Ms. Peach listened to the news and weather reports broadcast by one of the two stations in the
city equipped with backup generators. She knew one had to take anything gleaned from impersonal
sources as a probable lie, but found any news preferable to that blank emptiness into which rumor,
speculation, and private fantasy of direst catastrophe inevitably crept. And weather predictions, at least,
had a reasonable chance of being true.

Ms. Peach arrived at the Auvergne Preparatory Academy for Young Women sticky and sweaty from the
long dirty walk, though not disheveled--- as she observed of two colleagues sharing her elevator. One
could not afford to procrastinate ironing one's clothes or washing one's dishes or body, for one never
knew when water and power cuts would interfere with the orderly processes of civilized living. Ms.
Peach shook her head over the teachers who'd been caught unprepared: Ms. Auvergne would have
something sharp to say to them, indubitably; and if there were already notes of past lapses in their files,
they'd be looking for work by the end of the week. The teachers must be at least as neatly turned out as
the girls, that stood to reason. ``You are living examples to the students,'' Ms. Auvergne reminded them
at every staff meeting. ``Your appearance and deportment must be exemplary!''

Staring out at the faces in her homeroom class, Ms. Peach swallowed against the lump in her throat; her
eyes watered as she thought of the dozens of clean, pressed blouses hanging in these girls' closets. Never
did their blazers show signs of wear and tear or even the spills normal to adolescent clumsiness. When
Melanie was a teenager she never could wear a blouse two days running. And her school blazer
always seemed to be missing a button, which I insisted was her responsibility, not mine. Their
mothers of course have unlimited access to water and electricity, and probably maids as well. Ms.
Peach frowned down at the printout of the day's announcements to be read once the signal had been
given and the Pledge of Allegiance recited. Would her aging quality suit last another term? She had better
start saving the money for a new one. Ms. Auvergne gave no quarter when it came to propriety and
appearance. ``If we do not observe the decencies here, who will?'' Ms. Peach had once heard her say to
a teary-eyed teacher under ultimatum to replace her shabby threadbare suit.

Who indeed? Ms. Peach wondered as the signal pulsed through the halls and classrooms of the school.
Who indeed?

When Ms. Peach entered the Staff Lounge at morning break she found her colleagues in fevered
discussion of three choice (if not prime) pieces of news. According to the local NBC affiliate, the Mayor
and City Council were at that very moment debating whether or not to request Federal Assistance.
Colonel Lewis's faction, of course, opposed doing any such thing, and reportedly persisted in citing what
had happened in the city of M______ when FEMA had complied with its mayor's request for assistance.
That their Mayor, however, increasingly inclined these days towards bringing in the feds posed no
mystery for any of the teachers taking morning break in Auvergne's Staff Lounge. ``We just about have a
military junta running this city instead of the Mayor or the City Council,'' Ms. Devine stated bluntly,
provoking alarmed looks from her colleagues.
Nervous chatter poured into the pool of silence rippling outward from Ms. Devine's solecism, so that Ms.
Peach soon learned the second piece of news, an item her colleagues lingered over the way uncouth sorts