The Boiler Room
But when would I have seen it? Maybe it was on a tour, a day devoted to those who fed us and kept the school clean. We were taken through the kitchen like Kennedy to meet the hair-netted ladies who unfroze our lunches. Shy of their teeth, they covered their mouths when they laughed. Then it was on to the boiler room. We had walked by it before, put our tender ears to the green, industrial door to listen for the hiss of steam. The janitors stood down in the pit. They were black men in blue coveralls, laid off from shifts at Honeywell and Microswitch. The somnolent grooms of brooms, it was they who tossed sawdust on our pinkish vomit to set it into something dry enough to sweep up, and cleaned the toilets, those missed targets. That they had lives outside the school never occurred to us. Because they were there when we arrived in the morning and there when we left in the afternoon, we assumed they lived there, perhaps in the boiler room. They were responsible for the furnace, which made it possible for us to slough off our coats in the dead of winter without a second thought, the windows fogging up with our quiet answers. I seem to remember a teacher telling us that if it wasn’t for the boiler room we could do no learning. The lesson I learned that day I have never forgotten. I learned that there is something akin to a boiler room at the heart of every institution, housing a kind of furnace where something cold and fluid is placed under such pressure, and at such a high temperature, that it could scald you if you got too close. Put your ear to the right doors and you’re sure to hear it.