This short story follows a self-destructive woman who teaches math at a Catholic school despite the fact that she a) doesn’t really know math well enough to teach it and b) has to doctor the answers on the tests her students hand in to hide her failures in teaching and keep herself employed. She holds on to her ex even though he’s long since moved on after their divorce and calls him at all hours of the night while she’s drunk. On the topic of her drinking, she does so excessively, occasionally does drugs with her equally as destructive friend, and has sex with random people without asking about prior health history or when their last STD tests was. To top it off, rather than seeking therapy for her various issues, she laments to her students regularly and for longer than necessary, thus failing to teach them properly and needing to doctor records. Throughout the story, we watch as she barely manages to stumble through life and maintain some semblance of a routine.
The only time we see her attempt to actually better herself is when her Ex-husband asks to meet up with her. This is a turning point in her story, and from the information we’re given, we can assume she’s doing everything to appear like she, too, has moved on from the relationship. (Of course, in order to do so, we must ignore the fact she frequently drunk calls her ex, but she seems to do so, so we’re given the hint to do the same.) This is her turning point because based off her prior history of calling and lamenting to her ex, we can assume part of her hoped that the ex would want to have one last fling and possibly rekindle their relationship.
This woman is incredibly lonely and doesn’t even realize it until the end when she imagines a Priest acting fondly toward her when she attempts to leave her job. She always notices friends or families or groups of people when she’s in public and, near the end, notes almost sadly how none of the men she brought home “lasted more than a few hours” as if she were hoping one of them would want to after seeing how she lived. She wanted to leave her job after getting cut off by her ex because it hurt her more than she was willing to say, or possibly more than she realized herself. Her ex was one person she saw as a constant in her life since they spent the most time together when they were a couple, and besides her job, she never really had much else to hold on to. This is another behavior of the self destructive: this one bad thing happened, so I might as well wreck everything else.
Her decision to stay at the school was the one thing that shows that this character still has the potential to grow. If she really wanted to leave, she would have left the letter in the box and carry on, waiting for the final check to come in the mail or for the concerned emails/letters to come through asking if she’s sure about her decision. Instead, she carries the letter with her and tears it up to continue moving forward. She doesn’t say it, nor do I think she realizes it, but this character not only made the decision to stay at her job, but also stay with people since without them, she really won’t have anything to hold onto or maintain herself for, you know, despite barely being able to. And either way, how she takes care of herself during school days is still better than how she took care of herself after getting rejected. She needs the stability and the contact and she doesn’t take it away from herself.
Your take on this story was very different from mine, but I can definitely see where you’re coming from. Personally, I think that she’d grown so used to being lonely that all of her escapades were attempts to distance herself or distract herself from her loneliness. I don’t think that she wanted to admit how much she actually needed people to break her out of her self-destructive habits (hence the calls to her ex), but I also think that this job as a teacher was toxic for her in that it doesn’t push her to do much to change herself. Everything in her life was so habitual and repetitive that I think by staying it’s actually detrimental to herself and was another nail in the coffin so to speak. She said that she loved her kids, her students, but her actions say otherwise. What teacher shows up to school drunk/with a hangover, drinks on break, actively doesn’t teach, and flubs tests scores? I don’t think that she was ready to do her job in the slightest, it was more of a convenience for her, so that stability could also be a double-edged sword. If she had a good mindset, support system, maybe a close friend that she could confide in, or something similar to that then I could see this job being the perfect fit for her. But that just wasn’t the case, at least to me, but this is still a really interesting take!