mythology

My classroom has a storage closet with a large window and bookshelves along one wall. I love this closet. I spent days in it, clearing out the years of accumulated files and coffee mugs. I found a single stalk of plastic silver flowers, dusty posters that students had turned in with projects, a box of half empty bottles of tempera paint, and one of those small black combs that school photographers give out on picture day.

Against one wall, there is a large, two-door, wooden cabinet. It is like a wardrobe, except that it is in a school storage closet, so it could not be. One door of the wardrobe is open, revealing a neat row of yellow shelves, and I put the tempera paints on the top shelf. The other door is padlocked shut.

I want it open.

Each classroom comes with one locking cabinet, a place to secure the things you don't want to disappear. I think to myself that I would really like to have two locking cabinets. I'd like to have my own lock on the door, my own key around my neck.

I found the teacher that had my room last year and asked her about it. "Is that your lock?" She shook her head and said it wasn't, that it was locked when she moved in. She said she thinks that the room once belonged to a social studies teacher, but that he retired years ago, leaving his locked cabinet behind. I was suprised. "Didn't you want to open it?", I asked. She shrugged. I pressed on. "Didn't you wonder what was inside?" She said it was probably old test keys, because the retired teacher used to do after school tutoring.

But why would he leave and not unlock his cabinet? I imagine all the things that might be inside. Books. Number 2 pencils. Staplers. Bones. Treasure. It's a secret, a mystery. A lock without a key.

I want.

I want it open.

Across the hall, there is a teacher that I adore. She is a veteran, but she is one of those veterans that I want to be. A thirty-five year marriage, a son in college, and she still loves to teach. Last year, I heard her during the school mandated "moment of silence". Her students had been rowdy and difficult to settle down. She spoke her prayer out loud. "Lord, help me not kill 'em today." She is smart, and kind, and I admire her.

I offered her space in the small dorm fridge I moved into my closet. While she was there, I showed her the curious locked cabinet, expecting to find a kindred spirit to puzzle over it with. I told her that I wanted to ask someone to cut the lock off.

"You can't do that", she said. "Don't you know what happens in stories when people open things they should not open?"

I laughed with her at the joke, because it's not like I'm Bluebeard's wife. This is not once upon a time. The cabinet is not a rabbit hole. It's just a normal piece of storage. It probably holds nothing more exciting than stacks of answers to forgotten tests.

A week later, she overheard me asking the janitor if he could come and cut the lock. "I thought I told you NOT to open that cabinet", she scolded. I smiled and laughed. She just shook her head in disgust.

"You know you are living up to the stereotype", she said. She saw that I had no idea what she was talking about and so she explained. "You ever notice how in scary movies, it is never the black people that get killed? A black person would know not to open that cabinet." She paused to let her words sink in. "You want that cabinet open, but we know that bad things happen when you unlock cabinets like that."

I realized she is not joking. She is dead serious. She is warning me.

I've been thinking about what she said, about my compulsion to find out what is inside, my sympathy for Bluebeard's wife. Me, with my little apron pocket holding ring of forbidden keys that jangles and tempts when I walk. I wonder. What if?

What if I opened the cabinet and bad things did start to happen? The blame of opening would be on me. The guilt of Pandora and Eve, the shame in the color of my skin, all the arrogant sin of the world. The cabinet may be nothing more than a cabinet - but what about the thing that is in me? This thing, this compulsion, this craving to open after others have spent years quietly leaving it locked and well enough alone?

My husband brought a box of books over to my room yesterday. He saw the cabinet and offered to cut the lock. But I've become convinced that if I open it, I'll let something loose. I've read the stories. I know what happens when people unlock cabinets like that: a whoosh of ghosts and dust and despair unleashing and hope stuck like cobwebs to the void.

I told him that I've decided to leave it locked.