Helen's meditation class.

Apart from making up numbers for the first session, my presence also gave Helen's group an air of peer respectability . But I mustn't look as though I am monitoring her.  Recently, she has began to underscore the perfectly obvious. She used to do it with occasional looks, facial expression, but more recently it has become verbal. I cannot help but posit an erotic cause. I suspect her relationship with Sky has been sliding, very quickly, from the fiercely sexual into the maternal. And if that sounds like a wild assumption about the nature of young black- older white woman relationships, then so be it. I have been in this job a long time. Oh well, it just means Gareth and I are in for a few months of heavy condescension. I must give him a heads-up...But I didn't want to let this go. She smiled, and left the kitchen. Just out of interest, I yelled after her...How would you like me to look..? Saying this seemed to increase my anger and, briefly, I imagined punching the sink. Always ready to make a point, she turned on the stair and said..I would like you to look as if..you are meditating...Now, what did that mean?..Was she making a point? Was it the most normal, diplomatic response in the circumstances or was it, in fact, a little stab? And if so, at what? A little stab at what, the essentially theatrical, self creating nature of my character? A stab at that? What does she know? I imagined myself back in the attic. Taking a breath, I returned to the the sink, put my hands over it,  refusing to punch.