Among School Children (12 page)

Teachers' manuals say it is best to ignore a showoff, but Robert wasn't just a showoff. His penmanship itself was distressing to look at—sometimes round, sometimes angular, sometimes utterly indecipherable. He'd sit at his desk, dismantling a notebook or a pen, covering his hands and pants with ink, then grinning at the mess. He'd sit there and start crying out, "Oi, oi," then turn to tuneless song, then utter cries that sounded like imitations of sexual passion: "Oh, harder!" Chris would turn to him and see him tearing a hole in his jeans with his ruler. Or he'd have wedged a very sharp pencil between the edge of his desk and his groin, the tip facing groinward, and she'd see him pressing harder and harder against the pencil point with a distressingly placid look on his face. Without warning, he would start attacking himself, first patting his thighs, then slapping them, then pounding them with his fists, all the while wearing that bemused look. He would slap himself in the face, harder and harder. She'd grab his hand. "Robert, stop it!" He would enter one of those manic, masochistic periods, and then, just as quickly, he'd go silent and sit drooped over his desk, staring at nothing, radiating gloom.

Chris sat in her classroom one afternoon and read this essay of Robert's:

I don't now what to write because I have noten in my mind so I just want to say hello and good by to every body because I am moving to A New town A New house a New world like I'm out of my mind like Nobody cares if I Leave. Because parent's are so stuPid that if I were going to light a building on fire there just get out of the apartment and watch it burn down I have a poem to go withe it do you want to here the poem too bad you listen to it anyway it goes fill the halls with gasalin fa la la fa la la light a match and watch it gleam fa la la la la la la la la watch your school burn down to ash's fa la la la la fa la la la arent you glad you played with match's fa la la la fa la la la la la ha ha ha ha ha ah

One morning, taking a slightly different route to school, Chris passed the public mental health clinic on Maple Street. She thought about Robert on the instant. It was not a large leap of imagination; it was the kind of perception that seems to account for everything and explains nothing.

Chris could manage Robert. He would back down, unlike Clarence. If Robert started talking back to her, she'd just get her face close to his and he would shut up at once and drop his eyes to his lap, blushing. But what could she do for Robert? Maybe, somehow, she could talk his mother into taking Robert to a psychiatrist. In the meantime, she'd just keep trying to get him to do his work. She'd lecture him, and tell him he was smart, and keep him in from recess now and then, and for after-school detention when she could bear it. Sometimes Robert did his work in class, and did it well, and more often he didn't. Whether he worked or not seemed to have little to do with measures she undertook, except occasionally for one strategy. She'd tell him she was finished with him and wouldn't pay any more attention to him until he made an effort, and then sometimes he would stop singing or slapping himself or gazing moodily at nothing, and get to work, quite happily, it seemed.

The clock on the kitchen wall read nearly nine when Chris's son appeared in the dining room, wiping tears away with the sleeve of his pajamas. In school today, he had said to a classmate that he hated his best friend, and now he was afraid his classmate would tell his best friend, and his best friend would tell his parents, who would yell at him for saying that.

Chris smiled. "Come here," she said. "There's nothing to be upset about. I think you're just overtired."

"I'm not," he sniffled.

"Come here. You want a little ice cream? You want to sit here a couple minutes?"

"Okay." The boy's nose was stuffed.

She corrected a few more papers while the child watched.

"Guess whose test I just corrected."

"Whose?"

"Clarence's."

Her son smiled. "What'd he get?"

"He did good. Did well. He got a seventy-nine!"

Clarence must have studied for once. Could he have cheated? No, Chris had made sure his desk was shoved far away from Mariposa's. She had moved Clarence's desk several times already, most recently next to Mariposa's. She'd hoped that maybe busy, efficient Mariposa would have a calming influence on Clarence. Arabella, Clarence's previous neighbor, had complained. Clarence had been singing at Arabella, "There's a fat girl sittin' next to me."

If Clarence had studied for this social studies test, it was the first time this year. He did do all of his homework and classwork one time earlier in the fall, and back then she'd thought that perhaps a change was beginning. Chris didn't let herself believe that now.

Her son frowned at the news about Clarence's doing well on the test. He went behind the doorjamb in the kitchen doorway and peeked around the corner at Chris, imitating Clarence, banished to the hall and peeking back inside the classroom. He had heard enough stories to think that Clarence would be fun to play with. Her son had asked Chris if she would bring Clarence home someday.

Chris kissed her son and sent him back upstairs to bed. She returned to Clarence. Even here at her dining room table, she would look up from other students' papers, only to find Clarence's face there instead, blocking all the rest.

Chris tried to bury memories of troublesome students from years past. She wasn't sure, but she thought she'd never had a more difficult child than Clarence. By the end of the second week of school, his pattern had become unmistakable. She remembered one day out of many like it: Clarence wouldn't work. Chris told him gently that if he didn't, he couldn't go to gym. That didn't make Clarence comply. Instead, he beat up Felipe, his best friend and usual victim, in the hallway. A scolding followed. Afterward, Clarence ripped down part of Chris's bulletin board display. Chris planned to keep Clarence after school, to try to talk to him, but he managed to get away—she let him go fetch his little brother from kindergarten, telling him to be sure to come back, but Clarence didn't come back. She went home that afternoon and told Billy the whole story. Billy started to say that maybe Chris shouldn't take gym away from Clarence, and Chris started scolding her husband. "Don't tell me I shouldn't take gym away! I don't want to hear I shouldn't have done what I did!" It wasn't a serious argument, but Chris couldn't believe she'd let this boy disrupt her home that way.

When she felt calmer, Chris devised a new plan. It did not seem naive back then. Clarence would win a star for each day he behaved well and did his work. He would get a special reward for three stars in a row. The next morning, Chris called Clarence up to her desk to tell him about this new deal, and he seemed to like the idea. But when she got to the part about behaving well and asked Clarence gently if he knew how, as if to say that of course he did, Clarence started crying, and said he didn't.

"Did you see that? That's emotional disturbance," said Chris to Pam Hunt, the student teacher, afterward. Chris's voice sounded a little desperate.

Then there was the day when Clarence got angry at Alice over a classroom game; kicked Alice in the back of the legs on the way to reading; was rude to Pam, who scolded him; got even by punching Arabella during indoor recess; hit Arabella again, right in front of Chris, which was unusual; and when Chris got him out in the hall, called her a bitch. Chris decided not to send Clarence to Al that time. She sent him to a guidance counselor. This was early in the fall, when Kelly School still had two counselors. One was a woman who didn't seem to understand English fully, or boys like Clarence. Clarence sneaked away from the woman and went home. (Al soon had that counselor transferred.) Chris had decided that what Clarence needed most and yearned for was stability—consistent rules and consequences—and, she felt, the boy had defeated her again.

Clarence got only one star in three weeks before Chris let that frail attempt at behavior modification drift into oblivion. During the third week of school, she had started the paperwork for a core evaluation of Clarence. Actually, it was Al, not Chris, who insisted that Clarence be "cored." Then if Clarence did something truly bad, Al could prove that the school had already taken some action. Once in a great while, a core ended up with a child's being sent to one of the special so-called Alpha classes, which were notorious. Al said, "Clarence isn't an Alpha kid. He isn't a killer." Chris didn't think a core was what Clarence needed, but it couldn't hurt. Anyway, nothing would come of it for months.

From here at her dining room table, the year so far with Clarence looked like a one-boy crime wave. Chris could remember a long series of incidents: the disappearance of the special pens for story writing, of the playing cards from the cabinet, of Arabella's candy at one of the class parties. Again and again, after Chris asked the class if anyone had seen those things, Clarence would say "Nope" and shake his head much too earnestly. From the moment she heard Pedro's labored breathing and saw his heavy braces and protruding teeth, she worried about other children mocking him, and sure enough—it was around the third week of school—there was Clarence in the doorway, saying to his friend Pedro, "Get out of my way, buck teeth." There was the angry teacher telling Chris about that little fourth-grade girl who was shaking, literally shaking, and crying with fright at the end of a school day. The girl was afraid to leave the building and walk home across the Flats because Clarence had told her that morning, "You're dead meat. I'm gonna get you after school." Confronted by Chris, Clarence said of the tiny girl, "She starts trouble with me!" Chris warned Clarence. He turned his face away. Clarence threatened the little girl a few more times. Then, evidently, he lost interest in that, and it stopped.

Another day, Clarence beat up a boy in the bathroom. Clarence didn't act sorry. He gave Al a blow-by-blow demonstration in the principal's office. It might have been funny, except that the other boy was sobbing in the corner.

Sometimes Clarence seemed intent on destroying the community of her classroom, or on reshaping it to his own liking. Clarence's vigilance over all nonacademic matters in the room had now become a routine of the class. Now he would hiss at other children to get back in their proper seats, and tell them to be quiet right before and sometimes after he had gotten up in the midst of one of Miss Hunt's lessons and wandered around, refusing to sit down. Scold or punish Clarence, and he would get even with Chris through the other children, always ones who were weaker and almost always out of Chris's sight.

Chris, returning from coffee break, found Felipe sobbing because Clarence had kicked him and hurled him against the wall.

Chris, returning to the room, found Arabella—cheerful, enthusiastic Arabella, who was always kind to everyone—with her head buried in her arms on her desk, her shoulders heaving. Mariposa whispered to Chris that Arabella didn't want to tattle, but Clarence punched her very hard and made her cry for no reason that Mariposa could fathom.

Clarence, furious and feeling persecuted about being kept after school for not doing his homework, waited until Chris left the room and then took over, moving his chair into one of the aisles, playing the troll. Chris came back that time and found Clarence shoving away and threatening all children who tried to pass and get to their desks.

Clarence had taken a fancy to Judith. One day he passed this note down the rows to her:

Dear Judith,

You are so pretty that I would like to ask you something I love you But if you say no I will love you OK!!

"At least he has good taste," thought Chris when she found it a few days later. But the note was both actually poignant and an attempt to be poignant. Clarence had tried out many winning smiles on Chris when she asked him for homework he hadn't done. When smiles didn't work, Clarence sometimes tried tears. Most often he went stony. At the gentlest remonstrance, at the slightest insinuation that he could not do just as he pleased, Clarence would begin to turn away, as if on a motorized wheel, and refuse to look at Chris and refuse to answer. She felt tempted to plead for his attention then. If a less experienced teacher did plead, as Miss Hunt did early on, the suggestion of a smile on Clarence's face would give him away.

Chris felt she couldn't let him win the little contests that he staged, and give in to his cuteness or his stoniness. However, if she spent half her time and energy on Clarence, she would cheat the other children. He was like a physical affliction. Keeping down her anger at his attempted manipulations exhausted her, and so did the guilt that followed from letting some of that anger out. He was holding her hostage in her own classroom. Sometimes she felt that way. But lately, Chris thought, she was controlling Clarence, and herself with Clarence, better.

After school a while ago, Pam had told Chris about how Clarence had mocked Pam to her face in front of the class. Pam was searching for a general explanation of Clarence. "With a kid like him," she said, "maybe it's the structure of the school."

"You think he should be in another environment," said Chris, her chin on her hand, gazing at Pam.

"I guess," said Pam. "He's not really
bad.
He just wants to move around."

"I know what you mean, Pam," Chris replied. "But this is what there is. There is no other place for Clarence."

And because that was, or seemed, true, and Chris and Pam weren't going anywhere else either, Chris settled uneasily for an equilibrium dictated by Clarence as much as by herself. Sometimes Chris got some work out of him. She was very pleased with the couplets he wrote. One of them read:

The wind is cool as cool could be
But it is not as cool as cool as me

"These couplets are wonderful, Clarence!" Looking at his other set of couplets, Chris added, "But no 'Beans, beans, musical fruit,' okay?"

One of Clarence's cinquains read:

Christine
The best teacher
Sometimes she is so good
That she is so soft and cuddle
Christine.