Among School Children (17 page)

Clarence was watching her intently, mouth slightly ajar. "Yup," he said, and he grinned.

"Is there one person that's always right in that situation?"

"Yeah!" said Felipe. The hand-raising rule was tacitly suspended. Many of the girls were shaking their heads.

Chris let her tongue loll out briefly and lifted her eyebrows. "Felipe, if you have an argument with your sister, you're always right?"

"No! She is! Because I always get in trouble all the time!"

But with the assent of Dick and the girls, Chris insisted that in a war no side was completely right. "Also, you don't just go up and punch your friend for no reason," she said, suddenly advancing, with a fist readied, toward Julio, who looked up from the pens he had been fiddling with, shied away, and grinned.

Clarence threw a punch at the air. "Pow!" he said.

"You have reasons," Chris went on, glancing at Clarence. "And we're going to talk about them."

They had reached the issue of the colonists' desire to become independent. Chris told them that her baby daughter had recently decided she wanted to feed herself. Chris described her baby in the high chair, pushing away her mother's hand. "She wanted to be ... what's the word? I, n..."

"Impossible!" yelled Felipe.

"Well, she
is
that," said Chris.

"Independent!" yelled Felipe.

"Yes, she wanted to be independent."

"You let her?" asked Clarence.

"Yes," said Chris. "Maybe the colonists started like babies. When you were a baby, your parents did everything for you. But as you got older, you wanted to do more things for yourself. Jimmy, pay attention. I'm going to be asking you questions about this."

When they came to the issue of the trade laws, and discussed the ones that favored the colonists and the ones that didn't, Chris called Arabella to the front of the room.

(Arabella usually wore glasses in class. She didn't have them on. As she passed Clarence's desk, he hissed fiercely at her, "Wear your glasses.")

Chris whispered in Arabella's ear. Then she turned Arabella around to face the class, standing behind the girl, her hands on the girl's shoulders. "Arabella is French. I'm English. Now, all of you colonists out there, I'm offering you a hundred and fifty dollars for your tobacco. We got a deal?"

"Nope," said Clarence.

"I'll give you two hundred dollars," said Arabella to the class, and, having delivered her lines according to Mrs. Zajac's whispered instructions, she covered her mouth and giggled, and sat down.

"I'll give you a hundred and fifty dollars, and Arabella just offered you two hundred. Who you gonna sell it to?" Chris asked the class.

"Her," said Clarence, pointing at Arabella.

"Yeah, her," said many other voices.

"You can't," said Chris. "I just made a law that says you can't."

"Awww!" said Clarence. He was pouting.

Many others groaned, as if she had just announced, "Homework."

She let the groans die down and asked, "How do you feel?"

"Mad," said Clarence. "Sad," he added.

"Sad and mad," said Chris pensively. "Well, too bad. You have to sell it to me."

Judith was smiling, watching Clarence, then watching Mrs. Zajac. Smiling as if at herself, Judith added her voice to the many that were saying, "No way!"

Julio piped up, at England, "You wish!"

"Too bad!" sang Chris, arms folded on her chest now, a stance rather like Al's imitation of the Colossus. Her eyes were partly closed. She shook her head. "You have to sell it to me. Because I
own
you!"

"But that's not fair!" cried Felipe. "That's like prejudice!"

"I'm
paying
you," said Chris. She made a face and shook her head at them. "You like the trade law I made that said I can't sell anybody else's tobacco in England, I can only sell yours." She made such a face as mothers of teenagers often receive. "Oh, you people in the colonies want it all your own way."

"So?" said Clarence angrily.

Ashley was vigorously shaking her head at Mrs. Zajac. Felipe had taken up the cry of "You wish!" Jimmy, cheek still resting heavily on his hand, looked annoyed, but at the noise, not the unfairness of England. But most of the rest were denouncing King George, in the person of Mrs. Zajac, and the Revolution was launched with perhaps greater fervor than some patriots had felt. Chris had to raise her voice to be heard over the hubbub. "All right. I'm just trying to make you see how England felt." She added, "The colonists, on the other hand, felt, 'Hey, it's our tobacco. We should be able to sell it to whoever we like.' "

She brought them down gradually and told them to transcribe the list of causes she would write on the board. Later on, she'd administer a quiz, which for once nearly everyone would pass, even Clarence, Julio, and Pedro. Retiring to her desk right after that lesson, Chris glowed. Her face was flushed. She called that method of instruction "Rambo social studies." She was very glad to have seen Ashley, Pedro, and Julio engaged in the lesson, and wished that Jimmy, Kimberly, and Blanca had been, too. Felipe was marvelous, and as for Clarence, she wondered for that short, sweet moment how she could ever have thought of him as difficult.

Clarence
was
difficult during the Christmas party, the last afternoon before vacation. He turned up his nose at the McDonald's gift certificates that Chris gave each of them. "What's this? I don't want this." Chris felt a little sad, but that was not the time for a lecture on manners.

Then Clarence and Felipe nearly wrecked the party by getting into a fight during the game of Seven-Up. But Chris didn't scold them.

She pretended not to hear when Robert, after giving her a box of candy, said to anyone who wanted to listen, "I got her the two ninety-nine. I coulda got her the three ninety-nine, but she ain't worth that much."

Chris sent them away for vacation with smiles all around and many cries of "Have a nice vacation."

She grinned at the empty room. It had turned into just a room. It had lost its power over her. "This is freedom!" she cried. She foresaw Christmas carols, gingerbread, Christmas parties, leisurely mornings with her own children, who had only normal problems. She'd start to feel that life was too serene a few days before she had to come back, and when she returned, the children would look new to her again, and all of them really would be a little different. She knew that at least one morning she'd wake up in the dark, look at the clock, cry out, "Oh, God, I'm late!" and then, feeling doubly relieved of her duties, fall back to sleep.

Chris had been one of the model pupils whom teachers use as surrogates; the principal put her in charge of the school office for a day in sixth grade. She could still remember every time when a teacher had reprimanded her. Chris thought of her childhood as very happy, but also as constrained. She felt that she'd lacked confidence as a girl. She grew up obeying the many voices telling her what not to do, such as those of the nuns at CCD.

One of Chris's grandmothers was the sort of person whom people describe as saintly, a woman too kind and even-tempered to fit the usual profile of a real saint. Chris remembered hearing someone ask that grandmother why she went to confession. What could
she
possibly have to confess? "Angry thoughts," her grandmother had said. Recalling that line, Chris exclaimed, "Angry thoughts? I'd be in confession for a week!"

It seemed as though there was a part of Chris that felt pent up, and that her classroom was one place where she could let it free. In the classroom, she could be aggressively good.

Among other adults, Chris had a shy, reflexive way of turning aside compliments. She'd try not to smile and would utter a self-deprecating remark, as if to say she appreciated the compliment but didn't think she deserved it. Some people who'd served on committees with her thought she could be a little blunt, but when she spoke bluntly to adults whom she didn't know well, Chris often added a patter of laughter to her voice, as if hastening to say, "I don't think my ideas are better than yours, and I could always take them back if they offend."

She was different in her room. There, she had great physicality. Her friend Mary Ann, tall and blond and slightly dreamy-looking, would stand behind a girl in the hall and chat with Chris while braiding the child's hair. When Chris touched children, which was often, she would put them in bear hugs and head locks. Whether scolding or comforting or merely making sure that a piece of work was understood, Chris got very close to the children. Sometimes, leaning over them, she'd almost touch her wide, changeable eyes to theirs. They could smell her perfume, hear her breathing, and some, such as Felipe and Jimmy, would go all squirmy, like kittens rubbing their flanks against their master's ankle, while Clarence might even relax his vigilance and fail to see a stranger at the door. Chris could be squeamish. The day back in the fall when she spotted a cockroach skittering across the carpet, she cried, "Somebody kill it.
Please!
" and for the next half hour scratched at her arms. A few children carried in strong odors, which bothered her, but she denied none of them her close presence.

In the room, her confidence seemed unlimited. One day she stood beside her desk, holding aloft and shaking a sheaf of social studies quizzes on which none of the class had done well. She told the children they had to study harder. Then she declared, "Mrs. Zajac wasn't a very good teacher to you yesterday." So saying, and with a wild-looking smile, she tore the quizzes in half and dropped them in the wastebasket, throwing her fingers open to let the papers fall. She left her fingers splayed wide above the basket for a long, dramatic moment.

And when laughter came over her in her room, at something a student said or did, it wasn't at all nervous-sounding, but deep and raspy, erupting under glowing cheeks and widely opened eyes from a place in the throat where laughter can't be manufactured. In the room, all shyness left her, and her voice had the booming ease of carnival barkers and other practiced, shameless exhibitionists who love to work a crowd. Chris felt very comfortable in the classroom. For all her tricks, she felt almost completely honest with children.

As a teacher and as a woman, she liked the sorts of males whom she'd been taught to stay away from as a girl. Billy was a high school classmate, a member of several crowds including the fast one. He cut some classes and put peroxide in his hair. Chris would never let Billy forget that, any more than he'd let her forget that she was the only girl in their class who had worn her blue jeans pressed. Billy always liked Chris. He showed it in high school by joining the adolescent pack that lingered in the halls, making suggestive comments about the prim, proper girls of Chris's set. Chris would hug her books as she passed by, hating him. She had thought he liked her.

She remembered, from a time several years later when she and Billy were courting, talking Billy into coaching her girls' softball team. He was very patient but got quite annoyed at the female outfielders who, when bored, started weaving dandelions into their mitts. These days, Chris thought, Billy was an even more serious person than she, more devout and stricter with their children. She had married one of the bad boys, and reformed him. Of course, it wasn't that simple. Billy had only dabbled at being bad, and mostly he had just grown up. But reforming bad boys was a pattern of intent with Chris.

Chris liked a lot of the supposedly bad boys at school—catching them at their tricks especially. She worried sometimes that she played too rough. She'd had a cautionary dream about that in the fall: Al walks down a hallway toward her with one of the gang from her last year's math class. The boy has reformed. It's the talk of the school. This is amazing. But Chris sees that his shoelaces are untied and flopping around. Aha! she thinks. She sneers. "Haven't you learned to tie your shoes yet?" barks Chris at the boy. On the instant the boy regresses. He stands there flicking boogers at her and making armpit farts. Al snarls at her, "Time out, Chris! You just ruined everything we did with this kid!" She woke up, and for a moment that dream felt like something interfering with her breathing.

Chris tried not to go too far. She attacked the behavior of children such as Robert and Clarence, but never the boys themselves. In her rough-and-tumble way, as Judith noticed, Chris was kind.

On a winter morning, a new member of the class was brought into the room, a girl named Juanita. She was slender, with light brown skin and very curly brown hair pulled back in a fluffy ponytail and big, shapely mollusk ears. The vice principal led Juanita in. She looked as if she were being delivered to an executioner—on tiptoes, her head bowed before Mrs. Zajac.

Later, Chris would unearth an explanation for this child's shyness. Juanita's parents had gotten divorced. Juanita's mother didn't want the child living with her. Juanita's father had remarried. His new wife didn't want the girl around either. So Juanita had come to live in Holyoke with an aunt and cousins. In the evenings, Juanita cried in the bathroom at her aunt's apartment. She missed her father and her sisters and brothers. She had been placed mistakenly in a bilingual class at Kelly. Actually, she knew English far better than Spanish. Perhaps Juanita had tried to disguise that fact, and had aided in her own misplacement at the school. She had wanted to be in a bilingual class, she'd said, so that she could improve her Spanish, which was her father's principal language. She wanted to learn how to talk to her father better, she had told her bilingual teacher. Apparently, Juanita thought that if she improved herself in that way, her father might let her come back and live with him.

Chris didn't know the details then, but she felt she knew this girl at once. She brought Juanita up to her desk. She looked at the girl's address. It was in the area of Dwight and Pine, that newly tough part of town that Chris and her mother didn't like to visit anymore. The number of Juanita's apartment building was familiar. It had great significance for Chris. Chris smiled at Juanita, who kept her head lowered and peeked at Chris. She said to Juanita, "Did you know that's near where my father lived a long, long time ago?"