Among School Children (23 page)

Robert, keeping to his own desk, piped up, "I ain't signin' it. I hate Clarence."

Chris wheeled on him. "Robert, things that we do to others come back to hurt us twice as bad."

Robert wore a faint grin.

"Think about it." Her voice was low and fierce. "That's not a very generous or nice thing to do, and I'm extremely disappointed in you." She took a deep breath. Below her, Robert laid his head to one side and fiddled with a pen. Color rose in his cheeks. It rose in blotches on Chris's neck. "Someday, Robert, somebody's going to make you sad! Right now, I don't like what you just did. At all! I don't think it's funny, cute. Nothing! And I'm disgusted!"

Chris took another deep breath and went back to her desk. She glanced at Clarence, who was still washing the boards. She looked at the children signing the card. She grabbed her pocketbook and rummaged through her change purse. She grabbed the tape dispenser. Inserting herself into the crowd around Felipe's desk, Chris hurriedly taped seven quarters to the card, the children murmuring, "Ooooo." It was a bribe of sorts. She wanted to make sure that Clarence would accept the card.

"Bus one," said the intercom.

Felipe handed Clarence the card. Clarence studied it, standing over near the front table.

From near her desk, Chris called, "Good luck, Clarence. We'll all miss you." She wasn't saying goodbye. This was a cue for the bus students, and they caught it.

Alice, in purple coat and beret, rubbed Clarence's back hard. "Bye, Clarence."

Clarence put down the card and scowled. He shoved it across the front table, rejecting it. He went back to washing the boards. But he started grinning again as the bus students trooped past him, sweet female voices saying, "Bye, Clarence."

Little Arnie said, in a voice too squeaky for the manly words, "So long, old buddy."

Then only the walkers remained. They loitered around the front table. Clarence examined the card again.

Jimmy said, "A dollar twenty-five!"

Felipe said, "Two dollars."

Judith, detaching herself slightly from the throng, said, "A dollar seventy-five."

Clarence put the card in his pocket.

Chris kept busy. "Judith, I need you to do me a favor. These papers are piling up."

Over by the front table, the usual end-of-the-day movie and TV show reviews were being delivered. "
Friday the Thirteenth,
bro. It's go-oood!"

Felipe said to Clarence, "You still going to live in the same place? Well, in that case, I'll see you every day!"

"Every day after school," sang Chris. "All right, walkers line up."

"Mrs. Zajac. Mrs. Zajac," said Clarence.

"What, Clarence?"

"Arshhht."

She laughed.

"I got her," said Clarence to Jimmy.

Clarence turned back to the board. He stood next to the spot where she wrote the word of the day for penmanship. He had erased the one for today. Now Clarence took up a piece of chalk and wrote carefully, laboriously, "C—Clarence."

"Look!" said Felipe.

Mrs. Zajac smiled. "Well, at least it's nice penmanship. You all have your homework?"

Clarence stood beside her. He touched her arm, and inclining his head toward his name on the board, he said to her, "Do dat?"

"Yes, Clarence," said Chris. "We'll do that on Monday. I promise."

She led them to the door that opened onto the staircase. The procession halted there to await the intercom, releasing the walkers.

Arabella said, prematurely, since they weren't leaving just yet, "Goodbye, Clarence."

Julio said, "If you see my cousin up there, tell him he's a wimp."

"Yes, Clarence. You have a real nice time. Okay? And you be a good boy there?" Chris grabbed him from behind, in a gentle head lock, and moved him around in front of her. In her faintly mocking voice, which made the children giggle, Clarence grinning in her embrace and looking off to one side, she went on, "Like I know you can be? And work real hard, like I know you can do?" She gave him one more squeeze—"And have fun?"—and let him go.

"Walkers may be dismissed," said the intercom.

Children poured out of adjacent classrooms. Hers raced past her. Then the rest of the mob came by. The staircase rumbled. She stood aside and looked down over the railing. Clarence went right outside.

Chris stayed awhile in the room to read the journal entries. Most of the children had written that they felt sad. Irene had written, "I'm sad, but I'll get over it." Chris laughed. She pursed her lips as she read Juanita's entry:

I think Miss Zajac feels sad
today because is the last day
of one of her students.

All of Clarence's usual victims wrote that they forgave him. Almost all of them wrote that they thought Clarence needed special help, and a new class was the best thing for him. So she hadn't left them scared that they might get banished, too, and they had believed her when she'd said it was being done for Clarence's own good. Chris wished she knew what Judith thought. But Judith had worked on her
Shana and the Warriors
and had kept her own counsel on Clarence.

Chris locked the journals away in her closet and hefted her bags. At the door, she stopped and looked at Clarence's name on the board, in the penmanship position. The boy had style. He had left his mark. At least he hadn't gone away angry.

When she got outside the school, she said, "Boy, do I feel better than last Friday."

Someone must have used the parking lot as a service station last night. A puddle of oil with an old filter in the middle lay on the sidewalk. Chris stepped nimbly around the mess. There was a touch of spring in the air, and the river's scent.

Through the salt-streaked windshield, this grimy part of town looked even grimier to Chris as she drove down to work. It was the season of muddy footprints in the classroom. Outside the classroom windows, the snow had melted. When the sun came out, it shone on brown grass, on the unburied trash lodged against the playground's chain link fence, and on a pile of glossy, bulging green garbage bags somebody had dumped out there over the weekend. Victor, from the bilingual room next door, told Chris that a couple of his students had come to school, eaten the free breakfast, and then split. In Chris's room, another of the pale ceiling lights had started flickering. The smells of packaged onion rings and cheese puffs filled the room at snack time, then lingered. In reading, a child from another homeroom mentioned that he'd found some handcuffs in his mother's bureau. A boy came into reading with snot hanging out his nose. Chris kept handing him tissues while looking away. The things that the children made in art looked discouragingly alike. The decorations in the room—last month's book report projects dangling on clothes hangers and strings of yarn, the once alluring witches' faces on the wall above the closets, the poster of the monkey, captioned "The More I Think The More Confused I Get"—all seemed worn out, like the view from an invalid's window. She cranked the casements halfway open in the morning. Sounds from the factories mingled with the hum of the heater—these were the kinds of sounds a propeller-driven plane makes; you could drift away on them.

Al called Parks and Recreation about the garbage, but nothing was getting fixed. In the Teachers' Room, somebody quipped, "Landfill. Don't you know that's the future of Kelly School?" The Teachers' Room seemed newly grubby, the armrests of the orange sofas patched with tape, the busted stove with insulation poking out, the bathroom's sticky door and its noisy toilet, the sound of which revolted Chris while she ate lunch. Over coffee, a teacher said of their high calling, "Garbage picking is more rewarding." March wasn't over yet.

After school Chris ambled with the other teachers into the too brightly lit, yellow-walled, windowless "cafetorium." She sat with teacher friends at one of the lunch tables as Al, in shirtsleeves, standing before his faculty, voice booming, gave his speech of March. She knew this speech from years past, and she sat with her head bowed, watching herself doodle on Al's handout. Al said that anyone who had finally wearied of this school should think about a transfer for next year.

"Evaluate what you're doing," said Al. "If you're not happy, if this is the most boring job you can think of ... think about it. I thank the Lord I'm not in the same school where I started out."

"The Lord blesses you, Al," called a female voice. Chris looked up. The quip came from a teacher seated a couple of tables away, one of Al's perpetual critics. Chris went back to doodling.

She felt more dispirited than usual for this dull time of year. So did many others, including Al. The results of a new statewide standardized test had just come in—the Basic Skills Tests, which third, sixth, and ninth graders took. The other night Chris had read about the scores in the
Transcript-Telegram.
Everyone had read the article. On the Basic Skills Tests, Holyoke schoolchildren had some of the worst overall scores in the state. No question on those tests was harder than this one:

Carol can ride her bike 10 miles per hour.

If Carol rides her bike to the store, how long will it take?

To solve this problem, you would need to know

A. how far it is to the store.

B. what kind of bike Carol has.

C. what time Carol will leave.

D. how much Carol has to spend.

More than 30 percent of Kelly School's sixth graders had gotten flunking marks, below 60, on those very easy tests. Almost all who failed came from families below the poverty line, and many were Puerto Rican. Al was very upset. He was trying to buck up his faculty.

"I don't want to hear the test scores anymore. I know what kids we got here," Al declared.

Chris drew some wagon wheels on Al's handout—in social studies, it was almost time for the pioneers.

"We can't bring them all up to grade level no matter what we do," he went on. "But can we improve instruction here? You
bet
we can."

Then Al said, "But—"

Chris looked up. She knew what was coming. She smiled.

"We're doin' a good job. We really are," said Al.

Chris had a dream on Sunday night, the weekend after Clarence was finally sent away.

It's Monday morning. She sits at her desk. In the desk right in front of her sits Clarence! He has someone else's face. She knows that face but can't put a name to it. She also knows that it is Clarence in disguise. First chance she gets, she hurries to the office. "Clarence is back! I know it doesn't look like him, but it is! He isn't supposed to be here." The people in the office smile knowingly at her. She waylays some other teachers, but they just shake their heads and walk away. And then she's back in her room, and Clarence still sits at his old desk, wearing someone else's face. She gazes at him. "Oh, well," she says to herself. "Nobody seems to care. Everyone seems to have forgotten. I'll just keep him."

Chris sat at her desk that first Monday without him. The children filed in: Julio in his long, slow strides like a man on stilts, Pedro in his happy rolling gait, Robert in his heavy shuffle, dragging his heels,
clump, clump, clump.
She half expected to see Clarence dance into the doorway.

Jimmy came to her desk. "Is Clarence comin' back?"

"No, Jimmy. He's at his new school now."

"We should take his sticker off then," said Jimmy, who, with unusual vigor, ripped the name card off Clarence's old desk. Jimmy didn't like commotion. He was glad Clarence was gone.

Chris gazed at Clarence's chaotically stuffed desk. She asked Mariposa to clean it out.

In the Teachers' Room early that week, a colleague asked, "Is your room different without Clarence?"

"Night and day," Chris said.

Her classroom
was
different, wasn't it? It was certainly quieter, she thought. Maybe too quiet. The first days of that week dragged by. She kept imagining Clarence at the Alpha class. She fretted about the Basic Skills Tests. Several of the students from her low math group of last year had flunked. What had she done wrong? She brooded on the general question: why did the poorest children seem to learn the least in school?

But the problems she faced weren't general, and on Wednesday, out on the sofa during art and music, Chris began to take stock. Lifting her eyes from the plan book on her lap, she ran through the faces in her room. She saw Arabella's pigtail, fluffy pompadour, and perfect crescent smile. Arabella had made exceptional progress; if it continued, she should reach grade level in all subjects by the end of next year. Chris saw Alice shaking her head just to watch her silky hair brush across her shoulders. Alice had made progress. Alice did all that she was asked, but Chris thought she ought to start asking her to do more. Dick ought to do more talking, and Mariposa—her latest earrings looked like wind chimes—had to pay attention during social studies. Maybe Mariposa would do better, now that she didn't have Clarence sitting next to her and pilfering items from her desk and cutting pieces off her sweatshirt.

Most had made normal progress. Normal measures would carry them along. But was it just her imagination or had the problems of the ones with big problems gotten bigger suddenly? With Clarence gone, she did see the others' needs more clearly. She felt sure of that.

How many in this class would flunk the Basic Skills Tests next year? Jimmy probably would if he took the test on a Monday, when he was always exhausted. She imagined Jimmy yawning and stretching right in front of her, just like a baby getting ready for a nap. That was one of the problems with tests. They tested things more basic than skills, and one of those was a good night's sleep. Pedro still smiled"through the days, still at about second-grade level in every subject except for math. She had gotten Pedro some special tutoring. The testing that she had ordered for him six months ago must be imminent now.

Sitting on the sofa, head laid back and staring at the high ceiling, Chris conjured up the faces of several who had slacked off lately in their work, and she thought, "They don't know it yet, but they're going to miss Clarence." Then she thought of Claude. He had not slacked off. He had never started.