Among School Children (25 page)

She saw them one after the other, hurriedly, then faced her class. "Claude, let me see that bookbag." She had just told Claude's mother that Claude had to get better organized.

Claude presented his bookbag dutifully. He stood up at the front table next to Mrs. Zajac. He was being helpful, holding the bag open while Chris groped around inside it. She pulled out of Claude's knapsack a great disordered fistful of crumpled construction paper folders and half-finished homework assignments, some dating from the fall.

"What's all this?" cried Chris. She plunged in her hand for more. Another fistful of papers. Then a bunch of books with papers inserted among the pages and sticking out every which way. She pulled out a store-bought binder of the kind that is marketed as an "organizer." "This is a nice organizer, Claude. Do you know what the word 'organize' means?"

Claude nodded earnestly.

Out came the ancient remains of a sandwich, a test on the Revolutionary War, an Advent calendar. "Claude! Look, Claude, let me give you some advice. Every day you have some papers to show Mom and Dad. Don't leave them in your bag. Use your organizer."

Claude looked at Chris very earnestly and declared, "I got another organizer in my desk, too!"

"It doesn't organize itself, Claude," Chris said, and immediately regretted it. Several children tittered.

Chris pursed her lips and looked around her. The important thing at that moment was protecting Claude. Any minute, the rest of the class was going to find this searching of the knapsack all too enjoyable.

"Okay, Claude. You're going to organize yourself today."

Chris shoved thè boy's desk across the carpet and out the door. Claude followed, hands fidgeting as if he'd like to help. She instructed him in the use of the organizer, and gave him a heap of new construction paper to make new folders, and left him sitting at his desk just outside the door, out of danger for a while.

Claude sat in the hall pulling books and papers out of his desk and his bag, heaping them all into a large, chaotic pile. He sang softly as he worked. "
Doo doo dee doo.
"

Al was prowling the hallways. He stopped in front of Claude's desk and folded his arms, ready to dish out some wrath. The boy must have done something serious to be sent out here
with
his desk. "
What
are you doing?" Al asked him.

"I'm organizing myself," said Claude brightly.

Al looked taken aback. Then he said sternly, "Can you do it more quietly, please?" and moved on down the hall.

"
Doo doo dee doo,
" sang Claude as he sorted through most of a year's worth of papers, placing them into various new construction paper folders and into his organizer, though not in any discernible order.

By that afternoon, Chris felt exhausted. The art and music teachers took over. She went to the sofa in the hall and didn't even try to work. "This week I feel like, the harder I work, the deeper the hole," she thought. Claude's problem was much worse than she'd imagined. "I'm disgusted with myself for letting it go on this long. Maybe I should just give up on Claude." Having imagined surrender, she perked up a little. She'd keep after him. Strategies rarely worked at once, and no strategy worked all the time. Little steps, she told herself. Be patient. Just keep on working on him. She'd get his mother to visit again.

Chris sent many notes home with Claude. The mother came in.

"Sometimes," Claude's mother said to Chris, "I want to criminate him."

She had a thick French-Canadian accent. Chris wasn't sure exactly what Claude's mother meant, but understood the general meaning. Chris smiled and said, "To be honest, so would I sometimes."

Claude's mother had a harried, worried air. She said to Chris, "I don't know what to do anymore. We do care what happ-ens, but I cannot quit my job."

Chris liked the woman. They had several pleasant conversations. "You a left paw," Claude's mother noted. She marveled at Chris's patience. "When you go to Fleury Funeral Home, you are going to be an angel."

Chris blushed. Then she started trying to reorganize Claude's household. Chris got her hands moving like the wheels of industry and laid out a plan for Claude's after-school hours: the old homework-signing deal, the time and the place where Claude should study at home, the hour at which his father should check the work.

But his father didn't seem to follow instructions. Claude still came in with the wrong homework, or, more often, no homework. One evening Chris called up Claude's father. "He's just got to organize himself better," Chris said into the phone. "So I'll keep on him, and I'll let you know how he's doing. Okay?"

Claude's father said to Chris, "Claude didn't give you the note, huh?"

"Note?"

"Well," said the father, "I was
supposed
to write a note. I guess I forgot."

Chris laughed and laughed after she got off the phone. She told Billy, "What's in the cats is in the kittens, as my mother likes to say."

For a time, though, her struggle with Claude grew worrisome. One afternoon, she was trying again to tell Claude that he
had
to start doing his homework. Claude declared that he always did his homework. Then Dick, of all people—kind, quiet Dick—said, "Yeah, sure, Claude."

Claude said he'd do all his homework from now on.

Dick bet him a dollar he wouldn't.

"Okay," said Claude.

From every part of the room cries erupted: "
I'll
bet you a dollar, Claude!" "Me, too!" "Yo, Claude! I'll bet you a quarter!"

Wearing a sickly smile, Claude turned down all other bets. Judith wrote out the terms of Claude's wager with Dick on a piece of red construction paper, which she laid on the counter by the window. But Judith had second thoughts. A few days later Felipe told Claude, "Claude, all you think about is fish. That's all." And Judith spoke up. "So what, Felipe? You're always talking about becoming an astronaut. Why can't the kid talk about fishing?" Now Judith would mutter at classmates who teased Claude, "Leave the kid alone." Once again, Chris thought, "Thank you, Lord, for sending me Judith."

Chris herself sometimes felt a great desire to glue Claude's glasses to his nose, shake him by the shoulders, and say, "Forget the illnesses, forget the fishing, forget the excuses. Concentrate on what you're doing right now!" She had to keep on him. But she had to do it gently. The boy was enough of an outcast as it was. Chris taped an index card to the top of Claude's desk:
DON'T FORGET TO COPY YOUR ASSIGNMENT
! Claude was very happy with the card and kept fingering it, but he didn't usually follow its command, at least not yet. Chris kept lecturing him, but she did it quietly and in private. First thing in the morning, she would call Claude to her desk, ask him for the work he owed, and then tell him she was disappointed. He was a smart boy. She couldn't force him to learn. She would help him. But she wouldn't pay any attention to him if he didn't try. Day after day, she issued that threat.

Robert's mother also paid a visit, a couple of weeks after Clarence left. At first the woman balked at the idea of a psychiatrist. Then she declared that Robert had his father's crazy genes. She ended up demanding that Robert see a psychiatrist at once. Chris wished he could, but there was paperwork involved. Robert's mother also said, "This school hasn't done nothin' for him." And Chris, who had gone out to see the woman thinking "she probably had a real bad time in school herself," came away with her neck an angry red. All the rest of that day and that evening and the following morning, too, Chris kept wishing she had said, "At least we've tried, lady!"

The day after that meeting was the worst since Clarence. Robert tried to provoke her all morning, and succeeded just before lunch. Robert had come to school without his books again. All on his own, Jimmy had gotten up and fetched a spare textbook from the cabinet for Robert—maybe Jimmy was trying to head off noise; noise hurt his ears, Jimmy often said. At the end of the lesson, Chris asked Robert to put the book back. Robert, bouncing his desk on his knees, looked up at her with a little smirk and said, "Jimmy got it out. He can put it back."

Chris started yelling, really thundering at Robert. Matters came to rest in the usual way: Robert at his desk, looking down at his lap, his cheeks very red, the suggestion of a small, excited smile on his face; and Chris breathing deeply, glaring down at him, and thinking, "This does
no
good. Yelling at him doesn't do
one
bit of good." She talked it all over that night with Billy and decided that in the end, though he'd given her enough cause by himself, she'd only done to Robert what she had wanted to do to his mother. She'd try not to do that again. Robert wanted her to yell at him. He wanted her attention. She had to find a way to give it to him for the right reasons. First of all, she had to make herself stop giving it to him for the wrong ones.

A slightly sour smell of sneakers getting heavy springtime use scented the classroom. In the April sunlight that streamed in stripes between the blinds, the room often looked messy, a fragrant pile of pencil shavings under the sharpener and books and papers everywhere. But it had that feeling about it again of the craftsman's workshop. She saw Robert as the biggest problem in her room now. To herself, she said, "If Robert doesn't see a psychiatrist soon,
I'm
going to need one." She decided to isolate him. She had tried this tactic once before, on last year's most difficult student. It had backfired. The boy had liked being isolated. Maybe Robert wouldn't. Deep down, Chris thought, Robert really wasn't an antisocial child. She had misgivings. The tactic was harsh. But she had to do something. She warned him first. "Robert, if you make an effort, I'll give you all the attention in the world. But if you don't, I'm going to isolate you." He shrugged and turned away. She raised her voice. "And what I mean by isolate, Robert—you will not talk to anyone. You'll sit in the corner by yourself. I'm not going to put up with the behavior I've been putting up with!" She'd yelled at him again. She'd have to keep her word.

Chris didn't have to wait long. An hour or so later, Robert refused to work on the latest story. She moved a desk under the penmanship part of the chalkboard, so that it faced the board. She made sure that desk was empty, so he'd have nothing to play with. She took away Robert's pencil and paper. She led him by the arm to the desk. "There is no way in the world I'm going to say, 'Everybody has to write except Robert.' If you won't do it, fine. But you're not going to waste my time playing with pencils."

The situation was manageable, if a little nerve-racking. She glanced at Robert occasionally while she helped the others with their stories. He rocked and rocked in his chair in the corner. One time when she looked, he was pounding his thighs with his fists. He didn't seem any more unhappy than usual. But the next time she glanced at him, Robert looked glum. Once in a while, from the corner of her eye, she saw him looking around at her. He sneered.

The next day when Robert started misbehaving she put him in the corner again. She left him in isolation most of that day, too. The class had begun a new set of science reports. She took the children down to the library so they could do research. As the class spread out among the brown-topped tables set up in rows beside the metal bookcases, she took Robert by the arm. His head was bowed. He was almost as tall as she. She led him to the farthest table and left him there alone. She sat down two tables away, her back to Robert, the rest of the class at the tables in front of her and off to her right. Shy Juanita had sat down alone. But Judith arose and invited Juanita to sit with her and Alice and Dick. Juanita smiled.

There was a stillness around Chris, a library stillness that she'd always liked, with a murmuring from the children mixed in. It sounded cheerful and constructive. Good noise, she thought. A happy scene, if it weren't for Robert. Chris could feel him behind her. She was not going to look.

"Mrs. Zajac." Alice stood at Chris's side. Alice whispered that Robert was bothering them. He was, Alice said, "doing something gross" to his hand.

"Just try to ignore him. Okay?"

Ignoring him was hard. "I don't know what to do," she thought. "I wish he'd just let it all out and scream at me."

He was, but Robert screamed in his own way.

Chris hadn't taken everything away from Robert. He had a penny. Alone at his table, he had begun to scratch the back of one hand with the dull edge of his penny.

Robert looked at Mrs. Zajac. He scratched harder. Classmates passed by, going into the stacks. Robert held the hand aloft to show them. Then he went back to work, bending low. He dug with the penny. The copper penny turned red. It was carving a small bloody furrow in his hand. The furrow started at a knuckle. Now it reached almost to the wrist bone. He looked up now and then. He went back to digging. When the class returned to the room, he kept his hand hidden under his desk.

Chris never saw the wound while it was fresh, and later on she never asked Robert about it. Out of her earshot, Robert said he had attacked his hand in order to get sent to the nurse, who might send him home. He had not wanted to show his wound to Mrs. Zajac, though. "I wanted her to see it herself," he said.

The day after his second dose of isolation, Chris sent Robert back to his old desk with his books and pencils. Something quite astonishing happened then—too astonishing to trust in thoroughly. The day after he had wounded his hand, Robert came in with some homework. Then for a stretch of three days, Robert did all of his homework. In math, he got all the problems right. In reading some days, when up at the table with her, he answered her questions to the group correctly and with such alacrity that she had to ask him to give the other children a chance. Chris didn't let herself believe that she had engineered the change in Robert. It had happened too quickly, and she wasn't going to play psychiatrist. For all she knew, isolation and the change that had followed were just coincidental. She would savor the improvement while it lasted.

On one spring Friday morning, Robert's reading group finally reached the end of the dreary third-grade basal reader. Robert had gotten every answer right on the last end-of-chapter test—he had answered every question wrong on the previous one. The other children were reading. The room was quiet. Chris leaned across her desk toward Robert and told him he'd gotten 100 on the test. "I'm proud of you," she said.