Among School Children (26 page)

"Huh? Who? Me?" Robert shimmied at his desk.

She ignored that. Next week, she told him, they'd start in on the fourth-grade book. "Think you'll like that?" she asked.

Robert looked away from her and toward the window. "I'm happy for me," he said.

"I'm happy for you, too." She wished she could think of a way to make this moment last.

The following Monday she said to Robert, "You're doing much better."

"I am?" He shifted his shoulders around, his belly wobbling.

"Don't you think you are?"

"No." The maddening coyness of that squeaky, clipped no.

"You don't want to hear good things?"

"No." He was playing the burly coquette.

"Just bad things?"

"Yeah."

She breathed deeply and looked away, but a moment later she heard his voice saying, "Mrs. Zajac? Can I come up and work on my story with you now?"

One morning later that week, Robert started stabbing himself with a dull scissors. But she thought his fits had diminished in number and duration. He kept on doing some of his homework. And as for her, she had kept her promise to herself and had not raised her voice at him—except just twice—since he had wounded his hand.

On sunny weekends, in windbreaker weather, Chris's infant daughter, Kate, chased robins around the Zajacs' green back yard, Kate hurrying after the birds in a Chaplinesque waddle and Chris laughing as she chased her. It was the loveliest of ages, Chris thought, watching Kate. She was interested in everything, and everything was new.

The Zajacs went, as always, to Holyoke's elaborate St. Patrick's Day parade. The day was blustery, the sky the leaden color of the street down which, the parade wearing on, some marchers came lurching. When Senator Edward Kennedy hove into view, in tails and top hat and jauntily swinging a shillelagh, announced by many female voices up the street crying, "Teddy! Teddy! Teddy!" Chris whispered to one of her sisters, "I'm going to do it." She set her jaw, stepped off the sidewalk, and then she thought, "Oh, should I?" That cost her the chance. She'd just resumed her trot into the street when one of her elderly aunts, not hesitating for a moment, rose from her lawn chair, throwing off her lap robe, and dashed out to the senator. The aunt pumped his hand with both of hers. As the senator received the woman, with a slight bow and then a smile that he threw toward the sky, Chris veered away and trotted back to her place among her family on the sidewalk. She stood there muttering, making angry eyes at her aunt.

Chris and Billy put on their customary St. Patrick's Day party afterward at their house, nearly all of their extended families there, lots of corned beef and cabbage and some kielbasa, too. Billy merely tolerated the parade, and around this time of year if someone asked Chris a question such as, "What does St. Patrick's Day commemorate?" Billy would say, "Beer drinking," and Chris would fulminate briefly. What about the Polish, Billy? she'd say. Was beer unknown to them? The party was wonderful. Her best friend from college came. Chris got her mind entirely off school until around midnight, when she awakened with a start, thinking, "Has Felipe dropped his instrumental music lessons?" No, he hadn't. She went back to sleep.

Rain fell for a week. Sheets of rain swept across the playground, and the wind howled at the windows. A few blocks away the gusts were dislodging several windowpanes in Pedro's grandmother's apartment. The lights in the classroom seemed very bright. The children, Chris told Mary Ann, were "hoopy." "They're all out of it today. If we have one more day of rain, I'm going to kill myself."

Over spring vacation, Chris would visit Puerto Rico. She thought about the trip now and then, a little uneasily, but at least the weather would be fine. She hoped for fair skies and outdoor recess sooner than that. She laughed when they loaded up the erasers with chalk on April Fool's Day, and when Judith squirted her with disappearing ink, and she slipped over her pinkies and wore all day the two rubber spider rings that Alice sneaked onto her blotter to scare her. That was a sight: rubber spiders dancing on Mrs. Zajac's slicing, chopping, circling hands. The days were flying by now, Chris felt. She must be having fun.

The lovely uphill parts of Holyoke began to turn green. Spring travels up the Connecticut River Valley, but seems to skip the lower wards of Holyoke. On the outside walls of Kelly School, down in the Flats, a new crop of graffiti appeared, mostly in praise of rap groups:
RUN DMC = FRESH
. A new picture on an electrical box on the playground helped to make up for the lack of formal sex education lessons inside. Back in the fall thieves had stripped the hallways of the school's new lithographs of American scenes. The thieves had come out of hibernation. Several mornings Al came in and found the usual trails of wreckage, but, as was also usual by now, nothing of consequence stolen. Everything valuable was securely locked up, except books. "They" didn't seem to be interested in books, but kept coming back as if just for a visit. Some unidentified youths spotted a brand new red car with a high-powered engine out in the parking lot during school hours. They had the door open and were working on the ignition when someone saw them through the school windows and called the police, who chased the young men on foot and lost them in the side streets of the Flats.

The grass on the playground turned green. City workers at last arrived and picked up all the garbage along the fence. The custodians repaired the locks and ceiling panels that the thieves broke, and painted out the swear words among the graffiti (though they failed to recognize the Spanish ones). And the attempt to equip children to express themselves on paper instead of on public walls and to get their money via jobs went on inside, in many rooms, regardless. Heading off for the Flats on fine mornings, Chris might have seemed a victim of bad choices. She should have pointed her station wagon north, toward a greener town where children scored high on Basic Skills Tests in rough proportion to their parents' incomes and years of schooling. But on most of those spring mornings she was eager to get to her room. When she thought of this class now, she saw that many were performing very well, better than ever. It was a good class, all in all. They were kind to each other usually. Nice to look at, too. "My girls are beautiful," she thought. "And the boys aren't too bad either. They're pretty cute." More than ever, she looked forward to them.

She'd come hurrying across the parking lot at a quarter to eight, always a few minutes behind, overballasted and listing slightly under her bookbag, eyes on the front door. The top math group discovered geometry—first of all, at her direction, in the many angles they'd noticed in the room during daydreamy times: the joints in the metal trim around chalkboards, the intersecting lines of their classmates' legs under desks. The low group had finally finished with division. She had administered a final review test to make sure, and when she had gone over the last of the papers in the Teachers' Room, Chris had smiled and said, "I haven't changed Henrietta's attitude. I haven't changed Manny's. They're still going to be as obnoxious as the day is long.
But they know long division!
"

The low group began to grapple with decimals, with the very question on which the top group had begun the year: "How many parts is this number divided up into?" The children of the low group seemed delighted. No more long division or other stuff for low group kids. When Chris read them the answers to that day's problems with decimals, the children made many exclamations.

"I got a hundred!" said Jorge.

"
I
got a hundred!" cried Felipe.

Manny croaked, "I got a thousand."

Jimmy didn't even look sleepy. "We doin' this tomorrow, Mrs. Zajac? Thousands?"

Felipe, for no apparent reason besides curiosity, looked up the definition of ozone, wrote it out, and brought it in to Mrs. Zajac one morning. He wrote a rough draft of a story about a black hole, and, with many upward puffings at the glossy hair on his forehead, he actually started to rewrite it. There were moments during creative writing when she scanned the room and saw a scene that looked too good to be true, like a Norman Rockwell painting, this one entitled
Children of Many Nations Happily at Work.
Chris sat at her front table, the casement opened wide behind her, her pen poised over a child's story, her head lifted as if to distant music.

Every child worked, even Robert. Some sat in circles of twos and threes, their voices mingling as they read each other their rough drafts. Others bent over their desks, writing assiduously. Arabella giggled aloud at her own story. Now and then a question rose above the serene babble. "Mrs. Zajac? How do you spell 'high tech'?" That was Judith. In the latest crop of stories, Chris thought she saw signs of new progress in grammar, syntax, and consecutive thinking. She sat with Judith for a long time and discussed her latest story, which was marvelous. She sat with Pedro and had him dictate his story, which eventually made sense. Ashley wrote her best so far, about a robber who had barged into her family's apartment, chased by the police. Chris made time for Alice. "Okay, Alice, that was a good story. But remember my poem. Good, better, best. This was
good,
but it could be better. Maybe someone else needs to work on sentences. I want
you
to work on doing a little more. Why don't you write down some more ideas, and I'll help you fit them in."

She told herself that she was witnessing real progress that wouldn't have been possible with Clarence in the room. She hoped that he was doing well, and was glad when she heard rumors that he was. She also felt relieved when she heard he'd gotten into trouble for beating up another child. "If he was behaving perfectly, what the heck was I doing wrong?" She missed him sometimes, but in the midst of missing him she'd recall sitting with him at her table, trying to get him to write a story, his face growing stonier the harder she tried. She'd remember wasting half of the hour of creative writing trying to get him to work, and wasting most of the next half hour trying to regain her composure. She would remember coming back from lunch to find Arabella sobbing, and would remember knowing at that instant that she'd have to lecture Clarence again and that doing so would mean he'd put on the stony face and cause more trouble in the room the next time she turned her back. She'd remember thinking, "All I want to do is teach. I want a quiet afternoon so I can teach." It was the kind of small remembered pain that is encouraging. The children hardly ever mentioned Clarence anymore.

The delinquency lists rarely got very large. The actual number of disciplinary incidents remained about the same, but most didn't last long, most didn't lead to further incidents, and, Chris noticed, most didn't leave her feeling all worn out. Felipe went into an extended math sulk one day. She kept him after school to talk about it. He screamed at her, "You hate me! I know it! Why don't you just admit it!" But she kept calm outside and fairly calm within, and a thunderstorm worked wonders in Felipe. A few days later he remarked that Mrs. Zajac was "the funnest" teacher he'd ever had. On a day not long after that, the intercom announced that recess was outdoors, as it did almost every day now, and Felipe groaned, "Awww!" When Chris asked him why on earth he wouldn't want to go outside for recess, Felipe said, "Because we want to work on our spelling."

Inside the room, during social studies, the pioneers drove out onto the Oregon Trail in a station wagon. "Put your heads down on your desks. Jimmy, keep your eyes open, because I'm not sure about you." They were pioneer children, and she was their mother. She wore a short-sleeved blouse and khaki skirt. She walked up and down among the desks of her middle people, hands in her skirt pockets, stopping now and then to bend down and make sure Jimmy's eyes were open. "You come home and your mother says, 'Okay, we're going to a place called Molasses.' And so the first thing you say to yourself is?"

"Where's Molasses?" said Felipe, head still in the crook of his arm.

What was Molasses like? The mother didn't know. Were they ever coming back? Nope, going there permanently. A few worried ohhhs from the children. Chris smacked her lips. "Okay. And your mother says, 'You know, on the way I can't stop at McDonald's or Burger King or 7-Eleven and get some supplies. So, because I need room for the food, we can take very little of your things.' " She sang, "Goodbye, stereo.
Goodbye, TV.
" And her hands came out of her pockets and threw those things off the side of the trail.

The bit about the TV brought gasps of surprise and disbelief and a few cries of protest—"No way!"—from the roomful of lowered heads, and, voice cracking on that high but gravelly laugh, Chris cried, "Goodbye, bike! Goodbye, all those things!"

They climbed the Rockies—she had never seen them, except in photographs—and endured the hard realities of life and death on the trail. Her hands flew out to one side and threw down their Cabbage Patch dolls and all the dishes and the kitchen table by the side of the trail. "Because if you don't drop your stuff out at that point, you are
stranded.
One of our vocabulary words for this morning. You're
stuck
there, and there's nothing around for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles. Finally, you get to Molasses."

"Thank goodness!" said Arnie. He didn't seem to be joking.

And they had to build houses and contend with Native Americans, who didn't want these interlopers taking their land—and they wouldn't have felt any different, would they, if they'd been Native Americans?—and with exhaustion and illness and no hospitals. "I think most of us, including Mrs. Zajac, might pass out and say, 'No way!' "

Most of the children had sat up, and most nodded their heads.

"What you have just experienced in your minds is something not very, but a little similar to what the settlers experienced a long, long time ago. In those days they didn't use a car. What did they use?"

"A wagon," said Dick.

"I'd have an eight-cylinder Peterbilt," said Claude.

"Those people," said Chris. "Why did they do it?" With feeling, she added, "They seem like nuts to me." They spent the next fifteen minutes figuring out why; the answers were in the text. In subsequent lessons, she put on a skit with them, arranged them in study groups, had them write short essays in which they imagined themselves children going west in covered wagons—a lot of the essays were pretty good, she thought—and showed them a movie in which Indians in ceremonial dress did a ceremonial dance, and Dick, the quiet boy who loved social studies, piped up, "Mrs. Zajac, is that a stereotype?"