Among School Children (11 page)

Kelly School was right next door to what is called the Five College Area, but Judith had not yet heard of Smith, Mount Holyoke, or Amherst College.

From her classroom window in the crisp, dying days of fall, Chris would watch her students at recess on the playground below. She looked out to see if Clarence was in a hitting mood, and to see which children were making friends. Through the window, about a month ago, Chris had begun to see Judith hanging around in a group that included a very tough thirteen-year-old fifth grader from another homeroom, a pretty girl with a dirty neck, who leered at handsome boys and was often seen sitting on the bad-boy chairs outside Al's office. Then one day Chris saw that girl stuff some clothes under her coat at recess and promenade around, pantomiming pregnancy, while a small group of girls, which included Judith, watched. It looked as though Judith was laughing.

A while back Chris had bragged about Judith to a teacher friend. The friend had asked, "Have you considered moving her up to sixth grade?" Chris decided she should do that right away. Losing Judith from this class would be like losing an adult friend. The thought of the room without her made Chris feel bereft, and that made Chris feel it was her duty to promote Judith. She'd get Judith away from that tough girl and shorten the number of dangerous years between Judith and college.

The vice principal, Paul, talked Chris out of the idea. Wasn't Judith doing well? Didn't she seem happy? Paul asked. Chris was willing to be persuaded to keep Judith.

Every other day in Holyoke, a teenage girl was giving birth. Someone on the staff had carelessly remarked that Judith would probably get pregnant in a few years. But Chris refused to believe that.

"Judith, come here," Chris had said when class was winding up one day early in the fall. Judith came with her cheek laid against her right shoulder. "What do you want to be?"

Judith laughed.

"Do you want to go to college?"

Judith looked around her. The other children were getting their coats and weren't noticing. "Yes."

"Good," said Chris. "You should. You're a smart girl. If you keep working hard, you'll get a nice scholarship. So keep it up. Okay?"

Chris had been feeling very optimistic about Judith since the parent conferences. Judith's father had attended. He looked much older and less prepossessing than Chris had imagined him. He wasn't much taller than Judith. He wore rough work clothes. He spoke softly in Spanish.

Judith stood beside her father at the front table and translated into Spanish Chris's words of praise for her.

"Tell your father that you're an excellent student, Judith."

Judith obeyed. She seemed to be trying not to smile at the absurdity of it all.

Chris brought up college. Judith's father spoke. Judith said, "He says that maybe I can get a scholarship."

"Yes!" shouted Chris.

It was during that conference that Chris decided she hadn't understood the full extent of Judith's gifts. The girl had a huge English vocabulary and her parents didn't even speak the language. For Chris, there was no question now. This was the brightest child she had ever tried to teach.

When Debbie, the librarian and director of the reading program, came asking for children who could be spared to help out in the library, Chris volunteered Judith, during spelling. Judith didn't need spelling lessons. Then Chris decided to send Alice, who would certainly be going to college, along with Judith to the library, to keep her company. Pretty soon—Chris could have predicted it—Debbie was leaving Judith and Alice to run the library by themselves for half an hour in the mornings. Chris was afraid that Judith might get bored with school. Chris made sure to spend some time with her every day. But it didn't feel like enough. Chris kept looking at Judith and thinking, "If only 1 had more time."

When was it exactly that Chris noticed something wrong with Judith's eyes? Probably that time when Chris wrote a sentence on the board and, while turning to watch Clarence, asked Judith to read it aloud. Judith made just a quick squint when she must have thought Mrs. Zajac wasn't looking. But Chris saw the squint from the corner of her eye. Chris pounced. For weeks now, she had been cornering Judith near the door at the end of the day, cutting her out from the herd of other walkers and saying, "Judith, you'd look so pretty in glasses!"

Judith would lift her eyes to heaven, put her hands on her hips, shake her head, and smile at Mrs. Zajac. The girl was still resisting, but the struggle was fun, and it seemed worth the effort, if only for its symbolism. It was something Chris could do for Judith, who was always doing something for Chris. Just recently, for example, at the end of a very bad day with Clarence, Judith had said, "Mrs. Zajac? Do you mind if I take home a dictionary?"

In the dining room, Chris turned to Alice's test. Alice had pink cheeks and silky brown hair. She wore shirts with the designer's name on the front. The sight of an injured or weeping classmate clearly troubled her. Her hands, the nails brightly painted, would flutter nervously. If a crying child was within reach, Alice would rub the child's back. Chris could not remember a fifth grader with a more fully developed sympathetic imagination. Alice was spunky, too. One time Chris left the room and returned to find Alice standing up at her desk, glaring at Clarence. Evidently, Clarence had snatched something from Judith and Alice had snatched it back. When Chris entered, Clarence was saying to Alice, "You do that one more time, I'm gonna make you cry." But he was backing away from Alice, who stood resolutely, her little jaw firmly set, facing him down.

Chris imagined pretty Alice returning home to the upper-class Highlands. That daily event was life as it has been dreamed of in popular American culture: Alice in her snug house, working on her homework in a sunny family room. Alice was one of only several in the class who lived with all the trappings that every child has on TV sitcoms designed for the whole family: safety, fine expectations, no rats or roaches, only birds chirping in the yard outside, a mother who sat down and listened to everything Alice wanted to say, and a father always willing and able to help Alice with her homework. Her parents could have sent her to a private school, but they believed in the idea of public education. They thought she was getting a good one. Some girls at school picked on Alice out of envy of her clothes; her father thought that at public school Alice would learn resiliency.

Alice lived just a few minutes' drive but a socioeconomic gulf away from Judith's project. Chris figured that what the two girls had in common was probably more important: each had two parents who took pains with her. In school, adeptness with language usually matters most, and preschool training often has a lot to do with aptitude for language. Alice's parents had read to her from infancy; Judith's father had always told her stories. In grades and standardized test scores, the two girls resembled each other more than they did anyone else in the class. Alice ranked number two, a little behind Judith in most subjects.

Chris often corrected Judith's and Alice's papers after the others. They helped her get to sleep. "96 = A Very Good!" Chris wrote across the top of Alice's test.

"Oh, Alice," she said, "why don't I have more of you?"

Chris's pen made a regular, two-part sound, like windshield wipers, when it hit wrong answers and drew an X beside a question on the test. It was as if the pen were saying, "That's wrong." Her pen scratch-scratched down the page, then over onto the other side, saying, faster and faster and more and more angrily, "That's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong." Chris made a face. She said aloud, to Robert's paper, "Robert, you got a thirty. Isn't that wonderful?"

Sarcasm is wrong; it tears down a child. Chris hated it, especially in herself, even when she directed it at Robert's paper and not Robert. Clarence wasn't the only very taxing child in this class. Robert was a genius at bringing out the worst in her.

Robert had crew-cut black hair. His wide face looked as if it had been cut from a square block. He was big all over, with the ample belly of a middle-aged softball player. He had an improbably squeaky voice. On one of the first days of school, Chris asked him, "Robert, please, could you put this package of markers over on my desk?" And Robert did a shimmy at his desk, rolling his shoulders, a patch of jiggling white belly showing. "Who? Me?" he said. Then he looked up at Chris with that smartass grin on his face. "Robert, I'm not asking you to move a refrigerator," she said, but wouldn't she have liked to slap that coy grin away.

There was always an accidental quality to the life around her in her room. On the one hand, there was Judith, who wrote the following cinquain:

Space
is a dark void. Cold
stars and planets live up
there. Big Dipper and Mars. We
explore.

And on the other hand, Robert, who Chris knew had the equipment to do well in school, and who wrote this:

Garbage
is disgusting
garbage is wet and smells
garbage drips all over the ground.
It smells

Robert's paragraph about his ideal birthday party described a cake fight at his house, during which his mother's boyfriend got the cake "right in the face." Reading that here in her dining room one night a while back, Chris had thought, "They probably haven't cleaned up the mess yet. Maybe that's where the roaches in the room came from." Robert was getting to her more than he could possibly know.

He lived in an old, run-down apartment building in the lower-class Highlands, not many blocks from where Chris grew up. Maybe that was part of the problem. Maybe Robert made the kind of life Chris dreaded seem all too near at hand.

Where had Robert learned that the best way to deal with failure is to embrace it? One time, after Chris handed back a test, Robert said loudly, "F. F's my specialty!"

Another time, Chris told Felipe he had to stop leaning back in his chair. She tacked on a cautionary tale of a former student of hers who had fallen backward and cracked open his head.

"Did blood spurt all over?" said Robert, grinning.

Chris tried to add some fun to Friday's spelling tests by putting the children's names into sentences: "
Firefly.
Mariposa caught a
firefly
in her hand."

"And squished it," piped up Robert in his squeaky voice. He gurgled.

"
Smother,
" Chris said during one test. "You shouldn't put a pillow in a baby's crib, or it might
smother
itself."

"That'd be a riot," declared Robert.

That time Alice spoke for Mrs. Zajac. "Robert! You could kill the baby!"

Robert made his gurgly laugh and looked around the room, as if searching for more of that kind of approbation.

Robert was capable. Chris had asked Robert's reading group what sort of teacher she would be if, like the girl in the story they were reading, she didn't care for her job.

"You'd let the kids do whatever they wanted," said Robert without hesitation.

His misspent intelligence angered her. "He could be at grade level. Easy. He could be getting A's," she thought.

Once in a while, Robert did get A's. One day that fall, he even came in with all of his homework done, and did all his work in class. Chris wrote a note to his mother, saying that Robert had a very good day in school. Maybe his mother said the wrong thing when she saw the note, or maybe the note frightened Robert. He was acute enough to sense that the surest way of hanging on to his teacher's attention was not to do the work. He didn't do his homework again for weeks.

The second day of school, Chris wrote Robert's mother a note.

Robert's mother wrote back, in part: "I want to know everything he does. So I can stop it."

Which seemed both discouraging and encouraging. By immediate return note, Chris tried to institute the old homework-signing deal: Chris would make sure that Robert wrote down his assignments correctly and would initial the paper; Robert's mother should make sure that he did the work and she should sign it. A few times after Chris sent a note to his mother, Robert did his homework. But his mother could not have checked Robert's work very often because he rarely did any, and the little that he did always came back unsigned.

Finally, Robert's mother called Chris on the phone at school. The woman sounded angry. She demanded to know why Robert was being kept after school. Chris said it was because Robert hadn't done his homework for a long time. His mother said that surprised her. Robert did his homework. Chris said she never saw it. Then Robert's mother said that if her son wasn't doing his homework, maybe it was because the work was too boring for him. Chris held her tongue. Then the woman said she wanted Chris to keep Robert after school
every
day. Chris said she couldn't do that, and the mother soon hung up. "She just wants free babysitting," Chris thought. Here at her table at night, Chris had imaginary conversations with that woman. They usually turned into shouting matches.

She didn't always find it impossible to like Robert. He once said, "School would be better if they didn't have teachers. Just robots. Yeah. And we'd rewire 'em." Chris felt a little wave of admiration for him when he blurted out statements like that, or when he told her she was said to be the meanest teacher in the school. She'd think, "Boy, I'd never have had the guts to say that to a teacher." And Chris felt a little ashamed of herself, for her thoughts about Robert, when she read his scrawled writings about his father, whom Robert had never met. Without being able to say so, Robert seemed to feel that in the great mystery of who his father was lay the secret of himself. But Robert's mother evidently felt that a meeting with his father might lead Robert astray. A couple of times in class, Robert wrote letters to his father, letters that would never be mailed.

Dear Dad

were do you live I want to come and see you I love you but the only thing is do you love me. Why did you leave my mother in the first place because you had another lady on your mind or something.

By

Dad