Among School Children (21 page)

In Chris's family, one went to Mass every week. There was no discussion or argument. Even when Chris reached the age of choice, she attended church, but mostly out of habit and because she knew her parents wanted her to. She didn't know how much religion mattered to her until her father got sick. Then she didn't know what else to do except to pray. She prayed as doggedly as she did most things. She tried to cut any number of deals with God. When her father died anyway, she felt very angry. In church she might be on her knees and look devout, but in her mind she said, "You killed him. Why him? He was a good man, and we still need him."

In his eulogy, the priest, still one of Chris's favorites, offered an answer that would have resonance for anyone whose family history included the terrors of immigration. The priest probably drew inspiration from the Gospel of John. Chris's father had provided well for his family here on earth, and was still providing for them, the priest said. Her father had gone on ahead, to prepare a place for them in Heaven. He had died now so that they would not feel frightened when they followed him.

Occasionally, Chris asked herself, "Where
is
my father?" But with her heart she accepted the priest's explanation, and hung on to it through what remained of that worst year in her life. Her father had died in May, before school let out. In July, she lost her second child to a miscarriage. Then her mother's routine physical turned up something ominous. There had been too much death around her and inside her. She spent August living through the news ahead of time, that her mother was going to die, too. If she lived it out in advance, the worst would have happened already, and her mother wouldn't have to die. She made another deal with God, on her knees at Sacred Heart: "Please make my mother healthy, and I'll stop blaming You and the world for my losing my father." Chris kept her end of the bargain. The doctor declared her mother fit the day before school started. "It was like everything just left me. I saw I had so many things to be thankful for. Billy looked at me and he said, 'Thank God. I never thought you'd be normal again.' The first day of school, I was exhausted, but I felt like a new person."

Chris didn't talk about religion, except in church or among people very close to her. That God made people for a purpose seemed plausible to her, however. She thought God had intended her to teach, and if He had not given her the power to alter the lives of every troubled child who came into her room, He expected her to try.

So would her father. In her classroom, she would look at Clarence refusing to work and would consider just ignoring him. But then she'd say to herself, "No, you give me a hard time every day. I'm going to give you one." And she'd also remember the time when she began her student teaching and her resolution faltered and she said to her father that maybe she should become a lawyer. Her father had told her, "Oh, come on, Christine. You can't give up
that
easily."

Over the years Chris had gotten in the habit of wondering when she would burn out. It was like waiting to catch the flu and, at the first intimations, like waiting to see if flu would turn into pneumonia this time. Now in the room, during the week after the core, she kept having a feeling of doubleness. She didn't want to be here. The real Chris wasn't here. Now and then she lost her temper at one or another of the children for offenses that would not have upset her before, and her voice sounded harsh and shrill to her, like the voice of someone else, someone she didn't like. The little leaps of the clock's minute hand, which had seemed to happen much too quickly once, now seemed to come after endless delay. On the surface, her lessons seemed adequate but plain. In her mind, as she taught some of them, she thought, "I'm boring myself. I'll just get through this one. I'm not really here. I don't know what's wrong." She told herself, "It's March. I do this every year. I say, 'Uh-oh, it's March. I'm supposed to feel terrible.'" But in the middle of a social studies lesson on Tuesday, she felt as if she were listening to someone else drone on before the class, and she asked herself, "Oh, God, am I losing it? Am I burnt out?"

Little incidents distracted her. As if to remind her that Lil was gone from the office and not coming back, Al's mood music got piped into the classrooms by accident for a little while and made her interrupt her lesson until the place stopped sounding like a dentist's office.

Nothing visible had changed. The room was the same. The bright-colored children's chairs had the same old air of prearranged, forced cheerfulness. The flecked blue carpet, designed for wear, hid the little messes that inevitably occur in a classroom over years. What went on here now was just one little play out of many already staged and to be staged. Through the thin walls came the sounds of other classes going on just as before. The room was filled, as always, with the prettiness of children, and the many stacks of books and papers lay, as always, on the cabinets, on the front table, on the corners of Chris's desk, in the carefully organized disarray of a craftsman's workshop.

School goes on, but Chris felt as if it went on without her all that long week. Robert's arriving without homework, as usual, sent her to the phone by the door, to call the office and say, "Al? Robert. I can't deal with him today." (Al, who was not a stone, as some teachers thought, showed up just moments later and took Robert away for several hours.) The class seemed different to her. As the week dragged on, more and more children ceased doing their homework. Chris looked up at the quadrant of green board where she recorded debts of effort, and the lists were full of children who had been making lots of progress just a while ago, and by midweek the only name that she would not have minded seeing there now had vanished. The pattern was all wrong. For the first time this year, Clarence did all of his homework two days in a row. She looked at Clarence playing the little scholar, working on his penmanship without being reminded, his tongue pinned in the corner of his mouth. He made his cursive especially neat—she'd always praised his handwriting back when she had to search for ways to praise him.

She would have to tell him soon.

For a while Chris thought Clarence's mother might do that job for her. On Wednesday, his mother showed up. She said she hadn't heard about the core.

She wore a colorful cloth bandanna wound around her temples. She was tall. Her voice was deep. She looked exotic and powerful, and maybe even dangerous if crossed. And yet, in this setting, she seemed meek. Many adults feel a little nervous going back to school. Standing in the hall, leaning on the balcony railing beside Chris, Clarence's mother seemed more like a wayward pupil than an adult.

"And we thought it would be the best thing for Clarence to go to a special class," Chris said.

"A
special
class? Oh, no." But his mother's deep voice had no power behind it.

The counselor took the mother to his office. She was talked to by several others involved in the decision. The mother nodded. She looked a little sad sometimes. She made her musical laugh over jokey remarks from the counselor. She was extremely polite. She wanted to know how long Clarence would stay in the special class. Probably through sixth grade, said the counselor, who did not tell her any lies. "I think he'll like it, and you can always go up and take a look at it," said the counselor.

Clarence's mother didn't ask for a ride to see the special class, though. The counselor offered to explain anything she didn't understand about the class and about the forms she had to sign if she agreed. She said, "Well, give it a shot," and started signing.

Chris felt sorry for the woman, but while she'd talked to her briefly that day, Chris was thinking, "We're picking up your pieces. We have to try to figure out something to do for him. And I have to feel lousy about it."

That afternoon Chris told the class about an essay contest. She said it was optional, and Alice and Judith said, in that case, they didn't want to participate. Chris looked at them sternly and said, "I know I have a lot of good writers in here."

"Yeah, me!" declared Clarence.

He lingered after school. She didn't tell him to stay. She took the other walkers out and, returning, found Clarence sitting at his desk, copying down the homework assignments.

"Mrs. Zajac? What's that word? E-s-s-a-y?"

She stood over him, looking down at the busy boy.

Clarence looked up at her craftily. "Mrs. Zajac. I got a joke for you."

She lifted her eyebrows.

"There's a horse name Nobody. If that was the only horse on earth, who would you marry? No! If
you
and the horse was the only ones on earth, who would you marry?"

She smiled, half closing her eyes. "Nobody."

Clarence grinned. Then he asked her if he could wash the boards for her.

That night Chris woke up gritting her teeth again. She imagined Clarence's mother telling him about Alpha. That was his mother's job, but Chris wondered if she shouldn't have told him first.

Thursday morning, Chris felt as if she were holding her breath when Clarence came in and got to work on penmanship.

"Clarence? Come here, dear."

He leaned on the edge of her desk, his legs spread and far out behind him, his about-to-be-frisked pose for pleasant talks with Mrs. Zajac.

"Did your mother mention anything to you last night? About school?"

"No." He shook his head. He looked at her, his mouth slightly ajar. "Why?"

"Just wondering," said Chris.

So she'd have to do that job herself. She needed time to think.

That afternoon, when the children had gone to gym, Chris sat at her desk and read over some papers of Clarence's. She looked off at nothing. The papers proved again how far he was behind most of the rest. Maybe, she thought, he would be a star at Alpha. That was the main reason she hadn't fought against it, she told herself.

She guessed she'd have to tell him tomorrow.

Friday morning Clarence sat right down and asked her if he could work on his essay instead of penmanship. So he really planned to enter the essay contest. He might be gone, she thought, before the contest was judged.

She felt tired. Her daughter had been up half the night with stomach flu. Her own stomach felt as if it were drifting from its moorings. She felt grateful for her morning chores. But when she got to the attendance sheet, she stopped. She dropped her pen, let her shoulders droop, and gazed off at nothing, one hand covering her mouth. "I don't know how to tell him," she thought. "Oh, God."

"Clarence, come here a minute."

Clarence took his usual stance, leaning on the edge of her desk. Pitching her voice low for this private talk, she said, "We had a meeting about you last week, and I was therrrre and some other people were therrrre..." She heard in her own voice the exaggerated cadence adults use to coax little children off to sleep, a voice that rarely works, of course. Perhaps the strangeness of her cadences put Clarence on his slowly turning wheel. He was standing sideways to her by the time she had managed to tell him that he was going to a new class.

She had her old voice back at least. "So anyways, I don't know when you're going there, but I want you to know that's where you're going. I
also
want you to know that you're not going there because of the way you've behaved or anything like that. Mrs. Zajac isn't sending you there for a punishment. She's sending you there because I think it's going to help you. I think you'll
like
it, as a matter of fact. You'll probably like it more than this school, because there's only twelve kids in the room and the teacher will be able to give you more attention. What do you think of that?" She waited. He didn't answer.

"Think you're going to want to go?"

He shook his head.

"Why not?"

He wouldn't speak. His eyelashes fluttered. No other part of him moved.

She tried for a while longer, and then she said, "Well, if you have any questions about it, you come up and ask me. Okay? Maybe you can think of some when you're sitting back down. As I said, it's not going to happen on Monday or anything like that. I don't know when, but I'll let you know. Okay?"

He walked slowly back to his desk. He sat staring at the board, mouth ajar. Then, in a flurry of movement, he pulled out pencil and paper and started working on his essay for the contest. A moment later, with the quickness of a woodland creature, Clarence turned his head toward the doorway just as Courtney, arriving late, appeared. Clarence looked at Mrs. Zajac. "Courtney!" he whispered.

By the end of math, Chris's ears were clicking. All day her illness expanded, and as it did, she grew markedly gentler, as she always did anyway on Friday. At the start of the day's last hour, she led the children down to the library to do research on their astronomy reports. She sat at a table a little distance away from them and didn't even try to work. Now and then children came up to her.

"Mrs. Zajac, there's lava on the moon!" said Felipe.

Ashley came up. "Mrs. Zajac, a comet is a fuzzy star."

Chris smiled. Her eyes were puffy. Her words were full of the sound of the letter
b.
She watched Clarence while holding tissues to her nose. He sat several tables away. He was pretending his chair was a horse. She smiled. She ached too much to try to do her duty by him. In sickness, she felt better than she had for days. All week the room had seemed to harbor the secret of Clarence's banishment. Now the feeling of intrigue had been swept away. The worst was almost over, and the revelation that had lain in front of her for the last six days, like a figure in the carpet, was not impossible to face. She had waited all week for the old Clarence to return. He had not. He had been trying to make up in a week for all the lessons he had missed in his six years of school. He looked happy now and mischievous, rocking in his chair and chewing gum openly, and she was glad. How frightened the boy must have been this past week and a half! she thought. And what amazing instincts he had.

Since the core, there had been important differences between what Chris knew and what she told herself and friends. She was relieved to feel so weak and aching that picking up a book was hard, and to blame microbes and not herself. Maybe she'd been coming down with flu all week, she told herself, and then she made a face. She gazed at Clarence. She wished she could think that others had made the decision to send him away. She had tried to believe that all week. Well, in fact, they had. She had not argued for Alpha. But she hadn't really argued against it. Only she had made the decision not to try to
prevent
the decision. "I let him down in a way," she thought. "That's why I can't sleep." There. She'd faced it all.