Among School Children (33 page)

Chris cupped an ear and leaned toward Ashley, who said, "It's an overshot water wheel, and when water hits it, it turns." She didn't have much else to say.

Arnie's father had arrived. Chris smiled broadly. She extended her hand. Arnie's father clasped it shyly. Chris noticed that his pants were torn and dirty. An unmistakable, sweetish odor of liquor came from him. It was only about ten in the morning. Chris visited Arnie's table. On it lay a store-bought example of an electric switch. Arnie smiled at her. He looked especially cute to her now. He knew something about how the switch worked. Chris was writing grades in her book, grades based not on the projects but on what the children had learned. She wrote
B
beside Arnie's name. Then she paused. The grade meant nothing, she thought. She hadn't based it on what Arnie knew. She'd based it on Arnie's father. She might as well stop grading this event.

Other parents had arrived. There behind her homemade model of the solar system sat Arabella, smiling sweetly, looking chipper and healthy and confident, telling the judges all the names of the planets, their approximate distances from the sun, the main characteristics of each. And there, in his electrician's uniform, moving from table to table and correcting the mistaken notions of the various children who had done projects on electricity, was the explanation for the care behind Arabella's project and for the progress that Arabella had made this year—Arabella's father.

Alice's father wore a necktie and blue blazer. The team of Alice, Judith, and Margaret had done electrical generation. Alice's father had taken them to the Holyoke water power plant a few days ago. Through a friend he'd arranged a special tour for the girls. Afterward, he'd bought them all ice cream cones and taken them back to the Highlands to help them finish the project. Their display, a model town on a large piece of plywood, didn't show how power got generated, but it was the nicest-looking project in the gym. Chris questioned them. The girls knew their stuff. Chris chatted briefly with Alice's father. She thanked him for helping his daughter and her friends so much.

She meant those words. But she couldn't look around the gym now without feeling sad. The children whose parents had come to the gym—for the most part neatly dressed, confident-seeming adults—had the best projects and knew the most about their subjects. In general, the forlorn projects belonged to the children with no parents on hand, such as Courtney and Kimberly, who stood behind a table displaying a box of oatmeal, a hamburger bun, a piece of white bread, a carton of milk, an egg, two potatoes, and a remnant of iceberg lettuce growing brown.

Chris wished she could call a halt right now. The whole event looked like a rigged election, distressingly predictable, as if designed to teach the children about the unfairness of life. She saw one bright spot, though. There was some room in an unfair world for individual achievement. She walked up to Claude's table. She questioned his partners, Jimmy and Pedro, first. Claude said to them, "Come on, guys. Don't let me down." Pedro and Jimmy still couldn't tell Mrs. Zajac much about rivers, even though for weeks she had been opening books on the subject for them. But she felt rescued from this day, for a brief time, when she looked at what Claude had done: on the table, his thorough and neat diagram of a river rising in mountains and flowing to the sea; and behind that, Claude's model river. He had built his model on a metal serving platter. Little stones were piled up at one end, from which a chute of aluminum foil descended, depicting a waterfall, which led to the river itself, which had banks described by more small stones and a bed of aquarium gravel, and water, too. In the water lay a little rubber crayfish and a little rubber fish, which if you squeezed it (as Claude would for fairgoers) spawned several smaller rubber fish from its nether end. She'd never dared to hope for this much from him. And the best was still to come.

"All right, Claude," she shouted over the din, "tell me about rivers."

And Claude, who for six months hadn't managed to complete more than a few homework assignments, delivered a lucid description, even better than during rehearsals, of the birth of rivers. "Ice melts, see. It comes down the mountain into a brook, and the brook makes a river. It flows into the ocean and the whole thing starts over again because of evaporation which makes, like, clouds." As he expounded, talking fast, his right hand flapped, as it used to when he was concocting one of his loony homework excuses. "Sometimes a waterfall gets worn away," he went on.

He seemed to know enough to talk all morning. Chris had to move along. "Okay," she said. "Thank you, Claude."

Claude's mother had arrived. Chris spotted her in the crowd and went up to her. Now at last Chris could give that likable, worried parent some good news.

"Any improvement?"

"Yes!" cried Chris. "His science project is pretty good! He's still not getting
all
his work in, but he wrote a pretty good story. And he did
well
on a social studies test."

Chris had a slightly somber thought, which she kept to herself: "Maybe all my being on Claude these last weeks has made some of the others slip."

An island of chairs had been set up for teachers in the center of the gym's blond floor. Chris retreated to one of those chairs. She needed a break. In spite of Claude, this was the worst Science Fair she could remember. Or did she think that every year? No. This really was the worst. Maybe Science Fairs worked in other schools. But this kind of event had no place at this school anymore. She'd go to Al afterward and tell him they
had
to rethink the whole thing.

Hazy sunlight filtered through the gym's high, frosted windows. The noise, sharp and concentrated, made her feel as if her hands were vibrating, like tuning forks. Chris looked around. Where was Robert?

Robert had come to school this morning without his science project, saying that he had left it at a convenience store. The counselor had taken him to fetch the project. Chris had told Robert that when he got back, he should come down to the gym right away. But he was nowhere in sight.

Chris sent Courtney back to the classroom to see if Robert was there. Courtney returned in a few minutes. "Robert says he's not comin'," she said.

Chris lowered her eyebrows. "Oh, he isn't, isn't he?"

Chris strode down the corridor toward her classroom. The halls were wonderfully quiet. Her skirt rustled. She quick-marched, hands swinging high. Her mind was filled with heated, exasperated thoughts about Robert. Weeks ago Robert had said he wouldn't do a project for the Science Fair. She had tried to talk him into it, and finally, he had agreed. Overall, he had improved since that day when she'd isolated him, but plenty of the old Robert remained, enough to make her think that, when it came to his science project, he just wanted to get a rise out of her. Or just wanted once again to keep failure at bay by embracing it right from the start. He'd settle for the easy distinction of being weird.

Robert was one of those children who make it hard for a teacher to like them. Not quite consciously but on purpose. She had kept telling herself that she admired his boldness and his outspoken hatred of school. But then he'd start gurgling over the idea of a baby being smothered or refuse to do a science project and shrug his shoulders when she asked why.

Chris stopped in the doorway to her classroom. Robert sat at a desk near the door, his broad back toward her.

"You! Get over here!" she said.

At the sound of Mrs. Zajac's voice, Robert ducked his head. What lay on his desk was hidden from Chris for the moment.

"Pick yourself up and get to the office," she said.

Robert stood up. His arms hung limply in front of him. His chin was pressed to his chest. His broad face was bright. He trudged, listing to one side, toward Mrs. Zajac in the doorway.

Chris looked at him. Something was wrong. He wasn't smirking. He was clearly upset. She looked at his desk, and then the tightness left her jaw. She let her shoulders sag, and her face turned as red as Robert's.

On Robert's desk she saw a weathered scrap of two-by-six with raggedly cut ends. On each of its longer edges was a flashlight battery, precariously secured to the board by a profusion of bent and twisted nails. A tangle of wires, twisted around other nails, covered the surface of the board. An attempt had been made to tape the ends of the wires to the batteries and to a small light bulb. The bulb had a broken filament. A hammer and some outsize nails lay on Robert's desk next to his project. He had tried to make an electric light. It suddenly looked like a very difficult thing to do.

Chris looked at the project and she saw all at once a Robert slightly different from the one she thought she'd known just a minute ago. All year long she had tried to get Robert to take a chance and make an effort. Now he had. He had tried, and he had
sincerely
failed. And she had rewarded him with humiliation. How many times had-something like this happened to him in his life already? Was this the reason Robert behaved as he did? Is self-inflicted pain better than sadness and despair? She looked at the lashed-up wires and bent nails on the dirty scrap of wood, and it was all there in front of her: the dead, undeliverable letters that Robert had written to the father he'd never met. He had no one at home to help him make an electric light. That was why he'd said he didn't want to do a project. He wasn't just being perverse. "How stupid I am!" she thought. She should have bent the rules and given him more help. She should have arranged a success for him. "How stupid I am!"

"Sit down, Robert," she said softly.

He sat down at the desk and wouldn't look at his project. He looked at his feet instead, arms dangling down between his legs. She sat next to him. "Why aren't you coming to the Fair?"

"Doesn't work." His voice was a squeak. He stared at the floor.

"When were you supposed to figure that out, Robert? Before now. Right, Robert?" But her voice was very gentle. Not much of the year remained, but enough for her to make a change in herself, too. No matter how infuriating he might be tomorrow or next week, she wasn't going to let herself feel truly angry at him again. He had let her see the wounded little boy inside the fat would-be comedian. She felt like crying. At last, he had let her like him.

Robert made a series of little shrugs and began picking at the wads of black electrical tape on his project.

"Can you explain what it's supposed to do?"

"No."

She knew that he could. He had explained it very well last week, after she had directed him to books about electricity. The project showed that he did know how an electric light works. He just hadn't been able to make it happen. Maybe, she thought, she could help him now.

"Robert, if you took a little longer now, it might work."

"No," he squeaked, still looking at the floor.

His jeans looked dirty. The sleeves of the heavy sweatshirt he'd begun wearing since the onset of warm weather were too long. The cuffs half covered his dirty hands.

She didn't have time now to work with him on the project. She had to get back to the gym. Anyway, the light bulb was broken, and she didn't know where to find another in a hurry. She'd take him to the office and leave him there and try to forget about him for a while. No, she couldn't do that. She'd take him to the gym and let him join his classmates and hope that the rest of this day would pass quickly.

Robert seemed to recover fast. He ambled around the gym, making snaky movements with his hands in the manner of the dancers in a then popular TV video, done to a song called "Walk Like an Egyptian." Chris's recovery took longer.

The Fair ended with a ceremony after lunch. The parents had departed. The children sat in a huge, disordered phalanx on one side of the now dusty floor, and the teachers sat on chairs facing them. It was almost over. Al roared for quiet. Chris started giggling behind her hand. "Oh, God. Our leader," she murmured to another teacher. Finally, the wave of giddiness passed and she wiped her eyes.

The team of Alice, Judith, and Margaret got first prize. Arabella got the third-place ribbon and came bouncing up to get it. Chris felt glad that those children's parents had helped them. Claude's team got a ribbon for special effort. That was even better, because Claude had earned it all by himself.

"Oh, my God!" said Claude, receiving his ribbon.

Chris watched, and she smiled. She imagined Claude thinking, "I can't believe this! I got a prize!"

But Chris stopped smiling when she turned her eyes toward Felipe. He was scowling. Felipe's team hadn't won anything. She glanced at the faces of Jorge, Ashley, Kimberly, Courtney. The faces of the losers looked not exactly sad but distant. As more fortunate classmates took the ribbons, many of the losers watched with slightly opened mouths, like children gazing through the window of a toy store. If she could, Chris thought, she'd give them all prizes. She'd go to Al tomorrow. They couldn't let this happen again next year.

Chris once heard a veteran colleague say, "I'm not interested in impossible cases anymore. I'll teach the kids who want to learn." The strategy had an allure. "But," Chris told herself, "some kids don't know they want to learn until you put it in their heads that they do."
I'll teach the ones who want to learn.
She would turn those words over in her mind and answer back that her own son might not get taught if his teachers followed that strategy. And still, it was alluring. You can't fail if you don't try.

If all of life is like a rigged election, there is no point in teaching. Only the surprises prevent boredom and despair. Surprises happened every year, and Claude was one of this year's best. She'd nearly given up hope for him. On a morning a little while ago, she'd substituted him in her imagination for that rather "simple" but sweet old neighbor of her childhood, the one she saw sweeping the sidewalk in front of a store every morning. "Claude could do that," she had thought. She could see him differently now. Claude could become a game warden, a tradesman, maybe even a wildlife biologist. Whatever he did, he'd probably always be about eight weeks behind schedule, but now she knew he could do a lot more than sweep a sidewalk.