Among School Children (38 page)

There was a difference between the way Miss Harty had inspired Chris and Chris had inspired Suzanne, a generational difference. When Chris was growing up, teaching was still one of the best jobs available to a bright, ambitious woman, especially one with working-class parents. That, of course, was no longer true. Chris knew Suzanne wouldn't become a teacher. "Suzanne's too smart." In fact, Suzanne was hoping to go to Harvard Law School. But the transactions, between Miss Harty and Chris, and Chris and Suzanne, were similar. Suzanne had one overriding memory of Chris, and it was of a person who had helped her once and who, by doing that, had helped her all along the way.

"She's, like, my most memorable teacher," Suzanne said. She kept meaning to visit Miss Padden and tell her that, but hadn't yet.

On a sunny afternoon the last week of school, on the grounds in front of another, older elementary school, under one of several large maple trees, Clarence sat designing a tattoo, with felt-tipped pens, on the bared chest of an Alpha classmate. The friend he was tattooing was a huge twelve-year-old Puerto Rican boy, nearly six feet tall, nicknamed Little Richard by his Alpha teacher. He leaned against the tree trunk, a beatific smile on his face, while Clarence drew a huge eagle on his chest. The small, wiry white boy who had shown Clarence around the Alpha class some months before watched Clarence draw. Clarence had already tattooed himself: a big red eagle on his chest and a swastika on his right forearm.

In a little while, Clarence and the white boy began to tussle in a friendly-looking way. Clarence quick and lithe. Then the white boy plucked some grass and threw it in Clarence's face. And Clarence, his jaw suddenly fierce, ripped up some grass and rubbed it hard in the white boy's face. The white boy went limp and when he got the chance, scrambled a little distance away. Little Richard laughed serenely, and Clarence sat down again beneath the tree. Then Clarence said, "Girls. Check it out."

Of course, he was the first to notice a change in the landscape. Four schoolgirls, with neatly coiffed hair and in designer clothes, had sat down under another maple, about twenty yards away. "They think they're high-class prep," said the white boy.

Clarence called toward the girls, "Tell that girl in green pants to come over here!"

The girls elevated their chins and looked away. They were probably telling each other, "Those are Alpha kids. Just ignore them."

"Kiss mines!" Clarence yelled at them.

One of the girls turned an angry face toward the boys. "I'm not yours!" She must not have been accustomed to that idiom.

The white boy made a wolf whistle.

Little Richard yelled, "Fuckin' bitch!"

"He called you a fuckin' bitch!" called the white boy toward the girls. "That's what
he
said."

"
I
didn't say it!" called Clarence.

"Gimme that ass," murmured grinning Little Richard.

Clarence looked at Little Richard. Clarence smiled. "Go say somethin' to them girls," said Clarence to Little Richard.

Little Richard grinned more broadly then. He got up and walked in a wide, slow circle around the girls' tree.

Clarence laughed behind his hand as he watched.

Little Richard returned from his threatening promenade to the Alphans' tree and made as if to hump its trunk.

"They're so gross!" said one of the girls' voices, and once again the girls all turned their faces away.

And the three Alpha boys sat down together again.

"I wish I had a soda right here, man," said Little Richard.

"I wish one of those girls wanted to get popped," said the white boy.

Clarence plucked at the grass.

Clarence's teacher said that at first she had wondered why he had been sent to Alpha. It had been weeks before she had caught him breaking any rules, but the first time she had, a couple of her other charges had told her they were glad, because Clarence was always doing bad things she didn't notice. She still hoped to get him back in the mainstream soon. "I don't think he should stay long in this group," she said. But she allowed there was some question about who was a bad influence on whom. She had begun to notice a pattern. Her room was often divided into groups for various activities. Clarence would sometimes wander from group to group, and as he did, fights would erupt in the group that he had just left. "I can't nab him," she said. "And then, there's that adorable smile."

It was the next to last day of school when Clarence returned to his old class. Chris and the children had moved downstairs to the room that Chris would occupy next year. They'd cleaned up all the desks and put them in the hall, per Al's decree. Only a couple of chairs and Chris's gray metal desk, just the same as her last one, remained. The class had lined up against the wall beside the doorway, and Chris sat facing them. They were having a spelling bee. The children were laughing. It was peaceful in the room.

The windows to the playground behind Chris opened at ground level, within the reach of spray paint. These new windows were almost entirely opaque under a coating of white and green graffiti, which from inside looked like several years of accumulated bird droppings. This room also had a back door, which opened directly on the playground. Chris had propped it open with a chair to let in the breeze and sunshine. Past the doorway, behind her and to her left, figures of boys on bicycles flashed by—older-looking boys, perhaps playing hooky from junior high. Passing by, the boys left snatches of conversation behind. "Motherfuckin'..." Hearing those words from outside, Chris stiffened. "Lovely," she muttered to herself.

The spelling bee had come down to Miguel and Judith, and now Miguel had won. Judith laughed. The children lounged on the carpeted floor. Chris was sitting at her desk, watching them. She was thinking how small and cute they all suddenly looked. This always seemed to happen. In September her new students would walk in and right away become people whom she had to try to motivate and mold. Now that she was about to lose responsibility for them, they turned back into children, and she started missing them. In the midst of this reverie, sudden, untoward motion on the perimeter, that §ense of something out of place, made Chris turn her head, and there in the opened doorway to the playground stood the familiar figure of Clarence. Brown-skinned and wiry with huge eyes. The knees of his jeans had holes in them. He wore a dirty white T-shirt. He stood there, dismounted, holding on to the handlebars of a ten-speed bike, and gazed in at the children with his mouth slightly ajar.

"Hi, Clarence!" said Chris. "How
are
you?"

He looked at her and smiled. Those dimples! And he looked so small! In her mind, he had grown much larger. Could this have been the most difficult student of her career? He was only four and a half feet tall.

"Come on in!" she said to him.

Clarence, she noticed, still stuttered sometimes at the starts of sentences. "Nuh nuh no I can't. Gotta go someplace." But he lingered in the doorway, and his mouth came ajar again as he gazed at his old classmates. They were all looking back at Clarence now.

"Oh," she thought. "I feel bad for him."

"Don't you want to come in and talk to any of them?" asked Chris. It would be sweet and fitting for him to pass the last of this afternoon with them, as if perhaps he'd never been sent away.

"Did you pass?" said Robert.

"I don't know," said Clarence.

Chris sat in her chair, turned toward him. She smiled at him. Probably he wanted to join them, but was feeling shy. Maybe she could coax him. "Don't you want to come on in?" said Chris again.

"No," said Clarence. "Not today." He smiled at her, and again he went back to gazing at the children while Chris gazed at him.

"Oh, well," said Chris offhandedly. But she had to try once more. "Sure you don't want to come in?"

"No. Bye," he said.

He turned away and sped off on his bike, so quickly she hardly saw him go. It was like the time, months ago, when Clarence was supposed to stay after school, and she turned her back for only a few seconds and turned around again to find that he had vanished. The doorway was empty. She turned back to face the room.

On the last day, Chris handed out the report cards. It was a solemn moment, mostly because the report cards named each child's teacher for next year. The children studied their cards silently. Several would have Mrs. Zajac again. They were smiling. Most didn't have her, and they looked pensive. Now they'd have to wonder what next year's teacher would be like. Alice, who had left a few days ago on a vacation with her parents, had Chris. Her parents had requested it. So had Margaret's. Chris had Courtney again—by lottery, as it were, and not by parental request—and she had Felipe, whose father had also requested her. This was notable, the first instance in Al's experience of a Puerto Rican parent asking for a particular teacher. But Arabella's mother hadn't known that one could do that. When Chris ran into her later, that handsome woman said to Chris, "She doesn't have you next year? Oh, she was hoping she would!" Chris was sorry, too. She'd have liked to keep Arabella for another year.

Jimmy stared at his report card. He looked up at Chris as she passed by and said, "I thought I was gettin' you."

He sat for a while with his head resting heavily on the heel of his hand, staring off glumly.

Chris pursed her lips. "Oh," she thought. "I shouldn't have teased him about getting me next year."

A few of the children had brought her presents. Irene gave her a very sentimental card, delivering it on Chris's side of the big desk. Irene lingered next to Chris. She wanted Chris to kiss her. Chris did, and said, "Oh, Irene, thank you!"

Ashley offered her present. It was a sprig of flowering privet that she must have broken off a hedge on her way to school that morning. Ashley delivered it from the other side of the desk. She was afraid of being kissed. "Oh, Ashley, thank you! That's very nice." Ashley, lips fastened tight, slowly backed away and sat down among her classmates.

Chris had told them they could bring in records. "But no Beastie Boys," she'd added. They had put on a record and had hopped up to sit on the counter by the window. Now they sat there, legs dangling, their arms around each other's shoulders, swaying in concert, and singing along to a song called "Talk Dirty to Me," which in this setting seemed innocent enough. Chris joined them for a moment. Wrists cocked and eyebrows raised, she danced out across the carpet. She stopped. Ashley was the only one not sitting on the counter. She was standing off to one side, watching her classmates. Chris went to her. "You want to hop on the end there, Ashley?"

Ashley shook her head, black hair swaying across her cheeks. "I don't know the words."

Eventually, Ashley changed her mind. Then the whole class was sitting in a row on the counter. Chris leaned against the jamb of the inner doorway, arms folded on her chest, and gazed across the deskless room at her class, watching them sway to their music in front of the vandalized, half-opaque windows. "I'm going to remember them this way," Chris thought.

Looking at them gave her a familiar empty feeling in her stomach. She heard herself thinking, once again, "My chicks are leaving me." But most of them would do just fine, she thought. Judith, sitting on the windowsill, looked beautiful. Chris hoped that Judith wouldn't meet too many handsome men too soon. She still felt uneasy about Pedro. "I guess the neighborhood is what scares me, and the grandmother. I mean, I know she takes care of him as best she can and she loves him and that's nice, but she's old. I mean, you can't expect an older woman to do discipline and all this stuff that goes along with bringing up an adolescent. Pedro's immature right now." She worried about Jimmy. But then again, Jimmy had given her a few tiny reassurances. First, a couple of days ago, he had asked for those math games, and then earlier today, Jimmy had come up to her and said, "You know, Mrs. Zajac, you didn't finish that book." Jimmy meant the last novel she had been reading aloud, the one about the children hiding in the museum. At least, she thought, Jimmy had not slept through all the hours he'd spent with her.

After a while their chorus line disbanded. Claude dozed in the sun, sitting in the chair that propped open the door to the playground, and Arnie did some handstands on the carpet in the mostly chairless room.

"Arnie, stop acting so crazy," said Chris.

"It's the last day of school," he said.

Chris fingered her gold necklace. "What can I say?"

The children were dismissed early. Soon the intercom said, "Bus one," and the usual commotion ensued, Claude scrambling for his bookbag, Chris crying out, "Wait! Margaret! Oh, well." That was all right. She had Margaret next year.

"Dick, I just want to say have a nice summer, okay? Everybody have a nice summer. Okay?"

Many voices called back to her from the hall, "Have a nice summer, Mrs. Zajac."

"I'm not," Claude said, looking up at her in the doorway. "I'm gonna have a
great
summer."

"Good, Claude."

"Lots of fishin'. Yup. Monday fishin', Tuesday fishin', Wednesday fishin'..."

"How about some readin'?" said Chris. She had to bite her tongue for the last time over Claude.

Chris stood at the door to the hall, watching the last of the bus riders vanish around the corner.

"Ohhh," she murmured after them. "I feel a little sad."

As usual, the walkers took a more leisurely farewell, but soon they were filing out the door to the playground. Chris put an arm around Judith's shoulder, but Chris, seeming suddenly shy, didn't try to kiss her, and Judith, who looked serene and happy, smiled and walked away. Chris followed her outside. A child from another class must have pulled a fire alarm. Over its bleating, Chris called, "Take care, you guys! Have a nice summer! Be good!" The walkers waved without turning back. It seemed altogether too casual for the disbanding of a village.

She stood outside, watching as her walkers got lost among the others. "Ahhh," she said. "I'm losing them back to their environment for a summer. It's sort of sad. Well." She walked back into the empty room with pursed lips, and made as if to busy herself at her desk. She muttered over Ashley's piece of privet, "This is from one of those hedges." She took up tissues. She sniffled, and took up more tissues. "Ahhhh. I feel bad about 'em. Some of them. Judith. Mainly her. Because I don't think I'm going to see her again." Chris went to the sink and started cleaning it, still sniffling, and then she looked up toward the door to the hall, and she smiled with wet eyes. "And then again..." she said aloud. Summer beckoned. She did some thinking about next year. She had a lot of work to do over the summer. She told herself that teaching sixth grade would be like starting a new life.