Beholding Bee (15 page)

“Well, why didn’t they come themselves?” She inspects the other hand.

I pull my hair tighter and shrug.

“Well, I’ll have to see about this.” She disappears into the back room, and I hear her talking. Soon a man follows her out.

I stand up. I turn my face so only my good side shows. I want Pauline.

“No adult with you?” The man looks a little like Mrs. Marsh, with a high thin neck and a tight face. I wonder if they are related.

I tap my work boot against the wooden floor. I hold on to my hair and tremble. Each new person is a hazard, a flashing light, a warning deep in my belly.

“I already told her we need some sort of record to know what grade to put her in.” The woman takes off her glasses and wipes them with the hem of her sweater.

I look her over good. I think perhaps she cannot hear right. I have already told her Pauline taught me everything,
but I start again, very carefully, so my words will stick this time like maple syrup poured awful slow.

“I did not go to school. My Pauline taught me.”

“Well, all children must go to school,” the man says. “Are you telling me your mother and father never took you to school?

I stub the toe of my work boot on the floor tiles again.

“Well, that’s not an answer. Yes or no?”

I pull my hair so tight my head hurts. I watch the floor and wonder how somebody who talks to children all day long could be so terrible at it.

“We need a record of your progress,” he says. “How will we know what class to put you in if we don’t have your records?”

I watch the floor and whisper how my mama and papa are dead and my Pauline left with Arthur, and even Bobby left. I think it is a long sad story that makes you lonely just to think about it.

“How old are you?”

I am starting to wonder why this has to be so hard. Just give me some books and a desk to sit at.

“A bit feeble, I’d say,” the lady whispers to the man. I pull my hair tighter.

“Very well,” he tells her. “Test her reading and we’ll see. In the meantime, put her in with Mrs. Spriggs until we figure things out.”

Feeble, feeble, feeble
. I’m pretty sure this is not a good thing to be. The lady comes back beside me with a book and motions for me to sit down. She runs her finger against the words, slow like corn syrup. This makes my blood boil. The letters are big enough for Peabody.

She looks at me like I am light in the loaf.

“Well,” she says. “Can you or can’t you?”

I stare at her, refusing to say a word. “Humph,” I say finally, looking at her like I have won.

“Humph,” she says, looking at me like she knows better.

63

The lady marches me down one hall and then another, her soft soles squeaking. My work boots are so full of holes they barely make a sound. I try not to look at myself in the shined floor and pull my hair tight. I hold my breath and try to be nobody at all.

The lady leads me past one classroom after another, a row of dominoes, all with heavy wooden doors shut tight. We pass the janitor’s closet with a deep steel sink and a heavy metal bucket with a mop sticking out. She stops at the very end of the hall, right near the back door.

“This is your room, Beatrice,” she says, steering me in by the shoulder. I pull my hair tighter over my cheek, my helmet in place.

The room is darkened by a blanket that hangs over a window to block out the sun. When my eyes figure out the dark, I see a teacher knitting in a rocking chair and five children coloring.

“Hey,” says a skinny boy, who jumps up and airplanes around his desk, yelling, “Zoom, zoom, zoom.”

The teacher drops her yarn. “Jonathan!” Even when the teacher gets up the boy doesn’t stop zooming and she can’t get ahold of his arm until he airplanes around the room two more times. He is thin as a broom handle and very fast.

Finally, she grabs his shoulders and shakes him, once,
twice, three times. He slips and she grabs his collar and hurries him to his seat and shoves him down. “Now, stay.”

Everyone has forgotten their coloring. My heart is aching. The teacher smooths her dress and walks over to us.

“This is Beatrice.” The lady from the office presses me forward. “Please make a place for her, Mrs. Spriggs.”

The teacher frowns. “You know I am only supposed to be here until the school finds somebody else. I can’t have this many pupils.”

“Just until we determine where she needs to be.” The lady turns to me. “We do not like troublemakers in this school, Beatrice, and we do not put up with them, either. Not for a minute.” Then she marches to the door, opens it, walks out, and slams it behind her.

Mind your britches
, I say in my head to the children, who are staring. I pull my hair tighter against my face and make myself breathe, in and out, in and out, the way Pauline showed me. Nobody moves. I don’t move. Inch by inch, I make myself invisible: first my diamond, then my face, then my chest, my arms, my belly. I wonder if Pauline would recognize me.

There are three boys and two girls in this class. I see how I will make six. The girls are at one table, the boys at another. A little girl with pigtails and thick glasses jumps up and rushes over and grabs me around the waist and hugs me so tight I let go of my hair. I reach out to steady myself and pull my curls tight.

In an instant, everyone is up out of their seats. Two boys come over by me and try to get a good look at my diamond and then Jonathan is airplaning around the room again.

A tall girl with many, many freckles hobbles toward me.
Her right leg is in a brace and she moves pretty quick by dragging her leg behind and then skipping a little to pull it up to the other. It looks really hard, walking like that. One of her shoes is a saddle shoe, the other has a black sole as thick as a book. She smiles shyly at me and tries to pull the girl in the glasses away.

“Sit down, Susan!” Mrs. Spriggs hurries to the girl in the glasses, who is now saying, “I lub you, I lub you.”

“Sit down, everyone,
NOW
.” The teacher pulls at the girl, but she won’t let go. The girl’s glasses go flying.

“I lub you, I lub you, I lub you,” the girl is saying, holding on to my leg.

“That is very naughty to do, Susan,” says Mrs. Spriggs, who takes the girl’s arm and shakes her and pulls her back to her seat. “We just don’t go telling everyone we see that we love them.”

When Mrs. Spriggs finally gets all the children back in their seats, she points me to the empty space at the girls’ table and I go over and sit with them on their wooden bench. She pulls a fistful of broken crayon pieces from inside a green metal can and drops them onto the table. She gives me a piece of gray paper that somebody has already colored on. “Use the back,” she tells me, and then she goes back to her rocking chair and picks up her knitting.

Susan-with-the-glasses sits in the middle and the girl with the brace on her leg sits on the right. “My name is Ruth Ellen,” she whispers, turning to me when Mrs. Spriggs is counting her knitting rows.

I pull my hair tight. I don’t like to color. I look around the room. A Victrola stands silent. A chair is pushed into a corner, with its back facing us. The teacher’s desk is big as our
old hot dog cart. It stands in the front of the room, with two blackboards behind. There is a big wooden cupboard off to the side with the doors closed and nothing on top. There is a penmanship chart on the wall, a map of the United States, shelves for lunch pails, and hooks near the door with several coats hanging and army-green rubber boots lined up underneath. The floor is wide wood boards with dirt between the cracks. The walls are the same as along the hallway outside: brown halfway up, and battleship gray on top.

I do not think I was missing much by Pauline snuggling with me and teaching me to read on our soft bedrolls in the back of our hauling truck.

“Why aren’t you coloring?” Mrs. Spriggs asks, looking up from her knitting.

Susan scribbles with a red crayon in one hand and a blue one in the other. I pick up a butterscotch color and draw a picture of Peabody. I have to hold my hair with my left hand, and I make him all sad-looking that we are not together.

“That’s really good,” whispers Ruth Ellen.

It might be the first time someone my age ever said anything nice to me.

64

“Lunchtime,” says Ruth Ellen, just as my belly starts growling and the teacher rings the heavy brown bell on her desk.

“We eat right here at our tables.” Ruth Ellen pulls herself up off the bench and skip-hops over to the coat hooks and brings a lunch pail back from the shelf. “We can talk if we are quiet.” Susan is grinning like a jack-o’-lantern as Ruth Ellen unloads half a dozen cloth packages.

“She never comes with any food so my mama always packs enough for her. There’s enough for you, too.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I brought lunch.” I bring my lunch pail to our table and wait to see what Ruth Ellen has brought. La-di-da, I am a little jealous.

Ruth Ellen has the real deal: peanut butter sandwiches, carrots sliced thin as dimes, two fat red apples that somebody shined up real good, and a couple of pieces of peach cake so heavy with peaches she can hardly lift them. Glory, I think as I watch the things come out of her lunch box.

My own lunch box is neat and orderly. The eggs and biscuits that Mrs. Potter insisted I needed, plus some boiled potatoes and a little pickle jar of milk and a fat slice of my newest recipe: mocha honey cake. It turns out Susan wants a bite.

“Thomas and Robert don’t like to eat with girls,” Ruth Ellen whispers. “And they make Jonathan eat at the end of
the table. He peed over by the coats last week, right on top of Robert’s boots.” Ruth Ellen rolls her eyes.

Mrs. Spriggs pulls a sandwich out of her desk and eats it by herself. “She’s the substitute,” Ruth Ellen says. “The regular teacher got married and won’t be back. She didn’t like us much anyway. Most teachers don’t.”

When Mrs. Spriggs rings the bell again, it is time for recess. Ruth Ellen skip-hops outside and leans against the rough wood of the building. Susan holds her hand. The sun is hot on my cheek.

All the children from the other classes are already outside. The girls jump rope and play hopscotch on one side of the playground; the boys hit a baseball on the other.

“Why aren’t we out there?” I ask, stepping away from the building so I don’t get splinters in my shoulder.

“They don’t let us mix with the other children,” Ruth Ellen says, watching them. “We have to stay here on the dirt so Mrs. Spriggs can watch us.”

My skin sizzles. Robert and Thomas hunch over a puddle and build a stick bridge for their trucks. “Don’t get your trousers wet,” Mrs. Spriggs calls.

Jonathan airplanes around the dirt, moving his arms as he changes direction and racing around and around our dirt area. He runs with his face lifted like he is looking at the clouds and there is a smile on his face. Come to think of it, he runs just like Cordelia.

You can just tell he is not paying attention to where he is going and he flies over the puddle, knocking the bridge over. Robert is up on his feet very fast, chasing Jonathan. He pushes him in the dirt, screaming, “That was very bad,
JONATHAN
.”

Already, Ruth Ellen is hobbling over. She bends down and pulls Jonathan up by his arm. His face is red and then tears are streaming down and Ruth Ellen is smoothing them away with her hands.

All this time Mrs. Spriggs sits in a chair under a big pine tree with another teacher. She’s knitting and talking and hardly paying attention to us at all. Ruth Ellen is the one who keeps an eye on Jonathan. He plops onto the pavement and watches a line of ants. He pokes a stick down and scoops up a few and pops them into his mouth. I think maybe I am in the wrong class.

Ruth Ellen skip-hops over and knocks the stick out of his mouth. “Don’t eat those, Jonathan. Bugs are not to eat.”

She reaches into his mouth and pulls out several ants. Now I am sure I am in the wrong class. “We have to watch him all the time,” she tells me. “He will eat anything.”

Jonathan looks normal. A little skinny, but lots of kids are skinny. “He does everything very slow,” Ruth Ellen says.

We watch the hopscotch girls. The girl Francine is with them. I start thinking how I could blow my top, I am so mad that those girls get to play all shaded under the maple trees. I would never make anyone stand in the sun like this. Susan stops saying she lubs me and reaches up to hold Ruth Ellen’s hand. She sucks her other thumb. Then the bell rings.

“We have to wait here for the others to go in.” Ruth Ellen takes another stick out of Jonathan’s hand. “Get ready to line up,” she tells Thomas and Robert. Even they are quiet when the hopscotch girls walk by. I pull my hair tight over my cheek. You do not judge a book by its cover, I want to say.

I walk back to class behind Ruth Ellen and try to do the
little skip-hop she does. Susan takes my hand and Thomas is snapping Robert with a rubber band. Jonathan is looking like he would like to eat the rubber band.

One good thing about this class is nobody makes a big deal about my diamond. Everybody has bigger fish to fry.

65

Ruth Ellen asks where I live because she would like to have me over to play and her mama would want to talk to my mama for sure.

“I don’t have a mama,” I whisper, and I think once again how sad it is I do not have Pauline, either. “I live with my aunts.” I write my address on a piece of paper and give it to her.

When we all walk out of the school, Jonathan and Susan and Robert and Thomas have to go wait in the bus line. Susan tries to keep holding Ruth Ellen’s hand, but Ruth Ellen bends over and tells her no. “My mama is picking me up, same as I tell you every day.” Ruth Ellen gives her a big hug, and then Susan sobs, “I lub you, I lub you,” and Ruth Ellen gives her another hug.

“Do you want a ride home?” she asks me. “I’m sure my mama wouldn’t mind.”

I shake my head. I don’t mention that Mrs. Potter is waiting under the tree.

We are interrupted by a fuss in the bus line. Francine with the new dress that her mama warms by the woodstove is telling a little girl to hold her schoolbooks.