Among Schoolchildren

by Tracy Kidder

  Chris remembered walking with the neighborhood kids to school, and, in later years, walking home along this street arm in arm with a couple of girlfriends, kicking out their legs in unison, as in a chorus line, and feeling risqué while they sang:

  "We are the Highlands girls.

  We wear our hair in curls.

  We smoke our sisters' butts.

  We drive our mothers nuts."

  Her mother's house is white and small and very tidy inside. Everything looked much the same: the landing at the top of the stairs, where Chris used to play teacher with her smaller siblings, and her bedroom off that landing, the small, dark-stained desk still placed by the window. Chris could not recall a time when she hadn't wanted to be a teacher. In this house she conceived her ambition and also realized it, planning her first real lessons at that old desk when she was still unmarried, staring out the window and wondering what to do about her troubled pupils. From that window, she could see a part of the old brick firehouse, now closed up, where years ago indulgent firemen—Holyoke's firemen were less busy then than now—had let Chris and her friends play hide-and-go-seek. They would step into the firemen's big boots, which came up to Chris's hips, and hide behind the firemen's coats, which hung like drapery from the wall.

  Chris's infant daughter spent school days with Chris's mother. It was a cozy arrangement, and Chris felt lucky for that, too. Coming by to pick up her baby, Chris usually stopped awhile to have coffee with her mother. Chris and Billy lived in another neighborhood nearby, newer than the Highlands but quiet and shaded by big trees.

  The last part of her route home took Chris near the high school and one of the junior highs. Through her windshield she sometimes saw former students among the youthful, homeward-bound crowds on the sidewalks, and she would glance at them to see if they were carrying books—a good sign—or clinging to paramours—a bad one. Some days that fall as she drove home, her mind was full to bursting with thoughts about her class, the most worried, heated ones about Clarence. On those days she'd go inside and head right for Billy or for the phone to call her best Holyoke friend, Winnie. Most days a good talk was all Chris needed to clear her mind for home. She tried to guard against continuing at home the mannerisms of her school life. Sometimes, though, she'd enter the house and start giving Billy step-by-step instructions about some household chore, or she'd start wagging an index finger at him—her "teacher finger," as she said—and she wouldn't realize what she was doing until Billy said, "Chris? I'm not one of your students, Chris."

  But if she could not always get completely untangled from her teacher self, she always felt relieved to get back to the kind of visible order in which she had been raised. Her neighborhood was just a few minutes from the Flats but a world away. People here pruned their shrubbery, mowed small front lawns and larger back yards, and kept up modest houses like her own. Her brick house, built in the 1950s, had previously belonged to a pediatrician. Not long ago a Puerto Rican family had moved in a few blocks away, and they had told Chris that an anonymous caller had welcomed them to the neighborhood by asking, "Can I get you to burn down some buildings for me?" But in general, serenity reigned on her street, and inside her house. Chris often said that her house was a mess. Her standards were high. She and her once-a-week cleaning woman kept it very neat. Last year cockroaches had invaded classrooms at Kelly School, and Billy had made her leave her bookbag outside the front door of their house, just in case she had brought home more than a few worries and mannerisms.

  2

  The year was in full swing now, days going by like a blurred landscape out the windows of a train. It was dark outside when she started her homework around seven o'clock, after washing the dishes and helping Billy put their children to bed. The beige carpeting in the dining room was soft under her stockinged feet. The wallpaper was of a calm pattern and cool colors, dark blue flowers against a white background. She sat at a round table made of blond oak, her grandmother's table. She remembered sliding around on her bottom under it, playing cowboys and Indians as a child.

  Chris would spread her texts, planning and grading books, and yellow legal pad on the table. First she would plan for about an hour. Then she would begin to correct papers, and, one by one, her class would file into this quiet, orderly room. Here many problems seemed manageable, or at least she could imagine that she had time to work on every child's problems. As the evening wore on and she felt the first wave of sleepiness, she would lift her eyes from a student's paper and the child's face would rise, too. She could see the face of the child whose paper she corrected, the child's face framed against the blackened panes of the small, many-mullioned windows of the dining room.

  A stack of social studies tests lay before her on the table, slippery sheets of ditto paper, the questions in purple ink—fill-in-the-blanks questions that asked for definitions of terms such as "Tory." The test closed, as always, with an essay question; the children had to describe briefly a Famous Patriot. She stared at the stack of tests for a moment. "Do I want to?" she murmured to herself, and took the first test, Arabella's, off the pile. Chris's pen made a one-part scratching sound, inscribing red C's down most of the page, and she began to smile.

  "84 = B," Chris wrote across the top of Arabella's test. Sturdy, big-boned Arabella. Happy Arabella. Arabella's mother had told Chris that the girl was born smiling and hadn't stopped since. Arabella lived in the Flats. At Kingdom Hall, Arabella had acquired the habit of thanking God—for her parents, who always knew what was best for her; for her family's duplex and its two kitchens; for making her pretty; for the boy she saw at church, who, Arabella felt sure, liked her. As soon as she learned something, she was disposed to feel thankful for it. Arabella had made a lot of progress this fall. She had begun to learn to write coherently, and Chris had been able to promote her to the fourth-grade-level reading group. Arabella had now become its star. She was blossoming under Chris. Then again, Chris reasoned, a teacher who couldn't teach Arabella belonged in a different line of work.

  One of Chris's secret pastimes was to pick out a boy and a girl from her class who, if she adopted them, would improve the Zajac household. She imagined bringing Arabella, sweetness and light, home. Chris would snap at the girl, "Your room's a mess. Go make your bed."

  Arabella would smile. Arabella would chirp, "Oh-kay."

  The boy Chris chose for imaginary adoption was Dick, who came from the upper-class Highlands. Dick was very quiet. All the other children liked him. At the first parent-teacher conference, Chris had told Dick's mother what a nice boy he was, and Dick's mother had said, "He loves you."

  Chris's neck had turned bright red.

  An incident summed up Dick for her: the day when he came up to her desk and said softly, "Mrs. Zajac, I'll help Pedro with his spelling." Two heads, Dick's white-skinned and sandy-haired and Pedro's dark and eager, hovered side by side over the spelling book. Back on the first day of school, Dick had guessed North America when Chris had asked the class for the name of their country. But Dick always got A's in social studies now. He had come some distance, too. "He better do well," she murmured to herself as she began correcting Dick's paper. Her pen scratched C's all the way down the page and on to the other side. She paused to read his essay. He had written about John Hancock. He had closed, "And on the Declaration you'll see a large..." Below, Dick had inscribed a neat facsimile of the patriot's famous signature. Chris laughed aloud, and with a quick flick of the wrist, scratched a big red C across the essay. Turning back to the first page of the test, she wrote, "100 = A + Super."

  Next came Mariposa's test. For her nurse when she grew old, Chris would choose Mariposa, who lived in a part of the Flats, a stretch of Center Street, that some of her classmates avoided when walking home. Mariposa's father lived in Puerto Rico, Mariposa had said, and he didn't know where she and her mother and little brother were. Her mother had run away from her father. "My father was making trouble with her."

  Mariposa was tiny, with corkscrew curly hair and an in
congruously grown-up manner. One pair of her earrings nearly reached her shoulders. They looked like miniature chandeliers. Her experience with teachers had included being hugged fairly often and being entrusted with such chores as washing the boards. She would sigh happily and get to work. Mariposa liked to help out her teachers. Most of them, she believed, weren't very well organized. She was always helping Chris find things. She got only a 65 on the test. Chris let out a long breath. "She should do better than that." Mariposa loved to read, though. Just a little slump, Chris figured.

  Cheered up by Dick and Arabella and Mariposa, Chris was ready for Felipe's test. Felipe came from the Flats, but dressed in clothes that he could have worn to a country club. Dapper, with jet-black hair—Indian hair, perhaps a mark of Taino blood. Felipe was too young, in the psychological sense, to be as consistently kind as some of the others. His face came to her in two versions. In one, Felipe's skin had changed color from light to dark brown, under lowered brows, and his mouth had tightened and would spit invective at her if he dared. In the other, Felipe grinned, crying out an answer to her question, wanting to be the first to respond whether he knew the answer or not. Often, after Chris reprimanded him, Felipe started limping. But he was a wonderful artist, even considering that Kelly, like all elementary schools, was full of wonderful artists. And Felipe was easily the most imaginative story writer in the class. On the other hand, he hated to rewrite.

  Chris had to watch herself with Felipe. When he went into one of his sulks, she felt tempted either to shout at him or else to let his tantrums slide by in order to avoid another tiff. Most of the time she waited until the next morning, then took Felipe into the hall for a private lecture. Maybe the lectures had done some good. Recently, Felipe's teacher from last year had told Chris that his behavior seemed to have improved. It might just be puberty, Chris thought. If so, she wished Felipe's hormones would hurry up and grow him a mustache. Felipe owed her the second draft of a story. Chris turned to her legal pad and wrote on her list of things to do, "Felipe—story." She'd ask him for it first thing tomorrow. Her heart sank a little. Tomorrow would probably begin stormily.

  Felipe got a 78 on the social studies test. Not bad. But he could have done better.

  She put Felipe's paper aside and stared at Jimmy's. Jimmy could have done a lot better. Jimmy got a 28. She could see him, the Jimmy of Monday morning math class, cheek on his desk, glazed eyes staring at nothing. Jimmy came from the Flats. He had luxurious, long, curly brown hair. He was, in official terminology, a "white" boy. Imagining his ashen skin, Chris wondered what color it would be if she scrubbed him.

  Jimmy had said that math was his favorite subject. "When it's math time, forget it. I'm always payin' attention." However, Jimmy had continued: "But sometimes I don't. Even though my eyes are open, I'm sleepin' inside. Because I'm tired. I don't know why I go to sleep late. I guess I'm just used to it."

  Chris stared at Jimmy's test. He had not tried to answer more than half of the questions, and had not written an essay. Jimmy was the sleepiest boy Chris had encountered in years, also one of the stubbornest when it came to evading work that required thought. Jimmy had been absent a lot already, and when he came to class, he didn't do much work. Chris had badgered him about his homework. So Jimmy started bringing in homework in someone else's handwriting. Chris pointed this out to him. He confessed that his mother had written it. A few days later, Jimmy brought in homework that his mother had written but that Jimmy had laboriously traced over, not altering the looks of the writing but merely darkening the letters. Evidently, he thought that if he did that much, he could honestly tell Mrs. Zajac that he'd done the work himself. Chris explained to Jimmy that tracing over homework wasn't the same as doing it himself. A few days after that, she caught him trying to copy over on a separate sheet of paper, under cover of his desk, yet another page of homework written by his mother.

  Chris would explain an assignment. Jimmy would say, "I don't understand." Chris would explain again. Jimmy would say, "I don't understand." Of course, he was waiting for her to do it for him. Like Felipe, Jimmy made it tempting for Chris to do the wrong thing. Jimmy's resistance was impressive, though—both passive and stubborn. Jimmy was to schoolwork as Gandhi was to violence. Jimmy wasn't stupid in the least. He was hibernating. Chris was going to wake him up. She hadn't yet. But, by God, she would!

  Chris stared at the window. Maybe tomorrow, she thought, she'd make Jimmy take this test again. She went back to the pile.

  Courtney got a 78, which wasn't bad, considering that she started the year by flunking everything. A white girl from the Flats. No father at home. A mother who got home late. Courtney wore a door key on a chain around her neck, like many other children at Kelly School. But this was one child whose name had been written less and less frequently on the lists of homework delinquents on the board. At first Courtney had looked shabby and dejected, but more often now she looked neat and pert. The other day Chris had staged a small graduation ceremony. She had moved Courtney's desk from its middle-person spot to a place on the perimeter.

  Claude had been out that day. Chris had shoved Claude's desk into Courtney's middle-person spot, saying, as she did so, "I've got to have Claude up here where I can keep an eye on him, Judith." To Chris, it had not seemed odd by then that she should feel the need to explain herself to Judith.

  Claude got a 70 on the social studies test. That was very good, for Claude.

  Chris remembered Claude coming up to her desk, one day back in early fall, wagging his right hand rapidly, as if shaking down a thermometer, and saying, "Mrs. Zajac! Mrs. Zajac!" The mean sixth-grade boys on Claude's bus had dumped out the contents of his bookbag and had trampled on the second draft of his story, Claude said. So he'd had to throw that draft away, which was why he didn't have it, but he had done it. Claude made solemn nods, wide-eyed, and picked at his lip. There was something unfinished about Claude's face, something of the egg still about him.

  Sixth-grade boys were picking on him? Chris said she'd see about that, and marched off, her hands in fists.

  Chris returned to the room with her eyes narrowed. "Claude, no one was picking on you on the bus."

  "I know," Claude said. He looked up earnestly at Chris. "I must've lost it."

  Claude's pen ran out of ink one time. So, he told Chris, he couldn't do his homework. He left his bookbag at home another time. Claude said he would bring it in tomorrow. He did, but the homework wasn't in the bag. His hand shook, his eyes grew wide, he nodded his earnest nod. He said he'd taken yesterday's homework out of the bag last night, to finish it. But Claude, Chris said, you told Mrs. Zajac that you had finished it already. "I did," Claude said. "I just had a few things to do." For a while, she had tried cutting off Claude's homework excuses before they went too far. She was afraid they might inspire his classmates. Chris would thunder, "I don't want to hear it, Claude! I want to hear that you're going to do your work!"

  But then Chris would come to a halt, standing over Claude. She often couldn't help herself. She asked, "How did it get lost?"

  "I don't know. It wasn't on the kind of paper I'm used to," Claude said that time, looking up at her wide-eyed.

  Claude told the class one Monday that over the weekend he had caught a thousand-pound marlin and had been bitten by a copperhead.

  In her dining room, Chris smiled, and she shook her head over Claude's test. Why did his paper look as if it had been through a washing machine? "Get to Claude!!!" she wrote on her yellow pad. Then she gazed across the room, a hand covering her mouth. "I don't know if I'll ever get to Claude."

  Margaret got an 80. Good for her. Margaret still followed Alice everywhere, one hand limp-wristed, laughing at what made Alice laugh. But Margaret had shown a flair all her own for creative writing. At the parent conferences, Margaret's mother had said to Chris that this was the first year ever Margaret said that she liked school.

  "Margaret's another I have to get into," Chris thought. "There are a lot of those." Blanca, for inst
ance, who could read sentences aloud without seeming to have any idea of what they meant, and who almost always came to school an hour late. Chris had badgered Blanca about her lateness, and this note had come from Blanca's mother:

  Please excuse my daughter Blanca for being late. Right now we don't have no heat or power and we having a hard time getting the kids to school.

  Chris had asked the office to get more information on Blanca. Chris had gotten her friend Mary Ann to test her informally, to see if maybe Spanish was Blanca's better language. It was not. Blanca worried Chris. The girl had frightened eyes.

  On evenings like this, the children's faces came unbidden to Chris. But she always had to make an effort to summon Ashley's ghostly white and painfully chubby face, like the face of a fairy princess imprisoned in a tree. Ashley was one of the children who was much better at her self-defeating strategies than at any schoolwork. In her first essay, Ashley had written, "When I got to the 5th grade. I was kind of scared. I thought my teacher wouldn't like me. I sat quietly in my seat." Ashley hid less often now. "Mrs. Zajac, my dog had a puppy." "Mrs. Zajac, there was a robber in my house." "Oh, that's nice, Ashley," Chris would say, or, "Oh, Ashley, that must've been scary! That's something you could write about in your journal." But Chris never had time to draw the girl out, because Ashley always chose the busiest moments of the day to waddle up to Chris's desk and tell cryptic stories.

  The house was very quiet. From upstairs came the sound of Kate, Chris's infant daughter, whimpering. Chris looked up from the shrunken pile of social studies tests. She glanced toward the kitchen. The clock on the wall there read eight-thirty. "She's a little late." Kate usually cried at eight-fifteen. Chris left her class in the dining room, took a glass of water upstairs, and helped Kate take a sip. Now Kate would sleep through the rest of the night.