Among Schoolchildren

by Tracy Kidder

  Judith would lift her eyes to heaven, put her hands on her hips, shake her head, and smile at Mrs. Zajac. The girl was still resisting, but the struggle was fun, and it seemed worth the effort, if only for its symbolism. It was something Chris could do for Judith, who was always doing something for Chris. Just recently, for example, at the end of a very bad day with Clarence, Judith had said, "Mrs. Zajac? Do you mind if I take home a dictionary?"

  In the dining room, Chris turned to Alice's test. Alice had pink cheeks and silky brown hair. She wore shirts with the designer's name on the front. The sight of an injured or weeping classmate clearly troubled her. Her hands, the nails brightly painted, would flutter nervously. If a crying child was within reach, Alice would rub the child's back. Chris could not remember a fifth grader with a more fully developed sympathetic imagination. Alice was spunky, too. One time Chris left the room and returned to find Alice standing up at her desk, glaring at Clarence. Evidently, Clarence had snatched something from Judith and Alice had snatched it back. When Chris entered, Clarence was saying to Alice, "You do that one more time, I'm gonna make you cry." But he was backing away from Alice, who stood resolutely, her little jaw firmly set, facing him down.

  Chris imagined pretty Alice returning home to the upper-class Highlands. That daily event was life as it has been dreamed of in popular American culture: Alice in her snug house, working on her homework in a sunny family room. Alice was one of only several in the class who lived with all the trappings that every child has on TV sitcoms designed for the whole family: safety, fine expectations, no rats or roaches, only birds chirping in the yard outside, a mother who sat down and listened to everything Alice wanted to say, and a father always willing and able to help Alice with her homework. Her parents could have sent her to a private school, but they believed in the idea of public education. They thought she was getting a good one. Some girls at school picked on Alice out of envy of her clothes; her father thought that at public school Alice would learn resiliency.

  Alice lived just a few minutes' drive but a socioeconomic gulf away from Judith's project. Chris figured that what the two girls had in common was probably more important: each had two parents who took pains with her. In school, adeptness with language usually matters most, and preschool training often has a lot to do with aptitude for language. Alice's parents had read to her from infancy; Judith's father had always told her stories. In grades and standardized test scores, the two girls resembled each other more than they did anyone else in the class. Alice ranked number two, a little behind Judith in most subjects.

  Chris often corrected Judith's and Alice's papers after the others. They helped her get to sleep. "96 = A Very Good!" Chris wrote across the top of Alice's test.

  "Oh, Alice," she said, "why don't I have more of you?"

  Chris's pen made a regular, two-part sound, like windshield wipers, when it hit wrong answers and drew an X beside a question on the test. It was as if the pen were saying, "That's wrong." Her pen scratch-scratched down the page, then over onto the other side, saying, faster and faster and more and more angrily, "That's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong." Chris made a face. She said aloud, to Robert's paper, "Robert, you got a thirty. Isn't that wonderful?"

  Sarcasm is wrong; it tears down a child. Chris hated it, especially in herself, even when she directed it at Robert's paper and not Robert. Clarence wasn't the only very taxing child in this class. Robert was a genius at bringing out the worst in her.

  Robert had crew-cut black hair. His wide face looked as if it had been cut from a square block. He was big all over, with the ample belly of a middle-aged softball player. He had an improbably squeaky voice. On one of the first days of school, Chris asked him, "Robert, please, could you put this package of markers over on my desk?" And Robert did a shimmy at his desk, rolling his shoulders, a patch of jiggling white belly showing. "Who? Me?" he said. Then he looked up at Chris with that smartass grin on his face. "Robert, I'm not asking you to move a refrigerator," she said, but wouldn't she have liked to slap that coy grin away.

  There was always an accidental quality to the life around her in her room. On the one hand, there was Judith, who wrote the following cinquain:

  Space

  is a dark void. Cold

  stars and planets live up

  there. Big Dipper and Mars. We

  explore.

  And on the other hand, Robert, who Chris knew had the equipment to do well in school, and who wrote this:

  Garbage

  is disgusting

  garbage is wet and smells

  garbage drips all over the ground.

  It smells

  Robert's paragraph about his ideal birthday party described a cake fight at his house, during which his mother's boyfriend got the cake "right in the face." Reading that here in her dining room one night a while back, Chris had thought, "They probably haven't cleaned up the mess yet. Maybe that's where the roaches in the room came from." Robert was getting to her more than he could possibly know.

  He lived in an old, run-down apartment building in the lower-class Highlands, not many blocks from where Chris grew up. Maybe that was part of the problem. Maybe Robert made the kind of life Chris dreaded seem all too near at hand.

  Where had Robert learned that the best way to deal with failure is to embrace it? One time, after Chris handed back a test, Robert said loudly, "F. F's my specialty!"

  Another time, Chris told Felipe he had to stop leaning back in his chair. She tacked on a cautionary tale of a former student of hers who had fallen backward and cracked open his head.

  "Did blood spurt all over?" said Robert, grinning.

  Chris tried to add some fun to Friday's spelling tests by putting the children's names into sentences: "Firefly. Mariposa caught a firefly in her hand."

  "And squished it," piped up Robert in his squeaky voice. He gurgled.

  "Smother," Chris said during one test. "You shouldn't put a pillow in a baby's crib, or it might smother itself."

  "That'd be a riot," declared Robert.

  That time Alice spoke for Mrs. Zajac. "Robert! You could kill the baby!"

  Robert made his gurgly laugh and looked around the room, as if searching for more of that kind of approbation.

  Robert was capable. Chris had asked Robert's reading group what sort of teacher she would be if, like the girl in the story they were reading, she didn't care for her job.

  "You'd let the kids do whatever they wanted," said Robert without hesitation.

  His misspent intelligence angered her. "He could be at grade level. Easy. He could be getting A's," she thought.

  Once in a while, Robert did get A's. One day that fall, he even came in with all of his homework done, and did all his work in class. Chris wrote a note to his mother, saying that Robert had a very good day in school. Maybe his mother said the wrong thing when she saw the note, or maybe the note frightened Robert. He was acute enough to sense that the surest way of hanging on to his teacher's attention was not to do the work. He didn't do his homework again for weeks.

  The second day of school, Chris wrote Robert's mother a note.

  Robert's mother wrote back, in part: "I want to know everything he does. So I can stop it."

  Which seemed both discouraging and encouraging. By immediate return note, Chris tried to institute the old homework-signing deal: Chris would make sure that Robert wrote down his assignments correctly and would initial the paper; Robert's mother should make sure that he did the work and she should sign it. A few times after Chris sent a note to his mother, Robert did his homework. But his mother could not have checked Robert's work very often because he rarely did any, and the little that he did always came back unsigned.

  Finally, Robert's mother called Chris on the phone at school. The woman sounded angry. She demanded to know why Robert was being kept after school. Chris said it was because Robert hadn't done his homework for a long time. His mother said that surprised her. Robert did his homework. Chris said s
he never saw it. Then Robert's mother said that if her son wasn't doing his homework, maybe it was because the work was too boring for him. Chris held her tongue. Then the woman said she wanted Chris to keep Robert after school every day. Chris said she couldn't do that, and the mother soon hung up. "She just wants free babysitting," Chris thought. Here at her table at night, Chris had imaginary conversations with that woman. They usually turned into shouting matches.

  She didn't always find it impossible to like Robert. He once said, "School would be better if they didn't have teachers. Just robots. Yeah. And we'd rewire 'em." Chris felt a little wave of admiration for him when he blurted out statements like that, or when he told her she was said to be the meanest teacher in the school. She'd think, "Boy, I'd never have had the guts to say that to a teacher." And Chris felt a little ashamed of herself, for her thoughts about Robert, when she read his scrawled writings about his father, whom Robert had never met. Without being able to say so, Robert seemed to feel that in the great mystery of who his father was lay the secret of himself. But Robert's mother evidently felt that a meeting with his father might lead Robert astray. A couple of times in class, Robert wrote letters to his father, letters that would never be mailed.

  Dear Dad

  were do you live I want to come and see you I love you but the only thing is do you love me. Why did you leave my mother in the first place because you had another lady on your mind or something.

  By

  Dad

  Teachers' manuals say it is best to ignore a showoff, but Robert wasn't just a showoff. His penmanship itself was distressing to look at—sometimes round, sometimes angular, sometimes utterly indecipherable. He'd sit at his desk, dismantling a notebook or a pen, covering his hands and pants with ink, then grinning at the mess. He'd sit there and start crying out, "Oi, oi," then turn to tuneless song, then utter cries that sounded like imitations of sexual passion: "Oh, harder!" Chris would turn to him and see him tearing a hole in his jeans with his ruler. Or he'd have wedged a very sharp pencil between the edge of his desk and his groin, the tip facing groinward, and she'd see him pressing harder and harder against the pencil point with a distressingly placid look on his face. Without warning, he would start attacking himself, first patting his thighs, then slapping them, then pounding them with his fists, all the while wearing that bemused look. He would slap himself in the face, harder and harder. She'd grab his hand. "Robert, stop it!" He would enter one of those manic, masochistic periods, and then, just as quickly, he'd go silent and sit drooped over his desk, staring at nothing, radiating gloom.

  Chris sat in her classroom one afternoon and read this essay of Robert's:

  I don't now what to write because I have noten in my mind so I just want to say hello and good by to every body because I am moving to A New town A New house a New world like I'm out of my mind like Nobody cares if I Leave. Because parent's are so stuPid that if I were going to light a building on fire there just get out of the apartment and watch it burn down I have a poem to go withe it do you want to here the poem too bad you listen to it anyway it goes fill the halls with gasalin fa la la fa la la light a match and watch it gleam fa la la la la la la la la watch your school burn down to ash's fa la la la la fa la la la arent you glad you played with match's fa la la la fa la la la la la ha ha ha ha ha ah

  One morning, taking a slightly different route to school, Chris passed the public mental health clinic on Maple Street. She thought about Robert on the instant. It was not a large leap of imagination; it was the kind of perception that seems to account for everything and explains nothing.

  Chris could manage Robert. He would back down, unlike Clarence. If Robert started talking back to her, she'd just get her face close to his and he would shut up at once and drop his eyes to his lap, blushing. But what could she do for Robert? Maybe, somehow, she could talk his mother into taking Robert to a psychiatrist. In the meantime, she'd just keep trying to get him to do his work. She'd lecture him, and tell him he was smart, and keep him in from recess now and then, and for after-school detention when she could bear it. Sometimes Robert did his work in class, and did it well, and more often he didn't. Whether he worked or not seemed to have little to do with measures she undertook, except occasionally for one strategy. She'd tell him she was finished with him and wouldn't pay any more attention to him until he made an effort, and then sometimes he would stop singing or slapping himself or gazing moodily at nothing, and get to work, quite happily, it seemed.

  The clock on the kitchen wall read nearly nine when Chris's son appeared in the dining room, wiping tears away with the sleeve of his pajamas. In school today, he had said to a classmate that he hated his best friend, and now he was afraid his classmate would tell his best friend, and his best friend would tell his parents, who would yell at him for saying that.

  Chris smiled. "Come here," she said. "There's nothing to be upset about. I think you're just overtired."

  "I'm not," he sniffled.

  "Come here. You want a little ice cream? You want to sit here a couple minutes?"

  "Okay." The boy's nose was stuffed.

  She corrected a few more papers while the child watched.

  "Guess whose test I just corrected."

  "Whose?"

  "Clarence's."

  Her son smiled. "What'd he get?"

  "He did good. Did well. He got a seventy-nine!"

  Clarence must have studied for once. Could he have cheated? No, Chris had made sure his desk was shoved far away from Mariposa's. She had moved Clarence's desk several times already, most recently next to Mariposa's. She'd hoped that maybe busy, efficient Mariposa would have a calming influence on Clarence. Arabella, Clarence's previous neighbor, had complained. Clarence had been singing at Arabella, "There's a fat girl sittin' next to me."

  If Clarence had studied for this social studies test, it was the first time this year. He did do all of his homework and classwork one time earlier in the fall, and back then she'd thought that perhaps a change was beginning. Chris didn't let herself believe that now.

  Her son frowned at the news about Clarence's doing well on the test. He went behind the doorjamb in the kitchen doorway and peeked around the corner at Chris, imitating Clarence, banished to the hall and peeking back inside the classroom. He had heard enough stories to think that Clarence would be fun to play with. Her son had asked Chris if she would bring Clarence home someday.

  Chris kissed her son and sent him back upstairs to bed. She returned to Clarence. Even here at her dining room table, she would look up from other students' papers, only to find Clarence's face there instead, blocking all the rest.

  Chris tried to bury memories of troublesome students from years past. She wasn't sure, but she thought she'd never had a more difficult child than Clarence. By the end of the second week of school, his pattern had become unmistakable. She remembered one day out of many like it: Clarence wouldn't work. Chris told him gently that if he didn't, he couldn't go to gym. That didn't make Clarence comply. Instead, he beat up Felipe, his best friend and usual victim, in the hallway. A scolding followed. Afterward, Clarence ripped down part of Chris's bulletin board display. Chris planned to keep Clarence after school, to try to talk to him, but he managed to get away—she let him go fetch his little brother from kindergarten, telling him to be sure to come back, but Clarence didn't come back. She went home that afternoon and told Billy the whole story. Billy started to say that maybe Chris shouldn't take gym away from Clarence, and Chris started scolding her husband. "Don't tell me I shouldn't take gym away! I don't want to hear I shouldn't have done what I did!" It wasn't a serious argument, but Chris couldn't believe she'd let this boy disrupt her home that way.

  When she felt calmer, Chris devised a new plan. It did not seem naive back then. Clarence would win a star for each day he behaved well and did his work. He would get a special reward for three stars in a row. The next morning, Chris called Clarence up to her desk to tell him about this new deal, and he seemed to like the idea. B
ut when she got to the part about behaving well and asked Clarence gently if he knew how, as if to say that of course he did, Clarence started crying, and said he didn't.

  "Did you see that? That's emotional disturbance," said Chris to Pam Hunt, the student teacher, afterward. Chris's voice sounded a little desperate.

  Then there was the day when Clarence got angry at Alice over a classroom game; kicked Alice in the back of the legs on the way to reading; was rude to Pam, who scolded him; got even by punching Arabella during indoor recess; hit Arabella again, right in front of Chris, which was unusual; and when Chris got him out in the hall, called her a bitch. Chris decided not to send Clarence to Al that time. She sent him to a guidance counselor. This was early in the fall, when Kelly School still had two counselors. One was a woman who didn't seem to understand English fully, or boys like Clarence. Clarence sneaked away from the woman and went home. (Al soon had that counselor transferred.) Chris had decided that what Clarence needed most and yearned for was stability—consistent rules and consequences—and, she felt, the boy had defeated her again.

  Clarence got only one star in three weeks before Chris let that frail attempt at behavior modification drift into oblivion. During the third week of school, she had started the paperwork for a core evaluation of Clarence. Actually, it was Al, not Chris, who insisted that Clarence be "cored." Then if Clarence did something truly bad, Al could prove that the school had already taken some action. Once in a great while, a core ended up with a child's being sent to one of the special so-called Alpha classes, which were notorious. Al said, "Clarence isn't an Alpha kid. He isn't a killer." Chris didn't think a core was what Clarence needed, but it couldn't hurt. Anyway, nothing would come of it for months.