The Chalk Artist

by Allegra Goodman

  Darius raised his beer bottle.

  Collin said, “Good thing he can’t hear you.”

  “I’m your mother,” said Maia. She meant, You think I care?

  She was tall and young for a mother, darker than Collin, so they didn’t quite match. What am I? he used to ask when he was little. Black Irish, his mother said. His father was Irish and she was Italian, French Canadian, and a little bit Native American as well. She worked at the Fletcher Maynard Academy, in the basement therapy room with swings and finger paints, giant inflatable balls. The house was full of teaching prizes, clocks and plaques, two crystal apples from the district. She had posters too. WHAT DO TEACHERS MAKE? I MAKE KIDS WONDER. I MAKE THEM QUESTION…Collin had grown up with all these tributes, apples, and rainbows. He had been famous in school as Maia’s son, and had played in her therapy room as a small child. There had never been money for babysitters, so he’d attended his mother’s afterschool dance classes as well. Jazz, tap, and tango.

  Now Maia’s colleagues were arriving, and she served them borscht in honor of the Russian play. She ladled the thick magenta soup into bowls, and when she ran out of bowls, she handed mugs to Mrs. McCabe, the librarian, and Ms. Jamil, the occupational therapist. She found a “Mad Genius” mug for Mr. Cooperman, the fifth-grade science teacher, also known as Scienceman.

  Yoga friends tramped up the porch of the triple-decker and left their boots in the stairwell. In socks they padded into the dining room, where Maia had covered the Ping-Pong table with rich fabric and flatbreads, quiche, empanadas, latkes.

  Upstairs neighbors came in slippers. Lois, the art teacher from the second floor. Sage and her wife, Melissa, who grew tomatoes in window boxes on the third floor. Strawberry-blond Kerry O’Neil came from across the street, along with her twins, Aidan and Diana, suddenly sixteen.

  “Can you believe it?” Maia asked Collin.

  “How’d you people get so big?” said Collin. “Did I ever babysit you?”

  They didn’t answer. Aidan wolfed down his food and left, while Diana stayed, nibbling crispy spring rolls.

  “Collin!” Lois exclaimed, because she had seen the show. “Your orchard!”

  Lois’s white hair was short and spiky, her vest hand-quilted, her earrings fashioned of the most precious Scrabble tiles, Z and Q. “When the production ends, what happens to your art?”

  “Well…” Collin began.

  “Don’t say it.”

  Collin enjoyed saying it. Gentle, sentimental, Lois and Maia were crushed when he explained, “I’ll wash the boards and start something new.”

  Lois tried arguing with him, but he couldn’t hear. Everyone was laughing over in the living room. Darius laughed so hard that he had to lean over Emma to defog his black-framed glasses.

  The actors were talking about putting on a druggier, Big Chill Chekhov, like in a big house up in Maine. Meanwhile, the neighbors were discussing snow emergencies and parking bans, and how they were disappointed in the president. Troops still in Afghanistan, prisoners still rotting in Guantánamo. The economy still in the toilet. What good was he?

  The battered oak floors thrummed with Crosby, Stills, and Nash. “Judy Blue Eyes,” “Marrakesh Express,” “Guinnevere.” Noelle was flirting with some woodworker named Austin. He was much taller than she was, so she rose up on her toes, en pointe, to look into his eyes.

  Collin brushed past Noelle and said, “How’s the view?”

  She ignored him, and he hated her. No, he didn’t hate her; he felt nothing. He felt dead.

  Darius and Emma started dancing. Maia and Mrs. McCabe joined in, flushed with laughter and with wine, but Collin turned toward the front window to watch the snow. The little street was melting away, all the houses turning to gingerbread, white drifts icing porches and peaked roofs. He wanted to be out in it, away from everyone, especially himself. He pulled his jacket from the pile in the entryway, sat on the stairs and laced his boots.

  When he stepped onto the porch he was so lonely he could almost see it like his breath. Impatient with himself, he seized the shovel propped up near the door, and began clearing the front steps. Working fast, he excavated a path to the street and started on the sidewalk. It was still snowing heavily, but he was hot, and unzipped his jacket.

  His mother stepped outside and watched him from the porch. “Oh, come on.”

  He didn’t answer.

  She sighed and disappeared into the house. A moment later, she returned in boots. She was holding a glass of wine.

  “It’s only natural to feel a letdown.”

  “Letdown from what? The performance wasn’t any good.”

  “So then it’s even more natural, because the play wasn’t as great as the one in your head. That’s art.”

  “That’s life,” he said.

  “I’ve seen you and Darius do amazing stuff.”

  “It’s his stuff. It’s all about him.”

  “You’ll get your chance.”

  Collin planted his shovel in the snow. “I’m not working with him anymore.”

  Her temper flared. “Right, that’s the answer. Just give up.”

  “Nobody’s interested in theater on traffic islands and indoor tennis courts.”

  “Who’s nobody?”

  “Nobody in the real world.”

  “The real world is overrated,” Maia said.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Your loss.”

  They stood in silence as the city plow thundered down the street, sparking tiny flames, metal scraping asphalt as it clattered past. Then Collin started shoveling again, heaping snow into the garden.

  “Careful,” Maia said. “My hydrangeas are somewhere under there.”

  “They’re okay.”

  “They’d better be.” She watched him for a moment in silence and then tried again. “Do you want my advice?”

  “No.” He didn’t want advice. He wanted to escape. He wanted to break away, but he kept coming home, working with Darius, returning to Noelle. What was wrong with him? He could draw, but he drew only for Darius. He was a hired hand. No, just a hand! It wasn’t like Darius paid him.

  He had cleared the sidewalk and now he carried his shovel up the steps. “It’s a play about regret.”

  “I know.” Maia followed him.

  “It’s about wanting what you can’t have,” Collin declared under the porch light. “Maybe that’s too obvious for Darius. He always gets what he wants, so he can’t even see it.”

  Maia nodded. “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Mm-hm. What’s her name?”

  Loaded down with books and folders, Nina shouldered the heavy school door open. VISITORS REPORT TO THE OFFICE. THIS DOOR TO REMAIN LOCKED. OUR CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE. Dreading the day ahead, she backed her way into school.

  Dread was not too strong a word for Wednesdays. She had to start with the wild ones, her American lit class. Students came unprepared. (They’re kids, said Mrs. West, her department chair.) Some didn’t come at all. (It’s not about you, said Jeff, her TeacherCorps mentor.) Nothing worked with these eleventh graders. Her lessons were too difficult, her readings too long, her assignments way too complicated.

  “Good morning, Miss Lazare,” said Mrs. West as they stood in the glass front office, signing in. All the teachers spoke to one another like that, as if afraid a student might overhear their given names. “Are you okay?”

  Nina could only imagine how she looked—pale, sleep-deprived, floundering. Mrs. West, on the other hand, could walk the halls with total mastery, her midnight-blue manicure adorned with tiny crystal stars. Mrs. West was famous for her fingernails, for her languages, French and Haitian Creole, for her gorgeous singing voice, for her in-class performances of Romeo and Juliet. Above all, for her way with words. Nina had heard her harangue one boy into submission in the hall. “You can stand there and tell me that’s your best work, but you know that’s not true, so get your butt back in your chair and do it again. The
end. That’s all!”

  “I’ve got my eleventh graders,” Nina said.

  “Don’t let up!” Part coach, part cheerleader, part preacher, Mrs. West admonished Nina, “If those kids test you—then you test them back!”

  A sudden buzz and pulsing orange lights. A couple of boys had set off the metal detector, and the school’s police officers sprang into action. “Over here, you guys. Bags on the table. Keep the line moving.” Kids continued shuffling in with their backpacks, their headscarves, their puffy jackets, their attitudes. Nina joined them, climbing the chipped cement steps to her classroom, where she opened her desk and locked her purse inside.

  Emerson High School was small, diverse, and experimental. There were no exams, only year-end portfolios in which students collected what they considered their best work. The school was open to everyone by lottery, but had a reputation for “out of the box” kids—those who were artistic, or autistic, those with learning differences, or special gifts, or both at once. Each student was required to keep a journal of personal discovery in a marbled composition notebook. Required personal discovery seemed like an oxymoron to Nina, but so did many other aspects of the school. “A community of learners” with metal detectors. A non-linear curriculum in a rectilinear 1930s building. The wiring was antique, the doorknobs brass. The basement flooded during rainstorms, and in places the roof leaked. There were computers in every classroom, but some rooms had no heat. There were no whiteboards, let alone SMART Boards. Blackboards were strictly black.

  Nina took a deep breath and picked up her white chalk. DO NOW, she wrote on the board. List three adjectives Emerson uses to describe…

  “Miss?” Students were starting to drift in. “Miss?”

  “Get out your packets,” Nina announced. There were no textbooks for Emerson’s English classes. Humanities teachers had to develop their own materials. “Turn to the essay ‘Nature.’ Where’s your reading?” she asked Xavier.

  “I’m not exactly sure.”

  “Miss.” Rakim approached the board. “I think the page was missing or maybe—”

  “Let me see,” Nina said.

  “I think my packet is defective or something like that.”

  Nina found “Nature” for him. “Have a seat.”

  “I looked for it,” he said.

  “Rakim, please sit down.”

  He raised his hands in mock surrender as he backed away. Two girls started giggling, and Rakim played to the gallery. “Okay. Okay!”

  Some people had it—that mysterious rapport, the ability to catch a student’s gaze and hold it, to direct without seeming to direct, to take a joke and lob it back. Nina thought of her own high school teachers, charismatic Mr. Kincaid, witty Mr. Rousse. Was it a gift like perfect pitch, or something you could learn? She remembered the silence in Mr. Rousse’s classroom, the deliberate way he spoke, the way he made you wait for the next word. You shivered when he called on you.

  She had done well in training. For five weeks at Bowdoin College in blackfly season, Nina had learned, in theory, to teach high school. After long days of role-playing, mini lessons, and crash courses in curriculum development, she would sit with other TeacherCorps recruits in a darkened lecture hall to hear testimonies of transformation.

  Alumni perched on stools in front of the eight hundred trainees, and, one by one, those alumni stood and walked into the spotlight to tell of raising test scores, breaking through. “Is there anything you can do in this world that’s more important?” asked one former fellow, now working at McKinsey. “Is there anything more valuable than the life of a child?”

  All the alumni said that their students had taught them lessons they would carry with them their whole lives. Nina never doubted this, but as her own kids came in dancing, slouching, scuffling playfully, she hoped she could teach them something too.

  “Miss, could you sign this?”

  Leila was holding a pink slip.

  “You’re dropping language arts?”

  “Switching,” said Leila, a picture of innocence, framed by her white headscarf. “Mr. DeLaurentis thinks I’ll learn better with Mrs. West.”

  Of course he does, Nina thought miserably. Mrs. West had been teaching almost thirty years. Nina had been trying for thirteen weeks. Mrs. West invented her own acronyms: OWL (Own it, Work it, Learn it). QUACK (Question Underlying Assumptions Critically and Knowledgeably). Nina was still trying to keep her kids in chairs.

  She bent to sign her name, and felt for a moment as though she were signing a confession. I’m a fraud. I have no idea. I’ve failed to reach you. Everyone spoke about epiphanies and transcendent moments, the Miracle Worker of it all: teacher and student swept up in revelation, spelling into each other’s palms—touching the word, grasping the concept, feeling the rush of water. People didn’t talk so much about students switching out of your class.

  “Okay.” She handed Leila the pink paper. “Go for it.”

  “Thanks.” Leila ran out, and Nina shut the door behind her.

  “Take out your notebooks,” she directed, as she took attendance. Sixteen students, eight absent, including one learning better with Mrs. West. “Write your three adjectives.”

  “Three adjectives about what?” Rakim asked, and Nina realized that she hadn’t finished writing her DO NOW on the board.

  “Three adjectives Emerson uses to describe…nature.” She scribbled the missing word.

  “Can I borrow a—”

  “Can I use a—”

  Already two kids were up to sharpen pencils by the window.

  A pregnant girl named Brynna asked, “Miss, where’s the bathroom pass?”

  You just got here, Nina thought, as she searched her desk. “Three adjectives. Faheen, I don’t see you writing.”

  “I’m thinking!”

  Squeaking chairs, rustling papers. Always moving, always whispering, the class never settled. As soon as Nina shushed one conversation, another started. She needed to be everywhere at once, but she tried to focus on one student at a time as she walked between desks, reading over shoulders.

  “Beautiful, gorgeous, natural. No, that’s not quite it. I want adjectives that Emerson uses about nature,” Nina told Diana, who looked up, insulted.

  “Miss?” Brynna asked again.

  Nina handed over the restroom key with its big block of wood attached and she began writing on the board the adjectives the students had found in Emerson: tranquil, perpetual, transparent.

  “Is theory an adjective?” Chantal asked.

  “Is it descriptive?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Give me an example of theory as an adjective.”

  “Theory of relativity.”

  “Excuse me?” Nina asked Marisol and Cierra. The girls looked up from their conversation as Nina began walking over, but she got distracted by Rakim writing furiously, filling in some worksheet for another class. Shit. Nina had forgotten to collect homework. “Time out. Please hand in your short responses from last night. Rakim? Marisol? Pass them to the front. Cierra, did you hear me?”

  Nine homework sheets came in, accompanied by at least five excuses.

  “I was absent yesterday.”

  “Miss, I didn’t get the assignment.”

  “I never got the questions.”

  Nina struggled to assert herself. “If you were absent, you’re still responsible.”

  Unfortunately, when she was frustrated, her voice got quiet. Her kids continued writing, ripping pages out of notebooks, sharpening pencils, and talking, talking.

  You had to get louder in this profession, not softer. You couldn’t just look disappointed. You were supposed to scream to show you cared. Mrs. West would cry out, “Listen up. I’m talking to you.” Across the hall, Ms. Powers stamped her foot. Mr. Allan could bugle like a moose. Nina’s emotions were all wrong, if that was possible. She wasn’t angry when kids didn’t do the reading. She was crushed.

  “If you don’t understand, speak up!” she pleaded. “If you never
got the questions, then come and get them from me.” For a moment, her class looked at her, gauging her annoyance. “I’m tired of excuses,” she added, but the chatter had started up again.

  “You should all be on page thirteen of your packets. Rosie. Page thirteen?” Once more she walked up and down between the chairs. “Page thirteen,” she repeated. “ ‘Nature.’ Faheen, read the second paragraph for us, starting with ‘Nature is…’ I’m sorry, would you please sit down?” she told Sevonna, who was standing by the windows. She was a big girl scribbling on a tiny piece of paper, which she stuffed into the back pocket of her jeans. “Cierra? Marisol? Sevonna, would you please sit down? Please?” Nina repeated, even as Faheen read slowly, “Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue.”

  The sky outside was bright. From the fourth-floor window Nina could see Lincoln Playground, framed by black trees striped with snow. “Keep reading, Faheen.”

  “Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.”

  “Marisol,” Nina said. “What does Emerson mean by exhilaration?”

  “Don’t kick my chair, man,” said Rakim.

  “I never touched your chair.” Xavier stretched out his long arms and legs and tilted back his own chair until he sat on a diagonal.

  “It was on the homework. Exhilaration.” The noise level was rising, but Nina risked turning her back to write the word on the board, along with the words transport and ecstasy. She drew a line and then wrote SUBLIME as the header for these vocabulary words. “The Transcendentalists were interested in the sublime.” She spun around just in time to hear a crash and laughter, as Xavier and his chair slammed onto the floor.

  “Ow! Fuck!” Xavier moaned good-naturedly, and took his time getting up again.

  “Not in my class,” Nina said, and Xavier apologized for his language, but that took more time. Here she was, clock ticking, eight students absent, not to mention one in the bathroom, and she had covered three sentences.