Among School Children

by Tracy Kidder

  As a teacher and as a woman, she liked the sorts of males whom she'd been taught to stay away from as a girl. Billy was a high school classmate, a member of several crowds including the fast one. He cut some classes and put peroxide in his hair. Chris would never let Billy forget that, any more than he'd let her forget that she was the only girl in their class who had worn her blue jeans pressed. Billy always liked Chris. He showed it in high school by joining the adolescent pack that lingered in the halls, making suggestive comments about the prim, proper girls of Chris's set. Chris would hug her books as she passed by, hating him. She had thought he liked her.

  She remembered, from a time several years later when she and Billy were courting, talking Billy into coaching her girls' softball team. He was very patient but got quite annoyed at the female outfielders who, when bored, started weaving dandelions into their mitts. These days, Chris thought, Billy was an even more serious person than she, more devout and stricter with their children. She had married one of the bad boys, and reformed him. Of course, it wasn't that simple. Billy had only dabbled at being bad, and mostly he had just grown up. But reforming bad boys was a pattern of intent with Chris.

  Chris liked a lot of the supposedly bad boys at school—catching them at their tricks especially. She worried sometimes that she played too rough. She'd had a cautionary dream about that in the fall: Al walks down a hallway toward her with one of the gang from her last year's math class. The boy has reformed. It's the talk of the school. This is amazing. But Chris sees that his shoelaces are untied and flopping around. Aha! she thinks. She sneers. "Haven't you learned to tie your shoes yet?" barks Chris at the boy. On the instant the boy regresses. He stands there flicking boogers at her and making armpit farts. Al snarls at her, "Time out, Chris! You just ruined everything we did with this kid!" She woke up, and for a moment that dream felt like something interfering with her breathing.

  Chris tried not to go too far. She attacked the behavior of children such as Robert and Clarence, but never the boys themselves. In her rough-and-tumble way, as Judith noticed, Chris was kind.

  On a winter morning, a new member of the class was brought into the room, a girl named Juanita. She was slender, with light brown skin and very curly brown hair pulled back in a fluffy ponytail and big, shapely mollusk ears. The vice principal led Juanita in. She looked as if she were being delivered to an executioner—on tiptoes, her head bowed before Mrs. Zajac.

  Later, Chris would unearth an explanation for this child's shyness. Juanita's parents had gotten divorced. Juanita's mother didn't want the child living with her. Juanita's father had remarried. His new wife didn't want the girl around either. So Juanita had come to live in Holyoke with an aunt and cousins. In the evenings, Juanita cried in the bathroom at her aunt's apartment. She missed her father and her sisters and brothers. She had been placed mistakenly in a bilingual class at Kelly. Actually, she knew English far better than Spanish. Perhaps Juanita had tried to disguise that fact, and had aided in her own misplacement at the school. She had wanted to be in a bilingual class, she'd said, so that she could improve her Spanish, which was her father's principal language. She wanted to learn how to talk to her father better, she had told her bilingual teacher. Apparently, Juanita thought that if she improved herself in that way, her father might let her come back and live with him.

  Chris didn't know the details then, but she felt she knew this girl at once. She brought Juanita up to her desk. She looked at the girl's address. It was in the area of Dwight and Pine, that newly tough part of town that Chris and her mother didn't like to visit anymore. The number of Juanita's apartment building was familiar. It had great significance for Chris. Chris smiled at Juanita, who kept her head lowered and peeked at Chris. She said to Juanita, "Did you know that's near where my father lived a long, long time ago?"

  Juanita shook her head earnestly and looked at the floor.

  This was the saddest, shiest, most frightened-looking girl Chris thought she'd ever seen. Juanita walked stiffly back to her desk, like an acolyte carrying something sacred who is afraid of making any noise at all.

  But this was not going to be a difficult case. Chris started right in on Juanita during math. "Very good, Juanita! I'm impressed!"

  Juanita could not read aloud very well, but she understood everything she read. "Very good, Juanita!" Chris said during reading. Chris leaned toward her, so that she was looking right in Juanita's eyes, and declared, "You're going to fit right in here!"

  Toward the end of that day, Chris stopped in front of her desk. "I like having you here, Juanita." Chris leaned down, looking again at the shy girl's eyes. "Do you like being here?"

  Juanita nodded.

  "Good!"

  For about her first half hour in the room, Juanita would not look at Mrs. Zajac. But after Chris began to tell Juanita, in that emphatic, no-nonsense voice, that this was a place where she was entirely welcome, the girl's eyes followed Chris everywhere around the room. It seemed as if Juanita were afraid Mrs. Zajac would disappear. Two days later, Juanita wrote this in the rough draft of an essay:

  remember if you have a new teacher just give her a chance she might be the nices teacher you ever had. And if you have a teacher and you're a girl you could try to wear some of the clothes she wears.

  When Chris took her class to lunch or gym, she took them in a line. She did not insist that it be perfect. It was always slightly ragged, children trailing out behind her as she led them along the balcony corridors that overlooked the library, through carpeted hallways, and down uncarpeted stairways. Al sometimes played the local mood-music radio station over the hallway speakers to encourage serenity. Mrs. Zajac's class made a peaceful picture, in procession through the halls, to the sounds of homogenized soft-rock songs—"Da-doo-run-run-run. Da-doo-run-run."

  When Chris watched her boys walk, and especially when she saw them running on the playground, stiff-ankled, to keep their unlaced sneakers from falling off, she thought they looked very young, running as though they had loads in their pants. Many of the girls wore outfits that made them look in a hurry to be grown up: one lacy black glove, big black belts slung low and outlining their incipient hips, the fronts of those belts sloping down in front in suggestive V's. One girl in her reading classes wore a pair of plastic handcuffs on one of those belts. A few girls and boys occasionally wore salacious T-shirts—"Liquor Up Front Poker In The Rear." T-shirts like that made Chris wonder who was running things at home, but she knew that for the most part fashion dictated their costumes. Leading them in their line, Chris thought she was like the mother duck in the children's book Make Way for Ducklings, leading her chicks safely through the world.

  The world outside seemed perilous. Taking her class to lunch one day, she saw, on the balcony corridor opposite, a former Kelly student carrying a baby. The girl was all of fourteen now, and had come back to show her old teachers her first child. Chris hurried on with her class.

  The tough fifth-grade girl who had worried Chris by hanging around with Judith had run away from school early that winter. Chris heard rumors that she had an evil stepfather. No agency would agree to look for the girl yet, for the ridiculous reason that her parents would not report her as missing. A pretty young girl on the winter streets—the thought made Chris shudder.

  In January, a sixth-grade girl started crying when one of her classmates tried to take a snapshot of her, and a week later she spilled out a story of years of sexual torture at home. An agent from the Department of Social Services took that child away.

  And the boy who had figured in Chris's cautionary nightmare of the fall, who had not in fact reformed, fell out of his teacher's line and was sent to Church Square, an alternative junior high for children expelled from the regular ones. That boy was too old for Alpha, the special classes for troubled elementary students.

  Even in appearance, Church Square was desperate and depressing. Chris knew it only as a big red brick former church, which looked like an armory or a nineteenth-century ment
al hospital. The director of Church Square once described part of his student body this way: "Some of these kids are very smart. We have smart fifteen-year-olds functioning academically on a first- or second-grade level who are living the lives of twenty-five- or thirty-year-olds, with heavy sex, crime, drugs, and violence. Lots of these kids have seen people hurt violently, even murdered. We have one boy who saw his brother get doused with gasoline and set on fire in New York last year."

  Chris couldn't imagine a child she cared about being sent to Church Square. And, in her imagination, Alpha wasn't much better. Alpha classes were situated in a few of the elementary schools, though not at Kelly. An Alpha class was merely house arrest compared to Church Square, which was Siberia, but Alpha usually meant omega. Children rarely came back from Alpha to regular classes; some were bound to end up at Church Square. Even the name Alpha, now officially abandoned but still in use, had a scary, ironic connotation, like the word "asylum." Chris had never seen an Alpha class. She imagined rooms full of children as difficult as Clarence, and no Judiths, Alices, or Arabellas to compensate. She couldn't imagine trying to teach a class like that. She couldn't remember ever having a child leave her class for Alpha.

  Chris had a recurring dream from years past. In it, she is leading a class down the second-story corridors toward gym. As sometimes actually happened, she abandons her place at the head of the line to talk to another teacher, and the children get ahead of her. She looks up and sees her class filing out the door to the stairs, which lead to the playground and its many exits to the city. She runs but can't get to the door in time. She yells at the class to stop, but the children don't seem to hear her.

  2

  January went well for most of the class. Chris had come back from Christmas vacation full of energy, with plans for improving her reading and science lessons, which she knew to be her weakest, and with a two-page list of things to do. In January, Judith finally got glasses. "Well, Judith, you've got them on your desk. That's a start. Your desk can see fine." That ploy worked. "Oh, Judith, you look so pretty in them! Can I try them on?" At long last, Felipe seemed to be getting the beginnings of long division. "Felipe, you did all these problems by yourself! A light went on up there in the old attic, huh? You should be proud of yourself. Are you proud of yourself?" Felipe shrugged coyly. He did look proud, but Chris was prouder than he, faintly smiling from her desk at the volatile, black-haired, gleaming child.

  She printed out on index cards the steps to long division, and taped the one that read COMPARE to Manny's handsome forehead. That made Manny grin and, for the time being anyway, remember. Her introduction to astronomy was, she felt, far and away the best of her science lessons so far: a tour of the solar system with charts and glossy photographs, the children arguing loudly with each other when Arabella, playing Galileo before the Inquisition, suggested that the sun might be larger than the earth, and Chris chuckling to herself and lifting her eyebrows and saying, "We'll find out." Now, after scolding Robert, she would add, "You're a smart boy, Robert." She homed in on Jimmy. She'd creep up on him from behind, in morning math class, and say in his ear, "Wake up and smell the coffee, Jimmy," adding to a Jimmy who looked both annoyed at being awakened from his nap and pleased at the attention, "You think everyone is smarter than you, but you can do the work. When you do the work, Jimmy, it's beautiful. You're a smart boy, Jimmy." She thought she might be getting to him. One day, after she caught him with a book report copied from the description on the book's back cover, Jimmy wrote this:

  I did do my book Report What dose she want from my blood. If she doesn't like it go to Hell then, all teacher are Dickhead like stinky on floor cleaner Mrs Azaic the sheat lady.

  Chris laughed when she read that. The essay seemed like progress. Jimmy generally wrote no more than, "Today is a boreing day theres nothing to do today." Compiling the grades for the second set of report cards, Chris thought she saw evidence of an upward trend in Jimmy's work.

  She made her usual midwinter, post—report card, "clean chalkboard" speech to the class, likening the empty board at the front of the room to her grading book, and asking once again, at the end of the exhortation for "quality work": "If you bring in a paper that looks like it's been through the mill, what's Mrs. Zajac going to do?"

  Alice got the answer out quickest. "Make us do it over."

  "Make you do it over," Chris chanted.

  Driving down to school in the mornings, steaming plumes from smokestacks at the horizon, she passed by snow piles growing dingy and, on the corners awaiting their buses, many Puerto Rican children with sun-kissed skins, huddling in winter coats and wearing burgundy earmuffs (this year's most popular color). Chris had met a teacher from a little rural town up north who had told of watching with her students as a Great Snowy Owl flew by her classroom window. Glancing out her own narrow window, Chris remarked, "Wouldn't I love to look out and see a Great Snowy Owl instead of a great snowy trailer truck." The world outside the window lay frozen. Footprints had solidified, like dinosaur tracks, in the snow. Snow covered the factory roofs outside. On many days now, the playground was empty during recess. The intercom said, "It's indoors." Annoyed-looking teachers on recess duty prowled the halls, quelling disturbances inside the rooms, out of which came the raucous sounds of children confined for too long. In Chris's room, a few small pink wads of gum had become embedded in the blue carpet, which was coming up again at one of its seams. There was no morning light some days, just an ominous grayness outside, the wind whistling at the window, Henrietta saying in math class, "Mrs. Zajac, I hear something sounds like a ghost." News of coming snowstorms made the children fidgety and for moments too distracted to teach.

  Chris could manage weather and the "hoopy" days the weather sometimes brought. A couple of early-winter events distressed her, though. Looking back, she would feel that they came and went much too quickly for their importance. They were like gunshots.

  Without warning or any real explanation, Blanca's mother came to the school one morning and took that puzzling girl with the frightened eyes away for good. Chris had no time to do anything except to give Blanca a hug and tell the class, "Blanca's moving to a new town. Let's all say goodbye to Blanca."

  That morning, the police had called the school to say that Blanca's mother had called them last night: the girl hadn't come home. She had spent the night at Courtney's house. Blanca's mother didn't know that. She couldn't have known her daughter was safe, and yet she hadn't shown up at the school first thing in the morning. Al had sent the counselor to Blanca's address. The counselor had found not Blanca's mother but two men there, neither of them related to Blanca. About an hour later, Blanca's mother had finally appeared at the school and, saying she was moving, taken the girl away. Why, Chris wondered in the aftermath, hadn't Blanca gone home last night? Was she afraid of those men in the apartment? Why had the mother taken her away so suddenly? Was the family involved in a welfare scam? Or was something worse going on?

  Judith had watched Blanca leave. "Blanca was scared!" Judith said. She added, "Adults never do think about children."

  Then Lil, the beloved secretary, got sick, and only one week later the news came that she had died. It was around the time of those events that Chris started having trouble sleeping through the night. Not every night, but about once a week. She lay awake worrying about Blanca and thinking of Lil. One night she woke up—bolt upright, she later said, at three A.M.—with this hardly startling revelation: "Jimmy hasn't been doing his homework lately." Other nights, it was Clarence on her mind.

  In late January, Chris was sitting on her table reading to the class when from afar she heard Clarence's mother coming down the hall. "Where's Clarence! I want Clarence now!" Clarence had stolen twenty and maybe sixty dollars from his mother's purse. His mother took him away. Down the hall they went, Clarence in the lead and scurrying along, his mother not far behind, thundering, "You get on home, boy!" and Chris in the rear, trying to catch up, arms pumping like a drum major's on parade, sa
ying to Clarence's mother's back, "I think we should wait for the counselor. He's very good at handling this sort of thing."

  Clarence came back the next day, not bruised but very hungry. He said he hadn't eaten for a day. And Chris thought, "If that isn't an argument for free lunch and breakfast."

  She and Clarence had yet another spat, caused in the usual ways, and she kept him for a few minutes after school, to try, as unsuccessfully as usual, to reason with him. After she let Clarence go, Chris stood at her desk, collecting her homework. She heard a splat behind her—a snowball. Another hit the window. Chris waited until she got her grin under control, then cranked open the casement and called down to the playground, "Clarence, if you throw one more snowball, you won't be here tomorrow."

  They stood facing each other for a long moment, Clarence standing shin-deep in the snow and scowling up at her, dressed in his aviator-style jacket, and Mrs. Zajac high up in the window, meeting the boy's angry glare with dangerous-looking eyebrows of her own—Romeo and Juliet in winter.

  She kept on telling herself, "Clarence has to start doing his work," and she lectured him after school again and again, as gently as she knew how, saying, "It doesn't hurt me, Clarence. Do you understand? It's only hurting you." He'd avert his face. One time she said, "I'm not giving up on you, Clarence."

  Daily games of cat and mouse with Clarence on the stairs began. Children had been spotted in the building after hours. Teachers had reported little items missing from their desks and rooms. Al had ordered the staff to make sure every child really left at the end of the day. Chris would take her walkers to the top of one of the staircases that led down to a rear door. She'd watch them leave. Again and again, Clarence would not be among them. She'd go down to the next landing and see him hiding inside, pressed against a wall, and make him leave.