by Tracy Kidder
"Yes."
"Robert, don't you want to be in the tug of war?"
Robert shrugged.
The tug of war was about to begin. "Do it for Mrs. Zajac!" cried Alice.
At that last minute, Robert decided to lend his bulk to the contest. He took the end of the rope.
They won a heat. They won another. And then they won the finals.
"You may not be fast, but you're strong," Chris told them.
The front chalkboard, after lunch, recorded the triumph in excellent spelling: VICTORY AT LAST ... TUG OF WAR CHAMPIONS ... WE ARE THE BEST ... WE CAN PULL!
Neither Chris nor the class was quite the same after the heat wave. It had forced her into conceding the reality of June, and there was no going back. Chris held one more session of recess detention, but it really was June now, and she was letting go.
In the room, Chris allowed new liberties. She would lean her elbows on her desk and say, "What happened then?" when a child introduced a digression into a lesson. The last two weeks went on like one long Friday afternoon.
She remarked to Felipe one morning that he often talked loudly.
"And you talk loud when you're mad," Felipe shot back.
"Oh ho! He got you there!" said Miguel.
Chris smiled, elbows on her desk, the lesson at a halt, and she listened to them talk.
"My last teacher?" said Miguel to Mrs. Zajac. "He used to make us write out of the dictionary after school."
"That's what I call not a teacher," said Felipe.
"That's what I call a child molester," said Miguel.
She looked at the boys. She wore the faintest of smiles.
Pedro came up to her desk to brag. "In Mrs.—I forget her name—in her class we were studying body parts, and I got the mostest right."
"Good for you, Pedro!"
"I know about that!" said Miguel. "At my last school I went to classes about puberty? And they gave us pamphlets. I'm in puberty! We're all in puberty!"
Chris shook her head. "My little Einstein," she thought. She wished she'd had him all year long.
She sat at her desk more often than before. While sitting there one day, she noticed Claude go out the door toward the bathroom and then turn right. Minutes later, she got a glimpse of him on the other side of the balcony. He had taken the longest way to the bathroom. When he returned, she said, "Claude, you took the route to Tokyo."
"I always do," Claude said.
In fact, he had been taking that route, making those trips to the bathroom last, ever since September. Claude. He was still disorganized, but Chris saw method in it. She wasn't worried about him anymore. She couldn't say exactly why. She just wasn't. Introducing the final story of the year, she had suggested various topics, and turning to Claude, she had said, "Or you could write about why hunting is bad or good," and Claude's face had lit up. It was a going-away present to him.
The maples on the far river bank, billowing green clouds, made a new and lumpy horizon. Out on the playground on a mild, sunny June afternoon, all the regular recesses had ended and loud children's voices had died away. A little, quiet group of children, the variously handicapped ones, came out and some played jump rope on the cement pad below the window. Inside, Chris's class worked on a social studies assignment. The room was still, and from outside came the drifting-away sound of the ventilators. Chris turned her chair to the window and watched the long rope arcing, a child skipping.
"I loved jump rope," she said aloud after a while, still staring out the window. "Double Dutch and Scotch. Scotch was reverse Double Dutch. What do you call it now, Judith?"
Judith looked up from her social studies paper, a little startled. She glanced over her shoulder at Mrs. Zajac, who, without turning from the window, repeated her question. "What do you call reverse Double Dutch? We used to call it Scotch."
"Oh," said Judith. "Irish." Judith went back to work.
Chris laughed. "Do you sing songs?"
"Mmmm-hmmm," said Judith over her work.
"Do you play high low medium wavy walky talky slowly Pepper?" asked Chris, still looking out the window.
Judith looked back at her teacher again with narrowed eyes.
"Is Pepper still fast?" asked Chris.
"Yes!" exclaimed Judith, whether in amusement or exasperation wasn't altogether clear until Judith turned sideways in her chair and faced Mrs. Zajac with a wry smile. Judith seemed to be thinking, "Might as well let her get this out of her system."
"Ever play Chinese jump rope?" asked Chris. "I was very good at one rope, not so good at two."
Those conversations with Judith were precious to Chris. They became more precious at the end of another day, when Judith announced that her father planned to move the family back to Puerto Rico.
"Oh!" Chris blurted out, "I don't want you to leave!"
Chris knew that going back home would be wonderful for Judith's father. But Judith had become her shiniest hope. She was one Puerto Rican child who could certainly succeed on the mainland, and on mainland terms. Chris had counted on seeing Judith next year. She'd hoped to have her in class again. She'd looked forward to following Judith's career through teacher friends at junior high and high school. Chris thought about the girl from Miami whom she'd met at the school in Comerio, the one who'd had a hard time adjusting to the island. But then she thought, "Judith is accepting this better than I am."
Judith shrugged. She said she had to take things as they came. "I've got to, if I'm going to live in this world," Judith said.
And Chris thought, "Well, I guess I ought to take this like an adult, too."
The last music lesson came. The music teacher took the class outside. The children marched behind the music teacher, who strutted soldierly around the playground, playing on a set of bagpipes.
"Well, thank you," Chris said to that cheerful, enthusiastic, permissive soprano when the music teacher and the class returned to the room. "The class really enjoyed you this year. Didn't you, class?"
The children gave each other sneaky looks. They emitted one soft, collective "Yeahhhh."
Al had ordered almost every teacher to move to a new room for next year. In the halls, where bulletin boards were turning blank and cork-brown, many little Sherpas, laden with cardboard boxes, passed to and fro. Chris had not thrown away much in her fourteen years on the job. Now she was reforming. The piles that she pulled from her desk drawers, cabinets, and closet were impressive in their volume: folders full of old dittos and forgotten lesson plans and old sign-up rosters. "Look at this," she said to her helpers—Judith, Irene, Arabella, and, of course, Mariposa. "That class was so bad, I had to have them sign out for the bathroom." She found old letters to parents and the sheaf of bank books she once had to keep for students and her college paper on the purposes of education. " 'Personal Philosophy of Education,' " she read. "What a lot of bull. I didn't have a philosophy." There were perhaps a thousand dollars' worth of store-bought idea books for practically every contingency. Now and then she lingered over a discovery. " 'Chris Padden, Elementary Games,' " she read aloud, her helpers all around her. "Mem-o-ries!" she sang. "A flash from the past," she said. Old plan books made a pile two feet tall. "They're going to bury me with my plan books."
"Dump," said Chris when Irene showed her a collection of dittos about birds. "Dump," she said to a folder full of math games.
Jimmy, of all people, retrieved that folder from the discard pile.
"What do you want that for?" asked Chris.
"For some time when I get bored," Jimmy said, and Chris paused a moment, head cocked to look at him.
She had all but emptied her top right-hand desk drawer when she came upon a folded slip of lined white paper. She opened it, and at once she knew the handwriting; it was still as familiar to her as that averted, stony face and those amazing dimples. She read silently awhile about her own demise:
There once lived a witch her name was Mrs. Zazac and she was a very bad witch and never like no body there was a boy name Clar
ence she didn't like and she lived in a hunten house...
"Oh, I've got to save this." She put the story in her box of things to keep.
5
Gertrude Harty is invariably remembered by her former students as "little Miss Harty." She was tiny, and she seemed as fragile as a bird, but even in old age and retirement she had a presence. Receiving visitors, she still dressed as if for school, in a tweed suit and thin gold necklace, which she fingered now and then.
Almost all of the school buildings where Miss Harty taught had been torn down. The site of the first, a one-room schoolhouse in a little western Massachusetts town, had long since vanished under the waters of the Quabbin Reservoir. Miss Harty remembered the day when the town's graves were transplanted. After the gates of the dam had shut and the site of that first school of hers disappeared under the flood, Miss Harty had gone back to Holyoke, where she was born and raised, and had spent forty-two years teaching grade school. She could conjure up many of her students as readily as if they were all members of an extremely fertile, gigantically extended family.
"She's one of the ones I remember," Miss Harty said of Chris. She said she pictured Chris Padden in third grade, wearing a pink and white checked dress, sitting alertly with her books and pencils neatly arranged in front of her. The girl Miss Harty called to mind was very serious and often raised her hand. But only when she knew the answer—standing up to deliver it, as Miss Harty wished schoolchildren were still required to do. Miss Harty figured Chris had parents who listened to her.
Miss Harty remembered the first day of snow that year long ago. She had put on the Victrola a recording of Robert Frost reading "The Runaway." She remembered Chris listening intently, brow wrinkled. She could see that Chris and most of her classmates were worried about the little colt in the poem, who is afraid of snowflakes. "I tried to take the essence of the poem and engage them. I remember Chris and Chris's class. They were so receptive and responded so to the poem. It was fun for me, and I hope it was for them," Miss Harty said.
Robert Frost was what Chris remembered best of that year's lessons, too. Miss Harty had died this spring, during the third marking period. Standing over the coffin at the wake, Chris, who at most wakes felt mainly an overpowering urge to get outside, had this time allowed herself some nostalgic thoughts. "A little bit of Robert Frost died with you, Miss Harty," Chris had declared in her mind. Miss Harty had been a teacher of the quiet variety. When her students had gotten noisy, she had made her own voice softer until they got curious and had to ask what she had said. Chris had not been able to copy her favorite old teacher in that respect, but as much as anything else, the year in Miss Harty's room had made Chris want to be a teacher, too. Chris wished that she had visited Miss Harty years ago to tell her that. But Chris had never forgotten little Miss Harty, and Miss Harty had never forgotten Chris. "She was a very bright child and very dependable," Miss Harty said a few months before she died. "I don't remember her as an apple polisher. She was just one of the children you like to remember."
Chris herself now had an extended family of former students whom she liked to remember. The one who had been her all-time highest achiever was now a very pretty young woman with blond ringlets surrounding her face, like an elaborate picture frame. Her name was Suzanne. She had been living this year just a few miles from Kelly School, at Mount Holyoke College, where she was studying history and literature and still getting mostly A's. Suzanne was working hard for those grades but thought she could do even better. That year back in sixth grade, Miss Padden had made her feel that she could do anything. Suzanne remembered other lessons: Miss Padden deftly handling a fight Suzanne had with a classmate; Miss Padden trying to teach her not to be arrogant about her academic gifts; Miss Padden always making her feel that she could tell Miss Padden anything; Miss Padden instructing her to be cautious on the matter of boyfriends. "I had a massive crush on this guy who's now a waste case," Suzanne said. Miss Padden had warned her, with a look Suzanne could still remember—Miss Padden's head cocked, her tongue clucking once softly—when Suzanne was about to expose her unrequited affections for that boy one day in the room. Suzanne remembered thinking Miss Padden was beautiful. That year Suzanne, a seamstress as well as a student, made imitations of Miss Padden's outfits and wore them to school.
Suzanne remembered that Miss Padden had a boyfriend. (Billy had sometimes called on Chris during the school day back then, when he and Chris were courting.) "She'd excuse herself from the class," Suzanne said, "and we'd all whisper about it. I liked her so much I kind of felt jealous when she left to talk to him. And then she would come back in, and we were all happy she was there again. I think we all didn't like that, because she had affections elsewhere."
There was a difference between the way Miss Harty had inspired Chris and Chris had inspired Suzanne, a generational difference. When Chris was growing up, teaching was still one of the best jobs available to a bright, ambitious woman, especially one with working-class parents. That, of course, was no longer true. Chris knew Suzanne wouldn't become a teacher. "Suzanne's too smart." In fact, Suzanne was hoping to go to Harvard Law School. But the transactions, between Miss Harty and Chris, and Chris and Suzanne, were similar. Suzanne had one overriding memory of Chris, and it was of a person who had helped her once and who, by doing that, had helped her all along the way.
"She's, like, my most memorable teacher," Suzanne said. She kept meaning to visit Miss Padden and tell her that, but hadn't yet.
6
On a sunny afternoon the last week of school, on the grounds in front of another, older elementary school, under one of several large maple trees, Clarence sat designing a tattoo, with felt-tipped pens, on the bared chest of an Alpha classmate. The friend he was tattooing was a huge twelve-year-old Puerto Rican boy, nearly six feet tall, nicknamed Little Richard by his Alpha teacher. He leaned against the tree trunk, a beatific smile on his face, while Clarence drew a huge eagle on his chest. The small, wiry white boy who had shown Clarence around the Alpha class some months before watched Clarence draw. Clarence had already tattooed himself: a big red eagle on his chest and a swastika on his right forearm.
In a little while, Clarence and the white boy began to tussle in a friendly-looking way. Clarence quick and lithe. Then the white boy plucked some grass and threw it in Clarence's face. And Clarence, his jaw suddenly fierce, ripped up some grass and rubbed it hard in the white boy's face. The white boy went limp and when he got the chance, scrambled a little distance away. Little Richard laughed serenely, and Clarence sat down again beneath the tree. Then Clarence said, "Girls. Check it out."
Of course, he was the first to notice a change in the landscape. Four schoolgirls, with neatly coiffed hair and in designer clothes, had sat down under another maple, about twenty yards away. "They think they're high-class prep," said the white boy.
Clarence called toward the girls, "Tell that girl in green pants to come over here!"
The girls elevated their chins and looked away. They were probably telling each other, "Those are Alpha kids. Just ignore them."
"Kiss mines!" Clarence yelled at them.
One of the girls turned an angry face toward the boys. "I'm not yours!" She must not have been accustomed to that idiom.
The white boy made a wolf whistle.
Little Richard yelled, "Fuckin' bitch!"
"He called you a fuckin' bitch!" called the white boy toward the girls. "That's what he said."
"I didn't say it!" called Clarence.
"Gimme that ass," murmured grinning Little Richard.
Clarence looked at Little Richard. Clarence smiled. "Go say somethin' to them girls," said Clarence to Little Richard.
Little Richard grinned more broadly then. He got up and walked in a wide, slow circle around the girls' tree.
Clarence laughed behind his hand as he watched.
Little Richard returned from his threatening promenade to the Alphans' tree and made as if to hump its trunk.
"They're so gros
s!" said one of the girls' voices, and once again the girls all turned their faces away.
And the three Alpha boys sat down together again.
"I wish I had a soda right here, man," said Little Richard.
"I wish one of those girls wanted to get popped," said the white boy.
Clarence plucked at the grass.
Clarence's teacher said that at first she had wondered why he had been sent to Alpha. It had been weeks before she had caught him breaking any rules, but the first time she had, a couple of her other charges had told her they were glad, because Clarence was always doing bad things she didn't notice. She still hoped to get him back in the mainstream soon. "I don't think he should stay long in this group," she said. But she allowed there was some question about who was a bad influence on whom. She had begun to notice a pattern. Her room was often divided into groups for various activities. Clarence would sometimes wander from group to group, and as he did, fights would erupt in the group that he had just left. "I can't nab him," she said. "And then, there's that adorable smile."
It was the next to last day of school when Clarence returned to his old class. Chris and the children had moved downstairs to the room that Chris would occupy next year. They'd cleaned up all the desks and put them in the hall, per Al's decree. Only a couple of chairs and Chris's gray metal desk, just the same as her last one, remained. The class had lined up against the wall beside the doorway, and Chris sat facing them. They were having a spelling bee. The children were laughing. It was peaceful in the room.
The windows to the playground behind Chris opened at ground level, within the reach of spray paint. These new windows were almost entirely opaque under a coating of white and green graffiti, which from inside looked like several years of accumulated bird droppings. This room also had a back door, which opened directly on the playground. Chris had propped it open with a chair to let in the breeze and sunshine. Past the doorway, behind her and to her left, figures of boys on bicycles flashed by—older-looking boys, perhaps playing hooky from junior high. Passing by, the boys left snatches of conversation behind. "Motherfuckin'..." Hearing those words from outside, Chris stiffened. "Lovely," she muttered to herself.
