Going Down Fast (40 page)

Nancy cracked her bubblegum. Vera made her spit it in the big wastebasket. Afterward, she had Nancy open her mouth. Sure enough, half the wad was secreted between the child's upper gum and cheek. Back to the wastebasket. Nancy's sullen slanted eyes glowed in her thin face. You stole from me, they accused. My gum, my sweet gum. Who knew where Nancy had found it? She never had anything, not a pencil to write with or a penny for Christmas seals or a button to close her sleazy rayon jacket against the winter wind. She was tall for eight with good muscle tone and a quick stubborn mind.

Petey was taking too long. She peeked out the halldoor and noise spurted through the class. “Ow!” “Quit that!” “Hey, look at me!” “Who got my ruler?” There he was fooling around the drinking fountain, compressing the stream with his thumb to make it arc out and pee on the floor. As he saw her he came running. She hopped in for a moment. Bob was slashing at Jimmy with a ruler. She should not have let Petey go—the whole class was due in twenty minutes—but if he got upset he peed in his pants. When she swung around, Nancy was making a face. Mouth frozen instantly, eyes dropped. Soon they would not drop. The gum.

The door banged open and in came Jason's older brother with a message about a change in lunchroom forms. Jason giggled and craned around to see if everyone knew it was his brother and he stuck up his finger Fuck You at Ronnie. Some kids called at him.

The room smelled always. She thought it smelled like anxiety, old murky odor of failure sweated from the baseboards. Every desk was occupied and more shoved against the back and between rows—and there were five absent. The kids had helped take down Christmas decorations and cut white tissue snowflakes for the windows. On the bulletin board were drawings of firemen to be collected into booklets on Our Neighborhood Helpers. The widening social horizon.

The afternoon stretched like an enormous waitingroom, as long and dark and dingy as the halls of this vast rotting school. Mary Ellen was sucking her finger again. His head down on his desk, Terry at ten was the oldest and biggest. Ronnie was drawing. Petey looked like he might be playing with himself. Maybe a third of the class stared dully out the empty windows. Whatever happened Paul must not end doing something halfway true, for it would destroy him. That speaker last night on welfare: regimented rot. Tall thin-faced man with probably some Indian in him. Rich voice with muscles in it. From some black nationalist group.

As she put the pass away she saw her unfinished lesson plan. The principal, Mr. Burns, had spoken to her again. Selfrighteous pink fink. The kids hated the school. They learned right away it did not belong to them: it had them, they were condemned to it for years to be bored and tortured and teased and lied to—here as outside, as that speaker had said. She'd gone to the meeting mainly to please Betty Hamilton who had a couple of girls in the upper grades. Betty went to galleries with her so she went to Betty's meeting. Betty kept asking her wasn't Harlan Williams wonderful and on and on till she figured out that Betty had a secret huge middle-aged crush on him. If she didn't leave off thinking about him, she could stop laughing at Betty.

Terry was frankly asleep. He was always tired, sagging on his big frame. She woke him. “Would you be my captain for boys today, Terry?” Jimmy gave her a reproachful pout. Teacher's pet. She regarded him with that mockery she saved for whatever she really liked. Uncanny in arithmetic. Intuition. Would it survive?

Terry shambled forward. Single file, boys in line, girls in line, march. They shoved and giggled and tumbled after. Half the teachers acted as if they hated the kids in the halls: like her mother walking down the street in Green River with them, hand gripping, wringing small hand. Show them you're a lady. Things had to end somewhere their long queasy spiral. Let the others complain.

She leaned on the doorframe, keeping an eye as they straggled past. Mary Ellen's dress was unpinned and she fixed it. Flo had a new purple bruise on her upper arm she was showing off to the girls in line. How starkly depressed Paul had been. Ultimately she thought his ego would save him but she tended to underrate his suffering: as she had the time he'd fallen off the shed roof leading an expedition up Everest. When he just lay there wailing she had lost her temper and made him get up. His leg doubled. The bloody bone poked through.

She clasped herself. So hard to be a kid. Carla was standing out of line buffeted by the girls as if she were a heap of rags, withdrawn, shoulders hunched, eyes half shut. “Come on, Carla, don't you have to go?” Let herself be pulled along. She had not spoken in three weeks. Her arms were covered with scabs. She had sent Carla to the school nurse and the school nurse sent her back with a note,
This child scratches herself
.

For Paul, pangs of action must be cured by new action: family tradition that used to lead to ministry or teaching. Paul was perhaps shocked that she had accepted his new radical ideas and projects. But she had long ago learned to live in a hostile armed camp. He seemed himself in company with those shaggy kids, whereas she had not recognized her brother sitting with that toad, plucking dirt from his naval and rubbing it into his hair. Last night listening to the pride and anger and power in that man's voice for all her repulsion to rhetoric she had been moved, and moved to imagine Paul in that role. The sketch yes, she had realized as she finished it that it was a pastiche of the dove hovering over the waters, the spirit on the waves, but the waves were people's faces upturned and the bird was no dove: more eagle, a phoenix-eagle black as a crow, a muscular broadwinged bird with talons.

The urine ran in quick streams to the drain over the cracked tiles. The toilets were too high for second-graders. Nancy slunk past in line. She put her hand on Nancy's round head. The child pulled away. She liked Nancy who arched her thin back and fought. Teachers in the higher grades could not afford to like the tough vigorous ones, but who couldn't put down a second-grader?

Mary Ellen pushed Francine so she stepped into the urine and wet her shoe. “Mommy'll slap me down!” Francine wailed. She dabbed at Francine's shoe with a papertowel. Above the bank of washbasins she floated in the weaksighted mirror, rosy in her dress. Rowley had come to her door and put his hand in, touching her face. She had pulled back like Nancy. Touch me not, this black violet. She had liked his energy, his way of moving, his voice with its patches of roughness. He did not use love or other obscene tricky words, but finally like every other man he thought he was worth that, he wanted to be loved. Love was not historically possible, not to be arrived at. He talked about history but did not think it applied to him: not even his own, witness Caroline. She frowned, tapping her foot.

She quieted sniffling Francine and flushed the toilet after Carla and washed her hands for her. She had not liked his hands, like loaves that had never been baked. Would Paul guess about Rowley? He never had about Will, poor Willy, wherever he was with his lifeguard's body, his smile and his, alas, commonplace mind furnished by Poor Richard out of
Ebony
. His handsome useless body.

Images of power: not No-Power, not holy selfrighteous puritan power like the Jameson fathers. Black phoenix, bird of battle, black horse galloping. His face was quick with intelligence. His voice blew the crowd like wind. They said his wife had tried to hold him back politically, been afraid and wanting him to give up. Most women were barnacles or cows. Clingers or selfcentered breeders. Much of what he said was all that black pride rigmarole Paul had been spouting, but he said it with pride. Almost everybody seemed to need their totems, be it old 78 race records or African kings.

She heard noise in the hall and told Denise to line the girls up. When she got to the Boys, Ronnie and Jason were at it again. Ronnie was banging Jason's head and shoulders against a locker. Some of the kids were yelling. Terry was numb faced, mouth open. Norman had wandered away to peek into other rooms. She collected them all and trotted them along while she brought up the girls. Back to homeroom.
Home
room. They weren't fooled. If only she did not feel that Paul was luxuriating in his doubts and indecisions: might sit proliferating ideologies and swapping futilities with dormitory politicians until he grew bored and wanted distracting, and always there were girls who would oblige. Like her reaction to H.W.? The man said, We must make a new world, and the woman said, Honey, you so right, why don't you start with me?

The fast readers got a new chapter in the integrated reader. They got a colored chapter. Bobbie and Susan lived in the city in a big clean (Spotless) apartment with Father and Mother and Baby. Everybody in the white chapters was white, everybody in the colored chapters colored. Separate but equal chapters. Up yonder the hierarchy decreed that the new textbooks would motivate the children. Oh, colored balloonman with colored balloons. The children sagged and sprawled and yawned and picked their noses and drooled boredom. The fast readers read about the friendly policeman. They would not object though already they knew better, for they had learned already not to connect, not to believe. Their brains would turn to sawdust and their IQ's decline from testing period to testing period. Boredom lay over them like a worn hall carpet.

Wallie twisted a rubberband around his finger till the top swelled obscenely. Somebody's book hit the floor. Somebody else cried out in pain. A messenger from the office came in with a note that her class was using too much construction paper. A moment later came a loud muffled bang that shook the windows and everybody began talking, “Miss Jameson, what happen?” and getting up to look out the windows. “That was a bomb, man.” “Nah, Mr. Burns sitting down.”

Beatrice never would meet Benedict but then she did not expect to and laughed in the mirror as well as the world. The fast readers as a special treat tomorrow would reread the same story. Write Policeman four times. The slow readers sat in a circle, in the suburbs with the white children and their integrated dog Spot. “Show me the sentence which tells what color the house is. Who can show me?” Mary Ellen's eager hand waved, waved on an arm rigid with passion. Thin rickety girl with a love-me face. She would recite all the time if she were allowed—nine tenths of the time wrong. She could not read two words. Calling on her was adminstering a drug.

Norman's nose was running down his chin. She fetched another Kleenex from the box in her desk. He had a cold all year, one he had caught at birth. His first word doubtless a sneeze. Next to him plump demure creamy Denise sat in her impeccable smock, smiling faintly. Her PTA mother was deeply ashamed (her daughter an underachiever) and thus hostile. She wanted her kid bussed out and no wonder. Denise had started out eager but just given up.

The bell rang in the corridor. She flipped back her cuff to see her watch. Not time. Again. Again. Again. Surprise fire drill. Even though they would freeze in the slush for ten minutes and the kids would be wound tight afterward, it would wake them and use some of the slimy length of afternoon. She had them stand and form a column of fours. As they milled out, some pushing, some going bugeyed along serious and ready, others joking, she did a quick roll. “Where's Nancy?”

Blank eyes looked at her, away. The corridors were jammed already with four-abreast lines squeezing from every stuffed classroom to the jostling crowd outside. Exit Three for them. The end staircase.

“Where's Nancy?” she asked again. “Didn't she come out of the washroom?” She felt sick to her stomach. She always counted. But she had been rushed and thinking of Paul and last night and, “March along now, no shoving, Wallie. Flo, don't dawdle. Pick up your feet. Stay in your own line now.” She got them moving. “Miss McBee!” she called to the bluehaired third-grade teacher. She hated to ask her but she was next in line. “Miss McBee, would you take my class down with yours? I have a child in the lavatory.”

Miss McBee gave a knowing smirk. “I'll do my best, though when
he
hears about it, feathers will fly. If you didn't let them go running through the halls every five minutes …”

Miss McBee called the children animals. Well, she'd say in the teacher's lounge, back to the thundering herds. Welcome to the zoo, she'd say to new teachers. Vera walked from the stairhead, pushing against the current. She made her way past broken lockers, the leaky fountain, toward the Girls. Every time she passed a teacher she had to explain. Her cheeks burned. All for a piece of bubblegum Nancy must have taken off another kid on the playground.

She pushed open the Girls. “Nancy?” No answer. “Nancy Parks! We're having a fire drill. You come out at once.”

Letting the door swing shut she squatted on a comparatively clean stretch of floor to peer under. No legs. Nothing to do but open every door. And if Nancy had snuck off or hidden or gone home? O lord! Outside, the stairtreads thundered, the stairwells echoed with a loud roar. She marched along opening every door. In the last cubicle before the grill-covered windows, Nancy curled on a toilet with her arms hooked around her legs. Big-eyed scared waiting look, with something of relief. Nancy must have thought no one was ever coming to find and punish her.

She grabbed Nancy by the arm and pulled her out. “You've been very bad. You hid from me and stayed outside class and didn't answer when you were called.”

“Leggo my arm.” Nancy yanked free and stood rubbing her arm ostentatiously.

“If you'd waited to chew your gum after class, I'd never have taken it from you.”

“You could've let me put it in a piece of paper.”

“But I don't do that with the other children. They'd get jealous.”

“What you got to be yelling at me for? Everybody else always yell at me.”

“Come on, give me your hand. We have to go down with the others.”

Pouting but compliant, Nancy gave over her thin hand and let herself be yanked along. The bell sounded again. Were they done already? She'd be on the principal's carpet. She wasn't a regular teacher and never would be, the way things were going. Four bells. Then it went on. One, two, three. A fine time to pull that, or hadn't she noticed? Exit Three closed. Let's see, the alternate exit. “No, Nancy, we have to go back and use the middle stairs.” Meant she would have to use Exit Two and go all the way around the building to get back to her kids. Everyone would see her. No! She'd run down with Nancy the way the kids had gone and take her chances on getting caught.