Loser (2 page)

Donald Zinkoff

Before arriving in first grade, he has learned his letters. Some of them, anyway. And of course he has seen his name from time to time. But he has never traced it on see-through paper. He has never tried to copy it, has never hitched a ride on a pencil point, feeling the shape and movement of his name's letters.

 

 

Now, as he moves the pencil across the blue lines of the paper, he feels a thrill. He stares at his name, and it is as if he is staring at himself. As if the Donald Zinkoff that was born six years ago is here and now, by his own hand, in some small way being born all over again.

He rushes up to the teacher. He shoves the paper in her face. “Look! It's me!”

She takes the paper. At the top is his name as she has spelled it out for him to copy, as she has done for all of the students. Below that is his own attempt. If she didn't know what it was supposed to say, she could never read it. The confusion of pencil lines on the paper makes no more sense than the playpen doodlings of a two-year-old.

The joy streaming up from his face makes her smile. She lays a hand on his shoulder. “To be perfectly precise about it,” she says, “it is not you, it is your name. Your name is very important. It represents you.”

“What does ‘represents' mean?” he says.

“That means it takes your place. It sort of substitutes for you. Even when you yourself are not in a particular place, your name can be there. And so it's important to write it properly.” She hands the paper back to him. “And to write it properly, you must practice. Use both sides.”

A hundred sides would not have made a difference. Collecting papers before recess, she
discovers that she still cannot read Donald Zinkoff's name. Of itself, this is no big deal. He certainly isn't the first sloppy handwriter she has come across. In the past she has had straight A students who could not seem to write a legible word. On the other hand, sometimes poor penmanship indicates a problem with motor skills. For the boy's sake, she hopes he is simply sloppy.

 

Recess!

At exactly 10
A.M
. Zinkoff bursts onto the playground with the other Satterfield first-, second-and third-graders. For the first minute he is disappointed. He expected recess to be something different, something new. It turns out to be simply free time. Recess turns out to be just another name for life as he has always known it. Only shorter. His first recess lasted six years. This one is fifteen minutes. He means to make the most of it.

He dashes back into school. No one stops him. No one sees him. No one has ever run back
into
school during recess. He pulls his giraffe hat from
the cubbie and runs back out to the playground.

“Hey, there he is!” someone shouts. “The kid with the hat!”

In seconds there's a crowd around him, kids reaching up to touch the hat, kids calling, “Can I wear it?”

And then the hat is gone, snatched from his head. A boy has it, he's running off with it, jamming it onto his own head. Now other hands are reaching, grabbing, snatching. The hat goes from head to head. The kids are screaming, laughing. A second-grader runs off with it. He goes galloping around the playground. The brown and yellow hat bobs on his head like a real giraffe. Zinkoff laughs aloud. He enjoys the spectacle so much that he forgets the hat is his.

And then a tall red-haired boy, a fourth-grader, stands in front of the galloper, holding out his hand. The second-grader takes off the hat and hands it over. The red-haired fourth-grader looks at the hat carefully. Instead of putting it on his head, he sticks his arm into it, all the way up to his shoulder. With his fingers inside the head,
he makes the giraffe nod and seem to talk. He walks over to one of his equally tall friends. He makes the giraffe's mouth clamp onto his friend's nose. Everybody laughs. Zinkoff laughs. Even the recess-duty teacher laughs.

The boy turns to the first-graders, who are keeping their distance. “Whose hat is this?”

Zinkoff runs forward. He trips over a foot and falls flat on his face. Everybody laughs. Zinkoff laughs. He comes up to the tall red-haired boy. He stands much closer than a first-grader normally gets to a fourth-grader. He looks directly up into the tall boy's face and proudly announces, “It's my hat.”

The boy smiles. He shakes his head slowly. “It's
my
hat.”

Zinkoff just stares up. He is fascinated by the boy's face. He has never seen a face smile and shake itself no at the same time.

And he realizes that apparently there has been a mistake. Perhaps the tall boy was at the zoo on the same day Zinkoff was there. Perhaps he bought the giraffe hat first and left it behind by
mistake. Whatever, there is no mistaking what the boy said: “It's
my
hat.”

Zinkoff is sad. He has really come to love the hat that he thought was his. But he is not sad too, because he can tell how happy it makes the tall boy to get his hat back.

The boy is still smiling down at him. Zinkoff already knows that smiles do not like to be alone, so he sends his best smile up to join the one above. “Okay,” he says cheerfully.

The smile on the tall boy's face twists and changes. Zinkoff does not know it, but he has just cheated the boy. The boy expected Zinkoff to make a fuss, to try to get his hat back, maybe even to cry or pitch a fit. The boy loves to see first-graders pitch fits. It's fun. And now he is cheated of his fun, cheated by this smiling, agreeable little insect in front of him.

The tall boy takes off the hat. He pokes Zinkoff in the forehead with one of the giraffe's horns. “It's not mine, you dummy.” He wags his head and snickers. He turns to his friends. “First-graders are so dumb.” His friends laugh. He
throws the hat to the ground. As he walks off, he makes sure to step on it.

Zinkoff picks up the hat. Pieces of grit cling to the fuzzy surface. Suddenly the tall boy turns and looks back. Zinkoff drops the hat in case the boy wishes to step on it again. But the boy only laughs and goes away.

 

Zinkoff's mother is waiting for him after school. All the way home he jabbers about his incredible first day.

“Do you like your teacher?” she asks him.

“I love my teacher!” he says. “She called us ‘young citizens'!”

She pats the top of his hat, which makes him almost as tall as her. “One thousand congratulations to you.”

He beams. “Do I get a star?”

“I believe you do.” His mother always carries with her a plastic Baggie of silver stars. She takes one out, licks it and presses it onto his shirt. “There.”

As he bows his head to look at the star, the hat
topples from his head. His mother picks it up. She puts it on her own head. Zinkoff howls and claps. She wears it the rest of the way home.

 

Later Zinkoff sits on the front step waiting for his father to come home from work. His father is a mailman. He walks all day on his job but drives to and from the post office in his clunker. The Zinkoffs cannot afford a new car, so Mr. Zinkoff buys used ones. Every time he buys one he gets excited. “She's a real honeybug,” he says. And then, a month or two later, every time, the honeybug starts to go bad. A retread tire loses its rubber. The carburetor starts coughing. The belts break. He keeps patching it up with duct tape, baling wire and chewing gum. Pretty soon everything is patches except Mr. Z's faith in his honeybug.

The day always comes when Mrs. Z whispers to her son, “It's another clunker.” Zinkoff giggles and nods, but he never says the word “clunker” to his father, as that might hurt his feelings. It is never long after Mrs. Z says “clunker” that the
car dies, usually on a rainy morning on the way to work. The car simply refuses to move another inch over the face of this earth, and even Mr. Z knows that it is beyond the help of even a thousand new plugs of chewing gum. The next day he gets rid of it and begins shopping for a new honeybug.

This cycle has happened four times so far, which is why Zinkoff mother and son, between the two of them, call the current car “Clunker Four.”

Zinkoff hears Clunker Four long before he sees it. It makes a high squeal that reminds him of elephants in the movies. He runs to the curb as the car rounds the corner and rattles to a stop. As usual there is a smell of something burning in the air. “Daddy,” he cries out, jumping into his father's arms, “I went to school!”

“And a star to prove it,” says his father, hoisting him into the house.

Zinkoff talks about his first day at the dinner table and after dinner and right up until bedtime. As always, the last thing his mother says to him at night is, “Say your prayers.” While she hides his giraffe hat in the trunk with the comforters and
fancy tablecloth, Zinkoff transfers the star from his school shirt to his pajamas. He climbs into bed and tells God all about his first day. Then he tells the stars.

At this time in his life Zinkoff sees no difference between the stars in the sky and the stars in his mother's plastic Baggie. He believes that stars fall from the sky sometimes, and that his mother goes around collecting them like acorns. He believes she has to use heavy gloves and dark sunglasses because the fallen stars are so hot and shiny. She puts them in the freezer for forty-five minutes, and when they come out they are flat and silver and sticky on the back and ready for his shirts.

This makes him feel close to the unfallen stars left in the sky. He thinks of them as his nightlights. As he grows drowsy in bed, he wonders which is greater: the number of stars in the sky or the number of school days left in his life? It's a wonderful question.

Here is the surprise: Every day is like the first day to Zinkoff. Things keep happening that rekindle the excitement of the first day. Learning to read his first two-syllable word. Making a shoe-box scene about the Pilgrims. Counting to five in Spanish. Learning about water and ants and tooth decay. His first fire drill. Making new friends.

At the dinner table Zinkoff tells his parents about his days. But he always waits for his father's question. “So, what's new, Chickamoo?” Or “What's new, Boogaloo?” Or “Kinkachoo.” Or “Pookypoo.” Many things tickle Zinkoff, but nothing more than the sound of a funny word. Words tickle him like fingertips in the ribs. Every time his father comes up with a new one, Zinkoff has to put down his fork and laugh. Usually he leans to one side, as if the funny word has the
force of a great wind. Sometimes he even falls off his chair.

It's his teacher, Miss Meeks, who comes up with the best one. She stands at the greenboard one day, trying to explain what a billion basketballs would look like. “If you put the first one here,” she says, pointing to the floor, “and line them up out the door and down the hallway and across the playground and down the street—why, they would stretch from here to Jabip!”

The classroom is a sea of boggling eyes. Wow!

Someone calls out, “Where's Jabip?”

Miss Meeks explains that there is no actual place called Jabip. It's just her way of saying someplace really far away.

At that point Zinkoff, in the last seat in the last row, tilts alarmingly to the left and falls from his chair. The teacher rushes to him. His face is red. Tears stream down his cheeks. He's gasping for breath.

“Donald! Donald!” she calls, though he is inches away.

He looks up at her through watery eyes. He gasps, “Jabip!” He pounds the floor.

That's when Miss Meeks realizes her pupil isn't dying, he's merely laughing.

It's a good five minutes before Zinkoff calms down enough for the class to continue. Miss Meeks forbids the class—and herself—to utter the word “Jabip” for the rest of the day. Nevertheless, from time to time there are sudden giggly eruptions from the back row as the word pops back into Zinkoff's head.

When he hears Clunker Four coming that day, he runs alongside the car as it coasts to the curb. “Daddy! Daddy! Did you ever hear of Jabip?”

“Sure,” says his father out the open window. “I also heard of Jaboop.”

Zinkoff rolls on the sidewalk. Jabip. Jaboop. He keeps erupting through dinner. Eating becomes hazardous. His parents smile patiently for the first minute or so, then begin telling him enough is enough. But Zinkoff can't stop. When a bolt of mashed potatoes shoots from his nose,
he is sent to his room. That night he giggles through his prayer and into sleep.

In school for the rest of the week Zinkoff continues to produce outbursts of laughter in the back row. Every outburst triggers laughter from the other pupils. Sometimes, to get him started, a pupil waits until the teacher's head is turned, then whispers the forbidden word. Sometimes Miss Meeks bites her tongue to keep from joining in, sometimes she gets mad.

It's during one of the mad times that she says, “Donald, come up here, please.” When he stands before her she takes something from her desk drawer. It's a round yellow button. It's the largest button the students have ever seen, as large as a giant pinwheel taffy. It has black letters on it. “Can you tell me what it says?”

Zinkoff studies the button. Finally he shakes his head.

“It says, ‘I know I can behave.'” She pins the button onto his shirt. “And I know you can.”

Zinkoff has to wear the button for an hour. During that time he does not laugh once. Miss
Meeks judges her maneuver a success and returns the button to the drawer. Soon Zinkoff is laughing again. He gets the button back.

So it goes for several days. Second-graders who wore the button the previous year and who have heard of Zinkoff's endless giggling ask him in the playground, “Did you get the button today?”

One day Miss Meeks has to leave the classroom for a while. When she returns she finds Zinkoff's hand waving in the air.

“Yes, Donald?”

“Miss Meeks,” he says, “I laughed when you were gone.”

And she realizes at last that for Zinkoff the button is not a punishment at all, but a badge of honor. From then on she punishes him by keeping the button in the drawer.

 

Button or no button, Zinkoff loves school. One day he awakes before anyone else in the house. He gets himself dressed. He makes his own breakfast. He brushes his teeth and walks off to school.
I must be early
, he thinks, for he sees no
crossing guards or other children along the way.

He is sitting on the front step waiting for the door to open when he hears Clunker Four. It stops in front of the school and out pop both his mother and father. Both come running.

“Donald, we've been looking all over! You weren't in your bed!”

“I came to school all by myself,” he declares proudly.

His parents look at each other. His mother bites her lip. His father picks him up and says, “You're very big to do that all by yourself. The only problem is, there's no school today. It's Saturday.”

 

When Miss Meeks passes Zinkoff on to second grade, she writes on the back of his final report card: “Donald sometimes has a problem with self-control, and I wish he were neater, but he is so good-natured. That son of yours is one happy child! And he certainly does love school!”