Loser (4 page)

Second grade is no more than a minute old when Zinkoff gets off on the wrong foot with his teacher.

He asks her how many days of school are left. Not in this year but in all remaining eleven years. The teacher, whose name is Mrs. Biswell, thinks it is the most annoying, untimely question she has ever heard. Here she is, all bright and shiny for first day, and this kid in the front row can't wait till he graduates from high school. It's insulting and disrespectful. She comes closer than she ever has before to saying, “That's a dumb question.” Instead, she says, “Don't worry about it. You'll be out of school soon enough.”

Zinkoff has no intention of worrying about it. And he certainly doesn't want to be out of school. He simply wants to hear her say a really big number in the thousands, so he can feel that his days in
school will never come to an end. He has thought every teacher starts out the school year like Miss Meeks, but now he guesses he was wrong.

In the meantime he is packed off to the far back corner, last seat—the boondocks—as Mrs. Biswell assigns seats by first letter, last name.

The next bad thing he does is laugh. This might have been okay, but, Zinkoff being Zinkoff, he doesn't stop laughing. And when he does stop, it isn't long before he begins again.

Part of this is his own fault. Zinkoff is an all-purpose laugher. Not only do funny things make him laugh, but nearly anything that makes him feel good might also make him laugh. In fact, sometimes bad things make him laugh. He laughs as naturally as he breathes.

One day in the playground, a third-grader, angered by the sound of Zinkoff laughing, grabs Zinkoff by the wrist and pulls his arm behind his back. The higher he pulls the wrist toward the shoulder blade, the louder Zinkoff laughs, even through his tears. In the end the third-grader becomes frightened and gives up.

Of course, Zinkoff's classmates know what an easy laugher he is, so whenever they wish to be entertained, all they have to do is get Zinkoff's attention and stick out a tongue or pretend to pick and flick a booger. For half the class the entertainment is not in hearing Zinkoff laugh but in seeing him get in trouble.

Mrs. Biswell does not like children. Although she never says this, everyone knows it. Everyone wonders why someone who does not like children ever became a teacher in the first place. As the years have gone by, Mrs. Biswell herself has begun to wonder. Once a year, at home, she wonders aloud why she ever became a teacher, but there is never an answer from her husband or her three cats.

It is widely believed that Mrs. Biswell never smiles. In fact, this is not true. Mrs. Biswell smiles perhaps five or six times a year, but her face is so stone-chiseled into a permanent scowl that her smile appears to be merely a tilting of the scowl.

It is therefore impossible to tell if Mrs.
Biswell is really mad by looking at her face. The key is her hands. Anger makes hooks of her fingers and clamps her hands together. As her anger rises, the gnarled hands begin to churn over each other as if she is washing them in gritty soap.

Nothing makes Mrs. Biswell madder than sloppiness. She has had many sloppy students before, but Zinkoff is in a class by himself. Especially with a pencil in his hand. His numbers are a disaster. His fives look like eights, eights look like zeros, fours look like sevens.

At least there are only ten numerals. The alphabet gives him twenty-six letters to butcher. And once she starts teaching cursive, she might as well try to teach a pickle to write. His o's are raisins, his l's are drunken chili peppers, his q's are g's and his g's are q's.

And lines! The boy never saw a blue line he couldn't miss. Over the line, under the line, perpendicular to the line—his letters swarm willy-nilly across the page like ants on a sidewalk.

The teacher asks for a volunteer to help Zinkoff. Andrew Orwell volunteers. For a half
hour each day Andrew sits with Zinkoff and shows him how to make better letters and numbers. After a week, Zinkoff's writing is worse than ever. Andrew is fired.

After two months of the worst penmanship she has ever endured, the teacher wrings her hands and calls out to the boondocks: “Your handwriting is atrocious!”

Zinkoff beams, not knowing the meaning of the word. “Thank you!” he calls back.

“My handwriting is atrocious!” he announces to his parents at the dinner table that day. His father, seeing how proud his son is, replies, “One thousand congratulations.”

His mother gives him a star.

In all ways that teacher Biswell can see, the Z boy is a shambles. She shudders to think what must happen when he is in the same room with a coloring book. He is even at odds with his own body—not rare among second-graders, certainly, but this boy takes the cake. Hardly a day goes by in which he does not fall flat on his face for no apparent reason.

When he isn't laughing he's flapping his hand in the air. He's forever asking questions, forever volunteering to answer. For every right answer, five are wrong. The more he gets wrong, the more he wants to answer. The better to be seen back in his last-of-the-alphabet desk, he sometimes crouches on his seat like a baseball catcher, stabbing his hand into the air and grunting aloud.

It is unthinkable to Mrs. Biswell that such a mediocre-to-poor student could actually like school, so she concludes that his antics and reckless enthusiasms are merely ploys to annoy her.

Even so, she might forgive him—forgive him the sloppiness and the clumsiness and the endless laughing and the general annoyance that he is, forgive him for being a child—had he possessed the one thing for which she has a weakness: brilliance.

Brilliance is the one thing that makes Mrs. Biswell happy. In fourth grade in her own childhood, in the second report period, she got all A's and won a prize in her school's science fair. Ever since, she has had the highest regard for academic achievement. In all her years of teaching, she
could name only nine students who deserved to be called “brilliant.”

Zinkoff is not one of them. Quizzes, tests, projects—he never earns an A, and only one or two B's. He might earn more C's if she could understand his answers. Typically, she throws up her hands and gives him a D.

And so, in all these ways Zinkoff grinds down the patience of Mrs. Biswell. He is the greenboard against which her stick of chalk is reduced day by day. By December it is a nub.

And then he ruins her eraser.

Mrs. Biswell has long loved her eraser. It is so much better than the cheap, flimsy things that come through school supplies. Its deep, firm pad of felt soaks up chalk dust like a sponge. It is the Rolls Royce of greenboard erasers. Ten years ago she put out her own money for it, and she expects it to last for ten more. Every Friday she takes it home and claps it against the back of the fieldstone barbeque pit in her yard. No one but her is allowed to touch it. For that matter, no one but her is allowed to touch the greenboard or the chalk.

One day she comes back late from lunch to find Zinkoff writing at the greenboard. The students in their seats let out a collective gasp. Zinkoff merely smiles at her and keeps on writing.

“Stop!” she screeches.

He stops. He looks at her, his eyes round as quarters. Then, quicker than she can think, he grabs the eraser and begins swiping at the greenboard.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” she screams.

The words hit Zinkoff like a bear paw. His body flinches in three directions, he drops the eraser to the floor and throws up all over it.

“Out! Out! Out!” screams Mrs. Biswell. She stands in the doorway pointing down the hall. “Get out of my classroom and never come back!”

Zinkoff gets out.

In a daze he leaves the room and walks down the hallway. He flinches one final time as the classroom door slams shut behind him. He walks until he comes to the door at the end of the hall. He opens it and goes outside and keeps on walking. He walks for a long time, feeling behind his
head the pointing finger of Mrs. Biswell.

In time he finds himself home. His mother is looking at him with alarm. She is asking him where his winter coat is. She's telling him that he is trembling.

 

Mrs. Biswell tells the principal it was a mistake. She was merely pointing to the principal's office, she says, sending him there. The principal says mistake or not, no teacher can banish a student from school. Mrs. Biswell says she simply lost her temper, as anyone would have done if they had had to put up with
that
student. The principal says a teacher isn't just anyone, and he scolds her in the privacy of his office.

When Mrs. Zinkoff telephones the principal and asks if it's true that her son was told never to return to school, the principal laughs and says it was all a mistake and of course he is most welcome to come back. Zinkoff is back at school next day before the janitor.

For the rest of the school year Mrs. Biswell wrings her hands and combs the stores and cata
logs for another Rolls Royce eraser. With her own money she buys Zinkoff a yellow plastic beach bucket. She tells him he is never to go anywhere inside her classroom without it. Zinkoff never throws up into the yellow bucket, but he does use it to carry around his collection of interesting stones and pieces of colored glass.

In the spring Mrs. Biswell is certain that Zinkoff will be absent at least one day: Take Your Kid to Work Day. The boy is forever blabbing about his father the mailman and that he himself is going to be a mailman when he grows up. Surely he will want to go to work with his father that day.

The teacher is both right and wrong. Zinkoff definitely wants to miss school on Take Your Kid to Work Day, but the post office will not allow children to accompany postal parents on their routes. They say it is too dangerous and, besides, the mail Jeeps have only one seat.

Zinkoff has been begging his father for years to take him to work. Now, the thought of watching other kids go off to work with their parents while he stays behind is too painful to bear. Every day he pesters his father.

“I can't,” says his father. “They'll fire me. Do you want them to fire me?”

The youngster can only shake his head and pout. And the pestering starts all over.

Days of this.

At last Mr. Z has an idea.

“Okay, okay,” he says. “I can't take you to work officially. I can't take you on a workday. I can't take you in the Jeep. So here's what we'll do…”

When Zinkoff hears his father's plan, he rushes next door to tell Andrew.

“I'm having my own day. Take Donald Zinkoff to Work Day. It's going to be on Sunday. Now I can do it and my dad won't get fired.”

“I'm going with my dad on the real Take Your Kid to Work Day,” says Andrew.

“My dad's a mailman,” says Zinkoff. “I'm going to deliver mail.”

“My dad's a banker,” says Andrew. They are in Andrew's backyard. Andrew is batting a Ping-Pong ball against the wall with his mother's pancake spatula. He borrowed the Ping-Pong ball from Zinkoff weeks before. “I'm going to make money.”

“I'm going to ride in my dad's clunker.”

“I'm going to ride to work on the train. All the way to the city.”

“I'm going to carry my dad's mailbag. He says it's really heavy, but I'm going to carry it.”

Andrew turns and whacks the ball as hard and high as he can. It sails to the Zinkoffs' roof and rolls into the rain gutter. “I'm going to sit at my dad's desk. He said I can even sit in the vice president's chair.”

Zinkoff stares up at the rain gutter. That was his only Ping-Pong ball. “I'm having lunch with my dad. We're going to eat right there in the Clunker.”

“We're eating lunch in a restaurant. Sometimes the mayor goes there. My dad says when he gets a raise, we're outta here. He says we're never coming back to this dump.”

Zinkoff looks around. He doesn't see any dump. He wonders what dump Andrew's father was talking about. He can't look up at the rain gutter without the sun blinding him.

 

When the official Take Your Kid to Work Day arrives, Zinkoff watches Andrew go off to the city with his dad. Andrew wears a suit and tie. He looks like a little banker.

Two days later, Sunday, is Take Donald Zinkoff to Work Day. To prepare for the day, Zinkoff's dad has brought him a tall stack of envelopes and sheets of paper. Since there is no official mail to deliver on a Sunday, Zinkoff has to make his own mail. He writes letters. Forty, fifty, sixty letters and more. He writes words that he imagines people say in letters. He feels really grown-up because the sheets of paper have no lines. He folds up the letters and puts them in the envelopes. He draws stamps in crayon in the upper right corners of the envelopes and writes addresses and puts the finished letters—one hundred of them!—into the mailbag.

The Zinkoff family goes to church early that Sunday. Two minutes after they get home, the town's newest mailman is ready. He takes the lunches from the refrigerator. They were packed the night before in two brown paper bags. He
lets his dad carry the lunches. Himself he harnesses to the great leather bag. It hangs down to his heels. He hauls it across the living-room floor, out the door, down the front steps and across the sidewalk to the Clunker. Somehow he manages to sit in the car with the mailbag on his back.

Mr. Zinkoff is determined to make the day live up to his son's expectations. He knows Donald expects to travel a respectable distance to work, so he drives around for fifteen minutes before pulling into the empty parking lot of a dentist three blocks from their home. The street is called Willow.

Donald jumps from the car and starts off. His father grabs him. “Whoa there, Nellie.”

He gives his son instructions. Start with the dentist. One letter to each house. No peeking in the mail slots. Act professional.

“What does ‘act professional' mean?” Donald wants to know.

“It means behave like a grown-up doing a job. That's what you're getting paid for.”

The boy gawks at his father. “I'm getting paid?”

“Sure. End of the day. Five bucks.”

“Five bucks!” Donald tries to leap for joy, but the mailbag holds him down.

“And one more thing,” says his father. “You can't be a real mailman without this.” He reaches into the backseat and pulls out a hat. And not just any hat. His own mail carrier hat. The postal blue, strawlike pith helmet that he wears on hot summer days with his Bermuda shorts uniform.

Donald is popping with pride. He puts on the helmet. Of course, it's too big and comes down to his ears and nose, but he couldn't care less. He adjusts the helmet as best he can and staggers off to the dentist's door, the mailbag thumping against his heels. The helmet wobbles on his head.

He stops, turns. He calls, “And one
more
thing, Dad.”

“What's that?”

“Be friendly. Mailmen are always friendly.”

“That's right. Now get to work.”

The dentist's mailbox is at the edge of the parking lot. Donald swings the bag around so he
can reach inside, grabs a letter and places it in the box. He turns to his father in the car and raises his hands in triumph. “Yes!”

Ninety-nine to go.

He starts off down the block. A few of the houses on Willow are single homes with porches. The rest are brick row houses like his own. Some have mailboxes fixed to a railing. Some have slots in the front doors.

The first house has a slot. Donald slips a letter through. He listens for it to land but he cannot hear it. The slot is eye-high. Quietly, with his finger, he pushes in the swinging brass flap. He takes off his helmet and scrunches his eyeball to the slot and strains to see the letter on the floor. All he can make out is a green carpet. He looks around some more, hoping to spot something interesting, but all he sees is an ordinary living room with furniture and a picture on the wall of four basset hounds playing cards.

“No peeking!”

His father's voice pierces the jungle cat grumble of Clunker Four, prowling slowly along in the
street. Donald lets the brass flapper swing down. He replaces his helmet and goes back to work.

He discovers one thing right away: It is usually more fun to deliver mail to a door slot than to a mailbox. With a mailbox, no one even knows you're delivering. But with a slot, you're dumping the letter smack into the people's house, and sometimes they're right there on the other side of the door and you can hear them.

“Mommy! Mommy! We got mail!” he hears on the other side of one door. He pauses on the front steps to listen.

“There's no mail on Sunday,” comes a mother's cranky reply.

“Yes, there is! There's mail on Sunday! Look!”

Donald walks off smiling. He feels like Santa Claus.

At another house, just as he is about to push a letter through the slot, the door opens. Standing there is a two-year-old wearing nothing but a diaper and a mouth smeared with chocolate.

They stare at each other for a while, then
Donald says, “Mailman,” and holds out the letter.

“Moommsh,” says the two-year-old. Donald can't tell if it's a boy or girl. Whichever, its cheeks are bursting with food. The air is heavy with peanut butter.

“You take it,” says Donald. “Maybe it's a letter for you.”

The two-year-old takes it in chocolaty fingers. Suddenly he or she turns and runs, crying out, “Moommsh! Moommsh!”

Donald pulls the door shut.

Several houses later a kid is sitting on the top step. He looks like he's mad at somebody. The mailbox is bolted to the brick wall under the house numbers. Donald isn't sure what to do. Should he put the letter in the mailbox, or give it to the kid? But what if the kid doesn't live here?

“Do you live here?” says Donald.

The kid gives him a glare but no answer. The Clunker grumbles in the street.

Donald decides the kid probably does live here. He further decides that the professional thing to do will be to put the letter in the mail
box. He is reaching out to do so when the kid snatches the letter from his hand.

The kid looks at the envelope. He makes a face. “This ain't no letter.”

“It's a letter,” says Donald. “I'm delivering the mail. Look. This is my dad's mailbag.”

“This ain't no
letter
,” the kid repeats. His lip curls into a sneer when he says the word “letter.” “This ain't no
stamp
. It's
crayon
. This ain't no ad
dress
. You can't even
read
it.” He rips open the envelope. “And this ain't
writing
. It's
scribbles
.” He rips the letter in half and stuffs it back into the leather bag.

Donald knows he's supposed to deliver the mail despite rain, sleet or snow—but what about mean big kids who tear your letter in pieces?

He turns his eyes to Clunker Four. His father gives him a thumbs-up and points to the next house.

Donald remembers: Be friendly.

He gives the kid his best smile. “Nice to meet you,” he says and moves on.

Behind several doors he hears dogs barking.
Behind another he hears a language he doesn't recognize. He hears bits and pieces of words and people sounds, and, once, a noise that sounds exactly like that of a flying dinosaur he saw in the movies, but of course that couldn't be.

Each time he tries to sneak a peek through a mail slot, his father calls “No peeking!” But he can't help himself.

There is a minute or two during which he has a strange thought. Actually he doesn't really
have
the thought. His mind is trying to catch the thought as a cat tries to catch a shadow. The thought, if he could catch it, would go something like this: Behind the front doors of houses incredible, impossible things are happening, and as soon as you lift the mail flapper they all disappear and all you see is an ordinary living room.

When he comes to the last house in the second block—fifty-six homes so far and one dentist—his father calls out, “Lunchtime!”