One Child (19 page)

"I do be sorry for what I done. Let me go. You can trust me. Please?" Her voice was very small. "Gimme a chance. I'll show you how good I can be. Please? I wanna go."

I looked down at her. My own feelings were returning and I was beginning to think all that violent behavior was a con because she had stopped it so fast. That renewed some of my anger. "I don't think so, Sheila. Maybe next time."

She began screaming again, covering her face with her hands but remaining on the floor. She looked like a rag doll in the contorted position she lay in. I turned and walked away to work with the other children.

All morning she lay in a lump on the floor. She screamed for a while longer and then fell into silence, not moving, not looking up from her huddle. At first I was tempted to move her to the quiet corner, but I changed my mind. I was feeling defeated; I did not want to tangle with her.

By lunch my spirits had flagged completely. I was beginning to realize that I had been angry with her for exposing what I perceived as a teaching deficit in myself. I was mad because I was not able to leave her successfully. I was angry because she had done to me what I had watched her do to so many others. Somehow, I had honestly believed she would never take revenge against me. She had not until then and I had enough of an inflated ego to believe she never would. Now that I had been put on an equal footing with everyone else, my feelings had been hurt. With great embarrassment, I realized I had done back to her the same thing by taking away the field trip. She had hurt me and I had wanted to show her that she'd be sorry. I had chosen the one thing within my power that I knew would hurt her back.

Realizing this made me feel worse than ever. What a crass, egotistical boor. I hated myself, hated the world. Feeling absolutely bleak, I could not decide how to recover the situation.

Over our sandwiches at lunch, I unloaded my guilt on Anton. "Boy, I blew it this time," I mumbled into my peanut butter. Why had I ever become a teacher if I had such lousy control over my own feelings? Anton tried to reassure me. She had behaved very badly, he reminded me. She deserved to know that it was unacceptable.

But I felt like a zero. The poor kid. Here this day should have been a happy reunion for everyone. And I came back a shrew. What she had done was not so unpredictable. The kid was upset and was showing it the best way she knew how. Hell, that was why she was in this room to begin with. But what about me? Was that my reason for being there too? This day should have been a joyous affirmation that she could trust me; I returned like I had promised. Instead I yelled at her. And I took away a privilege she didn't even know was in jeopardy. God, how had I ever gotten into teaching?

I spent the entire lunch hour feeling like a monster and not knowing how to fix things. Even if I apologized, I could not undo becoming so mad at her in the morning. I choked unhappily through the last of my sandwich. She had been right. She had never said I could trust her.

Back in the classroom, I sat down next to her. The other kids were getting ready to go and parents milled around. Sheila sat alone over in the corner.

"Honey, I have to talk to you. I did something wrong this morning. I got mad at you when I was really mad at myself. I told you that you couldn't go on the field trip, but I've changed my mind. You can go. I'm sorry I was angry with you."

Without responding, without even looking at me, Sheila rose and got her coat.

After school, when the other children had gone home, the strained silence between us lingered. I had tried to break it all afternoon, outdoing myself to be funny and make everyone laugh. But Sheila remained apart, holding on to Whitney's hand. I gave up. As in all things, the best healer, I decided, would be time. I was recovering, knowing that I had acted inappropriately, but also knowing, as Anton had pointed out, that I was human.

I took the papers from the basket and sat down to grade them. I had offered to read but Sheila declined and busied herself playing cars on the floor across the room. The first hour passed and Sheila got up to stand by the window and watch the shadows lengthen across the snow. When next I looked up, she was still by the window but she was watching me.

"How come you come back?" she asked softly.

"I just went away to give a speech. I never intended to stay away. This is my job here with you kids."

"But how come you come back?"

"Because I said I would. I like it here."

Slowly she approached the table where I was sitting. The hurt was clear in her eyes now.

"You really didn't think I was coming back, did you?"

She shook her head.

Across a tremendous gulf of silence we looked at each other. I could hear the clock jumping the minutes. Onions, the rabbit, rustled in his cage. I was looking at her eyes, wide and fluid and the color of the water where I used to go diving off the coast. I wondered what she was thinking. And I realized sadly, that we never do understand what it is like to be someone else. Nor do we ever seem to be quite able to accept that truth, feeling glibly omniscient despite the limitations of flesh and bone. Especially with children. But we really never know.

She stood twisting an overall strap. "Would you read that book again?"

"Which book is that?"

"The one about the little boy who tamed the fox."

I smiled. "Yeah, I'll read it."

CHAPTER 13.

MARCH CAME IN BREEZY AND WARM, A welcome relief for the winter-weary North. The snow finally melted, and cool, brown mud rose through the grass from all the water. We were all anxious for spring that year. It had been a hard winter with more snow and cold than we usually received.

March was also peaceful as far as school went; as peaceful as one got in a class like mine. There were no vacations, no disruptions to cause friction, no unexpected changes. The migrant population was coming up from the South, the camp swelling to meet their influx. Teachers in the lounge groused because migrant kids were finding their way into their classes, but I had nothing to worry about in that way. The return of the workers, however, had a strange sad-sweet effect on Anton. When the first few trucks filled with migrants began arriving, Anton did not mention it but he became quieter and more distracted. I finally asked him about it. I was wondering if he were nostalgic for that less encumbered life-style.

He had smiled when I asked. Smiled and looked at me in the compassionate way one does when an issue is completely beyond the other's comprehension. Then he drew up one of the tiny chairs and dropped his huge frame in it. No, he explained to me, he did not miss the migrant lifestyle. There was nothing about living that way for a man to miss. He smiled again, more to himself than to me. What was affecting him, he said, was realizing how much he had changed since the trucks had rumbled out in the autumn. How different from them he had become. How he had never noticed the changing until now. Like Rip van Winkle must have felt upon awaking, he said, then gave a laugh of disbelief. He hadn't even known who Rip van Winkle was last year and now had more in common with Rip than with his own people.

I watched him as he talked. I studied the dark Latin features, the angular bones, the physical stigmata of a hard life too early. We both had changed, in ways I could not quite give words to, but which were no less immense for lack of expression. I was awed that we could have such vast effect on each other's lives and for the most part never realize it, certainly not while it was happening. For several minutes we sat looking at one another, openly, admiringly, the taboo on staring temporarily suspended. So many differences: our backgrounds, our sex, our education, so much. Yet somehow, in some way, we had managed to touch each other. That flicker of understanding silenced the two of us as we sat at the table. There was no need for words.

Like the daffodils, Sheila bloomed in spite of the harsh winter. Each day she was back showing more and more improvement. Within the limits of her situation she was now always quite clean. She would come bounding in each morning, wash her face and brush her teeth. She paid close attention to how she looked, inspecting her image carefully in the mirror. We experimented with new hairstyles. After school some days we played beauty shop. I let her work with my long hair and in turn I was allowed to play with hers, devising new ways to braid, or style it. She had become a truly handsome child, evoking comment from the other teachers.

Sarah and Sheila had become fast friends and I caught them sending notes during class occasionally. Sheila had gone home with Sarah to play on several occasions after school before her bus came. And Sheila and Guillermo played together at the migrant camp. Tyler was a bit too much of a prissy for Sheila's taste, and she would rebuff Tyler's motherly attentions. I was pleased to see that she generally attracted the favor of the children in the class.

Academically Sheila sailed. She willingly did almost anything I gave her to do. A paper was occasionally destroyed, but only very occasionally. If it happened twice a week, that was the exception. Even at that she had learned to come up and ask for another one. I had her working on third grade reading material and fourth grade math. Both were considerably below her ability level, but because of her deprived background and her fear of failure, I felt it was better to keep her in work which could cement her knowledge and confidence more solidly.

She was still overly sensitive about correction, going off into great sulks or heartrending sighs if she made a mistake. Some days seemed worse than others in that respect and she would spend the whole day with her head buried in her arms in dismal despair over missing one math problem. But as a rule there were not many disasters. With a bit of extra cuddling and reassurance she would usually try again.

Oddly enough in my mind, our falling out over my two days' absence did not appear to have adverse effects on Sheila's emotional stability. For a few days after my return she resorted to hanging on to me again, but soon after, abandoned that behavior. Never again did she do it. We talked a lot about that incident. She seemed to need to rehash the event over and over and over. I had left her. I had come back. She had gotten angry and destructive. I had gotten angry and lost my temper. I had told her I was wrong and I was sorry. Each little piece of the drama she wanted to discuss again and again, telling me how she'd felt, what had made her throw up that day, how she'd been scared. The saga was repeated over and over and over until I thought I would never hear the end of it. It held some secret significance that I did not fully understand and the ritualistic retelling seemed to reassure her. Certainly the fact that I had come back was important, but that was not the only facet she dwelled upon. That we had been angry with each other and weathered that appeared equally significant in her mind. Perhaps she felt assured to have seen me at my worst. She could trust me now, knowing what I was like even when I was upset with her. Whatever it was, she was learning to solve her problems verbally. No longer did she need physical contact; words were enough.

Oddly, the destructiveness all but disappeared after the event of my absence and return. When she became angry, which she still did with great regularity, she did not fly into a rage, throwing things to the floor and rampaging about. Revenge was becoming less important. When I thought about it, I wished I could have fully understood the importance of that incident because in many ways it greatly altered Sheila's behavior. But the full picture always remained a mystery. Sheila still had a lot of problems, but they were becoming more readily solved and much more manageable.

One of the things which still puzzled me was her language. Visiting her father had substantiated that her peculiar speech patterns with the lack of past tense and overuse of "be" did not come from home. As bright as she was, I could not fathom why she persisted in speaking so oddly, although as time passed she did appear to be using more normal speech. During March I decided to finally ask her about it, pointing out that some words were said differently if you were talking about something that happened yesterday. She was surprisingly antagonistic toward my comments, saying that I understood her, didn't I? When I said yes, I did, she asked me what did it matter how she talked if I understood her? That took me off-guard because it made me feel that the behavior was more premeditated than I had previously thought.

No one had any suggestions on the matter. All the speech experts to whom I sent tapes answered saying it was a dialect and often asking if she were black. When I replied that no, she wasn't, and no, it wasn't a family dialect, they had no other ideas. One night Chad and I were discussing it and he suggested that perhaps by not using the past tense, she was trying to keep everything anchored in the present where she could keep better control of things. The more I pondered that, the more possible it seemed. In the end, I concluded it was a psychologically based problem and let it go at that. We did understand what she was saying and perhaps someday she would feel comfortable enough to want
 
to
 
change.
  
Right
 
now, though, she did not.