Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (248 page)

First published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, February 1953

Lots of children
have imaginary playmates. You probably had one yourself if you were an only child or a lonesome one. Or if you didn’t, you’ve listened to stories about children who cried because Daddy shut the door on Jocko’s tail or Mommie stepped right in the middle of Mr. Gepp while he was napping on the kitchen floor. Well, being a first-grade teacher, I meet some of these playmates occasionally, though they stay home more often than not. After all, when you start to school, you aren’t alone or lonesome any more. I’ve seldom known such a playmate to persist at school for more than a week or so. And yet—there was Loo Ree.

Of course I didn’t see Loo Ree. I didn’t even know Loo Ree was there when Marsha came to register the Saturday before school began. Marsha and her mother sat down across the cafeteria table from me as I reached for the registration material stacked in front of me in anticipation of the morning rush.

I said, “Good morning,” to the nervous parent and smiled at the wide-eyed eager little girl who sat a seat removed from her mother.

“Wouldn’t you like to move over closer?” I asked.

“No, thank you.” Marsha sighed a sigh of resigned patience. “Loo Ree doesn’t like to be crowded.”

“Marsha!” Her mother shook a warning head.

“Oh?” I said inanely, trying to read mother’s eyebrows and Marsha’s eyes and the birth certificate in front of me all at the same time. “Well! So Marsha’s six already. That’s nice. We like them that old. They usually do better.”

As casual as that was the advent of Loo Ree to my classroom. But it didn’t stay casual for long. In fact, the second day, as the children lined up to come in at noon, I heard the spat of an open-handed blow and a heart-broken five-and-a-half-year-old wail.

“What’s the matter, Stacy? What happened?” I knelt beside the pigtailed, blue-ginghamed little girl who was announcing to high heaven her great grief.

“She hit mel” An indignant tear-wet finger was jabbed at Marsha.

“Why, Marsha!” I applied Kleenex vigorously to Stacy’s eyes and nose. “We don’t hit each other. What’s wrong?”

“She crowded in where Loo Ree was supposed to be.”

“Loo Ree?” I searched the faces around me. After all, I had thirty-four faces to connect with thirty-four names, among which were Bob, Bobby, Bobette, Karen, Carol, Carolyn, and Carl.

“Yes.” Marsha’s arm curved out in a protective gesture to the empty air beside her. “Loo Ree’s supposed to be by me.”

“Even so, Marsha, you shouldn’t have hit Stacy. In the first place, she’s smaller than you and then hitting is no way to settle anything. Stacy didn’t know Loo Ree was there, did you, Stacy?”

“No.” Stacy edged away from Marsha warily.

“Did Loo Ree tell you to hit Stacy?” I asked, because it was so very real to Marsha.

Marsha shook her head and looked at her bent arm questioningly. Then shamed color swept up her face. “No, ma’am, and Loo Ree says I wasn’t nice. I’m supposed to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Stacy.”

“Well, that’s the way polite children talk. Now, where’s our straight lines so we can come in?”

As the boy line and the girl line clattered past me into the room, I heard Bob, skidding in his new shoes, mutter to Bobby, barefooted and ragged, “I don’t see no Loo Ree. Do you?”

“School’s funny,” reminded Bobby.

“Oh,” said Bob.

* * * *

In the weeks that followed, Loo Ree did not fade out as other imaginary playmates have done in the past. Rather, Loo Ree became quite a fixture in our room. Bob was taught, the hard way, to respect Marsha’s good right fist and Loo Ree’s existence when Marsha bloodied his nose all down the front of his Hopalong Cassidy shirt for saying
Loo Ree was a lie. And poor little Bobby—he of the rusty, bare feet, the perpetually runny nose, the pinched blue look of chronic hunger and neglect—he sat all one morning staring at the chair where Marsha said Loo Ree was sitting. I saw the sunrise in his face when he suddenly leaned over and smoothed one grimy hand apparently down Loo Ree’s hair and smiled shyly.

“Loo Ree,” he stated to the room and, for an astonishing minute, looked fed and cared-for and loved.

The children learned—by, I fear, punching, poking and many heated words from Marsha—not to sit down on Loo Ree in the chair by the corner table where crayons and paper were kept. They learned so well that once, when a visiting mother lowered her not inconsiderable bulk into the chair, the concerted horrified gasp from the room turned to relieved smiles only when Marsha finally nodded. Loo Ree had slipped out from under in time. So the children slowly accepted Loo Ree and out on the playground, they solemnly turned the jumping rope, chanting the
jumping rhyme for Loo Ree and Loo Ree never missed.

Loo Ree was as real and immediate to them as Santa Claus or Roy Rogers and far less exotic than Batman or Tarzan. One Monday morning when the week’s paper monitors were being appointed, the children even insisted that it was Loo Ree’s turn to be monitor of row five. There were the makings of a small riot until Marsha stood up and said bluntly, “Loo Ree isn’t any monitor. Loo Ree is—is something special.” And that settled that.

It was toward the end of the first six weeks of school that Marsha came up to my desk, her left hand trailing behind her, leading Loo Ree. She leaned on the corner of my desk.

“Loo Ree wants to know when we’re going to start reading,” she said.

“Well, Loo Ree should know that we have been doing a lot of reading already. But if she means when will we start in our books, tell her that as soon as your group learns the word cards, we’ll get our little red books.”

Marsha looked disturbed. “But, Teacher, I don’t have to tell Loo Ree. You already did.”

“I’m sorry, Marsha. Remember, I can’t see Loo Ree. Is Loo Ree a boy or a girl?”

Marsha inspected the air at her left thoughtfully.

“Loo Ree’s got long, gold hair. Well, not exactly hair. But it’s real gold like Mommie’s ring. Loo Ree’s got a long dress. Well, not exactly a dress—” Marsha stopped, baffled. “Loo Ree, which are you?” Her eyes focused about a foot away. Then she wrinkled her forehead. “Loo Ree says she isn’t either one, but we can say she’s a girl because she stays mostly with me.”

“Good,” I
said, my head whirling in perfect figures of eight. “Well, then, as soon as we know our words, we’ll get our books. Now you go back to your seat and draw me a picture of Loo Ree so I’ll know what she looks like.”

I forgot about the picture until just before lunch. Marsha came up with a piece of manila paper.

“Teacher, I couldn’t do it very good because Loo Ree doesn’t look the same all the time.”

I looked at her picture. There were wavering lines of yellow and orange and round little circles of blue, vaguely face-like in arrangement. “I suppose it would be hard,” I said. “What’s that other one?”

“Loo Ree drew it with her finger. She says you’ll have to look fast because your eyes will make it go away.” She gave the paper to me and went to her seat.

I glanced down, expecting some more of Marsha’s unformed figures, but instead, my eyes dazzled and contracted before a blinding flare of brightness. I blinked and caught the after-brightness behind my eyelids. All I had distinguished was a half-halo of brilliance and a feeling of—well, I almost said “awe.” I looked at the paper again and there was nothing on it. I rubbed my hand across it and felt a fading warmth against my palm.

* * * *

It was the next day, after the dismissal bell had rung and the thirty-four restless occupants of my room exploded out the door and into the buses, that the next chapter of Loo Ree began.

I was trying to straighten our my front desk drawer into which I dump or cram anything and everything all day long, when I heard, “I want to learn to read.”

“Why of course you do,” I said automatically, not looking up. “It’s fun and that’s why we come to school. But you scoot now or the bus will go off without you.”

“I want to learn to read
now.”

I
sorted out six thumb tacks, a hair ribbon, a piece of bubble gum and three marbles before I looked up.

“It takes time—”

I stopped. No one was in the room. Nothing was there except the late sun slanting across the desks and showing up the usual crushed Crayolas on the floor around Bob’s desk. I rubbed one grimy hand across my forehead. Now wait a minute. I know I’ve been teaching for a quite a spell, but heavens to Hannah, not that long. Hearing voices is just about the last stop before the genteel vine-covered barred window. I took a deep breath and bent to my task again.

“Teacher, I must learn to read.”

My hands froze on the tangled mass of yo-yo strings and Red Cross buttons. The voice was unmistakable. If this was hallucination, then I’d gone too far to come back. I was afraid to raise my eyes. I spoke past my choked throat

“Who are you?”

There was a soft, musical laugh. “I drew my picture for you. I’m Loo Ree.”

“Loo Ree?” My palsied fingers plucked at the matted strings. “Then if I look, I can’t see you?”

“No, probably not. Your eyes are limited, you know.” The voice had nothing childish about it, but it sounded very young—and very wise.

“Can Marsha see you?” Nothing like satisfying my curiosity, now that some of the shock was wearing off.

“Not really. She senses me and has made an image to satisfy her, but as she told you, I seem to change all the time. Her concept of me changes.”

“Why?” A thousand questions piled up behind my tongue, but part of my mind was still shrieking, hallucination! hallucination! Finally I managed, “Why are you here?”

“I must go to school and learn to read and I can’t take the time to pace myself to Marsha’s speed. Could you help me?”

“Why yes, I suppose so,” I replied absently, as I tried to decide if the voice was like the taste of sweet music or the sound of apple blossoms. “But you know the language— your vocabulary is so—”

“I can get all the oral coaching I need, without help,” said Loo Ree. “But I must attend school and learn from this level because it is very necessary that I know not only the words, but that I also get the”—she paused—“the human concept and background that goes with them.”

“But why do you have to learn to read? Why come to me? After all, to teach someone—or something—I can’t see! Who are you?”

Loo Ree’s voice was infinitely patient. “It doesn’t matter who I am and it isn’t just the mechanics of reading I need. But it is important to you and to your world that I learn what I must as soon as possible. It’s not only important, it’s vital.”

I quivered under the urgency of her voice, the voice that I seemed to feel more than actually hear. I pressed my hands down hard on the edge of my desk, then I picked up the sight-word cards for the first pre-primer.

“Okay. Let’s go over these words first.”

* * * *

So it was that my principal, little dried-up Mr. Grively, brisk, efficient and utterly at sea when it came to the primary age levels, bounced into my room and found me briskly flashing word cards and giving phonetic cues to a reading circle of empty first grade chairs. For a moment he seemed to visualize the vine-covered bars too, then he smiled into my embarrassed confusion.

“Preparing your lessons for tomorrow, I see!” He beamed. “How I wish all of my teachers were as conscientious!” And he bounced out again.

Loo Ree and I laughed together before we went back to our words,
come oh, Mother
—

Whatever Loo Ree was—it wasn’t stupid. Before I went home at four thirty, she had mastered the words for the three pre-primers and I left her vocalizing in the shadowy class room, the pages of the open little blue book, third of the series, fluttering to

Mother said, “Come, come.

Come and help me work,”

In the weeks that followed Loo Ree finished, either by herself or to me, every reader and supplementary reader in my book closet Then she went on up through the grades, absorbing like a blotter, everything in all the available books. She reported to me each afternoon and I worked up quite a reputation among my fellow workers for staying at school after I was free to go home. They couldn’t decide whether I was overconscientious, incompetent or crazy. In fact, I began to wonder, myself.

It was several weeks later that I suddenly noticed that all was not well with Marsha. I was conducting the last vocabulary review for Group I before giving them their new books when it dawned on me that Marsha wasn’t in Group I any more. I ran my ringer down my reading group schedule and there was Marsha—in Group VI I counted rapidly backwards through the past days and realized with a shamed sinking feeling that Marsha hadn’t progressed an inch beyond where she was when I first talked with Loo Ree. And I hadn’t even noticed! That was the shameful part. So after Group I returned to their seats, clutching joyfully their new blue books, I sat and looked at Marsha. She was looking across the aisle at Stacy’s new book, her face so forlorn that I could have cried.