Somebody Else's Kids (31 page)

The next evening Claudia had stayed after school to help me clean up a science experiment. We were working together at the sink washing test tubes and glassware.

“Remember that other time we were talking?” she asked. “When you were telling me about sex and stuff?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ve been doing some thinking. Do you have to be in love to like having sex with a guy?”

“I think it helps.”

“I don’t guess I was in love with Randy. Not really, really. I guess. I don’t know. What is love?”

I pushed hair out of my face with a wet hand and looked over. “Boy that’s a hard question, kid. And it has so many answers I’m not sure which one to give you. Or if I even know.”

She shook her head. “It’s funny, sex and love. I don’t understand it. And nobody ever seems to know how to explain it.” She rolled her eyes. “All my mother ever tells me is about angels and cherubs and bells ringing. She makes it sound like going to church.”

I grinned and plunged my hands into the soapy water.

“Tor?”

“Yeah?”

She had walked over to the cupboard to put the things away and paused, leaning on the door. “How old were you when you first had sex with a guy?”

I hesitated, weighing the intimacy of the question. “I was nineteen.”

“Did you like it?”

I nodded.

“Were you in love?”

The question made me smile. Back into my thoughts came memories of a time that seemed almost like another lifetime. My student-protest days. College. The war. It was a long time ago. “Yes, I was in love.”

“How did you meet him? Did you go to school together?”

“Once.” I was still smiling with the sheer innocence of the memory. “I thought he was the greatest guy in the whole world. I was very much in love.”

Claudia’s eyes grew dreamy. She wandered back to me and the sink. “Where is he now?”

“There was a war on then. In Vietnam. He was a helicopter pilot.” I took a breath. “He didn’t come back.”

“Ohh.” And the soft, sad silence that always follows words of a long-ago death, particularly when one is talking with a child. She watched me closely, her eyes filled with a romantic intensity. It made her inordinately pretty.

“What was his name, Torey?”

“Tag. Taggart really, but we called him Tag.”

“Tell me. Tell me what it was like.”

And I did.

We were still leaning against the counter by the sink, the glassware long washed and put away. Still talking. Claudia paused. She placed her hands on her abdomen. “He’s moving. I can feel him move. Here, put your hands here. Feel him?”

I reached down, laying my hand over her smock. Beneath was the slow, fluid motion of the baby.

Claudia was studying my face. “Do you think I’ll ever be like you are?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think I’ll ever be happy?”

I
n the end Birk Jones was called in to settle the matter of Lori’s curriculum. Edna and I could not agree and Dan simply refused to discuss the issue any further. He called Birk and set the meeting for the following Tuesday.

The six days between were a special torture for me. Aside from the sheer mechanics of avoiding Edna, and even Dan, my waking hours were filled with soul searching.

The matter had grown so complex. The greatest issue on my mind was my own perception of the problem. Was I being hopelessly idealistic? The line between tilting at windmills and standing up for one’s ethical beliefs was so fine. At the same time I dreaded the descent into cynicism so many of my colleagues termed simply professionalism.

I was growing tired too. This made the urge to give up or give in much stronger than it had been. I kept thinking of such things as having Lori transferred. Maybe some other teacher at some other school could teach her the things Edna and I had failed to. When I thought about it, I knew it was untrue but I was becoming too tired to care.

The meanest thought to go through my head during those days was whether or not Lori was worth this. I was not proud of having such thoughts but they were not unusual. Some days I would sit in class and watch her. She remained her crazy, lovable self throughout the six-day period, chattering to me and the other kids about all the small details only Lori seemed to know. I would catch myself wondering if she would mind how all this came out, if it would matter to her one way or the other. The corollary of that question, of course, was did she matter that much to me? After all, she was just one kid, one of so many I had worked with over the years. I had lost a lot of them in that time. Would one more matter? No one would blame me. After all, officially, she wasn’t even my kid.

I hated myself for thinking those thoughts. I hated knowing I even had them. But they were there and the only way I could dispel them was to envision the future. Not Lori’s future, because regardless of how things came out, I could not see into that. Rather, I would envision my own. And I did not want to be the person I saw there.

So the six days passed.

My evenings were my own. Joe had been gone for a month now. I had finally packed his things and sent them to him. I put a new lock on the door. To me it seemed ironic that he, too, had left me over this one small girl. How I wished I had scales to weigh the problem, to see if the price I was paying was too high. But lacking them, I went about my life the best I could. I joined the YWCA and started swimming a mile a night. Billie lured me into taking a cake-decorating class. A local priest helped me refurbish my Latin and I began to read the original text of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
Rex Brittanicum
. Yet busy as I was, there was still too much time to think.

The meeting was scheduled for 1:30 on Tuesday afternoon. One of the office aides came down to take over my class while I was gone. We met in Dan’s office, the four of us. It was, as Birk liked to say, a “family gathering.” By his tone I could tell he planned to settle the entire issue right then and there.

The meeting was quiet. Birk questioned each of us. Edna first. What was her side of it? Where were she and I not in agreement? What in her opinion were Lori’s major problems? How had she treated them? What objections did she have to my approach?

I watched Edna as she talked. She spoke quietly and I wondered where the slavering idiot I had perceived her to be had gone. I noticed instead the deep lines around her eyes and across her forehead. What had put them there? What had her life been like? She looked like somebody’s grandmother, big, bosomy, gray haired. She talked like somebody’s grandmother, too, using all the little expressions that intimated a survivor of the Depression and the War to End All Wars. Like my grandma used. Beneath my anger at her I was only unhappy. We would never know one another for the people we were.

Birk then turned to me and asked me all the same questions he had asked Edna. He sat slouched down in an office chair, his sports coat pushed up in back to touch his hair. One hand braced his head at the temple. An unlit pipe dangled from his lips.

Then he moved to Dan. How had Dan managed thus far? How was policy in these cases normally handled? How could it all be interpreted in regard to the mainstreaming law? Who was in charge of what?

At last he asked for Lori’s file. Dan handed it to him and then minutes passed as Birk read it carefully, piece by piece. Dead silence. Edna shifted position and I could hear the soft shirk of sweaty skin being pulled up from the plastic seat of the chair. Dan checked his watch and made a comment about recess. I stared out the window and did not think.

With a snap Birk shut the file. He looked around to each of us in turn. When he came to me, he made a little click with his tongue. “Can you and I have a moment alone?”

Terror!
Oh Jesus!

Dan and Edna rose in unison to leave us. Desperately I did not want them to go. My heart was beating in my ears. Click. The door shut. There we were, Birk and I.

He smiled at me. A disarming, paternal smile. “So what’s this all about?” Still the smile.

My hands came up in a gesture of bewilderment. “It’s just like we said, Birk. That’s all.”

“But why did it come to this? To me? How come you and Edna couldn’t get it settled between you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Dan gives me the impression that you really don’t want it settled.”

“Me? I want it settled.” A pause. I was unnerved. My composure was wavering. If he was going to read me the riot act, at least he could be mercifully quick.

“Then what’s the problem?”

All the fight drained right out of me and it was all I could do just to keep from tears. “I can’t do it.”

“Can’t do what?”

“
This!
” I brought my hands up in a wide gesture.

Birk nodded and I had to put a hand up to my forehead and pinch the bridge of my nose to keep from crying. Beyond I could hear him tapping his pipe on the edge of Dan’s desk.

“So,” he said. “What do you want to do?”

“I want Lori, that’s all. I want to keep her in a modified curriculum. I want to keep trying.” When he did not answer after I spoke, I felt pressed to fill the vacancy. “Birk, we’re killing this kid – as surely as if we put her on a rack. And you all are asking me to be the executioner. I can’t do it. At this point in the game, I’m too tired to care about anything else, but I won’t kill this kid. Nothing’s that important to me.”

“Mmmmmm.” Tap, tap, tap with the pipe.

Taking my hand down, I sat up straighter. “Just give me a little time, Birk. You know me. I’m not out jumping on some bandwagon. This isn’t some gimmick or some experiment. I
do
want her in the regular classroom. I do want to teach her to read. Just not right this moment. Maybe later. Maybe next month. Or next fall. Just not now. She can’t do it and I can’t make her.”

No answer from Birk. His attention was on the pipe. Thoughtfully he extracted tobacco, tamper and matches from inside his suit coat. His lack of response frightened me.

“Please?” I asked.

“Tell me something. As one professional to another, what do you think this girl’s chances are of ever learning to read?”

I tensed. Trick question?

Birk looked at me over the bowl of his pipe.

“Not too good, I think,” I replied.

“No, I don’t think they’re good either. Not with this kind of injury. Not without some sign by now that she’s maturing out of it.” Birk was still watching me. He sucked in on his pipe and tried to light it. “So what’s all this fuss about? What you’re doing with her seems reasonable to me.”

I stared at him in disbelief.

Another smile and Birk wrinkled his nose like a rabbit.

Relief washed over me with such suddenness that the tears really did come to my eyes. I leaned forward weakly. These last six days had been too hard to end so anticlimactically.

“You don’t have much confidence in the system, do you?” he asked.

“No, I don’t.”

A congenial shake of his head. “You think you’re the only person in the business who cares? There’s plenty of us out here. If you know where to look. What you need, Torey, is a little faith.”

“I use it all up on my kids.”

“I know you do.”

I needed a few moments to put myself back together. I thanked him and apologized for having been the source of so much trouble. I had not meant to be, that was the truth! Birk kept working his pipe, trying to get it lit. The room was filled with his inhaling.

“Listen to me now,” he said, pausing from the pipe. “What went on here was just between you and me. I’ll explain it all to Edna. You don’t stir up muddy waters. Just go back and do your job.”

I nodded. “What about Dan?”

Birk leveled most of his attention back at the pipe. “If we were making flashlights or automobiles or garbage disposals here, I’d be mighty upset with you for all the trouble you’ve caused Dan and me, for pushing us out on a limb and then trying to saw it off on us. But the way I see it, we’re working with human beings. And once in a while things just have to bend.”

The kids were at work when I came back into the classroom. Claudia was reading. Tomaso labored over math problems at the table. Boo and Lori were on the floor near the animal cages. Lori had a huge sheet of blank newsprint in front of her and she and Boo were drawing on it, only Boo was more absorbed in coloring the fingers of one hand rather than the paper.

I came over to them. Taking a pillow from the reading corner, I propped it against Benny’s driftwood and lay back.

“You want to help us?” Lori asked.

“What are you doing?”

“Me and Boo, we’re drawing ourselves a flower garden, aren’t we. Boo?” She held up a handful of felt-tipped markers. “Here. You can help us if you want to.”

“I think I’ll just watch, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay.” Lori again bent over the newsprint. Boo grabbed a red marker and started scribbling in his corner of the paper. Lori paused momentarily to watch him.

Sun streamed down through the window and illuminated hundreds of dancing dust motes. As I was watching Boo and Lori work, I thought of the blue bird picture she had made for me back in January. Even now it made me smile.