It wasn’t true that she hated children. At least, a few she liked okay. It was just that she didn’t like
all
children, as if they were uniform members of some microphylum or something.
But she put on a breezy tone when she told Mrs. Chauncey, “Back in a jiff!”
Mrs. Chauncey just smiled at her (unsuspectingly? pityingly?) and turned a page of her newspaper.
Mrs. Darling’s office was next to Room 2, where the children were so little that they slept on floor pads instead of cots because they might roll off. Their room was dimmed, she could see through the single pane of glass in the door, and an intense, purposeful hush seemed to emanate from it.
The glass in Mrs. Darling’s door revealed Mrs. Darling at her desk, talking on the telephone while she leafed through a sheaf of papers. She said a quick good-bye and hung up, though, as soon as Kate knocked. “Come in,” she called.
Kate walked in and dropped onto the straight-backed chair facing the desk.
“We’ve finally got an estimate for replacing that stained carpeting,” Mrs. Darling told her.
“Huh,” Kate said.
“The question, though, is
why
is it stained? Clearly there’s some sort of leak, and till we figure it out there’s no sense laying new carpet.”
Kate had nothing to say to this, so she said nothing.
“Well,” Mrs. Darling said. “But enough about that.”
She aligned her papers efficiently and placed them in a folder. Then she reached for another folder. (Kate’s folder? Did Kate have a folder? What on earth would be inside it?) She opened it and studied the top sheet of paper for a moment, and then she peered across at Kate over the rims of her glasses. “So,” she said. “Kate. I’m wondering. How, exactly, would you assess your performance here?”
“My what?”
“Your performance at the Little People’s School. Your teaching abilities.”
“Oh,” Kate said. “
I
don’t know.”
She was hoping this would qualify as an answer, but when Mrs. Darling went on gazing at her expectantly, she added, “I mean, I’m not really a teacher. I’m an assistant.”
“Yes?”
“I just assist.”
Mrs. Darling continued to gaze at her.
“But I guess I do okay at it,” Kate said finally.
“Yes,” Mrs. Darling said, “you do, for the most part.”
Kate tried not to look surprised.
“I would say, in fact, that the children seem quite taken with you,” Mrs. Darling said.
The words “for some mysterious reason” hung silently in the room.
“Unfortunately, I don’t believe their parents feel the same way.”
“Oh,” Kate said.
“This issue has come up before, Kate. Do you remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“You and I have had some discussions about it. Some very
serious
discussions.”
“Right.”
“Just now it’s Mr. Crosby. Jameesha’s father.”
“What about him?” Kate asked.
“He spoke to you on Thursday, he says.” Mrs. Darling picked up the top sheet of paper and readjusted her glasses to consult it. “Thursday morning, when he brought Jameesha in to school. He told you he wanted to talk to you about Jameesha’s thumb sucking.”
“Finger sucking,” Kate corrected her. Jameesha had a habit of sucking her two middle fingers, with her pinkie and her index finger sticking up on either side like the sign language for “I love you.” Kate had seen that a few times before. Benny Mayo, last year, used to do that.
“Finger sucking; all right. He asked you to stop her whenever you caught her at it.”
“I remember.”
“And do you remember what you answered?”
“I said he shouldn’t worry about it.”
“Is that all?”
“I said she was bound to stop on her own, by and by.”
“You said…” And here Mrs. Darling read aloud from the sheet of paper. “You said, ‘Chances are she’ll stop soon enough, once her fingers grow so long that she pokes both her eyes out.’ ”
Kate laughed. She hadn’t realized she’d been so witty.
Mrs. Darling said, “How do you suppose that made Mr. Crosby feel?”
“How would
I
know how it made him feel?”
“Well, you might venture a guess,” Mrs. Darling said. “But I’ll just go ahead and tell you, why don’t I. It made him feel that you were being…” She read aloud again. “ ‘…flippant and disrespectful.’ ”
“Oh.”
Mrs. Darling set the sheet of paper down. “Someday,” she told Kate, “I can imagine your becoming a full-fledged teacher.”
“You can?”
Kate had never noticed that this place had an actual career path. Certainly there had been no evidence of it to date.
“I can see you in charge of a classroom, once you mature,” Mrs. Darling said. “But when I say ‘mature,’ Kate, I don’t mean just getting older.”
“Oh. No.”
“I mean that you would need to develop some social skills. Some tact, some restraint, some diplomacy.”
“Okay.”
“Do you even understand what I’m talking about?”
“Tact. Restraint. Diplomacy.”
Mrs. Darling studied her a moment. “Because otherwise,” she said, “I can’t quite picture your continuing in our little community, Kate. I’d
like
to picture it. I’d like to keep you on for the sake of your dear aunt, but you are walking on very thin ice here; I want you to know that.”
“Got it,” Kate said.
Mrs. Darling didn’t seem reassured, but after a pause she said, “Very well, Kate. Leave the door open when you go, please.”
“Sure thing, Mrs. D.,” Kate told her.
“I think I’ve
been put on probation,” she told the Threes’ assistant. They were standing out on the playground together, supervising the seesaws so that no one got killed.
Natalie said, “Weren’t you already on probation?”
“Oh,” Kate said. “Maybe you’re right.”
“What’d you do this time?”
“I insulted a parent.”
Natalie grimaced. They all felt the same way about parents.
“It was this nutso control-freak dad,” Kate said, “who keeps trying to turn his kid into Little Miss Perfect.”
But just then Adam Barnes arrived with a couple of his Twos, and she dropped the subject. (She always tried to look like a nicer person than she really was when Adam was around.) “What’s up?” he asked them, and Natalie said, “Oh, not a whole lot,” while Kate just grinned at him foolishly and jammed her hands in her jeans pockets.
“Gregory here was hoping to go on a seesaw,” Adam said. “I told him maybe one of the big guys would let him take a turn.”
“Of course!” Natalie said. “Donny,” she called, “could you give Gregory a little turn on the seesaw?”
She wouldn’t do that for anyone but Adam. The children were supposed to be learning to wait—even the two-year-olds. Kate sent her a narrow-eyed stare, and Donny said, “But I just now got on!”
“Oh, then,” Adam broke in immediately. “That wouldn’t be fair, then. You don’t want to be unfair to Donny, do you, Gregory?”
Gregory seemed to feel that he
did
want to be unfair. His eyes filled with tears and his chin started wobbling.
“Or, I know what!” Natalie said, in a super-enthusiastic tone. “Gregory, you can ride
with
Donny! Donny can be a big boy and share his ride with you!”
Kate felt like upchucking. She nearly went so far as to pantomime sticking a finger down her throat, but she stopped herself. Luckily, Adam wasn’t looking in her direction. He was lifting Gregory onto the seesaw in front of Donny, who at least was tolerating the arrangement, and then he walked over to set a hand behind Jason at the other end to add some weight.
Adam was the school’s only male assistant, a lanky, kind-faced young English-major type with a tangle of dark hair and a curly beard. Mrs. Darling seemed to feel she’d been exceptionally daring to have hired him, although most of the other preschools had several men on their staffs by that time. She had first assigned him to the Fives, known also as the Pre-Ks because the children there, mostly boys, were old enough for kindergarten but were thought to need a further year of socialization. A man would provide discipline and structure, Mrs. D. felt. However, Adam had turned out to be such a mild man, so gentle and solicitous, that halfway through his first year he and Georgina had been switched. Now he happily tended two-year-olds, wiping noses and soothing random cases of homesickness, and before Quiet Rest Time every day his mumbly, slightly furry voice could be heard singing lullabies above the soporific strumming of his guitar. Unlike most men, he stood noticeably taller than Kate, and yet somehow in his presence she always felt too big and too gangling. She longed all at once to be softer, daintier, more ladylike, and she was embarrassed by her own gracelessness.
She wished she had had a mother. Well, she
had
had a mother, but she wished she’d had one who had taught her how to get along in the world better.
“I saw you walk past during Quiet Rest Time,” Adam called to her as he worked the seesaw. “Were you in trouble with Mrs. Darling?”
“No…” she said. “
You
know. We were just discussing a child I was concerned about.”
Natalie made a snorting noise. Kate glared at her, and Natalie put on an exaggerated “Oh-excuse-
me
” expression. So transparent, Natalie was. Everybody knew she had a huge crush on Adam.
Last week, it was all over the school that Adam had given Sophia Watson one of his handmade dream catchers. “Oho!” everyone said. But Kate thought he might just have done that because Sophia was his co-assistant in Room 2.
Tact, restraint, diplomacy.
What was the difference between tact and diplomacy? Maybe “tact” referred to saying things politely while “diplomacy” meant not saying things at all. Except, wouldn’t “restraint” cover that? Wouldn’t “restraint” cover all three?
People tended to be very spendthrift with their language, Kate had noticed. They used a lot more words than they needed to.
She was taking her time walking home because the weather was so nice. In the morning it had been downright cold, but since then the day had warmed up and she carried her jacket slung over one shoulder. A young couple was strolling at a leisurely pace in front of her, the girl telling some long tale about some other girl named Lindy, but Kate didn’t bother trying to pass them.
She wondered whether the pale blue, faceless pansies she saw in somebody’s garden urn would bloom in her backyard. She had way too much shade in her backyard.
Behind her, she heard her name called. She turned to see a light-haired man hurrying toward her with one arm raised, as if he were hailing a cab. For a moment she couldn’t imagine what he had to do with her, but then she recognized her father’s research assistant. The absence of his lab coat had confused her; he was wearing jeans and a plain gray jersey. “Hi!” he said as he arrived next to her. (“Khai,” it sounded like.)
“Peter,” she said.
“Pyotr.”
“How’re you doing,” she said.
“I fear I may be having cold,” he told her. “My nose waters and I sneeze a great deal. Has been taking place since last night.”
“Bummer,” she said.
She resumed walking, and he fell into step alongside her. “It was a good day at your school?” he asked.
“It was okay.”
They were right on the heels of the young couple now. Lindy ought to just dump the guy, the girl was saying, he was making her unhappy; and the boy said, “Oh, I don’t know, she seems all right to me.”
“Where are your
eyes
?” the girl asked him. “The whole time they’re together she keeps looking into his face and he keeps looking away. Everybody’s noticed it—Patsy and Paula and Jane Ann—and finally my sister came right out and
said
to Lindy; she said—”
Pyotr briefly clamped Kate’s upper arm to steer her around them. It startled her for a moment. He was barely taller than Kate, but she had trouble matching his stride, and then she wondered why she was trying and she slowed her pace. He slowed too. “Shouldn’t you be at work?” she asked him.
“Yes! I am just going.”
Since the lab lay two blocks in the opposite direction, this didn’t make any sense, but that was no concern of hers. She glanced at her watch. She liked to get home before Bunny, who was not supposed to entertain boys when she was alone but sometimes did anyhow.
“In my country we have proverb,” Pyotr was saying.
Didn’t they always, Kate thought.
“We say, ‘Work when it is divided into segments is shorter total period of time than work when it is all together in one unit.’ ”
“Catchy,” Kate said.
“How long you have been letting your hair grow?”
The change of subject took her aback. “What?” she said. “Oh. Since eighth grade, maybe. I don’t know. I just couldn’t take any more of that Chatty Cathy act.”
“Chatty Cathy?”
“In the beauty parlor. Talk, talk, talk; those places are
crawling
with talk. The women there start going before they even sit down—talk about boyfriends, husbands, mothers-in-law. Roommates, jealous girlfriends. Feuds and misunderstandings and romances and divorces. How can they find so much to say? I could never think of anything, myself. I kept disappointing my beautician. Finally I went, ‘Shoot. I’ll just quit getting my hair cut.’ ”
“It is exceedingly attractive,” Pyotr said.
“Thanks,” Kate said. “Well, this is where I turn off. Do you realize the lab’s back that way?”
“Oh! Is back that way!” Pyotr said. He didn’t seem too perturbed about it. “Okay, Kate! See you soon! Was nice having a talk.”
Kate had already started down her own street, and she raised an arm without looking back.
She had barely
stepped into the house when she heard a distinct male voice. “
Bunny
,” she called in her sternest tone.
“In here!” Bunny sang out.
Kate tossed her jacket onto the hall bench and went into the living room. Bunny was sitting on the couch, all frothy golden curls and oh-so-innocent face and off-the-shoulder blouse far too lightweight for the season; and the Mintz boy from next door was sitting next to her.