we always told them. We all have different gifts. We can all make good choices if we try. But Reza gave the lie to this, bound in his charm and beauty as if in a net.
When, in the first week, he knocked Françoise down on the playground, by accident, in the exuberant throes of an impromptu soccer match, he put his arm around her trembling shoulder and sat out with her on the curb until she felt ready to sally forth again. He had tears in his eyes: I saw them. When he discovered that Aristide, whose parents came from Haiti, could speak French, his face opened in delight and the pair gabbled through the lunch hour, until Mark T. and Eli complained that they felt excluded; whereupon he nodded dutifully, shut his eyes for a moment and reverted to broken English, his imperfect medium. I didn’t have to tell him to do it; and from then on he and Aristide spoke French only after school was over, on their way out the door. When, also early on, the children suffered a particularly rambunctious afternoon—it was pouring; they’d been cooped up all day, the sky outside so dark that we bathed for hours in aggravating fluorescence—and in art hour—supposedly my favorite, as I am, or am supposed to be, an artist—the boys had the bright idea of squirting tempera paints from their plastic bottles, first at their papers but then, by the time I noticed, at the furniture, and the floor, and each other—when, in spite of my considerable, vaunted self-control, I raised my voice and thunderously proclaimed myself sorely disappointed—that day, at school’s end, a full hour afterward, Reza stopped at my desk and placed a small hand upon my forearm, delicate as a leaf.
“I’m sorry, Miss Eldridge,” he said. “I’m sorry we made a mess. Sorry you’re angry.”
His sitter hovered in the doorway, her lip glinting. Otherwise I might have hugged him: he seemed, for a moment, so much like my own child.
Children. Me and children. Children and me. How did I, of all people, become the favorite teacher of the Appleton Elementary third-grade class? April Watts, who takes the other section, is like a teacher out of a Victorian novel: she has hair like brown cotton candy, whipped into a gauzy attenuated confection around her head, and bottle-bottom glasses through which she peers, vaguely, her blue eyes enlarged and distorted by the lenses like fishes in a tank. Although only in her early fifties, she wears support hose for her varicose veins and she has, poor ghastly thing, absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever. It’s not on account of the hair or the glasses or the veins that I’m preferred, but on account of this last trait. I’ve been known—and I don’t say this pridefully—to laugh so hard that I fall off my chair, which seems to make up for the thunderous outbursts. My emotions, shall we say, are in their full gamut recognizable to the children, which seems to me pedagogically sound.
It was both a great compliment and a crushing blow to have a father say to me, a couple of years back, that I perfectly fulfilled his idea of a teacher. “You’re the Gerber baby of schoolteachers” is what he actually said. “You’re the exemplar.”
“What exactly does that mean, Ross?” I asked with a big, fake smile. It was at the end-of-year picnic, and three or four parents clustered around me in the playground’s fierce sunlight, clutching their miniature plastic lemonade bottles, daubing away at their chins or their children’s chins with ketchup-stained napkins. The hot dogs and tofu pups had already been consumed.
“Oh, I know what he means,” said Brianna’s mom, Jackie. “He means that when we were children, everyone wanted a teacher like you. Enthusiastic, but strict. Full of ideas. A teacher who gets kids.”
“Is that what you meant, Ross?”
“Probably not exactly,” he said, and I was surprised to recognize that he was flirting with me. Parents at Appleton rarely flirt. “But close enough. It was intended as a compliment.”
“Well then, thank you.”
I’m always looking for what people are really saying. When they tell me that I “get” kids, I’m worried that they’re saying I don’t seem quite adult. The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people’s. I see