Читать книгу Death, Unchartered - Dorothy Van Soest - Страница 12

FOUR

Winter 1967

Even though P.S. 457 was bleak and overcrowded, a physically and emotionally violent place, the energy of my thirty-five eight-year-old students lightened the building’s dull gray walls. It even freshened the air, despite the strange mildew smell that made my nostrils itch. From day one I set out to create for them a safe learning space from seven to noon five days a week. We followed the same routine every day so they always knew what to expect. I was quick to praise and encourage, and they, in turn, were eager to please. I kept the door closed to keep the sounds of other teachers’ voices, at the end of their nerves and at the top of their lungs, from filtering into our classroom. I never raised my own voice. I never had to.

During the first few months, I visited the neighborhood projects and crowded tenements and met with my students’ parents and other caregivers. I wanted to understand the circumstances in which they lived so I could better meet their individual needs in the classroom. I experimented with new ways of teaching and sometimes ran them by Frank.

“I have a brilliant idea,” I exclaimed one night when he was sitting in our faux-leather thrift store chair reading, as usual. He turned his book facedown on his lap and puffed on his pipe, which was a status symbol among seminarians. In many ways, we were a typical couple: me the annoyed and annoying wife, he the clueless and distant husband, who preferred reading to listening to me, who in spite of wearing tweed jackets with patches on the sleeves, watched sports and left the toilet seat up.

“Do you know the song Apples, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie,” I asked.

He nodded and took a sip from his glass of bourbon.

“Kids love it,” I said. “I have the record here. I could bring our little record player to school, maybe let my students dance to the song at first, get them loosened up a bit, you know? So this is what I’m thinking. I write the words on a big piece of newsprint with the key words I want them to learn to read underlined in red. While they sing along to the music, I point to the words. After a while, I turn off the music and point to the words again, see if they can repeat them after me. On another piece of newsprint, I post the words in a list, separate from the lyrics and in a different order, and have them read them by sight. You know what I mean? What do you think?”

“How much time will it take?”

I sucked in my breath and counted to ten while his question morphed from curiosity to criticism inside. “I don’t know how long it will take, Frank.”

“How do you know it will work?”

“I don’t,” I said with a drawn-out sigh. “But what I do know is that most of my students don’t know how to read. At least a third of them barely speak English. The rest of them are bored to death during reading time. ‘See Dick run. See Jane skip. Go, Spot, go.’ I have to do something different. I have to at least try.”

Frank grunted, took another sip of his drink, and went back to reading. When I started playing the record, he disappeared into the bedroom and closed the door. Late into the night I listened to Jay and the Techniques over and over again, stopping to write the lyrics in big black letters on newsprint, making sure I got them exactly right.

Early the next morning, I woke Frank and told him that because I had to carry the record player and the rolls of newsprint, I would be driving to school instead of walking. He groaned, rolled out of bed, and pulled on his jeans. It was his job to put the car battery in the van; after two of them were stolen, we kept it inside at night. He stumbled out of the apartment carrying the battery and leaving behind a trail of air sticky with residual irritation. He came back in, gave me a perfunctory peck on the cheek, and went back to bed.

My students’ faces lit up like never before as they danced and sang and shouted out the words, with and without the music. Every day they called out the titles of other songs and asked if they could learn to read with those, too. How could I refuse? Class preparation became the kudzu of my evenings. I was soon familiar with the late-night silence of the neighborhood and came to appreciate the absence of the sounds of screeching cars and of the human bustle of everyday life.

“You have an uncanny ability to focus,” Frank said almost every night around midnight when he headed off to bed.

That was, of course, his way of saying I was obsessed. Maybe he was right. I’d always been intense about mastering whatever I decided to do, and maybe I did work too hard. But I had high expectations of my students, too, and their growing confidence was obvious when their little chests filled with pride at the daily display of their accomplishments on the bulletin board. I always placed them right next to the achievements of their new cultural heroes—Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Matthew Henson, Charles Drew, Cesar Chavez, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali. My students and I were happy... until something happened that changed everything.

My class was working in their math groups. I heard a commotion, a banging noise out in the hall, and went out to investigate. I saw Anthony Frascatore, whose classroom was across the hall, slam a student against the wall, then pin him there by the collar of his shirt. He screamed at the student, his mouth mere inches from the boy’s ebony face: “What did I tell you to do?”

I swept toward him. “What the hell are you doing?” I said.

Frascatore looked surprised. He released his hold on the boy’s shirt, grabbed his wrist, and thrust him through the open classroom door. “Get back in there, and from now on you do what I tell you to do.”

“What are you doing?” I asked again. I was gritting my teeth so hard the roots hurt.

“Taming the animals in this zoo. What do you think I’m doing?”

“Assaulting a child.”

He sneered. “It’s called discipline, Mrs. Waters. You won’t find my students singing and dancing.”

I glared at him. He glared back. I crossed my arms, tucked in my chin, and stared.

“You do know that I’ve been teaching here for a long time, don’t you?” Frascatore glowered like he was about to slam me into the wall next.

“What I know,” I said, “is that you better never, ever let me see you lay a hand on any student again.”

He snorted. “Or what?”

“Or I will tell Miss Huskings what I saw.”

Frascatore clenched his fists, his face flushed. Then he turned on his heels, stormed into his classroom, and slammed the door.

I went back to my classroom, sat down at my desk, and tried to calm myself. You could have heard a pin drop, my students were so quiet. An hour later, when I hugged them and dismissed them for the day, they still looked anxious.

I went to meet Bonnie Goldmann for lunch in the teachers’ lounge. The room made my already gloomy mood worse. Its grayish-brown walls were dull and its furniture—metal chairs, a scratched Formica table, and an ancient brown refrigerator—was depressing. There wasn’t a single picture or plant. Most teachers avoided the room, which was why Bonnie and I started having lunch here, so we could share ideas about teaching third grade.

It wasn’t long before she had become a friend. She was a refreshing New Yorker—frank, pushy, talkative, well-meaning—who never judged me or made fun of my naive Midwestern earnestness. Her reddish glasses, propped halfway down her nose, complemented the color of her hair and gave her the air of a disheveled intellectual. A female Einstein, if Einstein had been attractive. She grew up in the Bronx with parents who were Romanian holocaust survivors. She seemed to know everything about the Grand Concourse and P.S. 457, where she’d taught for many years. I was sure she knew all about Anthony Frascatore, too. And today, that’s what I wanted to talk to her about.

“Mr. Frascatore and I got into it this morning.” I bit into my peanut butter and raspberry jelly sandwich and talked while chewing in an attempt to hide the angry tremor in my voice.

“He’s got a short fuse sometimes.” Bonnie waved her hand like she was swatting at a fly. “He hasn’t talked to me at all this year.”

I was about to ask her why when Frascatore appeared in the doorway. The last person I wanted to see. He sauntered over to the refrigerator and held the door open, turning and glaring at me as if the putrid stench of someone’s long-forgotten tuna fish inside was my fault.

“Geez,” Bonnie said, holding her nose. “Shut that.”

Frascatore grabbed a brown paper bag from inside and slammed the door. “Damned people leave their rotten food in the refrigerator,” he grumbled.

“So, Anthony,” Bonnie said, her voice a tease. “You still not talking to me?” She looked sideways at me and winked. I looked down at my sandwich.

“Why should I?” He put his lunch down on the table like maybe he was going to stay a while. I reached into my lunch bag for a potato chip. A strange smell emanated from Frascatore, some combination of aftershave, bologna, and sweat.

“Because maybe it wouldn’t hurt to listen to somebody other than Al Shanker and his cronies once in a while,” Bonnie joshed.

“You think I should listen to someone like her instead of our union president?” He jabbed his finger in my direction.

I opened my can of Diet Coke and it hissed.

“Admit it, Anthony,” Bonnie said in a now half-serious tone. “Going out on strike at the beginning of this year made things worse. We’re more divided than ever.”

He grunted. “Yeah, well, we gotta watch out for ourselves,” he said with a shrug. “We’re in the minority here. You know the stats same as I do, ninety-seven percent of our students are black and Hispanic.”

“Being taught by white teachers,” Bonnie said. “It’s our kids who are the ones getting the short end of the stick, not us.”

Frascatore’s face turned red, his mouth twisted in fury. “Don’t you start with that crap. We have to stand up for ourselves as teachers. If we let communities control our schools, it will be the end of our rights.”

“Not that simple,” Bonnie said with a shrug.

Frascatore grabbed his lunch from the table. “Mark my words,” he said. “Mark my words.”

I breathed a sigh of relief as he walked out the door in a huff.

“At least he didn’t go on and on about our right to discipline students,” Bonnie said with a roll of her eyes. “I swear, that’s all that man seems to care about.”

The tension was building inside me, waiting to be released. Did she know that Frascatore, in the name of discipline, thought teachers had the right to slam students against the wall? I would bet that if she’d seen what Frascatore did today, she’d be down at the principal’s office right now reporting it to Miss Huskings. I wanted to tell her what happened, but she had already started talking a mile a minute, and I couldn’t get a word in.

“Did I ever tell you about my dad? He scored at the top on the city teachers’ exam, and they still wouldn’t give him a job until he took a speech course to correct his Yiddish accent. Thanks to the union, they can’t deny someone a job because of accent or race anymore. Frascatore’s right that we need to be united, but he doesn’t understand what’s at risk here.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Bonnie glanced down at her hands for a second. Then she sat back with a sad sigh. “Look, Sylvia, my family is Jewish. I know what it’s like to be persecuted. For generations. It’s painful. It hurts me to see it happen to others. My friends feel the same way. What Anthony doesn’t get is that if the union keeps fighting the community control experiment in the black Ocean Hill—Brownsville district, the bond between us Jewish teachers and the black teachers is going to be broken.”

She paused and looked off into space before continuing. “My dad always said that one of the most precious and fragile links of our democracy is the solidarity of black and white working people through the unions. What scares me most, Sylvia, is that this conflict about who gets to control our schools is going to destroy that.”

She took in a quick breath like she wasn’t finished, but then she glanced up at the clock on the wall and started packing up her leftover food. “I’m sorry, hon, but I have to run. I’ve been going on and on without paying any attention to the time. I have to leave for a teachers’ conference this afternoon and I’m already late. It’ll be so nice to have a break for the next couple of days.” With that, she gave me a peck on the cheek and rushed out the door, leaving me alone with the last bite of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich sitting on the table and not knowing what to do about Frascatore.

So I did nothing for the next few days while I waited for Bonnie to come back. I avoided any conversation, even a greeting, with Frascatore, while at the same time keeping my senses on full alert and tuned in to his every movement. I listened for the sound of his voice. I kept my classroom door open so I could keep an eye on him across the hall. And the whole time, my conscience nagged at me. I hadn’t told the principal right away, but if he ever laid hands on another student again, I would not hesitate to do so.

Three days later, a sixth-grade student brought me a note from Miss Huskings. When I read Come to my office at twelve-thirty, all the muscles in my body tensed. I felt like a student being called into the principal’s office for doing something wrong. But what had I done? Maybe someone else had told the principal what I’d seen Frascatore do, and she wanted to know why I hadn’t come to her. Maybe someone had complained about my students singing and dancing during reading time, and Miss Huskings was going to question my unorthodox teaching methods. Maybe it was about something else. But what could it be?

By the time I hugged my students good-bye for the day and headed for the main office, I was pretty much a basket case. I leaned on the counter that ran from one wall to the opposite one. Behind me, a cluttered bulletin board was crammed with colorful pictures and announcements, cartoons, happy children’s faces, most of them white. In front of me, three desks on the other side of the counter were filled with uneven stacks of papers. To the left of them, a tall gray filing cabinet was piled high with haphazard stacks of ragged reading books. And behind the cabinet, hidden from view, was the door to the principal’s office, that narrow, secret opening in the wall known to suck in students who misbehaved. And teachers.

“You can go ahead and knock on Miss Huskings’s door,” one of the secretaries said as she lifted up the end of the counter and let me in.

I pulled my shoulders back, remembering when I was in elementary school, everyone said the principal had a stick in his office that he beat kids with. I never saw it myself. I’d never talked to Miss Huskings alone before, either, except to say hello and how are you in passing. Her mere presence on the auditorium stage during school assemblies and monthly teachers’ meetings was daunting enough. As I stood at the door working up my courage to go in, I heard ripples of laughter and animated voices on the other side.

I knocked. No response. I knocked harder.

“Come,” the principal ordered in her raspy smoker’s voice.

I turned the knob and pushed in the door. Miss Huskings, slouched down in a leather chair behind her mammoth desk, looked like a wrinkled lump of clay. Creases of skin puckered toward her lips, from one corner of which a cigarette dangled. She plucked the cigarette out with yellowed fingertips and balanced it on the edge of an ashtray overflowing with what looked like a week’s deposit of ashes and butts.

“Mrs. Waters,” she said.

“I guess I’m early,” I said.

Miss Huskings picked up the cigarette and brought it to her lips. She took a puff and blew out a perfect smoke ring. “Anthony and I were reminiscing a bit.”

I followed her gaze and saw Frascatore sitting off to the side with one leg crossed over the other. He was smiling and nodding like a bobblehead doll, the embodiment of superiority and clueless self-importance. I grimaced. What was he doing here? Was he the person who had complained about me?

“Sit.” Miss Huskings flicked her hand toward the chair next to his.

I pulled the chair a few inches away from him before sitting down. I wished I were invisible, like when, as a child, no one noticed what I said or did. I longed for the advantage that comes with the ability to pass unnoticed through whatever was to come. But it was not to be.

Miss Huskings’s pointy green eyes were stuck on me in a way that made it clear I was not at all invisible to her. “I’ll get right to the point,” she said. She heaved her thick body up and took another drag from her cigarette. “Some parents complained that their son was assaulted by a teacher. Now I know that if any of my teachers saw something like that, they would have reported it to me right away.” I froze, prepared myself for the attack to come. “So that’s not what this is about,” she continued. “Anthony here mentioned that the two of you had a conversation about discipline, and I thought it would help if we talked.”

This was my chance to set the record straight. But what could I say? How could I tell her that Frascatore had assaulted a boy, but I hadn’t reported it to her? She’d want to know why I didn’t speak up before, maybe accuse me of collusion and reproach me for putting her in a bad position with the student’s parents by not coming forward earlier. For a split second, it crossed my mind that she might already know it was Frascatore, but then why was he here? Wouldn’t Miss Huskings want to talk to me alone? Now that he was here, that made speaking up impossible. If I told her what I saw, he would deny everything. And why would she believe me over him?

I folded the note she’d sent in half, then in half again, kept folding until it was the size of a piece of hard candy. Then another thought occurred to me, one even more terrifying than the others. Maybe Miss Huskings already knew what happened. Maybe the student had told his parents I was a witness. What if this was all a test? What if my principal was playing games? I shifted my position in the chair, and it scraped on the floor with a high-pitched sound.

“No need to be nervous, Mrs. Waters.” The principal coughed into her hand.

I let out my breath. Then why am I here? I bit my bottom lip. There was a lead weight in my stomach.

“I told Ada here that you have an unusual philosophy about discipline,” Frascatore said in a casual, matter-of-fact tone of voice.

Ada? What was his relationship with Miss Huskings, anyway?

The principal blew out another puff of smoke. She leaned toward me and waited, eyebrows raised.

“I don’t think like he does,” I muttered. I was confused, thrown off-balance. “That’s all.”

“She doesn’t realize that sometimes it’s our job to knock some sense into our students.” Frascatore wrapped his arms around the back of his chair, expanded his chest. A button came undone on his dingy shirt.

I clenched my fists. “There are alternatives to violence.” I knew I was mumbling and kicked myself for it. I sat up straighter, ready to explain, and be more assertive, until I saw Frascatore shoot Miss Huskings a “didn’t I tell you” look.

“Are you saying that Anthony believes in physical discipline of his students?” the principal asked. Was it an accusation? Did she really want to know?

Frascatore cleared his throat and looked me straight in the eye. It was a dare if I ever saw one. I looked away. I didn’t know how to respond, didn’t know whether Miss Huskings was after him or me or something else. She was watching me, waiting. I had to say something.

“I guess you could say,” I said at last, “that Mr. Frascatore believes in controlling students and I believe in motivating them.”

He twisted his body toward me, a look of disdain on his face. “Here’s the deal.” The reminder was delivered with a smile. “I’m not sure Mrs. Waters here believes in any form of discipline at all.”

I tightened my jaw. So this was how Frascatore was setting me up. If I told Miss Huskings what I’d witnessed, he would argue that I had skewed ideas about discipline, that what I thought I saw was not what happened. I opened my mouth, angry enough now to tell the principal everything, get it over with, let the chips fall where they may. But then I saw the two of them smile at each other, and I squeezed my lips together. I was the one at risk, not him. The two of them had a cozy relationship. They’d known each other for many years. He was the union representative for the school. He had tenure.

“We can’t teach if we’re not in control,” Frascatore said.

A sharp pain shot through my temple. I spoke up, but my voice was weak. “I don’t believe teachers have a right to punish students with impunity,” I said. “Students can’t learn if they’re afraid.” I leaned back in my chair feeling nauseous.

“Ah, the self-righteousness of the young and inexperienced,” he said.

“Nothing wrong with idealism, Anthony,” Miss Huskings scolded. “It’s in short supply around here, I’m afraid.”

I sat up, feeling a bit emboldened by what seemed to be support. “We need to find ways to encourage our students,” I said in a stronger voice. “We need to motivate them.”

“Uh-huh, like having them dance in class.”

I whirled toward him. “Are you saying my classroom is out of control? Are you accusing me of letting my students do whatever they want? Is that what this is about?”

Frascatore crossed his short legs, one foot resting on the knee of the other, and smiled in a triumphant, bare-your-teeth way.

“Is this meeting about me, Miss Huskings?” I asked. “Have I done anything wrong?”

“No, no.” The principal’s response was quick and firm. “I know this is your first year with us, Mrs. Waters, but I’ve been at this long enough to spot a gifted teacher when I see one. I would like you to consider supervising a student teacher next year.”

I blushed and looked down at my lap.

“And you’ve been a big help to me,” she added.

“How,” I asked, looking askance at her.

“This discussion has helped me clear a few things up in my head. It seems like everything these days comes down to a difference of opinion about discipline.” She stood up, glanced at her watch, and grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a folder from her desk. “And now I’ve got a meeting to get to downtown.” She rushed toward the door with a side-to-side gait and a wave of her purse.

“Thanks, Ada,” Frascatore called out as he swaggered from the room behind her.

I sat there, stunned, and didn’t move until a secretary popped into the office with a stack of mail. Then I left in a daze. I’d been duped. Anthony Frascatore had set it all up. Had set me up. He’d protected himself by making sure I didn’t tell the principal what I’d seen.

I didn’t tell Frank about the meeting in Miss Huskings’s office. I couldn’t bear to listen to any of his critical questions or have him tell me I should pray about it or maybe suggest we get a puppy. After dinner we both did what we always did. He sat in his chair with a book and a drink. I did the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen before preparing lesson plans for the next day, ruminating the whole time about what happened in the meeting.

By the time I went to bed I was so tied up in knots that sleep was impossible. I had double-binded myself. My original sin had been not reporting what I’d witnessed to the principal right away. I’d done the easy thing, not the right thing. Yes, Frascatore had suckered me, but I had walked right into it.

I stared up at the sinister shadows slithering across the ceiling. The burden of my transgression was heavy, and much as I wanted to, I couldn’t put it down. I castigated myself for being so passive. I’d had another chance to tell the truth during the meeting, and had still remained silent, even as every fiber of my being was calling out to me to do the right thing.

It wasn’t the first time. My actions often were miles behind my passion. After years of careful training while I was growing up, it had become second nature for me to remain silent. I learned to not express my opinions, to not make waves. But I hadn’t been born passive. My passivity had come in small steps. Like colluding with evil came in small steps.

Enough already, I scolded myself. You might as well wear a sign saying you’re sorry for the Vietnam War, the bombing of Laos, and everything else that’s wrong in the world. Better yet, while you’re at it, why not apologize for your existence. Cut yourself a break!

I pulled off the covers and slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Frank. I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. No roaches scattered across the floor when I turned on the light. At least that was something. Then the water, cool on my throat, calmed me into a new thought. If my passivity had come in small steps, then why couldn’t it be undone in small steps? Why not, indeed?

I went back to bed, lay down with my hands on the back of my neck, and stretched my legs out. I closed my eyes, and images of my students and their apartments zoomed by as if I were a photographer snapping pictures of travels to new places. One scene in particular came into such sharp focus that it was almost as if I were there again.

~

I’m standing in the foyer of a four-story apartment building, waiting to be buzzed in. I push the apartment bell for the third time, and still no response. I walk outside, ready to give up and leave, when Mentayer’s brother comes running up to me. He’s out of breath.

“Ms. Sylvia,” he says. “I was s’posed to be watching out for you and tell you they was out back. I’ll show you the way.”

“Thank you, Markus,” I say. “So, is second grade still going well for you?” Every day at noon, Markus came to my classroom to meet his sister so they could walk home together. He was a cute kid, small for his age and full of energy, eager to chat and clean the blackboard for me and help me put things away. When Mentayer pulled him away with a reprimand, he’d tag along behind her with a skip in his step and without complaint.

“Yes, ma’am.” He nods, and his mouth falls open the same way his sister’s does. His resemblance to her is remarkable in other ways as well: a small gap between his two front teeth, a lopsided smile, and curious brown eyes.

His little hand grips mine as he leads me along a narrow, cracked strip of concrete to the back of the building. There, in a postage-stamp yard, sits his sixty-six-year-old grandmother, square of body yet wiry in the face and arms and dressed in a rumpled muumuu with magenta flowers and chartreuse leaves. She’s perched on a wooden crate scooping pigeon poop with a rusty metal spatula onto pieces of newspaper, which she then folds and tucks under the crate. Mentayer stands next to her.

“Grandma,” she says, “why don’t you put it in the garbage can? You come back later, there’s gonna be little pieces of poop scattered around for you to pick up all over again.”

“Rats gotta eat, too, girl. Everyone and everything’s gotta eat something.”

Mentayer spots me, and her eyes light up. “Look, Grandma, it’s Ms. Sylvia. My teacher. She’s here, like I told you.” Her gap-toothed smile widens as she takes my hand from Markus and pulls me forward. “Grandma, this is Ms. Sylvia,” she says.

“It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. LeMeur,” I say.

“Everyone calls me Grandma. Don’t expect you to be no different.”

I smile. This might take some getting used to. “Is this an okay time?” I ask.

Mentayer’s grandmother nods. She wipes her hands on her dress and stands up with effort. “You two go on in the house,” she says with a shooing motion of her hands and a flick of her wide hips. “Be sure to watch your feet now. Don’t you be dragging any dog shit or other garbage into the house again, you hear?” Mentayer scrapes the bottom of her shoes on the concrete and Markus scrambles behind her around the corner to the front of the building.

“Now, tell me, Ms. Sylvia,” Mrs. LeMeur says. “What trouble did my granddaughter get herself into this time to make her teacher come to here? I swear, Markus has more sense than she does even though he’s the younger. I tell that child every morning to try and act more like her brother, but it don’t seem to make no difference.”

“I’m delighted to have Mentayer in my class,” I say. “I wanted to meet you. I’m visiting all my students’ homes. You’re the first.”

She squints at me. “Huh! You sure she’s not giving you trouble? She was a handful for all her other teachers, don’t know why third grade would be any different.”

“She’s smart, as I’m sure you know. She’s a fluent reader, way above her grade level. School can be boring for a child as bright and quick as she is.”

“Her momma was smart, too.” A deep sadness gathers around Mrs. LeMeur’s mouth. “But that didn’t make no difference. Drugs took hold of her after Markus was born. Killed her in the end. I don’t want Mentayer going that road.”

~

Frank rolled over, and when his arm brushed against my cheek, I scooted away from him and faced the wall, not wanting the images in my head to go away. I kept thinking about Mentayer. She bored easily, the work much too elementary for her, and then would act out in ways that were challenging in their ability to disrupt, yet thrilling in their creativity. She’d grunt, pant, tap her fingers on her desk, her feet on the floor, sometimes burst into dramatic energy, her crowning achievement a swoon and a roll of her eyes. I designed challenging projects for her to tackle when I sensed she was restless, and more often than not the advanced work absorbed her interest.

I went to see her grandmother two more times after our visit in September. The first time I went to show her a story Mentayer had written and to praise her granddaughter for how well she was learning to manage her impatience in class. The second time I went to confer with her about an incident involving Mentayer in the gym. An older boy had sneaked up behind her when she was jumping rope and pulled out one of the ribbons braided in her hair. She gave chase with the rope and, in her words, “slapped that boy silly.” The boy took off crying, “like a baby,” and Mentayer ended up getting in trouble with the boy’s teacher. Who, thankfully, wasn’t Frascatore.

We met in the living room that time, Mrs. LeMeur sitting in an overstuffed brown chair, and Mentayer and me across from her on a ragged couch that was scratchy and had wooden legs. Markus was there, too, sitting in the corner on a chair he’d brought in from the kitchen. His eyes were wide with curiosity and his mouth open as he watched the scene unfold.

The apartment was immaculate and smelled of fresh paint. According to Mentayer, her grandmother made the landlord strip off all the paint down to the wood because there was lead in it, and then he repainted the whole apartment, which was why they all had to stay with an uncle for a week.

“What do you think about what happened in the gym?” I asked Mentayer.

“I think that boy won’t ever mess with me again.”

“That ain’t no excuse for doing what you done,” Mrs. LeMeur said. She wagged her finger to make her point.

“You know he won’t, Grandma.” Mentayer crossed her arms over her chest.

I had to agree with Mentayer about that. “But you came close to cutting his eye,” I said. “You could have blinded him.”

“I didn’t mean to do that.” Mentayer looked contrite.

“We know you didn’t,” I said.

“No matter. It could have been downright awful,” her grandmother scolded. “You woulda been suspended for sure.”

“He started it.” Mentayer poked out her bottom lip. “I didn’t go asking for trouble.”

“Both of those things may be true,” I said.

Mentayer stuck her chin out. “They are.”

“You’re not responsible for what that boy did,” I went on. “But you are responsible for what you did after he messed with you. Maybe there was some other way you could have handled things? Some way that wouldn’t have gotten you in trouble.”

Mentayer didn’t say anything. Her grandmother gave her what Mentayer had described to me as her evil eye. In the corner behind his grandmother’s chair, Markus sat up straight, without moving, his hands folded on his lap.

I stifled an urge to smile. I liked Mentayer’s stubbornness. “If you could do it over,” I said, “what do you think you could do different? Or if it happened again, how could it end better? You know what I’m asking, right? The usual questions.”

“But, Ms. Sylvia,” Mentayer whined, “that boy isn’t in our class, so he hasn’t learned how to work things out like we have. He doesn’t understand the process.”

I felt myself melting away and folded my hands over my chest. The girl was a challenge and I had to improvise, even be cunning at times, to stay a step ahead of her. But I had grown fond of her. Her brother, too. Markus was as bright as his sister but without her impatience. And I liked their grandmother. She hovered over both of them, Mentayer more than Markus. She was like a one-woman PTA whose singular charge was to raise her granddaughter to flourish in a world that was certain to ignore and even try to destroy her unstoppable curiosity and free spirit.

I closed my eyes and, thinking about the LeMeurs with a smile on my lips, fell asleep at last.

I woke in the light of dawn to the sounds of the city coming alive. A garbage truck screeched to a halt outside; sanitation workers shouted to each other as they threw rubbish onto the back. Smells of human refuse wafted through the bedroom window. Soon people would go into the bodega around the side of the building and come out with their morning cups of coffee. The super would bring out his chair to sit guard in front of his door; maybe he’d talk today, maybe he wouldn’t. Thirty-five third-graders would expect me to show up again today. Their eyes would be bright and their young voices hungry for approval as they shouted “Good morning, Ms. Sylvia.”

Another day. Another chance. If Frascatore ever hurt another child, I would act right away. Next time, God forbid there be a next time, things would be different.

Little did I know how different they would be.