More Than Allies (3 page)

She went into the school through the cafeteria, then cut over to let the office know she was in the building. As soon as the secretary saw her, she smiled and gave her a wave. Parents with children in the “Tri-L's” were expected to put in time in their children's classrooms. Most wanted to know everything that was happening; she was always getting notes and flyers about projects and concerns. Should the children raise money for a garden or send cash to Somalia? Who would go on the camping trip to the Redwoods with them, and who had tents? Was Jack stepping over some boundary when he had them do visualization exercises before creative writing? Should the children be allowed to bring candy in their brown bag lunches? And why were they required to take standardized tests like the regular classroom students?

At the classroom door, she scanned the room, looking for the teacher, and for her son. Jack was under the loft with a couple of kids, his head bent over their work, his hair sweeping his cheek. He was totally absorbed, though the room was swarming with activity. That was the first thing she had noticed about him, his ability to attend wholly to a child or a group. Above him, on the loft, which was piled with huge pillows, two boys were wrestling while a girl lay stretched out on her stomach, reading. At the table in the corner, a mother was sewing something; the old machine whirred and clacked, and two little girls hovered over her, chattering and bouncing. A boy was cleaning out the gerbil cage; the trash can by him was overflowing, and spilling onto the floor. Nowhere was anyone seated at a desk; in fact, there were no desks in the room, only tables, but no one was seated there, either. A couple of kids lay flat on their backs on a rug, holding books up over their heads. There was no sign of Gus.

A tiny girl—could she really be a third grader?—came up and took Dulce's arm. “Lechuga,” she said. “Qué bonita.” Obviously, the eager child, with her tiny Spanish vocabulary, knew whose mother Dulce was. Dulce knelt down beside her and said hello. In slow careful Spanish, she asked her name. The little girl's eyes squinched with effort, and finally she blurted out her age, “siete.” She threw herself against Dulce and hugged her. Dulce gave her a squeeze, and stood up.

“Do you know where Gus is?” she asked.

“In the gym. They're practicing for Spanish night.”

“Ahh,” Dulce said. She knew what she was here for, then. Jack had asked her in September if she would tutor the kids in Spanish, but she declined. She wasn't a teacher; she didn't even have a high school diploma. At that time there was no one to whom she even spoke Spanish; only since Hilario's family came to town had she any call for it. So she had shown up a couple of times a month and listened to children read, or helped with crafts projects. In the beginning, Gus had stayed near her, but in the last couple of months he had made sure he had something to do unrelated to her. She noticed that most kids were like that when their parents came.

She walked slowly to the gym. Along the hallway she looked at children's drawings posted on the walls. Outside one classroom was a long stretch of butcher paper on which the kids had drawn an underwater scene: fish and odd, unidentifiable creatures, plants with wavy tendril arms. The next stretch of drawings were copies of famous paintings; she recognized Van Gogh's sunflowers, and the Midwestern farm couple with the rake and stern faces.

In the gym she saw Gus right away. He and Hilario and a third student were working with a video camera in the back of the room. She saw him see her, and she smiled and waved. He nodded. His hands were busy with the camera.

At the front, on the stage, some kids were practicing their skit in front of a makeshift set constructed from a refrigerator carton. One child was wearing a cape, and another had a frilly hat on his head. She approached them, and Jay, with whom Gus used to spend most his time, called out, “Oh good, it's Dulce!” which made her relax and remember she was the adult and these were children.

They were practicing the story of Little Red Riding Hood. “Qué dientes tan grandes tienes!” they recited. She listened to the skit all the way through, slightly amused. They had been working on Spanish all year with one of the fathers, a pharmacist who went somewhere in Central America every winter for a while. Also, there was a teacher who came in once a week to drill the kids on vocabulary; Gus liked to recite the names of fruits and vegetables, and would sometimes blurt out, “Hace sol hoy,” or the like.

The students hit the sounds of “d” and “t” too hard, and they wandered in and out of the proper ending on the word for grandparent, but Dulce couldn't imagine that anyone would care or even notice except her and the Spanish teacher, who couldn't be everywhere at once. Dulce praised the kids and went through the skit again. She suggested that they speak a little louder. Their parents would want to hear everything. They said they needed to work on the set. They were drawing the grandmother's window on the cardboard. Dulce went to see what her son was doing.

The kids were taping family stories. Hilario had first told his in Spanish, then, with help, had written an English version and memorized it. “You like to hear?” Hilario asked now. Dulce agreed she would. They couldn't play the tape—there was no TV set up in the gym—but Hilario was eager to do his recitation. She sank to the floor, and some of the kids from the stage sat down around her, while others wandered off, back to the classroom.

Hilario stood up straight. He was a full head taller than the next tallest child in the class. He should have been in sixth or seventh grade, but with his poor English and lack of school experience, the middle school counselor had sent him over to the Tri-L class, where he would have fewer demands and a relaxed structure. It was true that he had learned a lot since his February arrival, but Dulce couldn't help wondering where they would put him next year, and just how far behind he really was. She would have thought he would work twice as hard to catch up, but he was enjoying being King Cock in grade school. For all practical purposes, Gus had a crush on him.

Jay, who had been one of the chorus reciting the wolf's lines in the skit, settled down close to Dulce. She reached out and put her arm on his shoulder. He moved in even more.

Hilario said, in his broken English, but rather better than Dulce would have thought he could, that his story was about something that happened to his mother when she was a little girl. She and her sister had gone to feed the pigs inside a fenced area. Her sister fell off the fence and into the mud with the pigs. She screamed, and when she jumped back up, she had pulled her hand inside the sleeve of her blouse, so that Hilario's mother, Lupe, could not see it. Lupe thought that a pig had bitten off her sister's hand, and she ran back to their mother shouting, “The pig ate her hand!”

The kids who had gathered around for Hilario's telling clapped, somebody whistled. Hilario beamed. Jay had disappeared.

A bell rang. It was time for recess. Dulce told Hilario she liked his story. She asked about his family. He went back to Spanish. His father was still in Mexico, where he had gone because his mother was sick. They had received a letter.

He looked through the windows at the torrent of children pouring onto the playground. “Go play,” Dulce told him in English. She looked around, but Gus was gone.

Then she realized there was a commotion in the front of the gym. She ran back up to the stage to find that the “set” had been knocked down and trampled, and that several boys were scuffling. She ran around to go on the stairs up to the stage. She could hear someone screaming. It turned out to be Jay. It took several moments to figure out what had happened. He had found a can of red spray paint on a shelf at the back of the stage, and had sprayed it on the back of the set. When another boy saw the paint, he lunged for it and Jay sprayed his shirt. Now there was paint on the floor, too, and in the scuffle Jay had hurt his cheek. Kids wandering through the gym clustered at the foot of the stage to see what was going on. Some of them were giggling. She heard one of the older boys in Gus' room tell Jay, “You're going to get it!”

She didn't know what she was supposed to do. She was afraid she would be blamed—rightly, perhaps, but what could she have done? She couldn't be in two parts of the large room at the same time.

A girl came up and told her there shouldn't have been the paint on the stage. Very primly she informed her, “Dangerous things are supposed to be locked up.” Dulce, recognizing budding authority, asked the little girl if she would go get the kids' teacher. He was there in two minutes. He apologized to Dulce. He said he hadn't realized that many children were out of the room. He studied the paint on the stage floor; it looked like red dust. He seemed quite anxious about it. Glancing over sternly at the kids, now lined up mutely along the stage front, seated with their legs dangling over the edge, he said, “You shouldn't have to worry about behavior when you come.” Dulce wondered what he would say to Jay, but when she glanced down the row of youngsters, she didn't see him there at all. As she left the room, she heard the others shouting their explanations; Jay's name rang out like a bell, over and over. Jay did it. It was Jay's fault. What are you going to do to Jay?

She stopped in the girls' bathroom. Little girls were shuffling and yelling. She thought she saw feet under all the stalls. She waited a moment for one to open, then went in. In the toilet was one of the longest turds she had ever seen in her life. She stepped right back out, and saw the girl who had come out of that stall, and before she had thought about it, she reached out and grabbed her arm.

The child looked up in astonishment, and several other girls around her stared, suddenly quiet. Dulce felt her temples pounding, but stumbled on. She pulled the girl over and pointed at the toilet bowl. “You left it nasty! If you don't flush that, who do you think will?” The girl was wide-eyed and quiet. The other girls giggled. Dulce let go, embarrassed at her outburst, and the girl rushed over to flush the toilet, then ran out, followed by her friends, now jabbering shrilly.

Dulce leaned back against the wooden door of the stall. She had an insane urge to giggle. She couldn't think what had gotten into her. Maybe when you have scrubbed out as many toilets as she had, you lose patience with carelessness. Maybe she was getting old and minding too much business.

Maybe God was working hard to make her glad she wasn't a teacher!

Austin, Texas

Dear Maggie
,

This isn't a good way for us to live. We have to decide whether we will be a family. I want that, but I don't believe we can make it, there. I need work, and you want work, and our children need both parents. I'm not going to say things over again about Mother, I know I said them too baldly when I left. I love her, and I know you do, too, but you are the mother now
.

Austin is very beautiful, not like Lupine, but not completely unlike Lupine, either, because it is green and hilly. The main thing is, it's bigger, and I can make a living here. Maybe we won't be rich, but we could rent a house here, we could do that. They tell me the schools are okay. The music is everywhere, and great. They have nice little places to go and drink beer, they call them beer gardens, like in Germany. And lots of cheap places to eat
.

If you would come down, and try it, see how you feel, I would stay open to living somewhere else, if there's work, but not Lupine. I am living in a one-room apartment in a house chopped up into apartments, but if you come I will rent a little house for the summer. It's hot here already, but there's water, many places to swim, good hamburgers. Jerry's wife is nice and wants to meet you. They have a baby a little older than Stevie. (They guessed which musician she was named for, which shows you they knew me pretty good right away!)

I thought you could come when school is out, since you won't be subbing. If you don't want to come, I want Jay for the summer. He can stay with me at the shop, or at Jerry's some of the time. I want to find an old car and start showing him how to work on engines. I promise I won't let him on a motorcycle, I know how you feel about that
.

If you aren't going to come, we need to come to an agreement about child support and stuff, and whether you want a divorce, oh Maggie, not that! But I don't feel right sending you what I decide, I don't know what I ought to be doing, but I can tell you the only reason I haven't sent more is because I was saving up for security deposits for renting a house and turning on the utilities, and I overhauled the engine on the truck
.

Well, school will be out pretty soon and there's no real reason for you not to come. I promise you you won't be nearly as lonesome as you think you will. Jerry's wife (Lisa) is dying for you to come, and I've already got to know some other people, too. You'd meet people because of the kids, especially when they're in school. What else can I say? I didn't say I love you, I miss you all the time, I've been true to you but I don't like being alone at all. If you want I will come get you, or we can use some of what I've saved and you can fly, except that you couldn't bring very much stuff
.

Maybe you could talk to Mom about it. Not your friends. I don't mean don't talk to them, God don't get mad like I've insulted them or something. I just mean they're not the best ones to understand us. They're not really like us. Mom wants us together. I bet she prays for it, if I know her. There's a Mexican works in the shop, he says everything that happens, his wife goes to church and lights candles. If I was Catholic, that's what I'd do. I'd light all the candles in the place, and every one, I'd say, please let Maggie and the kids come. Please let me say the right things instead of the wrong things this time
.

Love, Mo

Mrs. Tobler's English class had just finished reading
Death of a Salesman
. She had left a list of discussion questions. Maggie looked over the afternoon's plans—there would be three classes in a row—and saw that the next class had the same assignment, for the same play, and that the last class was going to watch part of the movie.