The Woman Upstairs Read Free

our first teachers’ meeting, “Sometimes, you know, the grasp of English itself doesn’t seem so important. If a kid is passionate enough, you can transcend that.”
    I demurred, reminded her of Ilya, the Russian boy, and Duong, from Vietnam, and half a dozen kids we’d seen splutter and almost drown un-Englished in elementary school, so that you sent them only trepidatiously on to middle school, fearing they’d come back thugs, or dropouts, or worse. Sometimes, inevitably, it happened.
    “You’re not worrying like this in the first week? That boy picks it all up like a sponge.”
    “I’m not worried about that boy at all,” I said. “But he’s an exception.”
    Exceptional. Adaptable. Compassionate. Generous. So intelligent. So quick. So sweet. With such a sense of humor. What did any of our praise mean, but that we’d all fallen in love with him, a bit, and were dazzled? He was eight, just a child of eight like any other, but we all wanted to lay claim to him. We didn’t say these kind things about Eric P., or Darren, or moon-faced Miles, whose dark circles beneath his eyes emanated gloom like some form of permanent mourning. Each child is strong in a different way, 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 soccermatch, 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 onaccount 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