by Kate Gray
“In the class last week I get the Second Formers dropping cones of paper off their desks. You know how that goes. Some fall smooth. Some tumble. Then, we add tiny weights. The cones go crazy. Kids love it. I give them paper and scissors, and they cut cones out of different shapes, like snow cones and pizza pies. Only a few go Conehead on me, wearing them on their heads, talking monotone. Stupid TV.”
“I like where you’re going with that,” Sam says. The Prince. The teacher for all teachers.
“I try to talk unstable equilibrium, but they get too busy winging the cones upside down. So, I ask what it takes for the cones to find their orientation.
“We talk gravitational pull. We talk aerodynamic force. So then I dump a bag of leaves on the lab table. ‘Have at it,’ I say. ‘Make these leaves fall smooth.’ They look at me like I’m stupid.”
“They have a point.” Sam jabs me with his elbow.
“Thanks.” I know he knows what I’m talking about. “Of course they can make a leaf fall. The whole lab turns into a leaf pile, kids dropping leaves on each other, stuffing up shirts. One or two try to get the forces to match.
“‘Tell me about the shape of the leaf,’ I say.
“Three kids talk at once, ‘Pointy,’ ‘irregular,’ ‘skinny.’
“‘Right,’ I say. ‘Edges, ridges, stems. Too many variables.’ Their faces look like a Rubik’s Cube.”
“I love that look,” Sam says.
“But it’s this kid, Kyle, who says, ‘No two leaves are alike.’
“And I say, ‘So?’
“And he says, ‘Density,’ ‘weight,’ ‘surface tension.’ How does he know this stuff? And because he gets it, they get it, that the slightest variation will destabilize the equilibrium = turbulence, and there is no way for scientists to predict how or where a leaf will fall. Smart. He’s the smartest kid I’ve ever seen.”
“But they don’t like it,” Sam says, “where science ends.”
“Hate it.”
“Yeah, everybody wants science to explain every single thing.”
“It can’t.”
“Not now.”
“Not ever.”
On that note, we pay our bills, leave the money on the counter with extra big tips for Nancy. The stack of lab books is on the floor between my stool and the one next to me. I spin around, bend down to pick up the books. When I turn, Sam is standing facing me. Behind him in one of the booths by the windows, I see two kids, maybe six and seven years old. They look at me, and their hands shoot up to their eyes. They tug their eyelids, turn to each other, and smile a fake smile, talk something chink-ish. I hear, “Ahhhh, so.”
When I straighten up, look at Sam, he starts to turn around to look where I’m looking, but the kids pull their hands down, look out the window. What Sam sees is two boys looking out the window.
Slight variation of that picture, great turbulence. What do these boys know of one man Japanese, one man Korean? They see Chinese, Mr. Chan with his bicycle legs, the two of us inside when Kim played in the pool. He made me say literal, slanted, let go, always the Ls. Good men like Sam and Mr. Chan showed me equilibrium.
With so many variables, my mind spins. Equilibrium lost. Without talking to the little white boys, I walk out with Sam, walk out with the fine teacher, the one who helps restore equilibrium by talking teaching, by affirming Kyle is unusual, inyon, gift.
Taylor / White on Black
Sunday after winning the Schuylkill and dancing to Donna Summer and too much cheesesteak was quiet. Papers stacked around my living room kept me indoors. For hours I graded and prepped classes, and no matter how many student reports I read on South Africa, Carla’s body in the doorway returned, her calling a power-ten for Sarah, on the river where Sarah still was. Since the moment I met Carla on the dock when the water and fog were the same thing, Carla was two things at once. Her smile, her curls, the way her words crawled into me, she was the type of cold that wakes your senses, the type of cold that shuts your senses down.
New teacher with three different classes to teach, I arrived most mornings early to my classroom. Monday morning the halls were gray walls and linoleum, but this Monday voices came from Geography. The one talking was soft and curled, and nothing was the other person. Carla was telling that person about her race.
“When she saw Warrenton, Rambo went ballistic. She called tens like crazy.
“‘In two,’ Rambo said, ‘pick it up. Power ten for Buttons. One, two. On this one.’
“What does it feel like? Your legs are already rubber, and you can’t breathe. So then she wants you to pull harder. Like you could. But you do because the others are pulling harder. I felt like puking my guts out. She went down the boat, ten for me, for Crystal, on down. Each ten the boat would go ahead. When we got tired, the boat slammed down to starboard. We dipped at the catch, like lurched. Caught my knuckles. See? Doesn’t hurt much.
“Rambo was like a hornet. She’d see an eight ahead of us, and talk faster, louder, more intense. The way her hands held the wood steering things, she banged them on the sides. Scared the crap out of me.
“Rambo, with the headstrap for the microphone, and the mouthpiece, and the way she leaned into the middle of the boat, she looked like a hornet, a fucking hornet.
“About a half a mile to go, Rambo said, ‘Okay, Saints, there’s the boat we’ve been training for.’
“Then, she didn’t say anything else. The oars turning in the oarlocks were boom, boom, boom.
“‘Warrenton is a few boat lengths ahead. We can take them.’ She talked soft to us.
“‘Let’s do it, Saints. You’re at a thirty-one. Take the rating up two in two. One, two. On this one.’ She shouted big. And in two strokes, all of us moved quicker up the slides. We gave her two in two.
“‘We’re gaining,’ she screamed. She could smell them. She wanted that boat. She had already called a ten for bow.
“‘One more ten,’ I said. Seven seat isn’t supposed to say anything. But I did anyway.
“‘For Sarah,’ I said. It came out loud. Rambo’s eyes like stingers. Ms. Alta never said Sarah’s name out loud, but we read the papers. We knew. That’s when Rambo really looked like a big hornet, like she had a triangle of eyes between her eyes.
“‘We’re taking a ten,’ she said, ‘for Sarah. In two. One, two. On this one.’
“And I swear to God, the boat lifted out of the water. It rose up out of the water and took off. We blew through Warrenton. We won.
“You should have seen it, Kyle. We fucking won. Rowing is awesome, something worth living for, you know? That and our geese, you know?”
Kyle and Carla. In the whole school, in all the classes, these two were a perfect match. Carla the confessor, Kyle the high priest. Perfect.
The light in the classroom was gray. A map of Africa was chalk on the board. No maps pulled down from the rolls of maps. The map drawn on the chalkboard was white on dark, shaped like an ice cream cone. Under the table where I usually sit at the front of the class there were cardboard shoe boxes, jewelry boxes, cereal boxes. There were plastic bags and paper bags, and papers pooled around the chair. Carla and Kyle slumped in chairs, the room was more campground than classroom.
“Hi, you two,” I said.
Kyle jumped. Gray sweatshirt and sweatpants, his hair greasy and stuck to his head, he turned a circle, picked up books and papers, ran one hand through that hair.
“Gotta go,” he said. “Shower, shave.”
“Relax, Kyle,” Carla said. “It’s just Ms. Alta.” Carla rested her chin on her fist, her elbow on the table. She waved at me with her other hand, half the hand, up, down, like a puppet.
“Will-report-for-duty-at-designated-time. Zip. Ping!” He picked up more papers and stuffed his arms. At full speed, he was a stuffed bookbag-missile aimed right for me. I side-stepped the missile. Class wasn’t for another fifteen minutes.
“What was that?”
“A little-little,” Carla said. “He’s terrific, a
ll gray. That’s the only way to go. He sees everything, and nobody sees him. A gray moth. You know, darker moths survive in cities better because they blend in with soot on things. He’s perfect for this place.”
“Because no one sees him?”
“Because he can hide.”
“He sure sticks out.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Carla said. She crossed her arms. We kept our distance.
“Meaning?”
“He calls so much attention to himself no one notices. Other times, he’s so gray he blends in. Awesome.”
“But you see him,” I said. The desk where I placed my bookbag was not at the front of the room. Kyle was camped there. My bookbag filled one of the three or four seats between Carla and me.
“Yeah, I know where to look.”
“How?”
“My dad taught me.”
“I thought your dad was an art dealer,” I said and took a seat at the end of the row where Carla and Kyle sat, where Carla still sat.
“Art dealer, peach farmer, #1 asshole,” she said.
“Right, you learned bugs from hunting them in the orchards.”
“Yup.”
“You liked what he hated.”
“Apparently,” she said. “Don’t go all Freud on me.”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot to bring my couch.”
“You teachers are all alike.” Carla was back in the classroom. Her words were curled.
“Like how?”
“You and Song, always wanting to get us to talk about things.”
“You talk much to Mr. Song?”
What Kyle had suggested couldn’t possibly be true. Since talking to him in the cornfield, something in me pointed toward something more between them. The way that Jack protected me at dinner, keeping the conversation on his end of the table, the way that he was gruff with students, formal and stiff, pointed toward empathy for underdogs. And wanting to know if there was more between them made me coarse. I wanted to know for the pleasure of knowing. I wanted to be on the inside of knowing.
“Not much. He’s an ass.” Carla looked at the blackboard.
“Watch it.”
“Sorry. He’s not my cup of tea.” She batted her eyes at me. The way she was dismissing him was as good as admitting it. The information tasted like butter on my tongue.
Footsteps in the hall were heavy. Not Second Formers. Maybe teachers on the way to class. Then, Kyle crashed into the classroom. A maroon hood was pulled up over his greasy hair. His chin holding in the binders and papers that stretched his arms full, Kyle bent over the table where Carla and I sat, and dumped the load. Hands free, he pushed back his hood, hopped up and down, grabbed his neck with his hands, pretended to strangle himself, and fell on the floor. His cheek on the carpet, his tongue stuck out. The tie was to the side, the knot pulled too tight. The eyes closed, the mouth open, and the tongue out.
Maybe teachers with experience could tell me what to do. The Second Formers, all sixteen of them, saw Kyle hang himself, jump off stairs, take falls, more than once a day. What to do was something I was supposed to know.
I walked to the side of the room and flipped on the bright fluorescent lights. “Hey, Kyle.”
His eyes didn’t move. His tongue still out.
“Kyle, you want to do your presentation today, right?”
Carla stood up, stepped over Kyle, and said, “Good luck, punk.” She walked out with a backhanded wave.
“Thanks,” he said. His head jerked up and slammed into the bottom of the table. He ricocheted back down on the carpet. He was out.
“Ouch,” he said.
“Easy, Kyle, how long have you been here?”
“All night.”
“You know we’re doing Vietnam today?”
He sat up without hitting the table. “But I didn’t give my presentation,” he said. “I have to give my presentation. Everyone has to know.” His tie was still cocked to the side. He spun around on the floor to face me.
“Know what?”
“Uranium,” he said. The word came out low and soft and raw.
I took a couple of steps toward him. “What about it?”
“It’s the whole reason.” His eyes were possum eyes.
“For what?”
“For killing, for apartheid, for everything.” His hands flew out from under the table and made big arcs in the air above his head. They stretched out in a Y.
I dropped into a seat at a student’s table. “Because of the bomb.”
“Duh,” he said, “kids today.” His hand hit his forehead. He shook his head. A smile was big and fast, a possum smile, then gone. Leaning forward on all fours, he picked himself off the floor, and took the seat at the front of the class.
The fluorescent lights made a hum overhead, and students rushing to class were a racket in the hall. Sitting in the second row of wooden desks, I faced Kyle. A little animal at the front of the class, his feet barely touched the floor, the floor covered with his stuff.
“Okay,” I said, “we’ll go back to South Africa for today, and then return to Vietnam.” I leaned back in the student desk.
“Thanks, Miss Alta,” Kyle said.
Maggie and Tommy came in from the hall.
“Zippo’s the teacher,” Tommy said. He slid his backpack off his shoulder and dragged it on the ground.
Maggie stood inside the door. “Kyle,” she said, “what are you doing?”
“Teaching,” he said. He brought his tie to the middle. He cupped his chin with one hand and he pointed into the air with the other hand. The Thinker with grease for hair.
“Hey, Kyle,” Tommy said, “how many teachers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Dragging his book bag, Tommy pushed every desk out of the way to get to his usual seat.
My shoulders twisted around toward Tommy. “Oh, hello,” I said.
Tommy’s face was a puppet with strings. His jaw untied. “Oh, Miss Alta,” he said, “nice to see you.”
“Two,” Kyle said, “One to do it, and one to write the quiz about it.” His hands moved fast, a quick clap for himself.
“Yeah,” Maggie said, “that was funny.” Maggie knew something was different about Kyle, and she talked to him like he was a hurt bird.
The rest of the students walked in from the hall. All wore the jackets and slacks required in the dress code. All wore them a different way. Some ties were hanging loose from collars. Some skirts were rolled up at the waist and hung more than one inch above the kneecap. Few Second Formers really combed their hair, except Terence Franklin.
Terence stopped at the door. His hair was closely cut, and his part was distinct. The knot in his tie was just the right thickness, the stripes landing just right. His shirt was pressed. He had a stack of books under his left arm.
“This is going to be good,” he said.
“As you have noticed,” I said, “Kyle is ready to do his presentation.”
“About time,” David said.
“Oh, great, back to South Africa,” Tommy said.
Kyle brought out a sheet of black cloth and spread it like he was making a bed, unfolding the sheet and floating it down on the empty tabletop. Then, he reached under the table and brought out shoe boxes, cereal boxes, and gift boxes. With dirty fingernails he peeled off tape holding the boxes together. Each box opened up, and stuck to the inside were smaller shapes. He lifted each side as if he were lifting a kitten. The Second Formers moved left or right to get a better look.
Inside each box Kyle had built a scene. Inside the biggest box, he had made skyscrapers and streets, street lights and cars. We could smell the rubber cement. Inside shoe boxes, he had cutouts and painted shadows and plastic trees. With each box he opened, he laid out a world.
Jimmy said, “I want to see.”
Maggie said, “Miss Alta, can we come up?”
“Let him finish,” I said.
Even the smallest box opened up. One had a shack, a miniature of the houses in the shanty towns, complete with t
in roofs. Another was a miniature lake where uranium was leached, with the logo of Nufcor on a shack on its shore.
“It’s your show, Kyle,” I said. “Want people to come up?” I got out of the table in the second row, and pulled a chair to the side of the room.
Kyle tugged the hair on the back of his head. It was already sticking up. He pulled a wad of papers out of his sweatshirt pouch. They had the rough edges of notebook paper torn out.
“I have to tell you a story first,” he said.
Almost all the students had read their reports to the class without looking up. Few had props, and none had boxes that folded out into cities. They read facts and figures easily copied from encyclopedias that Herbert the librarian had brought them. Kyle unrolled the lined paper, tried to smooth it open with his hand.
“Once upon a time,” Kyle said, “there lived a little boy in South Africa. His name was Mukutu.” Kyle looked at David with his thick glasses. Then, Kyle looked at Tommy.
“He grew up in a township called Soweto with his five brothers and three sisters, his mother, but his father lived in a different place because he worked in a mine.” He sat at the table behind his boxes laid out and looked down on his papers only a few times. His feet swung from the chair.
Kyle described the shanty town in which the family lived, told of the food, the water, the work. As he told Mukutu’s story, without his metallic voice, without his weird noises, the other students quit looking at each other. They threw no paper balls.
The room was loud like it was when we sang the songs of the African National Congress, but no one was singing. Our room, usually stuffed with sock smell, became dry as a gourd and scented with palm oil. Our room was Kyle’s world.
At times in the story, Kyle pointed to one of his boxes. The students leaned to see. His eyes were not animal. His eyes were round and thirteen. He was the center.
Even David said, “Awesome,” when Kyle pointed to the box that looked like a lake.
“Uranium,” Kyle said, “makes South Africa one of the most important countries in the world.” That word, soft and raw, started his speech speeding up. He described the way uranium was discovered in rich slurries of gold mining in the Transvaal. He told how the oil shortage led them to develop the first uranium mine, called Beisa, how the ore was milled, cut with chemicals and turned into lakes, dried out, and then, the enrichment was needed to convert the forms of uranium into fuel, the fission process needed for bombs. Kyle described a nuclear warhead, what it weighs, how big it is, what it takes to blow one up. All of it made his cheeks red.