Somebody Else’s Kids (20 page)

At last the box was stowed and they reluctantly joined us. I gave Tom his work folder. Lori took the sandpaper alphabet. A moment’s silence reigned while everyone considered the work to be done. Then Tomaso glanced sideways at Lori.

“Did you really get that for me?” he whispered. “Did you get it for me?”

Lori nodded without looking up.

“Because you wanted to buy me a present,
sí?
” There was a soft emphasis on the word “wanted.”

As I looked over at them, I smiled. A feeble expression for the deep, bittersweet emotion brought up in me. These terrible small tragedies always hurt my heart. They always did.

The hour and a half until recess was a pocket-size eternity. Lori kept watching the clock, nudging Tomaso or Claudia for the time, since she could not tell it. Tomaso’s glances were no less numerous, although he was less obvious. I even caught Claudia at it. Only Boo was oblivious. As usual.

Finally two o’clock arrived. I had an aide from the office take the kids out to recess while I cut cake, put out napkins and poured orange juice. Last of all I set the package wrapped in circus animals with its twenty-nine-cent bow right in the center of the table.

In they came. Wildly. Tomaso whooped, swung from the door lintel, leaped over a desk. Boo flew in, airplane-style, arms out, whirring loudly. Someone must have communicated to him during recess because he was definitely in a party mood now. Lori was singing. Only Claudia entered in a manner that I as a teacher could consider even close to appropriate, an expression of forbearance on her face.

“My present! Open my present first!” Lori shouted.

“Here.” I was handing out orange juice as they tore by. “Boo, no! No, no!” He was holding his cake above his head.

“Open my present, Tom!”

“Torey, Boo’s putting cake in his hair.”

“Lori, look out, for pity’s sake, would you? Sheesh. You almost stepped on me.”

“Help! Help me, somebody! Somebody? I’m gonna drop my orange juice.”

“Boo, would you
please
sit down? Don’t put that in your ear. Claudia? Lori? Would you get that cake out of his ear? Boo!”

“Lookit, I got a flower on my cake.”

“Hey? How come I didn’t get no flower? Torey? I want a flower too.”

“Boo!”

Chaos. “Okay, everybody. I’m going to count five. When I finish, everybody better be sitting on the floor with their food in front of them. Got it? One …”

A quick shuffle of chairs and feet.

“Two.”

“Tom, here. Quick. Sit by me.”

“Three.”

“Boo. Boo, sit down. Boo!”

“Four.”

“Stoppit! Quit shoving, Lor. Sit down, would you? We’re gonna get in trouble and it’ll be your fault.”

“Four and a half.”

Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.

“Five.”

Four bright angelic faces looking up at me. Tomaso and Claudia had Boo squashed down between them. Frosting still clung to his black curls, but he and everybody else sat.

“There. That’s better,” I said. “My goodness, you were acting like a bunch of savages. Now let’s sit and finish our cake and juice. Like civilized human beings. Okay?”

Three nods. Boo was slurping his drink.

There is nothing that quite equals the conversations of children while eating.

“I like this cake, Torey,” Tom said. “What kind is it?”

“Chocolate.”

“Oh yeah. I was trying to remember that name. It was on the tip of my tongue.”

This struck Lori as hilarious and she choked over her juice. Meantime, Claudia lifted her plate up. “I like the way chocolate smells.” Of course, everybody had to lift his or her piece of cake up for a good whiff. Even Boo tried when he saw the others.

“Boy, it sure does smell good,” said Tomaso taking a deep snort. “I could just sniff it right up my nose, it smells so good.”

Lori was up on her knees with excitement. “Guess what? Guess what I know? You’re attached back there.”

We all looked at her in puzzlement.

“Back there.” She opened her mouth wide and pointed. “Your nose and your mouth are attached back there. You know how I know?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Well once my sister Libby, well, we had beans for supper and then she went upstairs and threw up. She got sick in the sink and you know what? She threw up beans through her nose.”

“Lori!”
My teacher voice.

“She did, Torey. I’m not lying or nothing. I was there. I seen her. I was standing right in the bathroom with her when she did it and beans came out her nose. So you must be attached back there.”

“I didn’t think you
were
lying, Lori. It’s the topic …

“Well, you know what my grandfather does?” Claudia puts in. “He gargles up his nose with salt water.”

This cracked everybody up. I cut my cake in half and gave part of it to Tomaso who was sitting next to me. The conversation never did get any better.

Then came the big moment. Lori ceremoniously took the yellow-wrapped package from the table and brought it to Tomaso, seated on the floor. “Here,” she said, her voice hoarse with pleasure. She set the box down.

Tomaso sat a moment and simply stared at it. Then carefully, cautiously, he began to loosen the ribbon. With just one hand he worked and so delicately, as if the box at any moment might disappear.
“Leones,
” I could hear him whisper to himself, “
Leones y monos. Para meh
.” The words were so soft as to be no more than a breath. “
Para meh
.”

The yellow circus paper fell away to reveal an appliance box. Lori’s excitement was getting the better of her. She had one braid stuffed between her teeth and she was up on her feet bouncing, legs crossed. Coming back to where I sat on a small chair behind them, she gripped my knee with one hand. Hippety-hop from one foot to the other. Every few moments she would turn to pass her excitement on to me.

The box was well taped. Tomaso was having difficulty breaking through. His own excitement had grown and he was at the box with both hands now. But his fervor was making him clumsy.

“You want a pair of scissors, Tom?” I asked.

“No.” He pulled at the box top. Lori had used strapping tape to hold it down. A few more grunts of exertion. “Well, yeah, I guess I do, Tor. I can’t get it.”

“I’ll get ’em, I’ll get ’em!” Lori cried and ran for our scissors rack on the window ledge.

“No, wait, Lor. Those won’t be sharp enough to cut that tape.” I went to my desk and found the long, pointed shears that I kept but seldom used around the kids. “Here, Tom, use these. They should do the trick.”

“Yeah!” he cried approvingly and snipped away the binding of the box.

With religious care he opened the lid. Up came a wad of tissue paper. Lori was hopping against me again. Then he reached in and pulled the present out.

A teddy bear. It was brown and fuzzy, wearing a darker brown T-shirt. Not too big, not too small.

Tomaso held the bear a little way away from his body and stared at it. Lori erupted into joyous hooting. Claudia smiled at me. Tomaso, apparently stunned beyond words, simply sat. Soundless. Motionless.

“Well, do you like it?” Lori asked. “I boughted it with my own money. My daddy didn’t help me even one little bit and it cost $10.98. I’ve been saving clear since January and I even had to use some of my Christmas money that Auntie Gert gave me. But I knew you didn’t have no bear, Tom. I didn’t mind.”

Tomaso exploded.

Up on his feet, wrapping paper and tissue going in every direction. “What a dumb gift! What the hell you think I would do with that? What do you think I am? Some goddamn baby?” He was shouting. “What a shitty present! You’re as stupid in everything else you do as you are in reading. No wonder they got you in this fucking idiot’s class. You don’t know nothing!”

Stricken, Lori’s shoulders sagged, her mouth turned down. Tears bubbled up and flowed rapidly down her cheeks. She let out a long, low howl.

I was up and after Tomaso but I was not fast enough. He had caught me offguard.

“Here, let me show you what I think of your stinking present!” Tomaso yelled. He grabbed the shears. With one deft movement he plunged them into the bear’s belly and disgorged a wad of foam. The bear fell disemboweled to the floor. The shears crashed after it. Tomaso tore off around the room in hysteria, screaming and cursing. Lori wailed.

“Tomaso,
stop
!” I sprinted over the worktable in one jump and cornered him momentarily between the window and a low bookcase. Then up he went over the bookcase and on the run. Terrified that he would get out of the room in this condition, I bolted back over the worktable again and ran for the door.

Tomaso took that moment to gain the advantage. He had not been as incoherent as I had thought. Taking a small chair he swung it hard against my shin. The whack of wood and bone hitting one another resounded in my ears. Clutching my leg in pain, I fell against the door.

When I straightened up, Tomaso was holding the shears within inches of my stomach.

Silence. Abrupt ear-splitting silence. Lori even stopped crying.

“You don’t tell me what to do,” he said. His voice was low and hoarse. “I’m sick of listening to you, you goddamn bitch. You just shut up or I’ll run this thing right through your gut.”

He would. As I eased myself up to my feet, my back flat against the door, I warily regarded the scissors between us. I knew he would do it if necessity required it. His eyes left no doubt in my mind about that.

He moved the shears closer to my shirt. A mere fraction of an inch was between the point and the cloth.

Still the unearthly silence.

I took deep breaths and let them out slowly to force myself to relax. The pain in my leg still echoed inside my head and I could not dispel it. The air around us smelled heavily of birthday cake and orange juice and fear. I could not tell whose fear it was I smelled, his or mine. Claudia, Lori and Boo stood transfixed.

“You goddamn fucking bitch. You bitch,” he said again. Still the hoarse, low voice, but there was another emotion under it which I could not read.

The silence.

My heart was pounding in my ears. This type of occurrence was an occupational hazard for me. I worked too close to violence not to experience it myself occasionally. The acceptance of that fact left my head clearer; however, it did not necessarily lessen my fear. Sweat had soaked under my arms and along the back of my shirt where it pressed against the glass of the door. Now I felt it trickling down between my breasts.
Don’t do this to me. Come on, Tom, don’t. Please don’t
. Yet all around me was the silence.

We were watching one another. The scissors in his hand gave him the confidence to look me straight in the eye. Such a beautiful kid. Even now, and no matter how inappropriate the thought, that was what I was thinking, a thought more powerful than my fear.

We waited. Eye to eye in the silence.

I wished someone out in the hallway would notice me, my back to the door, and stop in the room to help. Then as soon as that wish materialized, I feared the consequences if it came true. Time alone was my best ally. If only I could outwait him without inciting him, if only I could hold out myself until his emotions ran down, that would be better. Should an outsider come upon us now, things might easily become worse than they already were. Tomaso might spook or be egged into doing something I hoped I could keep him from doing. Still, I felt so alone there on the wrong side of those scissors. And God knows how afraid I was.

The minutes edged by. One by one.

“Tomaso,” I whispered, “you don’t want to do this.”

“Shut up.”

“Come on, Tom. You don’t want to hurt anybody.”

“You goddamn bitch,
shut up!
You’re always telling me what to do! You’re always making me feel things I don’t want to feel. I’m tired of it. I’m not your property.” After the silence his voice knifed across the room. “I’m tired of it! You make too much noise. It hurts my ears. You, especially. You make my ears hurt.”

Suddenly the corners of his mouth pulled down, his chin quivered. Bringing his free hand up, he wiped his eyes on the cuff of his shirt.

“I hate you. It’s all your fault,” he cried.

“My fault?”

“And her fault.” He gestured toward Lori.

“It’s our fault that you’re so angry?” I said.

“I’m
not
angry! Why do you always say that for? How many goddamn times do I have to tell you? I’m not angry!”

“Oh. I see. You’re not angry.”

“No.” The tears were beginning to trickle down his cheeks and he brushed at them roughly. “I’m just unhappy.” A small sob convulsed his body. I took that opportunity to move slightly. Tomaso interpreted the move as hostile and jammed the scissors up against my diaphragm. I froze.

“Don’t you dare move.”

“Okay.”

I looked beyond him to the clock. I felt like I had spent half my life on the wrong side of those shears. In fact, we had only been in from recess half an hour. I sucked my stomach in and pressed even more tightly against the door to ease the point of the scissors out of my skin.