Holding Wonder

"Okay. Let's go over these words first." So it was that my principal, little dried-up Mr. Grively, brisk, efficient and utterly at sea when it came to the primary age levels, bounced into my room and found me briskly flashing word cards and giving phonetic cues to a reading circle of empty first grade chairs. For a moment he seemed to visualize the vine-covered bars too, then he smiled into my embarrassed confusion.
"Preparing your lessons for tomorrow, I see!" He beamed. "How I wish all of my teachers were as conscientious!" And he bounced out again.
Loo Ree and I laughed together before we went back to our words, come oh, Mother-
Whatever Loo Ree was-it wasn't stupid. Before I went home at four thirty, she had mastered the words for the three pre-primers and I left her vocalizing in the shadowy class room, the pages of the open little blue book, third of the series, fluttering to
Mother said, "Come, come. Come and help me work."
In the weeks that followed Loo Ree finished, either by herself or to me, every reader and supplementary reader in my book closet. Then she went on up through the grades, absorbing like a blotter, everything in all the available books. She reported to me each afternoon and I worked up quite a reputation among my fellow workers for staying at school after I was free to go home. They couldn't decide whether I was overconscientious, incompetent or crazy. In fact, I began to wonder, myself.
It was several weeks later that I suddenly noticed that all was not well with Marsha. I was conducting the last vocabulary review for Group I before giving them their new books when it dawned on me that Marsha wasn't in Group I any more. I ran my finger down my reading group schedule and there was Marsha-in Group V! I counted rapidly backwards through the past days and realized with a shamed sinking feeling that Marsha hadn't progressed an inch beyond where she was when I first talked with Loo Ree. And I hadn't even noticed! That was the shameful part. So after Group I returned to their seats, clutching joyfully their new blue books, I sat and looked at Marsha. She was looking across the aisle at Stacy's new book, her face so forlorn that I could have cried.
Group V came up for reading after lunch and Marsha sat there apathetically with Bobby, sniffing with his perpetual cold, and 'Naldo, who 'don't got mock Eenglich, Teesher' and Clyde, whose parents most obviously had lied him a year older than he was to get him into school sooner. She parroted the first pre-primer words only after the others gleefully prompted her and she didn't even care when she called Dick, Mother and Spot, Puff.
I kept her at my desk when the others went to their seats. I put my arm around her and hugged her to me.
"What's the matter, Marsha! You aren't learning your words." She twisted out of my arm and looked blankly out of the window.
"I don't care."
"But the children are all getting ahead of you. You don't even have your red book yet."
"I don't care."
"Oh, Marsha!" I reached for her but she avoided me. "You wanted to learn to reach so much. You and Loo Ree-"
Marsha's mouth quivered, "Loo Ree-I don't like Loo Ree any more."
"Why?"
"Just 'cause. She doesn't like me. She won't play with me any more."
"I'm sorry, Marsha, but that's no reason for you not to learn your words."
Marsha's wet eyes blazed at me. "You showed Loo Ree how first! Loo Ree can read already. And you didn't show me!"
Oh lordy, I thought, shame to me. And that Loo Ree. This is all her fault.
I took Marsha's hands firmly to hold her attention.
"Listen, honey-one. You remember, you told the children that Loo Ree was someone special? Well, she is. She is so special that she learned to read much faster than the other children, but they're trying and you're not. Do you want to make Loo Ree ashamed of you?"
She hung her head "I don't care. She likes you better anyway."
"Even if that were so, Marsha-and I don't think it is-what about your mother and father? Were they pleased when Bob took home his book and you didn't?"
"No." Her voice was very small.
"Well, you know," I said enthusiastically, "you could get your little red book tomorrow, if you knew your words, and then you could go as fast as you could, all by yourself, and maybe catch up with Bob and Stacy pretty soon. You'd like that, wouldn't you?"
Marsha's face brightened, "Uh huh!"
"Of course you would. Here, let's see how many more words you have to learn."
Marsha sat down on the little chair and, taking a deep breath, read every flashed word in the first bunch of cards without error.
"Why, Marsha!" I cried, my aching conscience easing a little. "Of course you're ready for the little red book." And after we rejoiced together and wrote her name neatly inside the cover, Marsha sailed proudly back to her seat, both hands clutching the thin, paperbacked little red book.
The next afternoon when Loo Ree came to me with a tool catalog she had found in the janitor's supply closet, asking for explanation of things as foreign to me as the azimuth of the subdeclension if there is such a thing, I exploded. "Foof to this whole deal!" I flung down a piece of chalk so hard that it bounced. "I think I'm just plain nuts, staying after school like this when I'm sagging with exhaustion, and for why? To talk to myself and wave my arms around at nothing. And it's your fault I'm neglecting my kids-and poor Marsha! You should be ashamed of yourself, dropping the poor baby like that and breaking her heart! Well, goodbye, whatever you are, if you are anything! I'm going home!"
"But, teacher, please!"
"Please, nothing. End of the line. All out." And I slammed the door so hard that the glass quivered. I drove home, defiantly running a boulevard stop at Argent Avenue and getting a ticket for it.
That night I got a telephone call from Marsha's mother. She wanted to know if Marsha had got into trouble at school.
"Why no," I said. "Marsha hasn't been very happy but she's one of my best behaved children. I've been a little worried about her reading but she got her book today. Why?"
"Well," her mother hesitated. "You do know about Loo Ree, don't you?"
"Yes, I do," I replied, maybe a little heatedly.
"Well, a while back, Marsha said Loo Ree was too busy to play with her much any more. I was relieved, because-well-" She laughed awkwardly. "Any way, she hardly ever mentioned her again, except when she was very unhappy, but tonight she told me Loo Ree was back and Marsha's spent the whole evening reading to her out of her new book." Again the embarrassed laugh. "You'd almost swear Loo Ree was prompting her. Everything's been all right here at home, so I wondered if at school-'
"Why no, Mrs. Kendall. Marsha's doing fine now." After some more usual teacher-parent chitchat, I hung up.
I don't know whether it was my conscience or Loo Ree that sat heavy on my chest all night and read choice selections from A Survey of Hiroshima, Dante's Divine Comedy and Ostermeir's Morbid Pathology, all complete with technicolor
illustrations. Anyway, next afternoon I was sitting behind my desk again, propping my heavy head up on one hand while Loo Ree read from The Koran to me. She had unearthed it in a pile of books contributed to the last library drive at school.
So time went on and Marsha didn't mention Loo Ree again. I could tell she was still unhappy and felt left out and she too often moped by herself on the playground instead of leading the games as she used to. I was worried bout her but I couldn't set my mind to her problem while the lessons with Loo Ree went on and on, sandwiched between Christmas program rehearsals, a combination that left me dragged out and practically comatose when the week before Christmas vacations arrived.