“You mean she just sits and looks at nothing?” Alpha’s voice grated into her questioning tone.
“Well, I can’t see anything,” I admitted. “But apparently she can.”
“But that’s having hallucinations!” Her voice went up a notch. “I read a book once—”
“Yes.” Marlene leaned across the desk to flick ashes in the ash tray. “So we have heard and heard and heard!”
“Well!” sniffed Alpha. “It’s better than never reading a book.”
“We’re waiting,” Marlene leaked smoke from her nostrils, “for the day when you read another book. This one must have been uncommonly long.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Alpha’s forehead wrinkled with concentration. “It was only about—” Then she reddened and turned her face angrily away from Marlene.
“Apropos of our discussion—” she said pointedly. “It sounds to me like that child has a deep personality disturbance. Maybe even a psychotic—whatever—” Her eyes glistened faintly as she turned the thought over.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, surprised into echoing her words at my sudden need to defend Sue-lynn. “There’s something about her. She doesn’t have that apprehensive, hunched-shoulder, don’t-hit-me-again air about her that so many withdrawn children have.” And I thought achingly of one of mine from last year that Alpha had now and was verbally bludgeoning back into silence after all my work with him. “She seems to have a happy, adjusted personality, only with this odd little—plus.”
“Well, I’d be worried if she were mine,” said Alpha. “I’m glad all my kids are so normal.” She sighed complacently. “I guess I really haven’t anything to kick about. I seldom ever have problem children except wigglers and yakkers, and a holler and a smack can straighten them out”
Marlene caught my eye mockingly, tallying Alpha’s class with me, and I turned away with a sigh. To be so happy— well, I suppose ignorance does help.
“You’d better do something about that girl,” Alpha shrilled as she left the room. “She’ll probably get worse and worse as time goes on. Deteriorating, I think the book said.”
I had known Alpha a long time and I thought I knew how much of her talk to discount, but I began to worry about Sue-lynn. Maybe this was a disturbance that was more fundamental than the usual run of the mill that I had met up with. Maybe a child can smile a soft, contented smile and still have little maggots of madness flourishing somewhere inside.
Or, by gorry! I said to myself defiantly, maybe she does have an Anything Box. Maybe she is looking at something precious. Who am I to say no to anything like that?
An Anything Box! What could you see in an Anything Box? Heart’s desire? I felt my own heart lurch—just a little—the next time Sue-lynn’s hands curved. I breathed deeply to hold me in my chair. If it was her Anything Box, I wouldn’t be able to see my heart’s desire in it. Or would I? I propped my cheek up on my hand and doodled aimlessly on my time schedule sheet. How on earth, I wondered—not for the first time—do I manage to get myself off on these tangents?
Then I felt a small presence at my elbow and turned to meet Sue-lynn’s wide eyes.
“Teacher?” The word was hardly more than a breath.
“Yes?” I could tell that for some reason Sue-lynn was loving me dearly at the moment. Maybe because her group had gone into new books that morning. Maybe because I had noticed her new dress, the ruffles of which made her feel very feminine and lovable, or maybe just because the late autumn sun lay so golden across her desk. Anyway, she was loving me to overflowing, and since, unlike most of the children, she had no casual hugs or easy moist kisses, she was bringing her love to me in her encompassing hands.
“See my box, Teacher? It’s my Anything Box.”
“Oh, my!” I said. “May I hold it?”
After all, I have held—tenderly or apprehensively or bravely—tiger magic, live rattlesnakes, dragon’s teeth, poor little dead butterflies and two ears and a nose that dropped off Sojie one cold morning—none of which I could see any more than I could the Anything Box. But I took the squareness from her carefully, my tenderness showing in my fingers and my face.
And I received weight and substance and actuality!
Almost I let it slip out of my surprised fingers, but Sue-lynn’s apprehensive breath helped me catch it and I curved my fingers around the precious warmness and looked down, down, past a faint shimmering, down into Sue-lynn’s Anything Box.
I was running barefoot through the whispering grass. The swirl of my skirts caught the daisies as I rounded the gnarled apple tree at the corner. The warm wind lay along each of my cheeks and chuckled in my ears. My heart outstripped my flying feet and melted with a rush of delight into warmness as his arms—
I closed my eyes and swallowed hard, my palms tight against the Anything Box. “It’s beautiful!” I whispered. “It’s wonderful, Sue-lynn. Where did you get it?”
Her hands took it back hastily. “It’s mine,” she said defiantly. “It’s mine.”
“Of course,” I said. “Be careful now. Don’t drop it.”
She smiled faintly as she sketched a motion to her pocket. “I won’t.” She patted the flat pocket on her way back to her seat.
Next day she was afraid to look at me at first for fear I might say something or look something or in some way remind her of what must seem like a betrayal to her now, but after I only smiled my usual smile, with no added secret knowledge, she relaxed.
A night or so later when I leaned over my moon-drenched window sill and let the shadow of my hair hide my face from such ebullient glory, I remembered the Anything Box. Could I make one for myself? Could I square off this aching waiting, this outreaching, this silent cry inside me, and make it into an Anything Box? I freed my hands and brought them together, thumb to thumb, framing a part of the horizon’s darkness between my upright forefingers. I stared into the empty square until my eyes watered. I sighed, and laughed a little, and let my hands frame my face as I leaned out into the night. To have magic so near—to feel it tingle off my fingertips and then to be so bound that I couldn’t receive it. I turned away from the window—turning my back on brightness.
It wasn’t long after this that Alpha succeeded in putting sharp points of worry back in my thoughts of Sue-lynn. We had ground duty together, and one morning when we shivered while the kids ran themselves rosy in the crisp air, she sizzed in my ear.
“Which one is it? The abnormal one, I mean.”
“I don’t have any abnormal children,” I said, my voice sharpening before the sentence ended because I suddenly realized whom she meant.
“Well, I call it abnormal to stare at nothing.” You could almost taste the acid in her words. “Who is it?”
“Sue-lynn,” I said reluctantly. “She’s playing on the bars now.”
Alpha surveyed the upside-down Sue-lynn whose brief skirts were belled down from her bare pink legs and half covered her face as she swung from one of the bars by her knees. Alpha clutched her wizened, blue hands together and breathed on them. “She looks normal enough,” she said.
“She is normal!” I snapped.
“Well, bite my head off!” cried Alpha. “You’re the one that said she wasn’t, not me—or is it ‘not I’? I never could remember. Not me? Not I?”
The bell saved Alpha from a horrible end. I never knew a person so serenely unaware of essentials and so sensitive to trivia.