in the Nola book and he read it from beginning to end. She made him read another, and another, her brow puckering more and more each time he did. It was the same with the large girl in socks and shoes.
Most of the other children wore their bare feet or cheap sneakers; we called them puss boot, softly, softly, walk softly, nobody can hear you coming. These sneakers made a noise only when it rained and children wearing them gleefully plunged their feet in the culverts and temporary waterfalls. They could hear their feet go squish, squish, squiddish as the water worked its way out through the tops and sides of the sneakers. This was what Moshe wore, puss boot, but also socks, unlike most of the other puss boot wearers, who had no socks. The large girl, she was very large, wore real shoes and socks, and her uniform pleats seemed sharper than everyone else's, as if they had been cut out with a blade before being starched and ironed. He felt in a vague sort of way that she was rich, though he was not quite sure what rich was.
He read for the teacher, three different Nola books, each the reading book for a higher grade. The large girl did the same. Most of the other children knew their phonics and their ABCs, a few could read several words of the first book, or use their phonics to spell out some words, but only he and the large girl were able to read everything. She read like someone talking, so that the words in the books sounded real. "Stay, mother, stay. You cannot go. You must stay at home with Baby Bob." He had never heard anyone read like that before. He, on the other hand, read as if he were singing, because the words seemed to him like the sound of his mother chanting psalms. He nodded his head to the rhythm of his reading. "This is Nola. This is Mother. This is Father. This is Baby Bob. This is Baby Bob, Baby Bob, baby," improvising repetitions that were not in the book.
"You two are way ahead of A class," the beginners' class, the teacher said, and called Man-Teacher's wife, who was teaching across the room, behind the first partition. Man-Teacher's wife came and together she and the A class teacher listened to the rest of their reading, his and the large girl's. Man-Teacher's wife said something short, sharp, and brisk to their teacher, who made them get up from their benches and, taking them by their hands, one in each of hers, led them past the partition where Man-Teacher's wife taught the B class, the second graders, straight over to the second partition to where a slight, slender man with a small waist taught the First class, the third graders.
Their teacher spoke to the slender-waisted man-teacher, and he moved three children who were sitting at a desk in the front to a desk near the back, and made Moshe and the large girl sit there together instead. No third child was put beside them, although the benches were made for three.
He missed his teacher, even after so short a time. She was beautiful, like his mother, and though she was stern she was kind. He did not know how this man-teacher would be.
The man-teacher did not teach as well as Miss Yvette. He beat a lot more, when the children made noise. Miss Yvette did not beat at all. The man-teacher did not beat Moshe or the large girl. They both found the lessons easy, and finished all their work on time, and did not speak. Whenever he came around to inspect what the children were doing in their exercise books, he halted by their desk, Moshe and the large girl's, with a strange hesitancy, his beating strap hung up relaxed around his shoulder, and smiled and passed on without saying anything. He took away their slates, and gave them free issue exercise books and a lead pencil each, to write with. Only children in the A class wrote on slates. Children in the B class used exercise books with small lines. In the First class they graduated to regular exercise books with big lines. The exercise books the man-teacher gave Moshe and the large girl on their first day had small lines. In-between lines, Moshe thought to himself.
He found that he loved school, and was afraid of it. The vast concatenation into which the noise of children learning resolved itself, like a soup into which many ingredients had fallen, was to him like a rumor from another world. Sometimes it was the clamor of a great town awake in the morning and sleepless at midnight. But sometimes again it came like the chorus of an everlasting hymn that, spilling out across the open doorways and partitions and what seemed to him the endless schoolyard, melded the whole school together in one solid sheet of praise.
The singing sound of the school both estranged and hugged him close. He was afraid of its largeness and the big children who stared at him and whispered, yet everything felt so warm when he sat down to do his work or when he held a book in his hands, the reading book or the arithmetic book; it was like being in a good cave, nice like cotton and most lovely to the touch. He felt he was living in a place of adventure that he had always known. And becoming part of that mighty hum of children learning, in which he himself was silent, with the large girl sitting silently beside him, he felt that he would die of happiness.
When the bell rang for recess, all the children except he and the large girl seemed to know what to do. They filed out in an orderly fashion, the man-teacher keeping watch in case anyone decided to rush or straggle out of line. Once they hit the top step, the rush could not be contained and they poured into the yard, screaming, yelling, joyfully free for a whole half hour. Moshe and the large girl filed out too, lagging behind because they did not know what to do.
They stood on the top step.
"A lunchtime?" he asked her shyly.
The large girl shook her head. "No, a recess time. Yu suppose to go play."
"Oh." He digested this news, wondering who he was supposed to play with. Most of the children were playing in the yard; a few were sitting or standing, animated, in corners under shade trees.
"Yu want one paradise plum?" She pushed her hand in her pocket, pulled out two of the bright orange–and-red sweets, and offered him one.
"Mi cyaan eat paradise plum, because i' have in sugar an i' wi kill mi."
She accepted this without question, popped one of the sweets into her mouth, and put one back. "Mi have bubby plum too. Yu want one?"
He nodded, shy, happy, and at the same time relieved that he could accept something that she offered. He didn't want her to feel bad, or think that he was being proud, not eating from strangers. She was not a stranger. Her name was Arrienne. In his mind he called her Arrii, because she was his friend.
She gave him the bubby plums, a handful of the dark red–and-green fruit which he loved, and pulled out another handful for herself from the seeming cornucopia in her uniform pocket.
He did not know how they came to be walking down the steps together holding each other's hands. A boy shouted as they passed, "How dat deh bwoy look so funny? Hey, dundus boy!" and she said, "Don't answer him. Jus come on," and as she pulled him, her fingers urgent on his, they walked across the yard and found themselves, suddenly, abruptly, beside the chicken coop with the bench standing in front of it. They had come to the back of the premises and though it had taken them no more than three minutes as adults count, it seemed to them as if they had walked for a long time. To children, distances, like the passage of time, are different.
At lunchtime, those children whose parents could afford the daily or weekly payment ate at the school canteen; others went home where nobody knew if all they had was a bulla and cold water or a mug of brebidge—beverage, the drink made from sugar, water, and Seville orange or lime—with maybe a bright-red or yellow cashew fruit crushed into it for added flavor. A few who had hoarded their pennies and halfpence crossed the road to Miss Caro's shop and bought sweets and snacks: paradise plums, drops, grater cake, bulla or peg bread, jackass corn, bus' mi jaw, police button, cobbla, and the exquisite morsels of saltfish fritter dripping in coconut oil that they called achee, flittaz, or stamp-and-go. His mother brought him his lunch so he would not have to walk home in the sun, but also because she wanted to make sure he was not being teased. She found him waiting with the large girl in the canteen, where the large girl was getting stew beef and cornmeal dumplings made strong and tight, for her lunch.
"A
