This Lincoln Elementary looked a little like the elementary school in Compton Sylvia had attended before her family moved to the city of Orange. The classrooms were filled with blacks, Mexicans—although she was supposed to call them Hispanics—Filipinos, Asians, mixed-race kids, white kids.
She began her teaching career in January in a third-grade classroom that had had five previous substitutes.
If the mysteries of a cash register had perplexed her, its technical complexities were silly putty compared to a class of thirty-five third-graders and their exponential demands.
Sylvia would arrive at seven in the morning and leave at five-thirty in the afternoon. At home, she read wretched compositions filled with illiterate spellings and painfully formed printing. Her red pen flew across pages and pages of worksheets.
Sylvia realized a few things:
She didn’t know how to teach spelling.
She didn’t know how to teach writing.
She didn’t know how to teach math.
She threw away her red pencils. Apparently teaching was a lot more difficult than it looked.
While the students—oh my God, the beautiful students, they all looked like they could be her or her sisters or her uncles or her cousins—chased each other in the classroom, Sylvia pored over her teacher’s manual, looking for the correct phrasing.
“Maestra, maestra,” the students would say, the parents would say, with their admiring eyes, their needy eyes.
Sylvia knew she was an imposter. An imposter! And what was the point of Victor Hugo or Dostoyevsky or Anna Akhmatova or de Maupassant if she couldn’t help a classroom of eight and nine-year-olds, for God’s sake?
For the unit on Columbus, she asked her students to tell her about the longest trip they had ever taken. When she was in third grade, the longest trip her family had ever taken was an hour drive to see relatives.
She called on Robert, a slim dark boy with lightly muscled arms who had earlier demonstrated his terror of spiders.
“Two years,” he said.
“Two years, Robert? Where were you going?”
“When we walked here from El Salvador.”
Pause. Well, Columbus’ three month cruise was going to have a hard time following that. Sylvia shared the story in the staff lounge.
“You didn’t believe him, did you?” a stridently gray-haired teacher scoffed, dipping her herbal teabag into a mug. “El Salvador’s an island, for heaven’s sake, he couldn’t have walked.” Perhaps Sylvia wasn’t as underqualified and incompetent as she had feared
Carrot, stick. Carrot, stick. Carrot, stick. Carrot—stickers, praise, candy. Stick—missed recess, detention, standards, late to lunch. But still the children spilled out of their chairs, tripped each other, ran wild through the hallways and onto the playground.
“All right,” she said one Wednesday in March. “If we can get through the next two days with you following my directions, we can have a class party.”
If they had spilled out of their desks before, now they were bouncing on the table tops. Sylvia raised her voice, “And if we have a party, you can bring treats, music—”
Lena, a little girl Sylvia had seated in the front row, a little girl who never finished her work but who betrayed such powerful neglect that Sylvia rewarded her with candy anyway, said, “Ms. Amado? Ms. Amado? Music? We can bring music?”
“You betcha,” Sylvia said.
Lena’s eyes became slits as she glowered at Sylvia. Now what had she done?
She found out Thursday afternoon when the principal asked Sylvia to come to a meeting after school. Lena sat outside the principal’s office, accompanied by a woman so huge she appeared inflated.
The little girl sucked on a piece of candy Sylvia had given her just as school had ended. The principal, Ms. Marroquin—a Latina Sylvia found incredibly beautiful and incredibly intimidating—smiled at the parent, asked her into her office, then looked at Sylvia. “Come in here,” she commanded Sylvia.
Sylvia felt two sets of eyes glaring at her.
“Now,” the principal said. “Would you please explain to Lena’s mother, Mrs. Wilkinson, why you called her daughter a bitch?”
After the meeting Ms. Marroquin said, “You are warned.”
In April her toughest kid, Saul, the eleven-year-old in a class of eight and nine-year-olds, listened, rapt, as she read The Little Match Girl.
“That’s a true story, ain’t it, Ms. Amado?” he said, as Sylvia finished.
Sylvia stammered. How did Malamud put it in The Assistant? How could she translate that here? It IS the truth, it IS the truth.
“It could be,” she said. But in elementary school, you taught them that nonfiction is truth and fiction is pretend. It’s pretend.
“It’s nonfiction, ain’t it, Ms. Amado.”
“It’s fiction, Saul.”
The light in Saul’s eyes clicked off.
Days later, weeks later, Malamud’s line ran through her head: “I lie to tell the truth.” Teaching was the hardest thing she had ever done, and she was terrible at it. This was all confirmed one morning in May. She was leaning over Lena’s desk to work on her daily oral language when she heard something so strange and unfamiliar. Thuds, then grunts, then the commotion of kids.
She jolted upright, scanned around, and saw Saul sitting on top of Robert, whacking Robert’s face with all his force.
“You monster!” Sylvia shouted. “You monster!” She bumped into children and knocked over desks before yanking Saul off of Robert, dragging him by the arm and leading him to the office. “Line up outside,” she told her class, and, to her shock, they did. Two orderly lines, filled with eyes, watching her drag Saul up to Ms. Marroquin’s office. “You filthy monster,” Sylvia said, over and over again.
The next day Ms. Marroquin, petite and brittle as a bird, tough as industrial cleaner, asked her into her office a second time. She said, “Saul was beating up Robert.”
Sylvia nodded.
“You were upset.”
“Very.”
“You hit Saul.”
Sylvia froze. She wasn’t even asking her. She was telling her.
“You hit Saul.”
“No.”
“You were upset. We would all have been upset. Now I have to talk to Saul’s parents. And I need the truth. He was being violent, you needed to stop him, you hit him.”
“No,
