'In all this rain and mud?' I protested. 'Wait till morning,' he repeated. Long after his steady sleeping breath came and went over my head, I lay and listened to the intermittent rain on the roof-and thought. Finally the tight knot inside me dissolved and I relaxed against Peter. Now that I had seen Gayla born, I could let her be dead. Or I could keep her forever the dreaming child in the playhouse on the school grounds. Why I had become involved in her life, I didn't need to know any more than I needed to know why I walked through the wrong door one time and met Peter. I tucked my hand against my cheek, then roused a little. Where were my glasses? I groped on the car floor. My shoe. Yes, the glasses were there, where I always put them when we're camping. I leaned again and slept . AS SIMPLE AS THAT 'I WON'T READ IT.' Ken sat staring down at his open first grade book. I took a deep, wavery breath and, with an effort, brought myself back to the classroom and the interruption in the automatic smooth flow of the reading group. 'It's your turn, Ken,' I said, 'Don't you know the place?' 'Yes,' said Ken, his thin, unhappy face angling sharply at the cheek bones as he looked at me. 'But I won't read it… 'Why not?' I asked gently. Anger had not yet returned. 'You know all the words. Why don't you want to read it?' 'It isn't true,' said Ken. He dropped his eyes to his book as tears flooded in. 'It isn't true.' 'It never was true,' I told him. 'We play like it's true, just for fun.' I flipped the four pages that made up the current reading lesson. 'Maybe this city isn't true, but it's like a real one, with stores and-' My voice trailed off as the eyes of the whole class centered on me-seven pairs of eyes and the sightless, creamy oval of Maria's face-all seeing our city. 'The cities,' I began again. 'The cities-' By now the children were used to grown-ups stopping in mid- sentence. And to the stunned look on adult faces. 'It isn't true,' said Ken. 'I won't read it.' 'Close your books,' I said, 'And go to your seats.' The three slid quietly into their desks-Ken and Victor and Gloryanne. I sat at my desk, my elbows on the green blotter, my chin in the palms of my hands, and looked at nothing. I didn't want anything true. The fantasy that kept school as usual is painful enough. How much more comfortable to live unthinking from stunned silence to stunned silence. Finally I roused myself. 'If you don't want to read your book, let's write a story that is true, and we'll have that for reading.' I took the staff liner and drew three lines at a time across the chalk board, with just a small jog where I had to lift the chalk over the jagged crack that marred the board diagonally from top to bottom. 'What shall we name our story?' I asked. 'Ken, what do you want it to be about?' 'About Biffs house,' said Ken promptly. 'Biff's house,' I repeated, my stomach tightening sickly as I wrote the words, forming the letters carefully in manuscript printing, automatically saying, 'Remember now, all titles begin with-' And the class automatically supplying, '-capital letters.' 'Yes,' I said. 'Ken, what shall we say first?' 'Biff's house went up like an elevator,' said Ken. 'Right up into the air?' I prompted. 'The ground went up with it,' supplied Gloryanne. I wrote the two sentences. 'Victor? Do you want to tell what came next?' The chalk was darkening in my wet, clenched hand. 'The groun'-it comed down, more fast nor Biffs house,' supplied Victor hoarsely. I saw his lifted face and the deep color of his heavily fringed eyes for the first time in a week. 'With noise!' shouted Maria, her face animated. 'With lots of noise!' 'You're not in our group I' cried Ken. 'This is our story!' 'It's everyone's story,' I said and wrote carefully. 'And every sentence ends with a-' 'Period,' supplied the class. 'And then?' I paused, leaning my forehead against the coolness of the chalk board, blinking my eyes until the rich green alfalfa that was growing through the corner of the room came back into focus. I lifted my head. Celia had waited. 'Biff fell out of his house,' she suggested. I wrote. 'And then?' I paused, chalk raised. 'Biff's house fell on him,' said Ken with a rush. 'And he got dead.' 'I saw him!' Bobby surged up out of his seat, speaking his first words of the day. 'There was blood, but his face was only asleep.' 'He was dead!' said Ken fiercely. 'And the house broke all to pieces!' 'And the pieces all went down in that deep, deep hole with Biff!' cried Bobby. 'And the hole went shut!' Celia triumphantly capped the recital. 'Dint either!' Victor whirled on her. 'Ohney part! See! See!' He jabbed his finger toward the window. We all crowded around as though this was something new. And I suppose it was-new to our tongues, new to our ears, though long scabbed over unhealthily inside us. There at the edge of the playground, just beyond the twisted tangle of the jungle gym and the sharp jut of the slide, snapped off above the fifth rung of the ladder, was the hole containing Biff's house. We solemnly contemplated all that was visible-the small jumble of shingles and the wadded TV antenna. We turned back silently to our classroom. 'How did you happen to see Biff when his house fell on him, Bobby?' I asked. 'I was trying to go to his house to play until my brother got out of fourth grade,' said Bobby. 'He was waiting for me on the porch. But all at once the ground started going up and down and it knocked me over. When I got up, Biff's house was just coming down and it fell on Biff. All but his head. And he looked asleep. He did! He did! And then everything went down and it shut. But not all!' he hastened to add before Victor gave tongue again. 'Now,' I said-we had buried Biff-'Do we have it the way we want so it can be a story for reading? Get your pencils-' 'Teacher! Teacher! Maria was standing, her sightless eyes wide, one hand up as high as she could reach. 'Teacher! Malina!' 'Bobbyl Quickly-help me!' I scrambled around my desk, knocking the section of four-by-four out from under the broken front leg. I was able to catch Malina because she had stopped to fumble for the door knob that used to be there. Bobby stumbled up with the beach towel and, blessedly, I had time to wind it securely around Malina before the first scream of her convulsions began. Bobby and I held her lightly, shoulder and knees, as her body rolled and writhed. We had learned bitterly how best to protect her against herself and the dangerous place she made for herself of the classroom. I leaned my cheek against my shoulder as I pressed my palms against Malina. I let my tears wash down my face untouched. Malina's shaking echoed through me as though I were sobbing. The other children were righting my fallen desk and replacing the chunk of four-by-four, not paying any attention to Malina's gurgling screams that rasped my ears almost past enduring. So quickly do children adjust. So quickly. I blinked to clear my eyes. Malina was quieting. Oh, how blessedly different from the first terrified hour we had had to struggle with her! I quickly unwrapped her and cradled her against me as her face smoothed and her ragged breath quieted. She opened her eyes. 'Daddy said next time he had a vacation he'd take us to Disneyland again. Last time we didn't get to go in the rocket. We didn't get to go in anything in that land.' She smiled her normal, front-tooth-missing smile at me and fell asleep. We went back to work, Bobby and I. 'Her daddy's dead,' said Bobby matter-of-factly as he waited his turn at the pencil sharpener. 'She knows her daddy's dead and her mother's dead and her baby brother's-' 'Yes, Bobby, we all know,' I said. 'Let's go back to our story. We just about have time to go over it again and write it before lunchtime.' So I stood looking out of the gap in the wall above the Find Out Table-currently, What Did This Come From? while the children wrote their first true story after the Torn Time. Biff's House Biff's house went up like an elevator. The ground went up with it. The ground came down before Biff's house did. Biff fell out of his house. The house fell on him and he was dead. He looked asleep. The house broke all to pieces with a lot of noise. It went down into the deep, deep hole. Biff went, too. The hole went shut, but not all the way. We can see the place by our playground. It was only a few days later that the children asked to write another story. The rain was coming down again-a little less muddy, a little less torrential, so that the shards of glass in our windows weren't quite so smeary and there was an area unleaked upon in the room large enough to contain us all closely-minus Malina. 'I think she'll come tomorrow,' said Celia. 'This morning she forgot Disneyland 'cause she remembered all
