The Human Stain

“Okay,” Faunia says. She is wearing a green corduroy jumper, fresh white stockings, and shiny black shoes, and is not nearly as jaunty as Carmen — composed, well mannered, permanently a little deflated, a pretty middle- class Caucasian child with long blond hair in butterfly barrettes at either side and, unlike Carmen, showing no interest in him, no curiosity about him, once he has been introduced. “Hello,” she mumbles meekly, and goes obediently back to moving the magnetic letters around, pushing together the w's, the t's, the n's, the 's's, and, on another part of the blackboard, grouping together all the vowels.

“Use two hands,” Lisa tells her, and she does what she is told.

“Which are these?” Lisa asks.

And Faunia reads them. Gets all the letters right.

“Let's take something she knows,” Lisa says to her father. “Make not,' Faunia.”

Faunia does it. Faunia makes “not.”

“Good work. Now something she doesn't know. Make ‘got.’”

Looks long and hard at the letters, but nothing happens. Faunia makes nothing. Does nothing. Waits. Waits for the next thing to happen. Been waiting for the next thing to happen all her life. It always does.

“I want you to change the first part, Miss Faunia. Come on. You know this. What's the first part of ‘got’?”

“G.” She moves away the n and, at the start of the word, substitutes g.

“Good work. Now make it say ‘pot.’”

She does it. Pot.

“Good. Now read it with your finger.”

Faunia moves her finger beneath each letter while distinctly pronouncing its sound. “Puh — ah — tuh.”

“She's quick,” Coleman says.

“Yes, but that's supposed to be quick.”

There are three other children with three other Reading Recovery teachers in other parts of the large room, and so all around him Coleman can hear little voices reading aloud, rising and falling in the same childish pattern regardless of the content, and he hears the other teachers saying, “You know that—u, like ‘umbrella’—u, u—” and “You know that— ing, you know ing—” and “You know I—good, good work,” and when he looks around, he sees that all the other children being taught are Faunia as well. There are alphabet charts everywhere, with pictures of objects to illustrate each of the letters, and there are plastic letters everywhere to pick up in your hand, differently colored so as to help you phonetically form the words a letter at a time, and piled everywhere are simple books that tell the simplest stories: “...on Friday we went to the beach. Saturday we went to the airport.” “‘Father Bear, is Baby Bear with you?’ ‘No,’ said Father Bear.” “In the morning a dog barked at Sara. She was frightened. ‘Try to be a brave girl, Sara,’ said Mom.” In addition to all these books and all these stories and all these Saras and all these dogs and all these bears and all these beaches, there are four teachers, four teachers all for Faunia, and they still can't teach her to read at her level.

“She's in first grade,” Lisa is telling her father. “We're hoping that if we all four work together with her all day long every day, by the end of the year we can get her up to speed. But it's hard to get her motivated on her own.”

“Pretty little girl,” Coleman says.

“Yes, you find her pretty? You like that type? Is that your type, Dad, the pretty, slow-at-reading type with the long blond hair and the broken will and the butterfly barrettes?”

“I didn't say that.”

“You didn't have to. I've been watching you with her,” and she points around the room to where all four Faunias sit quietly before the board, forming and reforming out of the colorful plastic letters the words “pot” and “got” and “not.” “The first time she spelled out ‘pot’ with her finger, you couldn't take your eyes off the kid. Well, if that turns you on, you should have been here back in September. Back in September she misspelled her first name and her second name. Fresh from kindergarten and the only word on the word list she could recognize was ‘not.’ She didn't understand that print contains a message. She didn't know left page before right page. She didn't know ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears.’ ‘Do you know „Goldilocks and the Three Bears”, Faunia?’ ‘No.’ Which means that her kindergarten experience — because that's what they get there, fairy tales, nursery rhymes — wasn't very good. Today she knows ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ but then? Forget it. Oh, if you'd met Faunia last September, fresh from failing at kindergarten, I guarantee you, Dad, she would have driven you wild.”

What do you do with the kid who can't read? The kid who is sucking somebody off in a pickup in her driveway while, upstairs, in a tiny apartment over a garage, her small children are supposedly asleep with a space heater burning — two untended children, a kerosene fire, and she's with this guy in his truck. The kid who has been a runaway since age fourteen, on the lam from her inexplicable life for her entire life. The kid who marries, for the stability and the safeguard he'll provide, a combat-crazed veteran who goes for your throat if you so much as turn in your sleep. The kid who is false, the kid who hides herself and lies, the kid who can't read who can read, who pretends she can't read, takes willingly upon herself this crippling shortcoming all the better to impersonate a member of a subspecies to which she does not belong and need not belong but to which, for every wrong reason, she wants him to believe she belongs. Wants herself to believe she belongs. The kid whose existence became a hallucination at seven and a catastrophe at fourteen and a disaster after that, whose vocation is to be neither a waitress nor a hooker nor a farmer nor a janitor but forever the stepdaughter to a lascivious stepfather and the undefended offspring of a self-obsessed mother, the kid who mistrusts everyone, sees the con in everyone, and yet is protected against nothing, whose capacity to hold on, unintimidated, is enormous and yet whose purchase on life is minute, misfortune's favorite embattled child, the kid to whom everything loathsome that can happen has happened and whose luck shows no sign of changing and yet who excites and arouses him like nobody since Steena, not the most but, morally speaking, the least repellent person he knows, the one to whom he feels drawn because of having been aimed for so long in the opposite direction — because of all he has missed by going in the opposite direction — and because the underlying feeling of Tightness that controlled him formerly is exactly what is propelling him now, the unlikely intimate with whom he shares no less a spiritual than a physical union, who is anything but a plaything upon whom he flings his body twice a week in order to sustain his animal nature, who is more to him like a comrade-in-arms than anyone else on earth.

And what do you do with such a kid? You find a pay phone as fast as you can and rectify your idiotic mistake.

He thinks she is thinking about how long it has all gone on, the mother, the stepfather, the escape from the stepfather, the places in the South, the places in the North, the men, the beatings, the jobs, the marriage, the farm, the herd, the bankruptcy, the children, the dead children ... and maybe she is. Maybe she is even if, alone now on the grass while the boys are smoking and cleaning up from lunch, she thinks she is thinking about crows. She thinks about crows a lot of the time. They're everywhere. They roost in the woods not far from the bed where she sleeps, they're in the pasture when she's out there moving the fence for the cows, and today they are cawing all over the campus, and so instead of thinking of what she is thinking the way Coleman thinks she is thinking it, she is thinking about the crow that used to hang around the store in Seeley Falls when, after the fire and before moving to the farm, she took the furnished room up there to try to hide from Farley, the crow that hung around the parking lot between the post office and the store, the crow that somebody had made into a pet because it was abandoned or because its mother was killed — she never knew what orphaned it. And now it had been abandoned for a second time and had taken to hanging out in that parking lot, where most everybody came and went during the course of the day. This crow created many problems in Seeley Falls because it started dive-bombing people coming into the post office, going after the barrettes in the little girls' hair and so on — as crows will because it is their nature to collect shiny things, bits of glass and stuff like that — and so the postmistress, in consultation with a few interested townsfolk, decided to take it to the Audubon Society, where it was caged and only sometimes let out to fly; it couldn't be set free because in the wild a bird that likes to hang around a parking lot simply will not fit in. That