“Okay stop.” She held up her left index finger, agitating the kids of PS 75 into feverish last-minute flourishes with their charcoal pencils.
The kids mumbled nervously, anticipating elaborate praise or deep disappointment. Zelda took Marshall Diem’s pad off his lap. He looked up hopefully.
“Is that what you see?” Zelda gestured across the Harlem River at the tall empty buildings.
Marshall nodded uncertainly and pointed at his eyes. The kids giggled; Zelda cut them off with a sharp look.
“Because I don’t see that.”
“It’s there.” Marshall reached for his drawing as if it were a life jacket of creativity.
Zelda shook her head. “Show me what you drew but not just on the page. Show me how you thought it.”
The baffled Marshall looked at his classmates for help. They were equally puzzled.
Zelda sighed impatiently. “Those buildings are ugly, right?” She held up the drawing, which showed a beautiful home with two parents, a child and trees. “This is not ugly. How did you get from that,” she jabbed past the holographic sailboats and seagulls at the squalid remains of Manhattan, still largely uninhabited after the chemical attack, “to this?”
Marshall’s eyes watered. Zelda wasn’t particularly sympathetic. Maybe if she liked children more. Or at all. Zelda knelt in the circle, the children anxious, their turn at having their art disemboweled by this always stern and slightly scary woman looming any second. Look at Marshall; his cheeks dripped tears.
“There is no right or wrong. But you have to explain what you do and what you feel. You can’t just draw shit and say, oh, this is my art.” She gave up on Marshall, his shoulders heaving slightly from terrified sobs. “N’ariti.”
The girl with thick hair extending past her shoulders sat up straight, considering possible escape across the River. She could just walk across, but no one would tell her that.
“Yes, Ms. Jones.”
“What did you draw?”
“I don’t know.” N’ariti clutched the pad to her chest, the charcoal smearing her uniform blouse.
“What do you think you drew?”
“I don’t know.” N’ariti suddenly found whatever blind courage exists in a six-year-old. “A window.”
Zelda smiled faintly. “Good. Show me.”
N’ariti shook her head.
“Show me the window.” Zelda waved off N’ariti’s offer of the pad. She tapped her own head. “Up here. Show me. Be a window.”
Zelda stood very carefully, eyes closed, hands by her sides. “I’m a window,” she said out of the corners of her mouth. “I am dirty. Broken. Abandoned. Lonely. Everything is organically emotional. That’s what I mean,” she suddenly shouted. The children huddled closer together. Zelda went through each of the children, reducing them to tears. It seemed only right that their parents should have the same opportunity with her the next day.
Marshall’s mother glowered across the principal’s office. Zelda so wanted to slap her silly, thick-headed Reg head.
“My son won’t go near windows anymore.”
Bennett Chambers, the PS 75 principal, nodded his wooly head in grave understanding.
“That’s good,” Zelda protested.
Chambers cleared his throat warningly.
“Well it is,” she couldn’t resist.
“He was a Muslim Europe orphan,” Marshall’s Mom said, fluffing her dress. “He still has nightmares.”
“Didn’t he come here when he was an infant?”
“I can see you’re not a mother,” Marshall’s Mom sneered.
“No, I’m not,” Zelda almost added thankfully.
“Then you’d understand the trauma of abuse and terror in an ME orphanage can affect even a baby. All those studies show it takes years to shed them of the horrors. Now he has to worry about windows.”
“Just keep them open so he won’t notice…”
“Zelda,” Chambers broke in. “Mrs. Diem, we will make sure that there are no more field trips like this.”
The mother rose. “I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but I don’t want him in this class anymore. Sorry, Ms. Jones.”
Zelda shrugged. “He doesn’t have much talent anyway.”
Chambers took the gasping mother to the door, whispering apologies. He returned behind his desk, coldly staring at Zelda.
“What did that accomplish, Ms. Jones? In your own words.”
“Which part?”
“Select one.” His teeth gritted.
“I think she’s a moron who doesn’t understand how to reach her child emotionally other than hiding behind stereotypical fears and blaming everything she does wrong on the kid not getting his butt wiped when he was two months old.”
Chambers struggled to conceal his shock. “Is that what you came away with?”
“I didn’t know there was a right or wrong answer, Principal Chambers. Which is what I was trying to get out of the class…”
“What you got out of them is hysteria.” He held up his pad. “The other parents all have meetings here. Do you think you should attend?”
“I probably don’t bring a lot to the table.”
Chambers leaned forward on his forearms. “Why couldn’t you just let them draw trees?”
“The blackened ones?”
“The holographic ones from Grandma.”
“Which aren’t real.”
“They are if we believe so.”
“Which is not a healthy emotion for an artist.”
“It is for the teacher.”
“I was an artist first.”
“And not a successful one, either.” He picked up Zelda’s file and tossed it back down as if she weren’t aware of her life story.
“I had some acclaim. Sold-out shows…”
“And that’s why you ended up here.” He rolled his eyes. “Ms. Jones. No more field trips. You will stay in the classroom and teach according to the curriculum.”
“Which gives a teacher latitude about helping students…”
“Your latitude over the past six months since you’ve been here demonstrates you take latitude with the latitude.”
Even Zelda knew better than to correct him. “Am I on probation, sir?”
• • • •
MRS. GONZALEZ’S EYES burnt skeptically above the brown leather strap stretching across her mouth. Pablo waited another few seconds. The annoyed old woman kicked, making the bicuspid-shaped examining chair swivel slightly. Finding this ploy, Gonzalez kicked a little harder; the chair turned forty-five degrees. Pablo glanced at the ticking machine and then away from the patient, enabling her to kick vigorously with both legs to turn the chair completely
