When Amanda came to our school, late in the fall, she was seven years old. She was quiet, watchful then, not sullen but guarded. She had short, strong legs and baby teeth. She was boyish, in spite of her long pigtails; I cannot picture her in a skirt. Her skin was dusky, warm, though not as brown as Carol's or Judy's. There was a wariness in her eyes, and, down the left side of her face and her short, square, snubbed nose (not up-turned, not flat) ran the whispers of large unstitched scars. I would not learn until much later that she had spent September in hospital following a car accident.
I liked her immediately. There was in her eyes the promise of quickness. She was far behind my students, most of them, and I laboured to pull her up. She did not trust me, which was only prudent. I was a stranger, who spoke too quickly and interacted with the others according to a set of long-established rules and routines which must have seemed baffling, unscientific, and entirely too frenetic; one imagines being dropped into an advanced tap-dancing class, one's new shoes heavy and disobedient.
I cannot explain to my satisfaction my motivation; whether it was patience, or perverse relentlessness; whether there was not a whiff of sadism in it. The others would pour out the door, pulling on shoes on the run, and she would remain to finish her work, and I would remain, sitting on the floor, my chin on my arm on the low desk, across the book, watching her, saying nothing but putting my finger down on the page, brushing her hand aside and erasing the letter, saying, Again, nodding, saying, Good, and, Again. And she would cry.
There is a feeling that comes in the moment before a girl begins to cry; she is not crying yet, but she will, and it cannot be stopped; you look at her and you know she is going to cry, and you know you are an oafish thug, you have misjudged again, you have gone too far, you take it all back; but it only lasts a moment. She begins to cry, and there is no taking anything back, and the only thing of any importance is finding a way to make her stop.
Amanda cried quietly, hopelessly. She always accepted comfort; she did not become angry, did not rebuff, but sometimes her look would reprove. I would stroke her forearm and whisper that it was all right, I knew she could do it, I believed in her, but she must finish, I would make her finish, but there is so little left, look, only a few more, and the kids will be back soon, and she must stop crying and finish, and then she will be finished, and I will be proud. How few of my words she must have understood then. And I would thumb her flushed wet cheek and smile sadly at her, and she would finish. Good, I would say, exhausted, and stand, and leave, and the kids would be crowded around the door, flinging their shoes off and tumbling up the steps.
She became one of my strongest students. Her reading was not as precise, not as focused as Judy's, nor as fast as Luke's; but it was more effortless, more natural than theirs. It was a pleasure to see her feign boredom, a thrill to watch her pass her pride off as nonchalance. She had a fine sense of humour; there was a heedless mischief in her eyes. There was no malice in her, no rebelliousness; only she did not seem to notice authority. She obeyed as if in passing. She did not seem to acknowledge or notice Teacher Lin, who was the wife of the school's owner, who was the arbiter of punishment, whom no one (except perhaps her own son and Ann's mother) liked, whom almost everyone feared consciously, maybe even I.
When I picture her, it is in the new school, at nine years old. I picture her smiling. She had an easy smile, big, squinty-eyed. She lost her teeth late; I picture her with one big right front tooth and a gaping two-tooth hole on the left. Once, I laughed at her teeth, and she surprised me by crying, and I stood behind her and held her with my wrists under her arms and my hands clasped across her chest and laughed and said I was sorry and rocked her; she only struggled a little, and soon we were friends again. Her laughter was wonderful, low, husky, genuine, frequent. I remember her weight, the character of her ribcage, lifting her onto my shoulders. She loved card games; I taught her hearts, and euchre, and she would organize games during the brief breaks and pull me off by the hand, and I would go, even if I were busy.
Amanda left our class for the summer. For a while, I was still going to the old school in the mornings to teach my kindergarten class, and I would see her there. She was in the big barren an qin ban class, and my heart sank, and leapt. She was in there, in there, with the ordinary children, the children who were not my children, who could not speak English, who still regarded me as a kind of exotic creature, like an ostrich, who came to the school in the afternoons after the public schools let out and all day in the summer, not to be taught but to do endless pages of busy work. I went in, and all the other kids pointed, and looked at each other. Most of them had seen me five days a week for almost three years, and still I had not managed to become human. I was worried she would be embarrassed. I sat down next to her; the chair was big-kid size. I leaned on the desk and we talked in low voices. We ignored the teacher, because she had no authority over us, and because she was congenitally stupid; she didn't really care. She was not a teacher in any meaningful sense; she was there to get dullards to finish their homework, and she and I had a long-standing, unspoken agreement that she was not to fuck with me or my kids.
We talked for a few minutes, and she told me her mother wanted her to spend the summer at the old school, because the new school had no yard, and her mother, a nurse and pretty, was concerned about her eyes. Apparently (as her mother wrote me later) Amanda was developing pseudo-myopia, and it was felt that she should spend more time outside, where objects were farther away. She told me they made her go to an English class twice a week; she showed me the book. It was the reader I started my four-year-olds on. The first four pages of this book are as follows: Peter; Jane; Peter and Jane; Jane and Peter. She should have been reading chapter books. I was very unhappy, and later that morning returned to her with a note for her mother, saying I felt strongly she should find another school for Amanda or at any rate insist that she be exempted from this ludicrous English class, taught by a well-meaning but thoroughly incompetent young Taiwanese woman, which was an insult to her intelligence and her diligence, and poisonously tedious.
So we talked for a while, quietly, and laughed at the teacher and the other kids, who were staring at us instead of doing their work; I told her some news of her old class and her teacher, Rachel. And as we were talking, she got up and sat on my knee and put her head back on my shoulder, and looked at me and laughed self-consciously, and we went on talking. The moment was very real, and very matter-of-fact; I had come to visit her, because I wanted to see her, and she took what I had to offer. That was what I loved: the obviousness of being satisfied by intimacy, the absence of pretence. I was myself with her, wholly myself, and she liked me. That is a simple thing, and rare.