Want, стр. 18
I want to come to work with you, she says. Nurse, she says.
You have to go, says my husband.
I hold the two-year-old another minute, wiping her face with my sweater, reminding her to breathe.
I’ll see you tonight, I tell her. This isn’t true, though, I remember just after I say this. It’s Thursday and I won’t be home until long after she’s asleep. I try not to do this, tell them I will be somewhere when I won’t be. I try not to ever promise things to them that I can’t give. But it’s too late now and I have to go and she won’t stop crying.
The four-year-old is still not wearing any pants and she comes out of her room and I pick her up to find her underwear and leggings, still holding the baby. You’re going to be late, says my husband. I dress the four-year-old and kiss her, hug her, give the red-faced baby to my husband. I hug them one more time and miss my train.
I have been called into a meeting with the principal and wonder briefly if the twenty-four-year-old has reported me. I’ve been leaving at least twice a week. I don’t think anybody sees me, but I also don’t work very hard to keep my leaving a secret. I walk out with my bag and coat on, usually while classes are going on so there aren’t many people in the hallways. When I pass coworkers, I assume they think I’m going out for coffee or a late lunch. Twice, the twenty-four-year-old has messaged me on the Google chat when I’ve been on the subway or already back in Brooklyn, and I’ve made things up about my kids.
Three times, I’ve had to ask my co–homeroom teachers to cover for me. I blame my children. I lie to my co–homeroom teachers because they’re just as frustrated with this job as I am but they don’t leave.
I see the twenty-four-year-old lingering, close to the principal’s office, just before I’m led in by his admin assistant. I brace myself for the look I’ll get at home when I tell my husband I lost this job and it’s my fault. I imagine what response I might give to excuse it, but I leave because I want to, which is not, I think, a reason I should say out loud to try to keep my job.
The principal appears, though, not to know about my midday leaving. Instead, he explains calmly to me that it’s time for test prep, that the portion of the year in which the kids are meant to be doing anything but test prep has long since passed. I am not, he tells me, trained in test prep and so will no longer be teaching the students I’ve been teaching since the fall.
I remind him I spent years as a test-prep tutor.
But you haven’t been trained by us, he says.
The teachers who they’re bringing in are coming from the middle school.
Middle school? I say, obviously disdainful.
You’re not being generous, he says to me.
I’m not.
He eats the whole time we talk, hot soup with a hulking piece of bread that he dunks into the soup and then into his mouth. He sits back in his chair, his ankle on his knee, and each time I talk he smiles.
But they’re learning, I say.
I realize that I might start crying, but I refuse to cry in front of this man whom I think of as a child.
He tells me that this was not his decision. The network, he says, smiling. Nothing I could do.
I love my students and am sad and angry, even though I know I leave sometimes for no good reason and that makes my love for them questionable at best. I tell my boss I think this is the wrong decision, and he stares blankly at me and doesn’t speak. He takes a bite of his bread and a clump lands briefly on his chin. We both pretend that I’m not crying. With all the things I hate about this job, the students are the only reason that I stay.
Teaching, I say, is ninety percent buy-in.
He nods.
They’re bought in, I say.
I try to tell him that they’re thinking and that they’ve been enjoying thinking. I try to tell him that he told me when he brought me on that he cared about helping them think.
He tells me he is grateful for my investment in the children and the vision. I will teach different kids now, kids who, he says, also need me—kids upon whom, I think, they have already given up. I’ll teach the seniors, who have already gotten into college or they haven’t, who have already taken all the tests there are to take.
I’m no longer crying, and I smile at him. I imagine he thinks I’m smiling because he’s managed to convince me of this plan I don’t agree with, but really he has spilled soup on his shirt and tie and, the way his face looks anxious and earnest at once now that he’s trying to convince me that everything is fine, he reminds me of a kid in our daughter’s pre-K class whose toes she stepped on while they stood in line for lunch because, she told me later, she did not know how else to make him be quiet like the teacher asked.
I leave the principal’s office and have to do my hall duty. Hall duty means sitting at a table in the hall as students walk back and forth between the bathroom and class. Sometimes students stop to talk or flirt and I have to tell them to move on. The ones who know me loiter and we talk about the classes that they’re taking, the social dramas that I know of. I’m trusted as much as the most trusted white teachers, which is to say