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Scenes from a “Special” Classroom
- Abstract
THE first time I saw the classroom that was later to become mine, none of the children was in it, and so it was empty of what made it unusual. I looked around that bright, sunny room with its blocks and alphabet charts, small chairs and washed blackboards, and smelling the old familiar smells of chalk dust and tempera paints, I let myself be towed away by a wash of nostalgic reverie. There, at one side, near the sink, the teacher, in a bright blue smock (imagine! remember? elementary-school teachers wear smocks!), was pouring out cups of slightly sour-smelling orange juice and opening up packs of graham crackers, preparing for the class’s mid-morning snack (neatly printed on the blackboard as SNACK), and opposite her, on the center wall, was a bulletin board jumping with free-form multicolored animals headed “Our Trip to the Zoo.” It all increased my feeling of heady unreality, and in the clear, airy, early-morning quiet of the room, surrounded by the appealing clarity of half-forgotten children’s things, I looked out the window, and with dreamy bittersweetness, began thinking of the Schumann piano pieces I had once played: Scenes from Childhood. It could not have been more out of place. Luckily, the teacher, who was busy, had no idea of how I was indulging myself. There were noises filtering in from the corridor, noises that meant the beginning of her working day. “They’re here,” she said, and as the door was pushed back and forth with terrible force, there they were. First, a blonde heavyset boy who walked slowly and half bent-over; he made animal-like moans, moved his head strangely, and kept biting at the bandages that covered his wrists. He did not sit down. The two boys behind him did-one a darkly handsome child with an intense expression and a painful darting squint. With his tortoise-shell glasses and keyed-up appearance he looked like a nervous, Times-reading subway rider, but once in his seat, he began banging his head on the desk, rocking back and forth, and in a high-pitched rhythmic frenzy, repeated, “Rockaway Beach, Rockaway Beach, 1963 Chevvy, 1964 Lincoln Convertible, Hungarian Rhapsody, Hungarian Rhapsody.” The boy next to him, a slight, pleasant, ordinary-looking boy, looked at him and doubtfully, tentatively called out his name. “Steven Wolf.* Ste- ven Wolf. Steven Wolf? Steven Fox? Steven Lion, maybe? Steven Kangaroo?” These parallel monologues continued and a fourth child entered the room. He too walked with a stoop, his expression was disdainful if not contemptuous, he had a yarmulke and Hasidic sidecurls, and as he twirled his sidecurls with his fingers, peered briefly at these two classmates and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Meshuga! Meshuga! The doctors, too, and nobody’s Jewish.”
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