Alone in the Classroom Read Online Free PDF

if you liked that kind of hand, square and shapely with soft black hair on the backs and fingers, hands that had the life of the body in them - he seemed of one violent piece - and they weren’t the hands of a man who had ever worked outside, despite his claims, the nails too long and carefully trimmed.
    She stood at the board, feeling revolted, and in that moment he came through the door.
    To be caught like that is to be caught forever, tied to the person in a new and endless way, for you’ve worn your hatred on your face. After that, he began his extra, inexplicable attentions to her.
    We let these people into our lives. They enter, and because we let them stay to work on our minds and hearts and imaginations, it’s as if we have invited them in.

4
Coral
    “It was a garter snake,” she said to Michael the following Monday, shortly after four o’clock. She had asked him to stay behind.
    He nodded. He had found it curled up on a rock, soaking up the last dregs of autumn sun. Harmless.
    She wrote on the blackboard:
He walked straight past the wolf and picked up the dead garter snake
. Common sense told her to have movement towards something he cared about.
    Michael copied the words slowly and accurately. She erased them from the board, had him place a ruler over what he had written, then write the words from memory.
He wakt past the fol and pickt up the ded grtre snake
.
    She already knew that some children can’t help making things hard. They expect to be stumped, expect to be confounded. They see assignments, tests, examinationsnot as neutral entities with obvious and expected answers, but as hedges in which their untidy brains get lost, and inwardly they seize up and panic. “Don’t make it hard for yourself,” she would tell her youngest brother (my father, for whom she had sewed trousers). “All the teacher wants to see is that you understand what you’ve been taught.” But something additional and mysterious was going on with Michael. He couldn’t remember the same word from one line to the next. He couldn’t even recognize it.
    There were things he would never forget. Her strong hand was one. How she leaned all her weight on the knuckles, a red pencil sticking out from between her chalky fingers. And the effect on him of her long, warm body right there beside him. How incredibly alive that was.
    She asked him to describe how a snake sheds its skin. He felt his hot forehead get hotter. On the edge of his vision was the stack of black workbooks on her desk. Close to the bottom was his, full of red circles around his misspelled words. And everybody knew. He spelled everything wrong.
    “What happens to the skin?” Her voice was patient, her perfume nice-smelling, warm, close.
    “It splits.”
    “All the way down?”
    “Around the corners of its mouth.”
    “Its
mouth?”
    He had her interest and he leaned forward. “The eyes get milky and hazy and the skin peels at the corners of its mouth. I see them around woodpiles. They curvethemselves left and right and left and right, looking for something to hook onto, a stone or a forked stick. Then it tugs and leaves its skin behind,” and he paused, choosing his words for accuracy and effect, “like a woman’s stocking.”
    He knew things, not things that were of any value at school. But he knew a lot, enough to impress someone if he wanted to impress her.
    He watches his pretty mother, she thought. And what a feeling it must be to shed your skin and be nude in the open air.
    “What does the new skin look like?”
    “Nude,” he said, and her face yielded a smile. “Fresh,” he said. “Flexible.”
    “Not wet?”
    “Not wet. Haven’t you seen them?”
    “I’ve seen them. I’ve seen old snakeskins too. I’m getting you to give me the words.”
    She wrote them on the board and he copied them. They were going to lick this, she said, they were going to have him reading and writing well by Christmas.
    Her face was like a sudden silver dollar in a