Зенна Гендерсон - Holding Wonder

manila paper.
"Teacher, I couldn't do it very good because Loo Ree doesn't look the same all the time."
I looked at her picture. There were wavering lines of yellow and orange and round little circles of blue, vaguely face-like in arrangement. "I suppose it would be hard," I said. "What's that other one?"
"Loo Ree drew it with her finger. She says you'll have to look fast because your eyes will make it go away." She gave the paper to me and went to her seat.
I glanced down, expecting some more of Marsha's unformed figures, but instead, my eyes dazzled and contracted before a blinding flare of brightness. I blinked and caught the after-brightness behind my eyelids. All I had distinguished was a half-halo of brilliance and a feeling of-well, I almost said "awe." I looked at the paper again and there was nothing on it. I rubbed my hand across it and felt a fading warmth against my palm.
It was the next day, after the dismissal bell had rung and the thirty-four restless occupants of my room exploded out the door and into the buses, that the next chapter of Loo Ree began.
I was trying to straighten our my front desk drawer into which I dump or cram anything and everything all day long, when I heard, "I want to learn to read."
"Why of course you do," I said automatically, not looking up. "It's fun and that's why we come to school. But you scoot now or the bus will go off without you."
"I want to learn to read now." I sorted out six thumb tacks, a hair ribbon, a piece of bubble gum and three marbles before I looked up.
"It takes time-" I stopped. No one was in the room. Nothing was there except the late sun slanting across the desks and showing up the usual crushed Crayolas on the floor around Bob's desk. I rubbed one grimy hand across my forehead. Now wait a minute. I know I've been teaching for a quite a spell, but heavens to Hannah, not that long. Hearing voices is just about the last stop before the genteel vine-covered barred window. I took a deep breath and bent to my task again.
"Teacher, I must learn to read." My hands froze on the tangled mass of yo-yo strings and Red Cross buttons. The voice was unmistakable. If this was hallucination, then I'd gone too far to come back. I was afraid to raise my eyes. I spoke past my choked throat.
"Who are you?"
There was a soft, musical laugh. "I drew my picture for you. I'm Loo Ree."
"Loo Ree?" My palsied fingers plucked at the matted strings. "Then if I look, I can't see you?"
"No, probably not. Your eyes are limited, you know." The voice had nothing childish about it, but it sounded very young-and very wise.
"Can Marsha see you?" Nothing like satisfying my curiosity, now that some of the shock was wearing off.
"Not really. She senses me and has made an image to satisfy her, but as she told you, I seem to change all the time. Her concept of me changes."
"Why?" A thousand questions piled up behind my tongue, but part of my mind was still shrieking, hallucination! Hallucination! Finally I managed, "Why are you here?"
"I must go to school and learn to read and I can't take the time to pace myself to Marsha's speed. Could you help me?"
"Why yes, I suppose so," I replied absently, as I tried to decide if the voice was like the taste of sweet music or the sound of apple blossoms. "But you know the language-your vocabulary is so-"
"I can get all the oral coaching I need, without help," said Loo Ree. "But I must attend school and learn from this level because it is very necessary that I know not only the words, but that I also get the"-she paused-"the human concept and background that goes with them."
"But why do you have to learn to read? Why come to me? After all, to teach someone-or something-I can't see! Who are you?"
Loo Ree's voice was infinitely patient. "It doesn't matter who I am and it isn't just the mechanics of reading I need But it is important to you and to your world that I learn what I must as soon as possible. It's not only important, it's vital." I quivered under the urgency of her voice, the voice that I seemed to feel more than actually hear. I pressed my hands down hard on the edge of my desk, then I picked up the sight-word cards for the first pre-primer.
"Okay. Let's go over these words first." So it was that my principal, little dried-up Mr. Grively, brisk, efficient and utterly at sea when it came to the primary age levels, bounced into my room and found me briskly flashing word cards and giving phonetic cues to a reading circle of empty first grade chairs. For a moment he seemed to visualize the vine-covered bars too, then he smiled into my embarrassed confusion.
"Preparing your lessons for tomorrow, I see!" He beamed. "How I wish all of my teachers were as conscientious!" And he bounced out again.
Loo Ree and I laughed together before we went back to our words, come oh, Mother-
Whatever Loo Ree was-it wasn't stupid. Before I went home at four thirty, she had mastered the words for the three pre-primers and I left her vocalizing in the shadowy class room, the pages of the open little blue book, third of the series, fluttering to
Mother said, "Come, come. Come and help me work."
In the weeks that followed Loo Ree finished, either by herself or to me, every reader and supplementary reader in my book closet. Then she went on up through the grades, absorbing like a blotter, everything in all the available books. She reported to me each afternoon and I worked up quite a reputation among my fellow workers for staying at school after I was free to go home. They couldn't decide whether I was overconscientious, incompetent or crazy. In fact, I began to wonder, myself.
It was several weeks later that I suddenly noticed that all was not well with Marsha. I was conducting the last vocabulary review for Group I before giving them their new books when it dawned on me that Marsha wasn't in Group I any more. I ran my finger down my reading group schedule and there was Marsha-in Group V! I counted rapidly backwards through the past days and realized with a shamed sinking feeling that Marsha hadn't progressed an inch beyond where she was when I first talked with Loo Ree. And I hadn't even noticed! That was the shameful part. So after Group I returned to their seats, clutching joyfully their new blue books, I sat and looked at Marsha. She was looking across the aisle at Stacy's new book, her face so forlorn that I could have cried.
Group V came up for reading after lunch and Marsha sat there apathetically with Bobby, sniffing with his perpetual cold, and 'Naldo, who 'don't got mock Eenglich, Teesher' and Clyde, whose parents most obviously had lied him a year older than he was to get him into school sooner. She parroted the first pre-primer words only after the others gleefully prompted her and she didn't even care when she called Dick, Mother and Spot, Puff.
I kept her at my desk when the others went to their seats. I put my arm around her and hugged her to me.
"What's the matter, Marsha! You aren't learning your words." She twisted out of my arm and looked blankly out of the window.
"I don't care."
"But the children are all getting ahead of you. You don't even have your red book yet."
"I don't care."
"Oh, Marsha!" I reached for her but she avoided me. "You wanted to learn to reach so much. You and Loo Ree-"
Marsha's mouth quivered, "Loo Ree-I don't like Loo Ree any more."
"Why?"
"Just 'cause. She doesn't like me. She won't play with me any more."
"I'm sorry, Marsha, but that's no reason for you not to learn your words."
Marsha's wet eyes blazed at me. "You showed Loo Ree how first! Loo Ree can read already. And you didn't show me!"
Oh lordy, I thought, shame to me. And that Loo Ree. This is all her fault.
I took Marsha's hands firmly to hold her attention.
"Listen, honey-one. You remember, you told the children that Loo Ree was someone special? Well, she is. She is so special that she learned to read much faster than the other children, but they're trying and you're not. Do you want to make Loo Ree ashamed of you?"
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