Зенна Гендерсон - Holding Wonder

Loo Ree smiled. "Well, I'm part of the Expert." She sobered. "When the Expert received the call, he was so alarmed by the very nature of the difficulty that he rushed in with a group of investigators to find where the trouble lay." Loo Ree paused. "Here I'll have to stretch my analogy a little.
"It so happened that the investigators were from another country. They didn't know the language of the school or the social system that set up the school-only insofar as its resultant structure was concerned. And there was no time for briefing the investigators or teaching them the basics of the classroom. Time was too short because if this influence could not be changed, the entire classroom would have to be expelled-for the good of the whole school. So it had to be on-the-job training. So-" Loo Ree turned out her hands and shrugged.
"Gee!" I let out my breath with the word and surreptitiously wiped my wet palms against my skirt. "Then you're one of them, finding out about our world."
"Yes," Loo Ree replied. "And we believe now that the trouble is that the balance between two opposing influences has been upset and, unless we can restore the balance-catastrophe."
"The Atom Bomb!" I breathed. "The principal must have found radioactivity in our atmosphere-" I gleaned wildly from my science fiction.
"Atom bomb?" Loo Ree looked puzzled. "No. Oh, no, not ,the atom bomb. It is much more important than that. Your world really ought to get over being so
scared of loud noises and sudden death. If you would all set your minds to some of the more important things in your life, you wouldn't have such loud noises and so many sudden deaths to fear."
"But the hydrogen bomb-"
"At the risk of being trite," smiled Loo Ree, "there are fates worse than death. It's not so important how you die or how many die with you. Our group is much more concerned with how you live and how many live as you do. You should be more concerned with living. I think you are, individually, because I have seen you, in your classroom, distressed by a symptom of this unbalance. Or rather, symptoms of symptoms of the unbalance.
"Anyway, in the course of my assignment, I followed Marsha to you. Of course the mere mechanical learning to read was no problem, but I needed to learn all the extra, unwritten things in the use of a language that give it its meat and motive power in society.
"Besides that, you know that school is usually the first experience of a child outside the home environment. His first school years are a large factor in determining his adjustment to society. So I have been observing, first hand, the classroom procedure, the methods-"
"You've been observing!" I gasped. "Oh lordy, why didn't you warn me?"
"The results would have been invalid if I had," smiled Loo Ree. "But the times I've hollered at them-that I've lost my temper-that I've spanked-that I've fallen so short-"
"Yes, and the times you've comforted and wiped noses and answered questions and tied hair ribbons and fed the hungry wonder in their eyes.
"However, I am ready to submit my data now. We might be able to start the turning of the balance because of what I have learned from you. You'd better pray, as I do, that we can get started before the unbalance becomes irreversible. If that happens-" Loo Ree shivered and stood up. "So there it is, teacher and I must go now."
"But wait. What shall I do about Marsha? You know what has been happening to her. What can I do to help her? I know that she's awfully small compared to a world or a cosmos, but she is lost and unhappy-"
"A child is a cosmos and a world," said Loo Ree. "But you have handled such problems before and you don't really need my help. The trouble would have arisen even if I hadn't come. She just happened to choose me to express her difficulty. You can handle it all right.
"Good-bye, teacher."
"I'm glad you came to me," I said humbly. "Thank you."
"You're welcome," said Loo Ree.
She was suddenly a tall pillar of light in the dusky room. As natural as breathing, I slid to my knees and bowed my head above my clasped hands. I felt Loo Ree's hand briefly and warmly on my head and when I looked up, there was nothing in the room but the long, long shadows and me.
The next morning, I sat at my desk, feeling so empty and finished inside that it seemed impossible to go on. Loo Ree had been more of my life than I had
known. All this time she had been giving more to me than I to her. Now I felt as lost and weak as a convalescent trying to walk alone after months in bed.
The children felt my abstraction and, stimulated by the nearness of the holidays, got away with murder all morning. Just before recess the whole situation erupted. Marsha suddenly threw herself across the aisle at Stacy and Bob who had been teasing her. She hit Stacy over the head with a jigsaw puzzle, then she dumped her brand-new box of thirty-six Crayolas over Bob's astonished head and jumped up and down on the resultant mess, screaming at the top of her voice.
Awed by the size and scope of the demonstration, the rest of the class sat rigid in their seats. A red Crayola projected from the back of the neck of Bob's T-shirt and Stacy, too astonished to cry, sat looking down at a lap full of jigsaw pieces.
I gathered up the shrieking, board-stiff Marsha and dismissed the class, apprehensive row by apprehensive row, then I sat down on the little green bench and doubled Marsha forcibly to a sitting position on my lap. I rocked her rebellious head against my sweatered shoulder until her screams became sobs and her flailing feet drooped laxly against my skirt. I pressed her head closer and bent my cheek to her hair.
"'There, there, Marsha. There, there." I rocked back and forth. "What's the matter, honey-one, what's the matter?" Her sobs were hiccoughy gasps now. "Nobody likes me. Everybody's mean. I hate everybody." Her voice rose to a wail.
"No, you don't, Marsha. You don't hate anybody. Is it about Loo Ree?" Her sobs cut off abruptly. Then she was writhing in my arms again, her voice rising hysterically.
"Marsha!" I shook her, with no effect, so I turned her over briskly and spatted her good and hard a couple of times across her thighs just below her brief skirts, then turned her back into my arms.
She burrowed into my shoulder, her two arms hugging one of mine tight.
"Loo Ree's gone away," she sobbed.
"I know," I said, and one of my tears feel on her tumbled hair. "She was my friend, too. I feel bad, too." Marsha knuckled her eyes with one hand.
"She was my most special friend, and she went away:"
"She had to go," I soothed. "She was so special she couldn't stay."
"But I didn't want her to go," cried Marsha.
"Neither did I," I patted her back.
"She told me lotsa stories." Marsha struggled to a sitting position. "She showed me pretty things. She loved me."
"Yes, she loved us. And just think, we can remember her all our lives. When you grow up, you can tell your children all about her."
"I'll tell them all about her," sighed Marsha, leaning against me and shutting her eyes. "When I grow up."
"When you grow up," I whispered, looking past her head and through the schoolroom wall out into the troubled world. "When you grow up."
I hugged her head to me tight and listened and listened for the creak of a changing balance wondering, with a catch in my heart for all the Marshas and Bobs and their growing up-Which way is it tipping? THE CLOSEST SCHOOL
WELL, WE were the closest school.
The rolling grasslands stretched all dry and tawny from the front of the school up into the hills until the slopes got too steep for the grass to cling. Behind the school was my store and in front of it was the thin white-stitched black tape of the main highway and beyond that the rolling grasslands stretched all dry and tawny up into the hills until the slopes-
At right angles to both the school and store and facing another way was the church and in front of the church the rolling grasslands stretched all– The last direction was faced by the Community Center and the rolling grasslands-
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