Free Don't Worry About the Kids by Jay Neugeboren Page B

window beside me—a middle-aged Puerto Rican man with deep pouches under his eyes, he was stir-frying onions and peppers on a grill, and the fragrance made me salivate. I imagined some of my students sitting in the booths behind me, inside the warm store, chattering and necking and feeling one another up, and I smiled at the man. He shrugged, and in the slight lifting of his shoulders and the world-weary expression in his eyes, I felt he was sharing something with me—an acknowledgment of the difficulties and trials life had brought to him. He returned my smile.
    â€œHey Miz Mishkin!”
    â€œMira! Miral Miz Mishkin! Miz Mishkin!”
    Across the street the children were lined up in a long row, on the other side of the wire fence, their fingers locked in its diamonds, their voices screeching in high-pitched tones of delight. They were glad to see me! I felt blood rush to my head, felt my heart catch, but I did not deny their greetings—I’d come for this moment, after all, hadn’t I?—I raised my head, smiled, waved to them, and then walked quickly down the street and away from the school, hoping none of the teachers had spotted me.
    â€œHey Miz Mishkin!” a boy called. “You look real swift!”
    I heard cat-calls and whistles, elaborate mock-groans and laughter. I didn’t turn around. I’d never see these children again, I knew. Michael and I were moving—his company was transferring him to their new electronics plant in Seattle this time—and I would go with him. They had waited until I was out of the hospital, though. They were very considerate. They had sent me flowers. Flowers instead of a child. But we do have Jennifer, Michael said, touching my hand. And you won’t have to go through these months of pain and worry ever again.
    That’s too bad, I’d said, and Michael had looked at me in the way that made me know I had reached him, had made him worry. There were, I told myself, even in that cold and bright room, still pleasures in life.
    We have each other .
    Do we?
    â€œHey Miz Mishkin—he got love real bad for you. He think you just like a real movie star!”
    I longed to cross the street and go through the schoolyard gates—to have them follow me into the building, singing and dancing and holding hands in a long line behind me. Still, the instant I turned the corner their voices were gone, severed by the buildings now between us. I slowed down and touched my fingertips to my right cheek, expecting to be burned. My cheek was barely warm. Willa Cather, I recalled, had felt that the years during which she’d taught Latin in a Pittsburgh high school were among the happiest of her life.
    I heard singing and tambourines, from a store-front church. Three fat Puerto Rican men sat at a card table in the middle of the sidewalk. One of them wore green wool gloves from which the fingers had been cut off. I saw infants in baby carriages, heard women call to one another from open windows, watched children playing in the small plots of dirt around trees. I thought of how wonderfully comforted I’d always felt in the morning, these past three years, walking from the subway station to my school, and I thought I now knew the reason why: I could not possibly believe, or hope, that anybody living here—the families of the black and Puerto Rican and West Indian children I worked with—could ever know what my past had been like. They came, literally, from different worlds. But on Long Island, the people looked as if they were from my world—as if they should have been able to understand what my childhood had been like. It was the illusion that angered me, I decided—and the absence of illusion that comforted me. Walking these streets, I realized—the streets Michael had walked when he was growing up—I usually felt good about myself in a way I rarely did elsewhere; here in Brooklyn I did not fear, at least not as much as I