booth hung this beautiful child, his curls dancing unkempt, his T-shirt impastoed with the filth of a day’s play and the bloody-looking sauce of whatever he’d been eating.
“What exactly is so damn funny?” I couldn’t help the “damn.”
“You are,” he replied, after a moment’s silence, his mouth in a serious line but his eyes mirthful. He had a strong accent. “You are very funny, in your apples.”
Something about his face, the matte smoothness of his cheeks with their faint rosy tinge, the wildness of his black hair and eyebrows and lashes, the amused intensity of those mottled gray eyes—I smiled in spite of myself, glanced back at my piles of food near the checkout, pictured my Baba Yaga–like dance across the floor, saw myself as he must have seen me. “I guess you’re right.” I stood up. “Want one?” I offered him the last apple, salvaged from the dust. He wrinkled his nose, barked his short laugh once more.
“Not good now.”
“No,” I said. “I suppose not.”
As I made my way to the exit, I looked over again at his table. He was not with his mother or father. His babysitter, young, with enormous breasts, had draped a tattooed arm—the design something Celtic—across the back of the banquette. Her hair was crimson, and what looked like a safety pin glinted in the skin of her lower lip. She plucked idly at her lettuce, leaf by leaf, and watched the shop as if it were television. The boy stopped his fidgeting and stared at me, brazen and long, but without expression, and when I smiled at him, he looked away. This, then, was Reza.
It quickly became clear that his English was cripplingly poor, but I wasn’t worried for him. That first night after school, I checked his file and could see that his home address was one of the fanciest university housing blocks in a cul-de-sac down near the river. That meant his parents were not even graduate students but visiting faculty, or important fellows of some kind. They, or at least one of them, would have English, would be able to help him; and they would care about it, being academics themselves, which was half the battle. Also, he himself wanted to learn. Even the first day I could see: with the other children, when he didn’t know a word he’d point, say “What is?” and repeat their answers in his funny foreign voice, slightly raspy, several times over. If it was an abstraction, he’d try to act it out, which made the others laugh, but he remained utterly sober and undeterred. Thanks to Noah, he learned the words “fart” and “butt” by lunchtime. I intervened only to clarify that “bottom” and “rear end” were considered more polite, but he had trouble enunciating “rear end.” It came out as “weah wend,” and to me even this seemed moving, because his efforts were so serious.
That was the third reason to know he’d succeed: his charm. I wasn’t the only one felled by it: I could see the little girls gaping and whispering, could divine the boys’ wariness melting as Reza proved such a sport, intrepid at games and cheerfully competitive, exactly the sort of kid you want on your team. And the teachers, even: Estelle Garcia, who teaches science, commented about him at our first teachers’ meeting, “Sometimes, you know, the grasp of English itself doesn’t seem so important. If a kid is passionate enough, you can transcend that.”
I demurred, reminded her of Ilya, the Russian boy, and Duong, from Vietnam, and half a dozen kids we’d seen splutter and almost drown un-Englished in elementary school, so that you sent them only trepidatiously on to middle school, fearing they’d come back thugs, or dropouts, or worse. Sometimes, inevitably, it happened.
“You’re not worrying like this in the first week? That boy picks it all up like a sponge.”
“I’m not worried about that boy at all,” I said. “But he’s an exception.”
Exceptional. Adaptable. Compassionate. Generous. So intelligent. So quick. So sweet. With such a sense of humor. What did any of our praise mean, but that we’d all fallen in love with him, a bit, and were dazzled? He was eight, just a child of eight like any other, but we all wanted to lay claim to him. We didn’t say these kind things about Eric P., or Darren, or moon-faced Miles, whose dark circles beneath his eyes emanated gloom like some form of permanent mourning. Each child is strong in a different way,