The Human Stain

You see how she did that, it's visually similar, but she still has something of the problem twenty-five weeks later. The m and the w. The i and the l. The g and the d. Still problems for her. It's all a problem for her." "You're pretty dejected about Carmen," he said. "Well, every day for half an hour? That's a lot of instruction. That's a lot of work. She's supposed to read at home, but at home there's a sixteen-year-old sister who just had a baby, and the parents forget or don't care. The parents are immigrants, they're second-language learners, they don't find it easy reading to their children in English, though Carmen never got read to even in Spanish. And this is what I deal with day in and day out. Just seeing if a child can manipulate a book—I give it to them, a book like this one, with a big colorful illustration beneath the title, and I say, 'Show me the front of the book.' Some kids know, but most don't. Print doesn't mean anything to them. And," she said, smiling with exhaustion and nowhere near as enticingly as Carmen, "my kids supposedly aren't learning-disabled. Carmen doesn't look at the words while I'm reading. She doesn't care. And that's why you're wiped out at the end of the day. Other teachers have difficult tasks, I know, but at the end of a day of Carmen after Carmen after Carmen, you come home emotionally drained. By then I can't read. I can't even get on the phone. I eat something and go to bed. I do like these kids. I love these kids. But it's worse than draining—it's killing."

Faunia was sitting up on the grass now, downing the last of her drink while one of the boys—the youngest, thinnest, most boyishlooking of them, incongruously bearded at just the chin and wearing, with his brown uniform, a red-checkered bandanna and what looked like high-heeled cowboy boots—was collecting all the debris from lunch and stuffing it into a trash sack, and the other three were standing apart, out in the sunshine, each smoking a last cigarette before returning to work.

Faunia was alone. And quiet now. Sitting there gravely with the empty soda can and thinking what? About the two years of waitressing down in Florida when she was sixteen and seventeen, about the retired businessmen who used to come in for lunch without their wives and ask her if she wouldn't like to live in a nice apartment and have nice clothes and a nice new Pinto and charge accounts at all the Bal Harbour clothing shops and at the jewelry store and at the beauty parlor and in exchange do nothing more than be a girlfriend a few nights a week and every once in a while on weekends? Not one, two, three, but four such proposals in just the first year. And then the proposition from the Cuban. She clears a hundred bucks a john and no taxes. For a skinny blonde with big tits, a tall, good-looking kid like her with hustle and ambition and guts, got up in a miniskirt, a halter, and boots, a thousand bucks a night would be nothing. A year, two, and, if by then she wants to, she retires—she can afford to. "And you didn't do it?" Coleman asked. "No. Uh-uh. But don't think I didn't think about it," she said.

"All the restaurant shit, those creepy people, the crazy cooks, a menu I can't read, orders I can't write, keeping everything straight in my head—it was no picnic. But if I can't read, I can count. I can add. I can subtract. I can't read words but I know who Shakespeare is. I know who Einstein is. I know who won the Civil War. I'm not stupid. I'm just an illiterate. A fine distinction but there it is. Numbers are something else. Numbers, believe me, I know. Don't think I didn't think it might not be a bad idea at all." But Coleman needed no such instruction. Not only did he think that at seventeen she thought being a hooker might be a good idea, he thought that it was an idea that she had more than simply entertained.