The Human Stain

"What do you do with the kid who can't read?" Lisa had asked him in her despair. "It's the key to everything, so you have to do something, but doing it is burning me out. Your second year is supposed to be better. Your third year better than that. And this is my fourth." "And it isn't better?" he asked. "It's hard. It's so hard. Each year is harder. But if one-on-one tutoring doesn't work, what do you do?" Well, what he did with the kid who couldn't read was to make her his mistress. What Farley did was to make her his punching bag. What the Cuban did was to make her his whore, or one among them—so Coleman believed more often than not. And for how long his whore? Is that what Faunia was thinking about before getting herself up to head back to North Hall to finish cleaning the corridors? Was she thinking about how long it had all gone on? The mother, the stepfather, the escape from the stepfather, the places in the South, the places in the North, the men, the beatings, the jobs, the marriage, the farm, the herd, the bankruptcy, the children, the two dead children. No wonder half an hour in the sun sharing a pizza with the boys is paradise to her.

"This is my friend Coleman, Faunia. He's just going to watch."

"Okay," Faunia says. She is wearing a green corduroy jumper, fresh white stockings, and shiny black shoes, and is not nearly as jaunty as Carmen—composed, well mannered, permanently a little deflated, a pretty middle-class Caucasian child with long blond hair in butterfly barrettes at either side and, unlike Carmen, showing no interest in him, no curiosity about him, once he has been introduced.

"Hello," she mumbles meekly, and goes obediently back to moving the magnetic letters around, pushing together the w's, the t's, the n's, the s's, and, on another part of the blackboard, grouping together all the vowels.

"Use two hands," Lisa tells her, and she does what she is told.

"Which are these?" Lisa asks.

And Faunia reads them. Gets all the letters right.

"Let's take something she knows," Lisa says to her father. "Make

'not,' Faunia."

Faunia does it. Faunia makes "not."

"Good work. Now something she doesn't know. Make 'got.'" Looks long and hard at the letters, but nothing happens. Faunia makes nothing. Does nothing. Waits. Waits for the next thing to happen. Been waiting for the next thing to happen all her life. It always does.

"I want you to change the first part, Miss Faunia. Come on. You know this. What's the first part of 'got'?"

"G." She moves away the n and, at the start of the word, substitutes g.

"Good work. Now make it say 'pot.'" She does it. Pot.

"Good. Now read it with your finger."

Faunia moves her finger beneath each letter while distinctly pronouncing its sound. "Puh—ah—tuh."

"She's quick," Coleman says.

"Yes, but that's supposed to be quick."

There are three other children with three other Reading Recovery teachers in other parts of the large room, and so all around him Coleman can hear little voices reading aloud, rising and falling in the same childish pattern regardless of the content, and he hears the other teachers saying, "You know that—u, like 'umbrella'—u, u—" and "You know that—ing, you know ing—" and "You know I—good, good work," and when he looks around, he sees that all the other children being taught are Faunia as well. There are alphabet charts everywhere, with pictures of objects to illustrate each of the letters, and there are plastic letters everywhere to pick up in your hand, differently colored so as to help you phonetically form the words a letter at a time, and piled everywhere are simple books that tell the simplest stories: "... on Friday we went to the beach.

Saturday we went to the airport." "'Father Bear, is Baby Bear with you?' 'No,' said Father Bear." "In the morning a dog barked at Sara.

She was frightened. 'Try to be a brave girl, Sara,' said Mom." In addition to all these books and all these stories and all these Saras and all these dogs and all these bears and all these beaches, there are four teachers, four teachers all for Faunia, and they still can't teach her to read at her level.

"She's in first grade," Lisa is telling her father. "We're hoping that if we all four work together with her all day long every day, by the end of the year we can get her up to speed. But it's hard to get her motivated on her own."

"Pretty little girl," Coleman says.

"Yes, you find her pretty? You like that type? Is that your type, Dad, the pretty, slow-at-reading type with the long blond hair and the broken will and the butterfly barrettes?"

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to. I've been watching you with her," and she points around the room to where all four Faunias sit quietly before the board, forming and reforming out of the colorful plastic letters the words "pot" and "got" and "not." "The first time she spelled out

'pot' with her finger, you couldn't take your eyes off the kid. Well, if that turns you on, you should have been here back in September.