educating margaret

Let’s draw our neighborhoods, I say. Think about your house, and the people you love, and your neighbors, and what you like to do on weekends. Let’s draw that.  She considers this.

The silence is interminable. Ay, hindi bumebenta si Maggie. I hear Leo’s voice in my head—ikaw kase, masyadong tee-eytch! Bombard her with a litany of suggestions, why don’t you?

I yield, disappointingly (predictably), but I’m still trying to sound unflappable and teacherly:  Or whatever, you know. Whatever you want to draw.

No, s’okay. I wanna draw my house and my dad and my cat. Finally, an acquiescence.

So we’re coloring furiously now, Taleisha and I. I’m thinking to myself, God, I fucking love crayola.  I remember how mama once bought me that mammoth box of (120!) crayons and how I fell in love with the color names more than the colors themselves: cornflower blue and goldenrod and sea green and dandelion and burnt sienna. Although no, I didn’t like that last one, because I knew a girl named Sienna and I would always imagine her burned to a stake, just like Joan of Arc. Gross. So yeah, that would always be the only one intact in a box full of broken crayons.

I am now drawing the gayest house in the world, with a (royal!) purple roof and (canary) yellow walls and I’m filling in my door with a color called Razzle Dazzle Rose. Hmmm. I don’t remember that one.  I draw a girl–long hair, tired eyes. Apparently I always have tired eyes.– in a midnight blue dress reading a book under a tree with dead branches. I color the sun Indian red and marvel at the unabashedly racially charged, un-PC name choice: I don’t see Chinese yellow or African American black or Chicano Brown here (ahem! colors which are, by all means not representative of these ethnicities. Yes. Unlike Crayola, I will always feel the need to be PC).* By the time I’m drawing nests with robin eggs in between the branches of my sad tree I realize that little Miss Taleisha is staring at me.

What.

That, she says, is just silly.

Why?

So that’s ‘spose to be you. And that’s ‘spose to be your house. She cocks her eyebrow upwards and purses her lips defiantly and her patent shoes are tapping on the linoleum. Clearly, this is a studied, well-rehearsed look, an amalgamated version of Raven Symone, Buttercup the Powerpuff girl and Amanda Bynes, the early years: The Skeptical Precocious Little Girl, as perfected by Taleisha.

Shit, she’s challenging me. Obviously, dili mauwat ang bata sa ako. Challenge her back! Shoulder-devil whispers in my ear.

Um, yeah. And why is that silly?

Because. She pauses and gives me this look, as if to say, Don’t bullshit me.

Because, she continues finally. You’re lying. No one has a house like that.

She points to my crimson sun, traces its elaborate curlicues and says, And the sun doesn’t look like that, all fancy and everything. And the sky isn’t that funny green color.

Well. In the first place, um. That isn’t green. It’s turquoise. (Great comeback, yes.)

T. pretends not to hear me and frowns. No fair, you told me we would draw our neighborhoods and I drew my house and I’m telling the truth but you’re not, that’s not the truth.

I look at her work and sure enough, there it is. A perfectly normal neighborhood: a red house with a white roof. A man in a green tie is cooking some hotdogs on a grill. There’s a girl in braids holding a black and white soccer ball and an ash-grey cat, with the words Sandy in parenthesis beside her. By all means, a truthful neighborhood. T. self-consciously snatches away her drawing, as if she is almost embarrassed by her colors that do not lie.

Five seconds become ten, ten seconds become fifty. Another endless silence with this sullen girl.

So. Do you know how to spell turquoise? (Why the F am I fixated on turquoise all of a sudden? Nice one, though!, Evil Jiminy Cricket laughs. There’s no way the little brat will be able to spell that. That’ll put her in her place. )

She’s glaring at me now. Still, she takes out a violet pencil from her High School musical pencil case and writes in fierce strokes: TURQUOYS.

I gush, I can’t help it. Wow, that was a very hard word, and okay, so you didn’t quite get it right…. but you spelled it with a Q and a U, which is correct! Most people think it’s spelled with a C or a K.

T. just blinks at me. Twice.

T-U-R-Q-U-O-I-S-E. I say. That’s how you spell it. When you combine O and I, you get an OY sound, right? But still, you almost got that one, Taleisha. That’s great.

She’s still glowering, and I swear to god I can hear her thoughts: Whoopdidoo girl, that’s awesome. Should I give myself a round of applause? Are you going to give me an “almost, but not quite excellent” gold star?

I sigh and stare at her pencil case. Zaquisha and Baby V and Ashley T and Corbin Bleu are all in their togas, in mid leap and they look so beautiful. So fucking young.  Haaaaay. Ugh why does this have to be difficult? Why can’t I be teaching at a school like that, where kids are gayer than gay and happy and just sing and dance? But here I am, next to an unimpressed 8 year old who is challenging the integrity of my artwork.

Okay, so my house doesn’t look like that, and the sky isn’t turquoise…most of the time. But I’m just pretending, Taleisha. Imagining, you know?

T is mumbling something.  I put my hand up to my ear, temporarily too tired to talk.

She repeats her statement slowly; she knows she is not talking to the sharpest knife in the drawer:

I , just, don’t, know, why, we ,alwaysalwaysalways, have, to, pretend.

*From Kuya Wiki: "Indian red" was renamed "chestnut" in 1999 due to concern that
some children thought the crayon color represented the skin color of Native Americans.[1]
According to the company, however, the name originally referred to a reddish-brown
pigment from India that is used in artists' oil paint. [1].

I guess our box had crayons from 1998? Whut. Ten year old crayons. Christ, the crayons
are older than Taleisha. This school needs more funding than I thought.