The Cards I Kept in the Bottom Drawer

The principal held Ricky back that June, and when he put the fall rosters together he wrote Ricky’s name on mine again. I did not fight it. It is the one decent thing I did that year, and I did it by saying nothing.

I did not lie awake over him. What I did was go back to school that fall with Ricky in the back row again, and I found I could not stop reading the cards from the year before. I read my own handwriting. Disruptive. Inattentive. Does not apply himself. Six words that were not a lie and were not the truth, either, and were going to follow a boy wherever he went next.

So I did a small thing. In June of 1984, the week the cards were due, I stayed after the last bus, when the floors smelled of pink sweeping compound, and carried the cards of the children I worried about down to the Xerox in the office. The secretary charged teachers a dime a copy. She looked at me over her glasses, but she did not ask. I copied the fronts. Back in Room 6, on the blank back of each copy, in pencil, I wrote one line.

Not a grade. Not a warning. One line about what I saw in that child when nobody was making me write it down.

I wrote, for a girl who would not speak in class: Talks to the janitor’s cat at recess. Start there.

I wrote, for a boy with a bad temper: Hits when someone laughs. Do not let anyone laugh.

I wrote, for a boy whose card said Below Grade Level in reading: Reads the cereal box aloud to his little sister every morning. Ask him to read aloud.

I put each half sheet in the bottom drawer of the oak desk in the dining room alcove at home, and I shut the drawer. I did not show it to anyone. The child it described never knew it existed. I told myself I was keeping a record for my own sake, so I would not do again what I had done with Ricky. His was the first sheet in the drawer, and the only line I ever wrote in ink, because I had not yet decided to be a woman who used pencil. I filed it and did what I always did with them, which was nothing.

He left school the week he turned sixteen. The secretary told me the following Monday, in the lunch line, the way you would mention that the fish sticks were back. For twenty years he pumped gas at the Marathon on Route 36, and every time I pulled in he found something to look at on the pump. I never said his name. Then he bought the place, in 2009, and after that I bought my gas at the Casey’s out by the bypass, for seventeen years, so I would not have to see the sign.

And I did it again the next June, and the one after that, for thirty years, until the last week of school in 2013, when I carried the final stack down the north hall to a copy machine that cost nothing at all.

Six hundred and twelve cards. I will give you the number without dressing it up: six hundred and twelve children, over thirty years, whom a card had gotten wrong, and one line on the back of each, in pencil, in my hand. A dime apiece would have come to sixty-one dollars and twenty cents. The school stopped charging around 1996, so I considered it a bargain.