Page 54 - A Little Life: A Novel

spent playing with them: reading to them, pushing them around the
grounds, tickling them with feathers. During recess all the classrooms
opened their doors to the school’s central courtyard, and the space filled

with children on such a variety of wheeled contraptions and vessels and
vehicles that it sometimes sounded as if it was populated by mechanical
insects, all of them squeaking and whirring and clucking at once. There
were children in wheelchairs, and children on small, scaled-down mopeds
that putted and clicked along the flagstones at a tortoise’s speed, and
children strapped prone atop smooth lengths of wood that resembled
abbreviated surfboards on wheels, and who pulled themselves along the

ground with their elbowed stumps, and a few children with no means of
conveyance at all, who sat in their minders’ laps, the backs of their necks
cupped in their minders’ palms. Those were the ones who reminded him
most keenly of Hemming.
Some of the children on the motorcycles and the wheeled boards could
speak, and he would toss, very gently, large foam balls to them and organize

races around the courtyard. He would always begin these races at the head
of the pack, loping with an exaggerated slowness (though not so
exaggerated that he appeared too broadly comic; he wanted them to think
he was actually trying), but at some point, usually a third of the way around
the square, he would pretend to trip on something and fall, spectacularly, to
the ground, and all the kids would pass him and laugh. “Get up, Willem, get
up!” they’d cry, and he would, but by that point they would have finished

the lap and he would come in last place. He wondered, sometimes, if they
envied him the dexterity of being able to fall and get up again, and if so, if
he should stop doing it, but when he asked his supervisor, he had only
looked at Willem and said that the kids thought he was funny and that he
should keep falling. And so every day he fell, and every afternoon, when he
was waiting with the students for their parents to come pick them up, the

ones who could speak would ask him if he was going to fall the next day.
“No way,” he’d say, confidently, as they giggled. “Are you kidding? How
clumsy do you think I am?”
It was, in many ways, a good summer. The apartment was near MIT and
belonged to Jude’s math professor, who was in Leipzig for the season, and
who was charging them such a negligible rent that the two of them found
themselves making small repairs to the place in order to express their

gratitude: Jude organized the books that were stacked into quavering,