THE WEIRD LITTLE GIRL

by Carl Steiger

Bella Codreanu came into my kindergarten in the middle of the school year. She's a weird-looking girl who wears peasant dresses and scuffed black shoes to school, and has her dark hair braided in pigtails. If she knew any English at all that first morning, she didn't speak any of it. But she did say "Goodbye, Miss Johnson" to me at the end of the day, and picked up the language quickly in the days that followed.

"My daughter is very smart!" her father had exclaimed to me when he came to enroll her in school. "She will learn English very fast! I am going to only speaking English to her at home." He was a heavy man and looked far too old to be a kindergartener's father. He walked with a cane, and one shoe had a high platform. He wore a suit that looked very old and greasy.

I really didn't like him. He wasn't interested in anything I had to say about the curriculum, but he did have a lot to say about his own importance. "I was very rich before I come to America. I lost my rich when I come, but I will be rich again soon."

Benson is a tiny town. How he thinks he can get rich here, I can't imagine.

Bella's father was right about her — she is learning English quickly. But the things she says are so strange sometimes.

One afternoon the children were drawing pictures of their homes and families. "Very good, Bella," I said when I stopped to admire her work. "Is that your little brother?"

"Yeah. He's a baby."

"His teeth aren't really that pointy, are they?"

"He bites a lot."

"Your mother's hair is so long."

"Yeah. Like Rapunzel. She's pretty. Miss Johnson, people who don't have heads don't look like people. They just look dead."

That was a non sequitur, to say the least. "Don't draw dead people, Bella," was all I could manage. "Just draw your family."

I wonder how she lives at home. Bella brings money to school every day and buys lunch in the cafeteria. She eats ravenously, and I sat next to her yesterday and asked why she eats so fast.

"I like school food," she said. "It's good!"

"Do you have good food at home?" I asked. "What do you eat at home?"

"We eat beans."

"What else do you eat?"

"Just beans. Daddy says only beans are good to eat, so we have to eat beans."

"Bella, you can't just eat beans."

"Yes, we can. They're special beans."

"Well, what kind of beans are those?"

"I forget. Daddy knows. But they're special."

I let it drop, and Bella resumed wolfing down her pizza.

***