Crossing the River by Amy Ragsdale Page A

stuff new notebooks into their backpacks. “Antonio said he’d open early so the kids can have some breakfast before they take off.”
    Molly would be taking thirteen subjects, including four sciences, religion, sociology, philosophy, and Brazilian literature—all in Portuguese. Skyler had nine. School was slated to start at seven. The Brazilian school year starts in February, so now, in mid-July, they would be entering into the second semester.
    Nothing about this was sounding easy. Though we had hired a Portuguese tutor back in the States, the reality of what it might be like to not understand anything was just too distant to grasp. Despite repeated urgings to do the homework the tutor assigned—“You’ll be thankful later”—at twelve and fifteen, their I’m-sure-it-will-be-fine outlook on life had won out. Now reality had arrived, like a semi ready to accelerate down a hill in the wrong lane.
    I’d attended Catholic schools twice as a child, always when we’d lived abroad, first in Manila, at age six, and then in Cairo, when I was eleven and twelve. In Manila, I remember begging my mother not to send me to school. At Assumption, they were fond of telling youthat you were going to be punished tomorrow, the better to let you wallow overnight in miserable anticipation. I’d sat in front of my second-grade class in a dunce cap; stayed after school more than once to fill the chalkboard with I will not talk ; and stood, humiliated, a second grader in the corner of the kindergarten classroom, face to the wall. All this for doing things like playing “stomp on your toes” with my partner while waiting in line to come in from recess, two-by-two like Madeline.
    You’d think I would have done anything to prevent our kids from having to go through the experiences I’d been through. But I found myself laughing and saying, “Well, everybody should go to a Catholic school at least once in their life.”
    It gives you entrée to that special club—the CSSC—Catholic School Survivors’ Club. And since it appears that the private schools in developing countries, the schools where the local elites send their kids and where all the Brazilians we’d met in the United States said we must send ours, are frequently Catholic, I wasn’t surprised that in Penedo there was no other choice. This would all be part of the experience.
    After a hasty breakfast of buttery fried eggs, dry chocolate cake, and graviola juice, I headed out the door in front of them, wanting to snap a picture of their first walk to school. They looked preoccupied.
    â€œHow’re you doing?” I asked anxiously.
    â€œOkay,” they both said quietly.
    The Brazilian school day is short. Skyler would be there for four hours each day, Molly for five. The number of kids in blue pants and white knit shirts, the standard uniform no matter which school you went to, was growing as we made our way over the broken sidewalks and up the ridge. Colegio Imaculada Conceiçao, or Imaculada, as we would come to call it, was at one end of the pleasant praça at the top. It was strikingly unadorned and institutional compared to the surrounding houses, with their baroque frippery or angular art deco embellishments.
    Cars blocked the street at odd angles as parents dropped off kids in front. We squeezed our way in. Irma Joanna, the nun from whom I’d bought the kids’ uniforms, waved us over.
    â€œ Tudo bem? ” Her smile shone white in her dark face.
    Iracema, the coordenador of the middle school, walked up and asked us how we were as well.
    It was only a week after Skyler’s trip to the trauma center. Sweat trickled down the small of my back as I struggled to explain, in pieced-together Portuguese, why Skyler was wearing a hat and that I hoped the teachers wouldn’t ask him to take it off. I’d made sure I knew the word for stitches and tried to emphasize that he