A Regular Guy (17 page)

“Because a lot of studies show that when you try to do that, it’s the English that suffers. A lot of these kids are hearing Spanish at home. School’s their only chance to learn to read and write in the language that’ll help them succeed.”

“Aren’t the studies biased?” came a grumble from the side.

Owens stood at a podium in a decrepit football field, half a mile from the convention center, the teachers sitting on the edges of damp, peeling bleachers. He’d begun in the assigned auditorium, then persuaded the teachers to follow him outside. They’d murmured as they’d come into the billowing, watery, blue-and-white day, but most of them felt glad to be outside. Teachers are used to changing their day for weather.

“Even without any studies—let’s say they don’t exist—it makes common sense that it’s harder to do two things well than it is to do just one. And here in California, in our public schools, we’re not even doing one thing well yet!”

A young woman stepped up to the microphone. She had a wide face, dark skin and a particularly upright carriage. “Don’t you think we’re in danger of losing an entire culture if the language that contains it falls by the way?” She had her hands in the pockets of a green parka. I want one like that, Jane thought, with the strings.

Kathleen scribbled quickly on a note card and handed it to him. He gave it back, mumbling, “I know how to talk without subtitles.” And then he spoke slowly, with care. “I think the best parts of a culture naturally last. For example, my parents come from the Midwest, where they eat a lot of pork. But when I became old enough to decide, I started eating rice and beans, which is not a part of what you would call my culture. I adopted it not because it’s from this culture or that culture but because it’s
good
.

“So I don’t think we have to worry about preserving every little thing from each culture. It’s like when your great-grandmother dies. Do you keep every button and figurine from her attic, or do you remember what you learned from her and make it part of yourself? The good things will stay because people want them.

“If your kid learns English, chances are he’ll do well in school. If he does that, he’s pretty sure of going to college or getting a good job. And don’t you think, at that point, if he wants to learn the language of his grandparents, he can do that pretty easily?”

Tentative applause rose from spots in the audience, then sputtered out.

The young woman in the parka had not left the microphone. “What language did
your
grandparents speak, and did
you
learn it in college?”

“Well, that’s kind of a hard question,” Owens said, walking out in front of the podium, arms crossed over his chest, “because I dropped out of college after one semester and also because my mother died when I was born and I didn’t know her parents. All I know about what they spoke is that one of them was Middle Eastern. And no, I didn’t learn that language. And the one grandparent I knew didn’t influence me much.”

“But doesn’t that prove my point?” the young woman asked. “Doesn’t that make a case for the integrity of an indigenous culture?”

“Absolutely the opposite!” he exploded, head shaking. He addressed the young woman directly now, his arms moving. This was easy for him, Jane realized. In front of an audience of nine hundred, what her father was doing was flirting. “She didn’t influence me because I didn’t really care for her. People being related biologically is irrelevant. What matters is if you like ’em. Or even more important, if you respect them.”

Kathleen fiddled with the recording equipment, gazing at the woman in the parka.

“What languages
did
you learn besides English?”

Jane felt pierced to the ground where she stood. She could tell it was going to sound bad here if he said just English. She wanted to give him her Spanish. She’d been teaching herself since she met the man from the post office picture, delivering Alta’s milk. She tried to catch Owens’ attention with a wave, so at least he could say his daughter had another language. But he didn’t see her.

“Well, I know
FORTRAN
and
BASIC
and probably about forty other computer languages. Oh, and pig latin. I like to think I know not the language of my grandfather but the language of my grandsons and granddaughters.”

Applause with a foam of laughter rolled through the crowd. Jane looked up at the sky, blue through the fronds of pine. Canary Island pine, Noah Kaskie had taught her. People carried seeds and cuttings from their homelands sewn in pockets, preserved in raw potatoes, and planted them here.

So he’d pulled it off again. It amazed Jane that though she’d felt a point in her heart like a splinter when he was on the verge of failing, now that he’d succeeded she was left feeling not victorious but chagrined.

Was he truly the most confident person in the world or, like her mother said, insecure?

In fact, Owens had not been invited to speak on bilingual education, pro or con. His assigned topic was science in the schools. But since Jane’s arrival in Alta, Owens had become interested in education.

He wanted every child at large not only to eat but to eat well. This he considered to be no problem. Some of the cheapest food you could buy happened to be what he liked best and believed in. He went on to establish a campaign for California’s fifty-eight county school districts to offer a free hot lunch daily, composed of beans, rice and one banana per pupil. He would donate the seed money himself, but the beauty of the idea was that beans and rice were cheaper than the junk kids ate now. After months of occasional meetings with his five political advisers and numerous phone calls, a bill had actually been drafted and put before the legislature. The rider Owens insisted on attaching called for the abolition of the milk subsidy, whereby children received a carton of milk, often chocolate, at ten o’clock in the morning for a nickel, which had once been Jane’s only incentive to go to school.

As his five advisers predicted, this provoked a real controversy, during which three hundred holsteins were led into Genesis’ parking lot by angry farmers and bellowed under the conference room’s panoramic window.

“I just don’t think cow’s milk is very good for us,” Owens shouted down, sticking his head out, over the sea of cattle and newspaper photographers. “We’re not calves!”

And as he explained later, it wasn’t the publicity that bothered him, the holsteins, or the three-inch headlines saying
LET THEM EAT BEANS
! He figured what was right was more important than what was popular and that popularity came at the end, not at the beginning, of honest work. But when he’d started visiting local schools, it occurred to him that there were problems greater than lunch. What seemed to him to work best was Huck’s eighth-grade laboratory classroom, where children sprawled freely on carpeted floors and the teacher came over to supervise, one by one.

Owens believed his first priority, after Genesis, was public education. But he despaired of the cost of changing thousands of schools, already entrenched in miniature military regimes; he didn’t have enough time, or even money. So he hired Henrik Henderson, who’d written the book that Huck’s eighth-grade experiment was based on, to develop a pilot program. Within the year, Owens hoped, school principals
up and down the state would be angling for subsidies to abolish order in the classrooms, free the wooden school desks from their regimental rows and scatter them in happier constellations.

He had hired a New York advertising firm to come up with a slogan to explain himself to the papers. He’d answered the questions himself too many times.
No, I’m not running for any thing. I’m a businessman. I work for a company called Genesis, in Auburn, California, and I’m also a citizen. A concerned citizen
. The copywriters used his own words to produce a slogan, and his public service announcements began: “I don’t have any degrees in education, I didn’t finish college myself, but I’ve got eyes and they work and here’s what I see.”

“How many of you drive Ford Tauruses?” he asked the crowd. “You can’t buy a car like that in the Soviet Union. Well, I’m asking you, where is the school that’s the equivalent of the Ford Taurus? And the answer is, it doesn’t exist because that car is the product of competition, and right now teachers’ unions have a monopoly.”

The teachers, whose salaries and vacations were negotiated by the union, began to stir. Teachers, in general, Jane noticed, were very well behaved.

Afterwards, a man who looked Mexican held out a wrinkled brown bag. “I wanted to show you,” he said, extracting a book, itself enclosed in wax paper. It was a dictionary, in Spanish, with thousands of English words scribbled in pencil. “This was how my father taught himself English. It took him nine years to really know it.”

Owens sat for the next twenty minutes, studying the English words written in soft, blurry pencil on the frail pages, translucent and flaking like insect wings.

“Well, you guys don’t agree on anything,” Jane said, sprawled on a large hotel bed. As Owens changed to jeans, turning into himself again, he’d asked her what she thought of the young woman in the parka. “Besides, if you’re so interested in schools, how come I can’t go?”

“I want to get one working right first. But in about a year, you should be able to go.” He sighed. “There’s some journalist coming here. Oh, so tell me about your friend Julie. Is she really great?”

“I think so. She’s really good at making—I don’t know—occasions. If you have a talk with her, you feel like you’ve almost had a tea ceremony.”

“Would you say she’s neater than Olivia or not as neat?”

“I don’t know. I can’t compare.”

“But if you had to, would you say she’s as beautiful as Olivia, more beautiful than Olivia, or not as beautiful?”

“Maybe as beautiful.”

“Really?” He raised an eyebrow.

“What do you enjoy?” the journalist asked. She had a pointed face and a very small body. More young than pretty, Owens decided. On the phone, she’d had an eager quality that reminded him of Albertine.

Jane sat in the corner at the desk, skimming the Gideons Bible. Their conversation all pertained to business and was dull. She kept thinking of what he’d said about being a college dropout. She didn’t want to be that.

“I like doing things well. I like doing the things I have to do in my life well.” At that moment, he was thinking of the small plastic bottles he’d bought with Jane from a mountaineering shop, to pack their Dr. Bronner’s soap and conditioner in—it was a point of pride for him to pack neatly—but he talked only about scientific applications, how with the information known now the world could already be changed. Jane listened for a minute and then her attention waned. She was thinking, I would know my answer: wind cuffing her neck softly, like it did this morning in the early sun with the top down on their rental car.

“So you’re not trying to discover the secret of life?” the journalist asked.

“The secret of life? The secret of life’s already been found.”

“Don’t you worry about being too lucky?” She mentioned the king whose touch turned everything to gold. “Do you sometimes think the gods might be out to get you?”

Thinking of the five-dollar bills, he said, “Well, maybe that’s where my girlfriend comes in,” and then laughed.

“Is it true that you have political aspirations?”

“I like my job a lot. I can’t think of any other job that would make me want to leave it.”

“Really? You wouldn’t, in a few years, say, consider running for governor? Or something bigger?”

Owens smiled enigmatically. Then the journalist glanced at Jane and asked whether he would encourage young people to follow his example in having children out of wedlock.

“Just to be clear,” he said, basketing his hands, “I’m not running for anything. And if I ever do, it won’t be for canonization. I’d run for some office that’s been held by men who might’ve done a great job for this country or a poor job but, without exception, men who’ve made mistakes. Whether they’ve acknowledged them or not. And I acknowledge my mistakes.”

“Oh, great,” Jane said when the avid young woman left. “It’ll be on the six o’clock news that I’m a mistake.”

The women in his life were not happy with Owens.

He was on television, answering a reporter’s questions in a Martinez apple orchard that had once been owned by John Muir. In the bungalow, Jane and Mary were perched together on the old love seat Julie had lent them, while Owens lay on the floor watching, his face as blankly studious as if it were any other news. Every day now, the California Dairy Council published full-page attacks on him in the newspaper.

What was it exactly that Owens did? Jane often wondered and tried to figure out. Well, he started a company, he and Frank Wu together. They manufactured LCSF and that turned out to be really important. But why? Owens didn’t even discover it. She asked Noah once what was the big deal and he said it was because they’d figured out how to put the protein into bacteria. They used to get insulin from pigs, he said, but people had immune reactions. They got human growth hormone—what they gave dwarfs—from cadavers, but it wasn’t safe to isolate proteins that way. That’s how Balanchine died, Noah said.

Most people knew only that Owens and Frank had started out in his parents’ basement and ended up being millionaires. But sometimes Owens talked about changing the world. And they did, I guess, Jane
thought; but doesn’t everything, then, in a way? Like what Noah told her, which she’d never known: that broccoli hadn’t existed, someone made it. Now millions of people, probably even in China, ate broccoli. That made a difference. And in the wintercamp she’d met the great-great-grandchildren of the man who’d invented the zipper lock. Peter’s family was connected with Ex-Lax. Somebody invented paper towels and the toilet and self-defrosting freezers—which would be a miracle to her and her mom since they’d waited too long and now the freezer was solid ice. But all those people weren’t on television. They weren’t famous.

When the news turned to weather, Owens suggested they go to the burrito place. It was still light out, and as they walked, Jane’s parents ganged up on her about makeup.