Language Arts (11 page)

After Cody places the block of noodles in the mortar, he takes up the pestle and begins, setting up a rhythm:

Down-up, down-up, down-up, down-up . . .

He smashes for a while, and then he changes to grinding:

Twist-twist-twist-turn, twist-twist-twist-turn . . .

It can take a long time to grind the noodles until they are just right: small and fine, like sand. The timer almost always goes off before then, and sometimes he can't help making a fuss. On those days, no sticker.

But if he finishes, he is able to run his hands through the noodles in their new form and feel what he has accomplished: the blocks of noodles started out one way—wrapped and separate—but now they are all one. All the same. He can do that.

And now Dad is going. He walks around the counter but stops far away. He doesn't make that mistake of coming too close again.

Goodbye, Cody. Goodbye, son. See you soon.

Cody doesn't look up.
Twist-twist-turn, twist-twist-turn . . .

The timer is still ticking.

Charles's mother, Rita Marlow, was a master when it came to preparing what is now a category of haute cuisine known variously as
small plates, mezes,
or
tapas
—although her culinary artistry was a byproduct of maternal obligation and went by the term
after-school snack.

When Charles came through the front door after that first day of fourth grade—

Mom! I'm home!

—he realized that the house was empty.

Mom?

The kitchen table was set with two napkins, two glasses of milk, and two plates, each of which contained a mandala-like display: peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich triangles alternating in a complex pattern with circular slices of Little Debbie Ho Hos, cut crosswise to reveal their spiraling jellyroll centers. All of this framed a perfectly centered Red Delicious apple filleted to look like a flower in bloom. A scattering of carrot curls added color and unified the overall design.

In the center of the table was a note:

Hello, Charles. I had to run an errand. You and Donnie may watch cartoons in the TV room after you have your snack if you wish. Please clear your dishes. Your father won't be home for dinner. I'll be back soon. Mom.

Charles and Donnie had been walking home from school together since kindergarten. Their kinship began when, after being toppled by a stampede of heedless upperclassmen charging onto the playground for morning recess, they ended up occupying side-by-side cots in the Quiet Room adjacent to the nurse's office.

While recuperating, they learned that being human bowling pins wasn't the only thing they had in common: they both went to a Catholic church; they both were only children; they both had a tendency to magnetize playground mishaps. For these reasons, they ended up meeting many more times over Mercurochrome, gauze, and the apple juice and Vanilla Wafers that the Nellie Goodhue nurse dispensed to every patient, a comforting reminder of the Blessed Sacrament.

It was in the Quiet Room that they invented their own version of a blood-brother ritual by swapping Band-Aids that had been applied to their ravaged knees. Their allegiance endured through third grade even as they noticed other clubs acquiring larger memberships, strong identities, cachet.

They enjoyed christening these evolving social circles. Charles started bringing a small flip-top spiral notebook to school, tucked into his shirt pocket, and—just like a TV police detective—he recorded findings and observations, taking down the names given to the groups as well as their membership rosters:

The Bullies, the Pretties, the Fatties, the Lonelies, the Good- at-Sports, the Jokers, the Smarties, the Cheaters, the Chatty Cathys . . .

What did they call themselves? What was the name of their club?

They didn't have one. They didn't need one. They were just Donnie and Charlie, best friends.

And now Donnie had moved away.

Charles crumpled his mother's note into a tight ball. How could she not have remembered?

After finishing his snack and his absent friend's glass of milk, he dumped the remaining food in the garbage and put the dishes in the dishwasher.

Where
was
she?

He walked into the living room and looked out the window. The garage door was open; both cars were gone. He recalled a recent conversation between his parents in which his mother reiterated her ongoing difficulty in raising and lowering the garage door: it was heavy, she was ruining her manicures. Garrett Marlow said,
Well, maybe if you're a good girl this year, you'll get a surprise from Santa,
to which Rita Marlow replied,
If I'm going to ask for something from Santa, it's sure as hell not going to be a garage-door opener.

Charles was restless. Now that Donnie wasn't around to trade comics with, his own collection had quickly grown stale and boring. He was about to go to the TV room and watch cartoons when he noticed the display of
Life
magazines on the coffee table.

So as not to disturb his mother's careful tabletop presentation of the most recent
Life,
he sat down on the sofa and decided to look at the older magazines on the lower shelf.

That was when he discovered Janet Leigh.

Opening the magazine in search of information about those mysterious red fezzes, he found stories with titles like:

THE MASTER OF AGENT 007

WHICH PHONE NUMBER DOES SHE DIAL TO STOP A MURDER?

BOYS AND GIRLS TOO OLD TOO SOON

Eventually, he located more photos of Ms. Leigh, part of an article on page 39 called
JANET, THE BELLE OF THE BRAWL
.
The pictures showed her wearing a scanty, circus-performer-type getup and being passed around by a roomful of men who'd apparently stolen her fezzes. These images only increased his concerns on Ms. Leigh's behalf.

But none of the photos were as gripping as those that accompanied the story called
THE DRUG THAT LEFT A TRAIL OF HEARTBREAK
: pictures of deformed, dwarflike creatures, real-life monsters that were easily as grotesque and fascinating as those in any
Amazing Adventures
comics or
Creature Feature
movies.

Except they weren't monsters. They were children.

Charles had no idea that
Life
contained such wonders.

He was still lost in thought when he heard his mother's voice from the kitchen.

“Hello? Helloooooo! Anybody home?”

“I'm here,” he replied, before realizing that his mother might not approve of his sudden interest in adult periodicals. He was about to replace the magazine and assume an innocent expression when she strolled into the living room. Immediately, she froze and gave a sharp gasp, followed by a humorless but relieved chuckle.

“Well, look at you,” she said. Her expression was odd, as if
she
were the one who'd been engaged in covert activity. “So grown-up, sitting there on the sofa, reading a magazine. For a minute I thought you were your father.”

She sat down beside him.

“What have you been up to since you got home?”

She smelled of hairspray and cigarettes. Wherever she'd been and whatever she'd been doing had made her happy.

“Nothing much.”

“Did you find your snack?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“How's Donnie?”

“Fine. I guess.”

There was a pause. Charles pretended to study an ad for men's slacks.

“I'm sorry I'm so late.”

“It's okay.”

“Did your father call?”

“No.”

“Were you worried?”

“No.”

“Are you angry?”

“No.”

She lit a cigarette. Charles felt her staring at him, thinking. As an acute observer of adult behavior, he'd recently realized that, in cases such as this, whatever his mother said next would
not
be the thing she'd been thinking about.

“How was your first day of school?”

“Fine.”

“Do you like your new teacher?”

“She's okay.”

“What's her name?”

“Mrs. Braxton.”

“Is she pretty?”

Charles shrugged.

“Well, I suppose I'll be meeting her soon enough . . .”

She got up and went into the kitchen. Next to the sofa, she'd left deep tamped-down toe/heel imprints in the shag carpet, as if she were a heavy piece of furniture that had been in the same place for a very long time.

Charles heard her cracking an ice cube tray and filling a glass as she spoke, her voice sometimes loud, sometimes soft: “Your father won't be home, he has a Jaycees meeting, or maybe Shriners or Sultans or Elks
or moose or caribou who the hell knows, one of those anyway,
so it will be just you and me and a couple of TV dinners. Aren't we
lucky
to live in The Age of Convenience? Isn't
all this
just a dream come true? Lucky, lucky, lucky . . .”

After gathering up several more issues from the lower coffee-table shelf, Charles tiptoed down the hall.

“We've got Salisbury steak, Mexican, fried chicken . . .”

He stashed the magazines in his bookshelf, out of sight, behind his comic books.

If his father could keep a hidden stash of
Playboy
s and his mother could be gone when he got home from his first day of fourth grade and forget all about Donnie Bothwell and not say where she'd been, then he was entitled to his own secrets.

He wouldn't even tell her about Dana McGucken.

•♦•

Mr. Austin Norman Palmer invented his famous method of business writing in response to the needs of a rapidly changing planet—one in which science and technology were advancing at a rate that left many people wondering where the telegraph left off and God began.

It was also a brawling, bold world, epitomized by America's president at the time, Theodore Roosevelt.

To get a sense of why Mr. Palmer might have felt it necessary to offer a pared-down version of cursive writing, consider the lettering style used by the Coca-Cola company. That's Spencerian script, the preferred penmanship of the late nineteenth century. It was high-minded and heavily embellished; built for beauty, not speed.

My father has many ideas involving handwriting—its significance, its evolution, its relationship to history. He believes that the metaphoric big stick of President Roosevelt's diplomatic policy found a correlate in Mr. Palmer's revolutionary approach to the pencil.

Here's why:

The Palmer Method requires tremendous physical strength, confidence, and tenacity. Early on, Mrs. Braxton informed my father's fourth-grade class that for these reasons, it was also referred to as Muscular Movement Writing.

With that in mind, we're going to revisit those basic loops you tried a while ago. You'll need to clear your desk and roll up your sleeves.

Now, instead of punishing your pencil with white-knuckle force and controlling its movement in a stingy, restricted way by using the small muscles of your wrist and fingers, you're going to move from your shoulder joint.

This means:

1. Your forearm and wrist form a long, unbroken line.
   

2. The muscles of your fingers are almost completely passive, engaged only to an extent that allows your pencil to ride in the seat formed where the bases of the thumb and index finger meet.
   

3. Your hand slides along on the fleshy cushion of its pinkie-side edge, losing its connection to the table only when you pick it up to begin a new line of writing.
   

Go ahead. Give those loops another try.

Remember, you're still seeking the holy grail of speed combined with size-and-pressure consistency, but you're using your arm as one large unit.

When it comes to teaching this element of the Palmer Method, Mrs. Braxton's method—which you're about to observe in action—might strike you as extreme; however, it certainly drove home the point that the Palmer Method required real chops.

Many people insist that this forearm-and-passive-hand approach to writing—using the grosser muscles of the arm to propel something as lightweight as a pencil in service of something as delicate as thought (although one could argue, and many have, that
thought
is one thing the Palmer system
didn't
require)—represents the
real
challenge of mastering Palmer penmanship. A roomful of people practicing loops, ovals, and push-pulls look less like they're learning cursive and more like they're taking PE. It's rigorous. It's calisthenic. It's exhausting.

As a schoolboy, Theodore Roosevelt wouldn't have learned Muscular Movement Writing, but it's fun to imagine him in a Palmer penmanship class. He would have been a natural.

•♦•

By late September, Charles had achieved a more complete understanding of the significance of Mrs. Braxton's seating chart.

The smart kids—aside from Astrida—occupied the classroom hinterlands. Apparently Mrs. Braxton trusted them to remain intellectually engaged and behaviorally appropriate, although in Charles's experience Smarties were just as disruptive and mean-spirited as anybody else, forever correcting, ridiculing, and shushing, even if all you did was drop a pencil or start coughing when you inhaled a mushroom cloud of eraser dust.

It likewise became clear that he'd been assigned to a seat in the center of the classroom because, in four years of public-school education, he'd firmly established himself as a boy who was neither bright nor riotous but merely obedient, occasionally distracted. Teachers had already come to expect a middling and nondisruptive effort from him (his report cards routinely featured words like
adequate,
sufficient,
and
satisfactory
); therefore, he sat in the middle.