Language Arts (20 page)

“Perfect, Charles.”

The Ax was so enthralled by her protégé that she had even started to smile, which was unfortunate; when the nearly atrophied muscles responsible for smiling drew her lips apart, they revealed a set of preternaturally white, store-bought dentures that were as eerily eugenic as Dana's God-given teeth were flawed.

In all areas of study but one, Charles remained consistently undistinguished, nonexemplary, neither exceeding nor falling short of his average status. But ever since Mrs. Braxton had given a lecture on the unexpected benefits of becoming a Palmer penmanship gold medalist (handwriting could build
muscles?
), he'd been driving himself strenuously.

“All right, class. Present arms!” This was the cue for students to take up their writing implements with no less vigor and intensity of purpose than if they were hoisting broadswords.

Each day, when the time came for penmanship lessons, Mrs. Braxton asked her star pupil to vacate his desk, station himself at the chalkboard, and lead the class in what she called preparatory calisthenics.

“Notice the evenness with which Charles writes,” she remarked, “the steady pressure he applies to the chalk.”

Producing a row of perfectly uniform Palmer loops extending the length of the chalkboard was clearly number one of Mrs. Braxton's criteria for academic success. Her gusto for the study and practice of penmanship so far exceeded her enthusiasm for any other subject that Charles sometimes wondered if she had a personal relationship with Mr. Palmer. Maybe they were pen pals.

“Notice how he keeps his arms relaxed, his movements completely smooth . . .”

That particular day, while Mrs. Braxton droned on and made her rounds, Charles began replaying the events of the previous evening, when he'd discovered the benefits of Palmer practice at home.

He and his parents were in the TV room. The evening news was on, the martinis were poured, and his mother was recapping the events of the day, which included a bridge-club luncheon at one of her friends' houses.

I just don't understand why some people don't make an effort to speak correctly. It's not rocket science, it's not brain surgery, it's a simple matter of opening up a dictionary, but I guess some people can't be bothered—but I mean, really, how can anyone hope to rise above their situation if they still sound like they're from, well, you know what I mean; in this country we can be whoever we
want;
we can
all
make something of ourselves, and speaking properly is one of the simplest ways to improve our social standing; it makes an impression, the way we talk; people are sadly misinformed if they think it doesn't; I mean, think about it, Garrett: you'd fire your secretary in a heartbeat if she sent out a business letter with misspelled words or improper grammar and yet people think nothing of saying
Warsh
-ington or
git
or
melk
or—

Suddenly, Garrett Marlow threw his newspaper down in a mangled heap and yelled,
Jesus Christ, Rita, you can be a pretentious BITCH!

He stormed out of the room. A minute later, he could be heard slamming the door to the garage, gunning the engine of his car, and speeding into the night.

“Notice the steady tempo,” Mrs. Braxton continued now, “the balance between energy and relaxation . . .”

While Walter Cronkite had reported on Wally Schirra's space orbit, Charles withdrew a cursive practice table from his satchel and began trying to slow his heart rate by executing a series of up-downs. His mother finished off the pitcher of martinis.

You may eat in the TV room tonight if you want, Charles,
she'd said after a while. Her voice sounded faint and quavering, as if she were speaking from inside the freezer.
I'll heat up a potpie—we've got a turkey; that's your favorite, isn't it?—and then I think I'll take a little nap.

In the safety of his bedroom, Charles retrieved his pocket dictionary;
bitch
was easy to locate, but it took a long time to find
pretentious.

“Look how consistent he is!” Mrs. Braxton marveled, her voice exuberant enough to penetrate Charles's reverie. “Really, that is quite
exceptional.
Textbook
perfect!
”

“
Egg-
SHEP
-shun-all,
” Bradley whispered, giving a sustained, reptilian emphasis to the
s'
s.

“
Puh
-fect.” Mitch's aggressive, plosive articulation of the
c
and
t:
a linguistic shiv.

Charles felt the ping of spitballs hitting his shoulder blades.

“Bradley! Mitchell! Shall I send you to detention?”

There was a momentary silence, followed by an impressive cadenza of farts.

Mrs. Braxton shot Dana a poisonous look. His head was resting on his desk, cushioned by his forearms, and up to this point, everyone had thought he was asleep. But now he roused himself. His weasel's grin expanded into a full-fledged smile and he craned his head around, basking in the accolades of laughter.

An eggy fragrance was permeating the air; the Ax pursed her lips, strode to the other side of the room, and threw open a window. She sighed heavily, then spoke in an uncharacteristically small, defeated voice. “I had so hoped that we might move on to more complicated letter forms today, but clearly that is not to be the case.”

She seemed unaware that Dana's contribution to the atmosphere had been dissipated by a sudden, bitterly cold wind blowing in through the open window and that the sky, the color of dull paper clips, was starting to spit snow—a meteorological event that, in Seattle, borders on the miraculous and fills students with the not-unreasonable hope that school will be canceled at any moment.

Whoa,
students began to whisper.
Look outside, it's snowing.
Children telescoped their necks to get a better view. Some dared to detach their bottoms from their desk chairs; others poked the unaware and then, gluing their forearms to their chests, allowed single, cautious fingers to unfurl and point.

Snow snow snow snow snow snow snow
. . .

The word gathered force with each repetition, the
s'
s and
o'
s filling the room, a two-letter alphabet soup spiraling around and around: a spell, a charm, an invocation.

When Brad hollered,
“Holy shit, it's snowing!”
Mrs. Braxton shook herself out of her melancholy, glared at him, and spoke a single word: “Go.”

Brad rose and exited. The class was riveted by Mrs. Braxton's sudden recovery of her godlike powers. She turned to the window and pushed down on the casement with such force that the glass rattled and the snow stopped falling. (By the time recess arrived, it had vanished without a trace.)

“All right, class,” she began. “Let us resume with a series of lowercase
a'
s. Charles will continue to lead. I will call out a rhythm. Present arms! And . . . up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down . . .”

She was near the back of the room when Dana spoke. His strange, denasal voice was not, for once, too loud; it was almost within the bounds of normalcy.

“You do good with that, Char-
Lee
Mar-
Low,
” he said.

A hush fell over the room. Even Mrs. Braxton was temporarily stunned into silence. Charles turned around.

Dana wasn't looking at him—Dana never looked directly at anyone—but his head and gaze were spiraling around Charles's general direction. He looked like he was tracking the movements of an inebriated bumblebee whose flight path was roughly at the level of Charles's face. He was smiling too, in a genuine, easy way, revealing his train wreck of a mouth. “Char-Lee, Char-Lee Mar-Low,” he repeated.

“Dana,” Mrs. Braxton said, less sharply than she normally spoke to a disruptive student. “Quiet, please.”

Dana bobbed his head, as if shrinking from a blow. He drew his hands toward his chest, squirrel-like, in a way that was usually the precursor to his hand-massaging habit. But then, very slowly, as if encountering terrific internal resistance, he separated them and inched his right hand to just above the level of his head. In this diffident and clearly difficult way, Dana McGucken was asking to be called on. Never had he employed this basic schoolroom protocol before.

“Yes, Dana.” If Mrs. Braxton was as astonished as everyone else by Dana's unprecedented use of classroom etiquette, she gave no indication. “Do you have something to contribute? You may put your hand down if you wish.”

Dana spoke at a normal volume, slowly, but with exceptional clarity:

“That boy . . . that Char-Lee Mar-Low . . . He do good work with . . . those . . . those . . .
Pah
-mer loose. He do real good work.”

It was the most anyone in room 104 had ever heard him say.

PART TWO

On the first day of fourth grade, Mrs. Hunter

collected our penmanship samples to save

until June; by then, she said, we'd write

in the handwriting we would have all our lives.

. . .

We were writing ourselves into the future.

—Katrina Vandenberg, “Handwriting Analysis”

I almost think we are all of us ghosts . . . It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that “walks” in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines.

—Henrik Ibsen,
Ghosts

Every childhood has a lexicon.

—Priscilla Long,
The Writer's Portable Mentor

The Intruder continues to disrupt the orderly workings of the many worlds Giorgia inhabits, an idle tourist with too much time on her hands. Maybe
she
has nothing to do but sightsee, chitchat, and take photographs, but Giorgia has obligations.

Most concerning of all, however, is the fact that the Intruder (whose name, Giorgia has learned, is Roma) has begun to evolve into something far more than a meddlesome, gossiping nuisance; she has become a
threat,
aggressively inserting herself into Giorgia's stories.

She has made herself a character in “A Love Like Salt”—a
sixth
sister in the
panificio,
when it is Giorgia who has always been the youngest!—parading around, showing off her strength and beauty, trying to supplant Giorgia as Papa's favorite.

She is the newest teacher at the school on “The Isle of Rain
,”
a novitiate seeking to endear herself to Giorgia's special students, some of whom are starting to prefer her when it comes time for handwriting lessons.

And she has also somehow gained access to Giorgia's convent cell, where Giorgia is the title character in “The Epistles of the Banished Princess.” Earlier this morning, she became aware of the girl crouched beneath her writing table, spying, peering over the edge through that camera lens, trying to distract Giorgia from her responsibilities as a wartime pen pal.

As if anything could keep her from that story and that work,
l'opera di Dio!
How wrong it would be to abandon her correspondence, written in an unperturbed, flowing female hand with the greatest of care, telling of ordinary things, affirming the enduring existence of places exempt from horror. The war is escalating. The body count is rising. Not every boy is fortunate enough to have a sweetheart or wife assuring him that there is at least one person in the world advocating for him morning, noon, and night with God the Father and with the saints in His special employ, the patron saints of soldiers: Saint Ignatius, Saint Joan, Saint Martin, Saint Maurice, Saint Sebastian, and Saint George—Giorgia's namesake.

Ha!
There is no Saint Roma!
It is a satisfying thought.
I bet she's never written as much as a
postcard
to a boy in uniform!

One thing is certain: this Roma had better not dare to step foot in the chapel again, or into any part of the story of “The Sunflower Bride.”

It remains a puzzle. For so long, Giorgia has moved easily and alone between worlds on paths she believed that no one else could travel; how is it that the Intruder is able to follow?

It matters not. She has come up with a way to shield herself. In one of the church classrooms, she found a large, lightweight white board with two folds, a standing screen that she can situate wherever it is most needed. It affords her privacy and separation. It allows her to concentrate. She can carry it with her wherever she goes, and she does, from world to world, country to country, across the seas and back again.

One world materializes as another recedes. It is difficult sometimes knowing where she is and who her allies are. But at least, always, she has this protective barrier that serves her many needs: portable confessional,
panificio
kitchen, convent cell, the walls of a classroom, the palace of her shame.

She has this wall, and her hands, and her ceaseless industry.

•♦•

Now she is in the story “Life Among the Changelings.”

Giorgia's pupils at the island convent school are among God's most special children: eyes tending ever upward, roaming the skies; speaking (if they speak at all) in a private, individuated language; typically oblivious to ordinary earthly concerns; often outright resistant to traditional forms of human connection—touch, eye contact, conversation; attentive first and foremost to celestial voices only they can hear and decipher. In this sense, Giorgia considers her role to be less teacher and more code-breaker.