Language Arts (8 page)

“Silence!”
Mrs. Braxton repeated, taking up a ruler and rapping it on her desk. Eventually, the children of room 104 regained their composure.

By the time the final bell rang on that first day, Charles Simon Marlow's attitude toward the boy in the white suit had undergone another change.

Whether Dana McGucken's courage was born of genetically programmed stupidity or genuine spirit was impossible to know, but the truth was, from the very beginning, Charles admired him.

Charles's academic year—his twenty-second teaching at the sixth- through twelfth-grade private school known as City Prana (C
ONFIDENT
I
NDEPENDENT
T
HOUGHTFUL
Y
OUTH
P
ROMOTING
R
ESPONSIBILITY
, the A
RTS
, and N
OBLE
A
SPIRATIONS
)—was off to a dreary start. Not because anything had
changed;
on the contrary, everything was exactly, reassuringly, as it always was. It was quite puzzling.

Charles always looked forward to the first day of school, the way the students' arrival transformed the main building from a mausoleum to a ballroom. A perplexing stylistic mashup of French Moroccan and English Tudor, the structure had been the original carriage house/servants' quarters adjacent to a nineteenth-century mansion that had been demolished decades ago; the forlorn and lesser surviving twin of an architectural duo that now, standing on its own, no longer made any sense.

He was grateful too for the way that the strictures and demands of his profession provided him with a vessel, one that contained the intrinsic messiness that is human interaction.

Above all, he relished the clean-slate, newly-emerged-from-the-confessional feeling:
Today, we begin. Today, and today only, there is achievement amnesty; anything is possible and everyone is excellent until proven average
.

But as Charles trudged upstairs to his second-floor classroom, he couldn't summon anything but a weary, resolute calm, oddly impermeable to the effervescent energies of students and staff. It was as if he'd been encased in the emotional equivalent of a hazmat suit.

He was tired, that was all; exhausted, really, since he was still having trouble sleeping. He'd even found himself drifting off during the required faculty meetings that had filled the two days before the students' arrival. One of his colleagues, art teacher Pam Hamilton, actually had to nudge him out of a sound sleep during the requisite yearly seminar on Diversity Awareness.

Was there such a thing as late-onset narcolepsy?

At least today's schedule was a reduced one: after checking in with their homeroom teachers, all students went to a fifty-minute welcome-back assembly in the gym, which was housed in one of the new buildings next door.

Charles decided that, having sat through two decades' worth of these first-day revels, he could skip today's and get a head start on reading the paperwork that had already amassed in his mail cubby—a daunting stack that included the latest edition of
The City Prana Senior-Project Guide for Teachers.

The sounds of footsteps, laughter, and spoken words faded. Charles could almost hear the old building sigh with disappointment:
What? Gone again? They're leaving already?

Taking a seat at his desk, he began to read.

Because senior project was the cornerstone and culmination of senior year, every homeroom teacher was expected to spend an inordinate amount of time going over
The Senior-Project Preparatory Handbook Packet
. After this, students were required to fill out the paperwork contained within
The Senior-Project Workbook
and produce rough drafts of their project ideas; finally, each of them turned in a contract confirming every detail and requiring only slightly fewer initials and signatures than a home mortgage.

Charles found this growing trend toward excessive accountability in education worrisome, one of the things that often made him feel less like the shepherd of young minds and more like a bank officer at a savings and loan—the beleaguered George Bailey from
It's a Wonderful Life.

As he continued making his way through the pile (wasn't the whole point of e-mail to avoid paper waste?), he was surprised to discover that the bulk of this mass consisted of the rough drafts of several senior-project proposals.

This was unprecedented. Charles couldn't remember ever receiving proposals on the first day. Was this year's senior class exceptionally motivated?

Naomi Barstow planned to volunteer with vets suffering from PTSD at the VA hospital; Carlos Fontana wanted to study community-sponsored agriculture and produce a local Farm Aid concert; Kaisha Woodward intended to explore a potential future career by shadowing women firefighters and interviewing them about their experiences in a male-dominated field; Ethan Chichester was composing a klezmer/jazz oratorio for an intergenerational orchestra and choir on Mercer Island to be performed as part of a community center dedication. Clearly they'd all assimilated the
noble aspirations
element of the school acronym.

Emmy would have been a model student at City Prana, but because their home environment was so tightly controlled, it was decided that a less rarefied atmosphere would be better for her—one in which she'd have to assert herself to achieve notice and wouldn't face the stigma of being a teacher's kid. It had been a wrenching decision, but a good one: their bashful, humble homebody of a daughter (with her off-the-charts IQ) had graduated summa cum laude from Roosevelt High School at the age of sixteen.

The fifth proposal came from Romy Bertleson, one of Pam Hamilton's art-student standouts:

“A Picture's Worth”: Photography and Text

(Combined Focus in Studio Art and Creative Writing)

PROJECT GOAL
:
to produce a series of photographic portraits and short texts for an art exhibit sponsored by Art Without Boundaries, an organization that provides arts-enrichment programs for persons marginalized by socioeconomic, mental-health, and intellectual challenges.

When Charles saw her sitting in the back row of his homeroom this morning, he'd barely recognized her.

My current interests are studio photography and science. At this point I hope to have a career in medicine, possibly in the field of neuroscience research. These interests dovetail in this project proposal . . .

Gone were the defiantly geeky horn-rimmed prescription glasses, the oil-spotted mechanic's overall, machine-embroidered with the name
Alonzo D.
and overlayered with thrift-store articles: Catholic school plaid skirts, crinoline tutus, men's boxer shorts. Today she wore a pair of jeans and a mannish-looking shirt over a plain T. Period.

Art Without Boundaries offers classes for people with conditions such as Alzheimer's, dementia, and developmental disabilities. I have been given permission to attend classes and take photographs.

The one fashion item that had withstood every costume change through the years was Romy's camera, worn on an embroidered strap and slung diagonally across her body, an accessory that—depending on the accompanying fashion context—had suggested everything from Miss America's silk moiré ribbon to Rambo's bandolier.

The culmination of the project will be the inclusion of my work as part of an exhibit that showcases the art and writing of professional artists and program participants and raises money for the organization.

What eventually confirmed her as
Bertleson, Romy Andrea,
was her voice—still a husky, high-pitched chirp—and that pleasant citrus odor that Charles had noticed for the first time a few years ago while Christmas shopping at the mall.

What's that smell?
he'd wondered, retracing his steps until he stood in the entrance of The Body Shop, and Emmy replied,
Satsuma Body Butter,
and Charles asked,
Do you think your mother would like some?
and Emmy considered, doing that funny thing with her mouth where she yanked it sideways, her default expression whenever she was contemplating something with gravity, and then she shook her head and said,
Some women are florals, some women are fruits, and some women are herbals; Mom is
definitely
a floral.
Charles asked,
How about
you? And she answered with tolerant exasperation,
Daaad, I'm twelve. It's too soon to tell. Ask me again when I'm sixteen.

Charles lifted Romy's proposal off his desk, laid it against his face, and inhaled deeply. Yes, even the pages were infused with the fragrance of oranges.

“Good morning.”

Charles's feet jolted off the floor, as if some unseen, punitive researcher had flipped a switch, causing the test subject to experience a low-voltage electrocution.

It was Pam Hamilton, leaning against the doorjamb, stock-still and smiling in a fond, amused way that Charles found unsettling. Even immobile, she gave off a hovering, silent, intensely vibratory energy, like a hummingbird. Charles wondered how long she'd been watching him.

“You playing hooky too?” she asked. Her hands were wrapped around one of those pathetic, lumpy paperweights-passing-for-coffee-mugs that her beginning pottery students were always making.

Charles tapped the edges of Romy Bertleson's proposal into alignment and turned it face-down on his desk. “I think it's safe to say we've both assimilated the content of the ‘Welcome to City Prana' assembly.”

Pam gave a subdued, single-syllable chuckle and sauntered into the room.

This habit she had, of strolling in without being formally asked, had been annoying Charles for at least a decade, but what ultimately made her intrusions bearable was the manner of their execution: Pam moved lightly, almost noiselessly, and in an indirect path, not looking at him but surveying various aspects of the room—ceiling, floor, walls, windows—as if she were here in the capacity of a building inspector, and Charles's presence was purely coincidental.

“I've been trying for half an hour to change my damn password,” she said, staring with apparent fascination at the electrical outlet next to Charles's desk. Her focus was so steadfast that Charles found himself following her gaze, noticing for the first time that stacked grounded outlets looked a little like smiley faces—vertical slashes for eyes, arch-shaped holes for mouths—except they weren't smiling; they appeared to be chorusing the word
Oh!,
as if witnessing a spectacularly horrific social blunder.

Pam moved farther into the room and shifted her eyes toward the ceiling; she began studying the smoke detector, which was, thankfully, featureless. “You got that e-mail, didn't you, about how some kid has already hacked into the system?”

“Yes. It's inconvenient.”

“At the risk of validating a passel of stereotypes, I have to say that I
hate
all this tech stuff.” She immediately slapped a hand over her mouth and emitted a muffled
Oops
. “Sorry, not the way we teach the kids to talk is it?
Despise?
Disdain?
” She started roaming the room again. “Personally, I find embracing technology to be a challenge. Why can't we go back to the good old days: attendance books you actually
write
in, with actual writing
implements?
Report cards?” She squatted beneath one of the windows, showing an acute fascination with the shoe molding. “You're old enough to remember report cards, aren't you?”

“I am.”

Nimble knees,
Charles thought, admiring Pam's flexibility. She had to be in her early sixties. His own joints suddenly felt sticky and unyielding, as if they'd been lubricated with tar. He wanted to get up and stretch. He wanted his solitude back. He liked Pam Hamilton but was always slightly discomfited in her presence; there was something too well-adjusted about her, too bright, too incisive, even when she wasn't looking directly into his face.
But then,
he thought,
that's a set of artist's eyes for you.

“Thank God,” she said. “Ever since becoming a card-carrying member of the AARP, people's ages are impossible to figure out.”

Charles inhaled sharply enough for her to shoot him a worried look. Although he'd trained himself out of the (according to Alison) extremely disagreeable habit of verbally correcting grammar infractions, he still experienced an intense reflexive repugnance for dangling participles.

He grinned in Pam's general direction and then took up his pen and a notepad and wrote,
I cannot determine people's ages.

Pam stood and ambled through the circle of desks to the far end of the classroom, where a trio of folding screens formed three walls of a smaller room within a room: a student lounge that Charles painstakingly furnished and arranged over the years with a rotating assortment of beanbag chairs, sofas, footstools, oversize floor pillows. There were thick-pile rugs on the floor, and a pair of HappyLight floor lamps allowed students to study beneath illumination gentler than that supplied by the twitchy fluorescent tubes overhead and helped combat seasonal affective disorder.

The intense, demanding work of a Language Arts class—reading, reflection, discourse, writing—put students in the path of risks and hazards that were (in Charles's opinion) every bit as dangerous as those encountered in chemistry, metallurgy, or glass blowing. It was his job to make sure that the young people in his care felt sufficiently protected to take those risks. Two decades of teaching experience had taught him that teenagers feel safest when they're allowed to slouch.