Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) (4 page)

“It’s different.”

“Than what?” I said.

“Than what you usually do. There’s something new here.”

“Feelings.”

“Is that it? Huh. I think you’re right.”

That’s when, art-wise, I became a fraud. With the pure, un-corrupted logic which God grants eight-year-olds, I reasoned that if art was made of feelings and feelings were secret, known only to the artist, then art could be anything you said it was. Collage by collage, tempera by tempera, I practiced producing mysterious oddities to which I could attach invented feelings. My stories about my art
became
my art. “This decoupage is about how sad I get when my father leaves on a long business trip.” “This watercolor shows my happiness when it snows and I can use my sled.” These stories brought praise and sometimes hugs, eventually convincing me that art was about one feeling above all others: being loved. Or wanting to be loved. And once I discovered this, I got straight As.

A
rope dangled from the ceiling of the gymnasium. If we could climb it fast enough and high enough, we’d be eligible for a framed certificate signed by our nation’s commander in chief—a man of humble beginnings, my father told me, who’d worked his way through law school, entered politics, suffered much ridicule from “egghead” types who lived in “ivory towers,” and finally prevailed by “giving them the finger.” You could think what you want about Nixon, my father said, but the man was no quitter, he had grit, and no one had ever given him anything; he’d taken what he had by force of will. No wonder I wanted so badly to climb that rope for him and bring home his autograph to show my father.

I hung back and let my friends go first. They attacked the rope with zeal, gaining their first few feet through sheer momentum, but for most of them there came a point when it was clear they’d rise no farther no matter how desperately they strained. The other kids would crowd in under them and holler encouragement, but all this accomplished was to rob the climbers of a dignified glide back to the floor. Instead, they were forced to put on a futile show, to claw and grunt and slip back even farther, turning what might have been a quick defeat into a protracted humiliation.

I panicked when my turn came. I’d already disappointed the president in two less-strenuous events—chin-ups and the standing broad jump—and another defeat, I feared, would crush me utterly and show me up as a poor citizen. It would prove that I wasn’t just weak but flawed, defective, and likely to prove a burden on my country should it ever be put to some great test such as resisting a foreign invasion. As I understood the program, the highly specific performance standards required to earn the fitness certificate reflected desirable or normal levels of strength, agility, and speed for healthy young American males. How these levels had been determined I wasn’t certain—by NASA or the Marine Corps, possibly—but I did understand that falling short of them was not a purely private matter.

I gripped the rope with clammy palms. The gym teacher blew his whistle and clicked his stopwatch. Five feet, six feet, six feet and an inch. I was already flagging and couldn’t hide it, certainly not from myself or from my observant classmates, who, I saw when I looked down, had already started massing for their death cheer. I felt puny, crippled, trapped. This wasn’t art or music, this was gym, and quick-wittedness couldn’t help me here. I was up against gravity, which can’t be fooled, and the implacable limits of my physique, which my father had urged me to strengthen through calisthenics but hadn’t bothered to demonstrate which ones.

“Go! Don’t quit! You can make it! Reach!” they cried.

I locked my ankles around the rope. My slide began. I checked it by clenching my thighs, slid farther, groaned, and imagined the president shaking hands with a line of strapping boys who would someday bring glory to America, in war, perhaps, or by building a base on Mars, while I lay feebly on a couch, watching their exploits on TV Then, for the first time since I’d entered school, I yielded, I folded, I gave up. I landed on the gym mat, found my feet, and as the next aspirant approached the rope, I wished him luck, sincerely, without envy. People were different. Some smart, some strong. The boy scrambled upward, on track to reach the ceiling, and I found myself pitying him, oddly, because I knew his triumph would be brief, his moment of conquest would be over soon, while mine, which would be of another sort—mental, not physical; fate had spoken—would only build and build.

Could Nixon have climbed that rope? I doubted it. But he could make others climb it, and that was true strength. The strength I wanted for myself.

I
n fourth grade I learned that reading was serious business, not just a pleasant way to pass the time, and that like medicine or engineering, it had a definite, valuable purpose: to foster “comprehension.” I learned this from boxes of plastic quiz cards whose labels bore the letters SRA. The letters stood for Science Research Associates, which was identified somewhere on the boxes as a division of IBM, the giant computer firm whose amazing machines, I gathered from the news, were crucial in the sophisticated activities which underlay our modern way of life, from weather forecasting to missile guidance. That IBM had taken on the job of providing the nation’s grade schools with color-coded essay cards arranged by steadily increasing difficulty and capable, according to the teacher, of enriching and assessing students’ “language capabilities” suggested to me, once again, that I was part of a vast and vital program, success in which would confer colossal rewards, possibly even widespread public gratitude.

The structure of the SRA kits encouraged scorekeeping and competition. Toward the middle of the second quarter, having finished the blue cards and plunged into the green, I consulted a homemade tally sheet taped to the bottom of my desk’s hinged lid and determined that, comprehension-wise, I was a solid week ahead of my two closest rivals: Brian Dahl, of whose background I knew little, and Karla Miller, the child of farmers who cultivated a modest patch of swampy acreage. The sheet was a secret and, I thought, unique, but later that month evidence emerged that Karla was keeping a similar log.

“I did some math,” she said. “By Friday I’ll be one card back from Brian, but by the end of next Monday I’ll be past him. Then it’ll be just you and me.”

I showed no reaction, which took great effort. To behold one’s least noble traits in someone else, and in a refined and concentrated form, is a piercing, destabilizing experience.

“It’s not like I want to prove I’m better,” said Karla. “I just think it makes it more fun if it’s a contest. You look mad at me.”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

Because we’d been forced from our desks by the custodian, who’d set up a ladder in our row to hunt for a leak that had warped some ceiling tiles, Karla and I were sitting on the floor, our SRA kits open on our laps, our bodies positioned hip to hip but at an angle to give us privacy. When she piped up about her game plan, I was extracting a fresh card from my kit. My reflex was to push the card back down so as to hide its number and color, but I thought better of the move. If observed, it might make me seem uncertain, and Karla might try to play on my anxiety.

A war of nerves ensued. I wasn’t prepared for it. If I’d given some thought to Karla’s situation as the poorest kid in class but also one of the cleverest, I might have expected such a challenge, but the problem was that I, like most of us, rarely thought about Karla much at all. Why should we? Her clothes were drab, her skin was dull, and her habit of responding with a vague chuckle to virtually anything anyone said to her—greeting, insult, request, or knock-knock joke—made it impossible to gauge her moods. I barely knew her, I realized, but I was starting to. She was like me, but slyer, more calculating, and whatever she said about “fun,” I strongly sensed that she wouldn’t be gracious in victory but vicious. This year, next year, and all the way through school.

I vowed to stick to my program, to stay calm. I set my SRA card on my knee and skimmed a couple of paragraphs on icebergs, ignoring three-quarters of the text in order to focus on the dates and numbers, the quotations and proper nouns, which usually formed the answers to the questions printed underneath the essays. This process involved neither reading nor comprehension; it was more like sifting sand for seashells. Karla seemed not to notice. I peeked at the card on the floor in front of her—its topic was bird migration—but I couldn’t remember any of its points despite having read it only days before.

The contest intensified but I stayed cool, convinced that I had a natural mental edge. Color by color, with Karla at my back, I acquainted myself with the world that IBM seemed to deem most deserving of comprehension. It was a world of technology and optimism, of aviation and antibiotics. Research submarines scoured its deepest oceans for valuable mineral deposits. Radar dishes in the arctic guarded the North American continent from sneak attacks by enemy bombers. The world was steadily improving. The descendants of slaves were attending top colleges. Women were taking seats in Congress. Birds that were thought to be extinct had been spotted mating in the wild. There were problems, too, of course—smog and drug abuse and cancer—but the essays implied that they’d be solved soon.

The race began to tighten. Karla passed Brian, just as she’d predicted. He rallied and almost caught up to her, but then slipped back a few days later. He didn’t seem to care. He read for the reasons I only pretended to read—for understanding, out of actual interest—and sometimes he looked up from his cards as though he were truly reflecting on their contents.

Once the race had narrowed to Karla and me, I tried to move more swiftly through the cards by reading the questions at the bottom first and circling back to the essays to find the answers. This trick worked so well that I wondered if IBM was really the marvel people said it was. From January until the grass turned green, I stayed a full color ahead of Karla, who seemed baffled by my continued lead and finally resorted to a dirty trick.

“Walter,” she said to me, pointing at her card, “I’m having a little trouble with this word. What’s ‘radiate’?”

“You should use your pocket dictionary.”

“The print’s too small and my glasses haven’t come yet. I just had an eye exam. I didn’t do well. It’s why I’ve been getting headaches, the doctor said.”

I didn’t believe her, but the damage was done: I lost my ability to concentrate. An essay on coral reefs that I should have completed in ten minutes took me almost twenty, mostly because I kept glancing over at Karla, who was playing her blind act to the hilt, holding her card at a distance from her face, squinting, then bringing it closer, then moving it back again. I couldn’t help thinking it was a masquerade arising from some intense determination that exceeded even my own.

I decided to be gallant. I slowed my pace, but by degrees, forcing Karla to struggle to surpass me and granting her a seemingly honest victory. As I’d expected, she gloated afterward, not out loud but in her manner, affecting a strut when she passed me in the hallway and habitually raising her hand in class whenever I raised mine. But I gloated, too—for my chivalrous refusal to dispel her illusion of superiority. What a prince I’d been, I thought, and how noble to bow before those one might have vanquished.

But then something happened that knocked me off my perch. As we cleaned out our desks a few days before vacation, filling the wastebaskets with pencil stubs and plugged-up bottles of Elmer’s glue, Karla appeared in the aisle beside me holding out a small pink plastic case.

“My glasses came,” she said. “You want to see?”

She settled the frames on the thin bridge of her nose and gazed at me through a pair of lenses whose formidable thickness and convexity spoke strongly of optical necessity. A prickly flush spread up my neck; the girl was a visual cripple, she’d told the truth, and the fortitude it must have taken to grapple with the SRA cards was painful to consider, as was the margin by which she would have bested me if she’d had the glasses all along. She knew this, too. She had to. Who’d spared whom? She was a queen, this girl. Moral royalty.

But then she had to rub it in by telling me what I was, which I didn’t appreciate at all. It didn’t decrease my respect for her—it raised it—but it did guarantee I’d avoid her from then on.

“Students who read the questions first are only cheating themselves,” she said. “I’m glad I’m not you. I really am. When I realized what you were doing, it ticked me off at first, but then I decided to pray for you instead. It softened my heart. I’m really glad I did it. I just wish you’d pray for yourself sometimes. You need to.”

I wasn’t sure what a person should say to this, or if he could be expected to say anything.

“Well, have a fantastic summer,” Karla said.

“You, too,” I mumbled. She smiled and turned to go. I was struck by an impulse to stop her and apologize—our talk seemed emotionally incomplete somehow—but I wasn’t certain what I was sorry for, because I hadn’t harmed her, it turned out, and the harm that she seemed to feel I’d done myself (finding an angle, and then playing it) wasn’t within my power to give up.

M
IDWESTERN COUNTRY SUMMERS, ALL ALIKE, BROAD GREEN
immensities of humid tedium, nothing to do but wade barefoot in the river, nowhere to go but to the store for Popsicles, no one to talk to but the dog. By July, I stopped heeding the shrill tornado sirens and couldn’t be bothered to slap the fat mosquitoes drilling my neck behind my ears. There were pickles and mayonnaise on every sandwich, a dying wasp in every cup of Kool-Aid. I built a model rocket. It failed in flight. I sent away for a slingshot. It never came. On weekends, I went fishing with my father, hypnotized by the ripples around my bobber, and in the firefly evenings after supper I pitched rocks into the trees just to hear them go ripping through the leaves. I sat on a stump with a
Playboy
from a trash bin, rehearsing the party jokes, relishing the nipples. There was always the library, my mother said, and she brought me there at every excuse, but the books were in poor condition, missing pages, and the best ones, like
A Wrinkle in Time
and the Hardy Boys series, seemed to be permanently checked out. Instead I ran off to the woods to break an arm or sped away on my bike to gash a shin. In August there was always a week in bed, a stretch of seclusion, Tylenol and root beer. There was always a murder on my AM radio, a shouting match in my parents’ bedroom, a grandparent dozing on our sofa. And then it was over. Time to buy new shoes. Time to start school again, to wake back up, with nothing to show for the summer but a fresh haircut and a bird skull I’d found in a puddle. But nothing learned.

M
ath had always been a cinch for me. My teachers said I had a head for numbers. But then, in fifth grade, math turned into something else. Letters were added. Symbols. Diagrams. “Problems” that had once had “answers” became “equations” with “solutions.” Mysteries emerged. The value of pi, we learned, could only be estimated, and we were informed that it was possible to count backward from zero, not just forward from one. I kept up with these puzzles, but I didn’t like them; they seemed to be pointing toward a realm of darkness, toward a less reliable reality.

It didn’t help that Marine was changing, too. The town’s adults, including my mother and father, were throwing more parties than in years past, and the parties were running later into the nights. My brother and I could feel them roaring beneath us as we lay in our beds watching talk shows from Los Angeles whose naughty banter and eccentric guests—a willowy hippie who strummed a ukulele, a bearded fat man who performed bad card tricks, a Spanish bombshell in a sequined sheath who shimmied her hips and yodeled nonsense—seemed to echo the strange vibrations we’d been feeling for a while by then. The first shock came when Marine’s new Lutheran pastor showed up for services one Sunday morning driving a motorcycle with a chrome gas tank and a suntanned girlfriend on the back. Soon afterward, someone set fire to the bandstand and spray-painted peace signs on the general store. Then the elm trees started dying, whole majestic arching columns of them, the cores of their trunks chewed to sawdust by foreign beetles. This blight coincided with the news that the parents of three of my best friends, three separate couples, were filing for divorces, and that one of the wives planned to marry one of the husbands. But the most jolting development, to my mind, was the appearance of a bumper sticker on two of my mother’s best friends’ station wagons:
BAN THE BRA!
Was it a joke? The slogan seemed ominously juvenile. Our parents, I began to fear, were no longer in any condition to protect us.

School was no refuge. The math units disturbed me, and Mr. Applebaum, our fifth-grade teacher, who was younger than the others, made me jumpy. His manner was boyish and exuberant, but there was a savagery to his vitality, especially on the subject of Vietnam. He supported the war. He loved it, actually, and those who didn’t love it disgusted him. He called them names. They were sissies, perverts, traitors. To counter the damage he said that they were doing to our national morale, he had each of us write a letter to a soldier. To fire us up, he described the distant GIs as noble giants beset by tricky peasants too cowardly to fight them man-to-man. Instead, the fiends used booby traps that fired poisoned shrapnel through our guys’ feet or snared their boots in coiled vines and snatched their bodies up into the tree-tops. The letter I wrote after hearing about these horrors was short and lazy. I assumed that the soldier it was addressed to would be dead by the time that it arrived.

Because it allowed him to talk about the war and other topics he found infuriating, Mr. Applebaum’s favorite subject was social studies. At first the units were textbook-based, but later he dismissed the books as biased and adopted an informal approach using stories from the news. He emphasized student riots, gun control, and violent crimes committed by drug abusers, coming always to the same conclusions: American men were becoming “soft old ladies,” young people weren’t getting enough exercise, and no one knew the value of money. When he stopped ranting, he asked for our opinions, urging us to argue with him, but we knew better than to comply. We confined ourselves to asking questions formulated to inspire fresh diatribes. Most of these questions were asked by me, since few of my classmates followed current events and knew just which subjects (the Arabs, ecology, acid rock, Jane Fonda) were most likely to arouse him.

In return for playing to his obsessions, I expected good grades from Mr. Applebaum. I got them. But I didn’t quite win him over. On the comment line of my first-quarter report card, and again in a parent-teacher conference, he remarked negatively on my “adjustment” and the quality of my “detail work.” I felt betrayed. I also felt exposed. The charges seemed vague to me but also justified, pointing to a weakness in my makeup that I’d grown increasingly aware of. Something was missing in me. Some central element. Not intelligence but whatever guides intelligence. Self-discipline? I wasn’t sure. What stung was that someone as nutty as Mr. Applebaum could see into me at all. I feared this meant that I was crazy, too.

In February, the man got worse. He became obsessed with Wounded Knee, a violent confrontation in South Dakota between a group of radical Indians and a squad of FBI men backed by armored vehicles and helicopters. Our social-studies units turned into updates about the developing situation. Shots fired from inside the compound. Fire returned from the perimeter. No casualties among the lawmen, an unknown number of wounded among the Sioux. As Mr. Applebaum described him, the Indians’ leader, Russell Means, was a threat to the Constitution, whatever that meant, as well as a secret ally of Russia. Photos of Means were passed around the class, presumably so we could focus our revulsion and maybe so we could spot him in a crowd should the Pine Ridge rebels break the cordon. Mr. Applebaum took this possibility seriously, and he encouraged us to do the same. South Dakota bordered Minnesota, also the home to many Indians.

“This thing might go national,” he said one day.

When there was no news from the front, Mr. Applebaum strove to place the crisis in a wider, historical perspective. The Indians, he told us, were a proud, resourceful people who’d ruled the Great Plains from before the days of firearms, but when the white man entered the scene with his forged metal tools, conflict between the groups became inevitable. War was to history, he said, what rain was to a garden. Without it, society would wither. He praised the Indian fighters for their fierce spirit, but he lambasted them for not accepting defeat. America’s tribes, he let us know, had never formally, legally surrendered. Having retreated to their reservations, they were still plotting a final campaign.

“We have tanks, though,” a kid beside me said.

“But will we use them? Do we have the will?” Mr. Applebaum turned to me, his telepath. “Explain to Brian why today’s Americans don’t have the guts to use tanks on Indians.”

“We don’t work hard or get enough fresh air.”

My complicity in these dialogues left me feeling dirty when the bell rang. Eager to breathe fresh air myself, I asked my father to take me fishing one evening, a few days after the season opener. The frosty stone steps from our house down to the river demanded careful footwork as I followed him to our fiberglass boat. We hadn’t used it since last summer and it had deteriorated, like everything. My friends’ parents’ divorces were final now, the elms along Judd Street were mostly gone, and the bumper-sticker plague had worsened, its slogans having grown blunter and more jolting
(BACK OFF, ASSHOLE; STICK IT, TRICKY DICKY
!
)
. No one went near the bandstand anymore because of a hypodermic needle that had been found in the grass beside its steps.

My father and I didn’t say much on the river. We tried all our lures, from a silver-bellied Rapala to a rubber-skirted Hula Popper, but didn’t attract any strikes. I didn’t care. I liked staring at the moving water. It beat imagining letters to dead soldiers soaking up rain on the floors of Asian jungles. It beat hearing Mr. Applebaum describe the role of LSD and devil worship in a recent California murder.

My father cast his Hula Popper. “How’s school?”

“The same, pretty much. I’m doing fine.”

“Comfortable yet with algebra?”

“Adjusting.”

“How about that lunatic young teacher?”

I grinned. I hadn’t realized my father knew.

“All he talks about is Wounded Knee.”

My father cast his lure again. I didn’t know which side he’d taken in the battle with the Indians. The government’s, probably. He voted Republican. Then again, he’d grown a mustache last fall and let his sideburns creep longer and go all bushy.

“What does Applebaum think?” he asked me.

“Shoot them. They never surrendered. Make them pay.”

My father fell silent, reeling in his lure. It spluttered noisily along the surface, meant to imitate a crippled minnow. The effect drove bass crazy, supposedly. Not tonight, though.

“They’re Americans, too,” my father finally said. I waited for him to say more, but that was it.

He yanked the cord on our Johnson outboard motor and headed down the river, away from town, toward the maze of sloughs we called Rice Lake. We’d be out for at least another two hours, this meant, in jackets too thin for the chill of springtime dusk, but I wasn’t ready to go back. The water seemed safer than the land these days.

The Indians dropped their weapons soon after that and Mr. Applebaum wheeled in a TV set so we could enjoy the scenes of their surrender. Heads down, in handcuffs, lines of captives shuffled toward armored wagons, guarded by FBI agents with rifles. Mr. Applebaum paced the aisles between our desks and made a fist as the wagons rolled away, pulling dust clouds behind them down a straight dirt road.

“Walter, tell us something.”

I didn’t look up.

“Why is our nation safer and better off—socially, constitutionally, in all ways—than it was at this time yesterday?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Oh, please. Come on.”

But I couldn’t do it, not this time. I was through, and my social-studies grade reflected it when I received my report card a month later. I didn’t mind for once. I didn’t care. I could afford this slipup, I decided, because there would probably never be another one. I wasn’t brave. I just happened to be tired.