Reading Madame Bovary (16 page)

The city was expensive and all they could afford to rent was a small box-like house on the edge of an infamous drug-dealing area. Their nights were broken by the wail of sirens and frantic shouts emanating from a block of derelict apartments at the end of their street. In daylight she had to endure the beggars. A three-block walk to the dingy supermarket was an encounter with panhandlers on the sidewalks, some black, some white. She found it easy to ignore the sullen professional who sat cross-legged in her regular spot outside a shop, her shabby hat set down on the pavement, but it was the random and the crazy ones that she found disturbing, the look of desperation in their eyes, their agitation, their twitching bodies and trembling hands. One day she arrived at the supermarket just after a shooting and there was shattered glass and blood spattered across the doors. Once inside she rushed through her shopping in a cold sweat. She resisted this market; the lighting was bad, the paint on the walls was peeling, the assistants were surly and the rows and rows of processed food looked time-worn and lifeless.

Only a few days after this, a young woman with matted red hair attacked her outside a DVD store, landing a wild haymaker punch on her shoulder. The woman's clothes were dirty and her eyes glazed with a black film. Frances could see she was on something and that the effect of the drug rendered her body flaccid; her muscles were slack and her punch lacked force. ‘So you don't like Madonna, eh?' the woman screamed and Frances could see that in her assailant's waking nightmare she, Frances, was someone else.

An elderly black man stopped and asked: ‘Are you alright?'

‘I'm fine,' she said, but she was shaken. When she told Tony that night he was surprisingly detached. ‘There's a lot of stuff here we have to get used to,' he said. She could see he was worried that she might not cope, that she might pack up and return home.

Every Thursday she would go to the city library to borrow books and quite often there was a figure in the women's lavatory, huddled on the floor in the corner and completely covered by a ragged brown blanket. The figure, she assumed it was a woman, would sit for hours, keening in the most miserable wail. The first time she encountered her there she went to the librarian on the information desk, a neat little woman who sighed and said: ‘Is
she
there again?' After a while, like everyone else, Frances ignored the sobbing figure huddled in the corner. She washed her hands quickly and returned to the shelves.

One afternoon, on the walk home, a tall, slender black woman of around thirty stepped into her path, put out a hand and demanded money. She had a dissipated beauty, a kind of worn elegance in the way she carried herself, but her aura was seething and dark. Unlike many of the street beggars, she stared directly into Frances's eyes, holding her gaze with a look of unalloyed hatred.

Frances froze. She had never been looked at in this way before. Even though she had lived in some tough neighbourhoods back home this was a kind of abjection that was new to her. Hideous and shameful.

‘You have to stare ahead into the distance and keep walking,' Tony told her. ‘You can't let it get to you.'

In the third week after she and Mattie arrived, Tony took a morning off and they drove to one of the two preschools that had been recommended to them by one of Tony's colleagues. The first of these was The Free School, not far from where they lived. This, they had been told, was a cultural icon. One of the old flagships of '
68
and the counterculture, it had been set up to ‘shine a new light' (this from the brochure) and to ‘enable children to bloom like flowers under a free sun'. Flowers? A free sun? This was hippie talk. Still, the supervisor of Tony's lab had sent her own daughter there so they were obliged at least to go and look it over.

The main building was a rambling two-storey timber house surrounded by a large garden that was mostly sand and trees. The swings were tall, dangerously so it seemed to Frances, and the adventure play towers were also very high and with low rails. They looked perilous. The place was a mess: sand and toys strewn everywhere, clothes spilling out of lockers or lying on the ground. Some children had stripped down in the warm weather to their underpants and ran gleefully about in pursuit of one another. A small girl tottered around in high heels with a red satin skirt pulled up around her neck and a pink net tutu on her head like a fuzzy halo. Snot ran from her nostrils to her top lip. She looked up at Tony and said: ‘I'm a rose.'

On the walls of the main building there were life-size cut-outs of each child pasted on the walls and stuck at crazy angles to one another, with names scrawled across each one. Rhiannon. Skye. Jacob. Jordan. Saba. Lindsay. Out in the playground a cluster of children were at the water trough, drenching themselves and one another.

‘Okay, you guys,' shouted one of the teachers, ‘I told you to put those aprons on. Now it's time to dry out.'

Frances looked up. A boy was hanging by his ankles from a twenty-foot pole, his blond hair floating down into the air. Her heart bounded with anxiety for him.

‘You be careful up there, Max,' bellowed a tall, bearded teacher who introduced himself as Dean. Dean was around forty, a kind of ageing hippie. He wore a bright-red gypsy scarf tied around long hair that drifted in fronds to his waist.

The school administrator, Sadie, was a petite woman with a friendly, no-nonsense manner and a black Afro perm. She wore black stiletto heels, tight black pants and a black leather jacket.

‘Our kids have confidence, they're outgoing. They come here; they're fearful, they're timid. Six months later they're climbing the highest scaffolding. They get a lot of colds, it's true, but when they leave, they're tough.' She led them through to the kitchen, where flour lay everywhere. ‘Lucy here is making soy pancakes for afternoon tea. We only use wholefoods for snacks. We explain to the children about holistic energies. No sugar, no biscuits or cake in lunches. That's a rule.'

‘They have rules here?' hissed Tony. ‘Could have fooled me.'

The rooms were in need of painting. There were shelves stuffed with old boxes and the husks of toilet rolls, rags and paint-encrusted yoghurt containers. There were guitars with broken strings hanging from nails above a battered and dusty piano. In the book corner the mat was fraying, the shelves scratched, the books old and tattered (though there were plenty of them). The sofas were battered and stained. The mattresses in the jumping room were piled on one another and scattered with sand. ‘Oh, dear,' said Sadie, scarcely missing a beat on the tour, ‘they're not supposed to bring sand inside. We'll sweep it up later. Well, listen, you guys just wander around here and look at whatever you want to look at. Talk to the kids. Feel free if you see someone on their own to be that person's best friend for a while. Feel free to make a connection.'

Out in the yard, in the far corner, was a large wooden cage on slats, with a black rabbit inside. In a small fenced-off plot the remains of a carrot patch were in seed, and two white ducks pecked at an empty water trough.

‘The children study the animals?' Frances directed this question to Dean, who at that moment was mounting a chipboard and glue project on a trellis table.

‘Nah, the novelty wore off on the first day. I don't know why we keep 'em.' He brushed his sticky hands against his jeans. ‘Mostly these guys just like to fool around.'

‘Do you have any classes?' she asked.

‘Sure we do. We have, like, a music class for the little ones and a dance class for anyone who wants to come. Boy, are those dance classes wild! Then there's a yoga class, and sometimes they cook. We've got serrated plastic knives and stuff. No-one's been stabbed yet, eh, guys?' he glanced around at his charges. ‘Depends on what the staff feels like doin' that day, y'know. We keep it spontaneous. But the classes are optional. Basically these guys can move from inside space to outside space and back again as they want. Face it, these guys are up for twelve years tied to their desks in school. This is their last chance to be free, right?'

A tousled girl held up her gluey chipboard assemblage, so covered in white paste as to resemble a geometric suet pudding. Dean patted her on the head.

‘Wow, Elisha, that's far out!'

In the cramped corner that was the principal's office, Sadie asked if they had looked at any other schools.

‘Well,' said Tony, ‘we were planning to check out the Montessori school in North Avenue.'

‘Oh dear,' Sadie shook her frizzy curls. ‘Oh dear. We have all sorts of problems with that. We all believe in early learning but, you know, there is such a thing as too many rules. Too much structure, too soon. We've had kids come here from Montessori schools and they're all tense, they're having nightmares at night. They have a fear of doing the wrong thing. They worry about making a mistake. A few weeks with us and, hey, they're kids again. You have to be careful, you know. There's such a thing as too much order.'

That night Frances was unable to sleep. She lay in bed and thought back to an abandoned Diploma of Education she had begun some years before, and her rudimentary study of child development. She knew of the German visionary Friedrich Froebel who had developed the idea of the
Kindergarten
. As part of his philosophy of Universal Harmony he had repudiated the idea of children as miniature adults who could usefully be put to work. Instead, he thought they should begin by spending their time in a children's garden, a haven of creative play where children could grow like flowers unfolding. Froebel set up a network of these kindergartens, some of which were closed down for a time by the Prussian government as too revolutionary. She thought of Froebel now as one of Sadie's forebears.

Tomorrow she and Tony were booked to look at the Montessori school, the San Diego Montessaurus, and she also knew something of Dr. Maria Montessori's pioneering work in the slums of Rome. Here the great innovator had worked with so-called backward children to develop a highly structured method that demonstrated how any child in the right environment could learn. Montessori believed firmly that freedom was not to be confused with anarchy; on the contrary, inner order was necessary to enable the child to see meaning in his or her existence. Chaos was not stimulating but oppressive. But this did not mean that inner order could be achieved through rigid external discipline of the old-fashioned kind. And so on. All Frances could recall were a few general principles but almost nothing of the detail of Montessori's method. What she did recall was how Montessori had an illegitimate son who was sent to the country to be looked after by a family there, and how she would visit occasionally to bring a toy and to observe him at play.

The following morning, they drove uptown to the Montessori school. It was a large property that took up a whole block, with a high fence all around that might well have belonged to a fort. They parked the car and walked to the tall wooden gates, which were unlocked. When, tentatively, they pushed one half of the gates open they found themselves in a peaceful yard. Here was a picture of perfect calm, of manicured order and low-key Californian charm. Several rustic, cedar-framed classrooms stood within a high-walled compound, almost obscured by trees and ranged in a semi-circle around a bitumen courtyard with a large oak at its centre. A number of red flowering bushes, planted at random intervals, softened the contours of the swings, the climbing tower and the slide. The only discordant note was a scruffy old tyre that hung by a thick rope from the oak tree.

The courtyard was empty. School was already in session.

They found their way to the office of the school administrator with whom they had made an appointment. Nancy was a tall, middle-aged woman with short, stylish grey hair. In her silk print dress and high heels she looked every inch the competent executive. She was also welcoming and cheerful, and she led them without much preamble to the first of the cedar huts. Inside, the hut was one large open space, warm and filled with natural light.

‘We often have observers,' Nancy smiled, ‘and the children are accustomed to it.' She gestured to a line of chairs at the back of the room and handed them a portfolio of printed sheets. Dutifully they sat on the small chairs and Frances was reminded that Montessori was the first to introduce child-size furniture. She opened the cardboard file that Nancy had given her and began to read her way through the notes. ‘The goal of Maria Montessori's educational method was world peace' (yeah, right) ‘and we agree with Dr. Montessori that each generation of children has the opportunity to remake the world it inherits.' Suddenly Frances was irritated by this high-minded sentiment, almost as sceptical as she was of children blooming like flowers under a free sun, and she began to skim until she came to a page headed ‘Observations':

The presence of visitors always has an effect on the children and the classroom atmosphere. In order that you may observe as natural and typical a classroom as possible, we ask that you please follow these suggestions:

1
. Do not smoke.

2
. Please remain seated.

3
. Do not initiate any conversations during the work period.

4
. If a child approaches you and asks a question, please answer briefly.

5
. Do not talk to other adults who may also be observing.

Well, that was clear; they had their riding instructions. They were not being invited to wander about and become anyone's best friend, not even for a moment.

Every class has two teachers, Nancy had explained to them as they walked the path between her office and the first cedar hut.

‘We're very proud of our staff, and they've been with us a long time, probably because they're not interfered with in their rooms. It's their own space. Joan specialises in art, she's doing an MA on children's painting. Clara is currently doing her Master of Education on children's music and plays several instruments herself. Sophie has a doctorate in children's language difficulties. All the teachers bring a range of their own interests and skills to their work.'