So Much for That (21 page)

“Daddy, I had a spell in Carbon Footprint Lab and had to go home early!” Heather had tromped into the kitchen and went straight to the freezer for a Dove Bar. In the last couple of months, Heather must have put on another five pounds. Nuts, you couldn’t win. Let them loose on the larder, and they got fat. Try to regulate their diet, they got all neurotic about food and ate in secret, and they got fat. Maybe he and Carol were lucky that at least Heather didn’t try to compete with her older sister over who could be skinnier, a contest she could die losing.

“But are you feeling okay now?” Jackson solicited.

“Not really.” Heather moderated her boisterous demeanor, and put on a poorly face. “I’m still a little light-headed.”

“If you’re not feeling well, maybe you shouldn’t be eating ice cream.”

“I may have low blood sugar. Kimberly has to eat sweet things all the time or she faints. Daddy?” Heather crawled onto his lap. When the heft of her ass hit a certain area, the pain was so sharp that his eyes smarted. He tried to rearrange her unobtrusively. “I’m having trouble paying attention in class, and I fidget a lot. I was wondering if maybe I need a higher dose of cortomalaphrine.”

Christ, she’d been fishing for the designation of learning disability for months. The cold truth was that Heather wasn’t as bright as her older sister, and maybe having a plain mid-level IQ was a learning disability of a kind. Strange how if you were straight-out dumb it was meant to be obscurely your fault, but with “ADD” your intellectual shortcomings became blamelessly medical. It didn’t really make much sense for the “learning disabled” to be given an unlimited amount of time to complete standardized tests, while the hopelessly stupid kids still had to finish by the bell, when both camps were victims of genetics. Hell, it was the flat-out dumb kids who should get the extra time, since they’d yet to invent a drug to make you clever.

“Maybe,” said Jackson. “But don’t you think the answer might be to pay more attention?”

“I don’t get it.”

“Paying attention isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you do. Something you make yourself do. Like you could make yourself stop fidgeting, too.”

“How?”

Jackson jittered the knee onto which he’d shifted her, and as she jiggled Heather went
uh-huh-uh-huh-uh-huh
and laughed. “Stop that!”

“I’m fidgeting! According to you, I can’t stop!” He deliberately kept jiggling her to the point where she seemed to find it unpleasant before planting his foot on the floor. “See? And you can do the same thing with attention. The teacher is talking about a story the class just read, and you’ve started thinking about what flavor ice cream you feel like eating. Then you decide to think about the ice cream later and think about the story now.”

“I don’t think it works like that. I think I need more cortomalaphrine.” Heather squirmed in her father’s lap and twisted her head. “Pee-yew, something stinks!” she declared, and slid off his knee.

For once Flicka’s poor sense of smell was fortunate.

“Tell you what, you two,” said Jackson, fishing a folded sheaf of printouts from his jacket. “How’d you like to play a game?”

“We can’t play a game,” said Heather. “We don’t have a computer in the kitchen.”

“For this game you don’t need a computer. This is a brain game. A friend of mine emailed me a copy of a public school test from 1895. Do you know how long ago that was?”

Heather’s face fogged. “It was in the olden days?”

Even through thick glasses, it was obvious that Flicka was rolling her eyes. “You’d think a fifth-grader would be able to subtract 1895 from 2005 without a calculator.”

“Okay, Flick, if you’re going to be so hard on your sister, let’s see how well you do on a test designed for two full grades below yours.”

“Three grades,” Flicka objected scornfully. “If it wasn’t for all that time in the hospital, I’d be a junior.”

“
Three
grades, then. See, in 1895, this is what every student had to pass in order to graduate from the eighth grade in Salina, Kansas.
Which is the boonies. Nowheresville. And we live in New York City, aka the center of the universe, which should make us more intelligent and sophisticated than the hicks in the Midwest, right?”

“Right!” said Heather.

“And we live in a time with technology and everything, and so if anything we should know more than they did over a hundred years ago, right?”

“Right!” said Heather. Flicka disdained group participation and didn’t chime in. Besides, she sensed a trap, and peered at her father’s printout with suspicion.

“Now, Heather, this is obviously going to be too hard for you, because it’s meant for kids three years older. But Flicka should be able to ace it, since it’s for a grade she graduated from ages ago. Let’s start with the first question, which is a real softball. ‘Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.’”

“My name, my name!” Heather clamored.

“Very good. That’s one rule. What are the other eight?” He could see Flicka trying to decide whether to play along. Since most folks did indeed assume when they met her that she was “learning delayed,” she rarely passed up an opportunity to prove otherwise.

She shrugged. “Countries. Cities. States.”

“Good. But I bet our friends in Salina, Kansas, would probably argue that place names count as only one rule.”

“Mr. and Ms. and stuff,” said Flicka. “…e start of sentences.”

“Great,” said Jackson, feeling like a proper father for once. “We’ve got four rules. Five to go.”

“When you’re really mad in an email!” said Heather.

“True, but they didn’t have email in 1895, so I don’t think that one counts.”

“Titles of books and movies,” said Flicka. “Organizations, like the PTA.”

“Excellent. Three rules left.”

Silence. “I’m bored with this.”

“You’re not bored with this, Flicka, you’re stumped.”

Granted, she did have to put in Artificial Tears pretty much all the time, but choosing to do so at this juncture seemed calculated.

“Okay, let’s do another one, then,” said Jackson. “‘Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.’”

“What the fuck is a
modification
,” said Flicka.

“Watch the mouth,” he said, embracing his new role as Real Dad.

“And don’t ask me, I’m just the humble test-giver. Can you at least name the parts of speech?”

“Yelling and whispering?” said Heather.

Flicka scrunched her eyes. “Is that like
naming words
and
doing words
?”

“They’re called
nouns
and
verbs
. You can’t be telling me that in tenth grade they still call them
naming words
and
doing words
.”

“Well, they do. And that’s not my fault,” said Flicka.

“No, it isn’t. But I pay taxes up the wazoo so that you girls learn something, and I don’t want to buy goofball, patronizing lingo like that.”

“I told you when you came home, I shouldn’t have to learn any of this shit. It’s a waste of their time, and it’s a waste of mine.”

“The education system isn’t aimed at students who are probably going to be dead before they’re twenty,” he snapped. He shouldn’t have said that, but Flicka was so brutal about confronting her terminal status head on that he sometimes made the mistake of being brutal in return. More to the point, the pain in his groin was nearly constant now, which shortened his fuse and addled his judgment. He tried to get the game back in hand.

“Let’s move on to the math section,” he proposed. “‘A wagon box is two feet deep, ten feet long, and three feet wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?’”

“Give me a break,” said Flicka.

“Don’t like that one? Try this: ‘If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 pounds, what is its worth at fifty cents per bushel, deducting 1,050 pounds for tare?’”

“That’s bullshit,” said Flicka. “You can tell it’s just a bunch of farm stuff, for the yokels. It’s what you’d need to know in stupid Kansas.”

“Okay, then, here’s a problem you’d need to be able to solve in New York today: ‘Find the interest on $512.60 for eight months and eighteen days at seven percent.’ Go ahead. You can use your pencil. In fact, if you want, I’ll even let you use a calculator.”

Flicka folded her arms. “You know I stink at math.”

“Then how about geography? ‘Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.’”

“All right, Dad, I get it. We’re all morons, and in the ‘olden days’ they were geniuses.”

But Jackson was so riveted with this test that he couldn’t let it go. “‘Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall, and Orinoco.’”

Since he’d had trouble pronouncing
Orinoco
—wherever the fuck that was—Flicka caught him out. “
You
don’t know these answers, either.”

He laughed, and was about to admit that he couldn’t answer more than two or three questions on the entire five-hour test when Carol clipped into the kitchen. “Why are you trying to make your own children feel dumb?”

“I’m not! I’m trying to make them feel uneducated, which isn’t the same thing.”

“I’m willing to bet the distinction is lost on them.” Carol tore the sheaf from his hands. “What is this? ‘District Number thirty-three has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?’ Please. In eighth grade? Somebody’s been pulling your leg, Jacks. Heather, it’s time to brush your teeth.”

“It’s not a joke. is was a real test.”

“Oh, how do you know?” said Carol. “You believe everything that pops up in your AOL in-box that reinforces your bitter, dyspeptic attitude.”

“We pay good money so these kids learn something. Instead they’re so coddled that Heather doesn’t even get proper grades. What do we get on her report card? ‘Does consistently,’ ‘does usually,’ or ‘does with
assistance.’ There’s no ‘doesn’t do,’ ‘won’t do,’ or ‘does, but it’s crap.’ And you saw that newsletter: they won’t let her teachers use
red pen
anymore. Red’s too ‘confrontational’ and ‘threatening,’ so now her tests are marked in a ‘soothing’ green. They’ve chucked the bell between classes to make the environment more ‘welcoming.’ They keep this up, Heather’ll grow up and get a job, and the first time her boss says, ‘You’re late,’ or has a tiny bit of a problem paying her to do work she didn’t do because she didn’t
feel like it
? She’ll jump off a bridge.”

“Just because your own schooling was cruel and critical and pitted children against each other,” said Carol, “doesn’t mean that your daughters have to suffer the same regime of public humiliation.”

“But this obsessive bolstering of self-esteem—well, I got no problem with self-regard so long as you think well of yourself for good reason. But now they’re told they’re all God’s gift, whether or not they’ve learned to spell. I read a study that was not in my ‘AOL in-box,’ thank you, but in
The New York Times
, which you worship, so I assume you don’t dismiss it as made up. They asked a bunch of Korean kids and a bunch of American kids whether they thought of themselves as good at math; thirty-nine percent of the Americans thought they were great at it. Only six percent of the Koreans thought they were any good, and the rest thought they sucked. But when you looked at their test scores, the Koreans were way ahead of the Americans in math. Students in this country are taught to be delusional.”

“So your answer is to make our children ashamed of themselves, which doesn’t improve their math skills one bit.”

Carol’s whisk-whisk motions were her only giveaway that she was furious. She didn’t exactly slam the dishes into the dishwasher, but he could tell from the obscenely controlled firmness with which she placed the plates in their slots that she’d have preferred to smash them against the wall.

“Hey, that chorizo-chickpea thing was top notch.”

“Please don’t try to butter me up. Flicka, did you finish your math homework?”

Their elder daughter wasn’t prone to try her I-don’t-have-to-do-
schoolwork-because-I’m-going-to-die routine on her mother. “I…finished with it,” she said obscurely. Fortunately for Flicka, her mother had other things on her mind.

“How’s Glynis?” Carol asked curtly, as if she didn’t really care.

“Faintly better. Little nervous she should have stayed in the hospital longer, but the insurance company wanted her out. Then, you must know that, since you saw her yesterday.”

“She’s still in a lot of pain. I do think they sent her home too soon. But I gather you’ve been pestering her with your retrograde, right-wing political opinions.”

“My opinions are not right-wing. In this town, that’s just a label for ‘evil’ anyway. And I’d be awful surprised if Glynis described me as ‘pestering.’ She’s mad as hell, and she enjoys the company of someone else who’s mad as hell, too.”

“Jackson, you know perfectly well that it’s inappropriate.”

Jackson hated the word
inappropriate
, which rod-up-the-ass prisses threw around with abandon these days to make other people feel dirty and ashamed. It made you immediately want to check your underwear for stains. The word had a deliberate vagueness, too, as if what you’d done wrong was too disgusting to name. And it attributed moral qualities to the merely normative. The incessant modern-day resort to
inappropriate
put a thin progressive gloss on what was really a regressive conformism. The folks who wielded that chiding adjective were the same buttoned-up paranoids who spotted pedophiles under every bush, since lately you could be as uptight and sexually repressive as you liked, so long as you projected your prudish Victorian revulsion onto children. He was no more pleased that his own wife had picked up the term than he would have been had she returned from a public pool with communicable plantar warts.

Carol swished the sponge across the counters in a reproachful show of efficiency, as if instead of wasting his children’s time with some obviously counterfeit eighth-grade test he might at least have cleaned up the kitchen. The resentment was disingenuous, too, since she was clearly fuming, and thus grateful to have something to do. Without laundry, bills to pay, one sweaty, adenoidal kid in constant need of hydrating or
Saran-Wrapping, another kid in constant need of compensatory praise and attention, Carol would go insane. As much as she might experience these domestic duties as impositions, she was utterly dependent on this feverish morning-to-night beaverishness, for she had long ago lost that vital capacity to do nothing. Carol’s industry resembled the full-dance-card cha-cha of Glynis’s mother, except that at least Hetty was in doomed pursuit of an elusive self-fulfillment; Carol’s ado had always to be in the service of someone else. This compulsive altruism seemed like self-denial, but it was creepier than that. She no longer had the faintest idea what she might desire on her own account, so what was she sacrificing? It saddened him to note that over the years she had insidiously replaced pleasure with virtue.