The Girl from Charnelle (28 page)

Theirs was the only high school in the county, so all the kids from the smaller towns caught the bus into Charnelle. Assembly, when all seventy of the juniors were present, was held once a week, and it was rowdy because it was the only time the whole class came together. The vice principal, Mr. Burchell, finally quieted the crowd, welcomed them all to the school year, and thanked his staff and made announcements about the new lunch schedule and the redesigned gymnasium, and then he introduced Mr. Sparling. Everybody clapped enthusiastically. They'd all heard, as Laura had, that Dwight Sparling was a good teacher.

He thanked Mr. Burchell and then made a couple of jokes about what an uncivilized crew they appeared to be and how he had his work cut out sophisticating them. He'd heard scandalous stories from their sophomore teachers, and he hoped they could be reformed, but he had his doubts. Everybody laughed, and then he said he wanted to speak more seriously today about what they could expect from the year. He paused, and a boy called out something asinine (Laura couldn't quite hear him), but Mr. Sparling ignored him, and then the crowd hushed, and he looked down at his notes, then up at the students.

Laura leaned forward a little and could see others along the curved row doing the same.

“This is an historic year,” he said, “the beginning of a new era in America. A new president will be elected, and though you will not have a formal say in that process, it will affect your lives irrevocably, and you will, I promise you, always remember this particular moment in time. We would like to seize this opportunity not just to meet the board of education requirements but also to engage you in a lifelong inquiry into American life. Not just what it means to be an American citizen but also the economic, political, and cultural process that has shaped who we are—who
you
are—and how that process affects your daily decisions and connects your past to your present and to your future.”

He leaned into the microphone, his elbows propped on the lectern, and though he spoke smoothly, even elegantly, with no trace of Texas twang, the rhythm of his voice also had a jittery energy, as if his language and ideas animated him. His eyes moved over the crowd, but Laura felt, even though he was a good distance away from her, that he was speaking directly to her, intimately, as if he were leaning across her kitchen table.

“What links exist between the life you live in Charnelle, the life you lead with your family and friends, and the life of a democracy, of
this
democracy? How do those two worlds impinge on each other? What myths bind us, unite and help either clarify or mystify who we are as a country and as a people? This is what we hope to investigate together.

“Toward that end, we will approach this year, and particularly this fall as the election approaches, as an investigation of the literature of the American dream. I do not mean just literary investigation, though we will do plenty of that as well. There will be opportunities to examine Cotton Mather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mark Twain. Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane. And perhaps even more modern texts.

“But we will also examine, with the same kind of precision, other great literary texts of our culture: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the great autobiography by the former slave Frederick Douglass. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and his Gettysburg Address. The Bill of Rights and even Supreme Court decisions like
Brown v. Board of Education
. You will read poetry, political editorials, and comic strips.”

This reference brought on a round of laughter, especially from a group of boys—Dean Compson among them—sitting in front of her.

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Sparling said, smiling slyly, “the intellectual exploits and philosophical quandaries of Jughead are particularly relevant to this crowd.”

This provoked a bigger laugh from the whole auditorium, and Laura grinned at Mr. Sparling's cleverness, his ability to heckle his hecklers. And then, just as the wave of laughter had reached its crescendo, he plunged back into his speech, which induced them all, Laura included, to lean forward more intently.

“You will listen to your mothers and fathers and grandparents as they tell you their stories. You will listen to songs ranging from ‘This Land Is Your Land' to ‘Oklahoma' to ‘Jailhouse Rock.'”

“Go, Elvis!” a boy shouted from the back of the auditorium, and again Mr. Sparling smiled knowingly. After the initial murmur of laughter, the crowd grew intensely quiet, and he used this pause to survey his audience.

“All this, ladies and gentlemen, is part of your literary heritage. These texts are part of you, whether you know that or not. You will begin to see patterns emerging. You will hear the arguments, the texts calling to each other in ways perhaps their authors could not conceive. You will hear the arguments and the calling, and behind that will be a simple contradiction. A capital-letter Yes and a capital-letter No.”

He paused to underscore the significance of his statement. Laura let out a little sigh, puzzled but intrigued, and waited for him to continue.

“When you read the first, stirring words of the Declaration of Independence—‘When in the course of human events…'—you will hear that contradiction. Men saying No to their past, cutting off the ties to a tyrannical monarchy, and you will hear a resounding Yes—humans, for the first time in modern history, not just articulating but insisting on each and every person's fundamental right to pursue happiness. And that simultaneous manifesto of revolt and declaration of freedom, ladies and gentlemen, is at the heart of our collective myth.”

Laura felt caught up now, as they all did. She wasn't quite sure what he was saying, what it all meant, but she felt the cadence of his words like a transfixing song.

“You will hear it in the tales of Paul Bunyan and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,' and in Emerson's demand for ‘self-reliance' and in Walt Whitman's ‘body electric.' You will hear it in Frederick Douglass's eloquent claim that he, too, is a man. You will hear it in F. Scott Fitzgerald's
astonishment at the bright green wonder of America and the promise it holds, and in his tragic love story of the corruption of that promise. You will hear it on the radio and on the football field and at the Ding Dong Daddy Diner.”

Another cackle of pleasure from the crowd.

“You will hear the world, and even yourself, speaking out of and through this mythology of America, and running, like a murmuring current beneath this talk, will be a simple, triumphant Yes and a simple, antagonistic, often enraged No.

“Yes, this is America, and we can send a rocket into space and maybe a man or woman, and that man or woman could someday be you. You can become a president or a tycoon or Mickey Mantle or Elvis Presley or Eleanor Roosevelt, or you can own Charnelle Steel & Construction or Spenser's General Store. There is no limit. As long as you can imagine it, it is in your power to invent yourself.

“And yet…” he said, his voice lower now and more drawn out. He paused and scanned the crowd. His voice had exuberantly rolled through this last litany of Yeses, but now Laura saw that he wanted them all to wonder, as she did, where he was going next. “And yet,” he continued, “countering that note of optimism, that great joy, you will hear the No, and that No will emerge from a sense of fundamental injustice. You'll hear it in the songs of Woody Guthrie and the Weavers. You'll hear it in Hawthorne's angry husband, Chillingworth, and in Melville's crazed, peg-legged Ahab and Steinbeck's Joad family. You'll hear it in Biff Loman's anguished cry to his father. You'll hear it in your churches, too, and you'll hear it in your homes as your parents and your parents' friends argue about Vice President Nixon and Senator Kennedy.”

“Go, Jackie!” a boy yelled, and Laura grinned and thought, yes, one of the primary reasons for voting for Kennedy was to get Jackie into the White House. Mr. Sparling didn't stop, just rolled right over this outburst, which he clearly didn't deem funny enough to acknowledge, not even with a smile.

“And you'll hear it from the candidates themselves, as they try to articulate for us all who we are at this point in history, where we've been and where we need to go. And I—all of us here—”

He turned and motioned to the row of teachers sitting behind him. Laura could sense he was coming to an end.

“We all want you to listen for those voices in yourself, too. That Yes and that No. Sometimes the Yes and the No will happen simultaneously, and then it's not so simple anymore. And when you hear those voices, they will connect you to that great, complex, historic process of which we are all part, that process that is not dead or abstract or boring but lives and breathes and moves profoundly through whatever you do.”

Mr. Sparling took a few final seconds to look over the audience, and then, almost shyly, he said, “Thank you,” grabbed his notes, and left the podium.

The spell broke. There was scattered, polite applause, a lot of hushed giggling, and a few cackles. The boys sitting in front of Laura rolled their eyes and elbowed one another. Marlene rummaged through her purse to find her nail file. Laura sat back and watched Mr. Sparling return to his seat on the stage, watched him shuffle his notes and put them in his briefcase, then whisper something to Mrs. McFarland, who was sitting beside him.

Mr. Burchell returned to the podium, told them to quiet down, and then he introduced the football coach, who lumbered to the podium to whistles and loud applause. But Laura just kept staring at Dwight Sparling. She wanted him to go back to the podium. She wanted him to keep talking.

A
fter that day, she went to class and did her homework with a new sense of urgency and focus, searching for the connections, examining her assignments with greater clarity of purpose. Was it true what he had said? She didn't know, but she was smitten with the notion that everything was intimately linked—the books she read, the history she studied, the songs she liked to listen to on the radio, the stupid television shows she watched with her family, the movies she saw at the drive-in, the magazines she pored over, and then ultimately her affair with John, and her relationship with her family, and her memories of her mother—all of it, everything, bound together by this simple tension, this Yes and No that Mr. Sparling had spoken of.

Was it that simple? Maybe so, but it also seemed complex and profound to her, the way she sometimes felt after visiting Aunt Velma, or going to church, that there were these hidden threads binding together the visible and invisible worlds.

She tried to explain this to John one afternoon, a couple of weeks later. They now met only erratically, though usually late in the afternoon on a Monday or Thursday when he returned from a run to Borger. With the out-of-town runs, there was no specific time he was expected back. He'd pick her up after five behind the warehouse and be able to stay with her until almost six-thirty, sometimes seven. She told her father she was studying late, at the library or with friends, and Mrs. Ambling watched Rich and then Gene when he returned from school. On those days, she usually made supper in the morning so her father wouldn't be put out or ask too many questions.

She started telling John about Dwight Sparling's theory as soon as he picked her up. It had entranced her, and she'd been thinking about it constantly, so she rattled on—and then stopped abruptly.

“You don't really care about this, do you?”

“Yes,” he said. “And no.”

“You're making fun.”

“Yes, I am. Go ahead and tell me. I want to hear about it.”

So she tried to recall specific parts of Mr. Sparling's speech, and she found that the more she just let herself talk about it, the more she remembered and the more eloquent she became.

“When you read the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence, you will hear that contradiction,” she said, her voice low and yet trying to catch that jittery energy of Mr. Sparling's. “Men saying No to their past, cutting off the ties to Mother England, and you will hear a big, huge Yes—people, for the first time in all of recorded history, demanding their right to happiness. And that manifesto of freedom, ladies and gents, boys and girls, is at the very heart and soul of our American myth.”

He was lighting the candles and the kerosene lamp, though there was still plenty of light in the room from the window. He closed the curtain over the window, so that it was partly dark in the barn, and he pulled out crackers and cheese from the knapsack he'd brought with him. She followed him around, chattering feverishly, not only about the books they would be reading but also about what they had already read and how she had listened to the radio the night before last and could hear what Mr. Sparling said, about the Yes and the No, in the lyrics of Elvis and Buddy Holly, Dean Martin and Nat King Cole. If you listened, they kept saying, Yes, Yes, Yes. You could hear it in the rhythm and joy of the music. And then she had flipped to the
country-and-western station, and the No was in the sweet, sad songs of Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, and Conway Twitty, the despair and the righteous sense of injustice and anger, too.

He stood behind her and began kissing her neck. She stopped talking.

“Don't stop,” he said, nibbling her ear.

“You're not saying anything. I just sound like a fool, don't I?”

“Not at all. I love hearing your voice.”

And so she kept on as he took off her clothes and kissed her neck and back and legs and chest. She talked about
Perry Mason
and
The Rifleman
and even
The Twilight Zone,
and what she heard Kennedy saying the other day about Nixon, joking that the vice president was like an elephant, with a long memory and no vision, following the tail of the lumbering elephants ahead of him. On and on she went, sometimes singing lyrics to songs, and reciting, almost verbatim from memory, a lecture about the Continental Congress.

It was like a gift, everything clearly in her mind and accessible. Soon she didn't even know what she was saying anymore, and it didn't matter. The whole thing was a kind of song that seemed to be pouring out of her mouth as he kissed her body, and it seemed the more she did not concentrate on what he was doing, the more she just let the words flow from her mouth, the more amazing it was what he was doing, as if this physical pleasure were entwined with this other kind of pleasure.

And quietly, behind her, still kissing her neck and holding her close, he moved into her, and only afterward did she stop talking. They lay there on the pillows, and she watched the kerosene lamp burn. It seemed eerily quiet now. Her throat felt scratchy. She reached for the canteen of water on the table, took three long swallows, and then turned toward him and nestled into his body. He put his arm around her. His eyes were closed.

“John,” she said.

“Yes, honey.”

“Do you want me to read the Declaration of Independence to you?”

He laughed. “I can't think of anything I'd rather you do.”

She slipped on her shirt and retrieved the copy from her satchel, and while he smoked a cigarette, blowing jiggling rings in the air above them, she read, as Mr. Sparling had done that very day, the words “When in the course of human events…”

When she finished, she looked over and saw that his eyes were closed. “Are you listening to me?”

“Yes.”

“Isn't that marvelous?” she asked.

“I think you're in love with Dwight Sparling,” he teased. “I think you have a thing for him.”

She hit him with the Declaration, but she was also blushing, because in a way he was right. Mr. Sparling had inflamed her mind, and it
was
similar to the way she felt about John.

“Just for that,” she said, “I'm going to read the Constitution.”

“Okay, I take it back. I'm sorry.”

“‘We the People, in Order to form a more perfect union—'”

“Okay, that's it,” he said, rising. “You keep reading. I'm going to draw you.”

“No, you can't draw me.”

“I am. Keep reading.”

With her elbow propped on the pillow, she mimicked Gloria's French Artiste character, which she'd been practicing. “‘Article 1,'” she intoned, lowering her voice, flipping up her shirt to reveal her panties.

“Oh, yeah, baby doll, give me Article 1.”

And quickly he sketched. Before she reached Article 10, he laid his pen and pad facedown, leaned across the mattress, and put his lips to her stomach.

“Do you want me to stop?” she asked.

“Whatever you want to do, sweetie.”

“The Constitution isn't nearly as interesting, is it?”

“Well, Article 1 was pretty damn interesting. And Article 5 gave me a boner.”

“Can I see the picture?”

“Wouldn't you rather see the boner?” he asked, drawing down his boxers.

“Shut up! Let me see the picture.”

“Here,” he said and handed it to her. He'd not drawn her since Galveston, and he'd made her destroy those paintings and drawings, except for the blurry, indecipherable one that had flown into the water. It was painful to burn images of herself, even though some of them were of her without clothes.

She looked at the picture and laughed. It was a cartoon version of her body reclining on the mattress and shaped like the flag waving in the wind,
her shirt covered with stars, her panties with stripes. Her mouth was wide open, square, and nearly as big as the rest of her body. Her teeth were also shaped like the flag. In her hands was a book that said “Declaration of Independence” on it. And above her head, in a curved movie marquee, little lightbulbs all around, were the words, in block letters, all caps:
YANKEE DOODLE GAL
!

She laughed again. “I have an awfully big mouth,” she complained.

“That's almost the best part of you, honey.”

“Almost?”

He put his lips to her stomach again and blew loudly, tickling her at the same time.

“Stop it!” she shouted, but he kept on and on, tickling her until she thought she was going to pee. “No, no, no…stop it!”

“Yes, yes, yes,” he shouted back. She pushed him away. He rolled over on the pallet and threw his arms back against the pillows.

She caught her breath and then picked up the drawing, studied it. It was very clever. “Is this how you see me?”

“Always.”

“Let me keep it,” she begged.

“No.”

“Pleeeeease!”

“What if your father were to find it, or one of those pesky brothers of yours?”

“How would they know it's me?”

“They'd know,” he said, reaching for the drawing. She lifted it out of reach. He lay back down and closed his eyes. “It's not safe, honey.”

She put the drawing on the table and climbed on top of him, her hips straddling his, her hands pinning his wrists to the pallet. “Please,” she said again, letting her hair drape over his face. “Pretty please.” She pressed her lips to his, knowing that he wouldn't change his mind, wouldn't let her keep it. She would have to wait until after they made love, when he dozed for a few minutes. She would smuggle it into her bag then. As she kissed him, she could already imagine the picture folded neatly and tucked between the pages of the Declaration of Independence.