Language Arts (7 page)

Okay, Cody . . . let's go back to your room to get your picture book . . .

Cody avoids looking at the others. Taking Esther's hand, he closes his eyes and makes a big, loud, long yawn all the way down the hall until they are back in his room.

Open your eyes now. Come on, Cody. Now get your book; go on, go get it.

Cody takes his picture book from its place on the table next to his bed.

They go to the kitchen. On one wall, there is a big whiteboard, the calendar, where they look every morning to find out what is happening today.

Esther says the names slowly as she points:
There's Robbie, Myles, Felix, Angie, Melody, and . . .

Cody lost most of his letters around the same time he lost his words, but he still remembers the way his father helped him identify the letters that make up his name. He was sitting in his high chair, eating a face snack; his father wrote on the kitchen chalkboard and drew pictures to go with the letters.

Here's Cody's name,
his father said, drawing.

Here's Cody's name,
Esther says, pointing.

C

(horseshoe)

O

(moon)

D

(Santa's fat belly)

Y

(martini glass)

Esther goes on.

Today is . . .

She points at some other letters, lost ones.

S . . . u . . . n . . . d, a, y, and . . . look! There's something here. Something is happening for Cody today.

Cody gets out his book. He flips to a picture.

No. Not ponies. You don't go see the ponies today.

Cody flips to another picture.

No, you don't go to church for art lessons.

Cody closes his book and sits on the floor.

Cody. Get up. Get
up!
You're not gonna get any stickers if you keep acting like that.

Cody lies down.

Okay. Fine. Hey, everybody! No stickers for Cody today!
And then, to the cook,
No breakfast either, I guess, Raisa, since boys who lie on the floor don't get breakfast.

Is somebody having a bad day
already?
Raisa says.
Too bad, because for good children I make bacon and eggs and potatoes, children who sit up and act proper and come to the table.

Cody,
Esther says,
don't start with me like this. Look . . .

She tries to take his book from him. Cody grunts and holds it tight.

Okay, that's it. I'm done. I guess you don't want to know who's coming to visit today.

Cody sits up. He flips to a photograph in his book.

Yes, Mom, but who else?

Cody flips to another photograph.

Esther sighs.
No. Not Emmy. Can I show you?

Cody hands over his book. Esther finds a picture and shows it to him.

Who's this? Who's this, Cody?

Cody signs: a
D
to his forehead.

Dad! Yes, your dad is coming today. Won't that be nice?

Cody scowls and begins shaking his head with such adamant force that his entire torso swivels in protest. Then he flips to another picture and again thrusts his finger at it with blunt insistence.

No, Cody.
No!
I already said no to the damn ponies.
No. Ponies. Today.
Okay? Now come on, get up, it's time for breakfast . . . Lord, give me strength. Raisa, is that coffee ready yet?

When the end-of-recess bell rang on the first day of school in the fall of 1962, the twenty-seven fourth-graders who had been assigned to Mrs. Eloise Braxton (a group that included Marlow, Charles Simon) dragged into room 104 with a sense of dread.

Charles was especially glum that morning, not only because he'd been condemned to spend the year with the teacher famously known as Brax the Ax, but because his best friend, Donnie Bothwell, had moved to Minnesota over the summer—suddenly, unexpectedly—when Mr. Bothwell got a better job working for Hamm's.

An inescapable reminder of this sad truth came in the form of a frequently aired television commercial. It began with a black-and-white film of a full moon shining on a dark, gently lapping lake; an announcer intoned, “This . . . is the Land of Sky-Blue Waters. This . . . is the Land of Enchantment”; then came the sound of Indian tom-toms accompanying a velvet-voiced choir singing,
“From the Land of Sky-Blue Waters . . .” Finally, the camera view widened to include a man and woman seated at a lakeside table raising their glasses in a toast while looking longingly into each other's eyes. Charles thought that Minnesota must be a wonderful place.

Then, as now, he did not make friends easily, so on that first day he was doubly worried about the things all nine-year-old boys worry about: Who would eat lunch with him? Who'd sit next to him on the bus during field trips? Who would offer the sanctuary of tribe during the wilderness of recess?

As the children filed in, they discovered a new kid; he was sitting at a front-row desk, smiling with unstinting benevolence, diffusing the laser beam of malice emanating from Mrs. Braxton, who commanded each child to state his or her full name and then—ominously, silently, not unlike the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come—slowly lifted her arm and pointed to the child's assigned seat.

The fact that this new student was in the front row didn't elicit any special note on Charles's part; in his elementary-school career to date, he hadn't given much thought to the significance of seating charts, although he would soon enough.

No, what was odd was the fact that this boy was already
there,
as if conjured by magic. No one had seen him on the playground that morning. No one had ever seen him
anywhere.

On the way to his desk, Charles heard the new boy mutter something in a strange, hollow voice that he took to be a greeting.

“Hi,” he replied. “I'm Charlie.”

“Dana McGucken!” Mrs. Braxton yapped. The force of her voice set her famously bulldoggish face jiggling. “No talking!” She rethrust her finger at Charles's fourth-row aisle seat and he moved on.

Dana burped. A couple of children laughed out loud; the rest snickered.

“Silence!” Mrs. Braxton marched to Dana's desk, leaned close, and hissed something. He bowed his head. His body curled in on itself, like a traumatized potato bug. At first, Charles worried that he might be crying, but once Mrs. Braxton's back was turned Dana looked over his shoulder, graced the class with a diffusely aimed smile, and stuck a pencil up his nose.

As the second bell sounded and Mrs. Braxton began roll call, Charles became aware of the three other children who had been assigned front-row placement: two thuggish types who looked like Boys Town rejects (because of their hardened appearance, he suspected they might be fourth-grade repeaters), and Astrida Pukis, who was brilliant but myopic and always sat in the front row. (They'd been in the same class since kindergarten.) But he barely noticed them.

Dana was the one; he had all Charles's attention.

He was small for a fourth-grader, elfin. His upper back was bent, and his head and neck retracted into his shoulders, giving him the appearance of someone who'd spent his formative years stuffed inside a tree. It made him seem ancient, wizened. He had chalky white skin and a weasel-shaped face. His teeth were impossibly crooked: a handful of Chiclets in a crazy-angled row.

There was a pale, cyanotic blush on the very tips of his ears and fingers, as if he were in the early stages of being cryogenically preserved. His hands were elegantly shaped, portrait-worthy, like those of some eighteenth-century aristocrat, poet, or pianist; his fingernails were long, oval, opalescent—weirdly feminine—but rimmed and clouded with grit.

He was dressed entirely in white: a rumpled, oversize three-piece linen suit (vest, jacket, cuffed and pleated trousers) and buttoned-up shirt. No tie. This getup, in combination with his cringing physical attributes, suggested the character of a slightly crazed, furtive foreign spy who'd been stationed for too many years in a politically unstable tropical country, one of those Peter Lorre types who keep laughing and grinning even as they're being slowly driven insane by the demands of the espionage business.

“Attention, children!” Mrs. Braxton began moving through the room depositing single half sheets of lined paper on the desks. “I'd like you to print your full name—first, middle, and last—in your very best writing.”

Astrida's hand went up.

“Yes?”

“Where would you like us to print our names, Mrs. Braxton? On the top line?”

“That would be fine, Astrida. Thank you for your attention to detail.”

Astrida swiveled in her chair, enough to make sure everyone could see her satisfied smirk.

“However,” Mrs. Braxton continued, “let me repeat: what is most important is that you use your
very best penmanship.
If you make a mistake and wish to start over, raise your hand and I will give you a fresh piece of paper.
No erasing!
You may begin.”

The children ducked their heads and set to work—everyone except Dana, who began to exhibit the first of several behaviors they would all come to know well over the course of the school year: he started swaying, back and forth, side to side. Not in a frantic way, but dreamily, serenely, at a tempo that would align nicely with a group of tipsy, fraternal, schmaltz-affected partygoers singing “Auld Lang Syne” with their arms slung round one another after the clock strikes midnight and the new year begins.

Charles was fascinated.

He was also horrified, because in that moment he understood the reason for Dana McGucken's front-row placement and, more crucial, the enormous social gaffe he'd made in speaking to him as if he were a normal kid.

How could he not have known?

Dana McGucken was
a ree-tard.

In 1962, the word
retarded
was the best, kindest, and frankly most accurate description there was, a linguistic catchall that has since been divided and subdivided into dozens, perhaps hundreds, of categories.

Who knows what Dana's real story was?

He might have had attention deficit disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Asperger's syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, phenylketonuria, fetal alcohol syndrome, Pitt-Hopkins syndrome, or some combination of the above.

Or maybe he was put on the planet as a miracle-in- reverse, a punch line for a joke that nobody gets but God, a test for the rest of us, something to interpret, translate, decode. A mystery of faith—
Can you accept never knowing? Can you love without condition?
—made manifest.

“I'm going to put these away until June,” Mrs. Braxton announced as she collected the work, “at which time we will compare them with your end-of-the-year signatures, which will be in
cursive.
”

She moved on to other subjects. There were the usual assessments in reading and arithmetic; as these proceeded, Dana showed off more behaviors in his repertoire: staring at the ceiling or out the window, rocking, picking his nose, sticking pencils in his ears, kicking his feet.

Near the end of that first day, Mrs. Braxton delivered a lengthy sermon, its subject the value of good penmanship in general and the virtues of the Palmer Method in particular. In little time, there wasn't a child in room 104 who wasn't cross-eyed—even Astrida had the look of a hypoglycemic on quaaludes.

At the conclusion of her lecture, Mrs. Braxton once again handed out sheets of paper. “Now, class, to see how well you've been listening, I'm going to ask some questions. Please write your first and last names on the top upper left line, and below that, the numbers one through four.”

Dana was demonstrating a new behavior: he'd started moving his arms in a grand, angular fashion, at the same time emitting rhythmic, grunting noises. Perhaps he was semaphoring an inspirational coded message—
NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP!
—or telling a morale-boosting joke.

“Again,” Mrs. Braxton said, striding through the ranks, stopping briefly at Dana's desk to take hold of his arms and firmly resettle them on his desk, “please demonstrate your very best penmanship. For today, and today
only,
do not worry about spelling.”

Stationing herself at the blackboard, Mrs. Braxton took up a piece of chalk and began writing her questions in cursive as she simultaneously spoke them aloud.

Brax the Ax was a squat, heavy woman, broad of beam, who wore high-heeled pumps that were obviously too small. Seen from behind, her silhouette suggested Humpty Dumpty balanced precariously on a pair of golf tees.

But there was no denying that to watch Mrs. Braxton write in cursive was to witness a transformation: she became a figure of impressive grace and strength. Her technique was so smooth and effortless that she might have been writing with a fountain pen; the chalk made almost no sound on the blackboard. And she wrote quickly too.

“Number one. The first objects to be written upon were tablets made of . . .”

Charles knew that one:
Clay.

“Number two. The name of the person who invented the penmanship style we will be learning in fourth grade is . . .”

Unsure, he guessed:
Mister Arnld Pahmer.

“Number three. The proper angle for writing cursive is . . .”

The only child to dive for her pencil in response to that question was Astrida.

“And, finally, complete this quote: ‘To know how to
write
well is to know how to
blank
well.'”

Dana filled in the blank with an impressively thunderous fart.

The room erupted in laughter.

“Silence!” Mrs. Braxton shouted.

Dana turned around and beamed. His pale complexion acquired the satiny sheen of a newly harvested pearl. His white suit seemed to emit a dazzling glow.