Oma went on, talking about tiers and classes. I tuned her out and listened to Petra’s television interview. She’d been joined by another woman who I recognized immediately as Malcolm’s boss at the Department of Education.
Madeleine Sinclair is hard to miss. Tall, with blond—so blond it’s nearly white—hair swept up into a classic French twist, she seems to wear nothing but electric blue suits, fitted to her curves in the way only custom-made clothing does. On her right lapel, there’s always that same pin, the yellow emblem of the Fitter Family Campaign. Today was no different, but her features seemed sharper, more hawkish than ever.
“It was going to happen sooner or later,” Petra said to the reporter. “We reached a point where the public school system couldn’t handle the disparity anymore, couldn’t supply an across-the-board education. When the Department of Ed started the voucher program, I guess I saw it as an opportunity. When they needed hard science to strengthen the Q algorithm, I knew the Genics Institute would be the first of its kind.”
Oma stopped talking and froze with the schnapps glass halfway to her lips.
The on-screen reporter nodded and spoke to the other woman. “Dr. Sinclair, there’s been some backlash about your policies. Can you tell us about that?”
Madeleine Sinclair turned her blue eyes toward the camera, as if she were addressing not the interviewer but someone on the other side. Perhaps she was speaking to me; perhaps to the old woman at my side. When she spoke, her voice was patient, an experienced teacher talking to a confused child, straightening things out. “There’s always going to be backlash,” she said. “It’s natural. Most of the criticism comes from”—she smiled, and in the smile there was a mix of sweetness and condescension—“certain factions. Certain factions who desperately want to believe we’re all the same.”
Oma drew in a shallow breath.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Nothing. Let me listen.”
“The thing of it is,” Madeleine continued, “the crux of the matter, and the point people need to understand, is that we are not all the same.” She paused, and when the reporter opened his mouth to interrupt, Madeleine put up a hand. “I’ll repeat that. We are not all the same.” Once again, she looked out from the screen. “Tell me, parents, do you want your child in a classroom with students who are two standard deviations out? With children who don’t have the capacity to understand the kinds of struggles and challenges your five-year-old faces? With teachers whose time is pulled in so many directions that everyone—everyone—ends up falling through the cracks?”
“I don’t think she is telling the truth,” Oma said. “What she is asking is if you want your baby Einstein in a room with twenty normal children. They might hold your little genius back, or they might interrupt his progress.” She stabbed at the remote control, missing the buttons, only increasing the volume as Petra and Madeleine nodded and provided each other with verbal reinforcements. “These women are evil, Liebchen. Ah, here is my taxi. At least I can still hear.”
A second blast of a horn announced Oma’s ride back to my parents’ house, and I went to the door with her. Our parting hug felt different—her hand on my back, ordinarily firm and warm, was light, and even in the hug there was empty space between us. A half-drunk glass sat on the coffee table, forgotten. I ignored its siren call and dumped the schnapps into the kitchen sink, then returned to the television.
Petra was talking again, telling us how she owed her success to the Fitter Family Campaign. “What started as a grassroots movement snowballed,” she said.
Avalanched was more like it. Somewhere in the middle of the country, in that expanse of former dust bowls and farmland that no one pays attention to, it started. Somewhere in the champagne-communism salons of Boston and San Francisco, it started. Somewhere in suburban living rooms where upper-middle-class mothers gather to share stories of sore nipples and sleepless nights, it started. And spread. And mutated like a virus, weaving into itself, reduplicating. A few voices turned into a chorus of voices, all calling for education reform. What we needed, they claimed, wasn’t more special programs in the schools; we needed more buckling down, more effort, more recognition that throwing money at a problem wasn’t going to solve it.
We needed to move on from the one-size-fits-all mentality.
“But,” Petra said, “change in a system doesn’t happen without change in the people who make up that system. That’s where the Genics Institute comes in.”
She was right. By the time the Fitter Family Campaign turned ten years old, they were holding Best Baby Contests in every single state. The motives were different, but each of them united together in a sickening solidarity. Middle America was tired of what they called underprivileged overbreeders; the Boston Brahmins wanted schools that focused resources on their own child prodigies (although even the champagne communists voiced their concerns about overpopulation—they just voiced them in their penthouse salons); the baby brigade worried over allergies, autism, a growing list of syndromes. Everyone wanted something new, some solution, a reason to feel safe about their little wedge of the human race pie in a country that would see skyrocketing population numbers in another generation.
It didn’t take long for people to “climb aboard the commonsense train,” as my husband is fond of saying. Of course, in exchange for major changes in the education sphere, the public had to make a few concessions: Administrators, not parents, knew best. And the federal government had the last say when it came to testing students and placing them in an appropriate school. As long as the moms- and dads-to-be took prenatal precautions, everything would run smoothly.
If they didn’t, there was the tiered school system: best, better, and somewhere around mediocre.
Madeleine came back on the screen, as if I’d just asked her a question and she decided to answer me personally. “. . . As I was saying, the state schools are there for the young people in this country who need—and deserve—extra attention. Please don’t think of us as taking your children away. Think of us as giving them the chance to blossom.” She did one of her classic nods, to the audience. “You want flowers in the spring? Give them the best soil money can buy. That’s what the state schools are about.”
I turned the television off, thinking about Oma, her reaction, her quick departure, the empty hug. Maybe she was right. Maybe these people were evil.
Evil or not, they won. They yelled and voted and screamed for stricter anti-immigration policies. They voted down No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Not that people didn’t want to give a leg up to the disadvantaged or the differently abled. They did. They just didn’t want them in the same classrooms with their own kids.
What they didn’t know then, but I know now, is that you can get rid of the old fish at the barrel’s bottom, but that just means there’s a fresh layer of rottenness waiting to be dug up and tossed out. By the time the Sarah Greens of the world figured out what was happening, tier systems and Q rankings were the laws of the land.
Back at the window, I watch Freddie’s green bus pull away through a veil of rain and wonder if I would have done things differently ten years ago if I knew then what I know now.
FIVE
THEN:
I was somewhere between four and five months pregnant with Freddie, only just beginning to feel that uncomfortable pinch whenever I buttoned my jeans, but happily well past the morning sickness that made me unable to eat anything other than dry toast without running to the hall bathroom. Even so, the husband-wife talk that had been sitting between Malcolm and me like unwanted leftovers was about to happen. Again.
“You know what we discussed, El,” Malcolm said when I came back from tucking Anne into bed. We were alone now, free to talk as married couples and life partners do, even though I hadn’t felt like a partner for some time. “El?”
“I heard you,” I said.
“So? When are you going to do it?”
It.
This single word covers all kinds of sins, from backseat gropes after a high school dance, to putting the dog down when he’s too old and too needy, to taking a fetus from a woman’s belly. Sex, euthanasia, abortion. All conveniently collected under the umbrella of It.
Our conversation took turns, doubling back on itself, coming full circle. An hour later, Malcolm hadn’t budged from his original position, or really said anything other than reminding me of what we discussed, of how utterly selfish it would be to bring a baby into the world only to watch her struggle and suffer while she tried to claw her way to a level she couldn’t possibly attain. He showed me pictures of the future, reminding me of Q scores and college admissions boards, of how no one would want a girl with a lower-than-average quotient.
“She’ll end up with nothing,” Malcolm said. “Or she’ll get someone like that kid who used to follow you around in school. Jack something.”
“Joe,” I corrected. “He was a nice guy, you know.”
“Nice doesn’t cut it anymore, El. Q matters. You know that.”
I did, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to think about Joe, or what happened afterward. I didn’t want to think about more tests and more Q numbers and the possibility of ever doing that again.
Malcolm rose from the table, taking the rest of the plates into the kitchen. Our conversation was over, and I sat alone reading through a long list of pregnancy management services on the back of the Q testing literature while Malcolm, who was supposed to be my partner in all things, presterilized dinner dishes with his back to me.
And there were no more postdinner talks. The next morning, I drove into town for my appointment at one of the Genics Institute’s prenatal clinics. It was well before they rolled out WomanHealth, before Petra Peller took things to a new level. Behind a dozen or so women, walls of green and yellow, verdant and sunshiny colors, set off posters of perfect families—perfect hair, perfect bleached teeth, perfect skin. Nowhere in the room were photographs of babies, only of grown children, and the usual stacks of pamphlets advertising formula or offering free samples of diapers were noticeably absent.
Everything from the decor to the reading material was targeted at women who would never see the inside of a delivery room.
And then there was the chatter:
“If they tell me its Q is one-hundredth of a point lower than nine-point-five, I’m getting rid of it,” said a pale woman behind her mask of painstakingly applied cosmetics. “Just like I did the last time.”
“Thank God it’s so quick now,” said the twenty-something next to her. “Wouldn’t it be great if manicures were that fast?” They both laughed.
As they traded phone numbers and emails, insisting their five-year-old whiz kids really must get together for a playdate one of these days, the door behind the receptionist’s cubicle swung open. A woman walked out, clutching an envelope close to her rather ample midpregnancy bosom. She had wisps of gray curling around her temples and faint feather lines at the edges of her lips. Easily forty, I thought. Maybe older. Ms. Perfect Makeup and Ms. Manicure looked her up and down, following the woman as she crossed the waiting room and exited hurriedly through the street door.
“What was she thinking?” Ms. Makeup said. “At her age.”
“I wouldn’t even try it after thirty-five,” the other one came back. “No way.”
“They’re saying now that even thirty is too late. I was reading this article the other day, and—”
“Saw it. Way too much science for me.”
I’d read the article, too, because Malcolm had left the magazine open on my pillow one night. A subtle hint and convenient timing, given we’d had yet another postdinner talk about the geometric decline of a baby’s Q score as the mother’s age increased.
The women stopped their conversation long enough to look across the room at me. Glances were exchanged; lips pursed. I could practically hear their thoughts: Bad luck for her. Wonder if she’ll keep it. Has to be pushing the envelope on the big three-five. And there could be other problems. No need to mention the D word.
Not many issues outranked a low Q score, but trisomies were on the top of the list of lousy outcomes. Down syndrome, in particular.
When the receptionist called my name, a thing happened. My baby, my little-person-to-be who I had already named and loved, already sung to sleep with old lullabies my grandmother had taught me, stirred somewhere deep inside my swollen body. I thought: Screw nature. Nurture counts more. And I knew I had a hell of a lot to give in the nurturing camp.
So I walked out the way I’d come in, eighteen weeks full of baby-to-be, no envelope with a magic number inside it, no fodder for a decision that would end up being more Malcolm’s than my own. I spent two hours that afternoon looking up Google images of prenatal Q reports and forging the one I’d later show my husband. It would say, I decided, 9.3 in large, silver-toned ink. A good number. A fine number. And it was the first time I made the right kind of choice after a series of poor ones.
SIX
I’m halfway down my driveway, fiddling with the Acura’s windshield wiper controls and cursing the defogger that’s been on the fritz for months now, when the yellow bus honks. It’s a different sound than the light but piercing ping of the silver and green buses. This is a sound that shakes you, like when you’re rolling steadily down a highway, humming along to top forty or classic vinyl, and out of nowhere a tractor-trailer driver yanks hard on his cord, blasting its horn at you. Most of the time, I think they do it for no reason at all.
The yellow bus, though, seems to have a reason.
It’s moved one house farther along and isn’t parked in front of the Campbells’ house anymore but in front of the blue and white colonial where Judith Green lives. It honks again.
I’m already late, so I tap in the school secretary’s number and hit send.
“Davenport Silver School,” the secretary chirps. “This is Rita. How can I help you?”
I tell Rita a lie about my car’s battery and ask if she’ll send a substitute to my morning biology class. “They can work on their chromosome mutation essays,” I say, thinking that first-year high school students in my day were still memorizing phases of the Krebs cycle, not working out advanced genetic theory. “I’ll be there as soon as I can get the car jumped.”
“No problem, Dr. Fairchild. Your freshman class is performing way above the benchmarks this semester.” A tapping of keys as she checks numbers; a pause as she seems to be considering the kindest way to remind me of the cost of tardiness. “And your Teacher Q can handle a few tenths of a point. Nasty weather to have car trouble in, though.”
“Yeah,” I say. Then I end the call and wipe fog from the driver-side window with my sleeve as the front door of the Greens’ house inches open. Judith’s mother comes out first, arms wrapped around her body so tightly her hands almost meet at the back of her waist. She’s got a terry-cloth robe on—not nearly enough protection from the rain—and her face moves in small, chipmunk-like motions, like she’s chattering from the cold.
Except it isn’t cold today. Only pissing rain.
Now Judith steps out. She’s dressed in jeans and a windbreaker, not her usual Harvard Crimson uniform with the knife-pleated skirt and vest, ivory blouse freshly pressed. Her mother hands her a flat yellow card, then steps back inside for a few seconds. When she returns to the porch, she’s carrying a single suitcase, which she sets down so she can fold Judith in her arms. The terry-cloth robe sags open and slips off a little, but Sarah Green doesn’t seem to notice.
Then the bus honks again.
I want to put the Acura in gear and race toward it, scream at the driver. Give them five more fucking minutes, will you? Just five minutes! It wouldn’t do any good, just like it wouldn’t do any good to go running after the Child Catcher, begging for more time. S
o I sit here with a drenched raincoat sleeve from wiping down the condensation on my window. Helpless.
Judith breaks the hug first, picks up her suitcase, and walks down the brick path, the same brick path she’s walked down since she and Anne started school, the same brick path Sarah Green lines with begonias in the summer and chrysanthemums in the fall. She presses her yellow card up to the bus door, and it folds open. A few blurred shapes through the front windows tell me Judith isn’t the only pickup this morning—I can’t make any details out through the rain. But I don’t imagine there are many smiles in that bus today.
As the bus pulls away, I throw the car into reverse, back out onto the street, and pause. Even after the time change, darkness lies over our neighborhood like a dreary blanket, mostly thanks to the rain. My phone tells me it’s seven forty-five, enough time for me to make it to school before first period ends and my Q rating goes down another tenth of a point.
Fuck it, I think, and I drive in the opposite direction toward Sarah Green’s house, past the empty playground with its perfect layer of shredded tire rubber, undisturbed by the scuffs of Keds and Reeboks. Even in the wind and rain, the swings are as still as broken pendulums, and the metal slide is a dull gray, never having been polished by the bottoms of children. I don’t remember ever seeing a child inside the enclosure’s fence. Kids appear in the morning when the buses come, then in the late afternoon when the buses return. They hurry inside and bend over books until dinner. If they’re anything like Anne and Freddie, they eat like hungry soldiers in a mess hall, and bend over their books until bedtime. Most of them are bleached pale, even in the summer months.
Sometimes I think all of childhood has disappeared.
I stop the car in front of the Greens’ colonial. Sarah is on her knees, robe fallen open to expose a thin nightgown. She’s pulling out the mums she planted only a few weeks ago, fists digging into the earth, flinging mud and roots in every direction. A few clumps of dirt stick in her hair, and a smudge of brown mars her face when she tries to wipe away tears.
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