Aefle & Giesla

by Libby Malin

  Of course it feels wrong, she thought to herself. You’re about to participate in a wedding ceremony with no intention to wed.

  At that thought, heartburn sizzled up her throat, and she downed her third antacid pill of the morning.

  “Hooboy,” she said to herself. “C’mon, Dee, you can do it. It will be over soon. It’s all going according to plan.”

  Her cell phone buzzed on the vanity table before her. Tom. No, she couldn’t talk to him now. He would just try to convince her, as he’d done a dozen times already, that she shouldn’t be doing this. Her emotional state was too fragile today to listen to his pleading. She hit the “ignore” button and let it go to voice mail.

  “I’m sorry, Tom,” she said to the pulsating phone. “I promise I’ll talk to you later.”

  Down below, she heard her doorbell ring, followed quickly by Kelly’s bright voice calling up the stairs.

  “Yoohoo! I let myself in. How you doing, girl?”

  Grabbing her silk robe around her, DeeDee went into the hallway to greet her friend as she came up. Kelly carried with her a tote bag filled with hair items, as well as her own maid of honor dress over her arm. She was the only bridesmaid.

  “As well as can be expected,” DeeDee said, giving Kelly a friendly embrace. “Tell me I’m doing the right thing.”

  “All right. You’re doing the right thing,” Kelly said, following DeeDee into her room, where she threw her things on the bed.

  “That didn’t sound convincing.” DeeDee plopped into her vanity chair again and reached for the antacid pills. “Wish these were beers.”

  Kelly chuckled. “Once this is over, I promise you a whiskey.”

  “You drive by City Hall? Everything set up?”

  “If you’re asking me if the news folks are there, it’s early yet. But I know Buck has got teams coming in from stations in Baltimore, and, of course, our local rag will have photographers and reporters in full force.”

  DeeDee closed her eyes and relaxed. That was reassuring. Buck wanted to capture her humiliation for posterity. The plan was working. She just needed to keep repeating that to herself.

  “Calm down, honey,” Kelly said, putting her hand on DeeDee’s shoulder. “It’ll be over before you know it, and we can all look back and laugh.”

  “I sure hope so.”

  Kelly peered at her friend’s image in the mirror. “Everything is working out just as you said it would. You’re brilliant. The government should hire you for counterespionage or something.”

  “I don’t know, Kel. I keep feeling something’s off.”

  Kelly knelt down beside her and took her hand. “Okay, like what?”

  “Buck. He’s been different the last two days. He’s called me a lot.”

  “You’re planning a wedding together! Of course he’d call you.”

  “Yeah, but before -- ever since our so-called reconciliation -- it was hard getting his attention to even nail down the precise time of this shindig.” That, too, had reassured her, sending the signal that Buck wanted to get his big payback but wasn’t interested in anything else. “And now, he sort of shifted. He called me twice yesterday -- just to talk!”

  Kelly blew out a breath and stood. “The man’s human. He might be as nervous as you about this phony-baloney event. He might be wondering what people will think of him. He might be wondering if you’ll go through with it and he needed reassuring, that’s all.”

  DeeDee snorted a cynical laugh. “Buck need reassuring? I don’t think so.” She went back to applying her makeup, first wiping off what she’d already sloppily put on. “It just feels off, Kel. I’m worried.”

  “Oh, hon.” Kelly embraced DeeDee’s shoulders. “Of course you’re worried. You’re doing a gutsy thing. You’ll feel brave after it’s all over. Now, you just need to be brave.” She smoothed a tendril of DeeDee’s hair. “Besides, you can always back out. That’s Plan B, remember. Just walk away again.”

  DeeDee swallowed. If she was wrong about Buck’s motivations, if he ended up being serious about this wedding and she played runaway bride again, her life in Oyster Point was over. Buck would make sure of it. And frankly, she would deserve it. Publicly rejecting a man once was bad enough. Setting him up to do it again was criminal. She just had to keep believing Buck would stay true to his character and exact his revenge, leaving her at the altar this time around and then moving on with his life, so she could move on with hers.

  For the umpteenth time, she wished Tom was coming for moral support. And for the umpteenth time, she reminded herself it was better if he wasn’t, and she would have protested if he’d offered.

  And then she hoped he would override her protest and show up anyway.

  ***

  Tom pocketed his phone. Damn it, DeeDee, why won’t you answer?

  But he knew why. She’d already told him, in an email the night before, not to expect to hear from her until after The Event, as she called it.

  He sighed heavily, as he readied himself for his own day’s events. He felt wound up, the slightest irritation liable to set him off. He had no patience today for foolishness. He wouldn’t rest easy until he heard from DeeDee.

  In the meantime, he had to calm himself enough in order to meet his professional obligations. Deep breaths, he said to himself as he shaved. Stay calm. No point in turning your nerves into a liability. DeeDee needs you to be strong.

  He laughed at himself before nicking his chin. He patted the scrape with a tissue before addressing his mirror image. “Be strong? You’re doing nothing while she does all the heavy lifting. Be strong? You don’t even know what that means.”

  Although he’d thought all along that DeeDee’s plan was crazy, he’d not realized the debasing effect it would have on him. She was doing something. He was just waiting. He wasn’t even going to be there as a witness. He’d thought of it but had discarded the idea when he’d contemplated how it would add nothing but distraction to her performance.

  Too late now, buster, he said to himself. You filled your schedule so you wouldn’t be able to go.

  He rinsed his face and dressed quickly, trying not to think about her. He had a full morning, and he should focus on that.

  At nine, the interdisciplinary committee would meet for a continental breakfast at Beewater’s house to “socially acclimatize Dr. Farley outside the rigid protocols of our halls of learning,” as the chairman had put it. At eleven, they’d head to campus and do a quick tour. At noon, they’d have their luncheon during which Dr. Farley would offer his opinions on their interdisciplinary plans so far and suggest improvements. At two, they’d head to a bookstore for a signing of Farley’s book.

  Did it matter what happened at two? DeeDee’s “wedding” would be over by then. It was scheduled for noon. Surely Tom could dump his Farley responsibilities for the afternoon, pleading a migraine. Let Heather take the man to the bookstore. Let her drive him to the airport.

  The less time Tom spent with Farley the better. He’d found him to be an insufferable jerk already.

  He’d met the guy the night before at a late dinner at Farley’s hotel. Heather had insisted he attend. While Tom had been mildly interested in meeting a peer in a different field, that interest had quickly soured once he’d listened to the old gasbag for the first quarter hour.

  Tall, long-faced, graying, very “tweedy,” Dr. James Farley, III spoke in such a low voice that Tom -- and even Heather -- had been constantly asking him to repeat himself. His diction was meticulous, and he’d sprinkled his conversation with Greek and Latin phrases uttered in flawless accents -- plenty of cui bonos and mirabiledictus and a smattering of carpe diems. But when Tom had used the phrase luxtua luceat to describe bright students who needed to feel comfortable with their intelligence, he’d had to explain to Farley that it meant, roughly, “let your light shine.” Farley was a phony. He must have memorized a bunch of Latin quotations without actually understanding the language.

  But that hadn’t been the worst of his off
enses. Before Dr. Farley had landed a professorship at Columbia, he’d “cut his pedagogical teeth” as a superintendent of schools in Vermont; this was where he’d started developing his “principlocracy” theories.

  Year after year, the good doctor had told them, his district’s students had failed to measure up on the statewide tests mandated by the federal government. Frustrated with the “destructive finger-pointing” such results triggered, he’d begun looking for “better, more accurate” measures of success in learning.

  “Not every student is destined to go to Harvard,” he’d drawled. “Some will be quite content working in factories. They need not be judged as if their aspirations lie elsewhere.”

  Tom had not been able to resist pointing out that his father had once worked in a factory and that factory jobs had been drying up for decades. But Farley had been prepared for that.

  “Well, bravo for your father,” Farley had said. “I don’t judge him because he worked with his hands. He discovered his element and made a success of it, right?”

  But Tom had the distinct impression Farley did judge men like his father as inferiors, and worse, wanted them to stay in their “element” and leave the likes of him to run the world.

  As to factory jobs drying up, well, Farley saw that as one more problem that needed addressing by the “experts,” such as economics professors working in collaboration with people like him. “My next book will be a partnership effort with a socio-economist who argues the Keynesian model can and should be used even in nondepressed times to create markets and the ensuing jobs for manufactured items our workforce will easily handle.”

  “You mean like buggy whips and AM radios?” Thomas had spit out before Heather had scowled at him.

  “Jackass,” Tom now muttered under his breath as he rushed to dress and get out the door. He was running late. He checked his cell phone -- no return call from DeeDee -- and his email -- no notes from “Gisela.” He had to wait.

  On the short drive to Beewater’s house, he cursed every red light. He honked impatiently at a spandex-clad cyclist straying into his lane. He gestured rudely at a driver making a right on red when Tom had the right of way. He shouted unheard obscenities at a pedestrian taking her time through a crosswalk while traffic waited for her to amble along.

  By the time he’d parked and made his way under hot sun up Beewater’s walkway, he was in a highly uncollegiate mood for this supposedly collegiate gathering of his peers. He rolled his eyes at the sign posted on the door: “Come in, Interdisciplinary Committee Members. Thieves and tramps, go elsewhere with your mischief-making!”

  Thomas walked in, hearing the clink of cups and glasses and the low murmur of voices in the dining room. When he entered, a number of faculty were gathered there, eating bran muffins and whole wheat coffee cake. It looked awfully dry. Belcamp was coughing and gulping coffee.

  Heather was next to Beewater at one end. Farley sat at the other, once again intoning on his subject. This time, he spoke in a clearer voice. Maybe the man used a low voice to make folks listen in an intimate gathering and a more projected tone when he wanted to dominate a room.

  When Tom sat next to Heather, she leaned over to rapidly bring him up to speed.

  “Dr. Farley is explaining his new assessment techniques.”

  Great, thought Tom, trying unsuccessfully to shut down his inner critic.

  “…drill and kill is what we would call it in my superintendency days,” Farley was saying. “Rote learning of facts and dates and names kills a child’s creativity. And when on earth will they need the material? When will they ever be required to tell anyone the thirteen colonies’ names, or the timing of the Roman Empire’s decline or even Newton’s theory of gravity? This is information for an elite salon’s fascinating after-dinner conversation, for monied gentlemen who smoke cigars in the parlor after the ladies retreat. It’s a throwback, all this meaningless trivia, to a time when people used knowledge to impress and bludgeon, to keep lower classes in their place, rather than to enlighten…”

  Tom saw people nodding. After pouring himself some coffee, he cleared his throat and spoke.

  “What, then, is important to teach them?” He was proud at how calm he sounded, when inside he was a roiling sea of resentment and worry -- the former addressed at Farley and crew, the latter over DeeDee.

  Farley smiled as if he’d just been asked a question by a pesky but precocious child. “Truth. How to recognize truth.”

  Heather concurred. “I know you’re a skeptic, Tom, but this is why I think searching for validity is so important. It’s really a search for the truth.”

  Tom stopped himself from spitting out his coffee, congratulating himself on his restraint. He looked at his watch. DeeDee would be getting ready now. He felt an overwhelming itch to leave, to be with her, to do something.

  “What about things like grammar and arithmetic,” Tom said in the same smooth tone. “Those things have their own truths that require some boring rote work, don’t you think? How do you handle that?” He grabbed a muffin, stared at it, and pushed it away.

  “I think the good grammar movement misses the point,” Farley said. “Their focus is on just the right spelling, just the right syntax, to the exclusion of the more important goal -- creative expression, uplifting communication. My God, you should have read some of the essays our students wrote. They were gems of creativity, portraits of beauty, beacons of inspiration. But if the Grammar Gestapo had gotten hold of them, they’d all have been marked as failures. We sometimes forget that even the Elizabethans were creative in their spellings of words, that we didn’t begin insisting on consistency until much more constricted times.”

  “But you have to admit that consistency -- in spelling and grammar -- makes it easier to understand each other,” Thomas said, reaching for a piece of coffee cake. Its molasses-brown coloring and rubbery consistency repelled him, though, and he ended up pushing this away, as well. “Wars have been started on small misunderstandings.”

  Beewater, who’d been watching him reject his food, snapped his head up. “You’re being argumentative rather early this morning, Tom. More bad news about your Aefle come in?”

  Tom reddened at the dig, but Farley was all too willing to continue his discourse.

  “Your point about communication is well-taken,” he said with his easy patronizing manner. “But if you read the essays I just mentioned, you’d be moved, inspired, even motivated by what they communicate. It doesn’t matter if their subjects agree with their verbs when their underlying thoughts agree with our shared experience of the world, providing a new light on injustice, tyranny, power and abuse thereof. I assure you, Dr. Charlemagne, you would not come away unchanged.”

  Tom couldn’t help noticing that, despite Dr. Farley’s dismissive attitude toward requiring the mastery of good grammar and spelling, he himself had acquired those skills and used them to advantage, speaking as if he’d written every thought down before entering the room and merely had to recite them from memory. He was, in a way, a “rhetoric” bully, using the occasional foreign phrase not to enlighten but to cow, not to offer context but to puff himself up in comparison to his audience. He was the very type of man of yore he’d criticized, using knowledge to impress, not to elucidate.

  “How can these kids have any insights into tyranny and injustice in the world? In their own small worlds, yes. But…”

  “That’s the point,” Farley interjected. “They use their own experiences to extrapolate.”

  “So, in other words, they learn to think they know it all without knowing anything. At least when you learn by rote, you’re constantly reminded of what you’ve yet to master, of the wider world outside your own experience.”

  “It’s hard to argue with such simplistic notions,” Farley groused, but Tom was gratified that he’d finally rattled the man.

  “All right,” Tom said, checking his watch again. DeeDee was probably still at her house. Was she driving herself to the town hall or was Kel
ly, her friend? He drummed his fingers on Beewater’s table. “How do you judge these kids’ creativity? If you get rid of the drill and kill and you get rid of the fascist state testing, how do you tell if they’re making progress?”

  To Tom’s happy surprise, some of his colleagues nodded their heads at his question. So they’d thought of this, too. There was hope for the world. He felt the corner of his mouth lifting into a cynical smile.

  “Simple,” Farley said. “You toss out preconceived notions of judgment. You ask yourself: what is it these kids really need to know? I think we’d all agree that they need to know how to work together for the greater good, most of all. And along with that comes a host of other smaller skill sets: persuasiveness, creativity, energy, good will. Things your factory worker father needed, I’m sure, in his job. I suggest using teams of evaluators…”

  Tom bristled at the mention of his father but focused on Farley’s methods. “You mean, evaluators like yourself. You’re here evaluating our planning.” And making money off the gig, too.

  Farley smiled, again as if he’d anticipated this argument. “Although I’d love to be involved in such evaluations, I believe my talents are in training the evaluators. Teams from the community -- from school boards, advocacy groups, teachers groups, the PTA -- people who are truly invested in their community’s future -- should be the evaluators, not so-called experts like myself,” he said with phony humility. “These groups can be quickly taught how to visit and evaluate schools, giving classes exercises to puzzle through together that will ‘test’ each child’s aptitudes on the traits I listed already. The training is quite easy once you’ve brought your teams to a level of understanding of the goal. Oh, it does require an investment of time and resources, but it’s well worth the effort. And one is no longer wasting money on expensive multi-national testing companies’ profit-making plundering of the educational treasure chest.”

  Farley dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. “In Vermont, we successfully trained a dozen teams who evaluated our students this way. Their results came in completely contrary to the paper tests. And the beauty of our method is there is no way a teacher can ‘teach to the test.’ The test is unpredictable and dynamic. It’s organic.”