But standing here now in my fluffy white spa robe, no makeup on, my skin aglow, tossing my worries away—clearly worries everyone else secretly has!—amid other women in their fluffy white spa robes…Finally we are all as one. There is no longer any competition. It is enough. I am enough. I have found my rung on the ladder, my coordinates on the grid, my nesting place in the honeycomb. Massage Room C.
In my airy, skylit, vanilla-hued massage room, my reverent male and female massagepersons meet me, clad in matching crisp white polo shirts and shorts, like Wimbledon ball people.
I lie on the table, and with the four-handed massage, I must tell you…
It is beyond exquisite, unspeakably so, to have one’s shoulder blades butterflied by two therapists at once. At first the hardest thing is to keep from laughing—but then I come to feel as though I’m being held by the giant palm of God, cradled, in radiant light—
And then, eyes closed, in such a state of ecstasy, I see it…
I see the Bodhisattva. Looking exactly like he does in all those quaint-colored Eastern hangings. Lotus position, forehead dot, the big hanging earlobes. And emanating from his chest, I see what my perennially hectoring therapist, Ruth, with her waving turquoise-beringed hands, is always trying to get me to visualize before bed.
The orb! Red, gold, yellow, red, gold, yellow…
And in waves, I can feel it all rolling off of me.
Worry.
Stress.
Guilt.
I think of Hannah saying mango, lion, hippopotamus, and a warm ring of contentment encloses me. Lutheran school.
And I realize this, finally, is a story, a movie, I can be the hero of. Because what I am this year, above all, is a loving mother who is taking good care of her family. To be a mother who fights for her children, who finds safe nestling spots in the vast, perplexing honeycomb grid for them, that alone is a hard job, I am doing it well, and for all other perceived failings…I forgive myself. I accept myself. Without irony, I give myself a giant, universal hug.
Afterward, we women lie on the sleeping porch in our fluffy spa robes, creamed, pummeled, lotioned, with cucumber slices over our eyes…
A mandala of sleeping beauties.
Ringed protectively by mystic circles of Spa and Real Simple magazines…
Like creamed sleeping beauties…
Under the blue sky of Napa, perfectly clear with, only occasionally, a passing hot-air balloon.
Not a crow in the cloudless sky.
Oh no. That would be waiting for me upon my return home.
When word comes that, upon interviewing her, Luther Hall has concluded that my daughter is not developmentally ready for kindergarten. The protective amulet I have fashioned for my daughter has revealed a crack. According to Hannah’s test, the school has decided she will have to be held back a year.
5
Fear in the Milk
This is the 2001: A Space Odyssey moment where lights and colors around you smear into tunnels. My gut turned to ice, I vault into the minivan, bouncing crazily down the rainy boulevards to Luther Hall—
Brenda’s MapQuest has disappeared into the passenger-seat pile—I try to reconstruct the route in my head, but even reliable Burbank…It’s totally backed up! Squeal of tires, I reverse, turn across a double yellow line, blare of horns. There is construction everywhere—red flashing lights, white-and-orange sawhorses. I’m driving like a maniac, like a wild-eyed Mother Tiger, stoplights flaring orange, knuckles turned to white.
I’m panting, I’m panting…Left at El Pollo Loco, zig left, zig right, there is the guard gate, which is…closed! Even worse…There is a guard in the guardhouse!
In just three weeks, so much has changed at Luther Hall. Ahead, above the administration building, stretches a large, ominous new blue-and-white banner…
BLUE RIBBON SCHOOL.
I force myself to breathe slower as the guard picks up the telephone, as the white arm of the gate reluctantly creaks open, as I hurry across the parking lot from my formerly perfect spot…SPLAT! goes the puddle I step into. Good Lord—I don’t remember all this construction. Everywhere around me lawns are dug up, rectangular ditches yawn, yellow tape is strung every which way—what are they building?
“There has been a mix-up,” I tell Doris Anderson, smiling through my teeth.
“Well I sure hope not!” Mrs. Claus says pleasantly. Today she is wearing a snowman cardigan with gold buttons that match the gold chain on her glasses.
“My daughter is Hannah? She came in for her—her ‘meeting’ the other week with my husband, Mike!”
“Yes!” Doris says, brightly. She picks up a thick pink pile of what appear to be…tests, and begins paging through them. “Let’s see now…Here we are!” she says brightly. “Hannah! Yes, she has been assigned to…DK.”
“DK,” I repeat.
“Developmental kindergarten,” Doris says, smiling up at me, and her smile is so cheerful, for a moment I almost imagine that this is good news.
“Well, what about kindergarten, REGULAR kindergarten?”
“THAT Hannah will start the year after,” Doris Anderson says smartly, not changing her body language. It occurs to me that the counter in front of her is like…its own kind of guardhouse. Which I notice also bears the little coat of arms.
“So what—when she comes to Luther Hall in September, you’re going to stick her into an extra year of preschool?”
“Not preschool. Kindergarten. DEVELOPMENTAL kindergarten. It’s a WONDERFUL program.”
“You mean you’re…holding her back a year?”
“We are not holding her BACK. In fact…” Here Doris leans forward, takes her glasses off, kind. “You might ask yourself, why are you pushing her FORWARD?”
The problem is that I have no Brenda. I am devoid of Brenda. Brenda is in Tennessee for two weeks. Without Brenda I’m lost. I have no idea how to negotiate.
I do a quick panicked scan of what cards I might be holding.
Celeste’s voice comes back to me: “You have to use whatever currency is in your pocketbook.”
My voice comes out very rushed and wobbly:
“It’s just that as a media person? Who has authored books and written for the Los Angeles Times and does regular commentaries on KCRW? And teaches at Marymount? We think we can be a useful addition to the—the Luther Hall FAMILY—?”
“I’m sure you can be,” Doris replies, unflapped.
There is a beat.
There is no Open Sesame.
“I guess—I guess we didn’t know you were TESTING them!” I finally wail.
“The Gesell isn’t a TEST, it’s an assessment,” Doris says.
Ah, so the horrible thing has a name. Doris holds Hannah’s packet up. I can now read the front of it: “Gesell Kindergarten Readiness Assessment.”
Doris continues: “Apparently, Mrs. Crandall—and our evaluators are very good; they all have extensive training in the Gesell…” Doris opens the test, puts her glasses back on, pleasant, anticipatory. “Well! Let’s see what she wrote here.”
I gaze down.
At the top of the first pink page is Hannah’s name and age—4.4.
And below…? Below is not a description of a child I recognize. It’s a sea of scarifying ADD-like phrases like “intermittent eye contact,” “not focused,” “attention seemed to wander.”
“Hm,” says Doris, turning the page. “So she’s a little wiggly—they can be.”
“Wiggly?” Was that bad?
“Here we go,” says Doris, sweeping her hand down the new page.
The main categories listed on the page are Conversation, Blocks, and Pencilwork, which are accompanied with many small technical diagrams. I feel a pang in my heart when I see Hannah’s brave pencil work, her careful scratching. I can imagine the frizzy yellow head of my love bent dutifully over this paper.
And to the right of her drawings, well, look! There’s an age-appropriate score spray of 4.0s and 4.5s!
“That’
s good, isn’t it?” I erupt, in relief. So it IS all a mistake! “Hannah is 4.4 years old and, hey, check it out, she’s doing some 4.5s, 4.6s!”
“Yes, but by January,” Doris says in that way she has that is both regretful and not regretful, “for Luther Hall students? Because our kindergarten curriculum fully utilizes both large and small motor skills, even at this point in the game we want to see more 4.5s moving into 5.0s.”
“Well, look at this British flag thing!” I half scream. Oh my God! Hannah replicated an entire British flag! I will tear this Mrs. Claus’s cardigan to bits if I need to to get my point across. I tap the British flag, hard.
“The British flag! Look at the score Mrs.—Mrs. Crandall put! 6.0! Six-point-oh years old, I believe that is!”
Doris leans over the British flag, moves down her pen to keep reading. I have to admit that I’m grateful, at the very least, that she is giving such careful attention to Hannah’s test, studying it as though it were a fascinating unfolding mystery.
“But look what the evaluator wrote,” Doris replies. “Because after drawing the flag, Hannah did not want THEN to try the much simpler diamond…That drops her score down to 4.0. In some interpretations, that would even scored be 3.5.”
My voice is shaking.
“You get nothing for doing something brilliant and then get docked for not trying something simple? What kind of—of…test is this?”
“Kindergarten is a long day, nine to three,” Doris says. “We don’t want Hannah to be frustrated. We want her to thrive. Kindergarten at Luther Hall is academically demanding.”
Academically demanding? They were cutting up teddy bears!
“She said ‘hippopotamus’!” I shrill. “I know for a fact she said ‘hippopotamus’!”
There is a moment of silence while Doris turns to the next page.
“Yes, animal naming, here it is—lion, tiger, hippopotamus. But you see—” Now she tilts her head back and fixes her eyes on a faraway, dreamy point.
And in this moment I hate her for not even acknowledging the word hippopotamus. She just said “hippopotamus” and went on, refusing to even say, “Hippopotamus—very nice.” To give said sparkling vocabulary word just the polite tip of a hat. No, Mrs. Claus said “hippopotamus” and went straight to the “But—” Argh! Suddenly I understand a drunken Leah railing away at AUTHORITY on her Topanga deck. I, too, could locate boiling dark rage, in a light and whimsical Chardonnay.
“But you see,” Doris continues, in that same dreamy way, “this is interesting about the Gesell, that’s why it’s such an interesting ASSESSMENT. The animal naming is timed.”
“Timed?”
“With a stopwatch.”
A stopwatch?
Why did my husband not tell me this?
All that marital hooey about Delegation…and fuckin’…Trust.
In the madness of my past few years of sleep deprivation, I seem to have conveniently forgotten that my husband is the world’s worst messenger of vital information. Any information! One time he came back from lunch with an old friend of ours whose wife of twenty years had just moved out. I met Mike at the front door, beseechingly: “How is Alan?” “Alan? He’s fine,” Mike said. “But what about Caroline!” I ejaculated. “Her moving out, hitting Alan with the divorce papers, the affair?” And my South Dakotan husband actually said, “Oh! We didn’t talk about that.” And this is the man to whom I’ve entrusted my daughter’s education…!
Mrs. Claus is still talking.
“What the Gesell evaluator is looking for is not WHAT animals the child names, but how LONG the child keeps going. Hannah stopped naming animals at, what? It says nine seconds. More developmentally mature children will continue trying to name animals for fifteen, even twenty—”
“You mean you could say ‘Dog, dog, dog’ over again for twenty seconds and that would get you a higher score than ‘hippopotamus’?”
Doris brightens. “That’s what makes the Gesell so interesting!”
And suddenly, horribly, I can picture Hannah during the test. I can picture what happened.
She became…me. At four.
Because if I were four and said ‘hippopotamus’? This is a very big word for a very small person! I, too, would have paused. I, too, would have to have been prompted, as the evaluator noted, for the far more tedious “farm animals”…Farm animals! Yawn!
In life I, too, tend to make a big splash…and then wait for applause…before gathering strength to go further. In our family? Well, I guess we’re show people! In our house, an unexamined life is simply not worth living.
Maybe we don’t flower so much during a test so boring you can hear the tick tick tick of the wall clock. Maybe we need a teacher with maybe a LITTLE BIT of a lively face to get us interested, to get us going—Who WAS this Mrs. Crandall?
My voice drops down.
“Look, maybe Hannah had a bad day. We didn’t prepare.”
“We don’t want you to prepare. Preparing doesn’t help.”
“It’s inhuman, the testing of children!” I plead. “They’re four! You should see Hannah and her little friend Cal play together!”
Cal! I suddenly think. Poor Cal! If Hannah with her big brain couldn’t swing this test, poor Cal, what did he get, 2s? 1s?
“Cal?” Doris asks.
“Cal Runyon!” I exclaim. “Poor Cal took the test, too!”
Doris looks back down under the counter, brightens.
She places another pink packet on the counter.
“Actually, Cal Runyon got one of the top scores on the Gesell assessment. He has been placed into kindergarten.”
My stomach drops through the floor.
“Cal has been placed a year AHEAD of Hannah? You mean they won’t even be in the same CLASS? You mean I have to tell Hannah that Cal…?”
Doris reads aloud to herself: “‘Excellent focus. Pleasure to be with. Follows instructions.’”
That kiss-ass! I think.
In the dream version of what happens now, I leap over the counter and take Doris by her floppy wool cardigan lapels.
And this is what I say…my voice as low as Clint Eastwood’s in Dirty Harry:
“Let me tell you something, Mrs. Claus. We didn’t even want to GO to this third-place school! We were doing you a FAVOR! Do you know why Hannah stopped naming animals, and why she didn’t try the diamond? Because she was bored. She was bored with you all. Look at you, Luther Hall, this sad little campus behind, let’s face it, a Target and an El Pollo Loco. Your wall of ivy? Just a bit tattered. Your coat of arms? Doesn’t stand for ANYTHING. I believe you people made that little coat of arms up!
“A Catholic nun with mustache and a ruler? That would have gotten my daughter’s attention, but no…Look at you. Look in the mirror. You are LUTHERANS. The most BORING of all Christian religions.
“Maybe you Lutherans are suddenly on your high horse, what with your pompous Blue Ribbon, because you’ve got an entire city of desperate Los Angeles parents—and even a couple of Europeans—washing up at your door. But try as you might, friends—you may close that white gate down, you may put a guard in that guardhouse, but you will never be Baptists with their lovable kitschy color! Or Catholics, with their mesmerizing drama-queen flair! Or our Evangelicals, who actually run the country…badly, but then again, I ask you…
“What do YOU do…Lutherans? What do YOU have to say for yourselves? I once saw on the coffee table of my South Dakotan mother-in-law a book called Reclaiming the “L” Word—” Here my voice would go high and pretend-weepy. “Oh! It’s like a twelve-step program to help Lutherans feel PROUD again about being Lutherans—
“Oh, poor Lutherans—You feel like the dark horses in the Christian world, infamous, ignored, overlooked—You inspire nobody’s passion—
“Well, boo-hoo!” Here I get up on the counter, Norma Rae–like. “From this day on, as God is my witness, it’s going to stay that way! More PR for your Blue Ribbon? I know Appalachian SNAKE handlers who are going to
get more ink than you! Grim lockstep followers of Martin Luther, with your seven-and-a-half-hour kindergarten, here’s MY Augsburg Confession, and that confession is that I curse you!”
My accusing finger stabs the air:
“YOU WILL NOT…REVIEW…MY CHILD…BADLY.”
And then I would turn back for one more zinger:
“So you got Joseph Fiennes to play Martin Luther? Not exactly Ralph, is he?”
Then I toss a match into gasoline and Luther Hall erupts into flames.
In reality, so shocked am I over the news that Cal is a genius while my own four-and-a-half-year-old has all sorts of cognitive and emotional problems, that I awkwardly thank Doris for her time, go into the parking lot, get into my minivan, fold my arms across the steering wheel, and cry.
I do this for a while, eventually desisting, and blowing my nose on all I can find on the passenger’s seat—what’s this? Another old to-do list:
Frsdrggb???
CUPCAKES
Bouncing home in the construction, in the rain, wandering, lost, taking every wrong turn, I pass by the hunched, brown, chain-link-fenced LAUSD elementary that I realize is…
Guavatorina.
The sign in front—it is in Spanish.
I can’t even make out the sign.
It says something about “Matriculación!” Something about “12 Janero!”
Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! Page 11