I made my way toward Wayne, pushing myself past two girls from another class. He was watching me with his little pinhead eyes.
“You told,” I shouted at him. “She was just kidding.”
“She shouldn’t have,” he shouted back. “We were supposed to be doing arithmetic.”
“She just scared you,” I said. “You’re a chicken. You’re a chicken, Wayne. You are. Scared of a little card,” I singsonged.
Wayne fell at me, his two fists hammering down on my nose. I gave him a good one in the stomach and then I tried for his head. Aiming my fist, I saw that he was crying. I slugged him.
“She was right,” I yelled. “She was always right! She told the truth!” Other kids were whooping. “You were just scared, that’s all!”
And then large hands pulled at us, and it was my turn to speak to Mr. Faegre.
In the afternoon Miss Ferenczi was gone, and my nose was stuffed with cotton clotted with blood, and my lip had swelled, and our class had been combined with Mrs. Mantei’s sixth-grade class for a crowded afternoon science unit on insect life in ditches and swamps. I knew where Mrs. Mantei lived: she had a new house trailer just down the road from us, at the Clearwater Park. She was no mystery. Somehow she and Mr. Bodine, the other fourth-grade teacher, had managed to fit forty-five desks into the room. Kelly Munger asked if Miss Ferenczi had been arrested, and Mrs. Mantei said no, of course not. All that afternoon, until the buses came to pick us up, we learned about field crickets and two-striped grasshoppers, water bugs, cicadas, mosquitoes, flies, and moths. We learned about insects’ hard outer shell, the exoskeleton, and the usual parts of the mouth, including the labrum, mandible, maxilla, and glossa. We learned about compound eyes, and the four-stage metamorphosis from egg to larva to pupa to adult. We learned something, but not much, about mating. Mrs. Mantei drew, very skillfully, the internal anatomy of the grasshopper on the blackboard. We learned about the dance of the honeybee, directing other bees in the hive to pollen. We found out about which insects were pests to man, and which were not. On lined white pieces of paper we made lists of insects we might actually see, then a list of insects too small to be clearly visible, such as fleas; Mrs. Mantei said that our assignment would be to memorize these lists for the next day, when Mr. Hibler would certainly return and test us on our knowledge.
Fenstad’s Mother
ON SUNDAY MORNING after communion Fenstad drove across town to visit his mother. Behind the wheel, he exhaled with his hand flat in front of his mouth to determine whether the wine on his breath could be detected. He didn’t think so. Fenstad’s mother was a lifelong social progressive who was amused by her son’s churchgoing, and, wine or no wine, she could guess where he had been. She had spent her life in the company of rebels and deviationists, and she recognized all their styles.
Passing a frozen pond in the city park, Fenstad slowed down to watch the skaters, many of whom he knew by name and skating style. From a distance they were dots of color ready for flight, frictionless. To express grief on skates seemed almost impossible, and Fenstad liked that. He parked his car on a residential block and took out his skates from the backseat, where he kept them all winter. With his fingertips he touched the wooden blade guards, thinking of the time. He checked his watch; he had fifteen minutes.
Out on the ice, still wearing his churchy Sunday-morning suit, tie, and overcoat, but now circling the outside edge of the pond with his bare hands in his overcoat pockets, Fenstad admired the overcast sky and luxuriated in the brittle cold. He was active and alert in winter but felt sleepy throughout the summer. He passed a little girl in a pink jacket, pushing a tiny chair over the ice. He waved to his friend Ann, an off-duty cop, practicing her twirls. He waved to other friends. Without exception they waved back. As usual, he was impressed by the way skates improved human character.
Twenty minutes later, in the doorway of his mother’s apartment, she said, “Your cheeks are red.” She glanced down at his trousers, damp with melted snow. “You’ve been skating.” She kissed him on the cheek and turned to walk into her living room. “Skating after church? Isn’t that some sort of doctrinal error?”
“It’s just happiness,” Fenstad said. Quickly he checked her apartment for any signs of memory loss or depression. He found none and immediately felt relief. The apartment smelled of soap and Lysol, the signs of an old woman who wouldn’t tolerate nonsense. Out on her coffee table, as usual, were the letters she was writing to her congressman and to political dictators around the globe. Fenstad’s mother pleaded for enlightened behavior and berated the dictators for their bad political habits.
She grasped the arm of the sofa and let herself down slowly. Only then did she smile. “How’s your soul, Harry?” she asked. “What’s the news?”
He smiled back and smoothed his hair. Martin Luther King’s eyes locked onto his from the framed picture on the wall opposite him. In the picture King was shaking hands with Fenstad’s mother, the two of them surrounded by smiling faces. “My soul’s okay, Ma,” he said. “It’s a hard project. I’m always working on it.” He reached down for a chocolate-chunk cookie from a box on top of the television. “Who brought you these?”
“Your daughter Sharon. She came to see me on Friday.” Fenstad’s mother tilted her head at him. “You want to be a good person, but she’s the real article. Goodness comes to her without any effort at all. She says you have a new girlfriend. A pharmacist this time. Susan, is it?” Fenstad nodded. “Harry, why does your generation always have to find the right person? Why can’t you learn to live with the wrong person? Sooner or later everyone’s wrong. Love isn’t the most important thing, Harry, far from it. Why can’t you see that? I still don’t comprehend why you couldn’t live with Eleanor.” Eleanor was Fenstad’s ex-wife. They had been divorced for a decade, but Fenstad’s mother hoped for a reconciliation.
“Come on, Ma,” Fenstad said. “Over and done with, gone and gone.” He took another cookie.
“You live with somebody so that you’re living with somebody, and then you go out and do the work of the world. I don’t understand all this pickiness about lovers. In a pinch anybody’ll do, Harry, believe me.”
On the side table was a picture of her late husband, Fenstad’s mild, middle-of-the-road father. Fenstad glanced at the picture and let the silence hang between them before asking, “How are you, Ma?”
“I’m all right.” She leaned back in the sofa, whose springs made a strange, almost human groan. “I want to get out. I spend too much time in this place in January. You should expand my horizons. Take me somewhere.”
“Come to my composition class,” Fenstad said. “I’ll pick you up at dinnertime on Tuesday. Eat early.”
“They’ll notice me,” she said, squinting. “I’m too old.”
“I’ll introduce you,” her son said. “You’ll fit right in.”
Fenstad wrote brochures in the publicity department of a computer company during the day, and taught an extension English-composition class at the downtown campus of the state university two nights a week. He didn’t need the money; he taught the class because he liked teaching strangers and because he enjoyed the sense of hope that classrooms held for him. This hopefulness and didacticism he had picked up from his mother.
On Tuesday night she was standing at the door of the retirement apartment building, dressed in a dark blue overcoat—her best. Her stylishness was belied slightly by a pair of old fuzzy red earmuffs. Inside the car Fenstad noticed that she had put on perfume, unusual for her. Leaning back, she gazed out contentedly at the nighttime lights.
“Who’s in this group of students?” she asked. “Working-class people, I hope. Those are the ones you should be teaching. Anything else is just a career.”
“Oh, they work, all right.” He looked at his mother and saw, as they passed under a streetlight, a combination of sadness and delicacy in her face. Her usual mask of tough optimism seemed to be deserting her. He braked at a red light and said, “I have a hairdresser a
nd a garage mechanic and a housewife, a Mrs. Nelson, and three guys who’re sanitation workers. Plenty of others. One guy you’ll really like is a young black man with glasses who sits in the back row and reads Workers’ Vanguard and Bakunin during class. He’s brilliant. I don’t know why he didn’t test out of this class. His name’s York Follette, and he’s—”
“I want to meet him,” she said quickly. She scowled at the moonlit snow. “A man with ideas. People like that have gone out of my life.” She looked over at her son. “What I hate about being my age is how nice everyone tries to be. I was never nice, but now everybody is pelting me with sugar cubes.” She opened her window an inch and let the cold air blow over her, ruffling her stiff gray hair.
When they arrived at the school, snow had started to fall, and at the other end of the parking lot a police car’s flashing light beamed long crimson rays through the dense flakes. Fenstad’s mother walked deliberately toward the door, shaking her head mistrustfully at the building and the police. Approaching the steps, she took her son’s hand. “I liked the columns on the old buildings,” she said. “The old university buildings, I mean. I liked Greek Revival better than this Modernist-bunker stuff.” Inside, she blinked in the light at the smooth, waxed linoleum floors and cement-block walls. She held up her hand to shade her eyes. Fenstad took her elbow to guide her over the snow melting in puddles in the entryway. “I never asked you what you’re teaching tonight.”
“Logic,” Fenstad said.
“Ah.” She smiled and nodded. “Dialectics!”
“Not quite. Just logic.”
She shrugged. She was looking at the clumps of students standing in the glare of the hallway, drinking coffee from paper cups and smoking cigarettes in the general conversational din. She wasn’t used to such noise: she stopped in the middle of the corridor underneath a wall clock and stared happily in no particular direction. With her eyes shut she breathed in the close air, smelling of wet overcoats and smoke, and Fenstad remembered how much his mother had always liked smoke-filled rooms, where ideas fought each other, and where some of those ideas died.
“Come on,” he said, taking her hand again. Inside Fenstad’s classroom six people sat in the angular postures of pre-boredom. York Follette was already in the back row, his copy of Workers’ Vanguard shielding his face. Fenstad’s mother headed straight for him and sat down in the desk next to his. Fenstad saw them shake hands, and in two minutes they were talking in low, rushed murmurs. He saw York Follette laugh quietly and nod. What was it that blacks saw and appreciated in his mother? They had always liked her—written to her, called her, checked up on her—and Fenstad wondered if they recognized something in his mother that he himself had never been able to see.
At seven thirty-five most of the students had arrived and were talking to each other vigorously, as if they didn’t want Fenstad to start and thought they could delay him. He stared at them, and when they wouldn’t quiet down, he made himself rigid and said, “Good evening. We have a guest tonight.” Immediately the class grew silent. He held his arm out straight, indicating with a flick of his hand the old woman in the back row. “My mother,” he said. “Clara Fenstad.” For the first time all semester his students appeared to be paying attention: they turned around collectively and looked at Fenstad’s mother, who smiled and waved. A few of the students began to applaud; others joined in. The applause was quiet but apparently genuine. Fenstad’s mother brought herself slowly to her feet and made a suggestion of a bow. Two of the students sitting in front of her turned around and began to talk to her. At the front of the class Fenstad started his lecture on logic, but his mother wouldn’t quiet down. This was a class for adults. They were free to do as they liked.
Lowering his head and facing the blackboard, Fenstad reviewed problems in logic, following point by point the outline set down by the textbook: post hoc fallacies, false authorities, begging the question, circular reasoning, ad hominem arguments, all the rest. Explaining these problems, his back turned, he heard sighs of boredom, boldly expressed. Occasionally he glanced at the back of the room. His mother was watching him carefully, and her face was expressing all the complexity of dismay. Dismay radiated from her. Her disappointment wasn’t personal, because his mother didn’t think that people as individuals were at fault for what they did. As usual, her disappointed hope was located in history and in the way people agreed with already existing histories.
She was angry with him for collaborating with grammar. She would call it unconsciously installed authority. Then she would find other names for it.
“All right,” he said loudly, trying to make eye contact with someone in the room besides his mother, “let’s try some examples. Can anyone tell me what, if anything, is wrong with the following sentence? ‘I, like most people, have a unique problem.’ ”
The three sanitation workers, in the third row, began to laugh. Fenstad caught himself glowering and singled out the middle one.
“Yes, it is funny, isn’t it?”
The man in the middle smirked and looked at the floor. “I was just thinking of my unique problem.”
“Right,” Fenstad said. “But what’s wrong with saying, ‘I, like most people, have a unique problem’?”
“Solving it?” This was Mrs. Nelson, who sat by the window so that she could gaze at the tree outside, lit by a streetlight. All through class she looked at the tree as if it were a lover.
“Solving what?”
“Solving the problem you have. What is the problem?”
“That’s actually not what I’m getting at,” Fenstad said. “Although it’s a good related point. I’m asking what might be wrong logically with that sentence.”
“It depends,” Harold Ronson said. He worked in a service station and sometimes came to class wearing his work shirt with his name tag, HAROLD, stitched into it. “It depends on what your problem is. You haven’t told us your problem.”
“No,” Fenstad said, “my problem is not the problem.” He thought of Alice in Wonderland and felt, physically, as if he himself were getting small. “Let’s try this again. What might be wrong with saying that most people have a unique problem?”
“You shouldn’t be so critical,” Timothy Melville said. “You should look on the bright side, if possible.”
“What?”
“He’s right,” Mrs. Nelson said. “Most people have unique problems, but many people do their best to help themselves, such as taking night classes or working at meditation.”
“No doubt that’s true,” Fenstad said. “But why can’t most people have a unique problem?”
“Oh, I disagree,” Mrs. Nelson said, still looking at her tree. Fenstad glanced at it and saw that it was crested with snow. It was beautiful. No wonder she looked at it. “I believe that most people do have unique problems. They just shouldn’t talk about them all the time.”
“Can anyone,” Fenstad asked, looking at the back wall and hoping to see something there that was not wall, “can anyone give me an example of a unique problem?”
“Divorce,” Barb Kjellerud said. She sat near the door and knitted during class. She answered questions without looking up. “Divorce is unique.”
“No, it isn’t!” Fenstad said, failing in the crucial moment to control his voice. He and his mother exchanged glances. In his mother’s face for a split second was the history of her compassionate, ambivalent attention to him. “Divorce is not unique.” He waited to calm himself. “It’s everywhere. Now try again. Give me a unique problem.”
Silence. “This is a trick question,” Arlene Fisher said. “I’m sure it’s a trick question.”
“Not necessarily. Does anyone know what ‘unique’ means?”
“One of a kind,” York Follette said, gazing at Fenstad with dry amusement. Sometimes he took pity on Fenstad and helped him out of jams. Fenstad’s mother smiled and nodded.
“Right,” Fenstad crowed, racing toward the blackboard as if he were about to write something. “So let’s try again.
Give me a unique problem.”
“You give us a unique problem,” one of the sanitation workers said. Fenstad didn’t know whether he’d been given a statement or a command. He decided to treat it as a command.
“All right,” he said. He stopped and looked down at his shoes. Maybe it was a trick question. He thought for ten seconds. Problem after problem presented itself to him. He thought of poverty, of the assaults on the earth, of the awful complexities of love. “I can’t think of one,” Fenstad said. His hands went into his pockets.
“That’s because problems aren’t personal,” Fenstad’s mother said from the back of the room. “They’re collective.” She waited while several students in the class sat up and nodded. “And people must work together on their solutions.” She talked for another two minutes, taking the subject out of logic and putting it neatly in politics, where she knew it belonged.
The snow had stopped by the time the class was over. Fenstad took his mother’s arm and escorted her to the car. After easing her down on the passenger side and starting the engine, he began to clear the front windshield. He didn’t have a scraper and had forgotten his gloves, so he was using his bare hands. When he brushed the snow away on his mother’s side, she looked out at him, surprised, a terribly aged Sleeping Beauty awakened against her will.
Once the car had warmed up, she was in a gruff mood and repositioned herself under the seat belt while making quiet but aggressive remarks. The sight of the new snow didn’t seem to calm her. “Logic,” she said at last. “That wasn’t logic. Those are just rhetorical tactics. It’s filler and drudgery.”
“I don’t want to discuss it now.”
“All right. I’m sorry. Let’s talk about something more pleasant.”
They rode together in silence. Then she began to shake her head. “Don’t take me home,” she said. “I want to have a spot of tea somewhere before I go back. A nice place where they serve tea, all right?”
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