by Dar Williams
“Exactly!” she said.
“And it looks like it worked.”
“Whew, yes, I was relieved,” she said. “It looks like Mrs. Nielson is nervous about the hospital bills, and they thought they’d need a lawyer to get the money from us.”
“How much will I owe them?” I asked.
“Nothing, I think. Mrs. Nielson is raising three kids alone. She doesn’t have time to read all her insurance information or call the insurance company four times a day. I’ll do that for her. I think she’s covered, though.”
“I could give them money. I could earn it for them,” I protested.
“It would probably be about five hundred dollars,” Phyllis warned me.
I sucked in my stomach. “That’s a lot of lawns to mow,” I said, “but I could do it.”
“Sit tight for now. If she’s still got that neck brace today, we’ll know that she has some real neck problems, and we should offer to help,” Phyllis agreed. “But if she doesn’t have a neck brace, we’ll assume that she’s okay, and you won’t have to mow lawns for eight hours a day. Fair enough?”
I nodded and asked, “Phyllis, you know what I liked the best? I mean, do you want to know how I really feel?”
“How’s that?” she asked.
“I feel forgiving.”
“That’s nice,” Phyllis said, surprised.
“I forgive myself, I think. I forgive Lenore, her mom, Mr. Shapiro.”
“And me?” Phyllis asked.
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You don’t know what I did this morning,” she muttered. Then she confessed, “I told Ms. Severance about your dad. I told her everything. I broke my promise.”
“Why did you do that?” I gasped.
“Because she’s a new teacher, and I like her, and I thought she could help you if I told her some of the things new teachers don’t always know.”
“She doesn’t like me,” I protested. “She thinks I’m a bad student.”
“She likes you, Amalee. She likes you a lot.”
I felt like I’d just eaten one of the apricots from Carolyn’s enchanted garden.
“I like her a lot,” I whispered.
“Well, if you can trust that I broke my promise for the right reasons — and, by the way, I felt like I could because John had already spilled the beans, obviously — if you can forgive me, I think you’re also going to be asked to forgive someone else.”
“Who’s that?” I wondered.
“Ms. Severance.”
Ms. Severance?
I walked back into class and sat down. I couldn’t even look at Ms. Severance. Then Lenore walked in. The neck brace was gone. She looked much smaller. She didn’t look at me or Ms. Severance. She didn’t look at anyone.
The bell rang, and Ms. Severance was silent. We waited for her to speak.
When she finally did, it had nothing to do with the word of the day or grammar. She said, “When I came here, a year ago, I thought this job would be fun, because I think learning is fun. When you know more things, you understand more things, and you can do new things. In that way, learning gives you power.”
Her voice was quiet and steady, as it always was, but she seemed a little nervous.
“But when I started teaching,” she continued, “I don’t know how it all happened, how things changed. I had a few kids in my class who were bullies. They made fun of me and the other kids. I was truly surprised. All I wanted was to help them learn all this great stuff, and they wanted to fool around and make fun of people.
“So I went and spoke to an expert here at school, and he said I had failed my students. He said it was my failure, because I hadn’t given my students enough order. He said my class was in chaos. He said I shouldn’t have expected to have fun. I shouldn’t have thought we could laugh and enjoy learning together. He said I had to be strict, and that the biggest gift I could give my students was order, structure, and seriousness, because then nobody could misbehave, and I could get my job done.”
This sounded familiar. I put two and two together. She was talking about Mr. Shapiro, the principal. I bet that Phyllis had been in here this morning telling her she didn’t have to listen to him! I realized he had said all these things to Ms. Severance and made her feel unsure of herself. Poor Ms. Severance, trying her hardest to be orderly and serious, when she really wanted to be nice. Phyllis must have gone ahead and told Ms. Severance what all the students knew, that Mr. Shapiro was a loon.
“I think the expert was wrong,” she was now saying. “And I think I even hurt some students in the process, because the other piece of bad advice he gave me was this: If you have one or two very able students, students who have a strength in English and social studies, you should be the strictest with them. If they think they’re smart, they will get conceited. They must believe they haven’t tried hard enough yet.”
Her eyes only flickered in my direction, but I caught the pain in them.
Somehow this was the Ms. Severance I had been wanting to see all year, the one who went with the beautiful mossy green sweater and the sparkly earrings.
Now things made sense — her cold looks that went with my good grades, the fact that she never smiled when I answered a question correctly.
“The truth is, you are a fabulous group of students, and you’ve learned more than I ever thought you could in one year, and I think you deserve to know that. So, congratulations! Now, on to the word of the day.”
Everyone looked happy, even Lenore.
I was afraid of getting too excited as I left Ms. Severance’s class that day, but I dared to think that now I could be happy about waking up and coming to school. I could show up for Ms. Severance. I could let her know how much I loved the books we read, the words she taught us, and even her North American history assignments.
And now that the Lenore nightmare looked like it was coming to an end, what about the rest of the picture? Did I have any friends? Did Sarah still like me? It’s easier to forgive than to ask for forgiveness. But she never seemed to be mad at me. No, I didn’t have to ask her to forgive me for what happened with Lenore. I just had to talk with her.
I saw a girl named Marin walking down the hall. She was friends with Sarah. Here was an opportunity. I would talk to her. If I wanted friends, I’d have to find a way to be a friend.
“Marin,” I almost whispered as she passed.
“Did you say my name?” She stopped and looked at me.
“I — I saw the stained-glass project your team did in art class,” I stammered. “We’re doing them next week, and Ms. Hutton showed us the one you did as an example.”
“The ones our class did, you mean?” she asked, one eyebrow raised.
“No, the one you did by yourself. She showed us all the details on it and said it was one of the best ones she’d ever seen. Did she tell you that?”
“No,” Marin said shyly.
“Well, it was really good,” I said, starting to walk away. Clearly what I had said made Marin uncomfortable.
“Wait!” she called, then caught up with me. “I’m friends with Sarah Smythe. We’re in Bye Bye Birdie together. She told me about what happened, and she said — Lenore Nielson told her why you pushed her.”
“She did?”
“Lenore knew it was because she said your dad was really sick.” Marin looked away and murmured, “I felt bad for you. So did Sarah. We thought we might have done the same thing.”
“You put yourself in my shoes,” I said. “That’s what Ms. Severance always says.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t usually push people,” I added.
“I didn’t think you did! How is your dad feeling?” she asked.
“Much better,” I said. “Thank you for asking.”
We headed off for our classes. I didn’t even care if I was late.
My books were lighter as I walked home from school, and the sun was shining through the trees in the woods, like an enchanted forest to go with
Carolyn’s enchanted garden.
I was excited to see my dad. Maybe I’ll tell him the whole story. Okay, maybe I’d tell him most of it. And, I thought, I would talk to him about his being sick. He had avoided the whole conversation with me, but I would bring it up with him. I would ask him everything about it.
He was sitting in the living room reading the paper. I sat next to him on the couch.
“Hey, there,” he said, smiling. “Did you have a good day at school.”
“I had a great day,” I answered. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” he said. Silence.
“Well, that’s new,” I encouraged him. “After the couple of months we’ve had.”
“Hey,” he said, “Phyllis says she’s gotten you up to speed on the government. Did you know we’ve got a big election coming up this year?”
I couldn’t speak. It hadn’t been my imagination. He refused to talk to me about his sickness.
“Do you really want to change the subject?” I asked.
“I was just asking if you knew about the election in November. It’s earlier than that, actually. The primary in September should be pretty big, too. Do you know what happens in a primary?”
“Yes. People from the same party run against each other and the winner runs against the other party in November.” I spoke as flatly as I could, just to show him that two could play at this game. No feelings.
Then I got up and said, almost threateningly, “I have to make a phone call.” Dad just nodded his head and went back to his paper.
I called Joyce and left a message.
She called back before dinner. I pretended she was someone from school, just to experiment with this idea that to be a friend I had to act like a friend. I told her I felt frustrated. I told her I needed her advice. I knew now that I was determined to do things differently. I told Joyce about Phyllis and Ms. Severance and how I felt about it. She’d already heard about Lenore from Phyllis. Then I swallowed and told her about Dad, and how he still wouldn’t talk about anything but the September primary.
“So you’d like me to help?” Joyce asked.
Did I?
“Yes, I’d like some help with this,” I said.
“I’m proud of you, Amalee. I’ve been hoping you’d ask.”
“Why are you proud of me?”
“Because you’re like your dad sometimes. You don’t like to talk about your problems, and you don’t like to ask for help.”
“Isn’t that just what human beings do?” I asked, a little afraid. I didn’t know other people had noticed this about me.
“Why, yes!” Joyce said. “But you know what I mean about your dad. He’s not exactly John. Or me.” She laughed.
I got off the phone when Dad walked in the room.
“So who’s running in the September primary?” I asked as seriously as I could, heading toward the kitchen to get us some vegetarian meat loaf for dinner. We could talk about politics over dinner. I would be happy to be eating with Dad in the kitchen, and I’d let Joyce take care of the rest for now.
School was starting to feel much better. After lying low like a river rock for the last two months, I didn’t feel the need to hide or to be so hard. I sensed that there was another river, next to the river of unkindness. It was the river of kindness, of course! It didn’t make the loud rushing noise of mean words and accusations, but was, instead, often quiet, and maybe harder to find.
Hally had a hole in the armpit of her sweater, and I didn’t point it out like I knew she would have. Who cared about a little hole? Not we who swim in the river of kindness!
I could survive the kids who were hard to deal with now that I trusted that there were kids who were trying to be nice.
Lenore tried to talk to me about our next social studies project. She started to explain that she’d picked the most difficult subject, but too much had happened between us. She couldn’t boast the way she used to. She knew that she shouldn’t have been mean about my dad. She knew I felt like a monster for pushing her the way I did. Competing over history projects was nothing compared to our own history.
I overheard Ellen telling her latest victim that George Washington became president in 1789, not 1776. I watched Bob, a pretty serious kid, nodding his head respectfully, ready to accept her suggestion that he was a little stupider than everyone else because he didn’t know it took over ten years for the United States to end the revolution and elect a president.
When Ellen walked away, I said to Bob, “I didn’t know that about George Washington. I thought he was elected on July fourth, 1776, when they all signed the Declaration of Independence!”
“So did I,” he confided.
“I guess we’re not very smart,” I said sarcastically.
“Oh, yeah, me and the smartest girl in the class,” he joked. Is that how the other kids saw me?
Ms. Severance was almost dancing as she wrote the words of the day on the blackboard. She asked for a sentence with all three words.
Bob raised his hand. I felt like I’d given him a little lift.
“Excellent!” Ms. Severance cried. He had used the words “opaque,” “transparent,” and even “translucent” correctly.
Bob looked up and then down at his notebook. He didn’t know where to look. This was very new for him.
Ms. Severance had clearly gone and talked with some other teachers, because in music class, Ms. Bernstein put the words “Lachrymose: tending to cry easily or to make people cry” on the board.
“Here’s a vocabulary word that you’ll probably never use!” Ms. Bernstein announced cheerfully. “It comes from the Latin word Lacrima ‘tears.’ I wanted to play you one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever heard. It’s called the ‘Lacrymosa,’ from Mozart’s Requiem, which means ‘music for the dead.’” We all shuffled around a little when we heard this. “By the way, Mozart was writing ‘Lacrymosa’ when he knew he himself was dying,” she added, “so it is truly a lachrymose piece of music. Feel free to let a few lacrimae go.”
Did she choose this because of me and my dad? She slipped a CD into the player.
This was different from the symphony she’d played a few weeks before. The violins played slowly, as if a very sad parade were passing by. I felt the tears starting to well up. I thought about a man who knows he’s going to die and who thinks about the way things come to an end. Is that how Dad had felt? Yes, lachrymose, indeed.
That day, after school, I saw Joyce’s car in the driveway. I wondered if something had happened. I plopped down my books and got a few cookies from the kitchen. Then I made my way to Dad’s room, only to see him sitting up, his back perfectly straight against the pillows on his bed.
“Oh, hi,” whispered Joyce, sitting next to him.
Joyce looked a little nervous.
“Hi, Amalee,” she said, moving over so I could sit between her and Dad on his bed. “Your dad has just agreed to let me try an exercise with him, something I read in an excellent book. It would really help me if I could practice it on him. I told him it’s just a little something to stretch his brain.”
“I said I would be happy to be a guinea pig,” Dad said innocently. Somehow I suspected that this wasn’t just an innocent exercise. Joyce was up to something!
Joyce looked down at me and smiled as if I’d just read her mind. Then she cleared her throat and said, “Close your eyes, then.” Dad and I both closed our eyes, even though this — whatever it turned out to be — was for him. Joyce continued. “Think about something that is filled with water. Think about that lovely red vase next to your bed, David, the one that Carolyn has filled with flowers. Think about the bright red vase and how it contains water so perfectly. Think about the vase without the flowers. It’s just a vase with clear water inside.”
Every sentence ran as smoothly as water into the next sentence. It was beautiful. I never knew Joyce could sound so calm and soothing. The next things she said were just as watery and floaty, but they came out as very separate
things to ponder.
“Now think about all the things that a person can cry about. In fact, think about all the things you yourself might cry about, things that are gone that you cannot change, or, on the other hand, things that are very, very beautiful. And now, think of a moment in the last couple months, say, when you may have felt like crying, but you thought that if you did, you might never stop.”
Joyce took an extra pause here, and found another way to say the same thing. “Somehow, you thought if you started to cry, you would think of everything in the world that makes you cry.” She paused again. I was trying to think of what my dad might be thinking. “Now,” she said, “imagine a big rubber stopper, like the stopper in a bathtub, and imagine pulling and pulling on the ring handle. You finally pull it up, and suddenly a fountain of tears comes welling up from a deep hole in the ground. What container would hold all those tears?”
After a minute or so, Joyce asked, “David? Do you see a container?”
“I’m in a boat,” he answered. “I’m in a boat on the water.” I’d always heard that some people were easier to hypnotize than others, and judging from the sound of his voice, I guess Dad was one of them! He sounded so different, it was strange, even though it was a relief not to hear the forced cheerfulness I thought I’d been hearing for the last few weeks. This was working! This was actual hypnotism! Was Joyce allowed to do this?
“I’m in a red boat on the water. It’s a rowboat. And it’s raining. It’s very cold, and it’s raining!” Dad’s voice was rising.
I felt something very strange then. It was a cold gust of wind at my neck, even though the window was closed, and I thought I could smell the rain — almost feel it. I saw a flash of red somewhere out in front of me.
Suddenly I saw myself on a beach surrounded by the plants that Carolyn had drawn, as if I’d gone back into the dream I’d had about being in her garden.
But I was in a part of the garden I’d never seen before. I was on a beach, and rain was drumming on the big green leaves of the rubber trees behind me.
In front of me was the water. I could smell the salt in the air. It was the ocean. An ocean of tears! And Dad was alone in an old red rowboat with chipping paint. He wasn’t that far away. I waded out and then swam to the boat. The water was warm, but the rain was freezing and falling in angry little daggers. Somehow, without Dad seeing me, I slipped into his boat.