Home Schooling

by Carol Windley

  “Maybe the guy in the office screwed up,” Ben said. “I knew he wasn’t paying attention. He was watching some movie on TV.”

  “It’s not that bad,” Marisa said. “In the morning it’ll look better.” She told herself to get a grip. The first night in a strange place was the worst. She knew that. While Ben showered she got Logan into his pyjamas and tucked up in the cot. Perhaps because of the travel sickness medicine, he fell asleep almost at once. She sat on the edge of the bed looking at him. His eyelashes cast shadows on his cheeks. His mouth was slightly parted. His eyes moved behind his closed lids, as if he were already dreaming. Dreaming he was at home. Dreaming of his mother, maybe. He was so small and vulnerable. She felt homesick, which was odd, considering she didn’t really have a home. She had a shower and got into bed beside Ben and went to sleep.

  In the morning, the room didn’t look any better. She and Ben and Logan dressed quickly and went outside, into the bright sun. They joined a crowd of dazed-looking people and walked with them down to the dining room, which was in a low, rambling building just above the beach. They lined up at the door and when their turn came had their names checked off and were given nametags. Then they got in line with trays and helped themselves to breakfast at a long table. Marisa hid her nametag under her plate of toast. Ben pinned his on. “It’s just a way of getting to know people,” he said. “I know,” she said. “But.”

  Once they were seated in the dining room, she thought her first impression was correct: she didn’t especially want to know any of the people here. The look of fragile yearning she saw on everyone’s face made her wary. What a homogenous, credulous-looking group, she thought. Everyone alike. Young couples with children. The children were noisy and rambunctious. Logan was very well behaved, by comparison. She diluted his orange juice with water until it got to a colour he was happy with. A woman came into the dining room and introduced herself as Sharon, the program director. She had to speak in a loud voice to be heard, and then suddenly the room went quiet, apart from chair legs scraping on the floor, and she was shrieking about the wonderful week ahead. She smiled and widened her eyes and in a more moderate tone went on to say she hoped their stay at Serenity Cove would prove illuminating and empowering. And a lot of fun, too, of course. “Enjoy your breakfast, eat up, you’ll need the energy,” she said. There was laughter. There was applause.

  Later, as they walked back to their room, Ben said he understood it all had to do with emotional intelligence, the ability to enhance your life skills through knowing how you responded emotionally to people and events. “I think they’re working on the assumption that, just as with any kind of intelligence, most people never realize their full potential.”

  “Well, sadly, I think people do use their full potential,” Marisa said. They groped their way into their gloomy room. She picked one of Logan’s T-shirts up off the floor and held it close to her. Logan bent down and started to drive his Thomas the Tank Engine over the rough brown carpet. She knew her despair at the thought of seven days and nights here was giving her voice an edge.

  “People do use their intelligence, but it never turns out to be enough, does it?” she said. “Why else do you think we’re all so messed up?”

  “Marisa,” Ben said. “Do you really believe that? That’s kind of a bleak view.”

  “It’s realistic,” she said. Also, it was the only view she had: a patch of sky, a dull brick wall. Ben didn’t know her. He didn’t know anything about her. She was a real pessimist. So was Norman. They knew too much about life. When they were kids, they’d loved it that insects, not people, made up the largest living group on earth. How cool, Norman had said. People thought they were so smart, but look at the ants! They had colonies and armies and expeditionary forces. They grew their own food, or some ants did. They had towering cities.

  Question: What would you do if you turned into an insect?

  Answer: I’d make like a bee and buzz. I’d beetle off.

  While Ben was at his first workshop, which was called “The Individual in Relationship” — an irony not lost on Marisa, at least — she and Logan went to the children’s play area, which was down a grassy slope from the dining room. There were swings and slides and a little roundabout and a sandbox, where Logan settled in with his beach bucket and shovel.

  Marisa found a bench in the shade of a fir tree. From here, she could see most of the buildings that made up Serenity Cove: the residences, the dining room, the office, a building where the workshops and other activities were held. There was also a swimming pool in a glass-walled, flat-roofed building. The buildings were unpainted, weathered wood. Paved walkways meandered around, and here and there planters containing petunias and marigolds were set out. The dining room had a deck that looked out over the sea. That was it, apart from the languorous, disinterested fir and cedar trees that enclosed the grounds.

  She got Norman’s letter out of her bag. She looked at the photograph of Norman’s fiancée, Teresa, and her little boy, Pawel. They were standing in a rose garden outside what looked like a Communistera apartment block. Teresa was wearing a white blouse and blue Capri pants and sandals. Her straight, light-brown hair was held back with barrettes. She wasn’t beautiful, as Norman had said, but she looked intelligent and sensible and pleasant. Her son had a look of Logan about him: the same dark, fine hair, tense little grin. It was as if Norman had honed in on Marisa’s whereabouts and learned everything he could about her, then couldn’t refrain from launching a few harmless but accurate strikes. Look, she imagined him saying. Look, Marisa, or whatever you call yourself now, you’re not so special after all. Even I have someone who loves me. And like your lover, mine too has a little boy for whom I’m playing substitute parent. Of course they were playing. This isn’t serious, is it, Norman, she wanted to say to him. In the long run, what does any of this matter?

  Whatever you call yourself now. It was true: Marisa wasn’t her real name. She’d changed her name, for luck, for euphony, for distance; because she felt like it.

  She wished Norman had told her more about his life in Poland, or had at least given her a phone number.

  The last time she’d seen Norman was a few months after their father had passed away. Norman had phoned to tell her their father, Jeff, had been found in the house by a friend, and the kind of horrific thing was that Jeff had been dead for several days by that time. Norman said he felt bad Jeff had died alone. He hadn’t even been to see him for months. Marisa had said, “I know. Me too.”

  In July, when Marisa was between jobs and Norman had finished a business course he was taking, they drove up to Vernon with their father’s ashes. They’d planned to scatter them in a field near the house where he’d lived as a child, but when they got there the field, with its grass and wild flowers, had been reduced to a barren strip of land between two new housing developments. Norman said they could go back to Jeff’s house and scatter the ashes there. Which, now that he thought about it, Jeff might have preferred, anyway. Marisa said she couldn’t face another long trip with the ashes in the car. She looked away while Norman opened the box and let the ashes drift onto the sun-baked ground. He asked if they should say a prayer or something. “Dad wasn’t religious, was he?” Marisa said.

  “How’s this?” Norman said. “Good night sweet prince. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, drink good booze and your pipes won’t rust.”

  “Norman,” Marisa protested. But she couldn’t help laughing. Norman was funny. He was charming. On the way back, they’d stayed in Victoria. Norman loved the city. He loved the constant wind. In the middle of the sidewalk he spun on his heel, and people had smiled and obligingly detoured around him. He was a good-looking man, slightly built, with fair hair and fine features. He had talked about moving to Victoria. He said technically he and Marisa were Canadians, although that couldn’t have been true, since they’d both been born in the U.S. Their father had left his parents’ home in Vernon in 1966, when he was twenty, so that he could enlist and get sent to Viet
Nam. He’d been a corporal in the Third Battalion, Ninth Marines. He showed Marisa and Norman the shrapnel scars on his arms and described in detail the bad case of “immersion foot” he’d got from slogging through flooded rice paddies. The best time in his life, he said. After the war he became an American citizen. He met their mother, Suzie, and got married.

  When Marisa was growing up, Jeff had worked as a car salesman, a delivery truck driver, a school janitor. Whatever job he had, it became a mania to him and then, suddenly, he would quit. During a stint as a trash collector he scavenged things he’d repair and sell from their front yard: old lawnmowers and bicycles and toaster ovens. Once he’d brought home a set of psychology textbooks, in which Norman had come across something called the F Test. He and Marisa applied it to their father and discovered that, yes, as they’d suspected, he met all the criteria; he was a Fascist. Marisa didn’t know what they’d been thinking, unless it was of old World War II movies or of Colonel Klink in Hogan’s Heroes reruns on TV. It was Jeff, too, of course, because he really could act a little off the wall every now and then. He’d fly into rages over nothing and try to pick a fight with Marisa’s mother. She’d shut herself in the bedroom and then Jeff would turn on Norman and shout at him and sometimes hit him. After their mother died, Jeff started drinking, or drinking more, with more finesse and dedication, as Norman said. Life with Jeff was not easy. Norman and then Marisa left home as soon as they’d finished school. On his own Jeff became reclusive, suspicious of everyone, sometimes refusing to cash his government check or go to the store for food. Marisa didn’t know if she and Norman could have prevented any of this. They’d felt as helpless, perhaps, as Jeff, and as lost.

  That July, she and Norman had taken the ferry from Victoria back to Port Angeles, although they’d bypassed the route that would have taken them to the house they’d inherited and didn’t know what to do with. They’d driven straight down to Seattle. Norman took her to the apartment she was subletting. He helped her carry her bags inside and then he left. She hadn’t seen him since. A week later, she’d started an assignment in the human resources department at a hospital, where the department head turned out to be a man called Ben, who, after three months in which both of them pretended they weren’t attracted to each other, they weren’t falling in love, he ended up saying he was sorry, but he just couldn’t let her go.

  Parents and children were drifting into the playground area, spreading blankets out on the grass to sit on. The women’s bright summer outfits reminded Marisa of how, when she was small, she’d liked to set her dolls out on the grass on a fine day. She didn’t mean to disparage these women by comparing them to dolls. The truth was, they intrigued and intimidated her. Almost, she could envy them. They got to stay in the fairy-tale cottages with their myriad children. Their rings sparkled in the sun, their hair shone. Marisa probably didn’t look all that different, but something set her apart. She knew that for a fact.

  She closed her eyes and heard, from the direction of the sandbox, a piercing shriek. She got up and stumbled over to Logan, the letter and photograph still clutched in her hand. A little girl screamed that Logan had thrown sand at her. Tears rolled down her red, crumpled face. The little girl’s mother hurried over to the sandbox.

  “Let me see, Emily,” the little girl’s mother said. “Are you hurt?”

  Hurt? Marisa thought. Hurt, from a little sand?

  “Did it get in your eyes?” the woman said. She demanded of Logan: “Did you throw sand at Emily?” Logan squinted up at her. Emily looked fine, apart from a telltale glint of sand in the flawless parting of her yellow hair. Marisa saw Logan’s dilemma. There was evidence; there was probably a motive. Still, she thought he’d be wiser not to admit guilt — not here, anyway. She’d talk to him later. Isolde had told her Logan had lots of friends at preschool and, if he wanted, could go on a play date every single day. Remembering Isolde’s fondness for Logan made Marisa smile. Emily’s mother gave her a suspicious look and wiped Emily’s eyes with a tissue. Emily pushed her away.

  “Now, don’t be like that,” Emily’s mother said.

  She smiled at Marisa. She said her name was Grace. Her skin was pale, her eyes a light glassy blue. She invited Marisa to join her Tai Chi class, at ten in the morning, in the annex behind the swimming pool.

  “After class, we go to the dining room for tea. Please come. We’d love to get to know you.”

  Marisa said, well, she had Logan.

  “Oh, there’s a drop-in play group. Didn’t anyone tell you?” she said.

  “No, I missed that,” said Marisa. She looked at Logan. He stuck his thumb in his mouth. “Don’t do that, Logan,” she said. Did everyone guess she was a fraud, neither wife nor mother? “It’s okay,” she said to Logan. “I used to suck my thumb, too.” He was pale, the skin under his eyes bruised-looking. He broke her heart, this kid.

  “Five more minutes,” she said, “and then we’ll go find Daddy.”

  She went back to the bench and looked again at Norman’s letter and the photograph of Teresa and Pawel. Were they real, she wondered? Did they exist? Norman was quite capable of inventing a fiancée and an economic venture, or anything else that suited him.

  The dining room had a low ceiling of knotty pine, darkened with age, and a row of small windows smudged and pitted from the sea air, so that even in this bright, clear weather the sky outside appeared overcast and dismal. Emily, the little girl from the sandbox, was in front of Marisa and Ben and Logan in the line-up. Emily was wearing overalls and had pink ribbons in her pigtails. She turned around and pulled a face at Logan and he pushed her. Emily’s father glared at Logan. He put his arm around Emily and leaned over, as if shielding her from harm. According to his nametag, he was Mike.

  “Emily,” he said, “you stay here with Daddy.”

  “Logan,” Marisa said, “you stay with me.” She spooned some green beans onto his plate. She talked him into having a little salad. A little mashed potato? she suggested. He shook his head. “That’s enough, lady,” he kept saying. “No problem, Bub,” she said.

  Marisa heard Emily saying that mashed potatoes made her throw up. She only liked spaghetti.

  “There isn’t any spaghetti,” Mike said. “There are just these nice potatoes. See, you put a teeny bit of butter on them, like this.”

  Someone touched Marisa’s arm. It was Grace. She stepped into line with her tray. She speared a slice of ham and said, “Marisa, I didn’t see you in my Tai Chi class.”

  “I know,” Marisa said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t,” Grace said. “Don’t say sorry. Come sit with us for dinner. We’ll have a chance to talk.”

  Marisa smiled and nodded. She poured gravy on her mashed potatoes, because what the heck, carbohydrates might calm her nerves. But, hey, how could you not love these things? The fatigue, the frayed nerves, the ennui followed by a sudden combative urge. Not to mention the paper banner on the wall that proclaimed: Healing the Family Week!! How could you not love it?

  Marisa and Ben took their trays out onto the deck and sat at a table shaded by a green umbrella that swivelled every now and then in the on-shore breeze. They swatted wasps away from their food and tried to keep the paper napkins from blowing away.

  Marisa waved at Grace and shrugged, as if to say, sorry, we just couldn’t find a table near you; everyone had come outside to eat, due to the stifling heat in the dining room. Next to Marisa and Ben sat Sharon, the program director, in vivid turquoise shorts and top, crimson polish on her toenails. The man sitting with her was someone Marisa often saw striding across the lawns with books and papers under his arm, head down, dark glasses concealing his eyes. His name was Garth, Ben had told Marisa, and he was a popular motivational speaker. Ben had seen him once or twice on public television. Garth was also a director at Serenity Cove, or, rumour had it, the owner. He wore khaki shorts and a black T-shirt that revealed his muscular chest and shoulders. He was tall and had a Celtic cross tattooed on his forearm. Later,
when the meal was more or less over, people drew their chairs closer to Garth. He waited for quiet and then opened a book, held it at a solemn distance, and read: “‘From my own voice resonant — singing the phallus. Singing the song of procreation …’” He paused, then went on, in a strong, authoritative, agreeable voice: “‘Singing the need of superb children, and therein superb grown people.’”

  The words of the poem, which seemed to emanate not from Garth but from a benevolent and disembodied source, washed over Marisa as if they came from the depths of the sea. The spell cast by the words was shattered, however, when Mike said, “That’s so cool.” Grace said, “I know. That’s Whitman, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Garth. “It’s Whitman. ‘Singing the need of superb children, and therein superb grown people.’ That’s us, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes,” said the others. “Oh, yes, that’s us, definitely.”

  Marisa leaned closer to Ben and said, “I love a little poetry after dinner.” Ben smiled thinly. A wasp zeroed in on Logan’s dish of ice cream and Logan, startled, threw his spoon into the air and it landed on the deck, which made him cry. Marisa picked it up and said she’d get him a clean spoon, but in the dining room the cutlery tray was empty. She went to the kitchen door and asked if she could rinse the spoon off at the sink. Without a word a young man removed the spoon from her hand. The staff at Serenity Cove worked with a negative energy she found irresistible. They crashed dishes around in the sink and dropped knives on the floor and kicked them out of the way and left the fridge door open. They were, she understood, recruited from the island’s year-round population, and in all probability resented being underpaid and overworked. She’d seen the coldly disdainful looks they gave the guests, the same kind of look she caught when the spoon, washed and dried, was returned to her.