. . .
Walking the neighborhood’s what I did when I was angry, when I was tired but couldn’t sleep, when I was bored. But mostly when I was angry.
And so I walked. In rain, I walked. In rain and tornadoes. In ice storms. Around me, the houses of River Run Heights huddled for warmth, rooftops licked by moonlight. Icicles hung from rain gutters and made mouths of windowsills. Driveways glowed gray beneath streetlights.
Across the street from the neighborhood stood the school. Tall and boxy, it rose into the stratosphere. Who’d ever heard of a four-story elementary school? But Atlanta land was at a premium. Desperate architects were reaching new heights of creativity and whimsy.
That week, we were in the grip of an ice storm, the city’s first in two decades, and so the windows of River Run Elementary hovered in suspended animation, frosted, opaque. Standing on my front lawn, I watched the school awhile, my breath coming out in clouds, then I turned and made my way, cautiously, down the driveway to the sidewalk and into the neighborhood.
We belonged to the neighborhood and we did not. The land behind us had been bought up once we moved in. The developer offered good money for our lot, twice what the house was worth, but Joy and I were newly married and very much in love. Which isn’t to say that we finished each other’s sentences. It is to say that we didn’t need words, as though whole conversations were exchanged—whole worlds erected and razed—with a smile, a wink, a nod. The implications, of our first home wrecking-balled into oblivion, we found unsavory and metaphorically problematic. That was then. Now, I’d have traded the house for the cash were it not for the school, a good one, the kind of school Joy wanted for our son.
So, we’d stayed and were accepted, reluctantly, into the development. Our neighbors didn’t hate us, though most kept their distance. We were enemies of symmetry. We’d thrown off the development’s feng shui, imperiling property values. In the end, we scored free lawn service, plus access to tennis and two pools. In exchange, a concrete marker the size of a compact car was lowered by crane onto our lawn. In imitation marble, it read: RIVER RUN HEIGHTS. And, below this: A KEN BUTLER PROPERTY.
I circled back, down side streets and past houses with turrets, until I came to a small, white house leaning into the wind. The house was not like the others. It was old and without brick, and it was ours. With its mossy shingles and peeling paint, our house failed to advertise River Run Heights’ grandeur, just as the neighborhood failed to live up to its namesake: Amid the property lines and cul-de-sacs of the developer’s wet dream, there was not now—nor had there ever been—a river. Instead, there was a dry creek bed that, come spring, trickled runoff approximating, in both color and odor, the pleasures of raw sewage.
Inside, my family waited for me.
All I had to do was open the door. Then we’d bundle our boy in his warmest coat. I’d sling his train bag over my shoulder, we’d each take a hand, and, with Luke between us, Joy and I would cross the street. We’d take small steps.
. . .
The elementary school was well-lit and clinically clean. We followed our son up three flights of stairs, Luke bounding the whole way, Joy and I pausing at each landing to catch our breath. The stairwell smelled like paint and character education. Each wall was plastered with artwork, the deformed dogs and amputated cats of childhood rendered in finger paints. Everywhere were smiling suns and happy rabbits. On a wall left over from November, Native Americans and Pilgrims enjoyed a smallpox-free feast.
Miss Morrell met us at the door. She was a stern-looking woman, tall, in her thirties, with dark eyes and dark hair that hung to her shoulders. Her bangs had been cut to fall in a sharp line across her forehead. The line seemed to balance on her eyebrows. She led us to her desk. A pair of chairs faced the desk, and we filled them. Joy emptied Luke’s train set onto the floor. He sat and began fitting track together.
“Well,” Miss Morrell said, “you must be very proud.”
Joy and I looked at each other. Then Joy nodded, though neither of us knew why she was nodding.
“You got my memo, yes? The yellow sheet in Luke’s Friday folder?” Miss Morrell drew in an exaggerated breath. “Okay,” she said. “The reason you’re here is that we would like to enroll Luke in River Run Elementary’s Gifted and Talented Program. It’s not curriculum replacement, but it is enrichment, enrichment that we believe Luke needs.”
There was a long pause before Joy asked, “So, he’s not in trouble?”
Miss Morrell returned our look of confusion with one of pity. I recognized the expression. It was the one Joy gave the Kroger bag boy, Down Syndrome Doug, whenever he bagged meat with bleach or lowered a melon onto our bread.
“You may have noticed that Luke isn’t like other boys his age,” Miss Morrell said.
Joy nodded, and I knew that, later that night, I would get the I-told-you-so talk of the century. From infancy, Joy had speculated that Luke was unique. I figured he was but hadn’t wanted to give Joy the satisfaction of knowing he’d gotten more of her genes than my own. Now, she had the confirmation she needed.
“The first graders take IQ tests,” Miss Morrell continued. “Luke’s score is several standard deviations above the mean. He fell into the hundredth percentile.”
“That’s wonderful,” Joy said.
“It’s beyond wonderful,” Miss Morrell said. “I’m not saying he’s bright. I’m saying that your son is effectively smarter than ninety-nine percent of his first-grade peers. Nationwide.” She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms, as though to let that sink in.
“Well, so is everyone in this room,” I said. I reached down and ran a hand through Luke’s hair. He was intent on his trains. He didn’t look up.
Miss Morrell leaned forward. She uncrossed her arms, grabbed the lip of the desk, and squeezed her knuckles pink.
“Mr. Davis,” she said.
“Call me Sam,” I said.
“Sam,” she said, “I don’t doubt you’re smarter than a first grader. But I will tell you that if Luke’s development is allowed to proceed uninterrupted, if his intellect is properly nourished, then his mind will surpass everyone’s in this room. And I don’t mean by a little.” She let go of the desk. She leaned back, looked at us like we were a couple of assholes.
I knew what she was thinking. Here was the mother who sold makeup and the father who got by in telemarketing. Like our house, we didn’t look like much. And here she was thinking of the apple, how it sometimes falls far from the tree. Except that, like I said, we weren’t idiots, Joy especially, just underachievers, people who’d settled into the steady income of easy, after-college jobs, then, getting older, let our chances at better work pass us by. I won’t defend our choices, but I won’t apologize either.
On the floor, Luke had assembled his wooden set into a circle. One train waited on the tracks while he added an engine and caboose to another. The assembly was taking longer than usual, maybe because he’d been listening, maybe because he was wallowing in his puffy winter coat. Sitting there, fitting together toy trains, he didn’t look all that special.
“You have to understand,” Miss Morrell said. “Most parents would kill for a kid like yours. Parents beg me to place their children in the gifted program. I’ve turned away bribes.”
Joy and I knew these parents. At fund-raisers and picnics, on skate nights, conversation invariably turned to the kids: which children were walking by one, potty-trained by two, reading by four. When Luke was reading at three, I wanted to be thrilled the way Joy was, but what I wanted, really, was for my boy to be normal, to be like me.
“I’ve always known Luke was special,” Joy said.
Miss Morrell nodded. She’d found her ally. Already I could see her joining Joy in the fight, and I hated this woman for it. I hated the way she looked at me. I hated her hair, those bangs like a black gash opening up her pale forehead. But mostly I hated how she talked like Luke wasn’t in the room.
I turned to the window. From the fourth f
loor, the view of midtown was striking: River Run Heights’s cluster of homes and the tall buildings beyond, the city blued by night. All the world was ice. I imagined Miss Morrell pushed out the window and flailing the way villains do when they fall from high buildings in bad movies.
“We owe it to Luke to see that his potential is reached,” Miss Morrell said. She spoke slowly, succinctly, eyes and bangs blazing. “We’ll do everything we can for him at school, but you two . . .” She paused, watched me, resumed. “You need to create an environment in the home that fosters learning.”
“What does that mean?” I said. I knew, but I was tired of playing along.
“It means,” Miss Morrell said, “that you do whatever it takes.”
On the floor, Luke brought two trains together in a head-on collision. He pulled an engineer from the cab of one and pantomimed a spine-crushing dive to the tracks below.
“I’m on fire!” he yelled. “Help! The pain! The pain!”
The other engineer joined him, screaming, “Stop, drop, and roll! For the love of God, man, stop, drop, and roll!”
The plastic men were spun up and down the tracks. They muttered in fiery agony.
“Look, Joy,” I said. “Our boy’s a genius.”
. . .
I made my money on the phone. At work, I was given products to sell and the telephone numbers of those to whom I should try to sell them. A bad job for someone with my disposition. People swore at me. Most hung up within seconds. The danger of such work is that you get used to this. You start thinking everyone on earth’s awful when only most everyone is.
Joy worked part-time at Lenox, Atlanta’s fanciest mall. Her job was selling cosmetics to average-looking women who left her counter looking like supermodels. “This lip liner,” she would say, “will change your life.” She talked and women listened. Her targets were the sad, the disenchanted, those desperate to believe in the restorative power of an eyebrow pencil. These women surrendered startling sums of money, unaware that, at home, they’d never be able to duplicate what Joy had done.
“They don’t know it’s not the makeup,” Joy said. “It’s me, these hands.”
For years, she’d tried to persuade me to sit for her.
“Men’s makeup,” she said the last time. “It’s never really taken off, but you’d be amazed. You can’t even tell. No one would know you’re wearing it.” With men, she explained, it wasn’t about accenting. It was about concealing. “Just imagine,” she said. “Blemishes. Broken capillaries. The creases at the corners of your eyes. All of it: gone.”
“Never going to happen,” I said. “No guy wants that.”
“I could make you look twenty again.” She studied my face, sighed. “Twenty-five.”
In the end, the work I did and the work Joy did wasn’t so different. We caught customers unaware, at the dinner table or walking through the mall, then we pressed our merchandise upon them. Difference was, Joy was good at what she did. That, and her clients loved her.
She’d finish, turn the mirror, and they’d sigh. And she’d buy into it, sure she was destined for something better than the mall and the life she had. Some nights, she’d come home talking about how if she’d only gone to grad school, if she’d only started showing her art young, as though she’d picked up a paintbrush in ten years. In the garage, her canvases leaned in a dusty stack.
“Go back to school, then,” I’d say, knowing she wouldn’t.
Joy was talented and she was smart, but she was also afraid the way we’re all afraid. What happened if she put herself out there, studied, painted, cast a line and nobody bit? And so she’d settled. She’d settled on me.
. . .
The next night, Joy got home late laden with yellow bags. Each bag sported a blue label that read BABY GALILEO. Joy dropped the bags and joined me at the kitchen table.
“I stopped at the education supply store,” she said. “It’s where teachers shop. Miss Morrell recommended it.”
“Okay,” I said. I stared at the bags. There were six of them, each overflowing. “But what’s all this?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about Luke’s learning environment and how we can foster it.” She pulled items from the bags. Picture books, workbooks, thick tomes on parenting: Your Special Child and Pick My Brain. I picked up Pick My Brain. On the cover, a well-adjusted-looking boy, hair stiff with hairspray, overalls starched, sat in a chair and puzzled over a Rubik’s Cube. He wore sensible shoes and an expression that said: This is all well and good, but my real passion is long division.
I flipped to the author’s bio.
“MD and PhD,” Joy said quickly.
“Then we’re in good hands,” I said.
The corner was torn from the dust jacket, the place where, in small black print, the price would have appeared. I set the book on the table. I reached into a bag and pulled out a shrink-wrapped bundle of CDs.
“Music,” Joy said. “Classical. For the synapses.”
“Synapses?”
“They’re stems, like these little hairy carrots in the brain. If they don’t connect, Luke won’t be able to learn a foreign language. The lady at the store explained it.” In case I still had doubts, she added, “It’s scientific.”
“That may be,” I said, “but we have libraries. We have the Internet.”
I moved to the floor. Spilling the contents from the remaining bags, I was surrounded by shiny, pricey merchandise: Maps (geographic and constellation) slipped from their long plastic cylinders. DVD cases advertised happy children. A small, heavy box marketed itself as the first safe, child-friendly chemistry set. NO ACID, NO GLASS, the box bragged in splashy red letters.
“Christ, Joy,” I said.
“I knew you’d do this.” Already Joy was standing. “I knew you’d take one look and make me the bad guy. Well, excuse me. Excuse me for caring.”
“That’s not fair,” I said.
Joy ripped into a green box. “I want what’s best for our son.”
“This is our entire holiday budget.” I lifted a bag and shook it. “Right here. You think, Christmas morning, Luke wants to unwrap Mozart?”
Joy dropped the box. It hit the table, and beads spilled out, hundreds of them. They dropped to the floor and scattered like insects, small and scared and black.
Joy’s thumb traced the hem of her shirtsleeve. “He might like Mozart,” she said.
“Oh, bullshit.”
“You’ve never appreciated how smart he is.”
“That’s not true. I just want the kid to have fun, to get a few toys at Christmas.”
“We can still get him toys,” Joy said, but, when she nudged a Baby Galileo bag with her toe, I saw she knew that we couldn’t. She looked up and admired the ceiling, a practiced move for keeping tears from spilling over.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We can return these and use the money to buy normal toys.”
“That’s what you’d like?”
“That’s what I’d like.”
“For Luke to be normal?” she said.
“Luke is six,” I said. “I don’t care how smart they are, when it comes to Christmas, kids who are six want baseballs, they want bicycles, not”—I pulled a box from a bag, held it up—“not ‘Kiddie Accountant: The fast-paced coin-counting game that’s fun for the whole family!’”
“We can’t deny Luke the mental stimulation he craves.”
“Craves?” I said. “Where’s craves? I see a kid who enjoys a steady diet of Play-Doh and crayon wax, but I don’t see craves.”
“I won’t let you hold him back.” Joy took a deep breath, exhaled, sat. She put a hand on my knee, and a shiver ran down my spine. It was the most intimate moment we’d shared in weeks.
“Haven’t you noticed that Luke has no friends? None. He’s not like other kids. He needs to be challenged.”
“Great,” I said, “then we’ll get him friends, gifted friends, and they can all play abacus together.”
“I’m serious.”
“I’m done,” Joy said.
She stood and left the room. I heard her move through the bedroom we hadn’t shared in months to the bathroom that, out of convenience, we shared still, heard her shower, flush the toilet, brush her teeth.
I rose and made the rounds, extinguishing lights and locking doors. Then I returned to the kitchen. On my hands and knees, though, picking up beads, I couldn’t stop thinking about Luke’s synapses.
For the first time, I was worried about the welfare of my son’s hairy carrots.
. . .
I was determined to find children like Luke, and, in the end, the neighbors did the work for me. Not forty-eight hours had passed before the phone rang.
It was Devon Tweed, the Englishman who lived four doors down. “The house with the purple wreath hanging from the portico.”
“Yes,” I said. I did not say that I had no idea what a portico was.
As it turned out, there was already a group dedicated to the gifted youth of River Run Heights. The children numbered five and gathered on Friday evenings. While the kids played, the adults enjoyed card games and wine.
“We meet fortnightly,” Devon said.
I rolled my eyes, but, for Luke’s sake, I would make a good impression. Still, something troubled me.
“How did you hear?” I asked. “About Luke.”
Devon let loose a throaty laugh.
“This Friday,” he said. “It’s the last gathering before the holidays. Do come.”
I waited for him to say “Ta-ta” or “Cheerio.” Instead, I got only the click of a cradled receiver. It was a sound I was used to.
Joy was beside herself. “What do we wear?” she said.
“Clothes, I imagine. Unless they’re beyond all that. Clothes,” I said, trying on my best Devon Tweed, “clothes are the coverings of peasants and vagabonds.”
Joy shook her head. “Don’t mess this up for Luke.”
“Skulduggery,” I said.
“I’m not kidding,” she said. “I’ll leave you.”
The Heaven of Animals: Stories Page 9