Do Bananas Chew Gum?

by Jamie Gilson

  “That’s what my dad said.” I shrugged and stared down at the green floor. Green tile. It was very dull. “I don’t know what else you need to know,” I said, like I couldn’t care less. I mean, she was nice and I really didn’t want her to find out more about me.

  “I expect you know more about yourself than anybody else,” she said. “We can start there.” She sat down in a chair across from me. “What do you do best, Sam?”

  “Me?” I looked up. What a stupid question, I thought. Do best? “I don’t know. Make people laugh at me, I guess. I’m good at that.”

  “You mean jokes? Like ‘Why did the robber take a shower at the bank?’”

  “Because he wanted to make a clean getaway,” I flipped back. “No, mostly not jokes. Mostly at me.” I shrugged again, like, of course, I didn’t care.

  “Come on, Sam. Mrs. Bird tells me you have a special ability in math. She says you’re a bright boy.”

  “I light up the night.”

  “Ah, you’re a sit-down comic. Then they do laugh because you want them to, sometimes. How about the math?”

  “I know a few tricks with numbers, that’s all. I’m mostly dumb.”

  She laughed. Laughed. I could have punched her. She wasn’t so nice after all. “No, it can’t be that easy,” she went on, still looking much too cheerful. “You’re not allowed in my door unless you’re smart. Children with a low ability level don’t come to me. There’s another teacher who works with them.”

  She’d change her mind soon enough. I wasn’t going to argue with her. I’d just let her start the tests. That’d show her. I stared out the window while she got some books and paper out, wondering just how smart people were different from me. I tried to imagine what was in their heads that wasn’t in mine.

  “I’m going to ask you some crazy questions, Sam,” she said.

  I looked up at her, wondering what she could ask that was crazy, and why.

  “First,” she said, “do bananas chew gum?”

  I laughed out loud. “Are you kidding?”

  “Not at all,” she said. “Do clocks swim?”

  “No, but time flies.” Mom was always big on riddles. Were these riddles that I wasn’t smart enough to figure out?

  “Do babies cry?”

  That wasn’t a trick. “Sometimes.”

  But then they started getting harder. After a while it was stuff like “Do interpreters translate?” Pretty soon the only word that made sense was “Do.” I had to keep saying, “I don’t know,” and feeling like an idiot. But just when they were getting so hard I bet she didn’t even know the answers, we started on something completely different.

  Lots of pictures. You had to match them. Like this one I remember that had a baseball on one side of the page and on the other side pictures of a violin bow, a rake, and a baseball bat. Really simp stuff. But they got harder, too.

  Pretty much every new part started out easy and got hard like that. There were lots of different kinds of things, like when Ms. Huggins laid these tiles down on a table and all the tiles had weird lines on them and squiggles and she’d say, “Which shape is different from the rest?” or she’d put up another and say, “Find this shape. It’s hidden in that picture.” She was timing all this stuff with a stopwatch, and it was hard.

  Then I was supposed to copy circles and arrows and boxes and stars and, boy, did I stink at that. So when we finally got to some math, it was like a vacation, or at least recess. It was real 2 plus 2 stuff to begin with. Then it got to be 5 1/3 times 2 1/5 equals, and then long division with decimals. She only gave me ten minutes to get it all done, but before the time was nearly up I got to these questions I didn’t even know what they meant.

  “That’s OK,” she said, “you won’t learn how to do those problems until seventh grade. I knew we’d get to something you do really well. You were terrific at the math. Fast, accurate, all those good things. I doubt there’s anyone in your class who could do so well.”

  “Alicia,” I told her.

  “Don’t know her.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “She pretty good at math?”

  “She’s good at everything. A brain.” My stomach felt like lunchtime was getting close. I didn’t want to start any more tests. I decided to stall. “Why is it easy for me to do math and not reading?” I asked her, even though I knew the answer. (Dum-dum-dum.)

  She shook her head. “I’m not sure. Nobody’s sure. Did you know some people can hardly do math at all? Some people just blink their eyes and shake their heads when you say that 4 plus 15 is 19. It’s as if they’ve got a short circuit in their heads and they can’t put numbers through their brain computer. If they’re smart otherwise, that’s a learning disability, too.”

  “Can they read?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes not. Learning disabilities come in all varieties.”

  “Like ice cream.”

  “More even than that.” She smiled, like she knew I was stalling. “Ready for another test?”

  “No,” I said. “Is it hard?”

  “I think so. Yes. This one’s spelling.”

  “Yuck. Isn’t it time for lunch?”

  She checked her watch. “Eleven-ten. Not quite. Just this last one, OK? Then we’ll break for lunch.”

  But geez, it was awful. After “dog” and “cat” and “hat” to make me feel like it wasn’t going to be all that bad, it was word after word after word I couldn’t spell and I knew I was guessing wrong. At least she didn’t ask me to spell “cute.”

  “Try sounding it out,” she’d say. “Try it out loud. Keep plugging.” But how do you keep plugging on “similar” and “license” and “miracle” when you hardly know how to begin? I didn’t care if I ever knew how to spell them. I mean, who cares, anyway? Every word more I sank lower and lower in the chair. My stomach growled like a mad dog.

  After I guess she figured she’d tortured me enough, Ms. Huggins beamed out this huge smile even though I knew there wasn’t anything to grin about. “Cheer up,” she said. “It’s chow time.”

  I didn’t smile back.

  “You’re doing fine. I’m finding out a lot about how you can learn even better. And the math was fabulous.”

  “That’s me, fabulous Sam.” What a fake she is, I decided. Always smiling and saying “terrific” when what she means is dumb. I get mad at Mom but at least she knows dumb when she sees it and doesn’t lie about it.

  “Do I have to come back?”

  “Around one-thirty,” she said, “we’ll start afresh. Why don’t you go early to the cafeteria and take a long lunch hour. I’ll give you a note. I think I hear a hungry monster in your stomach.”

  It wasn’t funny, so I didn’t pretend it was. I just stared at her.

  While she wrote out the pink permission slip I got up and hung around the door.

  “See you at one-thirty,” she said, holding out the paper. “Right after the party.”

  I started to bolt out the door. “Party?”

  “Didn’t Mrs. Bird say there’d be a party after lunch?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, remembering. “There’ll be a bunch of bananas hanging around up there chewing gum and eating cupcakes.” And I slammed the door on her silly smile.

  11

  Why Not Sam Mott?

  THE LUNCH HOUR went on forever. We had pizza casserole. Not many kids like it so an awful lot got smashed up in the trash compacter. I threw away about half of mine, even though I’ll eat almost anything. If Wally lost his retainer in stuff like that, I’d refuse to look for it. Or maybe I wouldn’t. If he was still my friend.

  After lunch I sat by myself, watched the first graders play, and then poked around in the grass with a stick, pretending to dig up treasures. All I found was a rusty nail and a few ants, who crawled all over a cookie crumb I fed them.

  When the bell rang there wasn’t anything to do but go back inside with the big stream of kids, like I was a fish on a hook. And there wasn’t anything inside I wan
ted to do.

  Mrs. Bird’s room was all laughs and giggles. It sounded so happy when I slammed my locker door I wondered if maybe it wouldn’t be a great party after all. I was the last kid in, but Mrs. Bird hadn’t gotten back from her lunch yet.

  “Cutie,” a girl yelled. “Did you see your cupcake yet?” I looked around the room, and on every desk was a cupcake, a napkin, and a paper cup with something in it. But kids were gathered around my desk like the ants on the crumb.

  “Mine has AB on it for the birthday girl. What does it say on yours, Cutes?” a boy asked with a smirk.

  “How do you spell it?” somebody giggled. They were really starting to laugh at me.

  And I got mad. I got so mad I could have zapped them. I know getting mad makes it worse, but I could feel my face get red and I felt like I could level them all. I straight-armed the guy nearest me. Alicia just stood there by her desk and looked confused. It was like she knew she kept botching me up and didn’t understand how.

  The stupid cupcake sat there. SAM was on it with a red heart iced around the letters. I hadn’t even noticed that before.

  “What does it say?” somebody in the back asked. “Does it really say ‘cute’?”

  I picked up the cupcake and held it up high for them to see. I shouted so everyone could hear, “It says Sam. That’s my name. I don’t want to be called anything else. And don’t you forget it.” They looked at me with their mouths open and I stared them down, feeling tall like a statue.

  I would have kept talking, too, but Mrs. Bird came back. She stood at the door of the silent room, trying to decide what was going on. Her eyes fixed on me.

  “Sammy,” she called out. I didn’t move. I just got madder. “Sammy,” she went on, “were you screaming? I could hear you down the hall.”

  “I was saying,” I told her in less than a shout, “that my name is Sam. And I don’t want to be called Sammy or New Kid or Metal Mouth or Dumbhead or—especially—Cutes. I don’t want to be called anything but Sam Mott.”

  “That sounds reasonable to me,” she said mildly. “Everybody agree to that?”

  There was a kind of general mumbling and I sat down in my seat, feeling like a balloon somebody had let the air out of—like I had been all filled up with being mad and now it was gone I just felt bad. Mrs. Bird just didn’t understand. I ate the top off the cupcake. The room was still very quiet.

  “That was really something,” Wally whispered.

  I nodded, my mouth full of sweet stuff. Gulping it down, I said, “I was mad.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I could tell.”

  We all had to sing “Happy Birthday” to Alicia. And I sang it like almost everybody else did, “Happy birthday to you, you belong in a zoo. You look like a monkey, and you smell like one, too.” I mean, that’s the way we always sang it. There’d been about four birthdays since I’d been in this school and mostly everybody sang it that way. It wasn’t being mean to Alicia, like name calling. After my big speech it worried me some. But I don’t think it was. She didn’t look mad.

  After we finished eating the cupcakes and drinking lemonade, the Bird gave all the captains math problems to pass back. Then she stopped at my desk and leaned over. “Are you all right?” she asked and I nodded. “You may be excused, Sam,” she said. “I would have called you Sam sooner if I’d known.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t just you,” I told her, and hurried out of the room while almost everybody else was groaning over the math.

  I knocked on the door of room 102.

  “Come in. Come in,” Ms. Huggins called like before. When I opened it, she said, “You’re back!” like she was surprised but glad. “How’s the monster in your stomach?”

  “Just fed him a cupcake and he’s happy,” I told her. I didn’t know why I wasn’t mad at her anymore.

  We started out with easy stuff. Numbers. “Repeat after me,” she said, “17-1-4-42.” Stuff like that. And it wasn’t hard at all. A piece of cake. A piece of cupcake.

  “Do you see?” she asked me when the test was over. “Do you see how much easier it is for you to learn from what you hear than from what you read? You remembered those so well.”

  The test had seemed easy. I did see, sort of.

  “You don’t have to read things to learn them,” she went on. “Most people learn a lot by listening to other people, to movies, to television. You can even learn to read better by listening to yourself.”

  That sounded crazy. “How?”

  “Just say there’s a word you want to read …” she started.

  “There is,” I told her. “There is!” I’d stuck the archeology book Brenda had left for me in the orange crate with my good junk. I’d looked through it and even read a little bit of it. But I still couldn’t figure out the word on the cover. I was sure it must be “archeology.”

  “Archeology,” I said, almost begging. “That’s the word I want to read. Can you teach me that one?”

  “Good grief, you start at the top, don’t you?” She wrote the word down for me on a piece of white paper, kind of splitting it up into parts—ARC-HE-OL-O-GY. “It isn’t the easiest word to sound out, but …”

  Then she took another piece of paper and tore a little square hole out of the middle. She put the hole on the word so I could just see the first three letters and she made me sound it out. Twice. And I did it. She moved the paper and I sounded out all the parts.

  Then she had me do that about ten times before she let me look at the word whole. And I could sound it out. Arc-he-ol-o-gy. Archeology. I kept looking at the word and saying it over. Out loud. Archeology. I was so excited I felt dizzy.

  “Can I have the paper with the hole?”

  “My compliments. But it’s not magic. You’ve got to do the work.”

  Then I looked at the paper and wondered how many words in the new book I could do that way by myself. But she kept after me. “Sam, that was terrific! The computer in your head sometimes gets confused by a lot of letters. If you just let it see a few at a time for a while, it’ll help.

  “There are so many things you can do, Sam. Have somebody record the pages you have to read, then listen to the tape as you read the words to yourself. Then try making a tape of your voice reading the words. Can you do that?”

  “No kidding?” I asked her. “A tape recorder? It would be OK? My mom said it would be a crutch.”

  “Nothing’s wrong with a crutch if you need one. If you had a broken leg she’d let you have a crutch. If you’ve got a tape recorder, put it on your desk to take notes for you. I’ll talk to Mrs. Bird about it. Reporters take notes with tape recorders all the time.”

  “I’m earning the money for one right now!” I’d tell Mrs. Glass and she’d let me stay. I was sure she would.

  Then we started another test and I had to guess which of a list of words fit best into paragraphs that were hard to read and I felt awful again.

  “This would be easy for Alicia and Wally,” I told Ms. Huggins. “It’s not fair.”

  “Right,” she said, “it’s not. Wouldn’t be fair if you fell off your bike and broke your elbow either, but you’d have to deal with it, fair or not. You can either give up and just plug your head into a TV set or you can work like crazy. I can help. Your folks can help. A lot of people can help. But in the end it’s got to be you.”

  Then she gave me another test. There was this one word at the top and five words listed under it. I was supposed to find the word that meant nearly the same as the word at the top. Like there’d be “nap” and under it would be “jump,” “roll,” “bad,” and “sleep.” Ms. Huggins said if I couldn’t decide which word fit best to just go on to the next question. After the first four or five I was a disaster.

  “You’ll get there, Sam,” she said when I started sagging down in my chair.

  “Never,” I groaned.

  “Listen,” she told me, still cheerful like I was winning the race, not crawling along on my knees, “Thomas Edison had a learning disability in school
, and so did Hans Christian Andersen, and Vice President Rockefeller, and President Wilson. They didn’t get famous by saying ‘never.’ They worked their way out of it. You can, too, but you have to do it a step at a time. Nobody’s going to wave a wand.”

  When I left room 102 I felt better. Some. “We’ll find out more about you next Monday, Sam Mott,” she said. “After that we’ll work together several times a week.” It was like I’d just waded up to my ankles in cold Lake Michigan water knowing I had to swim across the lake and back again.

  The bell rang to go home. It had been a long afternoon, a long day. But it was Monday and I didn’t have Chuck and Alex to play with. The day was sunny and warm so I just wandered outside, leaving my jacket up in my locker. Just watch it snow tomorrow, I thought. But I didn’t care.

  Alicia was standing at the corner by the crossing guard. And I was glad to see her. I really was.

  “Hey, Alicia,” I called.

  She turned around and walked back slow, like she was afraid of what I was going to do. “You were really mad at me,” she said.

  “No,” I told her. “Not exactly.” What I wanted to do was tell her about the afternoon. That other stuff didn’t matter now. “I just took some tests. There weren’t any ink blots.”

  “You’re not mad at me?” she said.

  “If I was, I’m not anymore.” The crossing guard held up his stop sign to the traffic and we crossed over with the crowd of waiting kids. On the other side she opened up the big cupcake box. It was empty except for one. “Sandy was absent,” she said. She broke it into two pieces and gave me half. “If there weren’t any ink blots, what were there, then?” she asked.

  “Well,” I told her, my mouth full of icing, “the first question was ‘Do bananas chew gum?’”

  She laughed. “Were they trying to find out if you’re crazy?”

  “I don’t think so. It was more like true-false to tell if I could understand what I hear. Another one was ‘Do reptiles slither?’”

  “What did they say, though—about you?”

  “It was Ms. Huggins who gave me the tests,” I told her. “You know, the tall lady who smiles. She said I’m not dumb.”