“Mindy,” I said. “I’m sorry. That was an asshole thing to say. I slept about three hours last night, and my stomach is just a goddamn nightmare. That’s no excuse, but I hope you can accept my apology.”
“I’ll accept your turn-in,” she said, “at tonight’s faculty meeting. Unless you think it would be more appropriate to fire yourself.”
“She can’t fire herself.”
Mindy looked across the table at Lulu. Lulu taught Spanish, a language she’d picked up during a Peace Corps stint down in Peru. She’d come home to the family farm in Pennsylvania, landing here after the only work she could find was checking in guests at the local Econo Lodge.
She was the saving grace of the entire Santangelo experience, in my opinion. Despite her fondness for show tunes.
“And why can’t Madeline fire herself?” asked Mindy. Her jaw clicked with a sharp snap, like a pinball popping up to hit the glass.
“Because she fired herself yesterday,” said Lulu. “You can’t fire yourself if you’ve already fired yourself. It cancels out.”
“Like Double Secret Probation,” said Tim.
Lulu closed her eyes, exhaled through her nose, and rubbed her fists back and forth across her spiky dark hair. Not without gusto.
I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking, No, Tim, that is NOT AT ALL like Double Secret Probation, as you would know if you understood ANYTHING, which you DO NOT, despite the fact that you have watched Animal House thirty-seven times, as you told us all in the faculty group therapy session at which Madeline fired herself last night.
She opened her eyes and grinned at me.
And then we were saved by Dr. Ed’s arrival with the stack of Med Plates.
He walked around the table, handing a disc of thick white dining-hall crockery to each teacher/dorm parent currently on duty.
These were preloaded with semicircles of tiny manila envelopes, a form of stationery I’d last seen stuffed with impotent Mexican dirt-weed on Fourteenth between Second and Third in Manhattan, circa 1983.
I still thought of them as nickel bags, which wasn’t the kind of word-association thing I could’ve shared at that table.
Each envelope was marked with a kid’s last name and first initial, followed by a list of medications contained therein: Haldol or imipramine or lithium or Thorazine.
Lulu, Mindy, Tim, Gerald, and the New Guy were dealt their respective plates by Dr. Ed, New Guy last.
Dr. Ed conferred with him, pointing from each envelope to its intended dosee.
The New Guy took it in with great seriousness. Then he caught me watching and winked. He was a babe—blond hair in loose curls that made me reminisce fondly about those portions of my youth misspent necking with surfers.
The plate bearers rose to make their appointed rounds. Each kid had to dump the meds into his or her mouth, hand the empty envelope back, take a sip of beverage, swallow, and then tilt his or her head back, open his or her mouth, and shift his or her tongue up, left, and right, so the doser could check that all pills had been ingested properly.
No hide-and-seek allowed. No save ’em, collect ’em, trade ’em with your friends.
I never got a Med Plate at meals because I was the only teacher who lived off campus. I was grateful to escape each night, but lately it had been hard to readjust to normal, like getting the bends because I’d come back to the surface too fast and didn’t have a decompression chamber to get the painful “therapeutic” bubbles out of my bloodstream.
I leaned back in my chair to catch the sun coming down through a skylight, right when this big cloud cut across it.
Perfect. It was just going to keep on being that kind of day.
New Guy was the first member of the Clean Plate Club. He walked back to the table and sat down next to me, in Mindy’s seat.
“Um,” I said, “I think that’s Mindy’s seat.”
“Are they assigned?” he asked. “It didn’t seem as though the two of you were getting along, exactly.”
“Um,” I said, “no.”
“No they’re not assigned, or no, you two aren’t getting along?”
“Both.”
“I don’t want to freak out Mindy,” he said, “you’re just the only one I haven’t introduced myself to yet.”
Mindy would be freaked out anyway. She always was.
“I’m Madeline,” I said.
“I’m Pete,” he replied.
He had one of those really slow smiles, the kind that just kill you.
At that exact moment, the cloud moved on past the sun, and a big fat warm beam of light came down and hit all his blond curls.
I looked across the room and saw Wiesner tapping a butter knife against the edge of his glass, checking the two of us out.
3
Sookie’s office was a slanted little room under the eaves of the Mansion.
Such a tacky word, “Mansion,” though the building itself was a sadly perfect monument to that forgotten magnate’s fortune, back when it was freshly minted.
His family crest still flanked the front door in twinned cement relief, so you wouldn’t miss the credential even if you happened to be blind in one eye.
Santangelo claimed the place had been a stop on the Underground Railroad, but I found that hard to believe. The building’s interior sagged under its sheer tonnage of embellishment: marble and parquet and stained glass and carved oak, gilt-scroll-encased ceiling murals crammed with ugly petulant cherubs, grand double staircase tortured into a frenzy of varnished pretension.
I pictured the flight of the man’s horrified offspring, shamed by this testament to their gentility’s raw vintage.
The place had since housed third-rate spas and schools, each enterprise patching over another layer of furbelow with asbestos or gypsum board or fire-retardant dropped-ceiling tiles. The roof leaked. The faucets dripped. The ballroom stank of mildew and mouse piss.
I jogged up three flights to Sookie.
Mindy and Tim had claimed the love seat. Last one in got the rotten-egg wobbly chair by the radiator.
“Welcome,” said Sookie. “Tim was just going to start us off.”
Tim raised one hand slowly, placing his palm flat against the center of his chest.
Sookie nodded with approval. “Tim’s feeling like he needs to nurture himself.”
Mindy stroked his hair. We were supposed to touch each other a lot.
“I talked with my dad again?” Tim said, glancing down at his hand. “He’s so . . .”
“Judgmental?” Sookie’s forehead wrinkled with healing concern. Another nod, coaxing.
Tim teared up, nodding back with relief.
Mindy slid a box of Kleenex onto his lap.
At Santangelo, there was always a box of Kleenex.
“He wanted to know if I’d changed the oil in my car. And I couldn’t even . . .” Tim dabbed his eyes with a fluffy blossom of tissue.
Mindy went for his hair again. “It’s okay.”
“Sookie?” he went on. “I wanted him to say something that didn’t have all his disappointment around it. Just once.”
“Let yourself feel that,” Sookie said. “We’re here for you. I’m here. Mindy’s here. Madeline’s here.”
He closed his eyes. “My mom was on the other extension, you know? She didn’t even . . . I mean, he told me to go out and write down what it said on the odometer. That he’d wait for me to come back and read it to him?”
I looked out the window. Not that I didn’t feel for the guy. He was in genuine pain. The room fairly brimmed with it.
“Madeline?” Sookie turned to me.
I kept my eyes on the window.
Just the glass. Not the actual view.
“You’re shutting down again,” Sookie said. “I know it’s hard for you, but can you try to let this penetrate?”
“Sookie, I’m soaking in it.”
“You are so cold,” Mindy said. “You are the coldest thing that ever lived.”
I turned my he
ad slowly until our eyes locked, which got her started blinking again. I stared until she had to look down at the Kleenex instead of me.
Blinky bitch.
“Let’s let Tim have the focus,” I said. “He’s hurting.”
Mindy got pinker. “How can you even say something like that without any emotion at all? Like you’re all . . . like you don’t even have anything inside except, like, words.”
Sookie and Tim’s attention snapped back and forth between us, like this was Wimbledon or something.
“It’s cultural,” I said.
“She’s all, so, like”—Mindy flapped her free hand, trying to get the other two on board— “cold.”
Some people are bi-polar.
I’m just polar.
I sighed. “It’s an illusion.”
“It’s disgusting,” Mindy said, blinking at Sookie and Tim in turn. “Madeline’s, like, this gross disgusting robot.”
And you’re like this repulsive inarticulate piece-of-shit tawdry butthead, so neener neener fucking neener.
Sookie turned toward me, crooning, “Madeline, how does it make you feel when Mindy says that?”
“Um . . .” I looked at the window again.
“Now, be honest,” she said.
“Well, okay.” I dropped my eyes. “I guess Mindy’s saying that I’m ‘a gross disgusting robot’ makes me feel as though she only cares about Tim as a prop on which to, like, lavish utterly insincere gestures of affection, so as to mask her apparently crushing sense of generalized inferiority with a temporary veneer of ersatz empathy and concern?”
Silence.
“And that,” I said, leaning over to squeeze Tim’s knee, “that just makes me feel really, really sad for her, you know? Because Tim deserves to be heard.”
“You are so . . . She is such a . . .” Mindy would have been blowing out flecks of spit if her jaw weren’t still frozen shut.
Sookie turned to Tim. “Would you be all right if I followed up on this with Madeline for a little bit now?”
He mumbled assent.
“So, Madeline,” said Sookie, “how are you?”
“Sookie, I’m terrified.”
Then my eyes got all leaky and my nose started running, but that bitch Mindy didn’t offer me a single Kleenex.
4
Terrified?” Sookie leaned forward and rested her hand on my knee. “Tell us about that. What are you scared of?”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing here. I just want—” My throat closed up.
Maintaining immaculate eye contact, Sookie started to nod, her head rising and falling so slowly that I flashed on those prehistoric-bird-looking oil derricks you see along desert highways, bobbing for sips of crude.
“This isn’t about ‘supposed to,’ Madeline,” she said. “Therapy is time for you. No judgment, no standard you have to meet . . . not in this room. Not with me. Ever.”
Not exactly true. Ever.
But, okay, I smiled at her. “I appreciate that very much, Sookie. I do. Except I’m not talking about feeling terrified in this room, or with you.”
“Mmm-hmmmm,” she prompted.
“I’m talking about, you know, working here.”
“You’re terrified of working here?”
“Not, like, in a personal-safety sense. I mean whether I’m doing a good enough job. With the kids.”
“Tell me what you’re feeling about that,” she said.
“I don’t know if I’m helping them. I might be making it worse. I mean, the meds that get handed out at lunch? Lithium. Haldol. We are not talking about ‘the worried well,’ here.”
“And that makes you feel scared?”
“It matters to me,” I said, “the fact that my students are in crisis. In pain. I take that very seriously. I want to do right by them, to the very best of my ability.”
Again with the nodding.
I wondered if it was something they taught in shrink school. Intro to Nodding 101. Advanced seminars on The Nod Through History: Freud, Jung, Adler, and Nodding and Nuance, a Feminist Perspective.
Sookie gave me the Empathy Smile. Sweetly enigmatic, with a touch of sadness around the edges. “What I’m hearing you say is that you’re concerned about your ability to handle responsibility. Struggling to overcome feelings of inadequacy—”
I waited for the rest. I did not nod.
“And I’m looking at how you’re sitting right now, Madeline,” she continued. “How you’re presenting yourself to us.”
She paused, bringing in Tim and Mindy with a small swoop of her hand.
Tim plucked at the sofa’s upholstery.
Mindy blew her nose.
“Sitting up straight,” Sookie went on. “Ladylike, in a studied way. Earnest. Your back isn’t touching the chair . . . exactly how I hoped I would look when I grew up.”
She tilted her head to one side. Appraisal. “I’m just wondering who that’s for.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Someone trained you to sit that way, Madeline.”
I fought the urge to cross my arms, knowing the gesture would be counted against me. A defensive move. An attempt at distance that Sookie would lap up as confirmation.
She gave me the curt nod. Zeroing in. “Someone made it very clear that you were required to cloak yourself in this sort of polished, impenetrable affect. This rigidity. Your parents?”
That made me cock a sarcastic eyebrow. Couldn’t help it.
Sookie leaned toward me, her face going all gentle again.
“Madeline,” she said, “were you sexually abused as a child?”
Mindy and Tim snapped to attention.
I rolled my eyes. Shook my head.
Sookie was unfazed. “I know it’s a tremendously difficult thing to talk about. If you’d prefer a private session, I can make time for you tomorrow afternoon.”
“Oh, for chrissake,” I said.
She got out of her chair and knelt before me, taking my hand in both of hers. Petting it. “Shhhhh,” she said, “it’s all right, sweetie, we’re here for you. You’re safe now.”
“Sookie,” I said, “I’m sure you have all the very best intentions, but you’re way off base.”
“You’re in denial, Madeline.”
I tried extracting my hand from her grip, but she just latched on tighter.
“Perfectly natural,” she said, “under the circumstances. We often want to block out our most painful memories, repress them so we don’t buckle under the sheer weight of shame and horror.”
“Sookie—”
“What’s important is that you know you weren’t at fault, Madeline, and understand that you didn’t do anything to encourage the abuse.”
Mindy was nodding now, too.
Terrific.
I tried breaking through to Sookie again. “No offense, but on what planet does good posture indicate a history of molestation?”
“In fact,” Sookie went on, “it’s often that sense of having provoked the incidents which renders victims incapable of remembering them. And hostile.”
“Of course Madeline’s angry, Sookie,” Mindy chimed in. “She must be sooooo weirded out now that she knows what’s actually wrong with her.”
“Mindy?” said Tim.
She looked at him. Blinky blinky. “Uh-huh?”
“Shut the hell up.” He gave her a sharp finger poke in the arm for emphasis.
I wanted to hug him, but the warning bell for the day’s last class went off, and we all bolted out of the room, except for Sookie.
“Come back tomorrow at one, Madeline,” she called after me.
My third class was all boys, three of them. Wiesner again, but no repeat of Forchetti, thanks to a last-minute shrink appointment. American History B: Civil War to Vietnam. We were kind of at Yalta, not that anyone was keeping track.
I was trying to get across why Stalin and Churchill and Franklin D. were so happy in the photo on page 192 of We the People, the archaic textbook Santan
gelo had probably scored at some other high school’s tag sale.
We were all pretty dopey after lunch. The room’s air felt thick and stale, bearing grace notes of mothball, sweat sock, and spilled root beer.
I had unfurled one of those giant window-shade world maps from above the blackboard. Probably yanked it down so far that I’d have to get up on a chair and tweak it massively before coaxing the thing to reroll, especially now that I’d whacked a fist under the Crimea so many times, hoping to make something stick in our collective unconscious.
Yalta, for chrissake—stupid pick, but I was in too deep to give up now.
“So these guys agree to send out an invitation to anyone who might want to join the United Nations,” I said, then started reading from the textbook: “‘The Government of the United States of America, on behalf of itself and of the Governments of the United Kingdom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Republic of China and of the Provisional Government of the French Republic invite the Government of blank to send representatives to a conference to be held on 25 April, 1945, or soon thereafter, at San Francisco. . . . ’”
Sam Sitzman raised his hand. “Um, excuse me, Madeline?”
I liked him. He had this curly-headed Saint-Bernard-with-an-old-soul vibe. You knew right away there was a kind and wise and forgiving heart under the shaggy bits and the glasses.
Especially for a seventeen-year-old from Manhattan.
Especially here.
“Would it be okay if I stand up for a while?” he asked. “This is all really interesting and stuff. It’s just sometimes my meds make me tired, and I don’t want you to think I’m bored if I yawn or anything.”
“No problem, Sitzman. Yalta is not exactly a thrill a minute, here.”
He thanked me and got up, shaking out his legs.
Mooney LeChance cleared his throat. “Hey,” he said, “isn’t the UN in New York?”
LeChance was normally sparing with the classroom participation. A decent kid, just not hugely invested. He would have been homecoming king anywhere else.
“Yeah,” I said, “the first meeting was the only one they did in San Francisco.”
“Does any of this really matter?” asked Wiesner. “I mean, Madeline, do you actually wander around thinking about Yalta or why they picked San Francisco or whatever?”
The Crazy School Page 2