Garden Lakes

by Jaime Clarke

  “Five-eighths.”

  “Very good. I was told you guys were smart,” Mr. Baker commented without a hint of irony. He moved on, discoursing about what thicknesses provide what kind of fire protection absent the use of fire-resistant drywall.

  “What color is fire-resistant drywall?” Sprocket asked, checking over his notes. His immersion in detail would be the wellspring of his success as a software entrepreneur.

  Mr. Baker wrinkled his nose. “It’s the same color as regular drywall. The only difference is its fire rating.”

  “And are there variances within the fire-resistant drywall that are similar to the variances of regular drywall?” Sprocket asked.

  The rest of us rolled our eyes, used to Sprocket’s constant over-self-education.

  Mr. Baker rubbed his forehead. “Sure. But we’re not going to be using any fire-resistant board, so I don’t see—”

  “Out of curiosity, then,” Sprocket said.

  “Okay, sure. Fire-resistant drywall is rated in time intervals—forty-five minutes, sixty minutes, and one hundred and twenty minutes—which is how long the board will resist fire,” Mr. Baker answered as he continued to pace the front of the room.

  Sprocket was the only one to enter this information into his job journal.

  We adjourned to the site as the sun pitched over the horizon, vanquishing the weak morning light that had spread across Garden Lakes. Armed with our job journals and pencils, and with the tutorial from Mr. Baker, we were able to focus on the framed house for the first time as we stood in the moonscaped front yard among the empty pallets and discarded cement bags. A portable outhouse stood sentry near the front door. The drywall was stacked like a gypsum butte along the side of the house. Inside, incandescent rectangles burned across the floors, through the slats of the framing. The smell of wood was overpowering.

  With Mr. Baker as a guide, we began the most crucial step: measuring the rooms for drywall. He asked for groups—two groups to make the initial measurements and two groups to recheck the measurements. Our hesitation was born out of our fear that, once formed, these would be the groups we’d be stuck in for the rest of the summer. We stared blankly, some of us standing in shadow, some in sunlight. A couple of us shuffled toward our housemates. Mr. Baker split us into four groups, his mind accounting for Sprocket’s inability to navigate the stairs.

  Tape measures were doled out to each team. Mr. Malagon supervised the upstairs measurements. Downstairs, we could hear Mr. Baker’s instructions to Assburn about which way to measure a wall. Some of us pulled out the store we’d stashed at breakfast, munching fruit and torn pieces of bagel as we measured.

  Measurements in hand, checked and rechecked, we reconvened in the kitchen. Mr. Baker, never guessing he was among those who would plot his kidnapping, freed a set of blueprints from a plastic tube he’d retrieved from his truck and bade us to call out the measurements room by room. We drew together in a circle, our job journals open like hymnals, and sang out the measurements as Mr. Baker called for them.

  Across the development, sophomores who couldn’t boil water were engaged in a crash course in cooking. They learned the distinction between diced and minced, how a tablespoon was not equal to a teaspoon, and that under no circumstances was a teaspoon a pinch. Mr. Hancock distributed photocopies of the same handout he’d been using for over a decade: “One-fourth cup plus one fourth-cup equals ______. One-third plus one-half is ______. There are ______ ounces in a quart. ______ in a gallon.” Sophomores who, on the advice of the previous class, had taken an unusual interest in kitchen work at home in the weeks leading up to Garden Lakes passed with ease. Those who remained baffled by how to double the measurements for any given recipe were relegated to the cutting boards and reminded that the kitchen’s first-aid supplies were limited.

  In addition to meals, the sophs made the daily soups from scratch, soups they’d never heard of, like spicy red bean soup or roasted bell pepper soup or Moroccan potato bean. Mr. Hancock fervently believed that all that life had to teach was represented in soup making. Lessons about action and consequence (a teaspoon of thyme when the recipe called for an eighth of a teaspoon would render the soup inedible), as well as lessons about how certain ingredients complement one another while others, when brought together, ruin the taste of a particular soup. The critical lesson, Mr. Hancock believed, was the notion that digression from the recipe invalidated it. Mr. Hancock’s tenure at Randolph had taught him that boys’ impoverished kitchen skills—however feminine and unmanly such skills were regarded by society at large—extended to practical matters outside of how to bring a hammer down on a nail, or how to tell a Phillips screwdriver from a flathead. He posited that while the boys may not be headed toward the exacting science of construction—he was sure that none of the boys who passed through Randolph’s hallowed halls would ever be a foreman much less an invaluable member of a construction crew—they would need to feed themselves (juvenilia about their wives or, God forbid, their mothers taking care of their cooking aside), and so Mr. Hancock took the occasion to inculcate the same precision required to calculate how many sheets of drywall each room in the framed house would require. Under Mr. Baker’s guidance, we scratched calculations into our job journals amid sighs and feverish erasing. Remeasuring of the electrical boxes was called for; strategies for drywalling the bathrooms were advanced and rejected. Pencil shading turned our job journals into coloring books.

  Mr. Malagon interrupted Mr. Baker as he was explaining about how corner beads bridged accidental gaps between juxtaposed drywall. “The boys have their seven-thirty break,” Mr. Malagon said.

  We tucked our job journals into our khakis and trooped to the dining hall for the muffins and juices laid out by the sophs, who also indulged in the feast.

  Sprocket and a couple of fellows huddled at one table, poring over their job journals. Sprocket could be heard muttering, “I think the light switch goes here,” or, “The outlet is too low.” Hands and Figs approached Mr. Baker, who was provided with a cup of Mr. Hancock’s black coffee, and lobbed questions about taping sequences, the number of coats of joint compound needed, etc. Mr. Baker checked his watch during a dissertation on skim coating and level-five finishes. Mr. Malagon slipped into the kitchen, and Roger stole closer to the basket of silverware, palming two knives in one hand and a batch of spoons in the other. The sophomores shook out their wrists, stretching their cramped fingers.

  Assburn, who would die plunging into a frozen lake somewhere outside Detroit while driving across the ice, smuggling counterfeit game systems into the country, sat by himself, the realization that neither Mr. Hancock nor Mr. Malagon was going to demand Q’s return hitting him hard. The first full day of Garden Lakes held so many promises for each of us, but Assburn knew that Q would not return, that he would therefore not be able to return the pen to Q, that the first bead in a long chain of apologies and forgiveness would not be threaded. The rest of us could see Assburn’s disappointment, though we hadn’t any idea of his dreams of contrition. The day when an accusation could be answered with “Yes, I’m sorry” or “It’s true, but I regret it” slipped from Assburn’s reach the instant Q disappeared into the darkness.

  As the midmorning break expired, Figs squeezed past the dividing wall, which had been pulled parallel with the east wall. A perfume of fruit and spices and warm muffins filled his nose. The Randolph faculty had granted Figs license to areas inaccessible to other students—the photocopier in the principal’s office, the sports equipment locker in the gym—and the kitchen at Garden Lakes was just another area Figs felt comfortable broaching. His intention was to propose to Mr. Hancock that a soda and juice break be added between the midmorning break and lunch, a proposal Figs felt sure would be endorsed by the other fellows, but he changed his mind (and direction) when he overheard Mr. Hancock’s baritone voice and saw him point a finger in Mr. Malagon’s chest: “I said no. And I’m not discussing it.”

  Figs drew back behind the serving counter as Mr
. Malagon reappeared, flushed.

  The space between the midmorning break and lunch was filled with Mr. Baker’s instruction on the proper methods for cutting drywall, whether you were using a jigsaw, handheld saw, or box knife. A tour of the supply shed familiarized us with the implements we’d be married to for the coming weeks. Sprocket inventoried the shed in his job journal, assigning each item its own page, counting the framing squares, chalk lines, drywall routers, saws, rasps, panel lifters, stilts, hammers, tape measures, screwdrivers, screws, nails, rubber mallets, hawks, taping knives, trowels, paintbrushes, and electrical cords (which could be run to the nearest finished house for electricity), as well as the gallons of joint compound and eggshell white latex paint (Cottage White, officially), which he tallied on the back cover. The cataloging comforted Sprocket. Until after the midmorning break, he’d suffered from a gnawing suspicion that his selection for Garden Lakes was just charity. Sprocket’s parents had raised him to endure his disability without bitterness, and he’d come to accept his situation as just one of those things. In that way, Sprocket’s thinking was more evolved than our own. At that point we still believed that life could be regulated at our bidding. We knew nothing of luck or chance or fate—we disdained those words as excuses for failure, a poor apology for an absence of will. As far as we knew, desire and stamina was all that counted.

  Mr. Baker rushed through his last twenty minutes with us, peppering his instructions with “Don’t forget to jot it in your job journal!” Our morale couldn’t have been higher as Mr. Baker’s truck sailed through the waves of late-morning heat rising from the asphalt and out the front gates, a confidence born from the assumption that each of us was paying closer attention to Mr. Baker than the others. But we had until the next day before we’d be tested, and nothing seals a sense of confidence tighter than the promise of the future.

  The sophomores broke in shifts from dinner prep to serve lunch, ladling pasta dishes (including macaroni and cheese) from trays heated by an elaborate steam system built into the serving counter. Lunch at Garden Lakes was traditionally traditional—the closest to cafeteria-style food we would encounter, dinner being an elaboration of Mr. Hancock’s moods, which ran the gamut from rich and creamy to spicy and healthful. Dinner was our reward for a long day of labor fueled by carbohydrates and was served to us at our tables by sophomore waiters.

  The only wait service afforded us at lunch was beverage service, furnished more in an effort to keep the aisle leading to the kitchen clear than for reasons of decorum. Sophomores fluttered in the background, roaming, waiting to be pressed into service. If a fellow ordered soda, he was also to indicate the brand of soda he wanted. Predictably, Smurf sent his waiter for Pepsi, then, to his table’s hilarity, spit the Pepsi out and insisted that he’d ordered Coke.

  Those at Roger’s table thought he was following Smurf’s lead when the waiter asked Roger if he wanted more to drink and Roger ignored him. The sophomore asked again, and Roger started a discourse about drywalling with Figs, who was sitting to Roger’s right. The waiter, Dennis Reedy, moved along, asking Figs if he’d like more soda. Roger slurped the last drops from his glass and slammed it against the table, inducing a Pavlovian glance from all the other waiters. Reedy asked Roger again if he wanted more soda and again Roger ignored him.

  Roger’s tablemates shifted in their seats, sensing that Roger was invoking a shun against Reedy. Everyone at the table knew the shun was without merit, as likely as not, much like the shun he’d invoked against Rebecca Clement, the Xavierite who had spurned Roger’s invitation to the winter formal. The first day of classes after the winter recess, Roger and two frosh—Donnelly and Hendrickson—were camped out around the courtyard fountain before the first bell. Rebecca Clement and her friends strolled by on their way to first-hour Spanish. “Hiya, Roger,” Rebecca called out. Roger pretended like he didn’t hear. Rebecca called out again, and again Roger didn’t acknowledge her. Rebecca kept up with her companions, continuing on toward Spanish class, confused by Roger’s insolence. Roger gave no standing order, but the next time Donnelly saw Rebecca, he was with two other freshmen, Cooley and Bricketts, and when Rebecca called out to Donnelly, he aped Roger, ignoring her salutation. Cooley did the same in the presence of Fitzsimmons and Anderson, who did the same when Rebecca called out to them in a crowd of freshmen. By spring, half the student body was carrying He-Man Becky Haters Club cards, printed on a dot matrix printer and laminated at the print shop down Central Avenue from Randolph, flashing the cards between classes and in the parking lot after school. Some Xavierites carried the cards as well, and by the Easter break, Rebecca Clement had transferred out of Xavier. Neither Roger nor anyone else spoke her name, but the He-Man Becky Haters Club cards kept surfacing around campus, brandished as a punch line or as a threat.

  “Roger, dude, do you want more soda?” Figs asked, while Reedy shied from the table.

  Roger carried on with his purported fascination with Sheetrock without pause, and everyone—including Figs—made like Figs had never asked the question. Reedy moved on to another table, terror in his eyes, and Roger rattled the ice in his glass. Another waiter, who had witnessed the shun against Reedy, quickly reached over and snatched Roger’s glass without asking him if he wanted more. Roger called out after the waiter, “Pepsi, please,” and the waiter returned with a full glass of soda. None of his tablemates spoke as Roger took a long drink and then continued his train of thought about what would happen if you karate-chopped a piece of Sheetrock.

  Reedy stepped in Roger’s direction, intimating that he wanted to clear up any misunderstanding, but Mr. Hancock appeared from the kitchen with Mr. Malagon, the two not so deep in conversation about the upcoming class that they wouldn’t have seen a row had one occurred. Reedy reversed, heading for the kitchen. Mr. Hancock and Mr. Malagon continued their conference at a table vacated by fellows who had trotted down the hall to the classroom early to get the seats in the back row. Sophomores serving themselves lunch repopulated the table as we decamped for class, some of us walking near Mr. Hancock and Mr. Malagon, hoping to catch a sliver of their conversation or to overhear what looked to us like supplication from Mr. Malagon.

  We could guess the nature of this conversation. Mr. Hancock was an enemy of change, so when Mr. Malagon, upon being chosen for duty at Garden Lakes, had suggested the academic curriculum be switched from English and philosophy classes (Mr. Malagon successfully argued that, as one of the state’s premiere schools, Randolph students were already inordinately well versed in English grammar and the fundamentals of classical philosophy) to a discussion about the great leaders and their decisions in twentieth-century America, Mr. Hancock had balked at the idea. Mr. Hancock’s syllabus for American Literature had had exactly zero amendments or additions to it over the years, and he saw no reason to alter a program of learning so successfully implemented.

  But the administration heard Mr. Malagon’s proposal. Mr. Malagon contended a close examination of the great leaders, not just presidents but men and women of substance, was vital to any true leadership program. Without making known his feelings about the legitimacy of arming fellows with confusing philosophical hypotheses and the keen ability to express their confusion in writing, Mr. Malagon argued a point the administration held dear: effective academia. Every year the administration combed scores of reports filled with colorful charts and graphs to assess and reassess the school’s curriculum, spelunking for ways to improve the relevance of a Randolph education. Mr. Malagon pleaded his proposal along these lines.

  Mr. Hancock rallied the rest of the faculty on the platform of tradition, pointing out the success rate of past Garden Lakes fellows. His colleagues privately framed the debate as a threat to the more senior, established faculty. Rhetorical questions permeated the teachers’ lounge and the halls after school. If the administration disregarded their position, what would stop students from exhibiting the same lack of respect? What message would it send to students to have a proven, successful curri
culum undermined by pop academe? And, more importantly, would a vote for the proposal of a junior faculty member signal an end to the administration’s confidence in the advice and judgment of senior faculty members?

  The questions would remain rhetorical, however. The administration embraced Mr. Malagon’s proposition, paving the way for a new course of study at Garden Lakes. The debate, while internal and secret, was leaked to the rest of us through Figs, who worked as an administrative aid during seventh hour. And though we didn’t know whether the scrapped English and philosophy classes would have been beneficial, the new course—or rather, the manner in which the new course had come into being—whetted our appetite.

  As we took our seats in the classroom, we observed an expression Mr. Malagon had never before exhibited: nervousness. Mr. Malagon chafed under the promulgation of historical inaccuracies, like the fairy tale that Betsy Ross sewed the American flag, or that Paul Revere ever uttered, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” He had rankled a few colleagues by crafting a class on Hitler aimed at humanizing the Führer rather than portraying him as a one-dimensional black hat. Could Hitler tell you a joke so funny that you’d wet yourself? was the opening line of the unit. “It’s easy to recognize evil once it has manifested,” Mr. Malagon would say. “A thinking person should be trained to spot the warning signs.” Thanks to Figs and his eavesdropping, we knew the proposed class at Garden Lakes was grooved in the same controversial vein, all of which was confirmed when Mr. Malagon launched into a prepared lecture on FDR’s administration, fending off a volley from Mr. Hancock, who added helpfully that many of the New Deal programs didn’t survive a court challenge, by emphasizing the New Deal’s legacy. We watched the interplay like fascinated children.

  The sound of sophomores shuffling in the hallway broke Mr. Malagon’s concentration, a sound that meant it was time for sports. “More about Mr. Roosevelt and the New Deal tomorrow,” Mr. Malagon intoned. “Be sure to read the handout carefully. Did I mention each unit will have a short quiz at the end?” He laughed through our groans. “See you in ten minutes.”