Language Arts

by Stephanie Kallos

  It was odd, Charles thought, how sometimes you could see in the faces of old people an underlayer, something not entirely obscured, the kind of thing he imagined an art-restoration specialist might discover, a painting beneath a painting. Pentimento; that was the word for it. Beneath this woman’s face was strength, humor, intelligence, Charles could tell. But even on the surface, she did not look like a woman who was losing her mind (he assumed the subject must be suffering from some form of dementia); quite the contrary, in fact—in the worn parlance of pop psychology, she looked like a woman who’d found herself.

  The phone rang. Charles let the machine pick up.

  “Charles. I know you’re there, it’s a school night. Pick up. Pick. Up!”

  He picked up.

  “We need to talk about Cody.”

  Immediately, even after all this time, that six-word sentence incited a physiologic, primal fear, a fast-moving flood of adrenaline, the fight-or-flight response.

  “Charles,” Alison said, her voice sharp and reprimanding, as if they’d been engaged in crucial face-to-face negotiations for several minutes but his eyes had glazed over. “Are you there?

  “We need.

  “To talk.

  “About Cody.”

  Charles felt his heart rate double and his breath grow shallow. He was enveloped by a hot, prickly sensation, a dangerous electrical storm of unknown origin, his own personal St. Elmo’s fire.

  “Charles! Did you hear me?”

  “Yes,” he managed, finally. “I’m here.”

  “The clock is ticking,” Alison went on. “He’ll be twenty-one in May. That’s less than eight months from now.”

  “I realize that, Alison,” Charles replied, not able to keep the faux-offended snippiness out of his voice, because, of course, he hadn’t realized that, or was engaged in avoidance or denial or whatever; it basically amounted to the same thing, with the bottom line being that there was no excuse. Having an autistic son who was about to become a legal adult and age out of state-supported care should have been at the forefront of Charles’s awareness, so on this occasion, as on so many others, he felt ashamed of his paternal failings. The fact that Cody had no more awareness of Charles’s failings than he did of Alison’s Herculean efforts on his behalf was moot.

  “So when do you want to meet?” Alison went on. “We need to talk in person.” Charles could hear the sound of pages being turned: Alison in consultation with her day planner.

  “Right.”

  “I’ve got aikido tomorrow, synagogue Friday night and Saturday morning …”

  “What?”

  “Synagogue? Shabbat? Torah studies? Charles. Really?”

  “Oh,” Charles said. “Right.”

  Why did she always act so annoyed when he forgot about the conversion business? She’d announced it, completely out of the blue, a few months ago—

  This is important to me, Charles. I’ve gotten to a point in my life when I need … Well, I’m not asking you to understand, but please. You have to promise you won’t …

  Won’t what?

  You know … scoff.

  What are you talking about? Why would I scoff?

  Because it’s a loaded issue and you have very firm ideas on the subject, and when I get serious about something you tend to, well, get silly, make jokes, try to lighten me up.

  No. Really? Did you get a PhD in psychology when I wasn’t looking?

  I get it, Charles, why you do it. I’ve always gotten it, and there have been many times when I’ve loved you for it. But about this—please. I don’t want to debate; I don’t want to win you over; I just need you to understand that I’m doing this for myself, for reasons that have nothing to do with you. So: promise me that you won’t make fun.

  All right. I promise. I solemnly swear not to mock, jeer, ridicule, or scoff.

  —but it wasn’t as if she’d chosen to share anything further on the subject. In fact, it had been so long since she’d mentioned anything, he’d been hoping she’d given up on the idea. He should have known better.

  “The rest of the weekend’s no good either … ,” Alison went on.

  He could ask her about it, he supposed. What version of Judaism was she converting to, exactly? Christmas was out, obviously, but would she have to wear a wig?

  “How about this: We’ve got our monthly meeting next Wednesday at six—you have that on your calendar, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t we go for drinks afterward and talk then? Someplace close to the hospital, maybe U Village? I know you don’t like to be out on school nights, but—”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I’ve done some research, so all I’m asking you to do is help narrow the choices and then spend a Sunday visiting these places with me …” Then she launched into a briskly paced monologue that Charles found himself only minimally able to follow—although he did pick up his pen and attempt to take notes.

  There were so many abbreviations and acronyms involved whenever Cody was the subject of discussion; Charles was able to readily interpret some of them—DSHS, UWAC, SIB—but due to some shortfall in his own brain wiring, he found calling up the meaning of many of these linguistic expediencies a terrible struggle. It was as if the acronyms constituted toeholds on some gigantic climbing rock and Charles was unable to continue his ascent until he’d laboriously translated each one.

  Alison, by contrast, was a fantastically agile and practiced climber, completely fluent in this bureaucratic cipher, so that by the time Charles finally anchored his foot in the recollection that ICF/MR stood for intermediate-care facility for the mentally retarded, she’d scaled all the way up to the rock’s pinnacle.

  Trying to remember what ARCHWAY stood for brought Charles’s listening efforts to a full stop.

  Alison, a perceptive listener, soon recognized this.

  “Charles, are you with me?” was what she said. What he heard was Charles, why can’t you keep up?

  “Yes, yes, I’m listening. Go on.”

  Charles never ceased to marvel at the irony that their son, someone who hadn’t spoken an intelligible word in seventeen years, continued to stimulate so much heated discussion, intellectual debate, soul-searching, cris de coeur—so much language—all of it ultimately useless, because none of it brought any of them closer to understanding anything about the inner workings of Cody’s unique mind.

  Charles followed the conversational thread (or, more aptly, the climbing rope) all the way through Alison’s comically huge understatement “At least we have some financial resources,” but he soon fell hopelessly behind once again.

  He looked down at his notes; they included a list of abbreviations transcribed in the order they were uttered:

  CRM

  RCSD

  HCBBS

  FEATWA

  LIHTC

  CDBG

  HCV

  Charles was fascinated by the way these randomly spoken acronyms formed a graceful, organized shape: when viewed vertically, a subtle convex curve to the right; when viewed horizontally, a gently swelling hillock. And they were perfectly, symmetrically ordered in terms of number of letters: 3-4-5-6-5-4-3.

  “You’ve stopped listening again,” Alison said.

  “Sorry, I—”

  “Never mind. I’ll see you next Wednesday at PLAY then?”

  Charles knew this one: Parents Loving Autistic Youth. “Yes.”

  “Six o’clock?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Drinks and discussion after.”

  “Sounds good.”

  Charles became aware that they were now speaking in another kind of verbal shorthand: nothing extraneous, nothing revelatory, as if they were criminal suspects under surveillance. Or the opposite—complete strangers whose conversation might be monitored for quality-control or teaching purposes. It was sad that to someone reading a transcript of this exchange, either scenario would be plausible.

  “Have you seen him?” Alison asked.<
br />
  “Tomorrow.”

  Charles visited their son twice a week.

  “He’s been very calm lately,” Alison continued. “We’re finding a good balance in terms of his meds.”

  Ali visited every day. She had a high tolerance for pain in all its forms.

  She went on to apprise Charles of Cody’s latest regimen of pharmaceuticals and supplements; she also gave an enthusiastic testimonial for a new treatment she was eager to procure, an oxytocin nasal spray. “It’s still in trials,” she said, “but the military is spending millions developing something similar for returning soldiers, an antisuicide nasal spray, so clearly they’re really onto something. It’s very exciting.”

  No giver-upper, my ex, Charles thought. She is fierce. She is undaunted.

  Of course, that had been one of many things that had attracted him to her in the first place.

  After saying goodbye, Charles noticed that his right hand was in spasm; he released his hold on his pen and began shaking it out.

  He looked down at the legal pad on which he’d been taking notes; it was covered with a series of scribbled loops. They traversed the entire page, line after line, row after row, smooth, controlled, uniform in size at the start but eventually becoming wildly erratic, so heavily executed that the paper was shredded in places. The acronyms and abbreviations were now obscured, as if standing behind the densely curled razor wire of a prison-yard enclosure.

  Charles had no memory of making these marks—the transcriptions, obviously, of a madman.

  He tore off the page and folded it into halves, quarters, eighths, and sixteenths before dropping it into the wastebasket.

  He took up his pen again and began to write:

  Dear Emmy,

  Do you remember the Seven Postcards exercise? I bring out the boxes containing my collection, give the kids an entire class period to browse and choose a week’s worth of favorites each, and then—with the caveat that “having a great time wish you were here” is not an option and that the per-postcard word count (excluding the address) must exceed twenty—tell them to compose one postcard a day to a thoughtfully chosen friend or relative, someone they miss sorely and aren’t likely to see any time soon.

  Over the years I’ve found this exercise to be a low-pressure way to reintroduce students to the act of putting pen or pencil to paper in the service of their imaginations, especially since it’s likely that the only writing many of them did over vacation was accomplished with the assist of a keyboard too small to be operated by anything other than thumbs.

  I find myself increasingly obsessed with the sorry state of penmanship. I’m starting to wonder if I should go back to college; perhaps I could better serve today’s youth with a degree in corrective graphology. Or maybe it’s called something else: handwriting therapy? That has a less punitive ring to it …

  I’m joking.

  But not entirely.

  Here’s my point: no one expects anyone to have decent handwriting anymore.

  It’s no wonder, when not only business but social interactions are conducted via the striking of keys, the thumbing of buttons.

  As an example, almost half the consolatory messages I received after my mother’s death were in the form of e-mails. Given that sad state of affairs, it seems likely that “sorry 4 ur loss” isn’t far down the road.

  This begs the question: At what point will elegant linguistic languor be permanently usurped by text-speak expediency? When will we humans abandon the ability to generate long, complex, lusciously worded emotional expressions—like Elizabethan sonnets!—in favor of:

  Pls b my wif xo

  Left u 4 him ☹

  My . a wk L8 ☺

  2 sad 2 have 2 kdz

  Whenever my students are called upon to produce something without the aid of computers or cell phones, their script is usually in the form of block printing that has a rushed, out-of-control, slightly panicked look, as if they’re all suffering from visual or neurological impairments.

  But of course, I’m as much of an offender as anyone else. How far I’ve fallen from my Palmer penmanship certificate-of-merit days. Writing letters to you by hand is one of the few ways I’m able to keep up my handwriting chops.

  So Seven Postcards remains an important curriculum element, intended to be both a creative assignment and athletic training, the Language Arts equivalent of a football scrimmage.

  Up next is a stack of postcards from Abe Kaparsky, one of my new crop of sixth-graders. From what I can tell so far, he has chosen to write to a long-deceased hamster named Houdini.

  I mean, really: Who wouldn’t love getting mail like this?

  The phone rang. Charles let the machine pick up.

  Hello, Mr. Marlow, sorry to trouble you so late, but this is Mike Bernauer from the Seattle Times, calling again to see if you got my earlier messages …

  Charles muted the sound, turned off his office light, and headed to bed.

  Alluring Objects

  My father has always been deeply comforted by the sensory delights of office supplies—the smells of different kinds of paper; the feel of pens in hand, their varying weights, textures, mechanisms; the degree to which writing implements embrace or resist contact with the page. He’s savored the dense resinous scent of wooden pencils, enjoying an across-time kinship with Henry David Thoreau for his entrepreneurial efforts on behalf of that homely instrument. He’s relished the look of corrugated, flat-roofed tunnels formed by lengths of conjoined staples, the smooth, streamlined elegance of paper clips.

  His well-stocked home-office cupboard provided my brother with some of his favorite playthings when he was small; one of Cody’s early pastimes was building whimsical, rainbow-colored structures out of cellophaned stacks of Post-its mortared together with double-sided tape. He also loved arranging and rearranging unsharpened Ticonderoga no. 2s in intricate patterns on the floor.

  Around the time of my birth, my brother (who had not yet lost his fine-motor skills) had begun to design and manufacture an impressive line of paper-clip jewelry.

  On our last day at the hospital, before I was released into my parents’ custody—

  —Cody solemnly presented our father with a special gift. That was the moment he permanently retired his crucifix and began wearing an intricately assembled, beaded paper-clip necklace next to his heart. He never takes it off.

  Should anyone ask, he’d testify to feeling far more solaced and protected by the powers of his Cody original than he ever felt by that fuddy-duddy symbol of Christ’s suffering.

  •♦•

  It would be logical to trace a straight line from Charles’s affection for office supplies to his life as a teacher. He often wished he could say that he’d felt called to his profession, that the idea of nurturing young minds came to him early and unbidden, but in truth it was a simple question from Alison on the night they met—followed by a conversation with a friend—that nudged him in that direction. Not toward becoming a Language Arts teacher specifically, but toward the radical notion that another version of himself—updated, improved, rebooted—might yet be possible, that his life story wasn’t over yet.

  He was thirty-five years old and happily living the unexamined life of a country-club bartender, work for which he’d always felt temperamentally well suited and to which he was still occasionally tempted to return.

  But it wasn’t just temperament that predisposed Charles to success as a mixologist; it was his early apprenticeship to Mrs. Eloise Braxton, Palmer penmanship zealot. By the time he was ten, Charles was able to execute a series of repetitive movements consistently, efficiently, and in a relaxed manner over long periods, often while experiencing substantial anxiety. Eight years later, casting about for a job that could keep him well stocked with weed while his parents funded four years of college and living expenses, he’d discovered that mixing one cocktail after another for the clientele of a happy-hour rush wasn’t all that different from producing a long succession of lowercase m’s in the pr
esence of the formidable Mrs. B. It certainly wasn’t as stress-inducing.

  So after graduating with a major in philosophy and a minor in linguistics, Charles decided that mixology was an excellent career match for both his academic interests and his recreational needs.

  Early on the evening of Friday, April 1, 1988, he was sacked out on the sofa, looking forward to spending the weekend reading, watching movies, and smoking dope (his chief downtime occupations for the previous two decades), when the phone rang.

  It was Zach Dennehy, the country club’s head bartender, asking if there was any way Charles could fill in for him the next two days.

  “I hate to ask, Charlie,” he said, “especially on such short notice, but I’m kind of in a bind.” He sounded terrible.

  “Absolutely. No problem.” Zach never missed a shift, never called in sick. “What’s up?”

  “Oh, it’s stupid, really. I’m in the hospital.”

  “What happened? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s just that I finally went to see the doctor about this damn cough. They took a couple of x-rays and guess what—I’ve got pneumonia.”

  “Holy shit.” Charles’s heart gave an arrhythmic jump, and he experienced an odd, ill-defined panic that did not have the familiar feel of pot-induced paranoia.

  In spite of the seven-year age difference (Zach was in his early forties), Charles considered Zach his best friend. They had a fair amount in common, neither of them aspirants to anything beyond earning a generous salary plus tips. As bartenders, they conversed with interesting, successful, and, for the most part, pleasant people, including attractive single women who were occasionally interested in commitment-free sex. Their camaraderie was founded on shared identities as affable, intelligent, middle-class slackers who’d successfully infiltrated Seattle’s social stratosphere but had no ambition to rise through its ranks, much less attain full membership.

  “Listen,” Charles said, detaching himself from the couch and shrugging into his jacket. “Why don’t I come over?” Zach’s gestalt was of the Clint Eastwood variety, lean, laconic, attractively rough-around-the-edges, and, above all, invincible; Charles’s mental picture of him—alone and bedridden in a hospital room on a Friday night—violated world order in a deeply disturbing way. “Where are you? I’ll get some takeout. I could even bring the VCR and we could watch a video.”