Language Arts

by Stephanie Kallos

My wife, Charles thought fondly, genius, legal advocate, fierce fighter, acting like a petulant tween who’s been unjustly grounded instead of a thirty-one-year-old woman who’s been gifted with a responsibility-free weekend. But then, Ali remained a case study in regression whenever her parents were involved.

  Forty-five minutes later, their bags were packed and they’d said a brief goodbye to Cody. (Don’t linger, Eulalie advised, don’t make a big production out of it.) Alison handed over a pamphlet of written instructions pertaining to Cody’s care—which, Charles felt sure, Eulalie would mostly ignore—and they were off.

  The trip did not begin well. On the way, they argued—as parents typically do when cut loose from the distracting and role-defining presence of their children. Weekend traffic slowed the journey to a crawl. When Alison fell silent, Charles sensed an impending, irreversible decline in her spirits; he feared the weekend was doomed.

  “Do you remember the last vacation we had?” he asked. “Just the two of us?”

  “We’ve never had a vacation.”

  “Yes, we have.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about our prenuptial honeymoon in New York. The day I proposed?”

  “Oh,” she said, her mouth softening. “That.”

  They’d lingered in Alison’s Cathedral Row studio apartment for hours, but eventually, famished, they went out. They ended up going into a Morningside Heights deli and designing a deluxe gift basket. It’s for some friends who just got engaged, Charles explained. They’re planning on having a big family. The deli owner smiled broadly, tucked in a box of menorah candles (Free with big spending! he said in heavily accented English), and then proceeded to shrink-wrap and beribbon their purchase. On the way back, they sat in the garden of St. John the Divine, decimated most of the roast chicken, couscous salad, and bialys, and then made out madly until a pair of territorial peacocks chased them away.

  “That was a good day,” Alison said.

  It was nearly nine by the time they left the restaurant in La Conner. The B&B was a few miles out of town, situated on a prairie next to a barley field, with a misty view of Mount Baker to the north and tidelands to the west.

  Their room had a fireplace flanked by shelves holding the complete works of Shakespeare in small, exquisite, separately bound editions; volumes of poetry; a bouquet of flowers; a basket of fruit and chocolates; a bottle of wine.

  They lit a fire.

  They slipped into the skins of younger, softer selves.

  They found each other again, in that room, in that house bordering a fruited prairie.

  And that was how they got their daughter.

  •♦•

  Dear Emmy,

  How are you, sweetheart? How are midterms going? It feels like a long time since I’ve written, probably because I’ve had an atypically full dance card this week.

  In fact, this will be a short letter; I have an appointment at the Seattle Center later this morning and have to leave in a few minutes.

  Your mom and I saw a film the other night—the first time I’ve been to a movie in a while. It was about a family dealing with autism, a good film, very heartfelt. Your mom loved it. So did everyone else, from what I could gather.

  I hate to sound cynical, but good God—they shoved every possible cliché into the narrative. Which is not to say that it wasn’t spot-on accurate, clichés being based in truth after all. But really, it got to be a bit much:

  1. Scene of PWA escaping due to negligence, leading family members on a frantic chase culminating in near tragedy but ultimately comic—check.

  2. Scene of PWA smearing feces everywhere—check.

  3. Scene of PWA masturbating in public—check.

  4. Scene of PWA freaking out in public as misunderstanding and/or insensitive onlookers are either appalled or interfering—check.

  5. Scene of PWA and family coming to blows, hurtful words spoken, combatants injured, dishes broken, walls punched—check.

  6. Scene of forgiveness—check.

  7. Scene of triumph—check.

  8. Scene of bittersweet acceptance—check.

  The End.

  Credits roll.

  I couldn’t help but wonder how a mainstream audience would respond to this film. They’d probably depart feeling good about the experience, the acquisition of insight and sympathy infused with laughter. Having purchased this bit of karmic goodwill—and with no need to revisit the subject until the statute of limitations on compassion expires—they could then feel free to spend their next moviegoing bucks on something like Die Hard 6.

  •♦•

  “Okay, I think I’ve got everything I need,” Mike Bernauer said, collecting his notes. The six of them were gathered around a circular table in the Center House food court, which, at some point in the years since Charles was last here, had been rechristened the Armory and redecorated by someone whose aesthetic ran to sleek and sophisticated and who obviously disdained any color but an exceptionally morose gunmetal gray. “Thanks again for doing this.”

  Mike was a tall, friendly guy with a strong Chicago accent who was probably around Charles’s age. One of the first things he’d asked after they’d settled in was what they did for a living. One was an investment banker, one worked for a computer software company, one was an Eastside art-gallery owner/mom heavily involved in philanthropy, and Astrid(a)—not surprisingly—had become a neurosurgeon. With the exception of Charles, they all seemed to have lived up to Mrs. Braxton’s expectations: wealthy, high-achieving pillars of the community. Of course, Mike had located and/or chosen only the five of them; perhaps the other students in Mrs. Braxton’s class were somewhere up in the Okanagan manufacturing meth, although, when Charles thought about it, that too required no small amount of mental acuity and ambition.

  “One last thing: our photographer would like to get a few shots outside, and then we’re done.”

  “When will the article be out?” the banker asked.

  “Probably sometime early in the new year. It’ll be in the Pacific Magazine section of the Sunday paper.”

  They headed out, the photographer snapped pictures of the group in front of a couple of iconic locations, and then they were free to go. It wasn’t even noon.

  “Whatever happened to Mrs. Braxton?” the computer fellow asked as they were about to part ways.

  “She passed, back in … let’s see …” Mike consulted his notes. “I did manage to get a phone interview with her daughter …”

  A daughter? Charles was thunderstruck. He’d never considered the possibility that Mrs. Braxton had a family.

  “Yeah, here we go … Patricia, only child, told me that her mother taught in the Seattle school system right up to retirement; she received a special award for her service a couple of years before she died, age eighty-five, in 1996.”

  Charles was only half listening. He was still thinking about Patricia. He wondered what her handwriting was like.

  “Nice to see you all!” the banker said, handing out his business cards.

  “Can’t say that I remember any of you, but this sure was fun!” the computer guy shouted.

  “I hope to see you all at the auction!” the Eastside mom/art dealer added.

  Astrid turned to Charles. “Which way are you headed?”

  “I’m in the stadium lot.”

  “Me too. I’ll walk with you. We didn’t really get a chance to catch up.”

  They made their way past the former location of the Fun Forest, where city kids used to be able to get a taste of messy, gooey, thrilling, and, yes, slightly sordid carnival life. The Fun Forest had recently been bulldozed into oblivion to make room for the Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum—a disheartening state of affairs, in Charles’s opinion, exemplifying the current ethos that exposing young people to a fragile, pristine, humorless, and hands-off environment of culture was preferable to the gut-dropping rush of riding a roller coaster.

  “I know you’re an English teacher,”
Astrid said, “but that’s about it. Where do you teach?”

  “City Prana. Do you know it?”

  “Capitol Hill?”

  “Right.”

  She nodded. “We looked at that one for the kids but ended up at Lakeside. How long have you been there?”

  “My whole teaching career, basically, so … since around 1990.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “How about you? Did you get your medical degree here?”

  “No, I went away, to Johns Hopkins, and I really didn’t want to end up back here, but … well … you know. The Northwest kind of imprints on you. Like on the salmon.”

  “I get it.”

  “So? What else? Family?”

  “Divorced. Two kids.”

  She chuckled. “Sorry. It’s just that, at our age, that’s pretty much the way we summarize our lives. At least for a few more years, until we start listing our ailments. Amicable?”

  “Now, yes. Not at first. You?”

  “Divorced. Three kids.”

  Charles laughed, or tried to.

  “You changed your name,” he remarked.

  “Hell yes. Wouldn’t you? I sometimes think I married my husband as much for the chance to escape my maiden name as anything. How old are your kids?”

  “Seventeen and almost twenty-one. Yours?”

  “My oldest is thirty-five, a pediatrician, and about to make me a grandmother, finally. Young people today seem to take their time when it comes to procreation.”

  “Very true,” Charles murmured.

  They walked on in silence for a while.

  Surely she was going to ask him. Surely that was the real reason she wanted to speak with him in private.

  “Well, this is me,” she said as they arrived at her Audi, spotlessly clean, liberally stickered: MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT LAKESIDE; PROUD STANFORD PARENT; COEXIST. “It was good to see you again, Charles. I wish you all the best.”

  “You too.”

  Was he relieved or troubled? Charles wondered as he walked to his car. Had Astrid forgotten the most significant experience they’d shared that school year? The cast of characters involved?

  He supposed it was possible. Not everyone had the proclivity, as he did, to be imprinted by the desert of exile instead of the garden of home.

  Teacher’s Pet

  By mid-October, Mrs. Braxton had granted favored status to a single student. No one was more surprised by her selection than the designee himself.

  “Perfect, Charles.”

  The Ax was so enthralled by her protégé that she had even started to smile, which was unfortunate; when the nearly atrophied muscles responsible for smiling drew her lips apart, they revealed a set of preternaturally white, store-bought dentures that were as eerily eugenic as Dana’s God-given teeth were flawed.

  In all areas of study but one, Charles remained consistently undistinguished, nonexemplary, neither exceeding nor falling short of his average status. But ever since Mrs. Braxton had given a lecture on the unexpected benefits of becoming a Palmer penmanship gold medalist (handwriting could build muscles?), he’d been driving himself strenuously.

  “All right, class. Present arms!” This was the cue for students to take up their writing implements with no less vigor and intensity of purpose than if they were hoisting broadswords.

  Each day, when the time came for penmanship lessons, Mrs. Braxton asked her star pupil to vacate his desk, station himself at the chalkboard, and lead the class in what she called preparatory calisthenics.

  “Notice the evenness with which Charles writes,” she remarked, “the steady pressure he applies to the chalk.”

  Producing a row of perfectly uniform Palmer loops extending the length of the chalkboard was clearly number one of Mrs. Braxton’s criteria for academic success. Her gusto for the study and practice of penmanship so far exceeded her enthusiasm for any other subject that Charles sometimes wondered if she had a personal relationship with Mr. Palmer. Maybe they were pen pals.

  “Notice how he keeps his arms relaxed, his movements completely smooth …”

  That particular day, while Mrs. Braxton droned on and made her rounds, Charles began replaying the events of the previous evening, when he’d discovered the benefits of Palmer practice at home.

  He and his parents were in the TV room. The evening news was on, the martinis were poured, and his mother was recapping the events of the day, which included a bridge-club luncheon at one of her friends’ houses.

  I just don’t understand why some people don’t make an effort to speak correctly. It’s not rocket science, it’s not brain surgery, it’s a simple matter of opening up a dictionary, but I guess some people can’t be bothered—but I mean, really, how can anyone hope to rise above their situation if they still sound like they’re from, well, you know what I mean; in this country we can be whoever we want; we can all make something of ourselves, and speaking properly is one of the simplest ways to improve our social standing; it makes an impression, the way we talk; people are sadly misinformed if they think it doesn’t; I mean, think about it, Garrett: you’d fire your secretary in a heartbeat if she sent out a business letter with misspelled words or improper grammar and yet people think nothing of saying Warsh-ington or git or melk or—

  Suddenly, Garrett Marlow threw his newspaper down in a mangled heap and yelled, Jesus Christ, Rita, you can be a pretentious BITCH!

  He stormed out of the room. A minute later, he could be heard slamming the door to the garage, gunning the engine of his car, and speeding into the night.

  “Notice the steady tempo,” Mrs. Braxton continued now, “the balance between energy and relaxation …”

  While Walter Cronkite had reported on Wally Schirra’s space orbit, Charles withdrew a cursive practice table from his satchel and began trying to slow his heart rate by executing a series of up-downs. His mother finished off the pitcher of martinis.

  You may eat in the TV room tonight if you want, Charles, she’d said after a while. Her voice sounded faint and quavering, as if she were speaking from inside the freezer. I’ll heat up a potpie—we’ve got a turkey; that’s your favorite, isn’t it?—and then I think I’ll take a little nap.

  In the safety of his bedroom, Charles retrieved his pocket dictionary; bitch was easy to locate, but it took a long time to find pretentious.

  “Look how consistent he is!” Mrs. Braxton marveled, her voice exuberant enough to penetrate Charles’s reverie. “Really, that is quite exceptional. Textbook perfect!”

  “Egg-SHEP-shun-all,” Bradley whispered, giving a sustained, reptilian emphasis to the s’s.

  “Puh-fect.” Mitch’s aggressive, plosive articulation of the c and t: a linguistic shiv.

  Charles felt the ping of spitballs hitting his shoulder blades.

  “Bradley! Mitchell! Shall I send you to detention?”

  There was a momentary silence, followed by an impressive cadenza of farts.

  Mrs. Braxton shot Dana a poisonous look. His head was resting on his desk, cushioned by his forearms, and up to this point, everyone had thought he was asleep. But now he roused himself. His weasel’s grin expanded into a full-fledged smile and he craned his head around, basking in the accolades of laughter.

  An eggy fragrance was permeating the air; the Ax pursed her lips, strode to the other side of the room, and threw open a window. She sighed heavily, then spoke in an uncharacteristically small, defeated voice. “I had so hoped that we might move on to more complicated letter forms today, but clearly that is not to be the case.”

  She seemed unaware that Dana’s contribution to the atmosphere had been dissipated by a sudden, bitterly cold wind blowing in through the open window and that the sky, the color of dull paper clips, was starting to spit snow—a meteorological event that, in Seattle, borders on the miraculous and fills students with the not-unreasonable hope that school will be canceled at any moment.

  Whoa, students began to whisper. Look outside, it’s snowing. Childr
en telescoped their necks to get a better view. Some dared to detach their bottoms from their desk chairs; others poked the unaware and then, gluing their forearms to their chests, allowed single, cautious fingers to unfurl and point.

  Snow snow snow snow snow snow snow …

  The word gathered force with each repetition, the s’s and o’s filling the room, a two-letter alphabet soup spiraling around and around: a spell, a charm, an invocation.

  When Brad hollered, “Holy shit, it’s snowing!” Mrs. Braxton shook herself out of her melancholy, glared at him, and spoke a single word: “Go.”

  Brad rose and exited. The class was riveted by Mrs. Braxton’s sudden recovery of her godlike powers. She turned to the window and pushed down on the casement with such force that the glass rattled and the snow stopped falling. (By the time recess arrived, it had vanished without a trace.)

  “All right, class,” she began. “Let us resume with a series of lowercase a’s. Charles will continue to lead. I will call out a rhythm. Present arms! And … up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down …”

  She was near the back of the room when Dana spoke. His strange, denasal voice was not, for once, too loud; it was almost within the bounds of normalcy.

  “You do good with that, Char-Lee Mar-Low,” he said.

  A hush fell over the room. Even Mrs. Braxton was temporarily stunned into silence. Charles turned around.

  Dana wasn’t looking at him—Dana never looked directly at anyone—but his head and gaze were spiraling around Charles’s general direction. He looked like he was tracking the movements of an inebriated bumblebee whose flight path was roughly at the level of Charles’s face. He was smiling too, in a genuine, easy way, revealing his train wreck of a mouth. “Char-Lee, Char-Lee Mar-Low,” he repeated.

  “Dana,” Mrs. Braxton said, less sharply than she normally spoke to a disruptive student. “Quiet, please.”

  Dana bobbed his head, as if shrinking from a blow. He drew his hands toward his chest, squirrel-like, in a way that was usually the precursor to his hand-massaging habit. But then, very slowly, as if encountering terrific internal resistance, he separated them and inched his right hand to just above the level of his head. In this diffident and clearly difficult way, Dana McGucken was asking to be called on. Never had he employed this basic schoolroom protocol before.