Language Arts

by Stephanie Kallos

  What the hell? Charles asked himself, wielding Alison’s Montegrappa Italia with a flourish as he marked the boys’ papers.

  “A’s for everyone! On to the sophomores!”

  It occurred to him that perhaps Cody could be said to be flensed of speech.

  But no, that would be inaccurate.

  One cannot be stripped of something one never really had.

  •♦•

  “You’re awfully quiet, Charles. Is everything all right?”

  It turned out that Charles had misunderstood the sequence of planned events; they’d looked at perfect-Pine-hurst-four-bedroom-rambler-on-quiet-corner first; now they were driving to the group home.

  Post–daylight saving time; five o’clock and it was already dark. Charles was reminded that suicide rates in Seattle and Stockholm were roughly the same.

  “I know it’s a lot for one day,” Alison continued, “a lot to take in.”

  “It’s fine,” Charles said. The rain had stopped and started several times in the past hour, sudden downpours followed by sudden cessations, as if there were a poorly sutured incision in the sky that kept opening up, being restitched by the same incompetent surgeon, and then tearing open again, a perpetual malpractice suit. “I’m fine.”

  They’d spent almost an hour rambling through the midcentury rambler. The sound of the rain’s dramatic stop-start was amplified by a large blue tarp spread out in the backyard, covering a swimming pool. The pool was a feature Charles had missed when he looked the property up on the Internet. Its presence left him doubting—atypically—Alison’s judgment.

  Of course, it wasn’t just her judgment at work, and Charles had to assume that she and her potential partners had discussed the wisdom of buying a house with a swimming pool in the backyard for three soon-to-be-technically-adult autistics.

  Another rain-letting began; Alison turned the windshield wipers up to full speed.

  “So, what do you think?” she asked. “About the house.”

  “It seems to meet most of your criteria.”

  “I know you think my mind is made up, Charles, but your opinion matters …”

  Charles found himself incapable of responding. Do I have an opinion? he wondered. Surely I do.

  “… especially as someone who knows about the inner workings of things.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know … plumbing, wiring, structural issues, things like that. Like your father.”

  “My father managed a warehouse, Alison. He sold acoustical ceiling tiles.”

  “Yes, but you always described him as handy. He could fix things. You know what I mean.”

  “I have no idea what you mean. My father and I weren’t exactly close, if you remember, and as far as I know, there’s no gene for pipe-wrench proficiency.”

  “You’re being purposely obtuse—and disingenuous. You talked a lot about those kinds of things with Daddy when we remodeled the house.”

  “I was faking it. I felt a strong need to impress him.”

  Alison sighed, but trudged on. “Well, in any case, we are going to have to make a decision fairly soon …”

  Why is it possible, Charles wondered, to recognize certain doomed conversational choreographies—especially the kind that occurs between spouses—and yet remain incapable of changing the steps? He’d pondered this for years.

  “In one sense”—Alison was dancing now in quickening circles; Charles was amazed that the car didn’t start listing to the right, given her accelerating buoyancy, his accumulating weight—“we’ve been really lucky, with the economy the way it is, I mean. It is sad to think that, if we do end up buying this property, we’ll be capitalizing on the financial misfortunes of others—I told you it’s a short sale, right? But we felt as though the timing couldn’t be better. It’s a lot of house for the money.”

  “The pool was a surprise.”

  Alison groaned. “God, that pool! Obviously, we’re talking about what to do about that if we end up going through with this. In every other way, though, it’s pretty close to perfect, don’t you think?”

  In using the word we, Alison was referring to two sets of still-married couples she’d grown close to over the years, fellow PLAY participants, parents of low-functioning autistic sons who’d been in the group home almost as long as Cody.

  “The fact that the Youngs and the Gurnees are willing to do this now, even though Robbie and Myles don’t age out for another year, is a huge blessing. I mean, there’s the financial piece, of course, but more than that, there would be the whole process of looking for prospective parents, doing interviews, vetting the kids, et cetera. The fact that our boys know each other will make this transition so much easier on them—and on us.”

  Do they? Charles wondered. Do our boys actually know each other? Autism, auto, from the Greek for “self.”

  The rain stopped. Alison turned off the wipers and sighed heavily.

  “This weather is really something, isn’t it?” Charles offered.

  Like Alison, the Youngs and the Gurnees were frequent visitors to the group home. Charles had met them only a couple of times, over coffee at the Lake City Starbucks. He tried to remember their first names. He tried to remember their kids’ names. Alison had just mentioned them, for Christ’s sake.

  He realized that Ali had asked him something.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything, Charles, there’s no need to bristle.”

  “I’m not bristling. But yes, in point of fact, I drank a glass or two of Gunderloch Riesling this afternoon while I was grading papers.”

  They drove on for a while. Cross-town traffic was murder—probably every bit as bad in Seattle as in Manhattan. Charles wondered if Emmy had told Alison about her young man, the Vermonter. I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know …

  “How’s school?” Alison said. “What are you working on?”

  … where the treetops glisten, and children listen … “Sorry. What?”

  “With your students. What are your students doing?”

  Strangely, the effects of the wine were only now starting to kick in; he could feel himself inching toward drunken maudlinity, maudlinness, wallowing, whatever, and so he made a concerted effort to enunciate. “First. Middle. Last.”

  “Oh, I love that one! Any especially good words this year? Any cheaters?”

  Charles felt suddenly protective of his flense boys and chose not to share their transgression. “No.”

  “I still remember when you came up with that assignment, how we made lists of everyone’s first, middle, and last names: friends, family, celebrities …”

  “Adjective, adjective, noun, my name, go.”

  “Okay.” Alison squinted. In the flash of passing headlights, Charles noted etched dashes at the corners of her eye: a bulleted list that hadn’t been made yet. “Cruciferous Sartorial Manatee.”

  “Very nice. Now yours … Amaranthine Nautical Macaroon.”

  “Oooh … Cogitating Laparoscopic Marzipan!”

  “Echopraxic Fulminating Mezuzah!”

  Why did I do that? Charles thought. Alison fell silent, bit her lip. She didn’t deserve his unintentional cruelty. She missed Emmy just as much as he did.

  “You win,” she said. They drove the rest of the way in silence.

  Why is it, he asked himself, that family misfortunes tend to arrive in a pileup? Is it really simple cause and effect, or do catastrophes establish a new normal of sorrow to which all subsequent events must conform, a base to which only some things may be added? Once certain ingredients are in the pan, one’s choices are limited; you can’t make rice pudding once you’ve started sautéing a head of garlic.

  Charles noticed that the car had stopped.

  They were in the group-home parking lot; Alison was yanking her keys out of the ignition. Looming over
them was a giant Douglas fir, boughs saturated with rain, nodding like a giant narcoleptic.

  “We’re here,” Alison said, but it sounded like Wake up! “Are you ready?” she asked, priest to prisoner in the moments before an imminent execution.

  •♦•

  This person, my son, Charles thought, for the thousandth time. How do I describe him?

  From where Charles was standing, in the foyer, a short hallway led to the spacious, well-lit combination kitchen/family room at the back of the house where the six residents (four boys, two girls, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty) took their meals and engaged in what passed for social interaction in a group home serving low-functioning autistic children. The house itself was clean but shabby-feeling, with its paucity of homey touches (one of the hallmarks of a state-funded facility); its sharp potpourri of chlorine, laundry softener, urine; its childproofed cupboards and cabinets; the waterproof pads laid out on every upholstered surface.

  Even though Charles had been visiting Cody and his various housemates for years, he still felt as though every time he walked through the door, he was entering a new dimension, stepping foot on a planetary surface that was not quite solid but a swirling, liquefying mass through which he was eternally falling.

  It was nearly dinnertime.

  The senior member of the group—Cody—sat at his TV tray, immobile, eyes downcast. His arms were rigid, right-angled, and held aloft, his forearms framing his face, fists clenched. It looked as if he’d been frozen in the process of wrestling two flailing, disobedient antennae that had sprouted from his temples. Or, a more sedate description: his bent arms defined the parameters of an invisible box into which he’d inserted his head.

  This was a signature posture for Cody, and one he took frequently, presumably in the interest of self-containment and/or segregation, although it was impossible to know for sure. What was certain was that he could hold this position for hours, whether waiting for food or not. Sometimes he even held a slightly relaxed version of it in his sleep. At least, Charles assumed he still did that; he used to, when he was little.

  Alison emerged from the conference room. Their meeting with Cody’s team had officially ended ten minutes ago, but she was still talking to the social worker assigned to the task of helping transition Cody out of state-supported care.

  Charles tended to lose his civility when speaking with these people. He understood it wasn’t their fault but found it beyond absurd that most of the state-funded programs and forms of assistance that were available to Cody as a child would disappear—poof!—the moment he turned twenty-one.

  He lingered in the shadowed hall, waiting for Alison to finish her conversation. She’d reminded him that his presence in tandem with hers was unusual and thus potentially upsetting; she’d go in first and then gesture him in when she felt that Cody was ready to handle the unusual experience of seeing both Mom and Dad in the same room at the same time.

  There were five staff members working tonight: Raisa, Benjamin, Malachi, Tami, and someone new: a small, compact, brown-skinned woman who could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty years old and whom Charles guessed to be Filipino. He’d overheard Raisa call her Bettina.

  There had been a lot of turnover in the years since Cody had been here. This was understandable—none of these children were easy to care for, most had medical issues compounding their autism, all had very specific limits and conditions in terms of what they could tolerate, and state-employed caregivers in this kind of situation weren’t exactly recompensed at a wage commensurate with the work—but it was also unfortunate. Personnel changes were hard on the kids, and every time a new caregiver came onboard there were almost always glitches. High turnover was one of many factors that Alison, the Youngs, and the Gurnees hoped to eradicate.

  “Hi, Cody,” Alison said, acting and sounding like an ordinary mom entering a regular room greeting a developmentally normal teenager who was hanging out with five close friends. “How are you doing, sweetie? It’s me, Cody. It’s Mom.”

  Cody showed no sign of registering either his mother’s greeting or her physical presence; he continued to sit absolutely still, his dazed, unlit eyes directed at the empty surface of the TV tray. One of his upheld fists clutched a cloth napkin, the other, a spoon.

  Dinner hadn’t yet arrived—Raisa would dish it up at the counter and it would be served by the other staff members—but Cody’s meal would consist of partially thawed frozen peas, mashed potatoes, room-temperature fried chicken, and a heavily vitamin-supplemented smoothie. Except for that final item—getting him to drink it was a fiercely fought, protracted battle begun when Cody entered adolescence—Cody’s evening entree menu hadn’t changed since he was thirteen. His food preferences were nonnegotiable.

  “Smells great, Raisa,” Alison said. She introduced herself to the new caregiver, said hello to Cody’s housemates, and then settled into one of the folding chairs that had been set up on either side of Cody. Charles realized with a flicker of anxiety that the second chair was for him.

  “Looks like somebody’s ready for dinner,” Alison said in a joking voice.

  No reaction.

  They sat side by side; patients in a waiting room, passengers on a train. Cody’s posture, in this tableau, suggested an exhausted commuter headed back to the suburbs, escaping the stresses of his day and the proximity of his fellow passengers by hiding behind the pages of the New York Times.

  Alison looked up briefly and caught Charles’s eye. Slightly shifting her body so that it blocked Cody’s view of the gesture, she held up her hand: No, not yet, stay.

  Cody was tall, long-boned, almost plank-like in his slimness; big hands and feet; extremely strong and muscular. Ironically, he’d been gifted with a set of attributes that would have predisposed him to athletic success—tennis player, track star, point guard.

  The new woman, Bettina, set Cody’s plate on his tray.

  A moment, and then, very slowly, he lowered his arms and began the process of feeding himself. The fact that some food did not end up on his bib, his face, the tray, or the floor was a mark of tremendous success.

  “Those mashed potatoes look really good, Cody,” Alison said. “Be careful. I might have to steal some when you’re not looking.”

  Cody emitted the abrupt, voiceless Hoo! that was his version of a laugh; it briefly rocked him back and then forward in his seat. Charles was reminded of those odd, silent, featherless toy birds that balance and bob on the rim of a drinking glass.

  Charles watched Alison watching Cody. When another spoonful of potatoes started making its unsteady way toward him, looking like its final destination this time might be Cody’s eye, she rocked sideways, close to him, and opened her mouth. Cody straightened out his spoon’s flight path and successfully deposited the potatoes in his own mouth.

  “Darn!” Alison said.

  Cody found this hysterically funny. Another Hoo! propelled him back and forth.

  Another Darn! tilted Alison from side to side, and then a game began, a cross-species ornithological pantomime with role reversal: baby bird (species A) feeds self, mama bird (species B) feigns disappointment.

  This reminded Charles of another favorite book from his children’s library, Are You My Mother?, in which a baby bird determines who his mother is by determining who she is not.

  Darn! Hoo! Darn! Hoo! Darn! Hoo …

  Charles loved that story, although he’d always hoped that Mr. P. D. Eastman would publish what would be the obvious companion to that book, Are You My Father?

  It had been clear for a long time that Charles didn’t have the same permissions that Cody granted Alison—Charles’s mere presence agitated his son in some profound, mysterious way; physical contact was out of the question. Because he and Alison were never here at the same time, Ali couldn’t know that reminding Charles to keep his distance was unnecessary; Cody would let him know in no uncertain terms if he was too close. The saddest part of Charles’s relationship with his son was this physi
cal banishment. Yes, children need to be held and touched by their parents; it is also true that parents have a reciprocating need to hold and be touched by their children.

  Wait. Look. Something is happening.

  Cody’s spoon was changing course, banking sharply toward Alison. Slowly, slowly, with a redirection of his lowered gaze so that he now seemed to be looking at Alison’s shoes, he began tilting toward her—the oozing pace of tree sap on a subzero day—stopping before their bodies could actually touch but allowing his spoon-wielding arm to continue on until it came to the edge of the no-fly zone, the outer reaches of his rigidly maintained personal bubble.

  Arm and spoon halted, hovered, and then a tremendous exertion of will allowed Cody to press on, sending his lone, cargo-carrying extremity beyond the limits of his heavily fortressed personal space and into the unknown space of another.

  Arm and cargo arrived at their destination, coming to a full stop in front of Alison’s gaping, astonished face.

  Then Cody did a kind of thing they’d been told over and over again was impossible, beyond the range of his abilities:

  He fed his mother a spoonful of mashed potatoes.

  Ali chewed, swallowed.

  “Yum.” The small vessel of that single word contained a sea of gratitude.

  No giver-upper, my ex.

  Dinner drew to a close. Alison gently wiped Cody’s face as Bettina deftly exchanged his dinner plate for a pudding cup.

  “Oh boy! Look, Cody. Here’s dessert.”

  As Alison carefully removed a long smear of mashed potatoes from Cody’s jawline, she nodded to Charles to let him know he could come in.

  “Cody,” she went on in a slightly lower, slower voice. “Guess what? I didn’t come by myself.”

  Charles started toward them, careful to strike an energetically neutral balance between stealth and exuberance.

  “Cody,” Alison continued, “are you listening? I brought someone else along. Someone you’ll be happy to see.”

  His expression relapsed into its default glazed blandness, his isolation firmly reestablished. Anyone observing the scene now would find it difficult to believe what had happened between mother and son only a few minutes ago.