Language Arts

by Stephanie Kallos

  He began prying the plywood off the fireplace, his hands bloodying with the effort, opening the long-closed flue, stuffing in newspapers, flattened boxes, whatever he could find in the recycling bin that could be set alight, striking the match.

  Then he hefted one box up and out from among the others and carried it to the hearth.

  Sitting down on the tiles (they were warm now and felt good against the cold clamminess of his soaked khakis), Charles began feeding “Flipper Boy” into the fire, one page at a time, as if he could unwrite the story, the tale he’d told as a prescient child, the fictional masterpiece that had come true.

  Paper burns hot, quickly. There was so much smoke.

  Charles heard a voice in his head, his own voice reciting the opening line of the fireman narrator of Fahrenheit 451—“It was a pleasure to burn”—and then a vision appeared: his ten-year-old son being transfigured by fire.

  Once upon a time in a small town in the Land of Sky-Blue Waters a boy was born to a husband and wife …

  Page after page went in; more splintered plywood; the sound of the fire growing louder, but never loud enough to drown out the trapped-animal shriek of Cody’s inchoate screams.

  They sounded exactly like Dana’s.

  Homo Faber

  Whereas some sense can be make of my brother’s noodle-pulverizing habit (from the first time he watched our father use a mortar and pestle to grind herbs from the garden, he was mesmerized), the reason behind his other primary occupation has remained a mystery.

  Beginning around the time I was born, whenever a magazine or catalog came into the house, Cody would snatch it up and rip it to shreds if it wasn’t immediately intercepted.

  What is further puzzling about this obsession is Cody’s fussiness about the kind of magazines he prefers to destroy. My parents endured many violent tantrums when they offered up periodicals that did not meet Cody’s criteria—whatever they were. They learned through extensive trial and error that only certain publications were acceptable. For example:

  People magazine, yes; Vogue, no.

  The Sundance catalog, yes; Bas Bleu, no.

  The New Yorker, yes; Newsweek, no.

  Cooking Light, yes; the Enquirer, decidedly no.

  As with the noodle-grinding, my mother impresses upon all of Cody’s caregivers the protocols surrounding magazine-tearing: it is an activity that must be strictly monitored; he is to be given only one magazine at a time; he is allowed to engage with the magazine for no longer than ten minutes.

  These hard-and-fast rules, however, have never been communicated to anyone involved in Art Without Boundaries.

  The guest artist volunteering this month arrives early and—assisted by Romy Bertleson—begins hauling the needed supplies out of his car and into the church basement. It’s a good bit of material, carefully organized into plastic bins of various sizes and weights; getting all of it inside requires three trips to and from the parking lot with the help of a handcart.

  There are stacks of precut posterboard, mat board, and card stock, packaged glue sticks, bottles of rubber cement, watercolor paints and brushes, used hardback and paperback books of all genres and sizes, boxes of greeting cards, calendars, stickers, photographs, catalogs, vintage sheet music, travel brochures, posters, junk mail. There is also an assortment of the collage artist’s most valuable tool: magazines.

  •♦•

  As soon as Roma offers up a copy of The Knot, Giorgia immediately knows the story they are enacting today, a prequel to “The Sunflower Bride”: she and Roma-as-Felice are studying hairstyles and makeup and wedding gowns so that Giorgia can learn how to dress like a proper American bride and make her husband-to-be proud. She mustn’t look like a peasant.

  “Devo carina per lui,” Giorgia murmurs. “O almeno il più carina possibile …” The models are all blondes. And so skinny! Don’t American girls have any curves at all?

  Giorgia turns the page. “Ah,” she says, relieved.

  “You like that picture?” Felice asks. “Should I cut it out for you?

  Giorgia pats her hand. “Sei tanto cara, sorella mia.” She looks at more pages.

  “How about this one?” Felice asks.

  “Hmmm.” Giorgia squints at the image appraisingly, tilting her head this way and that. “Forse no. Troppo fantasioso. Vediamo se c’è n’ è uno più semplice …” She turns to another page. “Quest’ultimo!” she announces happily. “Potrei farne uno come questo!”

  “Oh! That one’s beautiful!”

  “Bee-you-tee-fohla!”

  Giorgia finds more pictures she likes. Felice cuts them out.

  After they come to the last page of the magazine, Felice sets it aside and places a piece of posterboard on the table. “Where do you think this should go?” she asks, holding one of the cut-out bride faces in the palm of her hand.

  “Che vuoi dire?”

  “Remember? You’re going to take these little pictures—The ones we cut out? All the ones you said you liked?—and glue them to this”—Felice smoothes her hand across the posterboard—“to make a new, bigger picture. A collage.”

  “Colla?”

  “Where should this one go? Here? Here?”

  Giorgia pushes the posterboard aside and points to the middle of her white triptych screen.

  “You want to glue it there?” Felice looks around the room. Ah, Giorgia thinks, she has always been the most timid of all Papa’s girls, so worried about making him mad.

  Giorgia pats her hand again.

  “Well … okay. Why not? Where? Where should it go?”

  Giorgia takes the cut-out picture and pins it to the screen with her finger.

  “There? Okay. Perfect. May I have it?”

  Giorgia watches with interest as Felice turns the cutout face-down and rubs its surface with something that looks like a lipstick tube. “Sei così attenta,” she says with fondness. “Mi ero dimenticata che fossi così, sorella mia.”

  This is not exactly what Giorgia expected—in fact, this might be a new story altogether, one that doesn’t yet have a title—but she doesn’t mind. She is remembering when they were little girls playing with paper cutouts this way, except they had to make their own colla—when Papa wasn’t around, they collected the leftover flour from the panificio counters and floors, carefully brushed it into a bowl, and then mixed it with water. Their glue didn’t work as well as this, but at least it didn’t cost any money.

  Felice positions the picture on the screen.

  “How’s that?”

  Giorgia nods. “Perfetto.”

  “Show me where another one should go …”

  By the time class is over, the center of Giorgia’s triptych is dappled with cutouts of veiled and unveiled faces, bouquets, shoes, bridal gowns, and bridesmaids’ dresses.

  “You like it so far?” Felice asks.

  “Bene … Mi piace finora,” Giorgia answers.

  After Felice excuses herself from the table, Giorgia studies what they have made.

  Yes, this is definitely a new story. It lacks a title. The whole is not yet clear. There are many white spaces. But Giorgia has faith. What is needed at such times of confusion and uncertainty is what is always needed: patience and prayer.

  And look: Felice has left something behind! This in itself is a sign; an answer, at last, to Giorgia’s many entreaties to the patron saint of penmanship: Dear Saint Lorenzo—how many times she prayed for his assistance—Please make my labors visible to those who cannot see, please manifest in my humble empty hands the pen, and on this barren table the paper.

  And lo! Here they are, the tools she has longed for.

  “Grazie a Dio,” she murmurs, taking up the pen, rolling up her sleeves, resettling herself in the correct position.

  When Cody arrives, he immediately heads for Giorgia’s table; she is making marks on the posterboard.

  Romy arrives, pushing a cart with food for the not-Cody group. “Here’s your lunch, Mrs. D’Amati,” she says, setting a plate on
the table. “Hello, Cody. See the collage she made?” As she moves on, she adds, “You’ll get to make a collage today too.”

  Giorgia pats the table top next to her. “Col-la,” she says.

  Cody sits. “Coh-dee,” he replies.

  After lunch is over, Mrs. D’Amati and her group leave.

  The teacher introduces himself to Cody’s group and begins talking about the day’s activity. Moving among the tables, volunteers deliver the needed supplies to the students, two dozen PWAs ranging in age from fourteen to sixty. Each student is given posterboard and a magazine.

  When a volunteer arrives at Cody’s table, he leaps up, grabs the entire stack of magazines, and scurries away.

  “Hey! Cody!” Big Mal says. “Take a seat.”

  Clasping the magazines to his chest, Cody scoots under a table.

  “Cody! Where you goin’, big guy?”

  Cody puts the magazines on the floor and then sits on them.

  Big Mal walks over. “Give those to me, Cody. You know the rules.” He takes Cody by the arm and tries to get him to come out. Cody grunts, thrashes, and pulls himself into a tight ball: chin to chest, arms bent, elbows touching, forearms pressed against his cheekbones, fists like corks in his ears.

  “It’s okay,” the teacher says. “He can have all of those if he wants. I’ve got plenty of magazines.”

  •♦•

  For the next ninety minutes, Cody is oblivious to anything but his work. Here is how it goes:

  He takes the top magazine off the stack and sets the others aside.

  He tears out the pages one by one, placing them in a stack. Their edges must be lined up.

  He puts one page on the table in front of him. He tears this page into strips, sometimes the long way, sometimes the short way, but never on the diagonal. He takes great care with this part of the process—the strips can be different widths, but a single strip cannot be wider in some places and narrower in others; its shape cannot undulate noticeably. If that happens, Cody seems to consider the strip ruined, since he immediately crumples it up and throws it away.

  He goes on like this until every page of the magazine has been torn into strips.

  Today he does something he’s never had enough time to do before: he weaves the strips together into a bowl-shaped tangle that looks like a bird’s nest.

  He picks it up carefully and, cradling it in his hands, carries it around the room.

  “Ga,” he says each time he holds it out to one of his classmates. “Ga.”

  Egg-SHEP-Shun-All!

  Charles arrived on the doorstep of Cloud City Café, waved to Sunny the cook to announce his presence, poured himself a cup of coffee, settled into his corner, and opened up the Sunday edition of the Seattle Times.

  As was his custom, he read the first section while waiting for his food to arrive. There wasn’t much of interest today, with the exception of a page-six story that filled him with a potent melancholy: it was about the recently announced bankruptcy of an iconic American bakery.

  After greeting Jamie the waitress as she delivered his breakfast, Charles extracted the Pacific Magazine section. On the front page was a photo of him, Astrida Pukis, and the other three Nellie Goodhue interviewees, positioned within the Gothic-style niches of the Fisher Pavilion.

  These 1963 classmates did a fair job of predicting twenty-first-century life.

  Inside was the story, with Mike Bernauer’s byline:

  A half century ago, just after the Seattle World’s Fair, a reporter from the Seattle Times visited the Nellie Goodhue School in North Seattle to ask a group of ten fourth-grade Language Arts students what they thought life would be like in the twenty-first century.

  The article included a small partial reprint of the original piece, a photo of the class arranged in their reading circle, and captioned, close-up individual portraits the photographer had taken as they were being interviewed.

  Beneath Astrida’s picture: Robots will be used to do everything from cooking to taking people’s tonsils out.

  Beneath Charles’s: Everyone will take drugs that will grow new muscles and turn them into superhumans.

  Charles began skimming the article, hoping he wouldn’t find much mention of himself or his fictional masterpiece.

  These students—part of what was then a radical new reading and writing curriculum called Language Arts—first came to the attention of the Seattle Times when their teacher, Mrs. Eloise Braxton, submitted their creative writing for a citywide contest the newspaper sponsored that year: “Who will be the next century’s storytellers?” The winner of that contest was one of Mrs. Braxton’s students, Charles Marlow.

  Seeing his name in the newspaper was like hearing it broadcast in the room, a summons to the principal’s office for some behavioral infraction; Charles sank a bit lower in his chair and read on with trepidation.

  Mr. Marlow, 59, still lives in Seattle and for over 20 years has been a Language Arts teacher at City Prana, a grade 6–12 private alternative school. When asked if his experiences in that inaugural program influenced his career choice, Mr. Marlow chuckled and said, “I suppose so. Mrs. Braxton was certainly a dedicated and memorable teacher and her methods probably had a great impact on all of us.”

  That was the extent of it, thankfully.

  Of those ten members of Mrs. Eloise Braxton’s Language Arts class, eight were named in the original article; five of them gathered at the Seattle Center for this interview. A striking aspect of Mrs. Braxton’s fourth-grade Language Arts class is how accomplished these former students have become, in a wide array of fields.

  The article went on to list the credentials of the other interviewees—Astrid was referenced as a Seattle neurosurgeon who lectures at teaching hospitals throughout the world—and quote their reflections on their former predictions:

  We’ll be going to the moon and other planets in our solar system!

  There will be lots of inventions that will help us learn things faster!

  Everyone will have a telephone in their pocket!

  We’ll have ways of traveling underground like subways only much faster!

  Seattle will be famous! Everyone will want to move here!

  Cars will have a new kind of fuel!

  And to those ebullient, optimistic predictions, Charles silently cataloged his own, as laid out in “Flipper Boy”—a great many of which had also come true.

  •♦•

  At the parent-teacher conference in the fall of 1962, Mrs. Braxton began by praising Charles extravagantly for his academic excellence, exemplary citizenship, and prodigious affinity for the Palmer Method. In all her years of teaching, she’d never seen anything like it, especially from a boy.

  “Penmanship mastery seems to present a special challenge for males,” Mrs. Braxton remarked as she walked Rita Marlow around the classroom, “which is a great irony considering that both the Palmer system and its antecedent, Spencerian script, were male inventions. I have wondered from time to time if there isn’t some physiologic reason for the gender disparity, some organic cause that could account for the way boy students consistently lag behind the girls in this area of study.”

  Charles sat, waiting, a nonentity. Teacher and parent continued their tour of the room; Mrs. Braxton pointed with obvious pride to the many examples of Charles’s handwriting on display throughout the room.

  On a strip of orange construction paper thumbtacked to the wall where Mrs. Braxton exhibited art projects, Charles had lettered “The Monsters, Witches, Goblins, and Ghouls of Room 104.” Below this were class self-portraits. Charles had done a stiff, uninspired drawing of himself as a wizard; Dana’s picture consisted of exuberant scribbles rendered in white crayon—they were essentially bedspring ovals grafted together to form something that looked like an electrified snowman with numerous extraneous appendages. Because this self-portrait had been the result of one of their lunchtime lessons, Charles knew that Dana had meant to draw himself as the White Rabbit from Alice’s Adventure
s in Wonderland.

  Rita Marlow nodded and emitted an occasional monosyllabic sound. Her eyes kept darting between the door and the wall clock, and she moved with jittery hyperawareness, like a spooked animal. Although she was by far the lighter of the two women, her stiletto heels struck heavily against the floor; in the morning, Charles would be able to track her movements by following a smudgy trail of black, half-moon-shaped scuff marks.

  “Shall we wait a few more minutes for your husband to arrive, Mrs. Marlow?” Mrs. Braxton asked.

  “No. That’s fine.” Rita Marlow’s voice was burred, crenulate, shiny, like the aluminum rim of a Swanson Turkey Pot Pie pan.

  “Perhaps he’ll be along later? Perhaps he’s been delayed.”

  “Yes, well, in any case, let’s do get started. I know you have other families to see this evening.”

  “All right, then.” Mrs. Braxton indicated the chair where Mrs. Marlow should sit, waited for her to extract her cigarettes and lighter, supplied her with an ashtray, and then took her place behind her desk. “I must begin, Mrs. Marlow, by saying what an absolute delight it has been having Charles in my classroom this year …”

  Out came the cursive-writing tablets and reports and spelling tests and attendance book; Mrs. Braxton droned on about Charles’s successes. His mother inhaled deeply on her cigarette; she seemed to relax slightly, but did not smile. The minutes passed. Still no one acknowledged the subject of all this praise. Still Mr. Marlow didn’t come.

  “In conclusion,” Mrs. Braxton said, “Charles is a model student, a great help to me, someone the rest of the class looks up to and emulates.”

  That’s a joke, Charles thought.

  Mrs. Braxton fixed her eyes on him for the first time that evening, and for one heart-arrested moment he thought she’d mind-read his unvoiced smart-aleck observation.

  “Charles, I’ve selected you to be part of a pilot program at our school, an experimental curriculum that will be introduced in January. It’s called Language Arts.”

  She held up a textbook: Language Arts: A New Approach to Discovering the Joys of Reading and the Elements of Creative Writing. Its cover illustration showed a small group of wholesome-looking children sitting in a circle that included a very pretty young woman, presumably their teacher. The children held opened books in their laps; one child was reading, and the others were raptly attentive. Everyone looked very happy.