Language Arts

by Stephanie Kallos

  “So it’s a matter of convenience?”

  “Well, when you put it like that …”

  Alison cleared her throat loudly. She reached across the table, gripped Charles’s wrist—a reprimand disguised as a display of affection; there was no mistaking her subtext now—and started making exaggerated, focus-stealing movements, as if their waiter were wandering the Russian steppes.

  “I’m curious because Alison, for example”—Charles withdrew his hand—“has gone full tilt in that direction. The religious direction, I mean. Have you told your friends about that, honey?”

  This brought Alison’s diversionary tactics to a halt. Clenching her jaw, she grinned tightly and said, “I’m in the process of converting to Judaism.”

  “Really?” the Young/Gurnees responded in sync; poster children for passivity and tact.

  “Isn’t that wonderful?” Charles said. “I find it wonderful. I mean, all else aside, being Jewish is going to do so much for her sense of humor.”

  This comment spurred delayed tepid laughter, followed by comments like Well, it’s getting late, I suppose we should be heading home, and then generalized business involving wallets and a resumed effort to locate their exiled-to-Siberia waiter.

  “I’ve got this,” Alison said, insistently waving her credit card as if bidding on some especially coveted auction item.

  After the Young/Gurnees were out the door she turned to Charles and hissed, “I cannot believe that you did that, Charles, ambushed me like that, embarrassed me—and on a night that was supposed to be a celebration.”

  “Did what to you? We celebrated. Didn’t we? I don’t understand why you’re so upset.”

  “You don’t understand why I’m so upset? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “What? My bringing up the religion thing? Are you ashamed about it?”

  “It’s not that and you know it. You promised me, you promised when I first told you about converting, that you wouldn’t make fun. It was cruel. It was spiteful.”

  “Don’t you think you’re overreacting just a little bit?”

  “Do not do that. Do not use that word. I am reacting, and my reactions are perfectly appropriate.”

  “Well, touché, darling, and I cannot be responsible for your reactions.”

  Alison inhaled sharply, as if she were about to deliver some stinging retort. Instead, she bowed her head and stopped her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “You promised,” she repeated softly, and then she stood, gathered her things, and headed away.

  “I prefer written correspondence to dramatic exits!” Charles shouted at her back.

  He took out his pen and inscribed a short sentence on his cocktail napkin.

  Then he signaled the waiter to bring him another glass of wine.

  PART THREE

  101 NAMES OF GOD

  I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept onto my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it was my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible … but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one’s life in one’s arms.

  —Arthur Miller, After the Fall

  You have asked for and been given enough words—it is now time to live them.

  —Meher Baba

  Personal Reflections on the Value of Penmanship as a Biographical Tool

  Have you ever tracked the progress of your handwriting over the course of your life? If you have access to personal archival writings, you might consider making a study of the way your penmanship has evolved over the years; it can be an interesting undertaking, very revelatory.

  In an opinion I share with my father, not nearly enough credence is given to graphology as a supplementary tool in the study of personal development. I think there’s an argument to be made that, for those seeking degrees in psychology or psychiatry, required course work should include a class in graphology; how much those students could enhance their understanding by looking at that most direct and revealing expression of the self.

  Among the books in my father’s library related to this subject is one he especially likes because of its chapter on presidential penmanship. Richard Nixon’s mental decline, Abraham Lincoln’s melancholia—all are clearly demonstrated. Even a novice would be able to sense a sickening, a shift.

  On Thursday, February 14, 1884, the day his wife, Alice, died, Teddy Roosevelt’s diary entry reads as follows:

  The script is quavering, the lines broken, the penman too weak to add a period.

  If great men are not immune to the effects of personality on penmanship, then surely neither are the rest of us.

  You’re Carrying Some Slight Magic

  It was nearly time for Charles’s senior-project assessment meeting (SPAM) with Pam Hamilton and Romy Bertleson, their last before the school holiday known as midwinter break; an unfortunate title, conjuring (as it did for Charles, anyway) that nineteenth-century hymn “In the Bleak Midwinter,” with its mellifluous but woeful lyrics: Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow … In Seattle, rain was falling, rain on rain …

  Charles filled the electric kettle with water in case Pam wanted some tea. Outside, another weather system—one that had been drenching the city for days—seemed expressly designed to authenticate Al Gore’s dire hypotheses about the effects of global warming.

  At this vitamin D–deprived point in the life cycle of Seattle’s citizenry, almost everyone who didn’t have the good sense to invest in a full-spectrum light-therapy system was stumbling around in a stupor of depression, lethargy, mental cloudiness, and unfulfilled expectations. Charles found that, more than at any other time of year, late January through March was when it was most difficult to avoid feeling as though he had let everyone down. The relentlessly gray, damp outer world revealed the projected truth of one’s innermost character flaws, an irremediable structural rot that was the deserved result of being foolish enough to seat one’s support beams in soggy ground instead of dry concrete.

  Many folks took heart at this time of year in the emergence of daffodils and crocuses, grape hyacinths and snowdrops; to Charles, they were accusatory, shaming reminders of neglect. Years ago, he and Alison had planted all kinds of early-flowering bulbs. Charles knew that there was a point at which he was supposed to dig them up and separate them, but he could never remember when that was, and by the time he did remember, they’d already pushed out of the ground and were huddled together in overcrowded clumps, like tenement families, smacking their yellow-and purple-and white-bonneted heads against one another in the wind with such ferocity that their blooms survived only a couple of days.

  Even City Prana’s most stalwart, reliable, and rain-proof students seemed to languish. Creative-writing assignments were filled with phrases like weeping trees and lachrymose moss.

  Many students and their families—younger versions of that special class of retirees known as snowbirds—fled the Pacific Northwest for an infusion of sun. Some of Charles’s colleagues migrated as well.

  Pam Hamilton, for example; some years she visited one of her far-flung brood of children and grandchildren; other times she attended the Cowboy Poetry Festival in Elko, Nevada, doing a lot of plein-air sketching and returning with emerging freckles and sketchbooks filled with vividly colored drawings of horses, mountains, and desert plants.

  She’d given Cody one of these drawings years ago—a herd of amethyst-colored wild mustangs, grazing and becalmed before the backdrop of a fantastically colored western sky. Cody couldn’t stop staring at it when Charles brought him into Pam’s art room once for a visit, so she’d had it framed and given it to him when they moved him into his first group home. The picture hung in his bedroom there, and in the three subsequent bedrooms he’d occupied since then, four homes in ten years, a visual touchstone through all the upheavals that Alison felt compelled to put Cody through—always with the best of intentions, a
lways with the hope that the next situation would be better.

  None of Cody’s homes were bad in the sense of being unfit, abusive, or criminal, thank God; never did they have to move him because they were faced with one of the worst-case scenarios featured in those newspaper exposés Charles was always finding.

  What drove Ali, what she really hoped, of course, was that Cody would be better, that these perennial change-ups in environment and personnel would spark some transformation. They never did. Cody, like those wild purple ponies, remained fixed, static, as if he too were held within a mitered wooden frame.

  Charles wondered what Pam was doing over midwinter break this year.

  His plans mostly involved helping Alison and the Young/Gurnees ready the house for the boys’ moving-in day, which was set for mid-April.

  Beyond that, he’d be grading papers and watching DVDs of films that took place in sun-drenched settings. It was the perfect time of year to revisit those Merchant Ivory adaptations, stories in which repressed, tightly wound Englishmen traveled to the Italian countryside, shed their inhibitions and their waistcoats, and magically transformed into skinny-dipping, freewheeling hedonists.

  •♦•

  “There’s this new movement called photolanthropy,” Romy was saying, “photography that draws attention to a cause or an issue …”

  You mean photojournalism, Charles almost said, but he stopped himself; photolanthropy was a catchy word, one that would certainly be a dashing addition to the common-usage dictionary.

  “You have to make yourself invisible, let the camera do the work,” Romy continued.

  “What happened to that woman you were having trouble with?” Pam asked.

  “Mrs. D’Amati? Oh, I thought I already told you. She and …”—Romy darted her eyes to Charles—“another artist have started to collaborate. I’m hoping to get a portrait of the two of them working together. It just hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Well, you’ve already got a lot of terrific images to choose from,” Pam said. “As far as I can tell, you’re right on track.” She glanced at Charles. “How is the written component of the project coming together?”

  “I’m still planning on writing American Sentence captions for the photos …”

  Charles knew he was being distant, preoccupied, not at his senior-project-adviser best, essentially forcing Pam to conduct the meeting without his help. But in his own defense, he was acting as adviser on seven other senior projects this year, a record number. Surely it wasn’t a sin to coast a bit on this particular occasion. Pam was the one who’d suggested they do this as a team, after all. She was the one who’d said co-advising would allow them to share the load.

  He needed someone to share the load right now. It had finally dawned on him just what he had signed up for in the next ten days: a remodeling assault on Perfect Pinehurst.

  The magnitude of what lay ahead—Merchant Ivory films notwithstanding—suddenly fell on him like a circus tent collapsing under the weight of a monsoon.

  “Yes. Right on track,” he blurted, sweeping Romy’s paperwork into a pile and thrusting it in her direction.

  Pam and Romy stared at him. Charles realized that he’d not been following their conversation and had perhaps spoken inappropriately. A compliment was in order.

  “You’re very gifted, Romy,” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t think it’s me,” she replied. “There’s something Diane Arbus said, about how having this thing”—she indicated her camera, which was positioned, as usual, at the center of her chest—“gives you an advantage. She said, ‘It’s like you’re carrying some slight magic.’”

  Romy smiled, radiantly.

  Charles’s breath grew suddenly shallow; he found himself staring. Romy’s use of the word magic—unusual in this setting—along with the measured, mature emphasis she’d used when speaking the quote, her satsuma aura, and the fact that she so resembled Emmy had the unexpected and embarrassing effect of bringing tears to his eyes.

  “Will you excuse me?” he said, abruptly taking up his school satchel and flimsy umbrella and heading for the door. “I completely forgot that I have an appointment. Please, if you don’t mind, finish up without me, and then, Ms. Hamilton, could you lock up when you’re done?” He left without waiting for a reply.

  •♦•

  Language Arts class did not prove to be the earthshattering experience Charles expected, although it was fundamentally different from the rest of the school day in at least one way:

  Before lunch that first day, ten exceptional children trooped to the library—no hall passes required—and joined Mrs. Braxton, who was already seated, not behind a desk but in one of eleven chairs that were arranged in a circle, each chair seat containing a pristine copy of Language Arts: A New Approach to Discovering the Joys of Reading and the Elements of Creative Writing.

  Mrs. Braxton did not direct the arriving students to any particular place; they could sit, she said, wherever they wanted.

  Initially, Charles found this egalitarian setup and radical freedom distressing. There was nowhere to hide from either Mrs. Braxton or his fellow classmates; he’d had quite enough of center stage at this point and had begun to feel nostalgic for his era of academic invisibility. He had other concerns as well: Were they supposed to sit somewhere different every day? Was the place each chose to sit some kind of a test?

  For the first week, these questions filled him with anxiety. If being chosen for Language Arts was supposed to be some kind of honor, he’d rather do without.

  As time passed, however, and it became clear that most children preferred to occupy the same seat day after day (especially Astrida, who consistently rushed to station herself at Mrs. Braxton’s side) and weren’t penalized for it, he relaxed, grateful for the fact that, given this configuration, everyone was in the front row, everyone was noticed. In a sense, everyone was a teacher’s pet.

  The class format was simple and unvarying: Mrs. Braxton greeted the children as they got settled and then directed them to open their textbooks to the day’s lesson, which had titles like “Story Basics: Protagonist and Problem,” “Conflict: The Heart of Story,” and “Character Attributes: Dreamers and Doers.” They began by reading a story aloud, one paragraph at a time, going around the circle so that everyone got a turn; this was followed by a discussion of the accompanying study questions, vocabulary words, and concepts.

  The stories themselves weren’t that great—Charles still preferred the fantastic narratives and characters of comic books and sci-fi/horror movies—but they weren’t bad either, Reader’s Digest–type excerpts from English-language classics like Huckleberry Finn, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, even Moby-Dick. More and more, he found himself looking forward to Language Arts.

  There were never any tests, and there was a definite sense that Language Arts class questions didn’t have right or wrong answers.

  In your opinion, what makes a character heroic?

  Who are the heroes in your life? Do you consider yourself to be a hero? Why or why not?

  What does it mean to be a dreamer? What does it mean to be a doer? Which are you?

  What is an example of an internal conflict? What is an example of an external conflict? In your opinion, which kind of conflict makes for the best kind of story?

  What is a climax? Give an example of a climax in a story you’ve read or a movie you’ve seen.

  Have you ever wanted something really badly? Was there something in the way of getting what you wanted? How far would you go to get something you really want?

  The other great surprise of Language Arts was Mrs. Braxton herself. A completely different side of her personality emerged during those thirty minutes; she was calm, relaxed, congenial—more like a tea-party hostess than a despot.

  A protagonist is someone you root for. Pro = “for, in favor of.”

  An antagonist is the protagonist’s enemy. Anti = “against, opposed to.”

  Astrida raised her hand. “Why isn’t it anti-agonist?
”

  “What a good question, Astrida!” Mrs. Braxton replied. “I can’t say that I know the answer to that …” She shrugged, sighed, and added with obvious fondness, “Ah, well. You will find, children, that this English language of ours is full of idiosyncrasies.”

  The best and brightest had no idea what idiosyncrasies meant, nor did they care; they were too busy being bowled over by the fact that Mrs. Braxton had just admitted to a roomful of fourth-graders that she didn’t know everything.

  Describe yourself using the prefixes pro-and anti-.

  I am pro-American! I am anti-Communist! I am pro-math! I am anti–fish sticks!

  Sometimes the discussions got a little rowdy, but Mrs. Braxton did nothing to squelch the enthusiasm so long as the children took turns, raised their hands, and listened with open minds to everyone’s opinion. She actually appeared happy—even happier than when Charles produced a perfect row of Palmer loops. What a relief it was to know that he and Mr. Austin Norman Palmer weren’t the only sources of pleasure in Mrs. Braxton’s life.

  Language Arts remained enjoyable right up to the Friday when class began not with a story but with Mrs. Braxton instructing the children to turn to page 60 and read aloud the guidelines listed under “Unit One Assignment: Writing Your First Short Story.”

  “But … what is our story supposed to be about?” Astrida asked.

  Mrs. Braxton smiled, tolerantly. “Well, one of the things we all seem to agree on is that good stories feature an extraordinary protagonist, so why don’t you begin there?” Astrida opened her mouth to protest, but Mrs. Braxton held up her hand and addressed the group at large. “Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time.”

  It was at that moment Charles realized there was a downside to questions that had no right or wrong answers.

  He and Dana continued to meet in the lunchroom, peeling icing and practicing unusual approaches to the Palmer Method, but as the days passed and Charles remained unable to come up with an extraordinary protagonist, he left Language Arts class feeling worried and often arrived at Dana’s table subdued and preoccupied.