The splashing of the children was becoming intense. Dripping faucet water plinked in the sink basin. We sat at the kitchen table. I spread my legs and leaned back. Jenny held her teacup at chin level, near her face, giving herself a miniature steam facial. We talked about this and that. Jenny’s breasts showed beneath the fabric of her dress. She had graceful arms and slender hands. What kind of animal might she be? Ocelot? Sea otter? Certainly not a ruminant. Her breath blew steam from the top of her cup. I maintained an expansive lounging posture of alpha male insouciance, keeping my distance while subtly displaying, in the language of the body, mild assertiveness, a sexual openness. And I allowed my feet to come close to hers beneath the table—I was sure Jenny was aware of them by her chair. Her elbows rested on the table, her face floated. Her voice was mellow and inviting. “Well, Mr. Robinson, I mean Pete, what brings you on this visit?”
“School.”
“School?”
“Grades K through six, starting next week, at my place.” I put down my cup and leaned forward, facing Jenny across the table. We were inches from one another. I told her everything about the school except the political part, the “junior achiever” mayoral-campaign strategy. Also, I didn’t mention Freedom Field. My plan was to avoid that thorny subject altogether. I spoke freely on topics like moral guidance, A. S. Neill and alternative education, the Jeffersonian concept of the honor system, box lunches, and so on. It was a pretty speech, lasting about ten minutes, which was a pleasant surprise to me, seeing as I’d neither planned nor rehearsed. I wrapped up, “Jenny, let me assure you, it’s going to be amazing.”
“What’s this going to run?”
“Tuition will be enrollment-dependent. We’re looking to offer top-dollar education at economy rates. That means special emphasis on each child’s distinctive needs, within a friendly, traditional, family-style setting. That’s the home school advantage.”
“Susy! Brad! Come in here!” Suddenly the two sopping pink children ran howling from pool to porch to kitchen; the screen door slammed and daughter and son stamped in, streaming water. They stopped and stood in the dirty puddles they made, before us.
Jenny leaned over to address them at eye level, “Susy, Brad, what are you supposed to do before you come in the house after swimming?”
“Um, dry?” This from Susy, assuredly the leader, by virtue of age and intelligence, of the sibling pair. She clasped her brother’s arm and began tugging him roughly back toward the screen door.
“Hang on,” called her mother.
Without letting go of Brad, Susy turned, her quick and forceful motion requiring Brad to race around her in a half-circle, like a cruelly led dance partner. He almost slipped and fell. Jenny scolded, “Brad, be careful, the floor’s wet. That’s why you’re supposed to towel off.”
Susy said, “I’ve got him, Mom. I won’t let him fall.” It was one of those beautiful family moments, the elder child’s urge to nurture and protect.
“Guys, this man wants to be your teacher. How do you feel about that?”
I couldn’t believe it. Was Jenny going to leave the education of her children, aged five and seven, in their own hands? The kids watched me with blank expressions. Susy seemed to be squeezing down on Brad’s arm—she was giving him an Indian burn. I smiled benignly, winked in a charming, avuncular, fun/conspiratorial way, generally nodded and grinned, as Jenny pressed her offspring, “What do you think? Want to study with Mr. Robinson?”
It was all about trust. I was being judged. By babes. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might have to win over the kids. But of course that’s always the way. Parents seem to embrace, almost unquestioningly, this bizarre, superstitious belief in infant clairvoyance, as though their “innocent” offspring have access to deep truths lost to them, to the parents—lost to maturity, cynicism, compromise. It’s one of our most esteemed cultural archetypes: the Prescient Child.
Brad and Susy didn’t strike me as a couple of oracles. In fact, they looked a little stupid. Even Susy looked stupid. Her mouth hung open, her hair stood up in wet spikes. I wanted to come to her defense, to hers and to Brad’s, to say to their mother, Don’t lay this on them, it has to be your choice, you’re their mother.
But then Susy spoke, in syllables soft and quiet, too quiet, almost, to be heard. “Okay.”
It was sweet, I could’ve hugged her. The home school was now officially in business. Enrollment, two.
“What will you call your school, Mr. Robinson?”
Good question. “We’ll see when we get farther along. A school is a place to make sober inquiry into the workings of the world and the mind. The name of the school, the right name, should reveal itself through this inquiry.”
Robinson Country Day? The Robinson Academy of Arts and Letters? The Robinson Institute? It was, after all, my idea, my ideology. It was my school, in my house.
I made a total of seven recruitment visits that day and the next, was successful at each, and in danger of dying only once, when Deborah and Carl Harris’s automatic garage door/catapult discharged a fusillade of calcified coral fragments, missing my head by inches.
Deborah Harris cooed apologies from the house, “Yoo-hoo, Pete, sorry about that. I told Carl to turn that thing off. He must’ve forgotten.”
“I’m fine,” rising from the Harrises’ lawn and brushing myself off. “That’s quite a device.”
“Hey, Pete.” It was Carl Harris, emerging from the dark garage with a crescent wrench in his hand. This man had once spent twenty days adrift on the high seas in a rubber raft, with no fresh water, surviving on the blood and flesh of fish caught bare-handed. LOST PLEASURE BOATER LIVES! ORDEAL CALLED “HARROWING,” ran the headline. Looking at Carl now, you wouldn’t guess such a thing possible. His skin was white, he had a gut; he ambled splayfooted on short, bowed-out legs. “Almost plugged you, Pete. I’ve been experimenting with a new garage-door-to-air gyroscope.”
We shook hands, and I said, not discourteously, “I guess it’s a good thing you’re still experimenting.”
“Hell, Pete. I had no idea you were out there. Please believe me. Please, accept my apologies.”
“Apologies accepted. It’s my fault, too. We’ve all got to be more careful these days.”
After that it was easy to get Deborah and Carl to commit their ten-year-old twin sons, Matt and Larry, to the school. I felt no remorse about playing on the Harrises’ contrition—they had almost killed me. Besides, the important thing was the education of the children. “Okay. School starts next Monday at eight. We haven’t worked out busing, so for now it’ll be the responsibility of parents to provide transportation to and from, and also you’ll need to supply Matt and Larry’s lunches. I recommend a sandwich, Pop-Tarts, and a piece of fruit. You might stock up on eight-ounce cartons of low-fat milk. Additionally, we ask all students to bring along a favorite toy. I typically kick off the year with an open play session, in order to implant the idea that learning is fun.”
Deborah said, “The boys’ favorite toys are their bow-and-arrow sets. Is that going to be all right in class?”
“What kind of arrows? Do they have metal points, or those rubber suction cups?”
“They’re carbon steel shafts with two-bladed broadheads and helical fletches. They’ll shave a hair,” said Carl.
“Tell you what. Have Matt and Larry bring their bows and quivers, and we’ll work out something in the way of a target range out back.”
Which is exactly what we did, come Sunday—we affixed, Meredith and I, to the tangerine tree out back, a round piece of cardboard painted eggshell-white and crayoned with an imperfectly round, lavender bull’s-eye. I held the flimsy target against the trunk and queried, “Higher? Lower?”
“Higher.”
“Here?”
“Up more.”
“Here?”
“Higher.” She came and held the target against the tree while I delicately tapped in narrow finishing brads meant for fiberboard or plaster, for hanging light pict
ures. I’d gotten the nails from the tool cabinet in the basement. They were short, soft, inadequate.
“Pete, can we talk? About those fifth- and sixth-grade bio electives I was going to teach? Seeing as, so far, there aren’t any fifth- or sixth-graders? I mean, there’s Susy Jordan, she’s smart enough for bio, she’s smart enough for physics I’ll bet, but you know, she’s only second grade. I thought I might take the opportunity to switch over from science, and do an elective in religion.”
“Religion?” It seemed like trouble, tackling religion at the elementary level, though what kind of trouble, and for whom, I wasn’t sure. Meanwhile the nails were bending; it was as if they were made of putty.
“Pete, I feel like I don’t know anymore what’s up and what’s down. It might help me to teach a course in spiritual doubt,” biting her lower lip, brushing away from her face, with one hand, a hovering green bug. Meredith’s abrupt movement shook free a couple of imperfectly pounded nails, which trembled from their ragged holes and dropped to the ground. No way this crummy cardboard bull’s-eye was going to withstand arrow impact. I chucked the remaining picture nails and Frisbeed the cardboard over the pit; it winged spinning in an upward arc, planing skyward, six, eight, ten feet. In higher air it paused—the illusion of rest at the peak of ascent—before plunging to rest atop a triangle of nautical spear tips.
“Touchy.”
“Sorry.”
“What’s bugging you, Pete?”
I clutched the hammer. The sun was directly overhead and the air cool. There was a distant sound of splashing water—the Kinsey kids, no doubt, performing elaborate nose dives, cannonballs and can openers and watermelons and such, in their shallow aboveground vinyl pool. This mid-afternoon country club clamor of pre-adolescent recreation reminded me to take a stroll around the block and pay a courtesy visit to Delia and Hiram Kinsey, who most likely would voice no objection to sending their kids to school by way of a couple of backyards, provided right of passage could be obtained from the McElroys, which might be difficult considering Pat McElroy’s staunch isolationism, a position echoed all too clearly in the menacing advertisements posted on trees and the picket fence wrapping the McElroys’ quarter-acre lot: BACK OFF.
“Karen Kinsey is twelve. That’s sixth grade exactly,” I told Meredith matter-of-factly.
“What are you saying? I should hold bio lab for one pupil? You know, Pete, I’m having a hard time getting on board with this whole school idea. I know you want to help. I believe you want to do the right thing as a teacher. I believe you believe in education. But I don’t get it. Here we are out in the yard tacking up a bow-and-arrow target on a tree, and there’s a hole full of stakes three feet away, and I guess I don’t get it.”
“What’s to get? Archery as a phys-ed elective? Come on, it’ll be great. The target range is well away from the trench. Look, I’ll show you,” dropping the hammer and walking to pit’s edge and bending down, carefully, kneeling in the soft muck, one hand on the ground for balance, the other reaching over the tops of Meredith’s pretty bamboo spears (a narwhal and an inverted “pop art” snow cone cup), in order to retrieve the fallen target; and, target in hand, pacing off steps, toe to heel to toe, from pit to tree. “Right. The target range isn’t three feet, as you say, from the pit, it’s, well, let’s see here, it’s about, what? Seven? I fail to see the problem.”
“Seems dangerous is all.”
“Kids, Meredith. Kids. What are they going to do? And if you or I come out here and coach safe shooting, that’s a plus, as I see it.”
“How so?”
“Proper coaching inspires respect for weaponry and helps define the concept of sport.”
“Why do you think you have to do everything, Pete? This isn’t our responsibility. Other people’s children, Pete. They’re not our children! They’re not our responsibility!”
Such exquisite distress. But what, exactly, about? Was I being condescending? Was I lecturing? It’s a problem of mine, I’ll admit it, a tendency to become insistent to the point of excluding other people’s viewpoints. It’s something a lot of teachers probably struggle with in their personal lives: the adamant vocal style appropriate for driving home a lesson, and yet so hurtful among friends or at home.
Meredith shook her head and gave me a look it seemed best, in the spirit of marital harmony and academic diplomacy, to overlook. I said, “Do you suppose we might get a spare set of encyclopedias and dictionaries from one of the libraries? Hon?”
“I can check with Rita, but I think all the oversized volumes already went to Abe.”
“Abe?”
“He and Jerry and the other guys liked your idea of throwing books at the land mines in the park. They loaded up Abe’s van this morning. I forgot to tell you. They’re over there now.”
“At the park?”
There was no time to waste. I grabbed wallet and keys and hopped in the car and fastened my seat belt and backed out of the drive and sped off hurriedly through moderate downtown shopping traffic. On Water Street I got nothing but green lights all the way to Hyacinth; it was as if God were clearing a path. Explosions sounded from the direction of the park, dull concussive rumbles like construction site dynamite, audibly and subaudibly vibrating the hard and elastic surfaces of things: steering wheel, gas pedal, the car seat headrest, my head. Along the way, on Main Street, I noticed a bright sign in the window of Dick Morton’s clothing store, BIG WEEKEND CLEARANCE SALE! ALL MENSWEAR HALF PRICE! EVERYTHING MUST GO! and I made a mental note to stop in there later, to see about purchasing some presentable new dress shirts and a snappy bow tie to start off the teaching year.
At the park, things looked wild and dark. There is, of course, no auto access to the grounds, so I pulled up on the street outside, right behind Abe de Leon’s Dodge van and Tom Thompson’s Mazda. I shut off the engine, got out and locked the car door, then walked along the sidewalk, searching for a gap in the bushes, a route into the hammock. Everything was quiet, not even birds called. Presumably all the forest creatures were tensed up, waiting for bombs to go off. Overhead, twisted hardwoods draped leaf-heavy branches over thickets of briar and thorn that clogged the park’s walkways and nature trails, strangling smaller botanicals and forming a natural barrier between the roadway and the interior. It was impossible to see more than a few feet into that savage foliage. Finally I plunged on in, stepping lightly, pausing occasionally to orient myself, and to remove thorns snagging my clothes, brittle green points anchoring in the fabric’s weave, biting through to draw blood. Was Ben Webster still combing these woods for his vanished father? Or had son and dad reunited and gone home to a hot meal and comfortable beds? And Ray!—it grieved me to imagine a smart, personable guy like Conover, running berserk in swampy public hammocks, rending his clothes.
Too bad I hadn’t brought along Jim’s liver. This was just the place for it. The liver filters bodily impurities, it’s a giant sieve, a living trap for waste and virulent matter. These bushes growing everywhere, blocking passage, making headway into the park arduous and painful, were malignant floral impurities, invading and infesting a once pristine family recreation spot. Gone were the sun-dappled company picnics and barbecues, the Frisbee tosses and touch football matches. Now vigilantes gathered here to detonate explosive charges, using literature. And wasn’t this, in a broad cultural sense, impure behavior? In which case, mightn’t the ritual burial of a liver—and it needn’t even be buried, it could be unwrapped and tossed frozen into a patch of weeds, as a figurative, multipurpose cultural antitoxin/herbicide—mightn’t throwing Jim’s liver into the bushes act as a corrective to the strife and neglect that had lately transformed this serene leisure space into a grotto of death?
“Pete!”
It was Abe himself, hollering from the deep cover of a mountainous shrub:
“Duck!”
From the skies it came, a gargantuan blue tome, one of those Compact Editions of the Oxford English Dictionary, end over end hurtling in projectile descent, pages
fluttering and tearing in the wind, a screaming index of printed and bound lexical data, half a language heavy with gravity and gathering velocity. I dove for turf and covered my head as the OED cruised thumping to the earth.
When I opened my eyes I saw that it was the P–Z volume. A–O was lying nearby, loose pages from it papering the ground. The Supplement text was nowhere to be seen. Buried in some leaves? Already blown apart? Waiting, still, to be launched?
Here came the men. First Abe, followed by Bill Nixon and Tom Thompson and, taking up the rear, Jerry. They walked single file, like a ghastly family of four on an outing. They wore identical radiant orange hunting caps and Day-Glo pack vests over camouflage safari shirts. Each sported a hand-tied white armband that appeared to have been ripped from a bedsheet. Sure enough, Tom carried the OED, Supplement. He also wore a backpack. Bill, true to form, clutched a beer can in one hand, and in the other—this not at all typical of the man—a Webster’s.
“Hi, guys,” followed by handshakes all around:
“Pete.”
“Tom.”
“Teach, how’re you doing?”
“Okay, Bill. You?”
“Fair enough.”
“Hello, Jerry.”
“Mr. Scrivener, good to see you.”
“You too. How’s Rita?”
“Rita’s doing fine.”
“Say hi for me.”
“Will do.”
“Hi, Abe.”
“Almost clocked you there, Pete.” Abe offered me a strip of white sheeting. “Put this around your arm. It identifies you as a neutral party.”
I tied on the armband as Jerry explained the procedure: “Okay, first one of us throws his book, and the others try to get theirs close to that one, like in horseshoes. We want to saturate any area where a mine might be planted. We cover some territory, collect the books, and move on in a straight line. Slow and safe, no one gets hurt. Got it?”
I wasn’t sure I did. “Yeah, sure.”
Abe, crouching among the scattered A–O pages of the OED, shoveling up a thick handful of unglued papers, said to Tom, “Tom, my man, this one’s shot.”
Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel Page 10