Having gained an increment of strength, Glynis had sometimes coughed up her own sputum of spontaneous revulsion from the sidelines. He’d left the bedroom on a queer sort of high, apparently the kind of buzz you might get from chewing khat, the bitter leaves that Shep had explained underemployed slackers in East Africa ground between their molars all day long. Khat was a mild amphetamine, and Shep had tried it once. He said it left you edgy, jittery, annoyed for no especial reason, and primed for something that probably wasn’t going to happen. He said it reminded him of Jackson.
Pausing at the entrance to the kitchen, Jackson assessed that Flicka was only medium miserable—meaning, as ever, that she couldn’t walk properly or talk properly or breathe properly or even cry, aka business as usual—so he was not, for once, entering into the midst of a calamity, only into the slow-motion disaster of what they had learned to regard as normal life. Flicka’s glower sufficed for hello. Other members of the FD support group described their disabled kids as all sweetness and light—as taking suffering in stride and lighting up whole households with gratitude for survival into each glorious new day—and he’d always suspected the parents were lying. Yet even if this gratingly chirpy, accepting type wasn’t a myth, Jackson was relieved to have been awarded a sullen, aggrieved, precociously misanthropic kid instead.
Flicka was crooked at the kitchen table over her homework, a trickle of drool drizzling disdainfully onto the page. She could have wiped it away before it hit her algebra equations, but she let the saliva blot the numbers on purpose. “I wanna know why I have to learn factoring when I’m never gonna live long enough to use this junk,” she grumbled.
“If it makes you feel any better,” said Jackson, “your classmates who live to ninety-five won’t ever use factoring either.”
“Seems to me if I could drop dead at any time I should be able to do whatever I want. This is hardly making the best of a lifespan the length of a dog’s.”
“If we let you live like a dog—and not get an education—you wouldn’t even know what you wanted to do.”
“I’d rather watch Friends.”
“You’re a smart cookie. You’d get tired of Friends.”
“It’s all a farce,” Flicka insisted. “And it’s not for me, it’s for you and Mom. I’m supposed to go through the motions of being a regular kid who goes to school. So you guys can pretend you have a regular family. So you can pretend I’m gonna graduate and go to college and get married and have kids, too. As if I’d want the little brats, which I don’t. It’s all a lie, and I’m sick of it. I’m warning you, too. I may stop playing along.”
The trouble was that Jackson agreed with her. Maybe it would have been easier had they preserved Flicka’s “innocence”—translation: ignorance—but you couldn’t keep anything secret from kids these days, what with the Internet. He and Carol had signed up with their first dial-up service provider back in 1996, and the decision had been fatal. Flicka had readily figured out the drill, and her very first input into one of those early search engines—Northern Light or AltaVista—was the name of her disease. She’d stormed downstairs (which is to say, bounced down from wall to banister) and promptly vomited in a projectile spew of vengeful indignation. Their daughter hadn’t been offended so much by the prognosis itself as by the fact that her parents had kept it to themselves. She’d been eight years old.
So tonight he resisted the prescribed theater. He was supposed to chime in that new therapies for managing symptoms are being developed all the time and that she had no idea how long she might live. He was supposed to remind her that most FD kids would have been dead by Flicka’s age in the past—when she was born, her life expectancy was only about five years—but many now lived to as old as thirty. He’d heard this last figure touted out earnestly in meeting upon meeting of the support group, but Flicka knew full well that if you parsed this company line you figured out that just about all of them died before thirty. Flicka didn’t want a cheerleader for a parent, and he didn’t want to be one.
“Think of it this way,” he said lightly. “If your days are numbered, you might as well be able to count them.”
“Ha-ha. By the way, Mom left you some chorizo and chickpea mush on the stove.”
“Is it any good?” he asked distractedly, poking a fork in the pan.
She snorted. “How would I know?”
Jackson scraped some of the red stew into a bowl and slipped it into the microwave. “Anyway, Flick, we have to send you to school. It’s the law.”
“I can’t believe my dad is dragging out the law. ‘Arbitrary tyranny,’ I quote. Anyway, we could do homeschooling.”
“Your mother has to work to cover your health insurance. She wouldn’t have the time—”
“She wouldn’t have to do squat. I could hang out and read—on the few days I can see anything and I’m not spending every minute wearing the Vest, grinding up meds, practicing my swallowing so I can eat food I don’t want, doing those boring physical therapy exercises, and squitzering Artificial Tears.”
“Squitzering? And you think you don’t need an education.”
“I don’t. There’s no point training me to be a productive member of society when I’ll barely make it to being a grown-up. My having to go to school at all just exposes the whole thing as a big babysitting service. I don’t need to learn about the causes of the Civil War, and you know it. What’s gonna happen to all those facts? They’ll be cremated. They’ll literally go up in smoke.”
Having successfully taught Flicka the proper meaning of literally gave Jackson a profound sense of achievement. Curious how most of the time he was able to keep her indeterminately terminal status at bay as an abstraction, or as material for easy father-daughter banter—as theoretical as his own death. For that matter, his personal mortality had become a comfort. It kept them both in the same boat. “Don’t you like being able to meet other kids and make friends?”
“Not really. I’m more like their mascot. Being nice to me makes them feel better about themselves. They can show off to their parents by dragging home this stunted, scrawny kid who walks like she’s about to fall off a brick wall, and look all tolerant. Then when I drool all over the couch the parents think twice. They’ve done their bit. I don’t get invited back.”
The bell rang on the microwave, and he sat across from her with his dinner. He’d over-zapped it, and the chorizo on the edges had gone hard. “All your teachers and classmates seem to be in awe of you.”
“The only reason everyone thinks I’m so smart is they assume when I first open my mouth that I’m an idiot. I sound like an idiot. If my voice wasn’t all strangled and I was taller and had breasts—not that I give a shit about breasts, Dad. Please don’t go out and buy a stuffed training bra or something, ‘cause I’m never gonna have a boyfriend even if I liked some creep. Which I don’t. The point is, everyone thinks it’s amazing I can string a sentence together. And I cash in on Stephen Hawking. I can’t tell you, Dad, how many times I’ve been told I sound just like him. As if that’s a compliment! He sounds like a dork.”
“You could do worse,” said Jackson, blowing on his fork and mentally apologizing for having drawn the parallel himself. Of course, this line about not being exceptionally smart was a load of hooey. She was showing off how really, really smart she had to be in order to realize that in the grand scheme of things she wasn’t really so smart.
“I get better grades than I deserve. My papers suck. I can’t type. But none of my teachers have the nerve to fail me. They think they’ll be arrested. It’ll seem like discrimination.”
Since her papers tended, if in cryptic and sometimes unsettlingly parodic form, to reiterate her father’s ebullient anarchism, Jackson took offense. “Your papers may be short, but they’re more original than most of your classmates’ work, I guarantee.”
“Maybe,” she admitted. “Not that any of those retards know the difference. They’d ooh and ah if I turned in copy from a box of cornflakes. The whole faculty at Hen
ry Howe is scared of me. They’ve all been warned I can’t be ‘upset.’ You know, like Mom. Her calm, quiet, happy thing when really she wants to belt me. If they’ve ever seen me have a crisis, they’re really terrified. Like that Twilight Zone episode, when the creepy little boy turns anyone who talks back into a jack-in-the-box, or sends them to the cornfield. So nobody will tell me to shut up or give me a hard time for not doing the reading. If I don’t do this homework, nobody will say a fucking thing.” Flicka scrunched her worksheet into a feeble ball and tossed it toward the bin.
She missed.
“So much for your career in basketball,” said Jackson, retrieving the wad from the floor. He considered smoothing it back out and returning it to the table, but what was the use? He tossed it in the trash. Because she was right, on every score; she was already brilliant at factoring the variables of her life that mattered. He was supposed to be stern, to insist that like every other kid she had to master the basics. He was supposed to admonish her not to use bad language, too, but he hated parental priggishness, and she was only using the same language he did. On the other hand, letting her get away with not doing her math and saying “fucking” to her father’s face was part and parcel of letting her get away with pretty much everything else. He loved her, but she was obnoxious. He loved her for the very fact that she was obnoxious, which only encouraged her to be more obnoxious.
Nevertheless, Jackson did believe in education, because he hadn’t believed in it when he was getting one. He’d had contempt for his teachers in high school, sure that he knew more than they did, and only years later did he speculate that they might have been able to pass on a thing or two when he was still young enough for the knowledge to stick. In adulthood, he’d tried to make up for that misguided sense of superiority by cramming whatever information he could get his hands on, but it tortured him that he lacked a framework; he couldn’t sort this grab bag into neatly labeled cubbyholes but could only throw stray facts willy-nilly into a mental cardboard box. Much of what he gleaned online seemed tainted with dubiety, for the Net was like the Bible: you could find ironclad support for any old position if you snuffled around in it long enough. Forgoing college had seemed savvy at the time, when Knack of All Trades was inundated with more jobs than it could handle, and, hey, Shep didn’t need a degree, right? A university education was probably full of shit anyway. Still, that was only an intuition, and if he’d got one, then he’d have known it was full of shit.
What may have bugged him the most was words. In his early thirties, Jackson had made a systematic effort to improve his vocabulary, earning himself no small amount of ridicule at Knack, where he was razzed for referring to the “happy homeowner” as an oxymoron: “Oxy my ass, professor; our customers are morons, pure and simple.” (With the new wave of handymen, this was ridicule that he now rather missed. Practicing imprimatur on a wetback from Honduras would have been perverse.) But none of the words he’d learned as a grown man had ever taken the way they had when he was a kid. Their meanings stayed beside them, and he’d have to recite a little definition to himself of hegemony (and was that a hard or soft g?) before employing the term with any confidence, by which time often as not the opportunity had passed. Whereas cow was so perfectly synonymous with a big dumb farm animal that the word itself didn’t really exist. If he’d known what was good for him, he’d have memorized the dictionary when he was ten.
“Daddy, I had a spell in Carbon Footprint Lab and had to go home early!” Heather had tromped into the kitchen and went straight to the freezer for a Dove Bar. In the last couple of months, Heather must have put on another five pounds. Nuts, you couldn’t win. Let them loose on the larder, and they got fat. Try to regulate their diet, they got all neurotic about food and ate in secret, and they got fat. Maybe he and Carol were lucky that at least Heather didn’t try to compete with her older sister over who could be skinnier, a contest she could die losing.
“But are you feeling okay now?” Jackson solicited.
“Not really.” Heather moderated her boisterous demeanor, and put on a poorly face. “I’m still a little lightheaded.”
“If you’re not feeling well, maybe you shouldn’t be eating ice cream.”
“I may have low blood sugar. Kimberly has to eat sweet things all the time or she faints. Daddy?” Heather crawled onto his lap. When the heft of her ass hit a certain area, the pain was so sharp that his eyes smarted. He tried to rearrange her unobtrusively. “I’m having trouble paying attention in class, and I fidget a lot. I was wondering if maybe I need a higher dose of cortomalaphrine.”
Christ, she’d been fishing for the designation of learning disability for months. The cold truth was that Heather wasn’t as bright as her older sister, and maybe having a plain mid-level IQ was a learning disability of a kind. Strange how if you were straight-out dumb it was meant to be obscurely your fault, but with “ADD” your intellectual shortcomings became blamelessly medical. It didn’t really make much sense for the “learning disabled” to be given an unlimited amount of time to complete standardized tests, while the hopelessly stupid kids still had to finish by the bell, when both camps were victims of genetics. Hell, it was the flat-out dumb kids who should get the extra time, since they’d yet to invent a drug to make you clever.
“Maybe,” said Jackson. “But don’t you think the answer might be to pay more attention?”
“I don’t get it.”
“Paying attention isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you do. Something you make yourself do. Like you could make yourself stop fidgeting, too.”
“How?”
Jackson jittered the knee onto which he’d shifted her, and as she jiggled Heather went uh-huh-uh-huh-uh-huh and laughed. “Stop that!”
“I’m fidgeting! According to you, I can’t stop!” He deliberately kept jiggling her to the point where she seemed to find it unpleasant before planting his foot on the floor. “See? And you can do the same thing with attention. The teacher is talking about a story the class just read, and you’ve started thinking about what flavor ice cream you feel like eating. Then you decide to think about the ice cream later and think about the story now.”
“I don’t think it works like that. I think I need more cortomalaphrine.” Heather squirmed in her father’s lap and twisted her head. “Peeyew, something stinks!” she declared, and slid off his knee.
For once Flicka’s poor sense of smell was fortunate.
“Tell you what, you two,” said Jackson, fishing a folded sheaf of printouts from his jacket. “How’d you like to play a game?”
“We can’t play a game,” said Heather. “We don’t have a computer in the kitchen.”
“For this game you don’t need a computer. This is a brain game. A friend of mine emailed me a copy of a public school test from 1895. Do you know how long ago that was?”
Heather’s face fogged. “It was in the olden days?”
Even through thick glasses, it was obvious that Flicka was rolling her eyes. “You’d think a fifth-grader would be able to subtract 1895 from 2005 without a calculator.”
“Okay, Flick, if you’re going to be so hard on your sister, let’s see how well you do on a test designed for two full grades below yours.”
“Three grades,” Flicka objected scornfully. “If it wasn’t for all that time in the hospital, I’d be a junior.”
“Three grades, then. See, in 1895, this is what every student had to pass in order to graduate from the eighth grade in Salina, Kansas. Which is the boonies. Nowheresville. And we live in New York City, aka the center of the universe, which should make us more intelligent and sophisticated than the hicks in the Midwest, right?”
“Right!” said Heather.
“And we live in a time with technology and everything, and so if anything we should know more than they did over a hundred years ago, right?”
“Right!” said Heather. Flicka disdained group participation and didn’t chime in. Besides, she sensed a trap, and peered at
her father’s printout with suspicion.
“Now, Heather, this is obviously going to be too hard for you, because it’s meant for kids three years older. But Flicka should be able to ace it, since it’s for a grade she graduated from ages ago. Let’s start with the first question, which is a real softball. ‘Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.’ “
“My name, my name!” Heather clamored.
“Very good. That’s one rule. What are the other eight?” He could see Flicka trying to decide whether to play along. Since most folks did indeed assume when they met her that she was “learning delayed,” she rarely passed up an opportunity to prove otherwise.
She shrugged. “Countries. Cities. States.”
“Good. But I bet our friends in Salina, Kansas, would probably argue that place names count as only one rule.”
So Much for That: A Novel Page 19