by Robert Atwan
My son was a different story. I couldn’t pretend this wasn’t going to affect him. All I could do was think of my son in the future and imagine what it would be like for him to always tell people that when he was fourteen, his father committed suicide.
Fourteen. An age when every emotion you feel is magnified ten times over and misunderstood a hundred times over. An age that will be frozen in time if anything terrible happens within its sweaty, painful, pubescent months. Those teen years are when the scars happen. The scars you have to tend to the rest of your life, hoping they heal or fade away.
I grabbed a photo album full of school pictures and snapshots of my son. I thought about Chris showing me the photo of his daughter and how he wouldn’t let it go.
My son looks like me when I was a kid. You can see it in photos. There were some old photos of me mixed into the album I was looking at, and I held them side by side with photos of my son. We had the same pimples, broad shoulders, and awkward grin. Our clothes were even sort of similar—mine from the 1970s, his from the 2000s. You can even see how we had the same toys: Hot Wheels and Legos.
I showed him Star Wars when he was ten, the same age I was when I saw it. I showed him Winnie the Pooh and Little Critter books. I played football with him in the park. I taught him how to hit a baseball. We wrestled in the living room. I took him to Dairy Queen, and sometimes we walked to get doughnuts on Saturday morning. I played board games with him, and even though I don’t like board games, I was glad we spent the time together.
I wanted to do more with him. I wanted to teach him how to drive. I wanted to give him money for a date. I wanted to go to his graduations. I wanted to give him advice on something. I wanted to go to a bar with him. I wanted to do something for him that would always be there. I wanted to make him proud of me.
Just after midnight I went to bed. I had decided to tough it out. I decided to live. I sent my son a text message as I listened to people celebrating outside my window. It said: Happy New Year. Let’s make it a good one. I love you. Less than a minute later, he responded: Love you too.
I got in bed and wrapped my blankets around me like I was in a cocoon. I let those words sit in my heart for a long while. I breathed in deep, sucking in gulps of air and crying more. Then I tried to make my mind go blank until the morning. I pretended that everything would be okay when the sun came out.
The next morning I woke up and shaved and took a shower and drank my coffee. I went to work and took my position behind the info desk. The store opened two hours late because it was New Year’s Day. Customers came filing in, looking for books, looking for stories. Looking for the bathroom. I sat there, feeling fresh-faced and feeling like a survivor. I was ready to help anyone who needed it.
EILEEN POLLACK
Pigeons
FROM Prairie Schooner
NOT LONG AGO I went back to my elementary school, a Gothic brick-and-mortar fortress whose Escher-like stairs dead-end on floors that lie halfway between other floors and whose halls branch off into mysterious tunnels that suddenly disgorge a student into the cafeteria, or the girls’ locker room, or the balcony of benches overlooking the auditorium that doubles as the gym. Like most people who hated school, I wasn’t surprised to find my younger self crying at the back of this or that classroom, or staring up at some adult whose behavior had left me baffled, or wandering the gloomy stairwells, wondering if I would ever find my way out to a sunnier, less confusing, less confining life outside.
What startled me was how often I glimpsed the ghosts of classmates whose existence I had forgotten, the ones whose lives, even then, must have been far more troubled than my own, and who—even though there were fewer than one hundred students in my class—disappeared from my consciousness long before the rest of us had moved on to high school, let alone to college. Seeing those ghostly classmates, I wanted to bend down and comfort them, as I had comforted my own younger self. I wanted to assure them that everything would be all right. But I felt the way a doctor must feel approaching a patient who is waiting for a pathology report the doctor knows contains devastating news.
My own malady wasn’t fatal, although it felt so at the time. The symptoms started in third grade, the day a stranger appeared at our classroom door and summoned me to the hall. My classmates and I were making cardboard headbands on which to glue the feathers we had won for good behavior. A good Indian was defined by her ability to walk to the bathroom without speaking to her partner or digging a finger in his spine. (That was the year we discovered just how vulnerable the human body is. Twist a thumb between two vertebrae and watch your victim writhe. Place the tip of your shoe at the back of his rigid knee and effect complete collapse.) The edges of my headband kept sticking to my fingers. Not that I had any feathers to paste on the cardboard anyway.
“This is Mr. Spiro, the school psychologist,” my teacher said. “He wants to talk to you in his office.” Then she went back in and shut the door.
I had been causing a lot of trouble. The year before, my teacher had joked that she was going to bring in her dirty laundry to keep me occupied. In reality, Mrs. Hoos had the sense to let me do whatever I wanted, as long as I didn’t disturb my neighbors. At the start of each day, I stowed a dozen books beneath my seat and read them one by one, looking up to see if she was teaching us something new, which she rarely if ever was.
I still love Gertrude Hoos, who was as lumpy and soft as the bag of dirty laundry I gladly would have washed if only she had brought it in. But my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Neff, was made of starchier, sterner stuff. By God, if we were reading aloud, paragraph by painful paragraph, I was going to sit there with my book open to the appropriate page and not read a word ahead. If we were learning to add, I would sit there and learn to add, even if I already had learned that skill at home by keeping score when my grandmother and I played gin.
Mrs. Neff gave me a workbook in which I could teach myself to multiply, but working in that workbook was a privilege and not a right. The more bored I grew, the more I misbehaved, for which I lost the privilege of working in my workbook. Multiplication began to seem like a meal I would never get to eat, because I was too exhausted by my hunger ever to reach the plate. This continued until Mrs. Neff and I each wished the other gone. And since she was the teacher, she had the power to make her wish come true.
Warily, I followed Mr. Spiro to the third floor of our building and then down the main hall, where we entered a narrow door, traversed a short, dark passage, and climbed a few more steps. The room was oddly shaped, with slanted, low ceilings that met at a peak on top. We were in the belfry! You could see it from the playground, where the older kids frightened us with stories about the vampires who lived inside. There was an open window along one wall, but the office was so hot I could barely breathe.
Mr. Spiro settled behind his desk and motioned me to sit beside it. Bushy black curls exploded from his head like the lines a cartoonist draws to indicate that a character is confused or drunk. Mr. Spiral, I remember thinking, which is how, four decades later, I can still recall his name. His heavy black brows, gigantic nose, and thickly thatched mustache seemed connected to his glasses, like the disguises you could buy at Woolworth’s. His suit was white, with thin red stripes, like the boxes movie popcorn came in, and he wore a bright red bow tie. This was 1964. I had never seen a man in a shirt that wasn’t white or a suit that wasn’t dark or a tie that called attention to itself, and I felt the thrill and dread any child would feel at being selected from the audience by a clown.
He must have sensed that I distrusted him. “Would you like some Oreos?” Mr. Spiro asked, then slid a packet across the desk.
I can still see those cookies, so chocolaty rich and round, the red thread around their cellophane cocoon just waiting to be unzipped. But a voice in my head warned me to be careful. It was as if that clown had motioned me to sniff the bright pink carnation fastened to his lapel.
“How do I know these cookies aren’t poisoned?”
Those bushy black brows s
hot up. “Do you really think I would poison you?”
“Well,” I said, “you’re a stranger. How do I know you wouldn’t?”
I don’t remember what happened next. He probably reassured me that the Oreos were fit to eat. I don’t remember if I ate them. All I know is that he changed the subject. In a falsely jolly tone, he said, “So! I hear you want to be an authoress!”
If he had asked if I wanted to be an author, I would have told him yes. But I had never heard that word, authoress, and it seemed dangerous as a snake. Authoress, it hissed, like adulteress, a word I had encountered in a novel and didn’t quite understand, except to know I didn’t want to be one. “Who told you that?” I demanded.
“Why, your teacher, Mrs. Neff.”
“That’s because she doesn’t like me,” I said. “She probably told you a lot of other lies, but those aren’t true either.”
He began scribbling on a pad, and even a child of eight knows that anything a school psychologist writes about you on a pad can’t be any good. Outside, on the ledge, a pair of plump gray pigeons bobbled back and forth like seedy vaudeville comics (this was the Catskills, after all), pigeon variations of Don Rickles and Buddy Hackett, who sidestepped toward each other, traded a dirty joke, bumped shoulders in raunchy glee, and shuckled back across the stage.
“Well then.” He finished writing. “I hear you’re a very bright little girl, and I would like you to take some tests that are designed to show if you’re smart enough to skip a grade.”
Tests? I thought. What kind of tests? Who had suggested I skip a grade?
Then it came to me: Mrs. Neff. If she couldn’t get rid of me any other way, she would skip me a year ahead. I would miss Harry and Eric, the boys I couldn’t resist jabbing in the spine as we walked double file down the hall. But fourth grade had to be less boring than third. Bring on the tests! I thought, expecting a mimeographed sheet of addition and subtraction problems or some paragraphs to read aloud.
Mr. Spiro brought out a flipbook. He showed me drawing after drawing, asking me to describe what was missing from each. But how could a person know what was missing from a picture if there was nothing to compare it to? Did every house have a chimney? Was the daisy missing a petal, or had someone merely plucked it?
After we finished with the flipbook, Mr. Spiro brought out a board fitted with colored shapes. He would flash a pattern on a card and ask me to reproduce it. As I recall, he timed me. But as vivid as my memory is for people and events, I have a terrible time remembering patterns and facts. Had the purple triangle been positioned above or below the line? Had the rectangle been blue or green? And who had decreed that playing with colored shapes should determine if a child was ready to skip a grade? It wasn’t enough to be smart; you needed to be smart in the ways grownups wanted you to be smart.
Finally Mr. Spiro presented me with a test like the ones I was used to taking. “If you want to buy three pencils,” he began, “and one pencil costs four cents, how much would it cost you to buy all three?”
I was about to add three and four when I realized that this problem required a different kind of math. I could have figured out the answer by adding four three times, but something about being so bored that I had misbehaved, which had denied me the chance to work in my workbook, which had denied me the chance to learn to multiply, which seemed to be preventing me from going on to fourth grade, where I might be less bored and less tempted to misbehave, made me cry out, “That isn’t fair!”
But when Mr. Spiro asked me what wasn’t fair, I couldn’t put my grievance into words. We sat in silent stalemate until a pigeon flew in the room. It flapped around our heads and beat its wings against the walls. But this struck me as no more strange than anything else that had happened in that room; for all I knew, Mr. Spiro had trained that pigeon to fly in on cue and test some aspect of my psychology I would need to pass fourth grade. The safest response, I decided, was no response at all.
Mr. Spiro, on the other hand, leapt up on his desk and started waving his arms and shouting. Imagine sitting in a chair looking up at a full-grown man in a red-and-white-striped suit who is standing on his desk flailing at a pigeon. I might have understood if he had been flailing at a bee, but what harm could a pigeon do?
At last the pigeon found a crevice at the very top of the belfry and disappeared inside. My final glimpse of its bobbing rear is the image I still see whenever I hear the word pigeonholed.
Mr. Spiro smoothed his suit, climbed down from his desk, and asked me why I hadn’t been more upset. Hadn’t I noticed a pigeon was in the room?
All these years later, I still remember what I said. “Why should I be upset? This isn’t my office. I’m not the one who has to clean up after it.”
Then I remember nothing more until a disheveled Mr. Spiro led me back to class. Later he told my mother that I wasn’t emotionally ready to skip a grade. The experience left me more resentful than ever. I misbehaved more and more. The following year, my teacher grew so impatient with my incessant talking that in front of everyone else she said, “Eileen, has anyone ever told you how obnoxious you are?”
Obnoxious, I repeated, delighted and appalled by the toxicity of the word. Obnoxious, was I? Fine. I shunned the company of the other girls and hung around with the roughest boys, who were even more obnoxious than I was. I still did well on tests—what was I supposed to do, pretend that I didn’t know how to add (or multiply, for that matter)? But I refused to act the part of the well-mannered little lady the grownups wanted me to play.
I looked for Mr. Spiro, but I never saw the man again. I searched in vain for his secret office. From outside, on the playground, I could look up and see the belfry. But the windows were now boarded up, and the pigeons, like me, couldn’t find a way to get inside.
That is, until the first day of sixth grade. Climbing to the third floor of our building, I followed the directions I had been given to the dead-end passage to my class, where I saw a small alcove that led to what once must have been Mr. Spiro’s office. My teacher that year—let’s call him Mr. F—had persuaded the administration to let him board up the windows and use the belfry as a darkroom. Or he hadn’t bothered to ask permission and simply had gone ahead and done it.
Mr. F seemed even more bored by school than I was. At least once a day he would put his feet on his desk, tell us how desperate he was to quit his teaching job and work full-time as a photographer, then lovingly describe the Hasselblad camera he was saving up to buy. Unfortunately, my parents and Mr. F’s parents were friends. If one of my classmates misbehaved, Mr. F pushed him in the darkroom and we heard terrible bangs and crashes. But nothing I did, no matter how unruly, earned me so much as a timid reprimand. My status as the smartest girl, coupled with my complete disregard for other people’s feelings and my lack of social grace, would have made me a pariah anyway. But Mr. F brought that fate upon me even sooner by handing back a test on which I had scored an A, asking me to stand, and demanding of my classmates that they try to be more like me.
Complaining about being praised is like complaining about being pretty. Even then I knew it was better to be me than Pablo Rodriguez, whose parents were migrant farmers and who, in sixth grade, could barely read or write, or the Buck brothers, Phil and Gregory, who seemed to get punished for no other reason than being large and male and black. But if I was so unhappy, it defies me to imagine how much angrier and unhappier kids like Pablo or Phil or Gregory must have been.
A few weeks into term, I developed a crush on the boy across the aisle. He was handsome, thin, and lithe, with curly red hair and freckles. His name was Walter Rustic, which is why, whenever I read that ballad about the passionate shepherd wooing his lass (“Come live with me and be my love/And we will all the pleasures prove”), I imagine Walter Rustic saying those lines to me.
All of us were at the stage where we chased each other around the playground and tried to throw each other down in that hysteria-tinged way of not-quite-adolescents who don’t know any other mea
ns to touch or be touched. I was wearing a brand-new coat, which Walter had grabbed to slow me. As ecstatic as I was that he found me worthy of pursuit, I was upset that he had ripped the lining. My mother was always scolding me for ruining my clothes, and I was sure to get in trouble.
I hate to think that I squealed on Walter. I prefer to believe that Mr. F saw the ripped coat and asked me who had torn it. Either way, I watched in horror as he tugged Walter by the ear into that dreadful belfry—the darkroom, I suddenly thought—and we listened to the thwacks and grunts of a grown man throwing a boy half his size against a wall. I covered my ears and wondered what had happened to that pigeon. Had it made a nest inside that wall? What could it find to eat? Perhaps it subsisted on the crumbs of Oreos left by children who had accepted Mr. Spiro’s gift.
Then Walter disappeared. Not that day. Or the next. But he didn’t graduate from high school with the rest of us. My lack of popularity had reached such spectacular heights by then I couldn’t be bothered to consider that anyone else might be miserable for better reasons. But miserable they must have been. Kids killed themselves and killed each other. One of my classmates hiked out into the woods, put his rifle in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. Another set fire to her house with her family asleep inside. A carload of boys died in a drunk-driving accident. But no matter who disappeared or how, no one saw fit to discuss the matter with us. The job of a school psychologist isn’t, as people think, to offer counseling for troubled kids; it’s to administer IQ tests.
I have no memory of Walter Rustic after we left sixth grade. If I hadn’t gone back to my elementary school, I might have lived another forty years without wondering where he had gone. As it is, I called a friend who had been in that sixth-grade class. Walter? she said. Hadn’t I heard? He’d had a problem with drugs. Maybe mental illness had been involved. She didn’t know all the facts—she had gotten the information secondhand from her brother, who had been friends with Walter’s older brother, Frank, before Frank left town for Vegas. But Walter had been living on the streets in Corpus Christi, Texas, and he had fallen asleep in a dumpster. A garbage truck came along and turned the dumpster upside down and Walter’s skull got crushed.