by Kate Gray
“Mr. Song,” somebody at the table says, and I don’t even know everyone is sitting down but me. “Pass the potatoes,” the kid says. Eating machines. Taylor looks straight ahead. Nobody’s home.
“Whoa, whoa, ladies and gentlemen,” I say, “this is not the feedlot. Put your forks down. Now, each person turn to your colleague on the left and your colleague on the right, and say your name and what form you are in. That’s it,” I say, “Commence,” and it’s a race. The younger the student, the faster it goes.
“Marty Kraus, Fourth Form,” he says to the kid on his left. “Marty Kraus, Fourth Form,” he says to the kid on his right, and Marty Kraus grabs a dish.
Taylor Alta, still not there. She turns to the student on her left, opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. Earth to Taylor.
Taylor / Fresh Water Pond
They looked like birds, but in rows. Six tables in three neat rows, an aisle down the middle, two birds per table. The tables hid wings and feathers, revealed necks, beaks, and beady eyes barely above books and pencils and three-ring binders. The ones who sat alone were the only girl in the eighth grade and a boy who looked at the wall. At St. Tim’s they called eighth grade Second Form, ninth grade Third Form. There is no First Form. Something like the British schools. Something else prescribed, like what to wear and what brand. The boy who looked at the wall wore a wool tweed coat with elbow patches and a tie bumpy in its knot. His hair like electric shocks, he could have been Einstein if he weren’t a baby bird stuck behind a table.
You would have known what to do. You had already been teaching a year in Philadelphia before I ended up in this birds’ nest, the faces turned to me, their throats exposed.
“Miss Alta?” the small blond boy in the front row said. He was more tree frog than bird, bright green.
“Yes.” His name was sure to be on a list, but I was all gills and scales, no hands.
“How many tests will we have?” the frog said. “How much are they worth?”
If we had been swimming, little frog and fish, if we had faced each other suddenly in a slow pool, I would have unlocked my wide mouth and swallowed him.
“Well, now,” I said, “your name?”
“Jimmy O’Brien,” the frog said.
“Jimmy,” I said, and evolution caught up with me. I was a fish with legs and walked to his table. My hands sprang from gills, and I reached a hand to him. “Pleased to meet you,” I said and shook the clammy hand he extended.
I went around the room, taking each eighth-grader’s hand, Second Former’s hand, and wrapping mine around theirs. I stood, and they sat. I found my bag and lists, my three-page hand-written notes for an hour-long class. I found my spine and hands and voice.
“We’re starting this term with South Africa,” I said. “Does anyone know where that is?”
And David in the second row, on the left, his glasses making his face a dragonfly head, raised his hand straight up.
“In southern Africa,” he said, and he looked to his left at Tommy Underwood, and they giggled.
“Right,” I said. “So, what’s going on in South Africa right now?” Ask open questions, said the articles I read on teaching, the only teacher training I had. My undergraduate English major didn’t include Education classes, and learning to propel my body over water and lifting weights were more my world than witty conversation about Mr. Darcy. Perhaps Jane Austen would have served me better.
From the back row, the desk with one bird, the tweed coat and wild hair, a voice fired words like a typewriter.
“A-par-theid, the in-sti-tu-tional se-gre-ga-tion of the black ma-jor-i-ty by the white mi-nor-i-ty,” he said each syllable, and he moved his head like the platen of a typewriter, jerky, quick, turning one direction, until his head reached his shoulder, and he said, “Zip. Ping.” And he spun back to the other shoulder, and started the typing-speech again.
“Kyle, is it?” I said. His name checked on my list. He nodded machine-style, precise, up and down. “How did you know that?” The other birds turned toward the back row, and all I saw were heads of hair, blond, brown, tight-curled black.
“Don’t know,” Kyle said. His metallic voice flat, keys striking. He looked down, his chin almost tucked into the knot of his tie.
You wouldn’t meet my eyes at our graduation. Your last name in the middle of the alphabet, you marched in line before me, the As at the end, and stood while the rest filed in. In the black cap and gown, the white of shirts and the white skin of most of us, our line cut the lawn into green halves. Two classmates handed out pink, green, blue balloons, and you didn’t take one. I did. The balloons said, “Apartheid kills,” in big black letters. Our college had not divested. When I passed by your row, I tried to turn your head my way, but you were looking at the bleachers for Mark and your family.
When my family saw my balloon, they shook their heads. My family believed communists were at work everywhere, especially in South Africa. Workers organizing and rising up were a sure sign. They feared Martin Luther King Jr., feared Gandhi. They couldn’t say “Soviet Union” without whispering it as if the devil’s name might draw the devil out. Your parents pointed at you, snapped pictures, waved. Mark beamed at you, and you waved at him.
Kyle didn’t move. His arms slack at his sides, his head almost to his notebook, he was no longer typewriter, dictionary definition, words. Two boys leaned into each other at one desk and whispered.
“South Africa,” I said, “is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, and one of the poorest nations.” Two days I had spent researching and rehearsing great paradoxes and twists of language. I heard none of the oohs and aahs I had expected. The entire class was pond-bottom sludge. Lecture was what I knew. College. This school the Du Ponts built, stone by stone, had teachers from the finest colleges in the country. What we knew from our training in those fine colleges was analysis, how to take a Geography class and break it into countries. How to take a country and break it into statistics. What I didn’t know was eighth grade. Second Form.
The bell at the end of the period was spring.
Birds became bodies, and Second Formers scraped chairs on wood floors, slammed notebooks, stuffed books into bags. They slung bookbags on shoulders and ducked by my desk at the front of the room. Almost in the hall, they spoke loud and bumped shoulders and elbows. They had five minutes to find their next class, and I had an hour before Fifth Form English.
As they left, I heard, “Did you hear him?”
I heard, “What is wrong with that kid?”
“Weird” was the thing I heard that could have meant me.
Song / Flight
Geese are disgusting. St. Tim’s is on the flyway, goose poop everywhere. Every evening lines of geese flying low over our heads, and every morning there are green globs all over the lawn. Geese aren’t even good fliers, but they are good for explaining to young Misfits of Physics things like aerofoil and parasite, profile, and induced drag. It’s easy, really. Air passing over the top of a wing is faster than the air passing below it, causing less pressure above, causing lift. Flapping helps. Sometimes.
When I wasn’t inside practicing English, I sometimes went outside to play with Kim when we were little. Tea parties in the pool stopped when I was five, but not flying. I was the pressure below her wings; she was the bird. Carla said she and her brother Doug did the same thing sometimes. Different culture, same culture.
Carla spent a lot of time with her brother in the summer, told me her dad would make Doug work the peach orchards, “make a man of him.” As soon as she could get away from her mom and dishes, she found Doug in the trees. A few years older than Carla, he’d be hauling limbs bigger than he was, carrying a tree saw in the other hand. Brother and sister transformed into bug-hunters, and that’s where she found her love of bugs. And she told me that sometimes when they couldn’t find bugs in the bark or leaves, Doug rolled up his sleeves, made an offering of his flesh to mosquitoes. He got them fat in a second. But he kept flexing. And the bugs
popped. Blood bubbles. He got four going at once sometimes, that was, until their dad found them. Carla said their dad could come up really quiet, smack Doug on the ear, topple him. Doug never said a word, though. Tough guy, her big brother.
Doug and Carla were tough. Their dad thought he was so avant garde with performance art he sponsored in his gallery, goat blood poured on walls, and the artists all in black. Carla told me about one who smeared blood on her breasts, and that was too much, so she and Doug snuck out. They ran into the fields surrounding the suburban gallery.
She told me they tried goose calls. Doug was better at it. Somehow his throat opened up, and his jaw unbuckled so his voice went hollow.
Then they tried flying. His back flat on the dirt, Doug took off his shoes and lifted up his feet. “Here,” he said to her, “lay on my feet.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’ll lift you.”
So she put her belly on his socks. His toes tickled a little, but then she moved forward and he pushed up, and she was in the air.
“Put your arms out.”
And she did, like Kim, and she was a goose flying south over the Delaware cornfields, and he made the noises geese make from the back of his throat, and he lifted her higher, way high, and his eyes were right in her eyes, except her body was in the sky. And she leaned a little too far to the left, and his foot slipped out from under her, and wham, gravity, she was on the ground. Her nose was blood and her eyes not seeing for awhile.
Doug kept saying, “I’m sorry, Carla. I’m sorry,” and really, it wasn’t Doug’s fault. She stuck her finger under her upper lip like her dad did, and pretty soon it stopped. There was blood all over her shirt and Doug’s shirt and on her face.
“Your turn,” she said.
“Not even, I’m too big.”
“Are not.”
“Am, too.”
“Scared?”
On her back she lifted up her legs and her skirt went up and her panties showed, but she felt safe because it was Doug. It’s funny the things she told me. He lay his belly on her feet. At first he was heavier than she thought, but pretty soon she got the hang of it. Her feet, she said, might have gone right through him, but his bones stuck. He put out his arms, and she held him up. She couldn’t do the goose noise. His eyes were in her eyes, and her eyes were in his eyes, except his body was in the sky. I can see them because we did the same thing, except Kim never lifted me.
Carla is strong that way. She adapts.
It was bugs that drew us together. Flying bugs: mosquitoes, dragonflies, flies. Not too long after she arrived at Tim-Tim’s as a Third Former, she was out staring at shrubs. This girl with her curls going all over stood in the middle of shrubs outside of classrooms.
“Excuse me,” I said. “You okay?” In between classes, I had a stack of lab books under one arm and walked up to her sideways.
“Better than you,” she said. She didn’t even look at me, kept bent over looking at a dragonfly, a blue-spotted brown one that stayed still on a big leaf.
“What do you have there?” I said. Two steps closer, and she jumped and turned at the same time, came down in a crouch. Her arms out, her weight low, she was ready to tackle me or run or slap me silly.
“Whoa,” I said, “just curious.”
“It’s gone,” she said. “Thanks.” And the dragonfly was no longer framed by the green leaf.
“Sorry.”
“Aeshna juncea,” she said.
“Sedge Darner,” I said. And that’s when she looked at me.
After that afternoon, we walked many afternoons, all over campus. I told her about how dragonflies move, and how some bugs live in water until a certain age and then fly, and about inertia and entropy and turbulence. She told me the Latin names of everything, about larvae and spiders and how she can see the web shake when a fly feels the spider approach. As a fifteen-year-old, she was the type of scientist I could never be: She was outside doing it. As a Physics teacher, I was inside thinking about the outside.
Taylor / Small with Him
The chapel, its semicircular arches intersecting, the power of Romanesque architecture to overwhelm with the sheer weight of stone, is a tomb. Nothing in the contract required me there, but expectations in boarding schools are like ribs; the bones don’t show, but they confine every breath. The cornfields surrounding St. Timothy’s were mud and motion and spiraling bugs this Sunday in late September. Cut short, the stalks stuck up like a bad crew cut. My feet, out of my shoes, were quiet in the warm mud of the path, and the flocks of geese didn’t know I was there. The fog in the morning helped get me into the middle. The geese snuffled while they dug down. In the middle of the brown field with black and white and gray geese, feasting on grain and honking, I was one of them, a member of a flock, following heat and wind and food. Four swans in the far corner of the field, a clump of white interrupted the brown, and the geese didn’t mind.
In the middle of the field was a red patch the size of a moving box or a cooler or a sleeping bag. It wasn’t the color of mud or cornstalks or geese. If I tried to check it out, the geese would launch.
In the first days after I arrived at St. Timothy’s, I made them. I sprinted right into the middle, ran flat out. The birds took off. Their wings pounded, and their voices went up an octave.
That’s what happened just then, but not because of me.
The red thing moved. First a hand came out, then it sat up. The geese went mercury. The red thing was little. Its stretch scared them. It was that student, Kyle, the one the other kids called weird, coming out from under a red blanket. His hair was sticking out, and he stretched his arms way above his head, let out a monster yawn.
And after the yawn, he dropped his hands into his lap and turned into a rag doll. After looking around, he looked straight ahead, and my maroon-and-gray windshirt stopped him. He didn’t move. The birds were rising and swarming into the next field.
Then, there was light on dark. His white hand moved back and forth, right-left, right-left, in front of the red blanket. Quick little waves. His hand a little curled.
I waved back. Something small in me was small with him.
And I stood there in my windshirt. The whole world went mud and cloud and swirling birds.
Rolling forward on his knees, he put his hands into the mud and lifted himself under the red blanket to his feet. Wrapped in the blanket, he walked toward me, a cocoon walking itself.
I stepped over the crew-cut stalks, and we met in the middle of the field. The geese still frantic and folding into each other. Plenty of fields, corn and soy, and they got mad at this one. This was their field, and this kid was in it.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“Praying.” He said it to the dirt, and then looked up at me. His eyes were blue, the pale blue when clouds burn off the sky.
“Then why aren’t you in chapel?”
“Why aren’t you in chapel, Ms. Alta?”
“Hey, attendance is mandatory for students,” I said.
“Attendance is mandatory for all chapel services.” He quoted the school catalog. The blanket made a circle around his head. He repeated my words the way I said them.
“Enough.”
“Enough,” he said. My sisters and I did this too often growing up. I took a big breath in.
“Look, you’re going to get in trouble if you spend the night out here,” and he started in, repeating me.
“Cut it out,” I said, and I reached for his shoulder. As my hand was about to touch him, he jumped back and toppled over. Landing on his butt, his feet in the air, he almost did a backwards somersault. He’s so little and light. He didn’t say anything, just rolled on his side and curled in the blanket, his head tucked in, the blanket over him, like he was waiting for something else from me. Maybe a kick. I bet older kids kick him. And his peers, Second Formers. Kids from elementary school. Everybody.
Stepping to his side, I squatted down. “Hey, Kyle,” I said. He didn’t move under
his blanket. He’s so little, little like a bug curled up, a curled-up bug a bird would pluck whole and swallow.
“Kyle, what’s wrong?”
He didn’t say a word.
The fog had already passed over this field and left everything wet. I sat down cross-legged, next to Kyle. He was a red lump in the brown of the field. He didn’t whimper or sigh or shiver. Pretty soon my butt got wet, and the backs of my jeans got soaked. Pretty soon the geese settled into the next field, and Kyle and I were the only two people in the world.
“Sorry I tried to touch you,” I said.
He didn’t move.
“This is a great place. I go here, and I can leave everything behind,” I said. Why I was talking to this weird little kid I didn’t know, this thirteen-year-old wrapped in a blanket in a middle of a cornfield. “Everybody’s always around. There’s no place to think. I can think when I’m rowing, but it has to be in the middle of a lake when everyone’s working hard, when everybody’s pulling so hard the boat feels light. I can really think then.”
A beetle crawled from under one of the pieces of cornstalk. It waddled because it was so big. Its brown was so brown, like the middle of eyes.
“But I can’t make that happen when I need it,” I said. “Today I need to think.” The beetle crawled under another pile of grass.
“About what?” I heard from under the blanket. No movement.
“About everything,” I said more to the beetle than the boy. “Well, we have a head race in a few weekends in Philadelphia, that’s a three-and-half-mile race, and the Schuylkill’s where my friend died, and the crew isn’t rowing together, yet, like Carla isn’t matching Buttons’ back, Carla’s really strong and all, but the whole boat has to move uniformly, and anyway, I have your papers to grade.” I’ve said too much.