A chart I remember seeing in an undergraduate psychology survey course fills the right-hand page; dense narrative is on the left. In bold at the top are two words announcing the theme of the chapter: Scientific Support. I read the first paragraph.
It’s difficult to use the term “science” in the same sentence with phrases like “Henry Goddard, Director of Research at the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys” and “the greatest threat to civilization is in feebleminded individuals spreading their defect to future generations,” but I continue along, referencing the bell curve on the facing page as I read.
There’s no arguing that a thirteen-year-old with a mental age of two is an outlier on any intelligence measurement scale, but the casualness with which the term “idiot” got tossed around in the first part of the twentieth century is shocking. I check out the chart on the next page, a handy key to the categories. Less than seventy falls into the general category of “feebleminded,” with idiots at the bottom, imbeciles just above them—but still below fifty, and morons in the purgatory of fifty to sixty-nine.
Another page lauds Alfred Binet as the genius behind the one-hundred-point system, but he gets only a quick mention before the focus shifts to Henry Goddard and the broadening of standardized testing and the advantages of identifying mentally deficient children at the earliest opportunity. The name Goddard strikes a bell, and I close my eyes in an effort to visualize where I’ve seen it. On a car? No, that’s not right. On something with wheels, though. Something larger than a car.
A bus. A silver bus.
Quickly, I scan the shelf behind me for what I need. Three over is a large D-ring binder labeled Silver School Inventory with the current year. White tabs with bold black labels, each a state, separate the pages. I want the Ms.
They’re listed by county, and I let my fingers move down pages until I find Montgomery. And I read.
Davenport
Fernald
Galton
Goddard
Harriman
Laughlin
Noll
Sanger
Thomson
Almost all of the names are unfamiliar, or they were unfamiliar before a few minutes ago. Automatically, I turn toward the first bookshelf, pushing the wastebasket out of my way and heaving the file cabinet a few inches forward, enough to read two of the titles.
Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900–1940
The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness
Other books aren’t books but journals. Inside a 1912 volume of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal is a bookmark, and the pages separate on their own to the text of an oration by Walter Fernald. Its title is enough to make my morning coffee rise up in a wash of bitterness: “The Burden of Feeble-Mindedness.”
What the shit?
Malcolm’s computer is off-limits—something to do with security clearance—so I fetch my own laptop from my own desk and kneel down among the scattered books and journals, ears cocked like a wild animal’s for any sound from downstairs. My hands are shaking so badly I fail twice at the right password, and the little box shakes a schoolmarmish no no no at me each time I press return. On the third try, I hit the button to show what I’m typing, reading over the string letter by letter. It’s correct—I know it’s correct—but the box still shakes, like a wagging finger.
A wagging finger belonging to my husband, telling me it isn’t only his computer that’s off-limits.
He’s locked me out of my own laptop.
Twenty-Six
I’m about to use my phone as a last resort when I decide to call my parents instead, and in fifteen minutes I’m in the car, on my way north and west.
Madeleine Sinclair’s saccharine voice answers the interviewer’s question on a public radio talk show I used to enjoy, back when the guests were people who had more interesting things to say. I remember Queen Noor of Jordan talking about the importance of cross-cultural dialogue, Ursula Le Guin confessing the writing challenges that come with motherhood, Ray Charles waxing nostalgic about watching the Grand Ole Opry as a child. That was then; this is now.
“And we have exciting projects in the pipeline,” Madeleine adds. “Projects that will take the Fitter Family Campaign to the next level.”
“Fuck your Fitter Family Campaign,” I say to the radio as I weave through rush hour traffic, eager to escape the chain of metal coffins rolling along I-66 and reach empty side roads. So far, Madeleine Sinclair’s projects have taken my family to two exciting new levels: I fear for my youngest daughter, currently sitting on a yellow bus, alone, counting telephone poles on her way to Kansas; and I’m experiencing a renewed disgust for my husband.
If that isn’t exciting, I don’t know what is.
I shut the radio off and think about what I’ll say to Oma or, more importantly, what I want Oma to say to me. She has more to tell, and I’m ready to listen. Or I think I am.
There was a point in my teens when she and I stopped talking, around the time Malcolm and I experienced our first clumsy fumble in his car, after we had made the step from “least desirable” to “in crowd.” Oma didn’t like me very much then.
I tried to tell her about how awful things were in the before times, when I flushed red with embarrassment if our gym teacher insisted we practice cartwheels, when my feet got tangled up in a jump rope, when I teetered and fell on my ass before completing even one evolution of hopscotch. Name a playground game—catch, capture the flag, hide-and-seek, tug-of-war—and I sucked at it. I didn’t come home with skinned knees and bruised elbows, but I still felt the sting of scraped skin and the throb of ruptured blood vessels. They were invisible wounds, but real to me.
My mother, ever clinically sensible, applied the best salve she knew.
“You don’t have to be exactly like them, Elena,” she would say. “You’re better in your own way. You’re smart.”
Yes, there was that.
I took her words to heart, grinning smugly each time I finished a test first and walked my paper up to the teacher’s desk with thirty minutes to spare, each time the national aptitude reports came in and my scores shone with dark bars and ninety-ninth percentiles. I taught myself insults in Latin and ancient Greek, used them whenever some mush-brained cheerleader flopped next to me in her short little skirt on the day of a game.
Eventually, I found balance, fell in with the smart overachiever set while still finding time for things like makeup and trendy shoes.
Fell in with Malcolm.
Now that Madeleine Sinclair isn’t penetrating my personal space, the car is too quiet. I set the Bluetooth to connect with my phone and ask my pal Siri to play me something upbeat. Siri screws it up and throws Lucinda Williams’s “Joy” at me, which is fine. If I can’t have upbeat, ferocious and angry will do.
I’ve got so much of both.
I put the song on repeat and by the seventh time Lucinda tells the world she’s going to Slidell to look for her joy, I’m pulling into my parents’ driveway and parking behind their Volkswagen.
After two days of Malcolm hovering whenever Mom or Dad called, I’m itching to have a conversation with them that doesn’t consist of coded messages and subtext.
The day is cold for early November, but not as cold as yesterday. Still, I feel the chill of it, a blanket of icy air clinging to me, seeping through my pores and worming its way into my very bones as I walk up the porch steps.
“Well, I say fuck the lot of them,” my mother says when she opens the door. Then, with only slightly less bitterness in her voice, “I’m sorry. I just can’t say anything nice about these people. And your father. You should have heard him on Saturday afternoon. The air in the house turned blue he was cursing so much. Come on, let’s have a glass of beer. Oma’s not well, but I think she wants to talk to you.”
Lucinda Williams failed me. Before we even get to the kitchen, I’m a hot mess of tears, sick with everything. D
ad sits me down in his big chair, pours two fingers of Kräuterschnapps into a small glass, and holds it up to me. The smell of sugar-sweetened herbs and alcohol drowns out everything for a moment; my mother’s long fingers stroking me like I’m a beloved pet takes me back to nicer times. It’s a temporary reprieve, but I savor it.
“You want to stay with us tonight?” Mom asks.
I nod and blub and somehow manage words that sound like consent. “I have teacher assessments tomorrow morning, though. At nine.”
“It’s all about money, you know,” my mother says. “All of it. When I was still teaching, I submitted a request for extra funds. You know what the review board told me?”
“I can guess.”
“Three hundred seventy-five percent. That’s what they told me. In other words”—she makes a goodbye gesture with her hand—“no more money. A three-hundred-seventy-five-percent increase in cost per child since 1970. Just before I retired, they started talking about orders of magnitude in spending increases.” My mother lights a cigarette, ignoring the tut-tut sound from Dad. She sucks in smoke and blows it out in a heavy sigh. “So I’m in this meeting one day, and these people in suits start throwing around numbers. This percent of gross domestic product, that much spent per student, this much wasted—wasted—on teacher salaries, flat performance levels in math and reading and science. The way they said it, the whole school system was broken and I was part of the problem.”
“Blood pressure, Sandra,” my father offers. But his eyes tell me he’s enjoying Mom’s rant.
“Malcolm always said we were overspending,” I say.
Mom didn’t seem like she could have gotten any hotter a few moments ago, but she proves that wrong now. “Overspending? We spent some money and guess what we got? Higher scores in minority student groups. Better integration of talented kids who once upon a time would have been withering away in special ed classes because they didn’t give the right answer on a math test. That’s not overspending. That’s smart spending.” She pauses, looks at me hard, and goes on. “Then we’ve got the überclass. You know, I was in a PTA meeting and parents were screaming for the tier system. They loved the idea. Mostly because they figured it only applied to the Mexican next-door neighbors’ kids. Or the special ed crowd. Never to their own precious prodigies.” She shakes her head. “It’s like a funnel, Elena. A goddamned, ever-widening funnel. But at least we got the population problem under control.”
She’s right about that. Ten years ago the geography pundits were predicting an explosion. Miami, New York, Chicago, and L.A. were on a fast track to overcrowding. “If we keep on,” they said, “we’re looking at New Delhi proportions. Right here in our own country.”
“Anyway, now that we’ve got that Sinclair bitch as hellcat-incharge of education, the money thing’s getting worse. For example—”
But I already know the examples. I know Madeleine Sinclair has more power than the president. I know she has a bottomless pit of funding from the top two percent and the backing of so many more—the child-free families complaining about taxes, the white supremacist assholes worrying about an immigrant takeover, tens of millions of aging baby boomers who cheered when their property taxes were cut, parents like Sarah Green who never thought the yellow bus would come for them. The Fitter Family Campaign is pure genius, taking questions and fears from everywhere, from all directions, and answering them with a single stroke of a directive-signing pen.
An irregular tapping from the back room announces my grandmother, who has apparently moved her lodgings downstairs. “Leni?”
I turn.
“Hi, Oma.”
“I have something to say about your teacher tests.”
“You heard that?”
“You remember I told you I got new ears,” she says, settling onto the sofa with help from Dad. “Now if I could only have new bones to go with the new ears.” She laughs, but no one else does. “Come sit, Liebchen. They sent your girl away, yes?”
“Yeah.”
Oma levels her eyes with mine and grasps both my hands in hers, squeezing with a force I didn’t think possible for someone so frail. “You must go to Kansas and get her back.”
Twenty-Seven
There was a news story not long ago about an irate father who drove to one of the yellow schools. Bonita Hamilton, America’s least popular investigative journalist (“That Hamilton woman. She needs to climb aboard the commonsense train,” Malcolm said over Sunday breakfast), had written up the piece in the Post. The man drove out of the city, over bridges and rural roads, before pulling to a stop outside the school his daughter attended. He stopped, he parked, and he walked in. Or, I should say, he tried to walk in, Bonita wrote. He was turned away. Now here’s a question: What if this were your child?
I remember a few outbursts, a letter to the editor, a follow-up opinion piece by a retired academic asking if this was where America wanted to be. Malcolm sniffed when I mentioned it. “You have to wonder what kind of a parent lets their kid slip so far down. The schools are there—and God knows we pay enough for schools these days—to pick up where the parents fail. What the hell are we supposed to do, Elena? Let every angry mother and father try to run the show?”
My grandmother’s hopes of me walking into Kansas State School 46 are just that. Hopes. “I don’t think I can walk in there and fetch Freddie out,” I say.
Oma pushes away the tea my mother offers and demands schnapps. Dad gets two words of protest in before realizing he’s lost the fight, and returns from the bar with a short glass of the same thing he gave me when I arrived.
“Ah. Bitter and good,” Oma says, ignoring me. “And now I am going to tell you all a little story.”
I don’t want a story just now; I want my parents’ computer, I want to look shit up, and then I want to go to bed and forget everything that happened since I woke up this morning. But Oma’s eyes tell me to stay put and listen. How foolish of me to think she had lost that commanding way she always had. When my father gets up to put golf on the television, Oma vetoes it with a sharp rap of her cane. “This is about you, too, Gerhard. So sit down.” She says this in German, perhaps to make Dad understand she means business.
And then she begins to talk.
“I am old and I am going to die soon, and when I die, this story will die with me,” she says. “This is what I have always wanted for my family. To let something ugly die and to bury it. Aber.” But.
She tells us in English words and German words, words that develop colorful pictures and clear sounds in my mind as I listen to stories of young girls in uniform. Their heads are high and proud, even the youngest ones in the Jungmädelbund, only ten years old, stand with haughty self-importance as they are photographed at rallies, demonstrations, marches. Starched blouses barely ripple in the breeze, and the pleats in the navy skirts are crisp as the girls parade down streets and riverbank paths. There are echoes of a hundred steel taps on concrete, click-click click-click click-click, and young virgin voices rising in soprano and alto notes. They are the future, a man tells them. They are Germany, and they are perfect. And they march as if they know this.
The voices turn harsh, becoming low, menacing growls in schoolyards, outside shops and synagogues. Hands that spend evenings sewing and playing piano pick up stones. Maria Fischer, now just fourteen in the year 1933, walks past her friend Miriam’s house without so much as a glance toward the girl standing in the doorway. She does this every day, until there’s no more Miriam to ignore.
“Do you see now?” Oma says, inviting my father to refill her glass. When he does, and after she has sipped greedily from it, she continues, and I see the scene she paints pull itself together in detailed strokes:
Now we are in a building, a three-story beige block with a decorative mansard roof and flags waving in salute at the building’s right and left. Two men enter its doors, both gray and bearded, almost look-alikes. One speaks English with an accent; the other as I might, the flat and intonationless English of t
his country. The first, the one with the accented speech, has a little girl’s hand in his own. He smiles at her, telling her stories of the rich Americans who offered money to help finish the construction, and of the meetings that will fill its rooms in years to come.
Oma sinks back into the sofa’s cushions, her gray eyes glassy. “I remember that day,” she says. “We went to Berlin to see this new institute named for Kaiser Wilhelm. I must have only been seven, perhaps eight. My father had business appointments and left me in the care of a great-uncle. This uncle took me on a tour, and he introduced me to some of his work colleagues.” She pauses. “It was all rather boring for a young girl, but in the afternoon he took me to tea and told me he had a surprise for my birthday. All little girls like surprises, so I brightened.”
“What was the surprise?” I ask.
“A trip to Switzerland,” Oma says. “To the city of Geneva. I had never been to Switzerland, and when my uncle asked Father’s permission, I begged him to grant it. In two weeks, we boarded a—”
I see a train now, chugging furiously from village to village in the green of late summer, a small, pinafored girl sipping tea in the dining car. Her attention is torn between the adventure on the inside of the train, the smoke curling past the windows, and the cities they pass. Mannheim. Karlsruhe. Baden-Baden. The long journey makes her tired, but she resists sleep, wanting to take every moment in and hold it. Then, the blue-mirror lakes of Neuchâtel and Léman, as the train rolls toward the city of Geneva.
My father interrupts. “Mutti, what does any of this have to do with Elena going to Kansas? I’m sure Geneva was a wonderful trip.” He looks at me pointedly. “And one Sandra and I have heard about before. But—”
Oma quiets him with a raised hand. “Listen to me, Gerhard. And you will understand after I have finished. I am tired now, and my throat hurts me.”
Dad backs down, but he shakes his head at me.
“I met many people during those three days in Geneva. Uncle had meetings each morning, but in the late afternoons he would fetch me from the hotel where I stayed with a hired governess. ‘We are going out now, Maria,’ he would say, and so we did, always to a pretty tearoom with white linens and crystal chandeliers and cream cakes. There were professors from America and doctors from Italy and England, all of whom thought me very charming. But my favorite new person was an American lady. She came each afternoon and was very kind to me. I remember Mrs. Sanger said I would have beautiful, perfect children.”
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