My family would gather on the porch with our binoculars when she passed once a year. We couldn’t stay outside to see her pass directly overhead; looking up, letting the light fall on you — that would pull you in, so you had to be hidden. But she was beautiful to see on the horizon — sometimes just her crown, moving like a slow train across the land. Then later, we would see her head with her torch held low below the horizon, blazing in a constant stream of orange, combing the streets.
Her feet never crushed anything, her skirts never tossed cars or knocked down buildings, she just walked and searched, looking and looking like a mother for her children, and then — I saw this on TV — she disappeared at the first morning’s light and appeared back on her base on Liberty Island. I think she was my favorite of the gods, maybe because she was consistent and regular, and the rest of them we didn’t see up close and personal. And we knew, whatever happened to our family that Lady Liberty could take care of us, though nobody really knew what life was like once you were taken up.
“Are you sure people don’t get killed?” Celia asked.
She didn’t know History very well, and this was the biggest problem in her life.
And now it was our problem too.
We didn’t understand how Celia could grow up and hear all the stories of the gods and not remember them. Mom and Dad wouldn’t let us have dessert without first telling a story from the big leather-covered One Nation Under Gods. Dad read them in a voice he saved for stories that “would possibly save your life.” I loved all our stories, even though a few of them — like stories about the brothers, Strike and Patriot — would make my dad get a crack in his voice, and some — like the Union and Revolution story — well, he just couldn’t read them all the way through. He had a soft spot for Union, always thought he’d been betrayed when Revolution left him for someone in France. “She’d sleep with anyone who asked,” he said sometimes, and then catch himself, and tell us not to mock the gods, ever. You never knew who might be listening.
Well, it wasn’t Celia. Celia sat staring ahead, thinking about things I didn’t know. She wasn’t really hearing the stories when she watched Dad tell them. It wasn’t a problem until she started failing the eighth grade.
Until the eighth grade, she’d passed History with a D, just skating by, not even able to fill out the Families of Gods Charts. She couldn’t name all their first generation children — she almost always missed Independence, though I thought he was the easiest to remember, since he never got married. It was just charts and the simple stories until eighth grade and then you had to really know how the gods worked with Americans to shape our country — so many more events than I had to learn in the sixth grade. In eighth grade, you have what happened when Revolution left, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution — which you have to know by heart — and the names of all the Presidents and all the Reginas.
At the end of Eighth Grade you had to pass the Test to see if you got into high school or whether you would serve the country as a Pizza Hut or a Piggly Wiggly, or something useful.
These are the “transformed” people I personally knew: Mike, a bridge who’d been a good soccer player; Donny, a 7-11 that once let me borrow his bike, and the Drive-In Theater on Bronson Street who was this beautiful girl who loved to watch movies with Celia. She became a Drive-In last year. I knew their families had tried hard to get them to pass the Test, but when they didn’t, they got changed.
“Aren’t you afraid?” I asked Celia.
“Afraid of becoming something else? No,” she said. “I’m more afraid of not becoming anything, Danny.”
She had her Preference List already filled out. Every kid had to make one before they took the Test, but Celia had been thinking of hers for a while.
“I want to be a Cloth Store,” she said. “We don’t have any good ones in town, really. I think if Mom ran the shop, we’d have more money coming in. And other people who make quilts would have a decent place to find material. I’ve actually planned pretty good for this.”
“But why not just study harder?”
She looked at me, squinting. “You don’t think I have been? It’s hard. I don’t know how to put it all together. I’m not going to make it.” She started to cry, then she looked out the window until she stopped it — she could make an angry face that would freeze all the tears. She showed me her list. “I’m thinking practically.”
Some kids put down on their Preference List that they wanted to become missiles, but only the really poor kids got to be missiles. I don’t think it was fair but Mom and Dad told us that missiles didn’t last long. And restaurants allowed parents to keep their kids around longer, even if they were ovens and tables and salad bars. I thought being a Triton 2 missile would have been much cooler — shoot yourself over the ocean and land in someone’s back yard and explode.
“What’s the point of being a missile?” Celia asked me.
She didn’t understand the glory of exploding. Every real boy wanted to blow something up. I showed her by falling backwards onto her bed and told her that she was really lame. Her stuffed tigers and bears fell on my face.
She sat down beside me on her bed.
Her room was quieter than mine.
I didn’t want her to be a Cloth Store, so I threw a stuffed bear at her face.
In the summer, we would bus downtown together to the library or to the movies, or to the pool, and we would sometimes eat in the old-fashioned soda shop, My Little Girl, that used to be Courtney Simmons. “Her cherry phosphates taste the best,” Celia would say. And maybe they did, but I think it was because we’d known Courtney. Not that well — but when you know someone, and they get changed, it makes you attached to the place. I think the Chamber of Commerce knew this.
I only remembered that Courtney had been in love a lot, with every boy, whether he knew or not, and she used to hang out at the mall. She liked to watch people. Now she was a pretty popular soda shop, only one street from Main. My Little Girl had bright red walls and white tiled floors, and we sat on the silver stools and talked to Courtney’s dad, Al. He believed Courtney still talked to him.
“She chooses the songs on the jukebox,” he’d say to everyone. “And if you listen, she’ll have a song for you.”
It was true that sometimes the jukebox did not pick the songs you picked out when you put your fifty cents in. And sometimes, when it was on random, she often went back to Mr. Mister, Take these broken wings, and learn to fly again and learn to live so free.
When she first was changed, the jukebox was stocked with fifties music. But she refused to play the songs from the fifties, and her dad, figuring out that she might prefer the eighties and nineties songs, stocked it full of her music. “She plays it all day long now.”
My sister would look at me sometimes, and then look at the embossed ceiling, “So, see, she’s still here. She’s turned the place into her. It sounds like her.”
She said that to make me feel better. Like I wouldn’t miss her if she were a cloth store.
“I think if you asked her, she’d rather be human,” I said.
She looked at me, “You say that like she had a choice.”
Oh there were choices. Most of them were illegal. You heard about them all the time at school. There were ways to escape, car pools, safe houses, train cars that had secret doors. Sometimes, if you were rich, you could afford the “summer trip to Europe,” they called it. You just never came back. Maybe you became European. Parents were in on it. They would risk never seeing their kid again to keep him from being changed.
But it was a risk. There were stories of kids being caught too. Trains being boarded by Truants. Kids going to jail. Being changed into other things: dumpsters, public restrooms, city buses, sewage plants.
“Yuck,” the kids in my class would say. “That’s cruel!” And they would laugh.
But it made us learn. It made us study. It made us scared.
And now, it made me scared for Celia.
Mom and Dad were trying to play this legal. They hired a recent graduate as a tutor, someone with a serious reputation, who had references for bringing many eighth graders through the Test.
Holly stood over six-foot tall and stooped when she talked to people. She had red hair but dressed like a business executive. “You have to think of it like friends you know. History is just the story of different people you know. Like your mom or your dad or any of your friends. You have friends?”
“I have friends. I’m not weird.”
Actually, Celia was kind of a loner. She read craft books. She knew some science. She spent weeknights sewing. She made beautiful things — mostly quilts. But she didn’t exactly make friends. She considered what other eighth graders did boring and irrelevant. It didn’t help, either, that Mom and Dad moved us a lot. We lived in Missouri, in Kansas, and in Illinois. Dad was a furniture maker. Mostly dining room tables and chairs. We had a small house, but a very nice kitchen table.
Holly and Celia sat at this table, going over Holly’s note-cards.
“These are your new best friends,” Holly said, spreading them out.
I loved Holly’s cards. She had pictures of the gods that I’d never seen published. I wanted my own set. I was hoping that she’d leave them when she fixed Celia up, but I figured these might be the “magic” that transformed slower kids into geniuses. So, fat chance that I’d be pinning that smiling Patriot card on my wall.
Holly talked about the gods as if they were just like us. “Guess what I saw Independence doing yesterday?” which at first, sounded like sacrilege to me. She talked about them as if she’d seen them buying clothes at Sears. “He was talking to a bunch of guys in a tavern — that’s a bar. And he was talking about breaking away from England! I thought I would just die,” she slapped her hand on the table. She seemed so caught up in it. As if it were happening to her, as if these were her memories. “He bought them all dinner and it came to $17.76. Remember that. The bill was $17.76.”
I wanted to eat dinner with Independence. I wanted them to come on the soccer field with me. Or chase me through the park. I wanted them to talk to mostly. I sat and listened to Holly, wishing that her stories were true. “And then Patriot told me a secret,” she said. Oh, gods I wanted to know his secrets.
Celia must not have because she forgot them just as soon as Holly left.
“It’s like I’ve gone to a party and everyone has introduced themselves,” she told me, picking up a quilt she was making, showing fleet foxes darting into a cornfield. “I can’t remember what anyone said. I’m getting them all mixed up.”
Lessons with Holly lasted only two months. After that, it was as if everyone in the family knew a history that would be written on those cards — a history Celia was writing even then.
The President of the Chamber of Commerce came and spoke one day at School Assembly, and he had a map of the city up on a screen. Everyone got to attend — from the sixth through the eighth grades. He showed the eighth graders all the best pieces of business real estate, which could go to anyone at a huge discount if they chose them now. He talked about what the city needed, how students could help the city grow by investing in the future. He wasn’t as much counting on them failing, he said, as much as offering them the best of the available options.
Did you want to be a park? They’d put your picture up in brass.
Did anyone consider a trolley system? An interpretative center?
“Businesses are not the only thing you can be. Non-profits also benefit our city; beautification shouldn’t be overlooked. Even your own school needs repair,” he said smiling, opening his arms wide, as if to draw them all in.
“Paducah Chamber of Commerce welcomes you. To us, you are never a failure.”
In desperation, we tried new things for Celia. Mom and I made a giant chart on her bedroom wall where we put up butcher paper until it covered the blue-sky wallpaper. She took down all her pictures, working ahead of us pulling out the nails while Mom and I put the paper up with sticky tacky. Then we just started charting a timeline. I drew the long black line around the room and she put all the historical events on top and all the god events on the bottom of the timeline so Celia could see how they were related. “Because god stories happen while history is going on. That’s what makes America different,” she said. Celia took notes sitting on her bed while Mom lectured and I drew key words Mom and Dad had already written down.
When that was finished, we drew pictures of all the gods based on the pictures in the encyclopedia, and some I saw off of Holly’s cards. Mom said there wouldn’t be any part of the Test to identify pictures, but that the images were for Celia. She could remember them better if they were pictures. “She zones when people are talking,” I told Mom in front of Celia.
“I don’t zone,” she said. “I’m thinking.”
“You’re not thinking about gods,” I said.
“I think about the gods a lot. I just don’t think about their entire life stories. I don’t know why we’re tested on this. I mean, history is what happened, but it isn’t what’s going on now. What does knowing that Congress was turned into a bunch of monkeys for a day really have to do with my life?”
Mom stopped writing. She was writing on Lewis and Clark. “Honey,” she turned to Celia. “Congress was turned into monkeys because they filibustered for three weeks — the country nearly shut down. They got turned into monkeys as Democracy’s punishment on them, and they learned about being more bipartisan, about working together. The gods change you so you learn.” She kneeled down beside Celia. “If you don’t pass this test, you’ll be changed just like Congress — except you won’t get changed back at the end of the day. Whether or not you like what you have to learn, this is the way it works. We get to make some of the rules, and that’s more than anyone else has ever gotten to do with their gods. The least we can do is learn history.”
“Why can’t we make a rule that middle schoolers don’t have to become buildings and things when they don’t pass a silly test? Why can’t we save the lives of children?”
You could tell this was as hard on Mom as it was Celia. Her eyes got red around the edges. “I’m trying to save the life of a child, Child. What exactly are you doing?”
Mom walked Celia around the room and showed her all of America’s history. Then Mom started talking about one part of history and Celia had to run over and point to where it was on the timeline. It wasn’t hard — Mom had written in all the stories, but it made Celia have to know about where the story happened to get there before Mom finished telling the story.
“The gods created the City of Friends and Walt Whitman becomes our first Friends ambassador.” Celia ran over to the spot on the wall just before the turn of the 20th Century.
“The gods help the Founding Fathers write the Constitution and the Great Promise.” Celia ran to the end of the timeline, but I pointed the other way, and she changed direction and stood in front of 1789.
“When Watergate happened, this was the first time that an entire Administration flew into the air above the capitol to meet the gods in the Special Court.” Celia ran to the end of the 1960s.
“Revolution leaves Union, walks across the Atlantic and marries Fraternité. The French Revolution begins.” Celia ran back to the 1800s and scanned the wall. Oh, back farther than the Louisiana Purchase, I thought. Way before Manifest was born and pushed us all westward with the Energizing Fire. “The French Revolution,” Mom hinted, “was right after our revolution.”
Celia walked to the 1780s again and stood in front of the “Day Revolution Left.”
We placed the cards with the pictures of the gods on the floor.
“Pick up the picture of the God who Defends the Country.” Celia picked
up Patriot. Good.
“Pick up the picture of the God who is America’s offense.” Often known as the Offensive God, I thought. Celia knew these easy. She picked up Strike’s picture.
“Pick up their brother, the one who protects us from ourselves.” She looked around the pictures. I was sitting on her bed watching, because Mom said this would be great training for me, and because I wanted to help Celia win, and I saw something different.
Celia had all the gods at her feet. Arranged around her, they just stared up at Celia and I thought, wow, Celia is like a god looking down on the gods. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a pony tail and every time she bent down to pick up a god, she got more excited, as if she knew she was close. She picked up Freedom because he protects us from ourselves. And Freedom’s wife, Liberty, the gift France gave us to thank us for Revolution, was the next card, and then one by one, Celia picked up every god in her hand like a giant book and held it close to her and screamed for joy.
But that wasn’t it. Then she had to place all their names on a Family chart Mom papered across the Dining Room. It was just like the Test, she said. “You’re going to have to know who married whom and which children they had.”
The toughest was Union because he kept changing not only his gender but had a lot of partners, some of them were kidnapped or forced. Mom just put five blanks up next to his name, but I already remembered two more.
Mom and I made up songs for Celia too. We put American History to music, singing about the Constitution, the Great Depression, the Emancipation Proclamation — and we did it to The Beatles.
It’s a dirty story about a dirty man and his cheating wife never understands, and it’s based on a story by a man named Lear, and I need a job ‘cause I’m living in the Great Depression! Great Depression!
Listen. Do you want to know the secret? It’s about the Civil War, whoa, oh, oh. Closer. Let me whisper in your ear. Several reasons are so clear, whoa, oh, oh.
Tesseracts Fourteen: Strange Canadian Stories Page 31
