Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting!

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  I am now picturing portly bespectacled Swiss men in cardigans, shooting silent cutting looks at one another in the university cafeteria, over trays of IKEA-like meatballs and lingonberries…And I’m thinking, I’m sure a gothic purple writer like Ann Rice could make intrigue between battling Swiss child psychologists mesmerizing. For my money, I would need at least a Swiss vampire in the mix, an internationally known chef, or a castrati.

  But I have mocked Aimee before and been wrong. This information is clearly of high, high importance when it comes to our four-year-old American children.

  “So is Baz Ligiero there, at Wonder Canyon?” I ask. “He must be at least a hundred!”

  “Not Baz, but his son Dracul!” I hear Aimee literally say.

  “Dracul?” I ask, a little hysterically.

  And Aimee pulls up to an unmarked corrugated steel gate half hidden by a nest of trees. It has only a number on it, 6669. Oh my God, so that’s the secret of the extraordinary power of Wonder Canyon! Undead Swiss vampire child psychologists! Played Count Dracula–like, in white twin buns, by Gary Oldman!

  “No no no no,” Aimee says, suddenly normal again. “Racul. Racul Ligiero. He and his wife, Lisalotte, are the only living disciples of his father, who of course after the war was blacklisted.”

  Wonder Canyon contains an Upper Campus, a Lower Campus, and a central complex of K–2 classrooms called The Glen. Because of all the construction on the Upper Campus, Play Encounter families park in a dirt lot and mount white hybrid SUV’s that will take us down into the central Glen area. I see a bumper sticker: POWERED BY 100% VEGETABLE OIL.

  We bump down the winding road past several large buildings with soaring steel frames. Nestled in the hills, they look like great birds about to take flight. They are painted in soothing watercolor hues of salmon, lavender, and celadon. Beyond are several other great-birds-in-progress. There is the faint whine of a bulldozer, a crane lifting.

  I lean in toward Aimee.

  “I know nothing about architecture, and yet I very much want to use the word constructivist. Can I say constructivist?”

  “This is so exciting,” Aimee whispers, giddy.

  She points left to what appears to be a giant gazebo of weathered gray wood. Fairly simple, really, just a somewhat rambling gray wooden structure. “That’s the tanzhaus. That’s got to be the tanzhaus!” She points to squares of bright color lying here and there on the grass around it. “The tanztillen!”

  “Their arrangement seems rather haphazard,” I observe.

  Aimee shakes her head, again, at my ignorance. “Logarithms,” she murmurs, turning her face to the window. “Logarithms. The nautilus spiral.”

  As we continue to drop down into the canyon, the whine of bulldozers fades, and there are no more great steel birds. There are mostly trees, rocks, and the occasional stone sculpture, which you have to look really hard to find, so cunningly do their rough-hewn forms blend into the landscape.

  Our SUV bounces to a stop.

  Here we are: The Glen.

  I am, frankly, underwhelmed.

  The Glen looks less like an elementary school than a pre–World War II French village of perhaps eight small, plain wooden cottages. They are huddled together in a circle.

  Coming closer, you can see that each cottage bears, on its front door, a simple wooden placard that announces its name. They are all names of trees: “Cypress,” “Mulberry,” “Aspen,” “Birch.”

  To the left of “Birch,” we duck into a low arch, stepping through a tunnel of cool stone for just a moment, and suddenly our world opens up again into a dappled arbor.

  Our heads are literally crowned with green. The peaty, earthy, spicy scents about us are intoxicating.

  “Lavender!” Aimee whispers.

  “Rosemary!” I whisper.

  “Sage!”

  And now we hear, quietly but quite clearly, as though from some distant magical glen, the sparkling, ribbon-like musical intertwinings of Ravel. A string quartet. The music is so quiet but crystal-Bose-clear I wonder if it is actually playing in my head…if the Ravel is something I am thinking rather than hearing.

  No matter. The point is, here we are in a lush, real-life Ravelscape. Because now that we’re actually inside the ring of cottages, you can see they are simply exquisite. Through invitingly open Dutch doors and charming latticed windows, you can see that each wooden cottage is like a dream unfolding. There are colored rag rugs, pools of sunlight kissing rough-hewn pine floors, children’s art brightening every wall. If anything, the cottages looked a little odd, to my eye, at first glance because they are…

  Well, everything seems to be built to some slightly-smaller-than-normal proportion. What is that? Three-quarter size. It’s like a special…dwarf French village.

  It’s like a very, very special…Auberge des Enfants!

  “Welcome, Hannah! My name is Gretel!” says a smiling young beauty with smoothly upswept blond hair. If Uma Thurman had a sylph-like young cousin from the country, this could be she. Gretel bends down on one knee and waggles an adorable stuffed frog, who is wearing a white T-shirt that says WONDER! on it. The sylvan creature opens her arms.

  “Hannah!” she says. “Would you like to meet Gary Grenouille?”

  Hannah is the sort of person who would run to a smiling young blonde waving a real frog, even a dead one. Gretel could basically be waving a sock of poo. Off Hannah flies.

  “Well, I’ll never see HER again,” I say.

  “Do you want to come play with us, Hannah?” says Gretel. “Come on! We’re making a village…” And here she stops, humorously quizzical. “From hats?”

  Gretel makes a comical expression, as though wondering if she has gone just a bit batty. She looks at Hannah, questioning if Hannah can help her, in her momentary insanity.

  “Hannah—have you ever made a village…from hats?”

  “No, but I CAN,” says Hannah, slipping her hand confidently in Gretel’s. Why can Hannah trust her? Because she’s the young Uma Thurman! “I’ve made a village from boxes. I’ve built New York!”

  The blonde stops. Leans down again, amazed.

  “New York?”

  “The skyscrapers. Like in Gershwin!”

  “Hannah! I think I know what music you’re thinking of! Have you ever heard of the music Rhapsody in…in…?”

  Hannah listens intently, interested.

  “It’s a color?” the blonde says. “Like the sky? Rhapsody in…?”

  “Blue?”

  “Gershwin! Wow!” The blonde shoots me a quick look, mouths: “Amazing!”

  I jab Aimee in the ribs, in a paroxysm of glee: “That’s the one thing their good-for-nothing father does with them, in that Clampett-like backyard of ours! They build things, out of cardboard boxes, to music! I thought they were just weird nests, kind of nasty, but apparently…” I lift my arms up. “Genius!”

  “I like your hair clip,” says Hannah, reaching up. “Is that a butterfly?”

  “Here—take a look,” Gretel says, reaching back and, in one deft motion, she releases the clip and hands it to Hannah. Her long blond hair swings into the air, free, full, like a fan of spun gold.

  “Can I touch your hair?” asks Hannah.

  “Of course!” Gretel exclaims, laughing…And shoots me a warm look, placing a quick hand over her heart to indicate she is in love with my daughter…Who now pulls her forward by the hand. And Gretel’s attention is instantly back on Hannah. “Where did you say Gary Grenouille wants to go?” And off they trot to yon cottage of Mulberry.

  “And look how the teacher draws her out,” Aimee says. She looks physically sick. “I hate my sons’ school.” She hisses the word: “Coleman. I want to kill myself.”

  We gather with other parents in what appears to be a small wooden chapel—which is to say it’s laid out like a chapel, although there’s no cross or anything. The chapel just smells fucking great, like sun-kissed maple or teak or something. In the corner is an antique glass barrel of water, wit
h cut-up lemon and mint in it. We are each given linen-covered folders, tied up in twine. When you untie the twine, a few casual eucalyptus leaves fall out.

  The smell hits. It’s fantastic.

  “Eucalyptus!” I exclaim.

  Aimee repeats: “I want to kill myself.”

  “Imagine the killing Wonder Canyon would make if they sold their own line of spa products. I wonder if they give massages here, wraps, treatments.”

  Other parents are quietly taking their seats next to us, undressing their own linen folders. They are affluent Los Angeles people, clearly, but of the enlightened type, devoid of gold or baubles or anything tacky, cordial, thoughtful, clad in neutral natural fibers, and is that…Bishop from Alien? Do your remember? The kindly robot?

  I jab Aimee in the ribs. “Bishop!”

  “Don’t look,” she hisses. “Read your folder.”

  I do. I learn that five-year-olds at Wonder Canyon technically begin not in kindergarten but in a place, a state of being almost, called The Little Bungalow.

  The Little Bungalow

  The Little Bungalow is the first pod of a small, nurturing, progressive, developmental K–5 learning environment whose educational values include:

  • Honoring diversity

  • Peaceful conflict resolution

  • Respecting the individual student’s right to grow at his or her own unique academic pace

  Other features include:

  • Musical instruction via the Orff-Schulwerk method

  • An open-air dance and movement studio (tanzhaus)

  • Trips to the Getty, with Ph.D.-level art docents

  • Beginning Mandarin, including basic pictographs…

  The list goes on and on. But they protest too much. They had us at the frog. We want in!

  We are instructed to write our child’s name on an enclosed name tag, along with “the preschool your child is matriculating from.”

  I write on my name tag “Hannah—Valley Co-Op, VAN NUYS,” which is akin to saying, “Hi! I’m from Pluto!” But no matter. I’m untouchable. I’ve got the Rigoberta Manchú “Get Out of Jail Free!” card. I paste my tag on, smile and look around at the other parents, who, reborn through the naming of their children, also now smile and look around. Who are we? We are…“Ethan—Little Dolphins.” “Lennon—All Children Great and Small.” “Sequoiah—Little Red Wheelbarrow School.” “Iztzak—Brentwood Temple Beth Something or Another.” “Ariel—The Nurtury.” “Tuolomne—Maggie Haves.”

  “Now, that I haven’t seen,” I whisper to Aimee. “Tuolomne!”

  Aimee doesn’t reply.

  I look at her to see if she has heard me…

  And I see she is in a dream of her own. It’s a very painful dream. She is reading an attached handout on the philosophy of Baz Ligiero, pictured, smoking a pipe, in a brownish daguerreotype.

  Aimee’s expression is naked, vulnerable, with a longing that’s terrible to see. She looks like the Little Match Girl, pressing her face against the window. I’d never noticed before how small her hands are, almost like a child’s.

  And woken out of my self-involved reverie, of celebrating my own good fortune, I realize that I have completely forgotten that when Aimee even jokingly says, “I want to kill myself,” she is bearing witness to the reality that while my daughter is going to come here…her son is not.

  And it really doesn’t seem fair. Aimee has been studying Baz Ligiero half her life, and I couldn’t care less. I just want to be done with the trauma of finding a school.

  It seems so unfair.

  Then again…

  Look at the way it went down at Luther Hall.

  It IS unfair. Fuck it! Such is life!

  The folder also contains “Bungalow Days,” a newsletter apparently published by the parents of the K–2 students at Wonder Canyon. One of the headlines reveals the alarming news that apparently there is a new thing happening right now called Global Warming! Google it! Global Warming!

  “Oh, well,” I say, discovering the one tiny flaw that, as in a sacred Islamic mosaic, makes the overall design just even more breathtaking and exquisite. With all the help Aimee has given me, it is now my turn to toss her back a bone. “Okay—so it’s not necessarily the parents who are the geniuses.”

  “Racul and Lisalotte Ligiero,” a man announces and, all at once, as though meeting heads of state, we parents automatically stand.

  “No! No! No!” cries out a short seventy-something man with black I. M. Pei glasses and a shock of white hair, shuffling out energetically before us. He is indeed wearing not the cardigan I imagined but something very close, a beige sweater vest that ducks fly across, accessorized with a comical green bow tie. He looks like a kindly elf, or a magical Gepetto person, perhaps, from a fairy tale. He is followed by a beaming, extraordinarily beautiful older woman with a waist-length white braid. While Lisalotte has the classic cheekbones and regal bearing of a Geraldine Page, she exudes warmth, sparkle, and everything deeply good about earthy Scandinavian women—clay-firing, pot-throwing, bread-making…

  “Please sit! Sitting! Sit! My goodness!” Racul crows, with grand amusement. “I’m not the Dalai Lama. Although I have met him and I have to tell you…I’m no Dalai Lama!

  “My father…” he continues, putting his hands in prayer position. He thinks about going one way with it? Then goes another way. He opens his hands. “Well! Much has been written about my father, book after book. There has been lab work, research work, observation work—There are conferences in Geneva, in Bern, in Tokyo—Do we put the children in pods, do we give them objects of wood, do we split them at two, from the mother, so they can learn autonomy, and independence—

  “But this all is nothing,” Racul says. “Nothing. At the end of the day, my father said, ‘One word, Racul…’”

  The pause hangs.

  And hangs.

  And hangs.

  Racul’s gaze floats upward, toward a skylight.

  My gaze also automatically floats upward and I see dust motes, hanging, in a column of sunlight.

  “‘Wonder. What we do here is about wonder. A child is born into a state…of wonder. And the child herself…wonders.’”

  A dream-like hush has fallen over the room. Even Aimee seems becalmed.

  “Lisalotte laughs at me when I say this…”

  “Ach—zeah he gaws a GAIN!” Lisalotte exclaims, throwing her hands up, in a charming Franco-Germo-Belgio accent that I just knew she would have!

  “Lisalotte mocks me—” Racul repeats, clearly enjoying this comedic beat.

  As do we all. We all laugh as Lisalotte, Racul’s straight man, waves her hands above her head. She pretends to push him.

  “Ach! To me all ziss tooking, tooking, tooking is ze boring pohrt! I choost make clay. I choost make zings viss clay. Enoof viss zis tooking. Choost giff me kinder und clay!”

  “Lisalotte mocks me and it sounds so sentimental, but the learning, and the wonder, begins with love. The gifted child…Life is not easy for the gifted child…I love this country—I have lived here forty years—I believe, barring some recent unfortunate government policy—”

  There are murmurs of approbation among the group. We, too, feel some recent government policy is unfortunate, and we very much would like to funfer about it…!

  With amazing speed—I think of that TV dog trainer, Cesar Millan—the old man flies a firm and shushing hand up. We are not going there.

  Obedient, we fall quiet again.

  “I believe the US of A is still the best hope, on this globe, for John Lennon’s eventual, transcendental dream of world peace but…” Here Racul leans forward, shaggy eyebrows up, shaking his finger, amused. This much he WILL admit—! “Your America is not the most welcoming place for gifted children! The traditional American educational style is like a machine, marching, crushing! It’s very hard—with all that noise, that drilling, that testing—

  “Why do we test our children? Over and over again! This U.S. mania for testing, t
esting, testing! We do not test at Wonder Canyon. It’s a cruel practice—I think of child labor, whipping, torture! And some American parents, competitive American parents, want Ligiero for all the tricks, tricks, tricks—Like monkeys they love to trot them out, like our math in pictures…How to teach a five-year-old square roots! Ah, ah, ah!” he exclaims angrily, as though fighting off an army. “Here!”

  He whips a scarf off an easel…

  And lo and behold, there it is!

  The square root in pictures!

  Ah! To have been given an actual quaff of the magic elixer, and so soon…we parents are stunned.

  “Oh my God.” I turn to Aimee. “This is Ligiero?”

  She holds her hands up. Shakes her head in misery, a Cassandra who will never be listened to.

  “Feh! They call Wonder Canyon children Wonder Children, wunderkinds, because in kindergarten already they have such a ‘natural’ feel for higher math. Ooh, the IQ scores! Ooh, the academic acceleration! But these are but monkey tricks. Yes, our graduates easily matriculate to L.A.’s best private middle schools and high schools, Marlborough, Harvard-Westlake…Yes, they get 1600 SAT’s and AP5’s.” Racul seems exhausted to even have to recite the tawdry, the trivial, the obvious. “Yes, our Wonder Children go on to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Brown—” The words spill out quickly, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton being window dressing, beside the point. He waves his hand, sincerely angry.

  “My father, Baz, did not even believe in college, in formal instruction after the age of sixteen. He thought higher education was a plot, devised by the elites, to separate the classes! My father was a socialist! Why not the farmer’s son, he said, to learn Latin! To learn physics, the beautiful laws of Newton, the daughter of the koch… I mean the cook!” he rails, correcting a sudden slip into German!

  I look over at Lisalotte, who, as per her word, does seem to be in a bit of a glaze. Her mouth looks a little slack, even irritated. And I must say, I love how authentic she is. She really would rather be working with kinder und clay!