And it vaguely dawns on me, in a public-school setting, with the two old Latina abuelitas behind me, that in fact Martin Byrnes, assistant LAUSD principal, may not appreciate my shrieking out: “OH MY GOD—YOU’RE A GAY!!!!”
“We’re very excited about what’s going on in kindergarten,” Martin says, trotting down the hall. Without breaking stride he corrects things he sees—picks up a piece of litter, flicks off a water fountain that’s dripping. “We have a new literacy coordinator, Rita, who is terrific. She has managed, just this year, to raise our API score seventy-two points—”
“It’s 683, isn’t it?” I say, before stopping myself.
“That was last year,” he replies. “The new results just came in…Our current API is 755.”
I’m stunned. I didn’t know it was possible to actually improve an API score. I’d never factored that in as a possibility. I had considered a school’s API score a fixed destiny, which immediately tarred all children who came in contact with it with the destiny of being someone’s gang bitch in prison. A prison in…in Fresno.
“Well, that’s very good!” I say.
“We could crack 800 next year,” he says. “Well…That’s a bit optimistic. Let’s say two years at most. Our instruction is FINALLY meshing together. It takes a while.”
I feel a sudden stab of exultation. You mean Hannah could be at an 800 school? Just down the block? For free? My God! I’m still reeling from the concept. Who knew API scores could go up? Without divine intervention of some kind by the…the Gates Foundation? Or Oprah?
I hear…is that…music? From one room beyond, I hear violins. Scrapey, squeaky, it’s a familiar sound—that of a bad elementary-school orchestra.
“Is that…the kids playing?”
“That is our string program.”
“You have a STRING program?”
“Hm,” he says. “K through 2 is vocal, and then come third grade the kids can choose strings or recorders. I myself like the RECORDER,” he adds suddenly. “I think it’s a better home base for kids to start from, there’s more commonality there. Of course, I myself was a wind player, so my bias is for—”
“And there—there are still slots for kindergarten?” I ask, anxious all at once. I feel the familiar panic closing in. Oh no. Guavatorina—it’s actually an undiscovered jewel—and we are exactly two steps behind the wave.
“This is your LAUSD school?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“Well…” He pushes open another double door.
“Yes?” I ask, exhausted. I really cannot drag this project any further without help. If I’m thrown any more obstacles, even at my free corner 96 percent Hispanic public school, I will really be at my wit’s end.
“Will your daughter be five by December second?”
“Yes!” I cry out. “Hannah’s birthday’s in September!”
“Okay, then,” Martin replies, as though it’s all so obvious. “Ach, there’s still that smell. Can you smell it?”
I shake my head. I can’t.
“Maybe it’s my sinuses.”
Hannah’s admittance to Guavatorina—did he just say it was a given? I need to double-check. I look for the loophole.
“You don’t…You don’t have to keep an…an even number of boys and girls, do you?”
“Well, we like to if we can, sure…” He turns his head back to me, quizzical. “But you can’t always predict, can you?”
“But do you try?” I persist. “Do you use some kind of…” I wave my hand in the air, to imply wheels and dials, to let him know I know how sometimes you have to…fudge things, to get the best result. So all the kids can…succeed. Better. Together.
I persist. “Do you maybe admit some kids FIRST, ones you think are going to be more successful, see how many you have, and then…?”
He stares at me.
“You know,” I continue, “to balance individual versus group learning styles? Do you place them in kindergarten based on, you know…informal assessments?”
“Well, that would be illegal, wouldn’t it? By law, we have to educate every child who comes to us. This is PUBLIC SCHOOL.”
Martin stops, puts his hand on the knob of a chipped beige door brightened with a giant yellow sunflower.
“And here’s the library. The librarian is Mrs. Lewis. A forty-year veteran, she still likes to go by ‘Mrs.’” There is the faintest arch of a brow…But then it’s gone. There is not quite enough of a brow lift to provide a giant gap for me to drive my Mack truck of personality through the curtain to scream: “OH MY GOD, MARTIN, YOU’RE GAY AND I LOVE THAT!”
“She likes to go by ‘Mrs.’ and at Guavatorina we honor that,” Martin says. “Does Hannah like stories?”
“She loves stories!”
“Ooh boy! Then she’ll lo-o-ove Mrs. Lewis!”
He pushes open the door.
And there it is. An ordinary classroom with a chalkboard, desks, chairs, posters. Perhaps a dozen Hispanic children sit cross-legged on a rug of colored squares. On the walls around them are sunflowers with names handlettered on them. Not Cody, Cole, Coley, Colin, but RAMON, TERESA, AMY, PIERO, JOHNNY, AMIK.
And I have to admit I am…surprised.
This possibility literally never occurred to me.
I never imagined there were actual children inside these plain-brown-wrapper walls.
Every time I’ve spat out “Guavatorina,” as when other parents would spit out “Grant,” it never occurred to me that any of us was talking about actual children. I had always assumed we were talking about the Bush administration, an evil government torture institution, twin office towers full of bureaucrats, a bunch of smoky, sky-fouling oil derricks.
I had actually assumed, I don’t know…
If you sacrifice your kids to public school, the Republicans…win!
But no—that is not so at all.
My God. It is like that moment when Charlton Heston yells, “Soy-lent green…is people!” Oh my God, I think. The horrible truth is…
Guavatorina…is children!
The LAUSD…is children! L.A. Unified…is children!
The hopelessly broken U.S. public-school system…is children!
Acckkkkkkkkkkkk!!!!!!!!!
And seated before the Guavatorina students is an hourglass-shaped sixty-something-year-old teacher. She has a gray, sensible, somewhat bowl-shaped haircut, oval-shaped glasses. She is moving…very little. All she’s doing is reading in a pleasant, measured voice. For my taste, her reading style is plain. I like more theatrical flair. But the children gathered around her are rapt.
The children…who are not the children of famous people, of rich people, they are not beautiful, they are not un-wiggly, they are not necessarily frighteningly gifted. They are thin and fat and tall and short and clear-complexioned and pimply. Even though they are all brown-skinned children, yes, Hispanic with perhaps one or two Armenians, in truth, they seem the full spectrum of everything children are.
It seems a miracle that such ordinary children have been invited in.
It seems unbelievable that my own to-be five-year-old, warts and all, is also welcome here.
Around the group is a ring of bookshelves. I see familiar covers turned to us: Where the Wild Things Are. Hop on Pop. Madeline.
And what is the book Mrs. Lewis is reading?
Charlotte’s Web.
And then Mrs. Lewis reads the familiar, if long forgotten, words:
“‘It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.’”
And then Mrs. Lewis closes the book, the children crowd around her, and her hands move together over the tops of their heads like birds building a nest.
And I realize she is their quiet, web-spinning Charlotte.
And at that moment, two Hispanic moms working in the corner lift up the project they are working on. The whole room exclaims, claps hands together in delight. It is a painstakingly crafted yarn web, which reads:
&nbs
p; SOME PIG
Stumbling out of that school, I am swept up with euphoria.
I’m higher than I would be on any of Aimee’s company’s pharmaceuticals. I realize I will never be like the sad women in her company’s mournful TV commercials, sad women in V-neck sweaters staring tragically out misty windows.
Perhaps it is the wonder of periomenopause, but my days are suddenly shot through with luminous, almost hallucinogenic magic.
All at once, I see the meaning of my whole year.
I thought I had failed my family by not being tough enough to bite the debt bullet. I was not strong enough to commit to borrowing the hundreds of thousands needed to acquire, for our children, years of top-notch schools like Wonder Canyon.
One foot already on the last helicopter lifting out of Saigon, my family strapped safely on board…I fatally looked back down, saw the weight of the money…and let go of the life rope.
The unthinkable happened: I failed to save Hannah…to insulate her future from the horrors of a bad—or at least mediocre—or at least obscure and undistinguished—education.
But while I plummeted through space, full of grief, here was the wildest revelation of my unmedicated, premenopausal fever-dream: I suddenly saw what had been hitherto invisible to me, an astonishingly beautiful universe, a shimmering web made of millions of gossamer threads, tended, day by day, hour by hour, patiently, by the stubborn and unsung force…of women.
Everywhere around me, in the city, the whole time, there had been Charlottes, spinning their webs.
Brenda, Joan, Aimee, Celeste…
Even that damned Doris at Luther Hall. Who so loved her Gesell.
This was what the world was made of.
Women!
Bossy women…PTA women…Church women…Neighborhood Watch block captains who walk their dogs at six A.M. and stand on people’s lawns and yell at them about their trash…Women who you can tell are those captains, by the mere forward tilt of their heads, the angles of their visors, as they briskly step off the curb in front of you…
Women—who all at once I start to see everywhere, all over Los Angeles.
Brown women, white women, young women, old women…
Behind the Trader Joe’s I’ve always rushed to as though in a tunnel, my lens widens to notice a special-ed school…into which special-ed kids roll down via ramps in wheelchairs with their twisted necks and wide, liquid eyes.
They are all THE WRONG ethnicity. Some are fat. Some are ugly. Some wear Wal-Mart Bratz T-shirts.
In a universe darker than ours, no one would give two figs for these kids. These children would be the discards.
I watch with amazement as they roar in on yellow school buses. As bus drivers carefully help lower them out. As a bearded security guy in a pressed blue dress shirt helps them in. And, at the open gates, every single morning, women with smooth faces and lined faces and skinny asses and fat asses wave in these to-them-precious children.
“Welcome! Welcome! Welcome!”
People love these children! This is a miracle. Humanity…The human race. It is a miracle.
Waiting at bus stops in the morning, too, I begin to notice masses of brown children waiting, with backpacks, their abuelitas tweaking their already exquisitely braided hair. I see that they are loved, too.
There is grace all around me. The universe hums—the invisible web.
In a daze, I go to an ATM in Sherman Oaks, get cash, get back into my car, and there she is, a black woman in Chanel sunglasses tapping at my window. “You left your card in the machine,” she exclaims, a little angry at my inattention. “Here it is!”
At the stoplight, an Armenian woman—a Kokik—gestures at me. “Your tire is flat!” she yells. “Stop! Tire! Flat!”
I’m in the Van Nuys Ralphs and there’s a new checker. Middle-aged, been around the block, and yet wearing a fairly exciting blouse, for Ralphs, in a wild Pucci-like print. Checking the sad condiments of the dour male computroll in front of me, with a demon twinkle in her eye the checker suddenly sasses him with:
“So…What’s for dinner?”
I love checkers who ask that—I find it hilarious! It reminds me of a time in the West Village when I saw a gay checker in a deli whimsically remark to a mournful three-hundred-pound Middle Eastern immigrant, regarding his T-shirt: “Taurus—who knew?”
All around me, the city is literally vibrating, shot through with light.
I am so at peace with the world, it doesn’t even phase me when a letter on official-looking LAUSD stationery flops through the mail slot.
I open it. Call Mike.
“Hannah got in…the magnet school!”
“Hurray!” he says.
“Oh my God. I thought the odds were like one in twenty-four hundred!”
“I know,” Mike admits cheerfully. “Woo! You’re telling me! That was a close one!”
“Right!”
“But I told you to trust me,” he said. “Didn’t I? And now that she’s in the magnet, instead of going to the one hundred percent Mexican school, she can go to the fifty percent Mexican, fifty percent Armenian school.”
“It’s all good!” I reply. Is it?
10
Therapy Graduation, or My Dinner with Sandre
I am finally actually sitting in the cliffside home of my long-suffering therapist, Ruth. I am suspended in her glass box overhanging the rocks, while the Pacific Ocean crashes in thundering sprays below. Between sprays, you can hear the musical tinkle of the Zen fountain in the foyer just beyond.
I do not know if it is because I have been coming here for almost twenty years now, or because it is my last session, literally my therapy graduation, my final time here. But her house has already, oddly, started to feel like a memory to me. The gold-framed poster of Cezanne dancers, the African masks, the books by Jung…
It’s as though it’s a memory of a different time entirely. A time of my youth. When these totems of art, sculpture, literature held magic, a fond magic.
Or maybe this house just feels like a memory because so many of the artifacts are now literally in boxes. Stacks of books, crates, and half-packed-up art stand around us, a Forest of Stuff we have negotiated our way through to get to the familiar tan leather couches, with the familiar white sheeps-ruggy things over the backs.
“These movers!” Ruth cries out, waving her hands and shaking her head with a humorous look of wild exasperation. In person, she is still the statuesque Grecian vase of a woman she has always been, in beige caftan, with turquoise rings and silver bracelets and big geometric earrings, her wiry hair only slightly shot through at this point with leonine streaks of white and gray. If anything, her skin seems fixed in time, smooth, marble, yet elastic.
“Moving INTO Los Angeles, that costs practically nothing. But moving out…” She gestures to a sculpture of a Native American woman holding a baby in the cowl of a blanket. “Do you know how much moving Manda alone will cost me?” Ruth refers to all her sculptures by first name. “Simply getting her to ferry to the island…”
The island she is referring to is in the San Juan Islands. After practicing therapy for several decades in Los Angeles, Ruth is finally cashing out her giant Pacific Coast Highway “box of light”—that’s what she has always called it, her “box of light”—and moving to a forty-acre compound up in a remote, forested area in Washington State. It’s part of a multimillion-dollar investment she has made with several other baby boomers, a consortium made up of two other therapists, a restaurateur, an investment banker, a lawyer, a woman who made her fortune in herbal muscle relaxation products…
“Herbal muscle relaxation?” I ask.
“Something like that,” Ruth says, waving a hand. “There was sadly a negative ruling by the FDA, completely unfair, totally on a technicality…”
“What was the—the technicality?”
“Lab tests in Belgium had completely supported her company’s claims, but the Fed got different numbers…Fortunately, Dani has been able to keep mo
st of her money, but the whole experience left her feeling very tired of the corporate world and of our government, which is so narrow-mindedly Western and anti-holistic.”
Ruth shows me the white tabletop model for their compound, called Sanyassin.
“Sanyassin?” I ask.
“Yogic term for spiritual seeker. In your middle years, your ‘householder’ years, you are consumed with the duties of marriage, raising a family, and maintaining a household. But when that’s done, after sixty, you move into the Sanyassin years. In Sanyassin, you meditate, you pursue your spiritual practice. If need be, you become a tribal elder, give advice. We will be blogging our political thoughts, poems, stories, and prayers for world peace on our Web site.”
The plan for Sanyassin looks absolutely stunning. It is all waterfront, forest, skylights, decking, and dramatic angles. There is a movie theater, a steam room, a yoga studio, a greenhouse…
“And best of all…” Ruth says, flopping open a photo album of backup visuals. “Let’s see, where is it?” The page falls open to a photo of what appears to be a terrifyingly fit sixty-something-year-old man with flowing white hair, a red bandana, and little tiny buckskin shorts standing arms and legs akimbo before what appears to be a bank of windmills. He is kind of like the cowboy, the outlaw, the pirate captain of wind energy.
“Oh, that’s Thor,” Ruth laughs. “He’s our designer. He has already built a whole wind energy system in Sedona…Which is to say, Sanyassin will be ninety percent solar- and wind-energy-powered. Within two years, we will be ecologically self-sufficient. A surprisingly small carbon footprint.”
She taps a spot on the map.
“And we’ve just started planting in this area. There is an experimental type of grape Renard—the restaurateur, he started Shallots in Berkeley—is planning to plant for the cultivation of our own wines. A Merlot, a Cabernet, and maybe, depending on moisture levels, a Pinot Noir.” She taps another spot on the map. “This is already built. A small dairy farm, with cows and goats Renard has personally selected, to make our own cheeses.
Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! Page 23
