“That’s a stupidity I’d welcome.”
“You mean it?”
“Sure,” I said. “I want him to prove me wrong by turning out to be a decent guy. But just in case he doesn’t, don’t let’s give him any more turn-ins than we have already, okay? Especially not about the kids. Pete needs a little more seasoning before we teach him the secret handshake.”
“You’re right,” she said, “but I wish you weren’t.”
“Are you sweet on this guy?” I asked.
“A little,” she said. “Sure.”
“A little?” I said. “Hey, can you smell that?”
“Smell what?”
“The smoke,” I said, “from your pants being on fire.”
“Shut up!” She grabbed a dish towel to thwack me with, but I’d made her blush.
“Let me get the plates out,” I said. “I think food would help at this point.”
We walked them down to our building’s parking lot around ten, me and Dean.
“So check out Lulu’s car, it’s totally Methodist Blue,” I said, that being Dean’s nickname for the powdery shade his own farming parents always chose.
“Little bit paler than you’d see around Syracuse,” Dean said to Lulu. “You sure you’re not one of those Presbyterians?” He opened the driver’s door for her, and I walked Pete to the other side.
“Madeline,” he said, “I just want you to know that was the best night I’ve had in months.” He gave me a hug, adding, “You and Dean are friends I hope to spend a lot more time with.”
“It would be our pleasure,” I said.
Lulu started up the Methodist-mobile and cruised out of the lot onto North Street. Dean and I waved our final goodbyes after them and started back inside.
While we waited for the elevator, he turned to me and said, “That guy Pete? Talk about a candyass.”
“I felt bad for him, didn’t you?”
“Sure,” he said. “But I still wouldn’t trust him for half a heartbeat. He’s Santangelo’s lapdog, ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice on the off chance he’ll get to hump the man’s leg.”
“Lulu seems to think we can do a little deprogramming.”
“No way in hell,” he said. “It’s a goddamn miracle he didn’t show up tonight in saffron robes, waving a tambourine.”
The elevator dinged, and the doors peeled wide in front of us.
“Hare Krishna,” said Dean, climbing aboard.
“He’s not that bad.”
“He’s Hare freakin’ Rama bad, Bunny. Mark my words.”
Part III
I almost think we’re all of us Ghosts. ... It’s not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them. . . . There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.
—Henrik Ibsen,
Ghosts
15
Monday we had parent-teacher conferences, as promised.
All classes were canceled, and lunch was far more edible than usual—roast beef and au gratin potatoes and green beans that had been harvested sometime after the Korean War for a change. They even trotted out real coffee in rented urns, looking all shiny and spiffy atop the rented table linens.
Meds, meanwhile, were distributed offstage.
It wasn’t a happy occasion for anyone. I’d say only half the families showed up, if that. I wanted to believe they were too strapped for cash to venture across the country, in light of Santangelo’s hefty tuition.
I spent most of the day in my classroom, staring out the window while ticking off the no-shows with the passage of each fifteen-minute chunk.
Wiesner’s people gave it a miss. So did Forchetti’s and Sitzman’s.
Fay’s parents wandered in, confused—her impeccably blonded mother in head-to-toe size-four Chanel, her father sporting bespoke duds up the wazoo. I redirected them to Lulu, next door.
Mr. and Mrs. Gonzaga, parents of chair-tossing Patti, cowered in the doorway until I stood up to welcome them in. They seemed so tired and sad, clutching each other’s hands on the other side of my desk, that I didn’t have the heart to say anything true about their little girl.
“Patti’s awfully shy, as I’m sure you know,” I said, smiling at them. “But she’s sweet as can be all the same. A consistent pleasure to have in class.”
They wanted to believe me, but it was a stretch for all of us.
“Is she,” said her mother, “is she keeping up with her studies?”
“Oh, yes,” I assured her. “And she contributes especially fine work whenever we have free writing.”
Patti’s entire free-writing output consisted of five crumpled binder-paper sheets, one for each week since the start of the term—the words “THIS SCHOOL SUCKS! THIS SCHOOL SUCKS! THIS SCHOOL SUCKS!” scrawled thick and black down all of them, both sides, with respect to neither margin nor rule.
“And she hasn’t,” said her father, “thrown anything?” He coughed.
“Thrown anything?” I asked, picture of innocence.
“At you?” murmured Mrs. Gonzaga.
“Patti?” I said. “Oh my goodness, no!”
Her father coughed again. “It’s just that we . . . sometimes . . .”
“Chairs, you know,” said her mother, “at us . . .”
“The occasional plate or bowl,” he added.
“Well, then, she’s made tremendous improvement,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t be struck by lightning on account of that blatant falsehood. Hoping, too, that they wouldn’t credit Santangelo—who probably remembered their daughter’s existence only when he had occasion to cash their checks.
Mr. Gonzaga shook my hand when the bell rang. His wife was about to do the same but then stepped closer, to hug me instead.
I knew they hadn’t believed a word.
They shuffled to the door, and I heard Mrs. Gonzaga break down out in the hallway.
“There, there, my dear,” her husband murmured. “It won’t be long until we have our sweet girl home again.”
Patti’s mother didn’t answer, but she managed to cry more quietly until they got to the doors at the end of the hall.
Just about killed me, hearing that, so I was relieved that Mooney’s parents showed up ten minutes late.
Mr. and Mrs. LeChance wanted to be anywhere but in that classroom. They were good-looking people, tanned and fit. If they’d been birds, a naturalist would have noted the female’s brighter plumage.
“Mooney’s turned in all his work on time this term,” I told them. “We’re just finishing up our unit on the Second World War, and he’s made a real contribution to the classroom discussion.”
Mrs. LeChance was fidgety.
“Your son is just terrific,” I said, catching her eye.
“Oh, honey,” she said, “he’s not mine.”
Mr. LeChance had the decency to blush at that. “My first wife died several years ago. Beebe is Mooney’s stepmother.”
She patted her husband’s knee, making damn sure he got an eyeful of trophy cleavage. “Poor ol’ Sally. Such a tragic loss—and then the lawsuit dragged on, of course.”
“I’m so very sorry,” I said.
“That Mooney’s been out of control ever since,” she said, tossing a hand to wave away my concern. “Spoiled rotten, what with all the money we got for the settlement.”
Beebe stroked her husband’s knee again. “Isn’t that right, honey?”
She turned back to me, swinging her crossed leg to make the diamonds in her ankle bracelet flash against that golden tan. “Place like this is the very best thing for him. Thank the Lord we’re well enough off to afford it.”
Mr. LeChance cleared his throat.
She leaned over to straighten his collar.
“We best be going now,” she said. “
Wouldn’t want to miss our flight.”
Mr. LeChance looked at his watch. “I just want to catch a few minutes with my son before we leave.”
“We’re not allowed, remember?” she chided. “Seeing as how Mooney’s got himself in trouble. Again.”
Beebe stood up, turning toward her husband. She pushed her hair back, and I was overjoyed to spot the scars from her face-lift.
“Get a move on, Bucky-boy,” she said, clapping her hands. “Antigua waits for no man.”
She turned to wink at me when they reached the door. “Y’all keep up the good work, now, hear?”
Wiesner and Sitzman wandered in moments later, interrupting my prayers that a sudden loss of cabin pressure over the Caribbean would make Beebe’s implants blow up.
As such, the sharp crack of a small but definite actual explosion made me jump about three feet.
It had gone off somewhere in the building—not enough concussion to damage the windows, but my eardrums ached.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
Sitzman looked at Wiesner.
Wiesner shook his head in denial, then sniffed the air.
I followed suit and caught an acrid hit of nail polish remover.
“Peroxyacetone,” Wiesner said. “Made by some total amateur.”
“Yeah, right,” said Sitzman, “with absolutely no help from you.”
“Dude, I’ve been with you all morning,” Wiesner replied.
“Whatever,” said Sitzman. “I still totally know you did it.”
“I wouldn’t cook a batch of that shit if you paid me,” insisted Wiesner.
Sitzman and I traded doubting smirks.
“Seriously,” said Wiesner. “This friend of mine, Stevie, put a few grams in his front pocket a couple of years ago, and then he stood up too fast at the end of French class.” He bowed his head with great sadness. “Now we call him One-Nut.”
16
Tuesday afternoon it was cold as shit outside, wind pushing bits of everything around under a low brow of sky.
Forchetti was back in class, freed from the Farm, so that made four of us—him, me, Wiesner, and Sitzman.
“You guys really want to talk about the sixties?” I asked.
“Like out of the textbook or real stuff?” asked Wiesner.
“We could do real stuff,” I said. “With maybe some pictures out of the textbook.”
“I want to hear about what it was like for you,” said Sitzman.
Forchetti snorted. “She was a little kid back then. What the hell does she know about it?”
“I was born in ’63, Forchetti,” I said, “but I remember the last few years pretty well. And a lot of what you guys think of as the sixties kind of leaked into the first chunk of the seventies—at least until the war was over.”
“What,” said Forchetti, “like tie-dye and all that shit?”
“Tie-dye was the least of it,” I said.
“Ooooo,” he said, his head wobbling as he made peace signs with both hands. “Flower power with granola on top. Let’s all go pick daisies and talk about love.”
“Shut up, Foreskin,” said Wiesner. “You wanna sit here listening to crap about that McCarthy guy? At least maybe this won’t be totally boring.”
“Fine,” whined Forchetti. He slumped down in his chair like he knew full well I could bore him to sleep even if Godzilla suddenly bashed through the wall with a truckload of free tequila and strippers.
“Well,” I said, “I remember the time somebody sent us two keys of dope from Maui in this welded-shut mailbox. I think that was around when we were hiding the guy who went AWOL right before he was supposed to ship out for Vietnam. We used to dress him up in my mom’s clothes and put sunglasses and this big Afro wig on him to take him grocery shopping if he got bored of hanging around the house.”
“What happened to him?” asked Wiesner.
“Somebody drove him to Canada, I think. Nice guy. I got the grown-ups to do the Stoned Balloon on his last night, for good luck.”
Forchetti asked, “What’s a Stoned Balloon?” before he could cover up the fact that I’d gotten him interested.
“You take a dry-cleaning bag and twist it up into a rope until it doubles back on itself, then you put it on a wire hanger and hook it on a chandelier or whatever and light the end of it on fire.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Well, it just looks cool, you know?” I said. “You have to turn off all the lights and put a big bowl of water under it. And then these chunks of burning plastic drip off the bottom slowly. They make this zip noise, and there’s a streak of blue flame until they hit the water. It goes faster and faster near the end—zip-zip-zip-zip, with the blue streak getting so bright it just glows solid—and then the last one hesitates, balanced on the hanger, until it tips off and kind of pops and whines down and sizzles out in the water, and there’s just total darkness and silence. The grown-ups thought it was cool that we could get into it, even though we weren’t high.”
“What would you do after that?” asked Wiesner.
“Listen to Hendrix or Donovan and bitch about Nixon, mostly,” I said, “while passing around a bowl of Screaming Yellow Zonkers. By then it was usually my bedtime.”
“Just you and your parents and this army guy?” asked Forchetti.
“My mom and my stepfather, three of us kids,” I said. “But there were always lots of people around.”
“Like who?” asked Forchetti.
“Like maybe we’d pick up a couple of kids hitchhiking down the coast, and they’d crash in the living room for a night, or Black Panthers would come from Berkeley for the weekend. These guys Chet and Paul lived in the backyard in a really funky orange van for a while, in exchange for carpentry. Sometimes Joe the Woodchopper came up from Big Sur to cook potato latkes. Eldridge Cleaver was supposed to stay with us, but he went to Algeria.”
“Who’s Eldridge Cleaver?” asked Sitzman.
“This guy who escaped from prison,” I said. “I think it was for having a shoot-out with the cops in Oakland.”
“Who else?” asked Sitzman.
“Ken and Ginny sometimes. I think Ken could play thirty-two instruments. He’d mess around with my flute and stuff—totally cool guy.”
“So it was like a commune?” asked Forchetti.
“Just our house. But people were welcome to hang out.”
“Hitchhikers, though? That seems really dangerous,” said Sitzman.
“They were young, most of them,” I said. “We found a lot of cool babysitters that way.”
“ Babysitters?” sputtered Forchetti. “Just strangers off the street?”
“It was different then,” I said. “I mean, you can make fun of flower power and granola in retrospect, but for a while there it actually worked.”
“Sounds like you miss it,” said Wiesner.
“You have no idea how much,” I said. “I mean, I was a little kid, so I’m sure I have a skewed perspective, but there was something about it that was kind of . . . splendid.”
“How do you mean?” asked Wiesner.
“You always knew who the good guys were, and it seemed like we were really going to win out at long last. Shit would get better, you know? All we had to do was more peace marches until it sank in.”
“Peace marches?” said Forchetti. “What the hell for?”
I picked up my copy of We the People and flipped to the closing chapters. “Check out the picture on page four-oh-seven,” I said.
They opened their own textbooks.
“See the girl in the middle, running down the road?” I asked.
“The naked one,” said Forchetti.
“Her name is Phan Thi Kim Phúc,” I said. “This was taken right after her village got napalmed by accident. She’s naked because it burned her clothes off.”
“What’s napalm?” asked Forchetti.
“Jellied gasoline,” said Wiesner. “Pretty much the same shit that’s in Molotov cocktails, except not homemad
e.”
“You know how to make Molotov cocktails?” asked Forchetti, impressed.
“You mix the gas with dish soap. Stick it in a Coke bottle or something, with a rag in the neck to stop it up. Light the rag and toss it. Not exactly rocket science.”
“The soap makes it stick to whatever it lands on,” I said. “Fabric, wood, flesh—it keeps burning. Just like napalm.”
“That’s disgusting,” said Forchetti.
“It was all disgusting,” I said. “The whole war.”
He looked back down at the picture. “How old was she?”
“Nine,” I said. “Not much older than I was.”
“Did she die?”
“No. But she wasn’t expected to survive. I think she was in a hospital for about fourteen months.” I flipped back to the previous page. “Check out the picture on four-oh-five,” I said. “That was taken the year I was born.”
“What the hell is it?” asked Forchetti.
“Read the damn caption,” said Wiesner. “It’s a Buddhist monk who set himself on fire in Saigon to protest the war.”
“Why do those cops in the next picture have dogs?” asked Forchetti. “They look like they’re about to eat that kid’s face off.”
“You never heard of Martin Luther King, Forchetti?” asked Wiesner. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Forchetti slammed his book shut. “Just because I don’t sit up all night reading this shit like you do, Wiesner—trying to get in Madeline’s pants.”
“At least I can read,” said Wiesner.
“I can totally fucking read,” said Forchetti.
“Then try shutting up for five seconds, you ignorant piece of shit,” said Wiesner. “You might actually learn something.”
“Lighten up, you guys,” I said, “or I’m going to start talking about McCarthyism.”
“I want to hear more about this,” said Sitzman. “You said you used to go on peace marches and stuff. What was that like?”
“It was cool,” I said.
I glanced out the window, watching all those bare black branches tossing in the wind. “When I was a little kid, it really seemed like everybody would just keep linking arms in the streets, marching and singing, until the war stopped and people didn’t have to get hurt or messed up anymore.”
The Crazy School Page 10
