The School on Heart's Content Road

by Carolyn Chute

  Out in the world in a rattling rocking factory in China.

  Workers bend to inspect the flow of glossy MY CHILD IS AN HONOR STUDENT bumper stickers, broken into smaller orders from varying towns and schools. This batch is green with white English language lettering. Unreadable. Unappreciated.

  In thousands of American and other First World schools.

  The uniformly practiced fingers of millions tap the keyboards, the uniformly expectant eyes of millions are lit by the yawing radiance of screens. Millions of brains are locked to uniform programs of study in a haze of trust and belief, snatching at the high-speed and uniformly correct answers and theories required for tests, for scores, for honors.

  Secret Agent Jane gathers evidence.

  There is a person named Gail here at Gordie’s house today, one of the mothers, Michelle’s mum. Michelle is one of the oldish girls who is always too busy. She goes to the university with Claire on Wednesdays and talks all the time about stuff nobody cares about. This lady, Gail, has a cute body, nice and shape-ish. And her hair is a good long braid, black hair. But her face is line-ish. And she has too much tattoo. If you have a little tattoo on your leg or arm or titty, a little shamrock or butterfly, it is okay. But Gail has HUGE FLOWERS of smoodged colors around her neck—yes, her neck. In front of her shirt, over the button; you can always see part of it.

  She is making a rug. She didn’t bring any books or games. She doesn’t even try to make me happy.

  The cat likes her and sits by her foot or in the next chair. She calls him Duey. But Bev calls him Frank. He is black and scary and lazy. I hate him. Some cats I like. But all cats here are just dumb. Maybe my Mum will call and say she’s coming soon. Maybe the lawyer guy Kane has thought of a way. I reach up for the phone a couple of times when it rings. It’s the kind on the wall. Turns out it’s only people who want people. I let the phone drop and smash the wall right in the middle of their dumb words. Gail doesn’t care if I do this. She just keeps working on her dumb rug no matter what I do.

  Gordie comes in from a door with sheds and other doors. He has BAGS. Yes, stuff from the store. I squint my eyes and work up the power. The room glows a meanish pink. I fix my glasses better and I know he knows I know where he’s been. “What did you bring me?”

  He just feels my shoulder in a love way.

  I jerk away. “How come you didn’t take me to the store?”

  “Because you are unhappy when you are at the store.” He has more sunburn, more tan, and believe me, he did not go to the beach. The real beach. The ocean one where you can buy stuff.

  I say, “If you bought me stuff, I’d be happy. You make everything so hard,” I tell him. “You are just trying to get me mad. I’m losing patience!”

  He looks at Gail and she looks up from her rug right into his eyes, and then he goes over and puts some stuff from his bags into a drawer.

  I say, “The reason people go to stores is to BUY stuff. If I go with you, why? Just to go and stand there in useless stupid space? I need STUFFFFFF!” I cross my arms.

  He ignores me, goes to look at some messages on the big nail.

  With these secret-power glasses, I can see POLICE. They grab Gordie and sit on him with arm cuffs to make his hands behind him and scare him till he knows it was a BIG MISTAKE to make me mad.

  He calls somebody on the phone, and his voice is SO NICE, and he talks about pine furniture and medium grade and ready market. This might be in-legal. I will not forget any of this.

  Finally, he goes out the shed doors and I scream after him, “STUPID APE!”

  Gail acts like nothing has happened. But the cat is looking at me with evil eyes and twitching his tail in his chair beside hers. The table is covered with Gail’s rug stuff. No food. At lunch, we had to eat in our laps, which is okay only if you have a TELEVISION.

  She keeps doing her rug. I keep standing around rotting in boredom.

  In a nice way, I ask Gail where she got her pretty hair thing made of wood like a turtle, really cute. She says, “Gordon gave it to me.”

  My eyeballs turn to ice. Everything looks like flames. “How much did it cost?”

  She pulls it from the end of her braid. She puts it in my hand. It is so perfect, small cuts and lines, green so beautiful, yellow so beautiful. Colors so sweet for your eyes to see. “He made it,” she says. Her face is all cracks and lines as she moves her mouth. She smells sweatish, like a guy.

  “He made it?” I toss it back inside her hand. “Who cares what he makes? Little kids make stuff.” I am feeling sick. I sit down on a chair. It has arms. Better than the cat’s chair. I watch Gail’s hands, the rug getting more designs. Colors of rustish and green. She pokes at it with hooks. Her hands have rings, one a wedding kind.

  I say, “Gail, does Gordie have his truck license still X-pired?”

  She looks at me. “You mean his registration? Or his driver’s license?”

  “Whichever.”

  Her fingers push rust yarn through the rug shape. “I imagine he’s kept up on all that. He’s very efficient. It amazes me sometimes how much that man accomplishes in a day.” She looks me up and down. “Why do you ask?”

  I smile a very nice smile and shrug. “Some kids told me he was driving in-legal.”

  “I don’t know. So much goes on here. Maybe one of the farm trucks has a funny sticker. I can’t keep up with it all.”

  “It’s against the law to do inlegal rej-strations and stickers.”

  “Mm-hm.” She keeps looking at her rug. She always just brings her own stuff to do. Once she brushed my hair. That was nice. But otherwise, she is kind of a jerk. “Is your rej-stration paid up?” I ask.

  She looks at me again. “I don’t have a car anymore. I lost my license. OUI. People here drive me when I need to get anywhere.”

  “OUI. That’s the drunk thing.”

  She nods.

  “Are you drunk now?”

  “I’m having one of my dry times,” she says, not looking at me. “Ten months now.”

  “What about the windmills? Aren’t they inlegal?”

  She keeps her eyes down. “Ill-legal. And I did hear that about the windmills: too tall, by a few feet. The code man is Gordon’s friend, which helps. And it’s not a crime exactly. It’s some sorta ordinance, not as bad as murder.”

  “What about murder?” I ask. “Or robbed banks? Gordie done those ever?”

  She laughs.

  I don’t laugh. I say, “Well?”

  “Of course not, Jane.”

  Behind my pink-power heart glasses, my eyes squeeze into skinny thin shapes for extraspecial vision. I look around. I stand up and go over to Gordie’s desk and feel stuff. I open a drawer. I spin some wheels around, which are these things with people’s names wrote backwards on white cards and pink cards. Some cards are empty. There are their name, telephone, address, zip thing, and other words. There are so many cards on each wheel thing. Hundreds. Maybe some are crooks. Killers. Bomb men. Maybe the police would see these wheel things and go, Uh-huh, this is the evy dents we have been looking for.

  Gail’s voice. “Stay out of Gordon’s stuff, Jane.” She says it nice-ish and jerk-ish.

  I look, and the cat is looking up at Gail. Most cats sleep. This one just watches. I say, “What about Bev and Barbara? Are they against the law? Is their rej-stration run out yet?”

  Gail laughs, a soft but very long laugh. “You’re cute,” she says.

  Secret Agent Jane and the secret side of Gordon St. Onge. Jane speaks.

  Claire, who is Gordie’s round X-wife, says to me a couple of days ago, “Jane dear, I’m going to sign you up for our trip to Portland to see the quilt show.”

  Jane dear. I am sick of all this Jane dear business.

  I asked very nicely, “Do we get to stop at McDonald’s?”

  She said, “No.”

  “I’ll just stay here,” I told her.

  She said, “Most of the mothers and big girls would like to go see the beautiful quilts from a
ll over New England. And the big boys and men are all out straight on work this week, none to spare.”

  “Well, if you stop at McDonald’s, I’ll go.” I smiled real nice. “Sound like a good deal?” I folded my arms.

  She got a wicked mean look. “It isn’t going to be much longer, Jane, before you will have to do some things around here that take others into consideration.”

  “So?” I said. I took off my heart-shapes glasses and made my eyes as mean as hers, eyes into eyes.

  Later, Bonny Loo came to fix my supper and I said, folding my arms to show I was serious, “Bev and Barbara will do what I say. Tell them they need to stay with me when you guys all go to see stupid quilts.”

  It was the spatula I don’t like that Bonny Loo was using to fix my egg. It mooshes the egg too much. Bonny Loo only makes one egg for me, fried in butter. It usually comes out with too many brown lines. If I give one small look of disgust, she flips the egg to the cat. And she only brings ONE egg and she always says, “Ha-ha, a chicken laid this egg from its CUNT.” She is so disgusting she makes my stomach feel vomitish.

  So that night while she is poking the egg in the pan and all I see is her back, her voice says in a happy, singing, weird way, “Bev and Barbara are going to the quilt show, ho-ho.”

  I make my eyes squinty. “Well, who is going to stay here with me since I am NOT going unless we stop at McDonald’s . . . or maybe Burger King. I’ll go along with Burger King.”

  Her voice says, “Big Bertha is coming to stay with you.”

  “Big Bertha?” I ask. Something about the way she says Big Bertha makes my neck hurt. And my stomach.

  “We hired her. She lifts weights. She’s very strong and very big. You will luvvvv Big Bertha.”

  This was a joke. There was no Big Bertha. They were just bluffing me. I was not going to fall for this.

  “Oh, goodie,” I said.

  So the next day is the Quilt Show. That’s today. And guess what. There’s no Big Bertha. Ha-ha! I knew it. Instead there’s shifts. All men. And big boys. All sweaty. Some are nice. Some are boring. Some boys showed me tricks, head stands and stuff. I showed them some cheers of cheerleaders. The man Oh-RELL told me about one of his hogs who has a name of Al, who is extra smart. He told me about a horse once that could kiss lips and shut gates. Oh-RELL says he wants to be cremation-ized when he dies and buried with his oxen, which are big cows that pull. Oh-RELL taught me another French thing, how you say “Cummen Sar Vorr!,” which means Hi, I think. Or actually, How does it go? It’s very French. Plus I know ploys, which are wicked perfect pancakes,” he said. After Aurel, a man named Ernest. It was his shift. The boys told me Ernest hates kids and would probably be a grouch. He was quiet and didn’t tell me stuff or show me stuff, but he brought me an apple. And he gave me four quarters, which was very nice of him. I said, “Thank you very much.”

  So guess who comes for the noon shift, carrying a big box? Might as well be Big Bertha. It’s big hotshot Gordie. I am sitting at the table with good posture, looking straight ahead at a wall to show Gordie how much I have had to suffer here. I am wearing my heart-shapes glasses perfectly adjusted for special vision.

  Gordie walks across my vision and nods.

  I wiggle my fingers once to him, like a wave. To be nice. But not to act too excited. If you want POWER you do not act excited to see someone.

  He puts the box on the counter. He looks really hot and drippy.

  I say, without really looking at him, “I suppose that box is my horridable lunch.”

  Gordie says, “Right-o.” And he goes off to his room, which is actually the living room, and he comes back with a different shirt, still buttoning the top button. He smiles at me.

  I smile back. I have already looked in the box. There is nothing good about the box. You can tell Gordie isn’t even trying to please me. Not even one single maple candy in there. They have hundreds of maple candies here that come in cute shapes, like leaf shapes and cute cows and little smiling fat ladies. They taste like HEAVEN, creamy and sweet. The lady Lee Lynn told me they are kept in a secret safe place. That’s stupid. I am tired of the way everything here is always secret and safe.

  Gordie gets stuff out of the box and he makes me a sandwich with lettuce and tomatoes and beans. Yes, BEANS. Brown, cold, old. He puts the sandwich on a dish on the table next to my crayons and books and stuff.

  I say, “No thanks.”

  He looks at the sandwich a real long time.

  “I do not like beans,” I say.

  So he stuffs half this sandwich in his mouth and says, with his mouth stuffed, “I’ll make you one without beans.”

  I watch his back, his belt, his belt loops. His keys. His knife, which is folded inside the leather thing. His arms with sleeves rolled over and over real high up to show his tan. He is a huge person. Like on TV they wrastle or lift weights. He could probably sit right on you as long as he wanted. With these dark glasses, I can hear squeak sounds in his stomach. I say, “I don’t like those tomatoes.”

  He doesn’t turn around, just keeps pawing over the sandwich stuff. His voice says, “You liked tomatoes a few days ago.”

  “The other ones had sugar on them.”

  “How about this lettuce?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  So he brings a plain empty bread sandwich for me to the table and lays it very gently in the little dish in front of me. And there’s one with beans and everything for himself.

  Some bread in this world is yummy. But this is the beige wheat kind. With these pink heart-shaped glasses, I can see it has very disgusting pink specks. I pull both my hands back and put them in my lap. I say very calmly, “No thanks.” Out there beyond these secret agent glasses, his whiskery face is just the funniest weird color.

  He goes over to one of his cupboards, and he is very tall so the top shelves are easy. He says, “You like pepper jelly? It has sugar in it.” He gets a spoon from the drawer and digs out some stuff from the jar and makes a pile of it on his plate right beside his sandwich. The stuff is black. “Gor-maaaaaay,” he says, lapping the spoon and looking wicked love-ish into my eyes.

  I look squintish at the black stuff. I say, “What’s that?”

  He looks at my face. “A spoon,” he says. He’s playing dumb.

  I shrug. With these secret glasses, I can make him hardly there.

  “We’ve got plenty of milk down here today,” he says, nodding toward the fridge. Around his eyes sometimes is dark, tiredish and lumpy, which is how his eyes are today. And he is dripping all over his face from hotness.

  “I hate milk,” I says.

  “You need milk.”

  I shrug “I hate it. Bev and Lee Lynn and Gail and all of them know I hate milk.”

  He takes a bite of his lettuce, tomatoes, and bean sandwich, a huge bite. And his mouth sucks and chomps and plungers. It makes me sick. I stare at his mouth. The noise gets worser. With these special glasses, actually all these people here eat like pigs.

  “You like milk before you came here?”

  “You can ask Granpa or my Mum behind my back if you want, but they will just say no.” I stare into Gordie’s eyes. I know he and Granpa and my Mum whisper about me on the phone like I’m just a plant. I say, “It hasn’t anything to do with your horridable milk here being from Oh-RELL’s gross old pewish cows. I don’t like milk. You get it?”

  His lips and tongue are like a storm, a terrible whirring, everything squishing, juicing, chomping. And this is probably just a snack for him. After this, he’ll probably go up to the Settlement and eat a few chickens and sheep and pumpkins and thirty or forty maple candies shaped like cute leaves.

  I say, “I would like some sugar on this bread. WHITE sugar.”

  He leans a little toward me. “No.”

  Sick monster.

  “This is not a restaurant, Jane,” he says.

  “But I’m hungry.”

  “Take your pick. Tomato or lettuce or beans or bread and/or milk.”

>   “No thanks.”

  “Fine,” he says. With meanness. And his weirdish whitish blue or green eyes are like knives into my eyes. “I brought you plenty of carrots to snack on through the afternoon. And there’s people coming this afternoon, different people, to stay with you, and some are bringing you some afternoon snacks, and you can decide then whether or not you like what they bring.”

  “But I’m hungry now,” I tell him.

  “The women—when you first got here—decided to be accommodating. But it is starting to wear thin. Cooking you fourteen different sausages, ten different eggs, ten different cheese sandwiches, seven or eight pans of hot cereal, two dozen not-perfect-enough pancakes is a waste of food. This isn’t a restaurant, Jane.”

  “You already said that.”

  “Nobody in our family is forced to eat anything they don’t like. But most people like something. You can wait till snack time and see if the snack pleases you.”

  I touch the table leg with my foot. With these secret agent glasses, I can imagine it in splinters.

  He eats and eats. He smiles a little. He goes to make himself another sandwich. I watch his back as he stands over there by the drainboard yanking lettuce apart. He yanks on the lettuce so happily. I hate it when everybody gets so happy just when I’m feeling so mad.

  And then what’s next? Without even turning around, he says this thing: “Your mother has let you rule. Your mother is a soft and tender woman. A trusting, honest, hard-working, brave, very smart, really generous . . . and very-easily-pushed-around person.”

  “Shut up,” I say. The air is getting hotter and hotter and hotter like real fire.

  “I’m not insulting your mum. It’s just her personality. But other people’s personalities take advantage.”

  “I said to shut up.”

  “By three o’clock you’ll be hungry enough to eat grass clippings.”

  “I hate you,” I say.

  He cackles like a witch, walks limply and hunchedly back to the table. “Good,” he says. “Wicked evil ugly witches and wizards love it when you hate them. I’m glad you hate me. Hee-hee.” He bloms half the new sandwich into his mouth. “Mmmmmmm,” he says, around the lettuce that is still pulling itself into his teeth.