Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes

  “Yes, yes ...”

  “Well, I started the one about Cinderella and her extended family and she stopped me. I was sitting down on the sand and she came up and put her hand over my mouth and she said, ‘You know, Daddy, that’s very nice, but I’m just not happy enough for all this.’”

  Late that night, at home in bed, Jay asked me if I had coached her to say that. Of course not, I said. I asked him why he would doubt that Ollie came up with it on her own.

  “Well, gee, h-have you noticed that she never says anything nearly that sophisticated?”

  “Yes she does. Occasionally, she says something really amazing, profound. But only when she feels like it.”

  “That is amazing.”

  My head was partially buried under a pillow and Jay lifted the pillow and began to kiss my neck. I rolled over on my back and looked at him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just not happy enough for all this.” He laughed. Then we were very quiet for a while; then Jay went to sleep. I got up, sat in the living room in the dark, and thought about Ollie, then about my mother, Q, and Walter Faber, in that order. I smoked some cigarettes and then it was dawn. I thought about how infinity was tangible. I was very tired, but I sat still as the furniture became visible and morning traffic noises started up in the street. The things I thought about, before I went to sleep sitting up in my chair, were times when I could slow my life down, go into a kind of trance; this made me—if not rapturous—close to restored. If I thought about slowing down, I paradoxically thought about running a race as a kid, I could feel that long-ago morning’s air on my skin, I could feel the expectant surface of my skin and the miraculous engine of my nine-year-old body, in a steady pumping cessation of movement, moving fast but suspended, in my green hightop Keds; then I thought about a poem in French I’d learned in fifth grade: “À Verdun, à Verdun, / mon petit cheval brun”; I saw a woman’s hands (my mother’s?) working a lump of dough for half-moon cookies. We painted one half with white icing and the other with chocolate; I loved that line down the center: symmetry! Then I reconstructed a particular afternoon in the lab with Q when we’d made a discovery about a certain protein’s phosphorylation—I’d gone jigging out into the hall, throwing my goggles up. Q was wheezing like a teakettle, laughing and coughing his famous cough. The final bit of euphoria had to do with Jesse: his face, the way it looked to me once when we were making love and I was on top. His hair was in his eyes and he was unshaven: it was early morning. The way he looked as he began to come: I remembered putting my mouth on his, I remembered a certain way he moved and how my body, surprised, responded—one long shudder, a sound, and then, very slowly, we came together.

  Chapter 7

  I SAT ON the baby swings with the public-school kindergarten teacher. As we talked, we would swing a little, put a foot out, stop, swing a little, dragging the toes of our shoes in the dirt.

  I liked this teacher. Her name was Gloria Walther and she taught kindergarten at the Sixth Street School of the L.A. Unified School District, where Ollie would be going next fall. We’d been talking for a while, me trying to explain Ollie, Gloria Walther trying to explain her kindergarten: the thirty-four children in each classroom, the lack of resources. She’d been working without an aide, without enough paper, textbooks, audiovisual aids, since Governor Reagan and Proposition 13 had gutted the California public-school system. There were many Korean and Spanish children in the school who could not speak English. Gloria Walther said she had bilingual parents to assist her in the classroom. Gloria herself had learned these languages.

  I had visited her classroom and watched her in action, her eyes traveling everywhere in the room—reading group to coloring group to math manipulatives group to computer group, at work on the single, slightly rundown Apple.

  I watched Gloria now as she talked, a solid, pretty black woman with cornrows, bright hazel eyes, a startling smile. As she talked to me, she checked out the playground—a little boy climbing the jungle gym, two girls on the seesaw. I saw her adding up, taking away: Who was where? Who stayed in, who came out? It was after school, but some parents hadn’t collected their offspring yet. It was a mild autumn afternoon, with the sort of champagney breezes and clear air, the falling red leaf or two, that made me love L.A.—L.A. without smog, without gridlock traffic. A good day to drive fast ’round the curves on Mulholland; better yet, a good day to sit in a schoolyard on a too-small swing, reducing one’s expectations. Letting things get smaller instead of larger, not thinking about any chemistry but the sweet chlorophyllation process of the tired and toxic trees of Los Angeles, O2 rising from the leaves. I stared at a solitary small desk sitting by itself on the asphalt: An extra seat for Ollie? Or a sad little misfit? I brushed my hand over my eyes and listened to children calling to each other, Gloria Walther answering another teacher’s shout, the seesaw complaining quietly, sleep-night, night-sleep, and the sound of a tennis ball pock-pocking against a wall in the adjacent yard.

  Gloria Walther had been teaching for a long time. She was not put off by what I had to say about Ollie; she wanted to meet her. She and I shook hands; the chains of the baby swings rattled as we reached out to each other, then rattled again as we stood up.

  “Everyone tells me Ollie should be in a private school,” I said. “But the ones I’ve seen terrify me, their values seem so screwed up. At one of these schools, Ross Rossner is a parent. So, because he’s president of a studio, he treats the kids to first-run adventure films, he throws parties for them at the studio. OK, great, but someone told me that he opens the door of the school in the fall—and that drives me crazy. If Marie Curie or Einstein opened the door of the school, or Freud, or Margaret Mead ... that would be appropriate—but here’s this guy representing education who’s known for nothing but making a lot of money from big-market films and he opens the door of the school? What does this tell us about Los Angeles?”

  Gloria Walther put her head back and laughed heartily.

  “That it’s a company town? Calm down, Esme. It will be OK. Ollie will be OK. Sixth Street will be her school and we’ll love her here. And I open the door of my classroom.”

  I shook her hand and left, smiling, breathing deeply the freshened air.

  I hadn’t mentioned it to Gloria Walther but I’d actually taken Ollie and checked out a school for “highly gifted” children. It was called Ariston and prospective students had to score 148 or higher on the Stanford-Binet intelligence test to qualify for admission. Tests were given all year round, I assumed because so few children actually qualified to enter. I hadn’t thought about the Stanford-Binet for a while, not since IQ tests started getting a bad rep for being monocultural and skewed to little middle-class minds. I remembered it vaguely as slightly outmoded—and wasn’t it only yesterday that 135 or so was considered near-genius? I paged through the clunky prose of the Ariston brochure, numbing my distaste. Well, somebody was raising brainy tots. Ariston had acquired quite a sizable little population of whiz kids, including the offspring of some famous movie stars.

  Ollie had a cold, but she was very restless around the house and when I asked her if she’d like to take a little test at a school, she said, “Think this is wind, guess and test. Coming fruit in the tree, Mom.”

  The avocado tree had bloomed again: we stood looking up at the dark-green glossy pears, pendulous and perfect, the sun leisurely fingering through the fat leaf-blades. Ollie smiled happily. “Light light,” she said. “Trees test and test and fruit comes.”

  By some miracle there was no traffic and it happened that we entered the Ariston School’s large high-ceilinged drafty lobby a few minutes early—we sat waiting on a leather couch as the pinched-faced receptionist typed and sighed, rustling papers. Ollie sniffled, breathing noisily through her nose, humming a little. I looked around. Trophies and plaques: speech contests, interscholastic science competitions, drama statuettes. Signs that said WE WON: WE’RE NUMBER ONE. I shivered, I felt like I was catching Ollie’s cold and shakily faste
ned the top button of my pea jacket. I searched the walls: not a single child’s drawing, random and miraculous—only some framed things in a glass case on a far wall labeled Prizewinning Student Art, all of it palely derivative of Great Masters, pre-twentieth century. A bird and jug, nature morte, ballerina, Quixote figure. All roughly the same. No dropped toys, no music, no spilled candy. I sneezed. Ollie smiled at me and burped loudly. The receptionist looked up, disapproving.

  “Miss Oplesch says you may go in now.”

  A door in the near wall opened on cue as she spoke and a dowdily girlish person in a gold-and-brown plaid skirt, wide face, wide glasses, wide mouth, and a shellacked helmet of hair crooked her finger at us.

  She waved Ollie into the room, then stepped in front of me. She was squat as a fire hydrant; I almost ran her down, just managing to swerve at the last second. The word bouncer swam before my eyes. I stared down into the brown roots of her gold hair.

  “Oh, no, Mamma,” she said. “We don’t need you to help take a test.”

  I put my hand on the doorjamb. “Oh, no, of course not. But Ollie is—I just thought I’d get her settled ...”

  “No, Mamma,” she repeated. “We don’t need any help settling in. If Olivia tests in, she tests in. That’s it.”

  I nodded as she closed the door in my face.

  After half an hour (I was now feverishly sneezing and blowing my nose), the door opened again and Ollie ran crookedly out, zigzagging, then turning and leaping into my lap, burying her head in my jeans.

  Miss Oplesch stood in her office doorway, looking attentive, as if she was hearing a sound in a higher register, like an animal. She crooked her finger at us again and when I pointed to myself, she nodded.

  Inside her office I looked again for kid drawings and here, at last, there were some real primitive beauties: big heads, elongated houses, and turtle cars—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were displayed as some sort of evidence. Miss Oplesch’s master’s degree in psychology was prominently mounted as was a baccalaureate degree from a well-known Catholic college.

  Ollie sat on my lap, bouncing a little. I peered around her, suppressing a sneeze.

  “Well,” said Miss Oplesch. “We have a very unusual case here.”

  “I’m not surprised you say that. You see, I was going to explain about Oll ...”

  “I require no explanation. I simply test, Mrs. Tallich. And what these tests reveal about Olivia is quite ... singular.”

  Silence. I was damned if I was going to say anything.

  “Ariston gives the California Aptitude Test as well as the Stanford-Binet. The first only tells us what a child has been taught, the latter actually reveals intelligence quotient.”

  “Forgive me, I thought that IQ tests were only capable of measuring ten to fifteen percent of intellectual ability ... so I wonder how you ...”

  Her look stopped me. “Your information is incorrect, Mrs. Tallich. It yields complete IQ information. And in Olivia’s case, the CAT reveals that she has very little clearly organized knowledge—I mean this is a child who could not identify the shape of a teapot but recognized the word electricity as well as the word number and several others including test. When did you teach her to read?”

  “I didn’t. It’s new to me.”

  Miss Olpesch narrowed her eyes at me; was I lying? I sneezed, fishing in Ollie’s pocket for a tissue. She frowned and continued. Then Ollie sneezed. Miss Oplesch flattened her flat figure against her chairback, avoiding germs.

  “At any rate, her Stanford-Binet seemed very high, higher than our minimum admission score. I say seemed because while her spatial aptitude looked high, her verbal is impossible to interpret exactly. This is a child who cannot recognize a teapot and put sentences together in any comprehensible fashion. Is she acting like this? She has absolutely no ability to speak!”

  “I don’t know the answers to these questions. I guess that’s why I’m here with her. And she’s never seen a teapot, because I usually brew my tea in the cup.”

  Ollie and I snuffled together. Miss Oplesch got up and stood at the door, shutting her eyes and offering her flat naked-looking face, covered with tiny pimples. It hurt to look at her, the way it pained one to behold the stippled, goose-bumped flesh of a starfish, torn untimely from a tidepool. She kept her eyes shut, quivering, as if she expected me to kiss her.

  “Before any child is approved for entry into Ariston, an interview with Dr. and Mrs. Fleenarch is required.” Her eyes were still closed, but her hand pointed toward a hallway. We moved in that direction, sneezing.

  I pretended to sneeze again as we entered the offices of Dr. and Mrs. Fleenarch—in fact, I was suppressing a gasp. If Dickens had joined us at the millennium and cheerfully updated a few characters, I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect re-creation of Mr. and Mrs. Squeers than the one before my eyes. Of course, each had been air-brushed, coiffed, and recolored in contemporary tints. Dr. Fleenarch was Squeers after a lot of dental work: caps and crowns, a jolly brisk tweeze of the nose hairs, a pat or two of men’s pressed powder and some serious tweedy tailoring. But Mrs. Fleenarch was Mrs. Squeers behind the thinnest veil, peering out of her beady little shrike’s eyes under Halloween eyebrows. She had made an attempt to make herself up in the mirror, reaching toward some dim, inaccessible cosmetic ideal, some half-grasped combination of glamorous and good, as if someone had tried to vigorously sketch, say, Kim Novak’s features over Torquemada’s in repose.

  What child would ever climb on these laps, smile into these cold, depthless eyes?

  Ollie cowered behind me. Miss Oplesch introduced everyone and I pulled Ollie into a chair before the huge desk. Dr. and Mrs. Fleenarch sat up straighter across from us and Miss Oplesch, after a brief whispered consultation with them, disappeared.

  Dr. Fleenarch turned to me. His wife sat forward and stared at me, glanced briefly at Ollie, then stood up and vanished into an adjoining office, where I could make out her shadow and part of her profile in the doorway as she hovered, eavesdropping. Ollie sneezed and started to hum. Dr. Fleenarch ignored both of us for a while, he seemed intent on reading the front page of the L.A. Times. At last he looked up and asked me if I had any questions about Ariston School.

  “Well,” I said, “what sort of education do you provide for these children?”

  He knit his brows. “They get a leg up,” he said, “a leg up on Harvard or Yale. That I can tell you.”

  I couldn’t think of another question.

  “Now,” he said. “I’d like to address my questions to ... Olivia here, if you don’t mind.”

  I said I didn’t. My nose was running copiously. I asked if there was a rest room nearby and I patted Ollie’s hand.

  “Be right back, I promise.”

  She actually stayed in her chair, looking after me with huge questioning eyes. Dr. Fleenarch leaned forward.

  “Now tell me, Olivia, how do you spell your name?”

  “Your face makes a start and it hurts.”

  I listened to the silence as I fled. I heard him mumble something, then repeat his question. I turned quickly down a corridor, wandered a bit, gave up on the rest room, then retraced my steps past a classroom. I glanced inside. The teacher was occupied in the back of the room, bending over a student. I stared at the walls. Twenty-five versions of the same theme, all printed extremely neatly with the same beginning sentence: “The White House is the residence of our President.” The kids appeared to be working on math problems in workbooks. There were workbooks everywhere: English, Math, Social Studies, Reading: but no books, no sets of encyclopedias, battered with page-turning, no hardcovers, no storybooks, no slim volumes of poetry. Drawings on a bulletin board, all the same, a computer-generated pattern, colored in, no crayon marks outside the lines. I spied a box of pop-up tissues, winked at a chubby little girl in the front row who was staring at me, and snagged a few. She looked shocked. I turned to leave, noticed that the teacher had misspelled the word murmur as “mermer” on a posted wo
rd list, WORDS TO USE INSTEAD OF SAID. I felt a rough tug on my sleeve. It was Mrs. Fleenarch.

  “This way,” she growled, and pointed me back toward the offices.

  “I’m so sorry,” I croaked, “I just wanted to find a ...”—but she poked her index finger in my spine like a pistol and hurried me along.

  “This way,” she said again. “Visitors are not allowed in the classrooms.”

  When I came back, Ollie and Dr. Fleenarch were both staring at the wall. Mrs. Fleenarch vanished again.

  Dr. Fleenarch looked up as I entered.

  “This child,” he said, jerking his head toward Ollie, “is English her first language?”

  I nodded.

  “I cannot follow this child. I asked her several times how she was and she spoke in a foreign language. I could not follow a word of what this child said.”

  I took Ollie’s hand and we went to the door. I bowed at Dr. Fleenarch.

  “It’s Estonian,” I said. “She speaks Estonian, but with a slight Honduran accent.”

  He blinked slowly.

  “I see.”

  “Good-bye, Mrs. Fleenarch,” I called to the shadow behind the door. Her profile jerked back, out of eyeshot.

  Ollie and I ran to the parking lot, sneezing. At the car, I patted Ollie’s head.

  “You’re a smart kid,” I said. “Stick around and I’ll show you what a teapot is.”

  She sneezed.

  I drove home, where my favorite student, Rocky Salinas, was minding Ollie. When I came in, I found them in the kitchen, dyeing sand with food coloring. I’d been teaching Ollie the layers inside the earth; we’d taken an old empty aquarium and started from the inside out. We dyed the first layer of sand red and poured it into the aquarium as the core—then dyed succeeding layers yellow, green, and purple, stacking them one on top of the other. Rocky and Ollie were continuing work on this project. Through the aquarium glass, the earth—inner and outer core, mantle and crust—resembled nothing more than a runny cross-section of rainbow lasagna.