Walter Kirn

by Lost in the Meritocracy (v5)

  He steered me right, Uncle Admiral. He gave me the best start a four-year-old can get. But then I lost my bearings. I veered off course.

  I went away to school.

  MARINE, MINNESOTA, WHERE I ATTENDED GRADE SCHOOL, was a tidy bluff-top river town that belonged on a cake plate. The place seemed baked, not built. Its business district, centered around a park that featured a whitewashed wooden bandstand where actual barbershop quartets performed, consisted of a general store, a gas station, a hamburger restaurant, and a public library. Its people were mostly of Scandinavian heritage, meaning they didn’t talk much but smiled constantly. Most had grown up there, or on nearby farms, but a few, like my family, had come from larger places where it was possible to witness a crime, contract an illness other than a cold, and attend a social gathering that wasn’t a toddler’s birthday party or a funeral for a ninety-five-year-old. The perfect place to raise a child, some felt.

  But that wasn’t why my father moved us there. He did it because the houses cost next to nothing and he could bow hunt in the nearby forests, fish in the river for smallmouth bass, and work in the yard in nothing but long underwear without being seen by his colleagues at 3M. He could also spit chewing tobacco on the sidewalk and go around covered in buck scent, wearing camouflage, with blood from the deer he’d just killed smeared on his hands. A Princeton man. Who knew? Not me. Not yet. Sometimes I wondered how my mother stood him. Though her formal higher education was limited to the Ohio State nursing program, she played the piano, kept art books on the coffee table, decorated the house with reproductions of posters by Toulouse-Lautrec, and occupied herself with novels by Dickens, Dreiser, and Conan Doyle while my father sat on the sofa next to her, cleaning his shotguns and watching college football.

  Marine’s elementary school was on a hill. It was the largest man-made structure in town, one of the newest, and by far the ugliest. Shape: rectangular. Material: beige brick. Constructed with tax money, it looked like tax money, a fiscal line item come to joyless life. Even the playground equipment seemed bureaucratic: a stainless-steel slide and a set of iron monkey bars on which one could picture army recruits glumly sweating their way through basic training. From the moment I entered the building’s long tiled hallway, its colorless walls inadequately brightened with red-and-yellow construction-paper maple leaves, I wanted out. But out, I knew, meant through.

  Because I’d already mastered my letters and numbers, I was free to ignore the lessons for a while and concentrate on the atmospherics. What hit me strongest were the smells. One of the nicest arose from the soft nests of twisty cedar pencil shavings in the tin sharpeners mounted on the walls. To please my earliest teachers, all middle-aged women, I dumped out the shavings in the wastebasket whenever I felt this nice gesture might be observed. My reward was gold foil stars, for “thoughtfulness.” When I tired of appearing thoughtful, I sought out another, more thrilling odor: the brain-clearing fumes from jars of rubber cement. Education, intoxication, the link was forged.

  I kept my wicked sniffing secret—I had a reputation to protect. Somehow I’d come to school with it: the good boy. The boy who let other students go first in line, who kept his lips from touching the water fountain, and who never asked to use the bathroom outside of designated breaks. When the teachers’ felt erasers clogged up with chalk dust, I was the boy who carried them outside and pounded them clean against a wall, raising as much white powder as possible so I’d be coated in it when I returned. This entitled me to more gold stars as well as permission to wash up in the lavatory, where I could also relieve my pent-up bladder. There, I’d pump pink liquid soap into my palms, dry my skin with a rough brown paper towel, and reemerge with a new smell: bright-boy clean.

  My favorite school odor those first few years belonged to a part-time music teacher, Ms. Hannah, a brown-eyed hippie girl with feather earrings and Navajo-like, lustrous dark hair. She wore, beneath her colorful loose clothes, a blend of plant oils that smelled like my idea of the tropical ports in Uncle Admiral’s photos. Her job was to lead our third-grade music units. Everything was a “unit” at my school—or, in the later grades, a “module.” The term evoked a machine part. It suggested that learning could be engineered, and that it had been, perhaps by government scientists—the same ones behind the Apollo program, maybe, about which we were constantly shown filmstrips. Our education, we got the sense, was related to matters of great national importance. It was part of an effort to keep America strong, most notably in the physical-fitness certificates that were personally signed by President Nixon, which I was still too young to compete for.

  How music might aid this drive for global leadership I wasn’t sure. Our first unit seemed frivolous. Ms. Hannah unpacked a carton of wooden blocks, called us forward, gave two blocks to each of us, then sent us back to the cockpit-style desks that reminded me of the belted seats on amusement rides at the state fair. “Today we’re exploring rhythm,” Ms. Hannah announced. She clapped together her own two blocks while chanting a series of notations chalked on the blackboard: “Ta Ta Ti-Ti Ta.” Then she said, “Repeat.” Once we mastered the sequence, she lengthened it. Then she lengthened it again. Finally, the unit ended—or so I thought. In fact, the rhythm unit never ended. It was pretty much all we did in music that year.

  Our only breaks from this siege of syncopation came when Ms. Hannah brought out her guitar and sat on her desk with her legs crossed, revealing under her skirt a stack of silver ankle bracelets shaped like baby snakes, with ruby eyes. She produced the guitar without forewarning, apparently in response to strong emotions whose origins in her mysterious personal life were impossible for me to guess at but, to judge by the songs she chose, suggested deep gloom and disappointment. “I’ve looked at love from both sides now,” she sang, “From give and take, and still somehow / It’s love’s illusions I recall / I really don’t know love at all.” This was among her lighter numbers. Most of them were unsettling, even shocking. One song, from the movie Billy Jack, the story of a half-breed Indian who murdered people who threatened the environment, ended with the terrifying lyrics “There won’t be any trumpets blowing / Come the judgment day / On the bloody morning after / One tin soldier rides away.” The song that spooked me most, though, was by the Beatles: “wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door / All the lonely people / Where do they all come from?”

  From wherever Ms. Hannah dwelt, I came to feel, because in the weeks that followed Valentine’s Day, after the cupids came down in the classrooms and the rabbits and chicks went up, she sunk even further into her dim blue world. Her voice grew croaky, husky, soft, and her playlist dwindled to “The Circle Game” and “Send in the Clowns.” Beneath the layer of floral essences which distinguished her from the other teachers—old ladies who reeked of witch hazel and baby powder—I thought I detected a sharper odor: despair.

  “Ms. Hannah?” I said one morning.

  “What is it, Walter?” We were alone, the unit over. My classmates were all outside at recess celebrating an April warm spell with a muddy game of kickball.

  “You seem so sad these days,” I said.

  “I can’t say I’m very happy about our world right now.”

  Ms. Hannah laid her guitar in a black case whose satin lining was covered with decals. There were rainbows, peace signs, doves, and a chain of stick-figure children holding hands. I gathered that they were symbols of her hope for a gentler, kinder era. She’d told our class many times that music “healed” and had even asserted that it might end the war someday, if the politicians would just wake up. I took this to mean that politicians didn’t listen to much music for some reason, or at least not to the kind Ms. Hannah played. I couldn’t blame them. It was depressing, and they had jobs to do.

  “Well, I hope you feel better,” I said. I had a crush on her.

  “That’s hard when young men are dying for no good reason, but I promise you I’ll try.” She closed the guitar case, latched it, gripped its handle, and looked past me toward the
door. She had other units to teach at other schools, which made me jealous when I thought about it. I feared she had a favorite student somewhere. A boy, perhaps, who wasn’t at all like me. Someone more concerned with peace.

  As she was about to go, she touched my shoulder. “Maybe I have been a little down,” she said. “Human beings have rhythms, too, you know. You’ve heard the expression: ‘The rhythms of the heart’?”

  I nodded as though I had.

  “That’s all it is. It’s nothing more than that.”

  “Have I ever told you how nice you smell?” I said.

  “No, but I’m glad you feel that way. You’re sweet.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  “You made my day.”

  She kissed me on the hair and brushed past me out the door. A few minutes later, on the playground swing set, I reached the high point in one of my long arcs and felt the chains momentarily go slack. I could see out to the street in front of the school, where Ms. Hannah was getting into the brown van of the young man who sometimes picked her up and who, I suddenly knew, had hurt her somehow. The van stayed parked for a while, then rumbled off, and I realized I’d just learned something important—not about music, about teachers. They were people. Lonely people, often, who weren’t really free to share their lives with us but longed for appreciation, just as I did. And why not give it to them now and then? Maybe they would give it back to me.

  Certain questions which grown-ups deem unanswerable begin as answers which children find unquestionable. For example: what is Death? To me at eight years old, death was the signal for a person’s loved ones to cry and look stricken for a while and then begin dividing up his stuff. What is Beauty? The thing that made me like things when nobody was pushing me to like them. And what is Art? In third grade, I felt I knew. An artwork was any useless, random object created in order to break up the school day and then toted home to show off to one’s parents, after which it was misplaced or thrown away.

  The art units at my elementary school were even emptier than the music units. They were like recess periods held indoors. Art, the way my teachers introduced it, wasn’t really a subject, as math and science were, but a state of mind. Achieving this state required glue and scissors, sometimes glitter, occasionally bits of yarn, and long stretches of silence. Art was a form of stillness, dull and peaceful, and yet we were urged to approach it with great excitement, as though enduring boredom and immobility liberated what was best in people.

  “What’s that thing?” my father asked me one afternoon. It was November, well into the school year, and my art teacher was pushing a new line: that art, to be good, should show emotion. This contradicted her old line: that art was good no matter what.

  “It started out,” I said, “as a triceratops charging a stegosaurus that you can’t see except for the tip of its snout there at the edge, under the boulders shooting from the volcano.”

  “So how come it didn’t stay all that?”

  “My teacher.”

  “What about her?”

  “She told me to open up.”

  “Open up in what respect?”

  “By drawing forms instead of objects.”

  “The distinction there being …?”

  “All I know,” I said, “is what she told me. It’s fine that I draw good dinosaurs, she said, but drawing things that look like other things—things that we have pictures of already—isn’t really art, it’s copying. Art is feelings. She wants me to draw feelings. That’s what those squiggles are. Those wavy parts.”

  My father nodded. Then he went hunting. In a pipe in the wall I could hear the water draining from my mother’s bath upstairs. To spare her the awkwardness and insincerity of having to show pride in my botched picture, I crumpled it up and stuffed it in my corduroys, where it stayed hidden until laundry day.

  “What’s this?” my mother said.

  “Some art I made.”

  “I love it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s different.”

  “Than what?” I said.

  “Than what you usually do. There’s something new here.”

  “Feelings.”

  “Is that it? Huh. I think you’re right.”

  That’s when, art-wise, I became a fraud. With the pure, un-corrupted logic which God grants eight-year-olds, I reasoned that if art was made of feelings and feelings were secret, known only to the artist, then art could be anything you said it was. Collage by collage, tempera by tempera, I practiced producing mysterious oddities to which I could attach invented feelings. My stories about my art became my art. “This decoupage is about how sad I get when my father leaves on a long business trip.” “This watercolor shows my happiness when it snows and I can use my sled.” These stories brought praise and sometimes hugs, eventually convincing me that art was about one feeling above all others: being loved. Or wanting to be loved. And once I discovered this, I got straight As.

  A rope dangled from the ceiling of the gymnasium. If we could climb it fast enough and high enough, we’d be eligible for a framed certificate signed by our nation’s commander in chief—a man of humble beginnings, my father told me, who’d worked his way through law school, entered politics, suffered much ridicule from “egghead” types who lived in “ivory towers,” and finally prevailed by “giving them the finger.” You could think what you want about Nixon, my father said, but the man was no quitter, he had grit, and no one had ever given him anything; he’d taken what he had by force of will. No wonder I wanted so badly to climb that rope for him and bring home his autograph to show my father.

  I hung back and let my friends go first. They attacked the rope with zeal, gaining their first few feet through sheer momentum, but for most of them there came a point when it was clear they’d rise no farther no matter how desperately they strained. The other kids would crowd in under them and holler encouragement, but all this accomplished was to rob the climbers of a dignified glide back to the floor. Instead, they were forced to put on a futile show, to claw and grunt and slip back even farther, turning what might have been a quick defeat into a protracted humiliation.

  I panicked when my turn came. I’d already disappointed the president in two less-strenuous events—chin-ups and the standing broad jump—and another defeat, I feared, would crush me utterly and show me up as a poor citizen. It would prove that I wasn’t just weak but flawed, defective, and likely to prove a burden on my country should it ever be put to some great test such as resisting a foreign invasion. As I understood the program, the highly specific performance standards required to earn the fitness certificate reflected desirable or normal levels of strength, agility, and speed for healthy young American males. How these levels had been determined I wasn’t certain—by NASA or the Marine Corps, possibly—but I did understand that falling short of them was not a purely private matter.

  I gripped the rope with clammy palms. The gym teacher blew his whistle and clicked his stopwatch. Five feet, six feet, six feet and an inch. I was already flagging and couldn’t hide it, certainly not from myself or from my observant classmates, who, I saw when I looked down, had already started massing for their death cheer. I felt puny, crippled, trapped. This wasn’t art or music, this was gym, and quick-wittedness couldn’t help me here. I was up against gravity, which can’t be fooled, and the implacable limits of my physique, which my father had urged me to strengthen through calisthenics but hadn’t bothered to demonstrate which ones.

  “Go! Don’t quit! You can make it! Reach!” they cried.

  I locked my ankles around the rope. My slide began. I checked it by clenching my thighs, slid farther, groaned, and imagined the president shaking hands with a line of strapping boys who would someday bring glory to America, in war, perhaps, or by building a base on Mars, while I lay feebly on a couch, watching their exploits on TV Then, for the first time since I’d entered school, I yielded, I folded, I gave up. I landed on the gym mat, found my feet, and as the next aspirant approached the rop
e, I wished him luck, sincerely, without envy. People were different. Some smart, some strong. The boy scrambled upward, on track to reach the ceiling, and I found myself pitying him, oddly, because I knew his triumph would be brief, his moment of conquest would be over soon, while mine, which would be of another sort—mental, not physical; fate had spoken—would only build and build.

  Could Nixon have climbed that rope? I doubted it. But he could make others climb it, and that was true strength. The strength I wanted for myself.

  In fourth grade I learned that reading was serious business, not just a pleasant way to pass the time, and that like medicine or engineering, it had a definite, valuable purpose: to foster “comprehension.” I learned this from boxes of plastic quiz cards whose labels bore the letters SRA. The letters stood for Science Research Associates, which was identified somewhere on the boxes as a division of IBM, the giant computer firm whose amazing machines, I gathered from the news, were crucial in the sophisticated activities which underlay our modern way of life, from weather forecasting to missile guidance. That IBM had taken on the job of providing the nation’s grade schools with color-coded essay cards arranged by steadily increasing difficulty and capable, according to the teacher, of enriching and assessing students’ “language capabilities” suggested to me, once again, that I was part of a vast and vital program, success in which would confer colossal rewards, possibly even widespread public gratitude.