by Mike Heppner
“What kind of questions?” asked Simon, not moving.
“What do you mean, what kind of questions? Test kind of questions, now come on. You’ve taken tests before.”
“Yeah, but only where they let you do-over.” The boy lifted the door handle, let it go, lifted it again, let it go. The mechanisms inside the door sheared and groaned. He smiled. “Look, I can make a song.”
“Simon will you leave that alone!” She yanked on his sleeve. “Now listen. They’re not going to let you do-over. You’re going to have to think. You’re going to have to guess the right answer.” She held him in an awkward embrace, lugging him halfway out of his seat. “Now do this for Momma, baby. Do this for Momma and I’ll never ask you for anything else. I’ll never be unhappy with you again.”
“I gotta do math?”
“Yes, you gotta do math. And history. They’re gonna ask you all about history.”
“Like what?”
Lydia sighed, releasing him. “Like what, like . . . who was Susan B. Anthony?”
“Who was Susan B. Anthony.” The boy stared through the windshield, letting the question revolve inside his brain. “Who?”
Pissed, she stepped out of the car. “What do you mean, who? I have no idea. Pick something!”
She stood near the building, waiting for Simon to catch up. Once inside, they crossed a winding corridor with split levels that went up two steps and then down four, odd enclaves filled with comfy furniture, fabric sofas and ottomans shaped like giant aspirin, vending machines that dispensed only bottled water, only fresh sandwiches, only all-natural fruit pies. She stopped and pointed at the ceiling. “Listen!” she said. “Music!” Classical music played at just the right volume, something serious by Schoenberg, a string quartet, wild and dissonant. Sprawled across one of the ottomans, a young girl fingered violin hand positions in the air, each finger making its own precise movement. Another girl stood against the back wall, practicing a yoga stance. Both girls seemed to be listening to the music, focusing on every last difficult stretch of melody. This, without parental supervision! Lydia looked down at her son and smiled. She herself had enjoyed a fine education when she was his age. The private schools in the District of Columbia were lavish affairs. Children traveled with armed escorts, silent guys named Rich who sipped coffee all day and stood in the back of the room, pretending to read the show-and-tell board. The meals were all catered by fancy Washington supper clubs, and the silverware wasn’t silver but at least it was stainless steel; she could still remember the clink-clink of fifty-odd sixth graders sawing through steak tartare in the school gymnasium. Most of Lydia’s teachers were not American, and they spoke with thick accents, German, sometimes Hungarian. In every classroom, the sons and daughters of the world elite marked time; vaguely familiar, they resembled small, shredded versions of their famous parents.
Slightly dazed, Lydia and Simon found the main office and entered a tiny room with one desk in the center and a chair on either side. Half-drawn vertical blinds made a shadow like prison bars across the carpet. A woman sat in one of the chairs, eating a salad from a fast-food restaurant. The salad was thick with dressing; the smell of garlic stunk up the whole room. Lydia and Simon stood in the doorway while she finished her meal. Patting her lips with a napkin, she opened her purse and brought out a small compact that looked like a white seashell with a steel hinge at one end. The woman calmly reapplied her makeup, making an mmm-mmm noise as she smushed her lips together. Closing the case with a snap, she motioned for Simon to sit, then slid a booklet across the desk, along with a half-dozen pencils and a sharpener. “I’m Mrs. Olivet,” she said.
“Mrs. Olivet, hi.” The two women shook hands. The proctor’s skin was warm and soft, and she wore thick wooden bangles around her wrist. Red letters circled one of the bangles, forming a chain.
“You’ve noticed my bracelet, I see.” She spun the bangle, reading the message as it streamed by. “. . . learn more so that I may grow into a person who can learn more so that I may grow into a person who can . . . It goes on.”
“Yes, that’s very clever.”
“Isn’t it?” The woman’s voice sounded dubbed, the words taken from a documentary about apples. “This examination will last approximately forty-five minutes. Would you care to wait in the outer office?”
“Oh.” Lydia glanced over her shoulder, feeling rejected. “Okay! There’s not a . . .” Mrs. Olivet nodded, her lips parted, wanting very much to understand, to supply the next word herself. “There’s no place I can go to watch?”
“To watch?”
“A secret room somewhere. A secret room with a one-way glass.”
The woman smiled, then stood and took hold of Lydia’s hands. “You’re nervous.”
“No, I’m not nervous.” Lydia balled her hands into fists and twisted away. “It’s Simon. He’s more comfortable when I’m around.”
Mrs. Olivet, no longer smiling, looked at the boy and spoke in a soft voice. “Well, that’s something we’re going to have to work on. Simon is almost a young man. Young men do not need their mothers. Young men are independent, dashing and reckless. They drive their convertibles with the top down. This is what young men do. Loud music on the radio: ‘We’re gonna rock, rock, scream ’n’ shout ...’ ” She half-sung her words, snapping her fingers to some silent fifties jam. “Young men take vigorous showers. Huge handfuls of water splashing against their chests. Droplets exploding in slow motion, each drop proclaiming, I am a man! Young men gnaw on their food, tearing at it with their teeth like vicious beasts, vicious beasts guarding a fresh carcass. This is my food. Don’t touch my food. Young men read adventure novels, grand tales from the American frontier. When they read, they bend the cover all the way back, holding it with one hand. See him now, the sexy brute. Hey, Rico! Yo, you got a problem wi’dat?” Something seemed to run out of the woman, and she herded Lydia into a reception area, where a maze of drywall divided the room into quads. “Would you like some coffee?” she asked.
Walking backwards, Lydia tripped and fell into a partition. “S-sure.”
“There’s coffee. The reason I ask is, not everyone likes coffee. Some people hate it. Absolutely abhor it.”
“I’ve never noticed—”
“To the point of vomiting. If they smell it. If they even see it.”
“That’s—”
“Oh, yes!” Her eyes flashed mysteriously. “The fear is: I can’t see what I’m drinking. You know? I can’t see all the way down to the bottom of the cup. I’m just telling you what the fear is. I personally think it’s absurd.”
With a giggle, Mrs. Olivet closed the door and Lydia was alone. A tray of cookies looked unappetizing next to an old-fashioned coffee percolator. The coffee was strong and hot, so hot that it didn’t taste like much of anything, just generically hot liquid. Lydia poured herself a cup and grabbed some cookies, holding them in her lap as she squinted at a pile of magazines. Cosmo. Business Week. Something with Katie Couric on the cover. She knew it at once—a sense of Katie Couric preceded the face itself. This was Lydia’s ambition for her son—to make him a presence, a kind of psychological screen saver. What you saw when there was nothing else to see. Why him? Why not him? The reasons seemed arbitrary. Defeated, she now wanted an explanation, only that. Old desires turned hard inside her body. An undigested weight refused to go down.
An hour went by before the proctor finally returned, holding a scorecard in her hand. Her lips were straight and serious. She took a seat next to the coffeemaker, then hesitated, letting a difficult moment pass. “Your son is a very special boy,” she began.
“Yes he is.” They nodded sadly at each other, then at the floor.
“And special boys sometimes . . . have special problems.”
“Okay.”
“They just do. And it’s up to us . . . to understand it.” Wrapping her fingers around the scorecard, she formed the sheet of paper into a slender tube. “And sometimes, certain children are unable to perform . . .
certain functions.”
“That’s true.”
“It just happens. It just does, and I don’t think the good Lord above knows why. And that doesn’t make someone a bad person. You can be a very good person, and still not be able to perform . . . certain functions.”
“Functions.”
“Functions such as . . . multiplication.”
“I gotcha.”
“You don’t have to know how to do that. And that doesn’t make you a bad person.” The woman reached into her blazer pocket and pulled out a roll of breath mints. One mint spilled out into her hand—white with flecks of green, like linoleum tile. “Some people can do some things. And other people can do other things. And that’s what makes this world a wonderful place. We need good, strong people, who don’t necessarily know how to . . . spell. We need them.”
“We do.”
“Fishermen, for example.” She popped the mint into her mouth, then bit down, holding it between her teeth. “They’re good people! Good, solid people. And they perform for society . . . a function . . . that some people wouldn’t necessarily want to do themselves.”
“Air-traffic controller.”
Mrs. Olivet frowned queerly. “Air-traffic controller?”
“As another thing to do.”
“No, air-traffic controllers have to know . . . trigonometry, for one thing.”
“Oh.”
“Advanced computer programming. So. Air-traffic controller would be out, unless something changed . . . pretty damn quick.”
“Right.”
“But what I’m saying is, there’s a whole lotta things—I mean, look at Harry Truman! Harry Truman couldn’t do . . . some basic thing. And next thing you know—”
“He’s pres—”
“—he’s president of the United States. The most respected—until recently, the most respected job in the world! And he had to deal with all sorts of things. I just saw it on TV.”
“I think I missed that one.”
“Incredible stuff. They had this actor playing Harry Truman. And he’s walking down the street. And he sees this guy, right? And while he’s standing there, this car comes—boom!—and knocks him down. And Harry Truman’s standing there. The actor they had playing Harry Truman. And he goes up to the guy and says, you know, whatever, I’ll take care of you.”
“Nurse you back to health.”
“Exactly, whatever it takes. And the guy says, Fine! Take me back to your home. I mean, I don’t know, they might’ve—”
“Fluffed it up a bit.”
“Changed it around, sure, but the way I saw it, the way I interpreted the film was—”
“Things happen.”
“Things happen, and when they do—”
“You just gotta say okay—”
“And then you move on. And that’s all you can do. And that’s all we can do, as a society. But the important thing is, we shouldn’t look at a given situation and say this is this or that’s that. It doesn’t have to be one thing or the other.” She paused, a word lingering on the edge of her tongue. “This can be . . . conceivably, this could turn out to be a very good thing. But I have a sense that Simon isn’t the kind of boy who would be . . . well served by the services we can provide.”
“Okay. Okay.”
“The scores. The scores are a problem. The scores are not very good.”
“The scores are . . . poor?”
The woman nodded, less anxious now. Lydia seemed to understand. This was good. They could skim over the details. “The scores are very bad. Well below average.”
“We were worried that it might be an issue. But you never know.”
“You never know until you try. And you should try. And this is not the end of the world. This is a very small thing. In the large scheme of things.”
“I suppose.”
“But I’m so sorry.”
“No, no.”
“And if there’s anything—do you have a way of getting back to . . . ?”
“Oh, we drove in from town.”
“Okay, I wasn’t sure. Some people have . . . things to coordinate.”
“No, we’re . . . we should be okay.”
The ladies stood and walked across the room. Leaning against the partition, Mrs. Olivet folded her arms and sighed. It was the end of a long working day and she wanted to go home. She needed a bath. Bubbles. Steam. A bath and a big glass of sherry.
“If it’s all right, I’ll just let you find your way out.”
“Where’s . . . ?”
“Oh! He’s still in the other room. He was feeling a little low, so I told him you stay here and I’ll talk to Momma.”
Lydia walked back into the testing room and sat down, taking Simon’s hands in her own. Embarrassed, she longed to leave him here, to return home by herself, watch a movie, drink some wine, then wake up at six a.m., single and childless.
“Listen, Simon,” she said. “I love you and that’s not gonna change. Now we’re gonna go home and we’re gonna have a nice dinner.”
“You’re not mad?” he asked.
She bristled, detecting something manipulative in his voice. “No, of course I’m not,” she said, then stood and led him out of the testing site, past the fancy vending machines, the girl playing air violin, the scores of other children engaged in their prodigious activities, arguing in Portuguese, constructing DNA models out of straws and bent paper clips, writing morose one-act plays on the backs of old calculus exams. No one looked up as they passed; no one noticed and no one cared.
It was cold outside; the car started on the third go. Driving home, Lydia turned on the radio, waited a second, then switched it off. A single note squeezed through the speakers; she recognized the song: “Hungry Heart,” by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and from this she reconstructed the rest of the tune in her head. Her memory of the song was not as a linear piece of music, but rather as a single impression, all notes and all phrases heard at once. She felt “Hungry Heart” as a compact moment of art, and along with it came memories of the time when the song was popular, when she and Steve were still newlyweds living in Crane City and he was working four jobs, seven days a week, including a night gig sweeping up at a pharmacy, a humiliating experience for everyone involved—especially for Lydia, who had to watch her husband leave the house every night dressed in an apron and a nametag. What else did she remember from that time? Cheap furniture. Cheap wine. The magnets on the refrigerator—a watermelon magnet, a single slice of watermelon, and for a joke Steve would sometimes hold it up to his lips and pretend that it was a smiley-mouth, and Lydia would laugh and kiss him to get him to stop. The smell of Steve’s socks. The smell of the hamper. The way the hamper lid squeaked when you lifted it. How a whole week’s worth of their clothes fit perfectly inside the hamper. The thrill of mixing your dirty clothes with another person’s dirty clothes, a person of the opposite sex. Doing the dishes together. The rack where the dishes dried. The fun of being annoyed by another person’s stupid habits. Rolling your eyes in public. Yeah, that’s my husband. But loving it, loving all of the awful things.
East of the expressway, the woods took over, and Lydia could feel Big Dipper Township pulling her toward its frozen heart, where her own home gazed out upon the water and the high tower and the ring of trees that seemed to go on for hundreds of miles. Rounding the lake, she touched her son’s cheek. “Were you afraid?” she asked.
Simon scrunched his fists into his lap and pouted. “They had it too hard,” he said.
“They had it too hard? What was too hard about it?”
“They asked me, they said I had to know who was the guy who made the book machine.”
“Okay.” She thought about it. “And what did you say?”
“I said, I dunno, I dunno who he was, and they said okay, one wrong.”
She nodded as they turned up the winding drive. “That’s okay, Simon. It’s okay not to know things.”
Leaving the car, they walked across t
he driveway and into the house. Motion-sensitive switches activated the recessed lighting as they moved from room to room. Simon chucked his jacket over the back of the sofa and trudged upstairs. The quiet of the house seemed volcanic—the quiet of landscapes, not of living rooms. Passing into the kitchen, Lydia opened the freezer door and took out a steak to defrost.
At six o’clock, she picked up the phone in the master bedroom and called the store. A girl named Scarlet told her that Steve had left earlier that afternoon with Mr. Pee and Mr. Carroll and had not returned. Lydia said thank you and hung up the phone. She sat there for a few minutes, seized by a weird paralysis. Sliding out of her shoes, she propped up a few pillows and rested against the headboard. If Steve was here, he would be sleeping on his stomach with his head turned toward the window, toward the edge of the bed. If Steve was here, she would be more conscious of her every movement, the way she took off her shoes, how much noise it made, the clunk of the shoes dropping to the floor. He would be lying there without his shirt on, and Lydia would be able to see the silver-blond hair on the back of his neck, and if she crept around to the other side of the bed, she could look down at his sleeping face, his mouth open as he snored or cleared his throat. She grabbed the phone and redialed the store, demanding to speak with the manager. The same girl laughed and said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m doing two things at once.” Lydia wedged her feet under the comforter and snapped, “Why don’t you do one thing at once?” and the girl’s tone changed from friendly and professional to stiff and mean, something along the lines of, “I’m sorry, madam, but Mr. Mould left several hours ago and I have no idea where he is,” and Lydia—trying not to sound desperate—said, “Well, this is his wife and I would like to know where he is,” and the girl—hoping to gloss over her earlier remark—said, “I don’t know, Mrs. Mould, I’m very sorry, I wish I did, but the second we hear anything we’ll—” and Lydia said fine and hung up.
Padding past her son’s room, she leaned across the doorway and said hello. Simon looked up from his special coloring book; extra-huge crayons, the kind you’d buy for an infant, lay in piles and broken pieces. A few minutes later she came back, calling up from the bottom of the stairs, “Dinner soon!” His voice returned, unreasonably annoyed: “WHAT?!” Lydia scowled—Oh, fuck you—then went into the kitchen. The cat, hunched over its dinner, froze and stared, ashamed of itself. Lydia clucked softly but the thing ran off anyway, upsetting a few knickknacks in the living room. She walked over to the counter and picked up the steak. It was still hard; when she dropped it on the countertop, it made a noise like a giant poker chip. Pressing her thumb into the shrink-wrap, she felt the cold of the meat, the way it pulled at her skin. She removed her thumb and stared at her pink thumbprint, a little oval of color surrounded by frost. This was the color of flesh, of gore. The way things look when you cut them open. Her own flesh. What part would people eat? The muscles, probably. Lydia pinched her forearm. That’s the choice part, right there. Ass is too tough. Too much chewing involved. The organs? More of a delicacy. A little green sphere coated with gravy. And then when you cut that open? Chambers, cavities. Undulating tubules. What hideousness we conceal. Thank God for skin. Steve’s chest. Steve’s stomach. The rumbling underneath. The dumb response of his genitals. Everything hacked apart. The body splayed across a bloody patch of road. A hand here, fingers curled in death. Evidence for the re-enactment. Medics swarm as wild deer look on curiously. They’re waiting for leftovers. They’d eat it—oh, sure! Lap the blood. Fighting over the skull. An ear in one mouth, an ear in the other. The deer pull and the skull breaks apart. Braaayyyns! His last facial expression. Fear of the road. The wall ahead. Thank God he can’t see this. Eye stalks severed.
