The next afternoon I took the bus into New York, to have lunch with the young woman who had hired me for the summer internship at Hudson House Publishers. It was raining. As the bus entered the Holland Tunnel I thought casually of Flint, how tirelessly he’d trekked in and back from our school every Wednesday, no matter the weather. “For you, my children, I’d brave the fiercest storm,” he’d said once, in that voice to the timbre of which I’d thrilled ... No more. Already I was listening for other voices, ones which, because they belonged to a future that was for the moment fictive, a thing of my own imagining, I could make say whatever I wanted, like the stuffed animals that as a child I had imbued with personality. A joy to read, one said. And another said, the next T. D. Salinger. And the third said (I curse to remember it, I curse to repeat it), The truth and what you want to hear are the same.
2. THE GLASS-BOTTOMED BOAT
HIGHER EDUCATION, my mother used to say, is wasted on the young. A zealous autodidact, shamed, in that overachieving meritocracy that was the town in which we lived, by her single year of nursing school, she feasted on literature, history, and politics, first to prove her worthiness, later for the sheer joy of it. And at the beginning, I suppose her enthusiasm must have been infectious, for in high school I professed to be idealistic about learning; I even caused a small uproar one year by writing an editorial for the student paper protesting the English department’s decision to offer SAT Review as an alternative to Shakespeare on the electives roster. And yet, this idealism cannot have been long lasting, for in college I myself never took a Shakespeare course, though I did receive full credit for a seminar called Theory and Practice of Gossip. Moreover, thanks to some convenient Advanced Placement tests in Biology and Calculus that I’d passed in high school, I managed to “A.P. out” of my math and science requirements. What I did study were English Literature and Art History, in part because literature and art were the things I loved most, in part because these were the only subjects in which I felt sure I could get As. Even here, however, my education was full of holes. For example, as a student I never read Dante. I never read Joyce. In the end, thanks to a permissive system of requirements that I managed to manipulate to my advantage (not a single course in American or European History, Philosophy, Economics) I graduated from one of the finest universities in the land without knowing the causes of the First World War, or what Romanticism was, or the meaning of the term “Reformation.” All this has to be admitted. I didn’t go to college to learn; I went to college to achieve.
My troubles started very early in my childhood, when I was given my first I.Q. test. As it happened, I grew up both in the age and the land of the I.Q. test; my elementary school was even named after its inventor, which may explain the almost occult significance with which the adults I knew—teachers and guidance counselors and parents of my friends and friends of my parents—endowed its results. For in our community, flanked on one side by the university where my brother was a student and on the other by the incipient battlements of Microsoft, where my father would eventually go to work, everyone knew his I.Q. by heart, though few people spoke it, out of shame, or modesty, or because they feared lest by its very utterance such a mystical figure—calculated, as in numerology, according to ancient and secret formulae, in the halls of mysterious temples—might lose its potency. I honestly believe that if at that time an incipient Albert Einstein had appeared in our midst, bearing his theory of relativity in one hand and a low test score in the other, the test score would have carried the day.
When I was very small, of course, I understood none of this. Instead my life consisted mostly of play: endless games of crazy eights with my sister, of Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders, Barrel of Monkeys and Pick-Up-Stix, with my peers. Even school was mostly play, a perpetual round of drawing turkeys at Thanksgiving, and snowmen at Christmas, and hearts on Valentine’s Day. Holidays shaped the pleasant year—as soon as one was over we’d start planning for another—until one afternoon (it was the very beginning of second grade) I was taken out of class and sat down in a small room across from a young woman with born-rimmed glasses who spread out a series of blocks that I was supposed to fit one inside the other, and asked me to complete a story about a little boy whose glass of water was half-full, and wanted me to tell her which of four pictures did not belong with the other three. None of this seemed to me worth taking very seriously at the time; after all, back then I had no idea what a test was, much less that the results of one could ramify fatally into my future. Nor had I any reason to believe that in contrast to the thousands of rounds of crazy eights I’d played with my sister, the scores for which we simply tossed away when we grew tired, my score for this game would be carefully notated and preserved in some inner sanctum of the school, where in conjunction with other scores it would be used to determine the course of my education. Yet this was, as it turned out, exactly what happened, as I discovered one morning on the bus when a tiny girl named Jana Scott (she had recently taught me to tie my shoes) asked me whether I was planning to bring my lunch for the field trip or buy a sandwich at the dock. What field trip? I asked. What dock? The one next week, she answered, to ride the glass-bottomed boat into Puget Sound. I blinked. Of this field trip I knew nothing. Yet from Jana Scott, I now learned that all my friends were planning to go.
At recess that morning I asked my teacher about the field trip. Yes, she confirmed, it was to take place the following Wednesday. And was I to be included? She shook her head. No, I was not. Why not? I asked.
Then she rubbed her hands together and in a somber voice explained to me certain facts of which, up until that moment, I had never been apprised: first, that in our state there existed something called the Mentally Gifted Minors, or MGM, Program; second, that according to the terms of this program, for every student who scored above the ninety-eighth percentile on a certain test, the school received money from the state to be spent on special MGM activities, such as the glass-bottomed boat ride; finally, that as I myself was not an MGM, there was no money to pay for me to go on the trip. To put it crudely, unlike Jana Scott, I hadn’t made the cut.
That afternoon I arrived home in a state bordering on hysteria. Because I was not to be allowed to go, the glass-bottomed-boat ride had swollen in my mind to mythic proportions, as if what was to be viewed through the boat’s crystalline floor was not merely the depth of the ocean, but that very realm of intellectual delectation after which even at that young age I felt myself, in some intuitive way, hankering. What outraged me was the perniciousness of a system that granted to a single test the authority not merely to judge intellectual capacity, but actually to dictate the dispensation of rewards. Exclusion was the consequence. How I dreaded the prospect of the upcoming week, during which my friends would no doubt taunt me with their anticipation, not to mention the day of the field trip itself, my solitude at the bus stop, the morning after when I would be regaled with accounts of those pleasures of which, by virtue of my inadequacy, I had been deemed unworthy!
So began a dark and tormented period of my life, one that would last until I graduated from high school, and even then leave its dense residue in my psyche, like the pulp that remains once olives are pressed for oil. Because of the test, for instance, when I entered junior high school I found myself “laned” (such was the vocabulary of the day) in classes the numbers for which, instead of ending with A for “Advanced,” had no letter whatsoever appended to them. No matter that my teachers agreed that these classes were too easy for me: the test overruled. I was not an MGM. And though pleas on the part of my mother eventually led to my being allowed to “change lanes” in two subjects—English and science—nonetheless there would remain in my record forever not only the ineradicable result of the original test, but those of its spawn: the PSAT (which I was due to take the following year), and the SAT, and beyond that other tests, more tests. All of them were designed to quantify the ineffable: in keeping with the American paradigm, not learning, but the “capacity to learn.” A poor
score on the PSAT or SAT, I knew, would bar me from the prestigious East Coast education on which I had my heart set, just as my score on the MGM test had barred me from the glass-bottomed-boat ride.
Although I had been writing stories ever since I’d learned how to write—indeed, my desire to invent must have actually predated my acquisition of the skills required to give it issue, for I remember trying to copy letters out of books well before I knew what they meant—it was not until late in my childhood that I first cognized the idea of “being a writer.” In part I was responding to yet another test that my test-happy school had compelled me to take, this one purporting to adjudge “vocational aptitude,” according to the results of which the two careers for which I was best suited were those of (a) hairdresser and (b) forest ranger. Writer wasn’t even an option. Yet from my mother I knew that writers existed. Often I would look at their pictures on the jackets of the novels she checked out from the library. And I had my own writer-heroes, chiefly the theologian C. S. Lewis, a boxed set of whose Chronicles of Narnia my brother had given me as a Christmas present. Writing, at first, was pure imitation for me, an effort to prolong the reliable joy of reading once the last volume of the beloved Chronicles had come to an end. And yet, curiously enough, the more I tried to write like C. S. Lewis, the further I ventured from his Christian vision: writing, it seemed, though it might begin as a way out of the self, finally led one back into it.
Still, the fact that when I wrote, no adjudicators stood between me and the blissfully blank page—not yet, at least—did not free me from their influence in other arenas. For instance, according to my mother, in order to be a writer you still had to have a degree (as she did not) from a prestigious university. More importantly, you had to know the sort of people you were only likely to meet, or at the very least who were only likely to pay attention to you, if you had a degree from a prestigious university. In order to lead a life unencumbered by the test givers, in other words, you had first to placate them. This was the bargain I was offered, and to the compromised terms of which—unnecessarily, as it turned out—I ended up agreeing.
Now, as once I had not taken tests seriously enough, I took them too seriously. Most of my nightmares were about tests. Likewise most days after school, at the local bookstore-cum-coffeehouse, where, under happier circumstances, I might have been discovering stories by Raymond Carver or Grace Paley, I labored for hours on “Test Your Own I.Q.” booklets. Only pride kept me away from those schools the dedicated purpose of which was to “prepare” students for tests that by their professed nature cannot be prepared for. Instead, with my allowance money, I bought a volume of practice PSATs (the letters stood for Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test), which I administered to myself with the fervent dedication of a sacristan, in an atmosphere of almost sepulchral gravity: closed up in the kitchen, the oven timer set for twenty minutes, I would try to sharpen my mind to the same pinpoint of exactitude to which I had sharpened my number-two pencil. If I did well, I would reward myself with a moment of repose, a willed cessation of anxiety that by morning would have eroded, unable to withstand the onslaught of worry, which my mind produced as feverishly as a congested nose produces mucus. If I didn’t do well, however—and this was more often the case—then a heated panic would seize me, during which I would go back through my answers, trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong. Sometimes, it was true, I’d been slapdash, or hadn’t known the meaning of a word. More often, though, fear itself waylaid me, provoking me to look for tricks or traps where none existed. Thus, when asked to choose which of four words—liberty, exile, imprisonment, and theft—was the correct antonym for incarceration, I selected exile, because exile meant a state of external imprisonment, whereas incarceration referred to a state of internal imprisonment, i.e. in a jail. The answer, it turned out, was liberty; yet when, in my indignity, I asked my mother whether she wouldn’t have answered the same way, she replied with the clear-eyed fastidiousness of a crossword-puzzle aficionado, “I see your point. Still, I would have put ‘liberty.’” (Unlike me, she was the sort of student of whom standardized testmakers dream: measured, literal, with a mind as precise as an X-Acto knife.)
The day of the actual PSAT neared. A week before, my anxiety pitched over into a kind of apoplexy, after which, in a last-ditch effort to defend itself, my body shut down completely. For two days I stayed at home in a sort of fevered coma, from which I emerged only on the Saturday morning of the test, dry-eyed and eerily calm; bicycling to the school (not my own) where the test was to be given, I even wondered what my mother would have waiting for lunch when I got back. The other side of terror is numbness. Now that I’m an adult, now that I’ve been through psychotherapy and taken serotonin reuptake inhibitors, I recognize the truth in Forster’s pairing of panic with emptiness. I didn’t then. Instead—innocent of Prozac—I locked my bicycle and walked into the cafeteria, where the test was to be given. A guidance counselor checked my name off the fist, making sure first that my parents had paid for this privilege, then assigned me to a desk and handed me a narrow card on which were printed a series of empty circles, each corresponding to one of the four multiple-choice answers to each question. These cards, I knew, would in turn be tabulated by a computer—at the time the very idea of this amazed me—which was why it was very important, the counselor told me, that I use only number-two pencils, never number-one or number-three pencils, which were in the one case too light and in the other too dark for the computer to read.
The hour approached. In preparation, the guidance counselor handed out the test booklets, which we were told not to open until instructed to do so. He had seated us in alphabetical order, which meant that I was behind a girl named Susan Barrett, a very tall and cool girl who had been one of the participants (their names were forever etched on the surface of my memory) in the notorious glass-bottomed-boat ride. Unlike the rest of us, Susan Barrett appeared fairly unruffled by the prospect of the PSAT; indeed, she arrived just as the test was about to begin, out of breath, pushing hair from her eyes. “I overslept,” she whispered as she took her seat.
Then a bell rang. We opened our booklets.
Today, of that test itself, I recall few details—certainly no specific problems or solutions. What I do remember is finding myself, at a certain point, imperiled by a moment of wavering between two possible answers. One or the other, I knew, was correct; yet if I chose what was to me the more obvious of the two, might I not fall into a trap, as I had in the case of incarceration?
Stretching, I glanced at the clock, then allowed my gaze, for a microsecond, to move downward, to the little card on which Susan Barrett—who was already finished with her test and staring dreamily at the blackboard—had written her answers. It all happened so swiftly, it seemed as if I’d done it before I’d even decided to do it; my gimlet eye, the sharpness of which I had never previously tested, zeroed in fleetly on the appropriate line, the circle Susan had filled in. All at once I saw that I had given the wrong answer, the needlessly complicated answer, and with a sudden, silent “Of course!” I quickly corrected myself, my pink eraser alone bearing witness, by the black smudge on its tip, to this criminal act. And meanwhile a sensation of reassurance flooded me that was at once so profound and so pleasant that I could not help but cede to its flow.
So began my career as a cheat—a career to which, like my homosexuality, I would never have admitted even if confronted with the most damning evidence, and about which I felt little compunction for the simple reason that, so long as it remained secret, so long as I never got found out, it had no reality for me. Because cheating was never an activity I planned in advance, but rather fell into spontaneously, little anxiety preceded it; yet because it was also an activity at which I never got caught, no anxiety followed it, either, only the calming certainty that for once I had defied a corrupt system.
From then on, the assurance that if need be I could always cheat became for me an anodyne, an analgesic against the dread that the prospect of, say, a
French exam provoked in me. As it happened French and Math were the classes in which I cheated the most, probably because I approached them from the same point of view. French, for example, I looked upon less as a mode of communication and expression than as an aggravatingly inconsistent construct the complexity of which I could never quite master. Years later, when I went to France, I learned the language easily, and by the most natural method possible: by shopping in the grocery store, and falling in love with a French boy, and chatting with the lady who ran the dry cleaning shop on Rue St.-Martin. When I was in high school, however, French was merely a mess of irregular verbs and illogical rules so daunting that every time I opened my textbook a terror would seize me; suddenly it would seem as if I were looking at the page through distorting glasses, or a sheet of tears. Nor could I take these exams any less seriously than the evil PSATs, for I knew that in a high school as competitive as mine, a B in French or Math would significantly lower my chances of getting into the East Coast university, famous for its English department, on which I had set my sights.
I don’t think that my French teacher, Madame Hellier, who was from Nîmes and raised rabbits in her backyard, had any idea of the anguish that her tests provoked in me. She was an affable woman who took little interest in proctoring exams, preferring instead to lead us in dialogues in which one of us would take the role of M. Thibaut, the other of M. Dupont, or to stage scenes from Molière farces and absurdist comedies like Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, or to host potluck dinners to which we would bring frozen croissants, casseroles filled with some Joy of Cooking version of boeuf bourguignonne, and store-bought “French bread,” and to which Madame Hellier’s own contribution, no doubt intended to appall and amuse us, was invariably something repellent to our sensitive American palates—snails served in their shells with garlic butter, or frogs’ legs, or a stew prepared with one of her adorable rabbits. Still, she had to give the tests; it was part of her job.
Martin Bauman Page 4
