Sucking Up Yellow Jackets

by Jeanne Denault

  “That’s bad?”

  She had the grace to blush. “The other children get upset because he doesn’t have to sit at his desk. You really shouldn’t have taught him how to read.”

  “I didn’t. He taught himself.” She obviously didn’t believe me.

  A week later, I found folded wads of newspaper in his pants pocket when I was sorting clothes for the washer. I asked him if I should keep them.

  ”No, I read them already.”

  I looked at one. “How come you’re reading the want ads?”

  “It’s all I could find to read when I was out in the hall. It was in the trash.”

  He was offhand about it. He said his teacher sent him out to the hall because he didn’t like to sit at his desk while the kids wrote out exercises. “She won’t let me take a book with me so I read stuff I find in the wastebasket.”

  I asked his teacher why she was doing this. “That’s what we do here for punishment. Most kids hate it. Max doesn’t seem to care.” She shook her head. “I told him the next time he wouldn’t sit at his desk and write out words, I would send him down to the headmaster’s office. I understand that really makes them behave.” Totally unaware this was supposed to be avoided at any cost, Max loved it. He could hardly wait to tell me how much fun he had with the headmaster. “He let me staple things.”

  I made another attempt to persuade Max’s teacher to consider a more positive way to work with him. “He can sit for hours if he has a book to read or a challenging puzzle to solve.”

  “That’s not possible. He has to sit at his desk and print the words along with the other children. That’s the way I’m supposed to teach the children to read.”

  I knew two of the boys in the class. Both were bullies. One was twice Max’s size. Even with me in the classroom, the larger of the two boys couldn’t resist giving Max a shove that almost knocked him off his feet. The teacher flinched but didn’t reprimand the boy. He was the one who should have been sitting in the hall but the teacher was clearly afraid of him. Or she had been told to give him special attention because his parents or grandparents were big contributors.

  I spoke with the experienced teacher. She said, “I tried to have him transferred to my room but they won’t do it. That would give me fifteen children and leave his teacher with only twelve. I feel so frustrated every time I see him sitting in the hall. It’s such a pointless waste to punish him for being so smart. It not only gives him all the wrong messages, he doesn’t even know it’s a punishment.”

  “Would moving him to a higher grade solve anything?”

  “Not in his case. If he were large and mature for his age, maybe but he’s the smallest kid even in first grade. He’s such a nice child but painfully naive. He’d be the target of every bully in the class with an older, even larger bunch of children because he can’t figure out the rules well enough to protect himself.”

  Around this time his pediatrician prescribed a low dose of Rauwolfia, a centuries-old herbal medicine used in India to cure mental illness and snakebites. It was supposed to help calm anxiety. I wasn’t sure what it did for snakebites. If I had been attacked by a cobra, anxiety would have been the least of my worries. We stopped it by mutual agreement because Max didn’t like the way it made him feel. His doctor and I agreed his difficulty with first grade wasn’t the result of anxiety.

  That spring, the headmaster asked to meet with me. He looked at me then down at his hand. Clearly embarrassed, he was flipping a letter opener back and forth. “Max won’t be asked to enroll in second grade.”

  I felt as though the bottom had just dropped out of my lungs but kept my face impassive. “Why not? He likes it here.”

  He met my eyes, seemingly relieved at my matter-of-fact tone. I wondered how many mothers burst into tears when they were told their child was being banished from the school. “Max is a delightful, incredibly intelligent boy but he doesn’t get it.”

  “Get it? Is he a discipline problem?”

  “Not in the classic sense. He doesn’t defy the rules. He doesn’t even know they exist.”

  I nodded. A familiar weight settled on my chest. I felt trapped.

  The headmaster continued. “Let me give you an example of the problem we’re dealing with now. Max’s teacher was concerned because he won’t do the exercises along with the rest of the class.”

  “He already knows how to read. What will he gain by printing simple words he could read when he was three?”

  “Nothing. But the rest of the children would benefit. As it is now, he disrupts the class because the other students spend the time they should be learning to read fussing because he gets away with not doing the exercises.”

  “So the teacher sends Max out to the hall.” It was easy to see suggesting the teacher was incompetent would be a waste of my time but I was sorely tempted.

  “Yes. Only Max didn’t understand that this was a bad thing.”

  “No. He likes it there. He can read the want ads in peace.” I tried to keep the bitterness I felt out of my voice.

  The headmaster looked startled. He had an expressive face. I could see he wanted to know why I made the acid comment about want ads but apparently decided it might lead to areas he didn’t want to discuss.

  He finally nodded. “Right. So his teacher sent him to my office. The other children would have been horrified. Max walked into my office with a delighted smile, greeted me and shook my hand. He does have beautiful manners…we don’t see much of that these days. And he asked me what he could do to help.”

  “I understand you let him staple pages together. He enjoyed that.”

  “Yes. And he opened the stapler to check if it needed staples then asked me where the staples were so he could fill it. Made me felt incompetent. I’ve never figured out how to open the thing. I just give it to my secretary and ask her to fill it.”

  I laughed. “I know how you feel.”

  He frowned then lifted his shoulders in a brief shrug. “His teacher sent him to my office every day last week. I finally told Max if I saw him in my office one more time, I would have to send him home. I knew we were in trouble when his face lit up and he said, ‘In a school bus?’”

  Chapter 23

  Pete finally told me he was staying in Chicago. If I wanted to move fine, otherwise I was on my own. He wasn’t going to live in Philadelphia.

  He had been living in a hotel in downtown Chicago at the agency’s expense; the normal procedure until a transferee was able to resettle his family. Someone from billing obviously complained about the hotel bill Pete was running up because I refused to move. The complaint worked its way down to the head of the art department. On the rare occasions when I saw the head art director, it was clear he had no idea who I was. He acted as though I were just another nameless company employee of some sort. It was a very large agency.

  I don’t know who told him Pete’s wife was the freelance artist who had handled the ice cream account for the last two summers but someone clearly did. I had been doing work for different art directors off and on all through the winter but had not yet started work on that summer’s stint on the ice cream account. The head art director stopped me one day shortly after Pete gave me his ultimatum, called me in to his office and told me the company wanted me to go to Chicago. That’s what the agency expected from wives. He added that the agency could replace me as an artist but not as Pete’s wife. He had already assigned the ice cream account to someone else and wouldn’t feel comfortable giving me any other artwork under the circumstances.

  He mentioned there had always been concern about having two members of the family working for the agency. I knew this was true. They did have an anti-nepotism policy. When they considered me important to them as an artist, they had gotten around this by having me bill in my maiden name. Now that I had become more important as a wife, they didn’t feel comfortable hiding my identity.

  This was all couched in smooth logic. I was a good, dependable artist but according to Pete, a per
fect wife. Pete on the other hand was an artist who would be impossible to replace. He didn’t ask me how Pete scored as a husband. The head art director was a good salesman and felt comfortable with what he was doing. His attitude was the norm in March of 1960.

  I was so appalled that it took a few seconds for the full import of what he had said to sink in. I stared at him, trying to sort out my feelings. Did the man even realize I was a separate person? Something more than Pete’s wife? I was suddenly so furious that all I could do was stand up, nod and walk out. I couldn’t even manage a smile. People spoke to me as I walked to the elevator but I didn’t answer; I was afraid if I opened my mouth I would start screaming and not be able to stop. By the time the elevator reached the lobby, my initial fury had turned to desolation. There were no anti-discrimination laws at that time. Wives would probably have been excluded if there were.

  I had been naive to believe that I was finally established as an artist in my own right. I was wrong but that was my second mistake. My first one was gambling with a man I didn’t understand.

  From what little I was able to glean from Pete’s mother, Pete’s father had insisted on frequent, arbitrary moves but when she discovered she was pregnant with her first son, she flatly refused to move again. And they never did. Pete insisted I was a perfect wife but obviously not as perfect as his mother had been.

  The next morning, I was standing in our backyard watching Linda playing with the little girl who lived behind us. Seth stood next to them, one hand propped on his hip. He nodded his head occasionally. He had been diagnosed with alternating esotropia, a form of lazy eye and wore horn-rimmed glasses with tape over the lens on his dominant eye so he always looked studious. I couldn’t decide if he was taking mental notes on the complicated game the girls were constructing with lined-up popsicle sticks and small gray stones or keeping time to a song in his head. Max was in his room reading.

  The house cast an oblique shadow across the sixteen-foot-wide yard. Exhausted from a sleepless night spent worrying about what I could do to survive if I stayed in Philadelphia, it took me a few seconds to realize the shadow of the roof peak had something moving on it. A second later what was clearly a small shadow head reared up and looked into the backyard. Max. I knew he was comfortable three stories above the ground. He didn’t seem to have any grasp of the damage a small body would suffer falling off a roof ridge so high off the ground. I was terrified but couldn’t let him know how frightened I was. I didn’t dare look around. I willed my voice to be calm and mean at the same time. “Max, get back into the bathroom, NOW!”

  Linda looked up. I hoped she was at the wrong angle to see his shadow but decided I had better distract her. She would shriek if she saw him. Her shrieks could dislodge a lurking buzzard.

  So I asked her a question. “Have you decided how to play the game?” She went into an involved set of instructions. It turned out they had made up the rules before they did anything else. She liked to plan ahead.

  I watched the shadow lump on the roof ridge. It stopped, turned around and started back to the bathroom window. I tried to nod at appropriate intervals in Linda’s explanation but was so frightened I could tell I was blowing it.

  “Mom, you’re not listening. Why did you ask me if you don’t even care?”

  “Sorry, I was just distracted.” It was chilly but I could feel sweat prickling my scalp. How was I going to cope with this exasperating boy who could absorb every scrap of my time and energy and still be out of control? Some of the residual anger and despair from yesterday hardened my feelings.

  I didn’t turn around when I heard the kitchen screen door close behind me. Max sidled up to me. “How did you know? I was really quiet.”

  A pigeon alighted on the ridge. It was large enough to cast a distinctive shadow. I pointed at it. Max stared at it and muttered in disgust. “I wasn’t scared.”

  “You should have been. If you fell, you could have broken your back and spent the rest of your life in a wheelchair.”

  He mulled this over. “Wheelchairs are fun. I wouldn’t mind.”

  “You would if you broke your neck, lost control of your body from the neck down, had to wear diapers for the rest of your life and couldn’t wheel yourself around and get up and walk away if you were bored.”

  He shuddered at the mention of diapers then shook his head. “That couldn’t happen to me. I’m too careful.”

  I don’t remember the rest of that day. Severe stress either imprints indelible images on my mind or fuzzes all the edges. At some point I pulled out all the files and old bank statements and tried to figure out exactly how much money I would have to generate to stay in Philadelphia without Pete. It didn’t take me long to determine that I couldn’t afford to stay without jobs from Pete’s agency. Unlike the smaller firms in town, his agency didn’t have to wait until they were reimbursed by their clients to pay their suppliers. And they paid far more. I had no other contacts for work in Philadelphia. It was too close to New York to be a big advertising town. There were three good local art schools and few jobs. The small studios and agencies hired fellow grads.

  Later that week, our lawyer invited me to lunch. He was a friend of mine as well as Pete’s. I assumed Pete had prodded him to call me. I told him what was going on in detail.

  “You’re in a bad spot. Pennsylvania law says women have to go with their husband if he’s transferred or she’s legally considered the deserter and he doesn’t have to support her.”

  “That’s sick.” The knot in my stomach tightened. If it were possible to get an ulcer at twenty-nine, I was becoming a good candidate.

  He made a rueful face. “Yes but that’s the law in this state.”

  “Would he have to give me enough money to support the kids?” My mind flashed to images of my little family marooned in the bleak, dead-end world of the projects down near the airport. We wouldn’t survive a week. We would have to go back to the suburbs. But what could I do there to survive? Where would Max go to school?

  The lawyer was looking at me with pity. “He won’t have to give you a cent. If you decide to file for divorce, by Pennsylvania law, Pete will be considered the responsible person in the marriage and he could end up with all your assets and the kids.”

  I had to clear my throat before I could speak. “Why would he want the kids? He says he loves them but he doesn’t do anything to convince me that he sees them as anything more than rather irritating and constantly needy appendages. He rarely bothers to spend time with them.”

  “Men can be surprisingly possessive about their children. Judges don’t like to give men custody but in this state, you’re the bad one.”

  “But Pete has to work. He’d need a nanny. Why would a judge give the kids to Pete and have them raised by a nanny?”

  “He wouldn’t need a nanny for long. He’s attractive and makes good money. Women would be lined up hoping to snag him. He’d have some woman living with him before the ink on the separation agreement was dry.”

  “What about Max?”

  “He’s a charming little boy one on one: well spoken and obviously bright. If she’s around him long enough to pick up on his problems, she’ll think they’re your fault. Women always think they can do a better job than the first wife. Pete may go through more than one wife but there will always be some woman ready to jump into your shoes. When we eat lunch together women gape at him. They don’t even see me.”

  The lawyer’s comment about men being possessive jarred me. He had called that one right. Pete considered everything in our house his and his alone. He even carped at me when I used the sable paintbrushes I bought in art school, even though they still had my maiden name stamped on them. It wasn’t as though I maltreated the brushes. They were expensive and I couldn’t afford to replace them. I washed them with more care than I did my face.

  Pete preferred his children asleep or at the other end of a phone cord. He had no prior close-up experience with children and was upset by any show of emotion other than l
aughter. Any human frailty made him uneasy; children whose favorite mode of expression involved exuberant shrieking and yelling literally drove him out of the house. He went to great lengths to protect himself from the messy reality of an actual family. He referred to them as your children. If someone asked to see a picture of his kids, he flipped open his wallet and showed them a photo of an idiotic-looking monkey. He didn’t seem to understand this made most people cringe. They usually laughed and that was all he noticed. He called most days and asked what the kids had done. I did my best to turn their days into compelling vignettes. He liked this. I sometimes got the feeling this was all he wanted from his children. Touchy-feely DNA wasn’t included in his genes. He couldn’t help it if he tensed and flinched away from their touch. He hugged them at times, often harder than they liked, referred to them as “baby flesh” and clearly considered them his possession to be hugged or not when he chose.

  They loved their father even when he pushed them out of the way as though they were objects, or gritted his teeth and glared at them. They knew there was a loving and sometimes kind man lurking inside this person somewhere if only they could find the magic words to make him appear. Innately hopeful, even I wasn’t immune to this hope.

  Seth brought out Pete’s good side better than anyone else. He had an intuitive understanding of his father. Linda and Max used Seth to sound out their father’s moods. They all agreed Seth only guessed wrong once. This was one of the rare times all three children were in accord. There was a lot of dramatic eye rolling from all three when they mentioned this but none would say exactly what had happened.

  Unless one of their transgressions was too egregious to ignore, I edited it out of my daily phone chronicle to Pete. I felt vaguely guilty each time I did this but instinctively protected the children.