by Leigh Newman
Sweat and Pencils
Monday is a school day, but this time I’m actually going to school. Mom drops me off by the bench at the entrance. The willow branches leave a delicate, riffled shadow pattern on my skin. Then come the chestnuts. I look up as I walk under them, watching the veiny, golden trembling of the leaves. It’s quiet except for the wind and birds. The double doors to the school are already shut, leaving the great gabled stone building looking like what it once was—a mansion constructed for Napoleon’s great-nephew, who threw off his tyrannical uncle to marry a Baltimore socialite in the 1800s.
Roland Park Country Day for Girls smells of sweat and pencils, wool and damp chalkboard, an odor that the antique radiators boil into a heady indoor mist. I’m late again. I walk slower and slower through the twisting halls. By the time I drift my way to the door of my fourth-grade classroom, the girls are standing at their desks, chanting out the Lord’s Prayer.
Everybody stops before Amen and looks up.
During the four months of third grade that I spent at the school the previous year—from February to June—I learned to mumble through the forgive-us-our-trespasses part, as well as hitch up my bloomers under my tunic while running around with a stick with a leather woven pouch at one end. The specifics of what I’d been doing—playing lacrosse, wearing a uniform, asking for Protestant forgiveness—felt a little murky, but nevertheless entrancing. Books, binders, pencils at Roland Park Country all came stamped in a gilt version of the school’s symbol: a laurel leaf. Windows were thrown open in winter, under the belief that gulps of frosty fresh air strengthened our lungs and IQs.
I rarely had to interact with my classmates, though. During recesses, lunch, and after school, I sat inside with Miss Pendleton doing flash cards to catch me up to the rest of the girls. In Alaska, I had gone to “a wonderfully progressive” public school, as my mother always described it to other mothers. To me, it had been just plain wonderful. The teacher there had pointed out the math corner to me and the reading corner and said that we students could go to these corners and do worksheets whenever we “felt like doing math or reading.” I did not ever feel like doing math or reading. I felt like playing with the bunnies in the pet-the-bunny corner, which is what I did. Every day.
At Roland Park Country, unfortunately, illiteracy didn’t have a corner. Miss Pendleton sat with me during all her free periods, nodding and listening to me stumble through kindergarten picture books like Sylvester and the Magic Pebble. Mom had tried these tactics, too, but lacked Miss Pendleton’s je ne sais quoi—a mixture of vanilla extract and grim spinster determination.
Soon she discovered my lack of math. She drilled me incessantly with flash cards. Three times four? Eight times seven? I loved Miss Pendleton and her cardigan sweaters and long pearl necklace with little wire Mrs. Claus glasses dangling off the end. I loved not having to go outside where all the other girls were laughing and running and trading puffy stickers from their extensive collections housed in heavy leather photograph albums.
This year, though, I am under the supervision of Mrs. Chantal-Romanel, who wears her long brown hair tumbling down over her shoulders and her husband’s old shirts as “learning smocks.” Over the summer, while I fished with my father, she assigned us Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to read, as well as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This is not typical lower-school curriculum. But Mrs. Chantal-Romanel has higher goals, she explains to us, when it comes to primary education. Despite her poetic outfits, she does not appreciate tardiness, ignorance, or misleading questions—my specialties. I slink into the room.
“Everyone,” she says, “kindly pull out a fresh piece of paper.”
We are having a pop quiz on mythology. Some of the girls in the front row begin to cry. They didn’t know that they had to memorize the spelling of Sisyphus from last night’s reading. “Pop quizzes are standard procedure in university,” says Mrs. Chantal-Romanel, who is American but refuses to use American words like college. “Are you going to cry in university? My job is to prepare you for your educational future.”
The great yawning blankness of my paper stares back at me. While the other girls scribble away frantically, I use the time to study their uniforms. Something is wrong with mine. It had been wrong the year before, but I had been too confused at the time to pinpoint the source of the issue. We’re all wearing blue tunics with white shirts and brown shoes. And yet, as I now see, my tunic has darts for breasts I don’t have. It has a flared poodle-skirt. My shirt sports a round, high Peter Pan collar and is a brittle yellow, papyrus shade. My mother bought it used—unaware that in the eighty-odd years of Roland Park Country, no one had ever bought a used uniform. Mine had been sitting in the school closet since the 1950s.
“Prometheus,” says Mrs. Chantal-Romanel. “Pro-me-the-us.”
Scribble, scribble go the other fifteen pencils in the room. I draw pictures of my classmates’ matching clothing—their shapeless, new tunic sacks, their slouchy leather shoes, their oversized Oxford shirts. Then add a daisy on the margins.
A few periods later, we line up for recess. Mrs. Chantal-Romanel’s rule is that you have to hold your partner’s hand on the way to the playground. And the girls’ unofficial rule is that you have to play with your partner, too. In fact you can play with or talk to only your partner, who is also known as your “friend for the day.”
Down the line I go, looking for a girl to stand beside. One by one, each one says:
“I’m friends with Chandler today.”
“I’m friends with Eleanor today.”
“I’m friends with Libby today.”
I don’t know why I do this every day. Miss Pendleton taught me sufficient division. There are seventeen girls, which adds up to eight pairs of girls and a remainder of one girl, standing alone in the back of the line.
Down the hill from the jungle gym stands a mass of thick evergreens and spruces—vestiges of the forest that sheltered Jerome Bonaparte’s house a century before. A small creek burbles on the other side of the gravel road, continuing past a dilapidated barn that leans off its foundation, filled with broken lumber and bats.
I pitch a camp nearby under a pine tree, building up walls of boughs, collecting pinecones for kindling. I’m a settler on the wagon trail, with my trusty pinto pony, Samson. We’re living on griddle-cakes and honeysuckle sap. And winter is coming on quick.
This is a new game—one that’s also real-life training for when I get myself lost in the Alaskan bush. Which I know probably won’t happen. But other things could happen: Dad could slip under the plane and the propeller could cut off his hand. He’d lose his job at the hospital. I’d have to stay and take care of him, earning us a living by working at a salmon-canning plant. Or maybe, I’d lose my hand. Moving me back to Baltimore—with my injuries—would be out of the question.
Two girls from my class approach in the distance: Heidi Tompkins and Marcie Lerner, two loud, confident, bossy girls I’ve secretly worshipped for months.
“You’re the one that lives in an igloo, right?” says Marcie, but not in a mean way. Almost curious.
I look down at the pine needles on the ground. Say something! Say anything! Pine needles, pinecones, dirt. Say anything! But nothing about Marcie being black or there not being black people in Alaska or about touching her hair, which I’ve almost touched in class, just to feel the shiny, tight ridges of the curls. When I look up, both girls are still looking at me, but more intently. Say anything! Instead I run down the hill and hide behind the barn until the bell rings for class.
In the dining room, at the ball-and-claw-foot Queen Anne table, next to the mahogany sideboard that holds china and silver service for twelve—all purchased before the divorce—Mom is chewing on a pencil, punching numbers into her electric calculator, watching the totals spit out on a roll of white receipt paper. We have money problems. Dad pays for my school and my books. But Mom’s salary isn’t enough for food and the mortgage and … new shoes.
I slink in. I clear my
throat. But how can I ask for the slouchy, sloppy brown shoes that all the girls at school are wearing? The totals on Mom’s calculator tonight are in red ink—again—and a cut-glass goblet of Chablis sparkles on her coaster.
I slink out, making it only to the kitchen doorway.
She looks up. “The least you could do is keep me company.”
“The budget is boring. I want to watch TV.”
She nods, then explodes, throwing the legal pad off the table, followed by the calculator, which bounces against the wall. She’s crying. “How selfish can you be!”
I study the Oriental carpet—curl, flower, fringe.
“I worked fourteen hours today! Fourteen hours. All you ever do is take and take and take.”
It’s true. Mom had worked fourteen hours. All I’d done was go to school and watch cartoons in the basement. Last year, a high-school girl took me home to her house every afternoon and made me hot chocolate, but this year Mom said babysitting was too expensive.
“You got French doors,” I say, pointing to them. A man came in October and cut a hole in our wall. I got to hand him nails.
“That was for us. That was an investment.” She picks the bills off the floor and begins to stack them, evening out the untidy ones, forming neat, equal piles. One stack. Two stacks. “And by the way, don’t think that we wouldn’t be fine—just fine—if your father hadn’t cheated on our taxes.” Three stacks. “I’m not the one who got the big-deal accountant. I’m not the one who lied. But I signed the joint return. Like a dummy! And here I am, paying all the penalties.”
I back away—not just from her, but from the stacks, which are huge, looming.
“I’m just telling you so you know,” she says. “I’m not sure how much longer I can keep us afloat. Not with you and your clothes and your ballet lessons. Not with your father bleeding us dry. He wants twenty-five thousand dollars to make the IRS leave us alone. That’s what I make a year in salary.”
I head for the stairs. But Mom follows me to the landing. “At least I turned down his alimony,” she says, with a broken sound in her laugh. “I wasn’t that desperate. We still have our pride, don’t we? We still have that.”
In my bedroom, under the layers of covers, I feel sick. Where are we going to get twenty-five thousand dollars? Are we about to be kicked out of our house? Where will we go? Will we have to live on the street, in our car, the way Mom always says happens to women with children in Reagan’s pro-gun, pro-life, pro-capitalism society? Or will we have to live down south with Maybelle, with the hole in the roof and the splatted dead roaches in the bathtub and kitchen?
Would Dad even care? I wonder. But only for a minute. Then I curl up in a ball and try to go to sleep. I face the right wall. This is a rule I’ve recently made up, with my own blend of religion and logic: If you face the left, you go to hell if you die in the middle of the night. If you face the right, you go to heaven if you die in the middle of the night, and even if you don’t die, everything will be okay and perfect.
“Hello,” my father says. “Hello? Who is this?”
I hang up.
“Hello?” my father says. “I’d start talking if I were you.”
I hang up.
“Hello,” my father says. “Ellen, goddamnit, it’s you. I know it’s you. Leave me the fuck alone.”
I hang up. It wasn’t my father’s fault he didn’t know that was me on the line, not my mother. When we breathe, we sound like the same person. If I had talked, if I had said, Dad, did you steal twenty-five thousand dollars from Mom? he would have said, No, honey, that was all a big mix-up with the lawyers.
Behind me, my mother stands in her old flannel nightgown. My hand is still on the hot receiver of the phone. She opens the fridge, pours a glass of Chablis. The crystal twinkles in the refrigerator light.
She has to know that I called Dad. What if she knows what I was going to ask him? “It was Dad,” I say, very fast. “I only called to say hi.”
“That’s wonderful,” Mom says. “You and your father have such a good relationship. I never wanted to stand in the way of that. No matter what he’s done to me personally.” Then she smiles. But a smug, phony smile.
I stand there, hating her chin, which has a little flap of skin under it that jiggles. Then I hate her Adam’s apple and the way it bobbles in her throat when she sips. She sips and sips and sips. Her face changes. It gets hard and funny and I don’t even recognize my mom for a minute—until I do. She looks like her mother. She looks like Maybelle.
But she can’t look like Maybelle. Mom is adopted. Mom has brown hair and Maybelle has black hair. They don’t have the same DNA or noses or cells.
Then her voice curls, low and hissed. “And how is your father—with all his planes and all his money?”
I just have to go to bed. When I wake up, Mom’s face will be her face again and we’ll drive in the car all the way to some museum in Delaware or West Virginia to learn about Japanese pottery or the cooking habits of eighteenth-century kitchen slaves. This is the problem with Baltimore. Mom is so worried about Dad. But it’s all the other people who are scary and horrible—all the crazy or dead people who are seeping into us the more we stay here. We never used to talk about families or the past or even each other in Alaska. In Alaska, we were faraway and safe.
“Did I ever tell you how he called up all the banks in Anchorage, and told them to turn down my application for a mortgage? That’s why we had to leave Alaska. I couldn’t buy a place for us to live.”
I know what to say. Good night. Or I’m tired. But I’m sick of her talking about Dad. I’m sick of her telling me things that might be lies or might not be, and not knowing which I want to be true. “Actually,” I say, “Dad’s doing great. He wants me to pick out a bed for my bedroom in his new house.”
“Really? That’s wonderful.”
“I want to get a water bed. Or a canopy bed. We’re getting all new furniture. And a pool table.”
“That’s exactly what your father should be doing—setting up a home for himself.” Mom laughs, and takes a sip, sip, sip of wine.
“I can get any bed I want. Even if it costs a thousand dollars. The sky’s the limit. Dad said.”
She stops, cocks her head.
“Dad’s buying us a new cabin, too!” But now everything I’m saying is coming out panicked and stupid and rambling. She knows I’m lying. “A cabin in the bush. With a stove and a canoe and a kerosene lantern. I get to get my own snow machine if I want. He said just to ask.”
Mom waits a beat. Then she says in a flat, stabby voice that comes with a twist of a smile, “Why don’t you ask him if he’s started dating Abbie yet? Ask him that, why don’t you?” She turns her back to me and walks out of the room.
I run upstairs, the way I should have in the beginning. How did Mom know that Dad is dating? I found out last summer, when he went out to dinner that one time. But I never told her about it. I didn’t want to make her feel bad. And … how did she know it was Abbie who Dad was dating? I didn’t know. I thought he was dating a stranger, or different strangers—ladies who were hostesses at restaurants or veterinarians. A dark, scratchy feeling zigzags through me: Abbie works for Dad. She is his nurse in his office. She has long flippy blond hair and always makes homemade chocolate cakes for the receptionists’ birthdays.
You know how you can stop from thinking? You can break something. You can’t break something loud and get in trouble. But you can cut up a shirt with scissors, over and over into tiny pieces. I get down on the floor. I pull out my bag of fall leaves from under the bed. But they are just like wet river pebbles, after the pebbles have dried in your pocket. All the colors are gone—all the reds and golds and oranges and greens and yellows. Why didn’t anybody tell me? I reach into the bag. They’ve turned damp and black and slick. You can rip them, but it’s like tearing up a handful of soft molded toilet paper.
Two weeks later I’m busted by the police at the Homeland goldfish ponds. The ponds are dark, mossy sto
ne constructions, surrounded by weeping cherry trees and azalea borders. Fountains shoot up at the center. Little narrow bridges cross them, overseen by green copper nymphs wearing leaf-shaped caps.
I love the ponds. In Alaska, in our old neighborhood, which nobody called a neighborhood, we had a big drainpipe that funneled all the water down from the mountains, under the houses, and out to the town rivers where it went to the sea. I used to put on my waders and fish the drainpipe stream, even though there were no fish and my dad said never to do it. You can trip in heavy waders, hit your head on a rock, and drown.
As usual, no kids are around in Homeland. It’s after school, Wednesday, dancing-class day. Creaking white buses from the country clubs pick up the girls at our school in the parking lot, as well as the boys from the boys’ school across the street. Dancing class, I imagine, takes place in the ballroom from the storybook that came included in my scratchy old Cinderella record. Chandeliers twinkle overhead, the girls wear glass slippers.
As I walk home through Homeland, I sneak into a few backyards, kicking odd things that the families have left forgotten in the grass: the sprayer from a hose, galoshes, a barrette, a broken half of a croquet ball. Finally, I find what I need—a rake with a long wooden handle, leaning against a porch. I look around to see if anybody is looking, then sling it over my shoulder.
In my backpack, I’ve already stashed a few loops of dental floss, a safety pin, and a piece of bread. One of my favorite stories of Dad’s is the one about the summer when he and his friends poached salmon at the dam, back when he was growing up on a ranch in California. Dad and his friends had used Wonder Bread. Mom doesn’t believe in white-flour foods. But fish, I hope, will overlook a little whole wheat.
There is a sign by the ponds. It matches the Homeland neighborhood sign, except that it’s smaller. NO FEEDING. NO FISHING, it says in tiny black letters.
Kneeling down, I rig up the rake as a pole, using the dental floss as line and the safety pin as a hook that I bait with balled-up bread. The fish are moving along the edges of the pools, great fat orange monsters with mouths as wide and round as the tentacles of octopuses. I try to cast, but the rake is too heavy. I dangle the line directly into the water, pulling the bread ball over the surface, avoiding the lily pads.
