“There are reasons,” Terry pointed out. “As a lawyer, I have to say that firing has to be done right. And even when it’s done right, it’s hell on the morale of the other employees.”
“But the real reason,” said Chandler, “is they’re friends of hers. She hired them. They socialize together. She’s a woman and she doesn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings. Now, let me run this by you. Every goddamn time I ask Rue to do something she doesn’t want to do, she stops the conversation cold and says, ‘You’d have to fire me.’”
Terry sat up straighter.
“Boom, end of conversation. ‘Drop it, or fire me,’ and then ‘have a cookie,’ she says. Like it’s unthinkable. Like it’s her school. But I say it’s our school. We pay the tuitions, we sit on the Board. Where did everyone get the idea that the school won’t run without Rue Shaw?”
“Interesting,” said Terry. “But what grounds could you find for firing her? She’s been there a long time and the school is in very good health.”
“I think the length of her tenure is a problem. Is she the right person for the challenge of the nineties? I’m not sure she is. She’s too attached to her own way of doing things, and these are changing times. You have be ready to change with them.”
Terry thought about it. At last he said, “Firing a head can be very upsetting in a school. And Chandler, it’s a hell of a lot of work. Have you thought of that? Searches? Interim heads? And guess who most of it would fall on.”
“I’m perfectly aware of that. I’m just not afraid of it. I think it might be good fun to shake things up, roll the dice. Personnel is a long suit of mine. I think I could find someone I can work with.”
Terry was silent again, thoughtful. He was a trial lawyer, and he liked action. He liked conflict and tumult; he often said he liked to be “where the plates rub together.” But he also liked Rue, although they had had their run-ins. And he couldn’t help thinking of Chandler’s in-house counsel, Oliver Sale, who struck him as one of the strangest birds he’d ever met. Terry thought the guy was just too thin-skinned, too odd and angry to be a good lawyer no matter how bright he was. So he wondered exactly how strong Chandler was on personnel. Finally, he said, “But you have to have grounds. You can’t just take someone’s life work away.”
“That’s not so hard. This curriculum review thing, for instance. ‘The Board finds her intractable. Won’t respond to reasonable requests for information, for accountability. Won’t report to the Board, even when asked.’”
Terry began to see what he had in mind.
“Interesting,” he said, thinking it was daft, and wondering what was driving Chandler.
In the first week of January, Emily Goldsborough was putting shelf paper in the kitchen cabinets when Malone and Lyndie came downstairs. Jennifer Lowen had gone to Baja for New Year’s with her family, so Malone had nobody else to play with. She and Lyndie had been riding their bikes outside. Malone was very jealous of the bike Lyndie got for Christmas, which she said was like totally cool.
“Mom, can we make pull taffy?”
Emily said sure. Malone started telling Lyndie how totally cool pull taffy was.
“Haven’t you ever made taffy?” asked Emily, climbing down from the counter.
“I had a box of saltwater taffy once,” she said.
“That’s different,” said Emily. She began to get out the sugar and lemon extract and to look for the candy thermometer. Then she read the recipe aloud step by step for the girls, as they took turns measuring and pouring.
The girls knelt on chairs beside the stove so they could stir constantly and watch the sugar water turn to syrup. Emily, back on the counter with her shelf paper, kept warning them to watch the thermometer.
“If you get it too hard, you’ll have brittle, not taffy. We did that once, by mistake. When it cooled, it got so hard you had to break it with a hammer.” Lyndie seemed engrossed, as if being introduced to alchemy.
“Okay Mom! It’s at Soft Crack!” Malone shouted, turning off the heat in a panicky way.
“I’ll be right there.”
“No Mom! It’s ready now!” Malone hopped on one leg.
Emily climbed down. Lyndie watched, mystified, as Emily took off her watch and her rings. Malone too took off the silver ring with tiny turquoises that her father had given her for her tenth birthday. “Take off your ring, Lyndie, and give it to her. And you better take off your bracelet too.” Lyndie looked at Emily, questioning. Emily nodded.
Emily turned the taffy out onto a buttered cookie sheet to cool. Then she turned to the girls and with soft butter, greased their hands and wrists so the taffy wouldn’t stick to them as they worked it. She did Malone first, so Lyndie could see. Malone accepted these ministrations with professional calm. Then Lyndie offered her hands. Emily started buttering, but Lyndie flinched. Emily turned over her left hand to examine the underside of the arm. There was a long red angry welt there.
Emily reached as if to touch it and Lyndie pulled her arm away.
“Is it very sore?” she asked. “What happened?”
“It’s not that sore, I just don’t like to touch it.”
Lyndie held her hands out again. Carefully, Emily finished buttering her.
“Here, let me roll up your sleeves for you.” Lyndie obediently stood while Emily did this, taking care not to touch the welt. Lyndie and Malone, with their buttered hands in the air before them, looked like surgeons ready for the operating theater.
Emily tested the taffy and found it still too hot.
“What happened there, Lyndie? Did you burn yourself?”
Lyndie said, “I was rude to my father at Christmas dinner.”
Emily turned to look at her. Lyndie seemed blandly unaware of any non sequitur.
“So then what?”
“So, they sent me to my room, but I wouldn’t stay there.”
Emily tested the taffy again. It was still hot to handle, but she cut the lump in half with a buttered knife. She handed one lump to Malone, who sucked in her breath and passed it from hand to hand.
“Too hot?”
“Just a teeny bit.”
Emily picked up the second half, juggling it for a moment. “I think it’s all right now.” She handed it to Lyndie.
“Now you just keep pulling, like this, until it gets so you can’t see through it. And it gets stiffer.” Malone demonstrated, and Lyndie, fascinated, copied her movements, pulling her taffy out in a thick rope, then smushing it back together and pulling again.
“When it gets really stiff, we’ll put it all together and both pull, like a tug of war.”
“Cool!” said Lyndie. The girls worked away.
“So you didn’t want to stay in your room?” prompted Emily, trying to sound casual.
“No. I didn’t like being locked in. I was afraid the house would burn down.”
Shocked, Emily kept her mouth shut, hoping Lyndie would keep talking, as kids do in the back seat of a car, as if driving made you deaf.
Malone asked, “So what did you do?”
“I kept screaming and pounding on the door until they let me out.”
“While they were eating dinner?” Malone was impressed.
“Well, they were almost finished.”
“So they let you out?”
“But then they were really mad because I was like yelling, “If you don’t let me out I’ll break the fucking door down,” and I was pounding on it and kicking it, and my father was like right outside the door.” Both girls started to laugh. “He’d come to let me out. And I’m like, ‘I’ll break the fucking door down’ at the top of my lungs. He was pretty mad when he opened it.” She suddenly sobered at the thought of that.
“So…then what happened?” Emily finally asked. And Lyndie seemed suddenly to remember Emily was there.
“So…he let me out.”
“I mean, the welt.”
Lyndie shrugged.
“This is getting pretty stiff, Mom. Do you think it’s ready??
??
Emily looked at it. “I think you can combine.” Excited, ready for the next stage, they pressed their two lumps together. Then Malone held on tight while Lyndie pulled away from her. They both began to laugh.
“Don’t forget to twist it as you pull,” said Emily. Malone, remembering, showed Lyndie how to twist and braid the strands as they pulled.
Emily went to get powdered sugar in which to roll the finished rope of taffy before they cut it into bite-sized pieces. She somehow knew she wasn’t going to get the rest of the story. She didn’t want to push, for fear of saying the wrong thing.
She was glad the girls were getting along so well. She’d had a painful time listening to Malone describe the presents Jennifer Lowen got for Christmas and was just as glad the Lowens were out of town for a while. As she finished the shelf paper she could hear peals of laughter coming from Malone’s room, and when the girls piled down the stairs again to get Cokes, Malone asked, “Can Lyndie spend the night?”
Emily said, “Of course. We’d love to have you, Lyndie. Why don’t you call your mom and ask?”
So Lyndie went to the phone, and they watched as her face fell as she listened to her mother on the other end of the line, and then she hung up and said her dad was on his way to pick her up.
“Why?” Malone asked. Lyndie had closed in and shut down. “I don’t know,” said Lyndie. And suddenly there was nothing on the list of things that had been fun all afternoon that she felt like doing anymore. So the girls went out and sat in the driveway, and then Oliver drove up and swung Lyndie’s bike into his trunk, and the two drove away.
“She forgot to take her taffy,” said Emily. She had put Lyndie’s share in a plastic freezer box, each layer dusted with powdered sugar so the candies wouldn’t stick together.
Malone followed her mother around the kitchen for a while as Emily got ready to make chili for supper. She seemed deflated, as if having the fun of the afternoon let out so suddenly had left her weakened and smaller.
“Do you want to help? There are all these onions to chop,” said Emily.
“No, that’s all right,” Malone sighed, rather missing the point. She sat for a while, looking at the floor.
“Mom?”
“Yes, honey.”
“I’m worried about Lyndie.”
Emily stopped what she was doing and turned. “You mean the burn?”
“You know what she just told me? While we were outside?”
“What.”
“She told me she’s afraid to go home because there’s a ghost in the house. It’s an awful angry ghost that cries all the time, and it wants to hurt people. And she’s the only one who can hear it or see it.”
“She can see it?”
“Well I think so, I know she can hear it. The house will be quiet and suddenly it will be there, right behind her, crying. And it hits her and knocks into her, and tries to hurt her, and whenever she tries to tell her mom and dad how scared she is, they get mad. They think she’s lying! She was in the kitchen trying to help, and there was something cooking in one of those black frying pans, the heavy ones, and it was blazing hot and the ghost grabbed her arm and held it against this red hot pan, and when she screamed, her parents were like, ‘Goddammit Lyndie, why are you always doing these stupid things, like don’t you have eyes,’ like she likes hurting herself?”
Emily felt chilled as she listened.
“That’s a terrible story, Malone.”
“I know! I felt terrible watching her drive off! She wanted to stay here! I think her parents are mean. Do you believe in ghosts?”
Emily thought carefully, before saying: “I think there are a lot of things in the world that are harder to understand than some people think.”
“I believe in them. I knew a girl at daycamp who saw one. Maybe I should spend the night there. Maybe I would see it too.”
“That’s very brave of you. I’m not sure I’d be that brave.”
“Should I call her? You could take me over.”
“It’s not polite to invite yourself, honey. You can ask Lyndie when you see her if it would make her feel better to have you sometime, and then if she invites you, we’ll see.”
Emily was at Rue’s door on the morning of the first day of the new term. Rue came in from flag raising, and Emily followed her into her office, saying, “Do you have a minute?”
Oliver and Sondra Sale sat across the room from each other in Rue’s office.
“I know this is painful for you,” said Rue, gently.
“Do you?” asked Oliver. His voice was quiet, but his anger was so great, it was frightening. “Do you have any idea what you are doing to this family?”
Rue took a deep breath.
“I don’t want to claim to know anything that I don’t know. Would you agree with me that Lyndie is showing many symptoms of being a very troubled girl?”
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to live with her?” Oliver burst out.
“I’m sure it’s difficult.”
“You’re damned right, it’s difficult!”
“Oliver…please. I am sorry for anything that I do that adds to the pain this situation is already causing.”
“I should fucking hope so…. Why the hell are we here, may I ask? What business is this of yours?”
“Can you tell me how Lyndie got a nine-inch burn on her arm?”
“She burned herself on the stove,” he said, hissing with contempt for her inability to grasp this simple and utterly mundane fact.
Rue bowed her head and studied her fingers, laced in her lap.
“You are here, to answer your earlier question, because we feel we have seen a change in Lyndie in the last few months. I don’t know what is causing it. I was hoping we could talk about some of the possibilities.”
Sondra Sale unexpectedly dried her eyes and burst out now, with some passion.
“I’ll tell you one thing—that dyke you’ve got teaching PE! She comes on like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but she has a temper, believe me! They never know what she’s going to do next! It’s very upsetting to Lyndie. She has terrible pains in her stomach—that’s just since the start of the school year. I think she’s getting an ulcer!”
Rue decided that this outburst was so unreasonable it was best ignored. She said, “When a child is as unhappy as Lyndie seems, and when there’s a personality change unexplained by obvious stress or trauma…”
“We just gave you an explanation, but you’re not listening.”
“I am listening. But Miss Flower teaches PE to one hundred and twenty-four other children who have not developed ulcers. Received wisdom demands that we examine the system the child lives in.”
“System. The system she lives in. Do you mean the family she lives in?” asked Oliver.
“Yes.”
“Is that just ours, Mrs. Shaw? Or is it yours too? Does your daughter belong to a system?”
“Yes. Of course, she does.”
“And how’s it working?”
Oh, thank you, Chandler Kip, thought Rue. “Not very well at the moment. Thank you for your interest. Is there any chance that the three of you would consider family therapy?”
Oliver couldn’t stay in his chair. He got up so fast he nearly propelled himself against the wall of the narrow room. He looked like a higher primate in a suit, so full of adrenaline that he wanted to charge across the savannah or rocket up a tree and tear a lemur’s head off.
“Family therapy,” he boomed. “Are you kidding? This is the only country in the world where you have an angry, vengeful, self-destructive child tearing a family apart and blame the parents!” He turned to stare out the window to the primary playground, where Charla Percy’s second grade stood in a circle in the sun, learning Morris dancing.
“Let’s not debate that, let’s move on. Sondra, are you with me?”
Sondra, weirdly, had been staring at, and had now picked up, a teacher’s magazine that was lying on Rue’s table. She put it down and said, ??
?Yes. Of course.”
“I don’t know what is going on in Lyndie’s life. She may be in a phase that will pass. She may be in some kind of trouble that one or both of you don’t understand. But this much is clear. She is quite symptomatic, to use the professional jargon, for which I apologize. She is sometimes depressed, she can’t control her temper, and occasionally hurts others. She is, I agree with you, Sondra, very upset by inconsistency in adult behavior. And she is extraordinarily accident-prone. Every one of the symptoms I’ve mentioned has been confirmed by several, even many of the adults and children who work with her. And every one of those symptoms is typical of a child who is being abused. I’m afraid I don’t have any choice. I am legally compelled to call Child Welfare at this point. I am sorry.”
“If you’re sorry, why the hell are you going to do it?”
“I meant, I am sorry for the pain you are all in. And I’m sorry not to have the wisdom of Solomon. But I have to do what the law requires. I don’t know what is the symptom and what is the cause, but Lyndie needs some kind of help you seem unwilling to get for her. That alone forces my hand.”
There was a long, cold silence. Finally, Oliver said, “Would you be doing this if we had gone along with your therapy idea?”
“No, I wouldn’t. At least, not immediately. Are you willing to change your mind?”
“Absolutely not.”
“May I ask why not?”
“Absolutely not…you’ve done enough for one day.” He stood up, and Sondra followed suit, like a whip that’s been cracked.
On the second Monday of the term, Chandler Kip walked into Rue’s office, unannounced, and dropped a paper on her desk.
It was a report from Child Protective Services. It was written by Myra Dobkin, MSW. She had visited the Sale family and interviewed father, mother, and child. She saw a normal preadolescent with a nice room of her own, two parents who were tense, perhaps, but understandably so, and no reason to pursue the matter further. Chandler stood over Rue, glaring, as she read it. The Sales had withdrawn both their children from The Country School.