“Mr. and Ms. and stuff,” said Flicka. “… The start of sentences.”
“Great,” said Jackson, feeling like a proper father for once. “We’ve got four rules. Five to go.”
“When you’re really mad in an email!” said Heather.
“True, but they didn’t have email in 1895, so I don’t think that one counts.”
“Titles of books and movies,” said Flicka. “Organizations, like the PTA.”
“Excellent. Three rules left.”
Silence. “I’m bored with this.”
“You’re not bored with this, Flicka, you’re stumped.”
Granted, she did have to put in Artificial Tears pretty much all the time, but choosing to do so at this juncture seemed calculated.
“Okay, let’s do another one, then,” said Jackson. “‘Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.’”
“What the fuck is a modification,” said Flicka.
“Watch the mouth,” he said, embracing his new role as Real Dad. “And don’t ask me, I’m just the humble test-giver. Can you at least name the parts of speech?”
“Yelling and whispering?” said Heather.
Flicka scrunched her eyes. “Is that like naming words and doing words?”
“They’re called nouns and verbs. You can’t be telling me that in tenth grade they still call them naming words and doing words.”
“Well, they do. And that’s not my fault,” said Flicka.
“No, it isn’t. But I pay taxes up the wazoo so that you girls learn something, and I don’t want to buy goofball, patronizing lingo like that.”
“I told you when you came home, I shouldn’t have to learn any of this shit. It’s a waste of their time, and it’s a waste of mine.”
“The education system isn’t aimed at students who are probably going to be dead before they’re twenty,” he snapped. He shouldn’t have said that, but Flicka was so brutal about confronting her terminal status head on that he sometimes made the mistake of being brutal in return. More to the point, the pain in his groin was nearly constant now, which shortened his fuse and addled his judgment. He tried to get the game back in hand.
“Let’s move on to the math section,” he proposed. “‘A wagon box is two feet deep, ten feet long, and three feet wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?’ “
“Give me a break,” said Flicka.
“Don’t like that one? Try this: ‘If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 pounds, what is its worth at fifty cents per bushel, deducting 1,050 pounds for tare?’ “
“That’s bullshit,” said Flicka. “You can tell it’s just a bunch of farm stuff, for the yokels. It’s what you’d need to know in stupid Kansas.”
“Okay, then, here’s a problem you’d need to be able to solve in New York today: ‘Find the interest on $512.60 for eight months and eighteen days at seven percent.’ Go ahead. You can use your pencil. In fact, if you want, I’ll even let you use a calculator.”
Flicka folded her arms. “You know I stink at math.”
“Then how about geography? ‘Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.’”
“All right, Dad, I get it. We’re all morons, and in the ‘olden days’ they were geniuses.”
But Jackson was so riveted with this test that he couldn’t let it go. “‘Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall, and Orinoco.’ “
Since he’d had trouble pronouncing Orinoco—wherever the fuck that was—Flicka caught him out. “You don’t know these answers, either.”
He laughed, and was about to admit that he couldn’t answer more than two or three questions on the entire five-hour test when Carol clipped into the kitchen. “Why are you trying to make your own children feel dumb?”
“I’m not! I’m trying to make them feel uneducated, which isn’t the same thing.”
“I’m willing to bet the distinction is lost on them.” Carol tore the sheaf from his hands. “What is this? ‘District Number thirty-three has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?’ Please. In eighth grade? Somebody’s been pulling your leg, Jacks. Heather, it’s time to brush your teeth.”
“It’s not a joke. This was a real test.”
“Oh, how do you know?” said Carol. “You believe everything that pops up in your AOL in-box that reinforces your bitter, dyspeptic attitude.”
“We pay good money so these kids learn something. Instead they’re so coddled that Heather doesn’t even get proper grades. What do we get on her report card? ‘Does consistently,’ ‘does usually,’ or ‘does with assistance.’ There’s no ‘doesn’t do,’ ‘won’t do,’ or ‘does, but it’s crap.’ And you saw that newsletter: they won’t let her teachers use red pen anymore. Red’s too ‘confrontational’ and ‘threatening,’ so now her tests are marked in a ‘soothing’ green. They’ve chucked the bell between classes to make the environment more ‘welcoming.’ They keep this up, Heather’ll grow up and get a job, and the first time her boss says, ‘You’re late,’ or has a tiny bit of a problem paying her to do work she didn’t do because she didn’t feel like it? She’ll jump off a bridge.”
“Just because your own schooling was cruel and critical and pitted children against each other,” said Carol, “doesn’t mean that your daughters have to suffer the same regime of public humiliation.”
“But this obsessive bolstering of self-esteem—well, I got no problem with self-regard so long as you think well of yourself for good reason. But now they’re told they’re all God’s gift, whether or not they’ve learned to spell. I read a study that was not in my ‘AOL in-box,’ thank you, but in The New York Times, which you worship, so I assume you don’t dismiss it as made up. They asked a bunch of Korean kids and a bunch of American kids whether they thought of themselves as good at math; thirty-nine percent of the Americans thought they were great at it. Only six percent of the Koreans thought they were any good, and the rest thought they sucked. But when you looked at their test scores, the Koreans were way ahead of the Americans in math. Students in this country are taught to be delusional.”
“So your answer is to make our children ashamed of themselves, which doesn’t improve their math skills one bit.”
Carol’s whisk-whisk motions were her only giveaway that she was furious. She didn’t exactly slam the dishes into the dishwasher, but he could tell from the obscenely controlled firmness with which she placed the plates in their slots that she’d have preferred to smash them against the wall.
“Hey, that chorizo-chickpea thing was top notch.”
“Please don’t try to butter me up. Flicka, did you finish your math homework?”
Their elder daughter wasn’t prone to try her I-don’t-have-to-do-schoolwork-because-I’m-going-to-die routine on her mother. “I … finished with it,” she said obscurely. Fortunately for Flicka, her mother had other things on her mind.
“How’s Glynis?” Carol asked curtly, as if she didn’t really care.
“Faintly better. Little nervous she should have stayed in the hospital longer, but the insurance company wanted her out. Then, you must know that, since you saw her yesterday.”
“She’s still in a lot of pain. I do think they sent her home too soon. But I gather you’ve been pestering her with your retrograde, right-wing political opinions.”
“My opinions are not right-wing. In this town, that’s just a label for ‘evil’ anyway. And I’d be awful surprised if Glynis described me as ‘pestering.’ She’s mad as hell, and she enjoys the company of someone else who’s mad as hell, too.”
“Jackson, you know perfectly well that it’s inappropriate.”
Jackson hated the word inappropriate, which rod-up-the-ass prisses threw around with abandon these days to make other people feel dirty and ashamed. It made you immediately want to check your underwear for stains. The word had
a deliberate vagueness, too, as if what you’d done wrong was too disgusting to name. And it attributed moral qualities to the merely normative. The incessant modern-day resort to inappropriate put a thin progressive gloss on what was really a regressive conformism. The folks who wielded that chiding adjective were the same buttoned-up paranoids who spotted pedophiles under every bush, since lately you could be as uptight and sexually repressive as you liked, so long as you projected your prudish Victorian revulsion onto children. He was no more pleased that his own wife had picked up the term than he would have been had she returned from a public pool with communicable plantar warts.
Carol swished the sponge across the counters in a reproachful show of efficiency, as if instead of wasting his children’s time with some obviously counterfeit eighth-grade test he might at least have cleaned up the kitchen. The resentment was disingenuous, too, since she was clearly fuming, and thus grateful to have something to do. Without laundry, bills to pay, one sweaty, adenoidal kid in constant need of hydrating or Saran-Wrapping, another kid in constant need of compensatory praise and attention, Carol would go insane. As much as she might experience these domestic duties as impositions, she was utterly dependent on this feverish morning-to-night beaverishness, for she had long ago lost that vital capacity to do nothing. Carol’s industry resembled the full-dance-card cha-cha of Glynis’s mother, except that at least Hetty was in doomed pursuit of an elusive self-fulfillment; Carol’s ado had always to be in the service of someone else. This compulsive altruism seemed like self-denial, but it was creepier than that. She no longer had the faintest idea what she might desire on her own account, so what was she sacrificing? It saddened him to note that over the years she had insidiously replaced pleasure with virtue.
Carol dispensed the usual clatter of pills. Once Heather was bullied into getting ready for bed, Flicka loitered at the table, taking deliberately too long to grind her meds. The girl was an incurable busybody, and sensed something was up. Her mother would gladly have frustrated Flicka’s nosiness, but at length couldn’t contain herself. Searching out stray chickpeas with a whisk broom, Carol muttered to Jackson flintily, “So, you must be happy.”
“As it happens, I’m not in a bad mood,” he said. Feet on an adjacent chair and sipping his second beer, he adjusted himself by discreetly shoving a hand in his pants pocket. “But I get the impression that’s not what you mean.”
“You’ve seen the news?”
“Oh, that.” He was relieved. Of course, Carol wouldn’t allude to certain other issues with Flicka in the room. Still, any subject they discussed these days had an ulterior quality, and he was grateful for even this tiresome a diversion, just as Carol was grateful for sweeping the floor. “Why would I be ‘happy’ that Terri Schiavo died?”
All the in-laws’ avenues of legal appeal having been exhausted, at the husband’s request the Floridian’s feeding tube had been disconnected two weeks earlier. The poor woman had actually lasted longer than her doctors had expected.
“Well, all that unnecessary expense,” said Carol. “You and Shep must be tickled pink. Now we can send her IV and a fresh set of bedding to Africa.”
“I guess I’m relieved for her that’s she’s out of her misery,” Jackson said cautiously.
“But according to you, she couldn’t feel anything. She didn’t even exist, in your view. So how could she experience any misery to end?”
“Honey, I have no idea why this story is so important to you. You didn’t know her; she wasn’t your best friend. There were only a few snapshots to suggest what she might have been like when she was a human being.”
“She was still a human being; that’s the point! And she was murdered. As surely as if someone had shot her between the eyes.”
“But I didn’t kill her. So why are you mad at me?”
“You did kill her. Your way of thinking killed her. Oh look, that woman isn’t pretty and entertaining anymore, so let’s just pull the plug! So who else would you like to dispose of while we’re at it? Who else is too expensive or inconvenient? Old people? Or kids with Down’s? Would you put them in a gas chamber because they couldn’t pass your ‘eighth-grade’ test? It’s a slippery slope!”
“Oh, spare me the ‘slippery slope’ routine!” Jackson cried. “We live on a slippery slope, like it or not. It’s amazing any of us can stand up. We do kill people. We give serial killers lethal injections and we mow down the Taliban in Afghanistan—”
“Not if I had anything to say about it we wouldn’t.” Carol reined herself in, glancing at Flicka in dismay. It was now too late to shoo her from the room without implying that at sixteen she wasn’t welcome to participate in discussions of the evening news with her parents.
“Well, I’m happy she’s dead,” said Flicka.
“Flicka, don’t you dare say that. Ever. About anyone. It’s ugly.”
“What’s so ugly about it? Terri Schiavo was brain dead and no use to anybody. She was all fat and couldn’t talk, and just blobbed around in bed.”
“So now we’re killing off fat people, are we?”
“I bet if that lady knew she’d turned into a blimp, she’d of pulled the plug on herself. She was all into bulimia and stuff.”
“It’s not for us to judge what’s ‘good life’ and ‘bad life,’” said Carol, “or what someone would prefer when they can no longer speak for themselves. Human life is sacred, sweetheart. In any form. Don’t ever forget that.”
“I don’t see what’s so damn sacred about it,” said Flicka stolidly. “Sometimes it’s crummy and dumb. Getting all messed up about Terri Schiavo kicking the bucket is like bawling ‘cause you stepped on a bug.”
Flicka was deliberately winding her mother up, pushing her to cross a line; it was a point of unity between Flicka and her father that they were both dying to see Mom lose it. Carol would not lash out, lest her daughter become ‘upset.’ But the whole purpose of parental reprimand was to make your kids upset. If you didn’t affect them, you’d failed. So how could Carol be a stern, responsible parent who set firm ‘boundaries’ without throwing the girl into the FD version of anaphylactic shock?
“And you?” Carol said coldly. “How would you feel if someone talked about you like a bug?”
Though she knew she wasn’t supposed to, Flicka took off her glasses and rubbed an eye. “Sometimes I feel like a bug. I don’t see why being alive is always supposed to be so great. I think it stinks. In fact, I can’t stand it. You can have it. Terri Schiavo is lucky.”
If Flicka didn’t have FD, Carol might have slapped her. But Flicka did have FD.
“Being alive is pretty wonderful compared to the alternative,” Jackson offered.
“How do you know?” said Flicka. “Me, I think ‘the alternative’ sounds great.”
“Sweetie, you’re tired,” said Carol. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“Yeah, I’m tired,” she slurred. “Of the whole thing. Sweaty sheets. Itchy eyes wrapped in Saran Wrap like leftovers in the fridge. Never being able to walk down the hall at school without that geeky health aide on my heels—”
“Now, we had to campaign long and hard with the Board of Ed—” said Carol.
“I know we were ‘very fortunate’ they agreed to pay for her, but how am I supposed to make friends? Laura’s a goon, and she hovers. Never gives me any space. She’s mostly scared if I trip or choke she’ll get sued. Always calls me ‘hon’ and ‘pumpkin,’ and I hate that. And I’m tired of sleeping with that oximeter on my finger. Stupid beeping sound. The way the alarm wakes everybody up. When half the time there’s nothing wrong with me, and the machine is just fucked up. Sleeping with that oxygen mask over my face. Not being able to turn over because of the feed to my g-tube. Setting my alarm for one and four a.m.—”
“Look,” said Jackson, “we told you—”
“I know you’re ‘happy to fill the bag for me.’ But I don’t want you to! I want somebody to get some sleep! You did that for years. Stumbling up in the middle of the
night because your kid needs another can of Compleat. Like running some junky car that’s always leaking oil. The point is, I’m sick of it. It’s all bullshit.”
“Sure it is!” Jackson declared cheerfully, sweeping Flicka into the air by her underarms; she was so tiny and light that it was easy to forget she was sixteen years old. “But it’s all we’ve got. And you and Heather are all we’ve got. So you hang in there just to be nice.”
Sometimes Flicka herself forgot that she was sixteen years old, and she curled onto her father’s shoulder as he carried her upstairs.
“I hate it when she talks like that,” Carol said as they got ready for bed. “I know she doesn’t mean it, and it’s probably down to the Klonopin and Depakote. They both list ‘suicidal ideation’ as a side effect. So she doesn’t really understand what she’s saying, but it still disturbs me.”
“She may have a better idea of what she’s saying than you think.”
“In that case, she’s cruel. What about us? Reminding us all the time, as if we need reminding. She uses the FD thing to goad us.”
“Sure, she does. You use what’s handy, right?” When Carol unsnapped her bra, Jackson felt a stirring, followed by a sharp, throbbing twinge.
“What’s that smell?”
Jackson sniffed. “I don’t smell anything.”
“It’s been nagging me all night. In the kitchen, wafting in and out.
I thought maybe something had gone off in the pantry, but now it’s up here.”
“Oh,” he said sheepishly. “I’ve been having trouble with my guts. Could be the chickpeas.”
“I know what a fart smells like, Jackson. It’s not methaney; it’s rank. Like spoiled meat.”
He shrugged. “You’ve always had the more sensitive nose. I’m not getting it.”
“Do you think some animal might have died under the house? I don’t think a rat would do it. A cat, or a raccoon. If this keeps up, I’m afraid you’re going to have to look for it.”
“Ought to be some advantage to living with a handyman. That’s the sort of fun job gets called into Knack every day.” Having thrown his shirt on the chair, Jackson sauntered into the master bath in slacks.