Astonish Me (7 page)

“Harry is four, too. Does she take dance?”

“No. She does tumbling.”

Joan fingers her ponytail, frowning. Sandy doesn’t want to have to talk about Joan’s ballet shoes, the exercises at the chair, the flexibility that the husband must enjoy. “What does your husband do?” she asks.

And Joan’s answer sends a thrill through Sandy because she and Gary know Chloe is gifted. There can be no doubt, Gary says. Their daughter observes more keenly and learns more rapidly than any child he has ever met. Gary should know, too—he was a gifted child and an excellent student until he got bored in high school and stopped trying. He’s always wished someone had challenged him. “Aren’t teachers supposed to inspire you?” he says. “None of mine could have inspired paint to dry.” And his dad had been a dud, and his baseball coach hadn’t liked him. With a little encouragement, a
little recognition, who knows how high he might have risen? Admittedly, he’s great at his job, but, given half a chance, he might have done something more significant than managing the leasing office at the mall. He might have made the big leagues or been a professor or a doctor or something. Sandy was never very studious, and she worried when she was pregnant that her genes would drag down Gary’s. But even when Chloe was a baby, Gary could see all the smart things Chloe did, and now Sandy just wants to get her tested already, stamped as gifted, so they can relax.

“Come inside,” she tries again. “Have something to drink. Bring your son.”

Joan looks back at her house, her discarded ballet shoes. “I should finish.”

“Oh, come on,” Sandy says. “Live a little.”

In a few minutes, Joan is at her front door, her white-taped toes and battered feet in a pair of rubber sandals, a cardigan over the billowy overalls even though it is eighty degrees out, her son hanging from her hand. This, Sandy knows, ushering them inside, is the beginning of something. They will live the next part of their lives side by side, their children growing up in tandem. Even though she doesn’t quite like this thin, wary woman yet, she will try to be her friend. They are neighbors.

“
WELCOME!
”
JACOB SAYS
,
OPENING THE DOOR FOR THE WHEELOCKS
. “Come in before you blow away.” It is October, and the Santa Anas are in full force—dry, prickly autumn winds that whip trees around and howl at windows and rattle leaves along the gutters and pile them in the corners of yards. Driving home from school, Jacob had seen an actual tumbleweed blow through an intersection. Californians treat the winds as a weather event of grave importance. On Santa Ana days, his colleagues discuss them in knowing, respectful tones, squinting at the horizon like Bedouins crossing the Sahara.
Somewhere up north in L.A. County, a brushfire has started, and the evening sky is a hazy orange grey.

The Wheelocks have a posed, formal look on the doorstep, and they don’t lose it as they come inside and go through the greeting routine. Jacob can’t blame them for being uncomfortable; he hasn’t been able to establish a rhythm with either Sandy or Gary, but he is glad Joan has a friend and that the kids get along. Harry leans against Jacob’s leg and Chloe against Gary’s. The children regard each other with serious faces, full of solemnity and apprehension about their impending playtime. Chloe, Jacob fears, is the reason Sandy and Gary are tense around him. According to Joan, Sandy talks a lot about how gifted the child is, and indeed every time Jacob goes next door to pick up Harry or runs into Gary taking out the trash, he is regaled with another overblown story about this little girl he strongly suspects falls within the normal range of intelligence. Jacob has already decided that he can’t be the one to test Chloe next year.

Sandy is carrying a rectangular pan covered in foil, a cake for Joan’s thirtieth birthday. “Double fudge!” she says.

Probably with a lard center, Jacob thinks. Joan’s main complaint about Sandy, reluctantly confided, is that she gets after her to eat more, and now that he’s started paying attention, Jacob has noticed Sandy pushing food on Joan like she’s planning to turn her into foie gras. Gary holds out a bottle of wine by its neck, showing the label. “Thought we’d have a nice little cabernet.”

Jacob leans in to look it over and nods, sure the other man knows his appreciation is feigned. “Joan says you’re a connoisseur.”

Gary waves the word away. “Barely.”

He is tall, an advantage he emphasizes by affecting a slight stoop whenever Jacob speaks, as though otherwise Jacob’s words might not find their way all the way up to the lofty altitude of his ears. He has a small head and a fox’s triangular face and narrow, sly eyes. On weekends and in the evenings he is devoted to his road bike and
cycles for hours, crouched head down over the handlebars that curl like rams’ horns, decked out in a stretchy neon green outfit that displays his lean, if borderline stringy, physique. His hair is always side parted and combed in a careful fluffy swoop over his forehead, and he dresses for work as though he were heading off to some trading floor and not the leasing office at the mall, favoring striped suspenders and blue shirts with white collars and cuffs. For Joan’s birthday dinner, he has opted for yachting attire: a white Izod shirt with the collar turned up, chinos, and loafers with no socks. Jacob, in jeans, longs to tease him, but the man is humorless.

Jacob takes the wine. “Birthday girl’s in the kitchen,” he says, leading them down the carpeted hallway that connects the living room with the rest of the house. The Wheelocks’ house is a mirror image to the Bintzes’, and Jacob always feels unnerved in their same-but-different rooms, oddly violated by the sight of another family living in a box the same size and shape as the box that contains his family and their unique life. The children scramble away upstairs to play. Jacob walks slowly so that Sandy and Gary have a chance to admire a wall of enlarged photos of Joan onstage, midleap in a tutu or striking a modern, angular pose in a leotard. He picked them out himself and had them framed. In the only photo Joan chose, she arches backward over Arslan Rusakov’s arm. Rusakov’s face is turned away. Her throat is taut and exposed, and her eyes bore into the lens. Jacob dislikes the photo and the pulse of anxiety it causes in him, but Joan said the others were pointless without it.

Sandy bustles ahead in a hurry to deliver her cake while Gary pauses and leans close to one photo and then another, scrutinizing. Even though this is what Jacob wanted, he doesn’t like the man’s silence or his nose just inches from Joan’s leotard. “Come on into the kitchen,” he says. “We’ll open the bottle.”

The wine has turned. As soon as they clink a toast to Joan, Gary sips and then barks so loudly everyone jumps, “Spit it out! Just spit it out. It’s piss.”

Sandy and Jacob swallow—after all, the wine is only a little sour,
not too terrible, not poison—but Joan is startled into letting hers splash out of her mouth and back into her glass.

“You try to give people a nice bottle,” Gary says, “and look what happens.”

“No big deal,” says Jacob. “We have wine here.”

“No, the fun’s gone out of it. I’ll just have beer.” Gary crosses to the sink and upends the bottle. The purple liquid glugs away down the drain.

When they sit down to dinner, Gary fixes Jacob with a hard stare meant to suggest he won’t be easily fooled and asks how anyone can really be sure which kids are gifted and which aren’t. “No offense to your profession,” he says, “but how can a test really prove anything? What if some kids are so gifted they resent tests? Some kids don’t like structure, you know, they get bored easily. It seems to me like those kids might be some of the ones you’re looking for.”

Harry and Chloe are under the table pretending to be dogs—they are going to be dogs for Halloween—and Jacob slips one of them a bit of chicken, uncertain if fingers or teeth take the scrap. “Well,” he says, “with five-year-olds, boredom and rebellion don’t tend to be big problems. If you have a five-year-old who’s too disillusioned to take a standardized test, that kid’s probably not a good match for the program anyway. You make a fair point though, Gary, because it’s true that people test differently on different days and over the course of their lives. And there are different forms of intelligence—Howard Gardner’s idea. People think IQ is the be-all and end-all, but it’s not.”

“But IQ’s what counts, isn’t it? For your program?”

“For the purpose of grouping children into special day classes, psychometrics are the best tool we have right now,” Jacob says.

Beside him, Joan sits watching the Wheelocks eat, her own plate untouched, tensely monitoring the trajectory of each forkful. She has already apologized for her cooking, which no number of compliments will ever convince her has gotten pretty good. No number of compliments will convince her of anything, and one of Jacob’s
projects in their marriage is to wean her off perfectionism. After Harry turned two, some private impulse had driven her, finally, to learn how to prepare something other than hard-boiled eggs and yogurt. He had played it cool, being careful not to overpraise her first mangled meals—Joan has no patience for flattery—but even now, two years and immense gains in skill later, even the simplest recipes tie her in knots, and she murmurs the instructions to herself as through incanting over a dangerous potion.

“Joan, you eat like a bird on a hunger strike,” Sandy says. Obediently, Joan takes a bite of salad.

“Don’t hassle her,” Gary scolds. He gives Joan a brisk, apologetic nod, and she looks back at him, stymied. Her knife and fork hover over her plate. Jacob has wondered if Gary has the hots for Joan, but that doesn’t seem quite right. More likely Gary just appreciates her as a physical template, a more refined model of wife than his own. Something about dancers’ bodies, the obviousness of their manufactured perfection, makes people brazen about looking and commenting.

Flustered, Sandy redirects her attention to Jacob. “What do you mean, people can be gifted in other ways?”

“The gist is that someone who might not do well with traditional academic tasks could still have other aptitudes. Like for music or spatial relations. Or someone might have interpersonal gifts.”

“That’s you, honey,” Gary puts in, conciliatory.

“Or someone might be physically gifted—Gardner calls it bodily-kinesthetic intelligence—and be an excellent athlete or a dancer like Joan.” Jacob strokes his wife’s leg under the table, then remembers the children and stops.

Gary says, “I aced an IQ test when I was a kid. Off the charts, I guess.”

Jacob nods politely, as though it were possible to “ace” an IQ test. All people want to do is tell him about their IQs, which are either off the charts or, in the case of a certain breed of red-faced men on
airplanes,
so low they almost put me out with the cattle, but, sure enough, a few years down the road I started my own business, and now you wouldn’t believe what I’m worth, so just goes to show you IQ tests don’t amount to a pile of beans
.

“What I’m afraid of with Chloe,” Gary goes on, “is that she won’t get the support she deserves.”

“That happened to Gary,” says Sandy. “No one challenged him.”

“I’m not complaining, but I want Chloe to have every opportunity.” Gary wipes his mouth, drops his napkin back into his lap, shakes his head. “Every opportunity.”

“In my experience,” Jacob says, hearing and regretting the preachy note in his voice, “the key is to allow children to discover what they’re passionate about.”

“How old are you?” Gary asks.

“Twenty-eight.” Before he can stop himself, he adds, “And a half.”

Gary’s smile is controlled and contemptuous. “Robbing the cradle,” he says to Joan.

A yipping comes from under the table. “Do I hear a puppy?” Sandy says. “Is there a puppy under this table?”

The yipping turns to a howl and then trails off.

Sandy leans to one side and lifts the tablecloth, peering underneath. “What kind of puppy is it?”

“Two puppies!” Harry announces. “And one’s a bitch!”

Gary dives under the table like a sea lion after a fish. “Excuse me, young man? What did you say?”

Jacob feels his son’s small hand on his knee. He bends and peers into the dim space, at the small curled bodies of the children and the large staring faces of Sandy and Gary. “Dad,” whispers Harry. “A bitch is a girl dog. Chloe’s a girl. We’re playing dogs.”

“You’re right,” Jacob tells him, “but it’s also a bad name people call each other to be mean. Probably you should just avoid saying it.” He sits back up, and the Wheelocks surface too.

Joan is fighting the giggles and losing. For a long minute she
turns away, shielding her face while the others watch in silence. It’s the tension, Jacob knows. In high school she would laugh when someone got yelled at in class. When she looks up, her eyes are red and watering. “Sorry,” she says to Gary and Sandy, her face crimping with the effort of seriousness. “I didn’t even know he knew that word.”

“He owes Chloe an apology,” Gary says.

“As far as he knew, he was being factual,” says Jacob. “If we make a big deal out of it, we only draw attention to it.”

Joan trembles in her chair, tears rolling down her cheeks. He can’t look at her or he’ll laugh too.

Gary runs his tongue over his incisors, close mouthed, making a gorilla face. “Thanks for the parenting lesson, but Chloe needs to know she’s respected.”

“He’s not being a misogynist. They’re playing puppies.”

“I don’t see what’s funny.”

Joan plunks her elbows down on the table, making the china rattle, and presses her face into her hands. Jacob feels himself being pulled after her as though by a tether. As he tries not to laugh, he makes an accidental strangled sound, which sends him shooting off the edge. He lists toward her and presses his face into her shoulder. She leans back against him, shaking, and rests one hand on top of his head, lightly gripping his hair. “I’m sorry,” he wheezes. “I’m sorry. It’s contagious.”

Whether it is a blessing or curse that the contagion spreads to Sandy, Jacob doesn’t know. Probably a blessing for him and a curse for her, as Gary singles her out as the target of his most stern and outraged glaring. The children are laughing too, under the table. They are all in it together until, inevitably and abruptly, control filters back, and they pull themselves upright, hot faced, spent, vaguely ashamed.