Saving St. Germ (10 page)

Jay was lying on his stomach, half asleep. After a while he rolled over and stared at me.

“Do you understand her when she talks?”

I shrugged. “Not always.”

He shut his eyes.

“I almost n-
never
understand her when she talks.”

I waited.

“Last week she told me she couldn’t eat her food because it was
tired
.”

Again I waited, expecting the stand-up shoefall, but Jay wasn’t, for once, being funny.

“I asked her what she meant and she just kept repeating that it was t-tired, tired food. Finally I said, trying to get into the spirit of this, should we put the l-lamb chop to bed? And she looked at me like I was nuts and basically said, ‘Dad, it’s a lamb chop, why would you p-put it in a
bed
?”

I laughed. He didn’t. He sat up, opened the cooler, and took out another Bud. He popped it, then rolled up a beach towel behind his head and lay back.

“Why can’t she talk the way the rest of the world does?
Why
doesn’t she say ‘Hi, Daddy’ or ‘I want
a cookie
’?”

“Is that the way you
want
her to talk?”

He shot me a look. I noticed that he was tired. Daytime tech directing and stand-up nights were wearing him down. His Oxford-undergraduate look had given way to a wan, strained expression about the mouth and eyes. He pursed his lips as he looked at me, the unconscious pout of a man older than he, a prim, orderly man.

“Yes, I’d like it if I c-could understand my own daughter. A simple declarative sentence with a normal insight or t-two—‘The sky’s up, the earth’s down’—would be a relief. I admit it.”

I watched Ollie, who’d dropped her orange sand shovel and was following a huge seagull on scavenger duty—and sighed. As always, she whispered, a running account, in the third person, of what she was doing. “Ollie dig. Ollie dig. Ollie run. Bird going up. Ollie is big.” She picked up handfuls of sand and piled them up, smoothed them. “Core,” she said. “Mantle.”

“I don’t want anyone to hurt her,” I said.

“Who’s hurting her?”

“Nobody. I didn’t mean that anyone is hurting her. I mean I think ahead to ... possible situations in her life and I ... just don’t want them forcing her into some
pattern.
”

“Esme, is she retarded?”

“Jesus, Jay. How can you ask that? Listen to the questions she asks. She’s
thinking
all the time!”

“But her thoughts don’t m-make sense! Ever!”

“Her thoughts make sense to
her
.”

“Well, that’s as g-good a definition of ‘nuts’ as I’ve ever heard.”

“But look. She thinks along unexpected lines. She’s escaped somehow a lot of the patterns that are imposed so early on kids. I mean, we never taught her accepted responses to things ...”

“We never t-taught her anything.”

“
I’ve
taught her things.”

“What things?”

“I teach her some science. Some things about gravity, the planets. I show her when we water the plants how osmosis works, I explain the vacuum ...”

“No wonder she’s like this. I wish you’d just let her develop n-normally.”

“You mean watch TV all the time?”

“I would prefer that to a weirdo who b-builds a TV and lives inside it.”

We turned away from each other, avoiding a fight.

Ollie shuffled up, covered with sand, and I handed her a fruit-juice packet. Together we worked at inserting the straw and getting it to draw up the juice.

When the juice was functioning, Ollie rubbed her nose and then began to rock a little on her heels. Back and forth. She sang a song about the bird she’d been following. Jay sat up.

“Hey Ollie. Wanna take a walk with Daddy?”

“Daddy legs are dark and away.”

“What?”

I laughed. The umbrella shade had cut off his legs at the thighs. His lower body was lost in darkness. I pointed to the shadow. Jay nodded, relieved.

“Let’s g-go, Ollie.”

He picked her up and she sat solemnly on his shoulders, bobbing a little as he plodded along through the sand. I lay back, letting the sun seep through me, watching the two-tiered person grow smaller and smaller as it headed up the beach.

There were a few people around. Nearby a young couple on a Ninja Turtles towel tended a huge radio, a ghetto blaster. The radio generated a steady bass that reverberated for a while dizzyingly in the air, but the regularity of its beat made it inaudible finally—it erased itself. There was an occasional sharp noise: a car horn. Children arguing over a pail. Gull cries. I started to drift off.

Jay shook me gently awake. The sun was low and I felt a chill.

“You know what Ollie said to me?”

“What?” I sat woozily up and brushed sand from my legs.

“We were just
drifting
up the b-beach, wading, picking up shells—and I started trying out a few
very
very basic routines on her ...”

“Jay.”

“Come
on.
You know I tried one of my ... I don’t know what to c-call them exactly—my weird Kiddie Stories? You know how I do the one about Santa Claus wearing fur, smoking, being overweight, b-breaking and entering ...”

“Yes, yes ...”

“Well, I started the one about Cinderella and her extended family and she
stopped
me. I was sitting down on the sand and she came up and put her hand over my mouth and she said, ‘You know, Daddy, that’s very nice, but I’m just not
happy
enough for all this.’”

Late that night, at home in bed, Jay asked me if I had coached her to say that. Of course not, I said. I asked him why he would doubt that Ollie came up with it on her own.

“Well, gee, h-have you noticed that she never says anything nearly that sophisticated?”

“Yes she does. Occasionally, she says something really amazing, profound. But only when she feels like it.”

“That
is
amazing.”

My head was partially buried under a pillow and Jay lifted the pillow and began to kiss my neck. I rolled over on my back and looked at him.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just not happy enough for all this.” He laughed. Then we were very quiet for a while; then Jay went to sleep. I got up, sat in the living room in the dark, and thought about Ollie, then about my mother, Q, and Walter Faber, in that order. I smoked some cigarettes and then it was dawn. I thought about how infinity was
tangible.
I was very tired, but I sat still as the furniture became visible and morning traffic noises started up in the street. The things I thought about, before I went to sleep sitting up in my chair, were times when I could slow my life down, go into a kind of trance; this made me—if not rapturous—close to
restored.
If I thought about slowing down, I paradoxically thought about running a race as a kid, I could feel that long-ago morning’s air on my skin, I could feel the expectant surface of my skin and the miraculous engine of my nine-year-old body, in a steady pumping
cessation
of movement, moving fast but
suspended,
in my green hightop Keds; then I thought about a poem in French I’d learned in fifth grade:
“À Verdun, à Verdun, / mon petit cheval brun”
; I saw a woman’s hands (my mother’s?) working a lump of dough for half-moon cookies. We painted one half with white icing and the other with chocolate; I loved that line down the center: symmetry! Then I reconstructed a particular afternoon in the lab with Q when we’d made a discovery about a certain protein’s phosphorylation—I’d gone jigging out into the hall, throwing my goggles up. Q was wheezing like a teakettle, laughing and coughing his famous cough. The final bit of euphoria had to do with Jesse: his face, the way it looked to me once when we were making love and I was on top. His hair was in his eyes and he was unshaven: it was early morning. The way he looked as he began to come: I remembered putting my mouth on his, I remembered a certain way he moved and how my body, surprised, responded—one long shudder, a sound, and then, very slowly, we came together.

I
SAT ON
the baby swings with the public-school kindergarten teacher. As we talked, we would swing a little, put a foot out, stop, swing a little, dragging the toes of our shoes in the dirt.

I liked this teacher. Her name was Gloria Walther and she taught kindergarten at the Sixth Street School of the L.A. Unified School District, where Ollie would be going next fall. We’d been talking for a while, me trying to explain Ollie, Gloria Walther trying to explain her kindergarten: the thirty-four children in each classroom, the lack of resources. She’d been working without an aide, without enough paper, textbooks, audiovisual aids, since Governor Reagan and Proposition 13 had gutted the California public-school system. There were many Korean and Spanish children in the school who could not speak English. Gloria Walther said she had bilingual parents to assist her in the classroom. Gloria herself had learned these languages.

I had visited her classroom and watched her in action, her eyes traveling everywhere in the room—reading group to coloring group to math manipulatives group to computer group, at work on the single, slightly rundown Apple.

I watched Gloria now as she talked, a solid, pretty black woman with cornrows, bright hazel eyes, a startling smile. As she talked to me, she checked out the playground—a little boy climbing the jungle gym, two girls on the seesaw. I saw her adding up, taking away: Who was where? Who stayed in, who came out? It was after school, but some parents hadn’t collected their offspring yet. It was a mild autumn afternoon, with the sort of champagney breezes and clear air, the falling red leaf or two, that made me love L.A.—L.A. without smog, without gridlock traffic. A good day to drive fast ’round the curves on Mulholland; better yet, a good day to sit in a schoolyard on a too-small swing, reducing one’s expectations. Letting things get smaller instead of larger, not thinking about any chemistry but the sweet chlorophyllation process of the tired and toxic trees of Los Angeles, O
₂
rising from the leaves. I stared at a solitary small desk sitting by itself on the asphalt: An extra seat for Ollie? Or a sad little misfit? I brushed my hand over my eyes and listened to children calling to each other, Gloria Walther answering another teacher’s shout, the seesaw complaining quietly,
sleep-night, night-sleep,
and the sound of a tennis ball pock-pocking against a wall in the adjacent yard.

Gloria Walther had been teaching for a long time. She was not put off by what I had to say about Ollie; she wanted to meet her. She and I shook hands; the chains of the baby swings rattled as we reached out to each other, then rattled again as we stood up.

“Everyone tells me Ollie should be in a private school,” I said. “But the ones I’ve seen terrify me, their values seem so screwed up. At one of these schools, Ross Rossner is a parent. So, because he’s president of a studio, he treats the kids to first-run adventure films, he throws parties for them at the studio. OK,
great,
but someone told me that he opens the door of the school in the fall—and that drives me crazy. If Marie Curie or Einstein opened the door of the school, or Freud, or Margaret Mead ...
that would be appropriate
—but here’s this guy representing education who’s known for nothing but making a lot of money from big-market films and he opens the door of the
school
? What does this tell us about Los Angeles?”

Gloria Walther put her head back and laughed heartily.

“That it’s a company town? Calm down, Esme. It will be OK. Ollie will be OK. Sixth Street will be her school and we’ll love her here. And
I
open the door of my classroom.”

I shook her hand and left, smiling, breathing deeply the freshened air.

I hadn’t mentioned it to Gloria Walther but I’d actually taken Ollie and checked out a school for “highly gifted” children. It was called Ariston and prospective students had to score 148 or higher on the Stanford-Binet intelligence test to qualify for admission. Tests were given all year round, I assumed because so few children actually qualified to enter. I hadn’t thought about the Stanford-Binet for a while, not since IQ tests started getting a bad rep for being monocultural and skewed to little middle-class minds. I remembered it vaguely as slightly outmoded—and wasn’t it only yesterday that 135 or so was considered near-genius? I paged through the clunky prose of the Ariston brochure, numbing my distaste. Well,
somebody
was raising brainy tots. Ariston had acquired quite a sizable little population of whiz kids, including the offspring of some famous movie stars.

Ollie had a cold, but she was very restless around the house and when I asked her if she’d like to take a little test at a school, she said, “Think this is wind, guess and test. Coming fruit in the tree, Mom.”

The avocado tree had bloomed again: we stood looking up at the dark-green glossy pears, pendulous and perfect, the sun leisurely fingering through the fat leaf-blades. Ollie smiled happily. “Light light,” she said. “Trees test and test and fruit comes.”

By some miracle there was no traffic and it happened that we entered the Ariston School’s large high-ceilinged drafty lobby a few minutes early—we sat waiting on a leather couch as the pinched-faced receptionist typed and sighed, rustling papers. Ollie sniffled, breathing noisily through her nose, humming a little. I looked around. Trophies and plaques: speech contests, interscholastic science competitions, drama statuettes. Signs that said
WE WON: WE’RE NUMBER ONE.
I shivered, I felt like I was catching Ollie’s cold and shakily fastened the top button of my pea jacket. I searched the walls: not a single child’s drawing, random and miraculous—only some framed things in a glass case on a far wall labeled Prizewinning Student Art, all of it palely derivative of Great Masters, pre-twentieth century. A bird and jug,
nature morte,
ballerina, Quixote figure. All roughly the same. No dropped toys, no music, no spilled candy. I sneezed. Ollie smiled at me and burped loudly. The receptionist looked up, disapproving.

“Miss Oplesch says you may go in now.”

A door in the near wall opened on cue as she spoke and a dowdily girlish person in a gold-and-brown plaid skirt, wide face, wide glasses, wide mouth, and a shellacked helmet of hair crooked her finger at us.