The Crazy School (3 page)

“He wanted to know if I’d changed the oil in my car. And I couldn’t even . . .” Tim dabbed his eyes with a fl uffy blossom of tissue.

Mindy went for his hair again. “It’s okay.”

“Sookie?” he went on. “I wanted him to say something that didn’t have all his disappointment around it. Just once.”

“Let yourself feel that,” Sookie said. “We’re here for you. I’m here. Mindy’s here. Madeline’s here.”

He closed his eyes. “My mom was on the other extension, 1 7

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you know? She didn’t even . . . I mean, he told me to go out and write down what it said on the odometer. That he’d wait for me to come back and read it to him?”

I looked out the window. Not that I didn’t feel for the guy.

He was in genuine pain. The room fairly brimmed with it.

“Madeline?” Sookie turned to me.

I kept my eyes on the window.

Just the glass. Not the actual view.

“You’re shutting down again,” Sookie said. “I know it’s hard for you, but can you try to let this penetrate?”

“Sookie, I’m
soaking
in it.”

“You are so
cold,
” Mindy said. “You are the coldest thing that ever lived.”

I turned my head slowly until our eyes locked, which got her blinking again. I stared until she had to look down at the Kleenex instead of me.

Blinky bitch.

“Let’s let Tim have the focus,” I said. “He’s hurting.”

Mindy got pinker. “How can you even say something like that without any emotion at
all
? Like you’re all . . . like you don’t even have
anything
inside except, like,
words.
”

Sookie and Tim’s attention snapped back and forth between us like it was Wimbledon or something.

“It’s cultural,” I said.

“She’s all, so, like”—Mindy fl apped her free hand, trying to get the other two on board—“cold.”

I sighed. “It’s an illusion.”

“It’s
disgusting,
” Mindy said, blinking at Sookie and Tim in turn. “Madeline’s, like, this gross disgusting robot.”

And you’re like this repulsive inarticulate piece-of-shit tawdry butt-head, so neener neener fucking neener.

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Sookie turned toward me. “Madeline, how does it make you feel when Mindy says that?” she crooned.

“Um . . .” I looked at the window again.

“Now, be
honest,
” she said.

“Well, okay.” I dropped my eyes. “I guess Mindy’s saying that I’m ‘a gross disgusting robot’ makes me feel as though she only cares about Tim as a prop on which to, like, lavish utterly insincere gestures of affection, so as to mask her apparently crushing sense of generalized inferiority with a temporary veneer of ersatz empathy and concern?”

Silence.

“And
that,
” I said, leaning over to squeeze Tim’s knee, “that just makes me feel really, really
sad
for her, you know? Because Tim deserves to be
heard
.”

“You are so . . . She is such a . . .” Mindy would have been blowing out fl ecks of spit if her jaw weren’t still frozen shut.

Sookie turned to Tim. “Would you be all right if I followed up on this with Madeline for a little bit now?”

He mumbled assent.

“So, Madeline,” said Sookie, “how are you?”

“Sookie, I’m terrifi ed.”

Then my eyes got all leaky and my nose started running, but that bitch Mindy didn’t offer me a single Kleenex.

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4

“Terrifi ed?” Sookie leaned forward and rested her hand on my knee. “Tell us about that. What are you scared of ?”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be
doing
here. I just want—” My throat closed up.

Maintaining immaculate eye contact, Sookie started to nod, her head rising and falling so slowly that I fl ashed on those prehistoric-bird-looking oil derricks you see along desert high-ways, bobbing for sips of crude.

“This isn’t about ‘supposed to’, Madeline,” she said. “Therapy is time for
you.
No judgment, no standard you have to meet . . . not in this room. Not with me. Ever.”

Not exactly true. Ever.

But, okay, I smiled at her. “I appreciate that very much, Sookie. I do. Except I’m not talking about feeling terrifi ed in this room, or with you.”

“Mmm-hmmmm,” she prompted.

“I’m talking about, you know,
working
here. At Santangelo.”

“You’re terrifi ed of working
here
?”

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“Not, like, in a personal-safety sense. I mean whether I’m doing a good enough job. With the kids.”

“Tell me what you’re feeling about
that,
” she said.

“I don’t know if I’m helping them. I might be making it worse. I mean, the meds that get handed out at lunch. Lithium?

Haldol? We are not talking about ‘the worried well’, here.”

“And that makes you feel scared?”

“The fact that my students are in crisis matters to me. I take that very seriously. I want to do right by them to the best of my ability.”

Again with the nodding.

I wondered if it was something they taught in shrink school. Intro to Nodding 101. Advanced seminars on The Nod Through History: Freud, Jung, Adler, and Nodding and Nuance, a Feminist Perspective.

Then Sookie gave me the Empathy Smile. Sweetly enigmatic, with a touch of sadness around the edges. “What I’m hearing you say is that you’re concerned about your ability to handle responsibility. Struggling to overcome feelings of inadequacy—”

I waited for the rest. I did not nod.

“And I’m
looking
at how you’re sitting right now, Madeline,”

she continued. “How you’re presenting yourself to us.”

She paused, bringing in Tim and Mindy with a small swoop of her hand.

Tim plucked at the sofa’s upholstery.

Mindy blew her nose.

“Sitting up straight,” Sookie went on. “Ladylike, in a studied way. Earnest. Your back isn’t touching the chair . . . exactly how I hoped I would look when
I
grew up.”

She tilted her head to one side. Appraisal. “I’m just wondering who that’s
for
.”

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“I beg your pardon?”

“Someone
trained
you to sit that way, Madeline.”

I fought the urge to cross my arms, knowing the gesture would be counted against me. A defensive move. An attempt at distance that Sookie would lap up as confi rmation.

She gave me the curt nod. Zeroing in. “Someone made it very clear that you were required to cloak yourself in this sort of polished, impenetrable affect. This rigidity. Your parents?”

That
made me cock a sarcastic eyebrow. Couldn’t help it.

Sookie leaned toward me, her face going all gentle again.

“Madeline,” she said, “were you sexually abused as a child?”

Mindy and Tim snapped to attention.

I rolled my eyes. Shook my head.

Sookie was unfazed. “I know it’s a tremendously diffi cult thing to talk about. If you’d prefer a private session, I can make time for you tomorrow afternoon.”

“Oh, for chrissake,” I said.

She got out of her chair and knelt before me, taking my hand in both of hers. Petting it. “It’s all right, sweetie, we’re here for you. You’re
safe
now.”

“Sookie, I’m sure you have all the very best intentions, but you’re way off base,” I said.

“You’re in denial, Madeline.”

I tried extracting my hand from her grip, but she just latched on tighter.

“Perfectly natural under the circumstances,” she said. “We often want to block out our most painful memories, repress them so we don’t buckle under the sheer weight of shame and horror.”

“Sookie—”

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“What’s important is that you know you weren’t at fault, Madeline, and understand that
you
didn’t do anything to encourage the abuse.”

Mindy was nodding now, too.

Terrifi c.

I tried breaking through to Sookie again. “No offense, but on what planet does good posture indicate a history of molestation?”

“In fact,” Sookie went on, oblivious, “it’s often that sense of having provoked the incidents which renders victims incapable of remembering them. And hostile.”

“Of course Madeline’s angry, Sookie,” Mindy chimed in.

“She must be sooooo weirded out now that she knows what’s actually
wrong
with her.”

“Mindy?” said Tim.

She looked at him. Blinky blinky. “Uh-huh?”

“Shut the hell up.” He gave her a sharp fi nger poke in the arm for emphasis.

I wanted to hug him, but the warning bell for the day’s last class went off, and we all bolted out of the room, except for Sookie.

“Come back tomorrow at one, Madeline,” she called after me.

My third class was all boys, three of them. Wiesner again, but no repeat of Forchetti, thanks to a last-minute shrink appointment. American History B: Civil War to Vietnam. We were kind of at Yalta, not that anyone was keeping track.

I was trying to get across why Stalin and Churchill and Franklin D. were so happy in the photo on page 192 of
We the
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People,
the archaic textbook Santangelo had probably scored at some other high school’s tag sale.

We were all pretty dopey after lunch. The room’s air felt thick and stale, bearing grace notes of mothball, sweat sock, and spilled root beer.

I had unfurled one of those giant window-shade world maps from above the blackboard. Probably yanked it down so far that I’d have to get up on a chair and tweak it massively before coaxing the thing to reroll, especially now that I’d whacked a fi st under the Crimea so many times, hoping to make something stick in our collective unconscious.

Yalta,
for chrissake—stupid pick, but I was in too deep to give up now.

“So these guys agree to send out an invitation to anyone who might want to join the United Nations,” I said, then started reading from the textbook: “ ‘The Government of the United States of America, on behalf of itself and of the Governments of the United Kingdom, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Republic of China and of the Provisional Government of the French Republic invite the Government of
blank
to send representatives to a conference to be held on 25 April, 1945, or soon thereafter, at San Francisco. . . . ’ ”

Sam Sitzman raised his hand. “Um, excuse me, Madeline?”

I liked him. He had this curly-headed Saint-Bernard-with-an-old-soul vibe. You knew right away there was a kind and wise and forgiving heart under the shaggy bits and the glasses.

Especially for a seventeen-year-old from Manhattan.

Especially here.

“Would it be okay if I stand up for a while?” he asked. “This is all really interesting and stuff. It’s just sometimes my meds 2 4

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make me tired, and I don’t want you to think I’m bored if I yawn or anything.”

“No problem, Sitzman. Yalta is not exactly a thrill a minute, here.”

He thanked me and got up, shaking out his legs.

Mooney LeChance cleared his throat. “Hey, isn’t the UN in New York?”

LeChance was normally sparing with the classroom partici-pation. A decent kid, just not hugely invested in scholarship.

He would have been homecoming king anywhere else.

“Yeah,” I said, “the fi rst meeting was the only one they did in San Francisco.”

“Does any of this really
matter
?” asked Wiesner. “I mean, Madeline, do you actually wander around thinking about Yalta or why they picked San Francisco or whatever?”

I got up to open a window while considering my answer. “I think it’s hard to know what will matter, Wiesner.” The window crank didn’t want to budge even after I tried hitting it a couple of times with the side of my fi st to loosen it up.

“Stuff like this is all layers and layers, and most of it you’ll forget, but maybe down the line you’ll fi nd what matters to
you.
Probably not Yalta specifi cally, just some wayward little snack-o’-trivia you won’t even remember having fi led away.”

The crank gave suddenly, pinching my knuckles against the window’s metal frame hard enough that I wanted to stick them in my mouth to quiet the sting.

The fresh air was worth it. Crisp, even bracing.

I looked over at Wiesner. “Dude, I don’t have a damn clue what the Taft-Hartley Act was about anymore, or which numbers match most of the amendments to the Constitution.”

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“So can’t we blow that stuff off ?” he asked. “The teacher-geek trivia?”

“But you never know what
won’t
matter.” I fl opped into my chair. “Like, here’s the kind of thing I remember if someone talks about the UN: It’s on top of the FDR Drive, on the East River.”

“That’s just near where I live,” said Sitzman.

“Lucky ducky,” I replied. “Anyone know what’s
under
the FDR Drive?”

No takers.

“Rubble from London,” I said. “Chunks of all those buildings the Germans bombed to shit in the war—”

“Heinkels and Junkers and Messerschmitts,” said Sitzman, suddenly looking all blissed out and dreamy.

“Rubble that was dumped into the holds of U.S. Navy ships for ballast on the way home,” I continued.

“Why did they
need
ballast?” I said looking at Wiesner.

He shrugged, but he wanted to know.

“Because those ships were emptied out,” I said. “All the tanks and planes and jeeps they’d brought over that weren’t blown up got left there, in case Stalin tried taking over Europe after the war. A lot of bodies got left there, as well. Two hundred ninety-fi ve thousand Americans didn’t come home—guys no older than all of you.”