The Crazy School (8 page)

“Today, I want to discuss something of vital importance to all of us as a community. Something that should stand as an emblem of our concern for one another—our mutual respect, our common courtesy.”

His gaze roved across the room, pausing to narrow in on random offenders. “We all—every one of us—need to become more
aware
of the salad bar.”

He rocked back on his heels, looking up as though petitioning the heavens for the strength to continue. “The level of 6 5

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disrespect
. . . croutons in the Thousand Island . . . carrot shreds mixed with the chickpeas
and
the olives . . .”

Below the table, Lulu began to saw the blade of a butter knife slowly back and forth across her wrist.

“We cannot continue to operate in this state of confusion,”

Santangelo declaimed, shaking an indignant fi nger, “this passive-aggressive inattention to our surroundings.”

“He is
so
right,” said Mindy, maneuvering a wedge of fi sh stick into her prim mouth, as she chewed while nodding and blinking in reverence.

“If we are to
survive
as a community, we cannot continue to indulge ourselves in such appalling displays of arrogance,” said Santangelo.

He looked around the room again. “I’d like you all to join me in a moment of refl ection.”

He walked over to the source of his consternation and laid a loving hand on the hazed Plexiglas of its sneeze guard, then bowed his head. So did the band of administrators and staff at his table.

Mindy closed her eyes and followed suit, still chewing.

Lulu made a sly choking noise and pressed the knife’s blunt tip into her thigh. I leaned my shoulder against hers and bit the inside of my cheek. If we laughed, we were dead meat.

New Guy Pete looked over at me and raised an eyebrow.

I wasn’t sure if he intended to convey commiseration or judgment.

Santangelo raised his head. “Thank you,” he said. “I know you’ll all take this conversation to heart, because each of you values the integrity of our community as deeply as I do.”

The room stayed quiet while he walked back to his seat, then everyone slowly resumed the business of eating lunch.

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Tim asked Pete if he could please pass the salt. Mindy turned to Gerald and picked up where she’d left off about lesson plans.

Lulu and I exhaled.

The lasagna sucked, but I wasn’t about to go get more salad.

I sank into the middle of Sookie’s love seat two minutes early, relishing my rare sole possession of the thing.

“Hi,” I said. “How’s your day going?”

It had gone gloomy outside, afternoon sky piled thick with gray-blue Brillo clouds.

Sookie turned on her desk lamp, then pulled up a chair within hand-holding distance. “Have you given more thought to what we discussed in our last session?”

“Well, things have been frenetic,” I said. “You heard about Mooney punching out the window?”

She gave me a disappointed smile. “And you didn’t feel your own issues merited consideration?”

“No offense, Sookie, but having failed to recognize the slightest connection between myself and the issues you ascribed to me, I didn’t feel they had merit
to
consider.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I wasn’t aware I had any choice.”

The radiator clanked on, sending a yeasty and slightly burnt perfume, like cafeteria toast, up into the silence.

“Look,” I said, “I have no idea what this is supposed to accomplish.”

“This session?”

“This session. The therapy here in general. I mean, do you 6 7

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really expect me to have some big epiphany about repressed memories of sexual abuse in the next hour?”

“I think it’s worth pursuing,” she said.

“Why, exactly?”

“Your resistance,” she said.

“See, here’s what I don’t get about this whole process—how does my saying your hypothesis is bullshit deepen your conviction that it’s valid?”

“Your hostility tells me this idea resonates with you in a profound way. We resist what we can’t face.”

“So the only way you’d believe I wasn’t molested is if I agreed that I
had
been?”

She cleared her throat and started fussing with her skirt, smoothing it out over her crossed knees.

“I mean, Sookie, why not throw me in a pond to see if I fl oat like a witch?”

“If you’re embarrassed to discuss your sexuality—”

“God, no,” I said. “I’d be happy to regale you with anec-dotes about my misspent youth.
That
might actually be interesting.”

“So you were promiscuous?” she asked perking right up.

“Another classic hallmark of childhood molestation.”

“Sookie, give this shit a rest, okay?”

“I don’t bring it up lightly.”

“You brought it up because of my
posture,
for chrissake. What next, you’ll analyze the color of my aura?”

“You meet all the criteria,” she said. “Discomfort with inti-macy, aversion to physical contact—”

“Wait, I’m promiscuous
and
I can’t stand physical contact?”

Sookie glared. “You dislike being touched whenever someone offers you a gesture of comfort during our sessions.”

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“Want me to sit in Mindy’s lap and lick her forehead?”

She ignored that. “Then there’s your insomnia, the perfectionism, the distrust of authority fi gures—”

“Figures such as yourself ?”

“Not limited to me,” she said. “Your attitude hasn’t gone unnoticed by the administration.”

“So the hallmark of an
un
molested childhood is blind faith in authority? I hate to break it to you, Sookie, but that’s not mental health, that’s Stalinism.”

“Once again, I see I’ve struck a nerve.”

“Struck a nerve? You’re trying to convince me I’m non compos mentis because I have the gall to insist that my life experience differs from your cheesy movie-of-the-week presumptions about it.”

“You’d characterize childhood sexual abuse as cheesy?”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

“So now I’m Stalin
and
an idiot?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, I don’t deny having major gnarly fi ssures in my psyche, okay?” I said. “But you’re trying to shoehorn me into some completely bogus
DSM-III
template, here,” I said.

She looked so taken aback. I put my hand on her knee, and said, “I’m sure you mean really well with all of this, and if it were true, you’d be doing a bang-up job and everything, you know? It’s just that Lolita has left the building.”

She stared into her lap, eyes all glittery with gathering moisture.

“Look,” I continued, trying to coax a smile out of her, “would it cheer you up if I swam out to the middle of a pond and sank, as proof of my good intentions?”

Her head snapped up. “Why are you so
hostile,
Madeline?

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What’s behind your pathological need to belittle everyone you come in contact with?”

I yanked my hand back.

“This is a healing, supportive community and all you can do is snipe at us,” she went on. “Maybe I’m off base, concluding you were molested, but I just want to fi gure out what kind of trauma could have produced someone so hell-bent on slapping away the hand of anyone offering the slightest kindness.”

I crossed my arms. “This is kindness?”

She nodded. “Absolutely.”

“And you’ve never questioned anything done here in the name of therapy?”

She fl inched away from me, dropping her eyes again.

I leaned toward her. “Explain how dorm parents making a kid kneel on a stone fl oor until three a.m. is kindness, Sookie.”

“I’m sure Dr. Santangelo would never countenance such a—”

“Dr. Santangelo spent half this morning’s faculty meeting screaming at Tim because Tim had objected to it. The man was spewing all this corrosive shit about how the kids should shove poor Tim’s head through a blackboard because he’d had the gall to speak up.”

“That’s not—”

“Not
what,
Sookie?” I asked. “Not ‘healing and supportive’?”

She blanched.

“You’re forgetting what I tried to discuss yesterday,” I said.

“How I’m terrifi ed that I’m not doing my best to help these kids. That wasn’t worthy of your consideration, was it?”

“Madeline, you have to know that I’d never—”

“I watched a kid practically bleed to death when he punched his hand through a window yesterday. I watched his girlfriend 7 0

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eat a hunk of his fl esh off the glass after they took him away in the ambulance.”

Sookie winced.

“And all Santangelo can do is scream at a concerned teacher when some other boy gets tormented until dawn by his dorm parents?”

She didn’t answer.

“You wonder why I’m hostile? Get a kumba-fucking-ya
clue,
lady.”

I stood up and walked over to the window.

“Goddamn joke to call this place a ‘healing community,’ ”

I said, taking in the sorry-ass view of campus. “Kids would stand a better chance if you guys broke out some leeches and gave them all a good bleeding.”

Okay, so now she
was
crying.

I sighed and turned around. “Have some Kleenex,” I said, grabbing a box off her desk and putting it in her lap.

She yanked out a half dozen sheets and blew her nose, then balled them up and made a wussy pitch at the wastepaper basket which landed two feet short.

I leaned down to pick the wad off the carpet and tossed it home.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“So you throw like a girl.” I shrugged. “There are worse things.”

“No, I mean—” she started, then got all choked up again.

“I went back to school for this,” she said. “I worked my ass off to get a degree because I want to
help
people . . . the kids . . .”

“What’d you do before?”

“Wall Street.”

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Perfect, my very own shrink-broker.

All the same, I felt shitty for making her cry.

“Look,” I said, “you want to do therapy, let’s do some goddamn
real
therapy.”

She nodded, taking a shaky breath.

I sat on the love seat and took a shaky breath of my own.

“Last year someone I cared about a great deal tried to kill me.”

“My God, Madeline! How did you cope with that?”

“I shot him.”

She reached for my hand. I let her take it.

“Are you worried he’ll come after you again?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“You’re sure?” she asked. “Depending on his pattern of behavior—”

“I emptied both barrels of a shotgun into the man’s neck from so close it practically took his head off.”

She didn’t say a word in response to that, just held my gaze and reached for my other hand. The two of us were so quiet I could hear the rumble of a man’s voice from behind some closed door down the hall, then the hesitant clatter of a hunt-and-peck typist.

“Someone you cared about,” she said at last.

I closed my eyes.

“A great deal,” she said.

“Yeah.” Such a tiny word, with so very much freight behind it.

I pulled both hands free of hers. Covered my face.

“Madeline, I have no doubt you did the only thing you could have in that devastating situation.”

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I opened my eyes. Drew my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. “The hard part is learning to live with that decision.”

“You’ve taken the fi rst step, telling me about it.”

Not fi rst step. More like last resort.

The warning bell rang for the day’s fi nal class. I stood up.

“Will you come back to see me on Monday?” she asked. “I’d like to hear more.”

“Glutton for punishment,” I said. “Same bat time?”

“Same bat channel.”

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11

The Brillo sky was spitting down cold rain, so I sprinted out of the Mansion with my jacket pulled over my head.

Sitzman and Wiesner were already in the classroom by the time I skidded down the hallway. It was just the three of us for the day, what with Mooney and Forchetti being down on the Farm.

We got through a good bit of the late forties and early fi fties, polished off the Korean War (with a fast-forward to Eisen hower’s Military-Industrial Complex speech in ’61), even worked in a bit of McCarthy intro before the bell rang.

I was expecting the pair of them to bolt on the dot of three o’clock, but they didn’t budge. Maybe it was the rain.

“Are you going to make us talk more about this Red Scare shit on Monday?” asked Wiesner.

I tilted my chair back. “What kind of shit would you prefer?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something that doesn’t revolve around, like, totally boring dead guys.”

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“It’s a history class, Wiesner. History tends to revolve around totally boring dead guys.”

“Maybe you could skip the boring part just for a day? There must be a couple of interesting dead guys.”

“Pick one. Doesn’t have to be a guy.”

“Oh yeah, like dead
chicks
are interesting,” said Wiesner.

“Betsy goddamn Ross. Give me a break.”

“Amelia Earhart,” said Sitzman. “She was cool.”

“Bitch might still be alive if she wasn’t such a sucky pilot,”

said Wiesner.

Sitzman laughed. “She was not ‘sucky’, Wiesner—she had a drunk navigator.”

“Yeah,
and
?” Wiesner threw up his hands. “You want to impress me, Sitzman, try landing your plane someplace that’s not the middle of the Pacifi c Ocean. I mean, Amelia couldn’t have just said, ‘Yo, navigation dude, I know you’re all drunk and shit, but that’s totally
water
down there . . . Drop the tequila and fi nd us a damn island already’?”