Outside, the automated street sweepers suck leaves and twigs and debris from Thursday-night college kids off the pavement on the other side of Wisconsin Avenue. The two cars whose owners forgot about street-cleaning day get tickets. Not paper tickets, but in a few minutes one hundred dollars will move between bank accounts for the green Jeep, and another hundred for the yellow Mini Cooper with racing stripes. The parking enforcement drones and meter maid trons move on, up Wisconsin, in search of their prey.
All this automation makes me wonder where they’ll put the yellow school kids in another few years when the last of the grocery stores switch to self-checkout and the little Amazon delivery drones buzz up to front doors, plopping their parcels on the porches. Click, buzz, plop. It’s supposed to be progress, and I guess we’ll be seeing more of it. Who knows? Before I retire, they might even automate teaching.
“Competition,” Malcolm says during his dinner-hour updates, almost always for Anne’s benefit. “You work hard, you study, you succeed, you get a job.”
The problem here is childishly simplistic: The jobs are disappearing and the people aren’t. When I pull into the underground parking garage and let another machine scan my car’s decal, greeting me with a sunny, if electronic, Good morning, Dr. Fairchild, I wonder where all the yellow school kids will be in another ten years. I wonder what we’ll do with the people who aren’t necessary anymore.
Nine
The high school where I teach isn’t very different from the high school I attended almost a quarter of a century ago. There are rooms, teachers, books, and students. It’s the students, I think, as I set up books and attendance sheets on the desk in my classroom and pull the blinds up to give us a view of something green, who are too similar. Far too similar to each other and to what they were in my day.
Back then, the autism spectrum wasn’t so much a spectrum as a what the fuck is autism? question—as bright a blip on the high school radar as peanut allergies, celiac disease, transsexual restroom rights, and out-of-the-closet teenagers were in 1990-something. Changes trickled along, a drop or so at a time. I figured by the time my girls were teens, everyone would have joined in on the diversity dance.
I was wrong. Diversity never made it past a slow, awkward shuffle. As my students come in for one last period of pretest cramming—what we’re supposed to call a final review, but what everyone knows is an umpteenth-hour cram session—they’re all the same. Straight, mostly white, athletic. And I’ve never seen such a thing as a trans-friendly bathroom.
Testing days are both rushed and slow. This morning, we rush. I take my classes through their review, getting them ready for the SOLs. The acronym is supposed to stand for Standards of Learning, an updated version of its former self, but I’ve been calling it the Shit Out of Luck test for a year now.
Never out loud, of course. And never to Malcolm.
It’s the Shit Out of Luck test because two months ago I stood in front of thirty faces. Today I stand in front of twenty-seven. The three empty desks are still here, though, scattered about. No one bothers to remove them, or consolidate them in the back of the classroom. Or maybe that’s the plan—to leave the empty desks, the ones that used to be occupied by Judy Green and Sue Tyler and a ghost-pale boy named Antonio who kicked ass at chemistry but couldn’t hack it in number theory. Maybe the empty desks are here as a carrot.
Or a stick.
Some teachers have it worse than I do. Nancy Rodriguez, for instance, who teaches advanced programming, lost two students after last month’s tests. I’ve heard Dr. Chen’s chemistry class has dwindled from two dozen to a scant fifteen. Talk in the teachers’ lounge happens in whispers around them. Nancy’s kids better pass the lab module or she’ll find herself teaching in a green school. Chen is pulling her hair out because of the failures. And so on. As the students advance, the sieve gets finer.
It isn’t that the green schools are lousy—Freddie says her teachers are great, even if Malcolm frowns at the idea of faculty with master’s degrees instead of doctorates. And I’ve seen the homework Freddie brings back every afternoon: stacks of heavy hardcover textbooks, instructions for the quarterly science fair projects, annotated bibliography assignments that would have made a college freshman back in my day start filling out course-drop requests. The faculty is good enough that every once in a while a green school student scores out of the ballpark, ends up with a silver card, and transfers to a first-tier school.
Most of the time, though, there’s only one way for a kid to go once she’s in a green school. Down.
We aren’t supposed to look at it as “down,” per Madeleine Sinclair’s crowd. We’re supposed to view it in euphemisms: helpful, appropriate, child focused.
“Money saving” never gets a mention.
So I take my students through their Mendelian genetics; I hurl words ending in -osis and -isis at them until their eyes glaze over, until I’m confident they know the material backward and forward and upside down, until, when I say “Who’s ready for the test?” twenty hands go up. Mercedes Lopez, sitting three rows away and glancing nervously at the newly empty desk every few minutes, is first. She’s my only remaining European student. The rest fled while they could.
All the while, Judy Green’s desk sits vacant in the front row, pencils and pens and highlighters cleared from the trough on the left side, books gone from the shelf underneath it. Last month, when I asked who was ready for the test, Judy’s hand was the first one raised.
And yet her Q fell more than two full points, low enough to send her off on a yellow bus.
This isn’t what bothers me, though. What’s been eating at me since this morning, since I stood in the rain listening to Sarah scream accusations at me and punch me with words that she should have thought about first, is that even if Judy didn’t pass—even if she blanked out during transcription of genetic codes or screwed up the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic musculature—every single one of Judy’s tests would have had to be completely blank to bring her down so far.
My students file out and a new batch comes in, the chemistry crowd from Dr. Chen’s class in a building across the street. A few of them are like Anne—confident, even haughty. They know they’ll pass. Others squint nervously, as if they’re trying to visualize the entire periodic table on the backs of their eyelids. One girl—I think her name is Alice—chews on a fingernail. When she takes it away from her mouth, there’s a raw, red crescent of blood where she’s nibbled down to the quick.
I’m proctoring today, and that means I’m not permitted to speak to the students except for reciting the test rules, which I know by heart.
You have one hour.
You may not speak to any student.
You may not leave the room for any reason.
When time is called, put down any and all writing implements. If you do not, ten points will be automatically deducted from your score.
Once, I added an extra line about cheating. It’s not necessary anymore.
It used to be that cheating was an art form. We knew all the tricks: the sticks of chewing gum with chemical formulas written on them, dissolved by teeth and spit if a teacher should pass by; inked thighs under pleated skirts bearing presidents and dates; some genius kid’s famous “Inviso-Method,” which involved writing your notes on a disposable top layer of paper, hard enough to impress the bottom layer. There were folded-up crib sheets tucked into knee socks, last year’s exam copies bought with pooled lunch money, calculators pre-programmed to solve the deadly quadratic equation. If there was a way to cheat, someone invented it.
So maybe competition isn’t all that new, but there’s no cheating these days, not since that incident a few years back.
I’m not sure of the details. There were whispers, naturally, about the two women from the Fitter Family Campaign, about how they spent a solid hour behind closed doors with the kid who stashed microscopic notes inside the barrel of an automatic pencil. Nancy Rodriguez said he bit one of the women. Dr. Chen told me she heard crying behind the door. What I do know, and what I’d rather forget, is that before the kid’s parents made it across town to the school, his Q was recalculated and a machine spat out a flat yellow card.
We didn’t see him again. And, of course, there haven’t been any further cheating incidents.
One by one, the students take their seats. I hand pristine sheets of lined paper to them and supply each desk with a pencil and a pen. Then I recite my lines and start the slow march up and down the aisles. I hate this part, because it reminds me of touring a museum, shuffling along and shifting my weight, getting a good case of museum-foot. I’ll proctor four more tests before the day ends, and by the time I’m home my ankles will be swollen.
By the time I’m home, I’ll find out how Freddie’s day went. I can’t say I’m in a rush to know.
Ten
Dinner is a disaster.
We always get Chinese takeout on testing days because the idea of standing over a stove long enough to boil even a pot of water for spaghetti makes me cringe. The dining table is littered with those white boxes. Rice, spicy eggplant, rice, General Tso’s chicken, rice, egg rolls, something called Happy Family Delight, and rice. After Malcolm mentions his broken peace lily for the third time, the only words Freddie says are “Pass the soy sauce, please.”
“So,” Malcolm says. “How’s school going?” He scoops more of General Tso’s famous and ubiquitous chicken from the paper container onto his plate, setting the rest between himself and Anne at the exact moment Freddie reaches for it. “Oh. Sorry. Did you want some, too?”
Freddie just looks at me, defeated. On nights like this, it’s as if Malcolm has only one child.
Anne stops revisiting every single minute of the five tests she sat for this afternoon and pushes the chicken toward her sister. It’s a small act of defiance, but my heart skips all the same. “Go on, Freddie. You first.”
“I have a project for government class due next week, Dad,” Freddie says.
Malcolm says nothing until I kick him under the table. Then, “Need any help?”
“Maybe. Just for brainstorming. We’re supposed to design some kind of social system.”
As if we haven’t already, I think.
“I need a bit more specificity,” Malcolm says drily. If Anne had been as vague as Freddie, she would have gotten a teasing smile.
I ignore my husband and coax my daughter. “Go on, sweetie.”
But she doesn’t go on. Instead, Anne comes to her rescue. “I have the same project. It’s about social institutions. You know, trying to come up with a place to put everyone based on their Q scores. The Fitter Family Campaign’s sponsoring it, and there’s a prize for best project.” She smirks. “Actually, there are two prizes this year. The winner gets a summer internship at the FFC headquarters in her home state.”
“What if a guy wins?” I say with one eyebrow raised. It’s as if Anne hasn’t contemplated the possibility of her coming in anything but first.
“Then it’s his home state. But only if he wins.” She throws me a wink.
“That’s my best girl,” Malcolm says.
Freddie sinks a few inches lower in her chair.
I kick his foot under the table, harder this time, and he turns to give me a what was that for? look. Christ, he’s oblivious. Or maybe not. Maybe he really doesn’t care that Anne gets ninety percent of his attention while Freddie stares at her plate, pushing rice grains into abstract patterns with chopsticks, one at a time. She makes a feeble attempt to interrupt, gets a “Hush up a minute, hon, I’m listening to Anne,” and gives up.
“Malcolm,” I say. “How about we let Freddie tell us how her day went?”
Freddie blanches, shakes her head, and goes back to decorating her plate with rice mandalas. Malcolm looks grateful.
“I bet her day went just fine,” he says, passing another wrapped egg roll to Anne. “If she’s anything like her sister, she sailed through.” He isn’t actually speaking to Freddie, only about her. So I give him a third under-the-table kick. “Right, Frederica?”
Malcolm’s never taken to Freddie’s nickname, something he points out each time he addresses her.
“Sure, Dad,” Freddie says in a clockwork voice. Then, “Can I be excused?” She doesn’t wait for an answer before pushing out her chair and going down the hall to her bedroom. No. “Going” isn’t the right word. She skulks or slinks or scuttles. Some onomatopoetic thing. Something a primitive nocturnal animal would do.
Anne gets up and follows her. “Be right back, Dad.”
When she’s out of earshot, I shake my head at him. “Anyone would think you were the one who had the umbilical cord sixteen years ago. Anyway, the yellow bus came today,” I say, peeling the wrapper from an egg roll.
“Huh.”
“That’s it? ‘Huh’?”
He shrugs. “I thought I told you, El. There were some schedule changes. Memo went out a few weeks ago.” He takes the egg roll from my hand. “You don’t really want another one of these. They’re all grease.”
What I want to say is, Get your paws off my fucking egg roll. Instead, I go back to the real subject. “Do you even care who it picked up?”
“Who?”
“Judith Green from up the street.”
Malcolm’s eyes widen a few millimeters, but otherwise his expression doesn’t change.
“You know. Judy? Anne’s best friend since she was five?”
“Oh. Right,” he says. “I think I remember her.”
Okay. I take the egg roll back and forget about peeling off the oily outer layers before sinking my teeth into it, just to show him I don’t give a crap. “You think you remember her. For chrissake, Malcolm, she was here last weekend for a sleepover. We made chocolate chip pancakes on Sunday morning, and the girls asked you for help with their homework. So don’t fucking tell me you think you remember.”
Anne’s back. “Remember what?”
“Language, El. Language.” Malcolm slides his eyes in my direction.
“Don’t lecture me.” I’m hot now, hotter than I’ve been in a while, but I pause, take a few of those deep yoga breaths, and cool myself down before speaking. “There’s no way Judy failed her test last month. No way.”
“Wait a sec,” Anne says. “Judy failed? That’s impossible. Judy’s a fucking rock star. Oh. Sorry, Mom. Freaking rock star.” There’s no tutting or reprobation from her father. “Anyway, no way Judy bombed.” She leaves the room, iPhone in hand, fingers working madly at the keys.
When we’re alone again, I glare at my husband. “Like I said.”
So what does Malcolm do? He shrugs. That’s it. Shoulders up, shoulders down. And he pinches another piece of eggplant with his chopsticks.
I used to love the man sitting across from me. I loved his wit and his smarts and his I’ll always take care of you attitude, and I looked up to him. I traded something for this man, something I thought I wanted, and still do.
In hindsight, it was a shitty trade.
Eleven
THEN:
I was in my studio apartment at Yale on the last Saturday of September, finished with classes and ready for the weekend. New England had started turning pretty with its annual leaf-mosaic show, and I’d planned on taking the car out of shitty New Haven and driving farther north for the weekend. I had not been planning to wake up and lurch to the tiny subway-tiled bathroom.
An hour later, after a quick trip to the Rite Aid down the street, I was still in that bathroom, sitting on the icy porcelain of the toilet, shaking the pee stick, as if by shaking it I could knock one of those blue lines out of the little window and turn a plus into a minus, change a baby into a nothing.
I’d split up with Malcolm in early summer, partly because my mother persuaded me that a break might be a good thing, partly because I didn’t want my first boyfriend to be my only-and-forever boyfriend. And partly because of Joe.
We grew up together, played kickball in the street and made mud pies in a ditch behind my parents’ house. Joe was normal, except for a fanaticism about anything with an internal combustion engine. When we got our licenses, he fixed up an old Mustang, a wreck of a thing he rescued from Mr. Cooper’s junkyard. When he turned seventeen, Joe had the hottest car in town. He also had the lowest grade point average in our high school, and SAT scores a hedgehog could have beaten.
He wasn’t exactly Joe College, but he was a good guy, taking me to movies he swore weren’t dates, buying me gallon-sized tubs of fake-buttered popcorn while some teen-scream villain with razors for fingernails flashed in the on-screen shadows. At sixteen, I was more interested in museums than movies, but I still let Joe talk me into a Friday-night replay of a decades-old film that he once again swore was Not. A. Date. Until he tried to turn it into one. He shivered once next to me when Freddy Krueger danced murderously into the dreams of unsuspecting Elm Street teenagers, and I realized Joe didn’t like the flick, either. But I knew then why he had picked it.
So we sat, shrinking back in our seats, tucked against each other, giggling at the absurd bits and gasping at the cheesy horror.
I told Malcolm about the movie the next day, deliberately leaving out the awkward almost-romance. He rolled his eyes and asked why I was wasting my time with that type, with someone who could never amount to anything more than a subpar grease monkey, with someone who would only make me miserable. He drove the point home by always stopping for gas at the station where Joe worked, and the subject never came up again. I saw the black grease under Joe’s fingernails, the tattooed dragon coiling around his biceps, the future of him undefined and not very desirable.
Joe still called, sent emails, caught up when I came down from Connecticut on school breaks. He got me through a bad patch of depression, spent hours on the phone with me when exam anxiety wouldn’t let me sleep, told me stupid jokes on the nights I didn’t think I’d ever smile again.
That summer, everything changed.
I’d just gotten home from Connecticut, temporarily back in my childhood bedroom. Maryland was already sticky with humidity, and my parents’ house felt close with it after spring in New England. Winston, our dog, seemed also to feel it, so I fetched his lead and went out the front door, starting down the street toward the wooded path heading west.
I heard the Mustang’s eight cylinders before I saw it. It was a cool sound, a leonine purr I remembered well.
“Hey! Fischer!” the voice called. I remembered it well, too.
“Hey, yourself!” I called back, raising a hand in a wave.
Joe pulled over and parked, killing the purr, letting the beast rest, and we walked along with Winston. Then he did the strangest thing.
He kissed me.
What I did next was even stranger—I kissed him back. And I didn’t kiss him the way I kissed Malcolm, lips slightly apart, tongue withdrawn, eyes open. No, I went in deep and hungry, tasting him. Swapping spit, as kids would say. As Malcolm would never permit.
“What was that for?” I said, twisting, trying to get some space between us so I could talk.
“Just wanted to know what it felt like to kiss you,” he said.
“Why?”
“No good reason.” Joe leaned in closer. “Maybe I like you.”
“What do you like about me?”
“Well, you’re beautiful,” he said, his lips a breath away from my own.
“That’s not enough.” He was still leaning, and I was inching back now, keeping my distance. Physical beauty wasn’t supposed to drive decisions. Malcolm had shoveled that line in one word at a time through high school.
Joe laughed. “It’s not the only reason, El. And I don’t mean you’re only beautiful on the outside.”
A runner rushed up the path toward us, and we did that thing people do when they’re caught, instinctively separating ourselves, adopting some ridiculously unnatural pose that told the whole story. The woman, who I’d seen before in the woods, ran on, but not before shooting a smile my way.
And, like magnets, Joe and I closed in on each other.
“Do you like it up there?” he said. “At Yale?”
My parents and grandmother had asked the same question only a few hours before. The answer I gave Joe now was the same. “It’s okay.”
“Then why stay?”
We were side by side, shoulders and thighs touching as we leaned against a fence rail, watching Winston burrow his way into the dirt. Joe’s pinky finger wrapped itself around mine and squeezed. I wanted to tell him about the pressure, about the nights I spent alone in the library, wishing I had someone to take me to the movies. But I didn’t have to.
“Don’t go back, El,” he said quietly. Whether he meant to Yale or to Malcolm, I wasn’t sure.
Joe might not have made the grades in high school, and he had as much use for standardized college entrance tests as a cat does for a set of roller skates, but he wasn’t stupid. “This whole country’s getting crazy,” he said. “And it’ll get worse before anyone figures it out. Come down to the islands with me. We’ll get a boat. Maybe two. Maybe a couple of kids to go along with the boat.”
I didn’t make any decisions about quitting school and escaping to St. Thomas, but I did quit Malcolm for a time. The next time I saw Joe’s Mustang, curvy and red and smooth from the kind of waxing only young men have time for, I was in its backseat. And kissing wasn’t the only thing we did. It was a heavy car, but not as heavy as Joe’s body on top of mine, not as heavy as the even breaths I drew in and pushed out, not as heavy as the rain that pounded the soft top or the thunder that clapped along to our rhythm. We went slow and fast, and then faster and slower. After two times, we rolled, and I lay with my head on Joe’s bare chest, listening to his heart like it was the only sound in a still and quiet universe.
And then we did it all over again because when you’re young and crazy in love, the body has a way of resetting itself as many times as it wants to or needs.
In September, I went back north, driving my little VW Rabbit, missing the hardness of the Mustang and the hardness of Joe’s body. And now I was here, in a subway-tiled bathroom holding a pee stick with its accusing blue cross. If I turned it, the cross became an X, and I imagined it was my entire life that was being crossed out.
I threw the testing stick into the trash bin, pulled up my pajamas, and climbed back into bed, thinking I’d call my mother. As I reached for the phone, it rang. The caller ID announced Malcolm. I let it go to voice mail and fell asleep.
Three hours later, I played the message.
He was driving up for the weekend.
He was taking me to the Cape.
He wanted to ask me a question.
On the first Saturday of October, I’d taken care of things. It was easier than I thought, allowing myself to stretch out on that gurney in the student clinic, watching the anesthesiologist as she gazed into my eyes and said something that sounded vaguely like She’s nearly under. Not worrying anymore about what kind of child a mechanic and a college dropout could possibly raise.
Joe never knew about any of it. He knew only what I wrote him in my letter, the one he never answered.
I’ve decided to marry Malcolm. I’m so sorry. I love you, Joe.
I love you crazy. But I don’t think we have a future.
I tore the sheet up and rewrote it, leaving out everything after “sorry.”
