Saving St. Germ (11 page)

She waved Ollie into the room, then stepped in front of me. She was squat as a fire hydrant; I almost ran her down, just managing to swerve at the last second. The word
bouncer
swam before my eyes. I stared down into the brown roots of her gold hair.

“Oh, no, Mamma,” she said. “We don’t need you to help take a test.”

I put my hand on the doorjamb. “Oh, no, of course not. But Ollie is—I just thought I’d get her settled ...”

“No, Mamma,” she repeated. “We don’t need any help settling in. If Olivia tests in, she tests in. That’s it.”

I nodded as she closed the door in my face.

After half an hour (I was now feverishly sneezing and blowing my nose), the door opened again and Ollie ran crookedly out, zigzagging, then turning and leaping into my lap, burying her head in my jeans.

Miss Oplesch stood in her office doorway, looking attentive, as if she was hearing a sound in a higher register, like an animal. She crooked her finger at us again and when I pointed to myself, she nodded.

Inside her office I looked again for kid drawings and here, at last, there were some real primitive beauties: big heads, elongated houses, and turtle cars—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were displayed as some sort of
evidence.
Miss Oplesch’s master’s degree in psychology was prominently mounted as was a baccalaureate degree from a well-known Catholic college.

Ollie sat on my lap, bouncing a little. I peered around her, suppressing a sneeze.

“Well,” said Miss Oplesch. “We have a very unusual case here.”

“I’m not surprised you say that. You see, I was going to explain about Oll ...”

“I require no explanation. I simply
test,
Mrs. Tallich. And what these tests reveal about Olivia is quite ... singular.”

Silence. I was damned if I was going to say anything.

“Ariston gives the California Aptitude Test as well as the Stanford-Binet. The first only tells us what a child has been taught, the latter actually reveals intelligence quotient.”

“Forgive me, I thought that IQ tests were only capable of measuring ten to fifteen percent of intellectual ability ... so I wonder how you ...”

Her look stopped me. “Your information is incorrect, Mrs. Tallich. It yields complete IQ information. And in Olivia’s case, the CAT reveals that she has very little clearly organized knowledge—I mean this is a child who could not identify the shape of a teapot but recognized the word
electricity
as well as the word
number
and several others including
test.
When did you teach her to read?”

“I didn’t. It’s new to me.”

Miss Olpesch narrowed her eyes at me; was I lying? I sneezed, fishing in Ollie’s pocket for a tissue. She frowned and continued. Then Ollie sneezed. Miss Oplesch flattened her flat figure against her chairback, avoiding germs.

“At any rate, her Stanford-Binet
seemed
very high, higher than our minimum admission score. I say
seemed
because while her spatial aptitude looked high, her
verbal
is impossible to interpret exactly. This is a child who cannot recognize a teapot and put sentences together in any comprehensible fashion. Is she
acting
like this? She has absolutely no ability to
speak
!”

“I don’t know the answers to these questions. I guess that’s why I’m here with her. And she’s never seen a teapot, because I usually brew my tea in the cup.”

Ollie and I snuffled together. Miss Oplesch got up and stood at the door, shutting her eyes and offering her flat naked-looking face, covered with tiny pimples. It hurt to look at her, the way it pained one to behold the stippled, goose-bumped flesh of a starfish, torn untimely from a tidepool. She kept her eyes shut, quivering, as if she expected me to kiss her.

“Before any child is approved for entry into Ariston, an interview with Dr. and Mrs. Fleenarch is required.” Her eyes were still closed, but her hand pointed toward a hallway. We moved in that direction, sneezing.

I pretended to sneeze again as we entered the offices of Dr. and Mrs. Fleenarch—in fact, I was suppressing a gasp. If Dickens had joined us at the millennium and cheerfully updated a few characters, I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect re-creation of Mr. and Mrs. Squeers than the one before my eyes. Of course, each had been air-brushed, coiffed, and recolored in contemporary tints. Dr. Fleenarch was Squeers after a lot of dental work: caps and crowns, a jolly brisk tweeze of the nose hairs, a pat or two of men’s pressed powder and some serious tweedy tailoring. But Mrs. Fleenarch was Mrs. Squeers behind the thinnest veil, peering out of her beady little shrike’s eyes under Halloween eyebrows. She had made an attempt to make herself up in the mirror, reaching toward some dim, inaccessible cosmetic ideal, some half-grasped combination of glamorous and good, as if someone had tried to vigorously sketch, say, Kim Novak’s features over Torquemada’s in repose.

What child would ever climb on these laps, smile into these cold, depthless eyes?

Ollie cowered behind me. Miss Oplesch introduced everyone and I pulled Ollie into a chair before the huge desk. Dr. and Mrs. Fleenarch sat up straighter across from us and Miss Oplesch, after a brief whispered consultation with them, disappeared.

Dr. Fleenarch turned to me. His wife sat forward and stared at me, glanced briefly at Ollie, then stood up and vanished into an adjoining office, where I could make out her shadow and part of her profile in the doorway as she hovered, eavesdropping. Ollie sneezed and started to hum. Dr. Fleenarch ignored both of us for a while, he seemed intent on reading the front page of the L.A.
Times.
At last he looked up and asked me if I had any questions about Ariston School.

“Well,” I said, “what sort of education do you provide for these children?”

He knit his brows. “They get a leg up,” he said, “a leg up on Harvard or Yale. That I can tell you.”

I couldn’t think of another question.

“Now,” he said. “I’d like to address my questions to ...
Olivia
here, if you don’t mind.”

I said I didn’t. My nose was running copiously. I asked if there was a rest room nearby and I patted Ollie’s hand.

“Be right back, I promise.”

She actually stayed in her chair, looking after me with huge questioning eyes. Dr. Fleenarch leaned forward.

“Now tell me, Olivia, how do you spell your name?”

“Your face makes a start and it hurts.”

I listened to the silence as I fled. I heard him mumble something, then repeat his question. I turned quickly down a corridor, wandered a bit, gave up on the rest room, then retraced my steps past a classroom. I glanced inside. The teacher was occupied in the back of the room, bending over a student. I stared at the walls. Twenty-five versions of the same theme, all printed extremely neatly with the same beginning sentence: “The White House is the residence of our President.” The kids appeared to be working on math problems in workbooks. There were
workbooks
everywhere: English, Math, Social Studies, Reading: but no
books,
no sets of encyclopedias, battered with page-turning, no hardcovers, no storybooks, no slim volumes of poetry. Drawings on a bulletin board, all the same, a computer-generated pattern, colored in, no crayon marks outside the lines. I spied a box of pop-up tissues, winked at a chubby little girl in the front row who was staring at me, and snagged a few. She looked shocked. I turned to leave, noticed that the teacher had misspelled the word
murmur
as “mermer” on a posted word list,
WORDS TO USE INSTEAD OF SAID
. I felt a rough tug on my sleeve. It was Mrs. Fleenarch.

“This way,” she growled, and pointed me back toward the offices.

“I’m so sorry,” I croaked, “I just wanted to find a ...”—but she poked her index finger in my spine like a pistol and hurried me along.

“This way,” she said again. “Visitors are not allowed in the classrooms.”

When I came back, Ollie and Dr. Fleenarch were both staring at the wall. Mrs. Fleenarch vanished again.

Dr. Fleenarch looked up as I entered.

“This child,” he said, jerking his head toward Ollie, “is English her
first
language?”

I nodded.

“I cannot follow this child. I asked her several times how she was and she spoke in a foreign language. I could not follow a word of what this child said.”

I took Ollie’s hand and we went to the door. I bowed at Dr. Fleenarch.

“It’s Estonian,” I said. “She speaks Estonian, but with a slight Honduran accent.”

He blinked slowly.

“I see.”

“Good-bye, Mrs. Fleenarch,” I called to the shadow behind the door. Her profile jerked back, out of eyeshot.

Ollie and I ran to the parking lot, sneezing. At the car, I patted Ollie’s head.

“You’re a smart kid,” I said. “Stick around and I’ll show you what a teapot is.”

She sneezed.

I drove home, where my favorite student, Rocky Salinas, was minding Ollie. When I came in, I found them in the kitchen, dyeing sand with food coloring. I’d been teaching Ollie the layers inside the earth; we’d taken an old empty aquarium and started from the inside out. We dyed the first layer of sand red and poured it into the aquarium as the core—then dyed succeeding layers yellow, green, and purple, stacking them one on top of the other. Rocky and Ollie were continuing work on this project. Through the aquarium glass, the earth—inner and outer core, mantle and crust—resembled nothing more than a runny cross-section of rainbow lasagna.

“You look tired,” said Rocky as I came in, slipping a little on the sandy floor.

“You look bored.” I knelt down and accepted the pink and green handful of sand Ollie offered me. There was sand in her hair and around her mouth.

“No, no, man—I
love
this. Maybe I could try it in lab, since I bombed out on every other procedure.”

Rocky was having trouble lately in Organic; her grades had fallen and she couldn’t seem to get anything to work for her. She set a pie tin of sand aside, looking preoccupied. She had so much curly dark hair that her face seemed overshadowed, a tiny planet surrounded by flames.

I didn’t want to pry. I watched Rocky pick up her Walkman and her red bookbag; I stuffed some bills in her leather jacket pocket.

“Thanks, Rocky.”

“Sure. Anytime.” Rocky bent down and kissed Ollie, who was still at work, pouring orange food coloring from a large bowl to a small one. Ollie reached up quickly and touched Rocky’s nose. Rocky laughed and smeared the orange dye all over her face. She was so pretty, I thought, tall and thin, coltish.

“Better than blush-on, right?”

“Rocky, you want a tissue? What’s the matter?”

Rocky stood looking straight at me and made a strange noise, a muted cry. Her face was full of panic.

“I’m going to flunk out, I know it. I can feel it happening to me in this kinda
slow motion.
I just can’t hack Organic, Prof.”

“You know, Rocky? You shouldn’t start thinking this way! This is what happens to women in Organic—they start out—”

“Please don’t give me no big lecture, OK? I’m not all the women who ever took Organic. I’m
me
and I’m selectively fucked up.”

I put my arms around Rocky. Her thin shoulders shook. “Would you like to stay to dinner, Rock? I don’t know if Jay’s going to make it, and it’s only stew on the menu, but you’re very welcome.”

Ollie stood up, poured green dye over her head, and walked out. I indicated her with an extended hand. “And the
company
!”

Rocky hung her head. “I’m supposed to meet this
guy
.”

“Selectively fucked up, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s always
somebody.
But I don’t feel
nothing
—I’m gettin’ laid, that’s it.”

“There’s a test tomorrow. Column work. But you know that.”

“Oh yeah. I know that. I’m going to try and get in
real
early tonight.” We looked at each other and laughed.

“Rocky. Please don’t flunk out,” I said. I felt close to tears myself. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you’re gonna be a goddam depressing
statistic
if you do. I can help you, we can work a little extra in the lab, what do you think?”

“What I think is that I have to go give Lance a blow job. I mean
Troy.
Man, these
Anglo names
! This guy should be called Ski Mask.”

She put her hand on my shoulder. “I’m going to try not to flunk out. But the thing is, I’m not as good as a lot of other ones in that class. I see it. Real clear. Maybe I should admit it, you know?”

“No. I don’t think so. You just need a little tutoring.”

“Good night, Prof.”

I watched her drive off. Rocky had a little Austin, dented and rusted, but it gave her an aura of freedom, her radio blasting Bonnie Raitt. I envied that freedom for a split second, staring out the window, till I remembered the clichéd ending Rocky was probably headed toward. I closed the window. It was cold. When had it gotten so cold?

“Come on, Ollie,” I called. “Let’s get washed up. Time for dinner.”

O
LLIE DEAR, LISTEN
to me. It’s late at night, I stare at a buzzing, blinking tube light on the lab ceiling. Driving over here to work, I realized that I hardly even notice my surroundings anymore. But the day I arrived in Los Angeles I saw into its heart.

I was more than a little out-of-it from gunning through the last leg of my cross-country trek. I’d driven through Needles and Barstow
—
having crossed the Mojave
—
where it was still ninety-seven degrees at four in the afternoon.

I hit Los Angeles at rush hour. All the freeways were jammed, then on the 10 West, I watched as one of the many hot and exhausted motorists, lurching toward his exit across four lanes, cut in front of a young man on a car phone who’d been trying to whipsaw diagonally across to the fast lane. The cars jackknifed over each other: a Porsche and a Toyota Camry: snared and yoked at the jowls. No one was hurt, but traffic in three lanes stopped and the left lane slowed to a crawl, as the drivers got out to argue.