Saying Grace (15 page)

“Then we have an important disagreement,” said Chandler quietly.

“I believe that this country was built by individualists. The revolution was fought by men who weren’t afraid to say ‘Bullshit’ to bullshit, who wouldn’t pay taxes that exploited them without giving them any return. The economy, and the character of this country, were built by men who go their own way, take care of Saying Grace / 105

their own, and who aren’t afraid of competition. That’s what
I
think this school stands for. And I’m prepared to put it to a vote.” Rue stared back at him appalled.

“And women,” said Ann Rosen, as she made an X on a tic-tac-toe grid and pushed the paper over to Sylvia.

“What?” said Chandler.

“Men and women. The revolution was fought by men and women.

‘The national character was built by men and women who.’”

Chandler didn’t get it. He turned questioning to Terry, who smiled slightly but didn’t speak. Chandler let it pass. Terry turned to look at Ann.

“I move we vote to abolish Annual Giving. Second?”

Rue said, “Chandler, it’s late. Don’t you think it would be a good idea to poll the community before we do something that will be very hard to undo?”

“We can’t respond to that motion, Rue, since you’re not a voting member of the Board. Is there a second to my motion?”

“I move to table the motion,” said Ann Rosen.

“Second,” said Sylvia French. Rue thanked them with her eyes.

Just then, the door to the music room, where they were meeting, surrounded by pictures of musical notes and shelves full of Orff instruments, opened. Looking very apologetic, buffed and coiffed like a model, Chandler’s almost beautiful wife poked her head in and waggled her fingers at the group. “Hello…sorry…sorry to interrupt…shall I wait in the car?”

“No, come in, come in, of course not, come in, Bobbi,” said everyone except Chandler. Bobbi scooted in and sat in a tiny chair against the wall, as if by achieving stillness quickly she could erase the interruption, and perhaps her presence.

Chandler looked back at the table. His motion was unseconded and he felt suddenly that his control of the group was at an ebb, now that he was being picked up at school as if by his mother.

“My car’s in the shop. Again,” he said, and got a murmur of sympathy.

“Damn Jags,” said Terry. “They’re pretty though.” Everyone agreed.

“Well,” said Chandler. “There’s a motion on the table. All in favor?”

106 / Beth Gutcheon

Everyone said ‘Aye,’ except Chandler. He took a breath.

“Motion to adjourn?”

“So moved,” said Sylvia.

“Second,” said Terry.

“Meeting adjourned. Thank you all,” said Chandler, standing.

Everyone else began to talk wearily and gather papers and pens and handouts. Bobbi popped up and went to rub against her husband, like a cat marking territory.

Henry had built a fire and was waiting for Rue with a glass of wine beside her chair.

“How did it go?”

“Unbelievable,” she said, sinking into a huddle and accepting the wine. “I thought the big issue would be personnel and the budget.

I thought maybe I’d get chewed on some more because the Lowens are so mad that I moved Lyndie Sale out of Catherine Trainer’s class but I won’t move Jennifer. But no.” She described what had happened.

“I think I should ask Chandler to join my men’s group,” said Henry.

“What men’s group?”

“I think we should get together in the woods some weekend and do some drumming and chanting and then talk about what shits our fathers were until we all burst into tears. I think it would do us a world of good.”

“You know, it might. I’m out of ideas.”

“We’ll be Men together. We’ll stride around the woods carrying big sticks to show what Men we are, and we’ll talk about natural selection and kill small animals with our teeth. You can spend the afternoon with Bambi, learning to do your nails.”

“Bobbi.”

“I’m sure it’s Bambi. She works so hard on those doe eyes.”

“I could have a major revolt on my hands,” said Rue. “Without Annual Giving, I couldn’t afford Mike’s salary. It happened to a friend of mine in San Diego. The Board made him balance the budget by firing staff. He spent all day doing two people’s jobs and nearly had a nervous breakdown. The teachers lost faith in him because he could never give them time when they needed him. The Saying Grace / 107

parents began to run roughshod over the teachers, all the while complaining that Todd was unresponsive.”

“What happened?”

“Half the faculty quit. Then the Board fired Todd. Then half the parents withdrew their kids. The school lost its niche in the ecology, to adopt Chandler’s point of view; all the normal kids went off to a rival school and liked it fine, and now Todd’s school is running with about a fifth of the enrollment they had had, as a school for children with learning disabilities.”

“I bet Chandler’s father brought him up to be a real Man, don’t you? I wonder if he was breast-fed. I bet he wasn’t; I think I’ll ask him.”

“Please do,” said Rue. “I think it’s important for Men to be close to each other.”

“Me too,” said Henry.

A
t the November Parents’ Council meeting, Emily Goldsborough brought up the subject of the Annual Giving campaign.

There was hot debate. Some parents felt embarrassed by it because they couldn’t afford to give. Some of the long-term parents were still smarting because once Rue had addressed a financial appeal to the grandparents who had attended Grandpersons’ Day. This had unexpectedly turned up the fact that some of the medical or real estate or software millionaires who sent their children to Country had parents of their own who lived in trailers. The grandparents would have liked to give to the school, but they couldn’t, and they didn’t for a minute enjoy having this brought home to them.

Rue was pointedly given to understand that it was confusing enough, in this land of opportunity, to encourage and enable your children to succeed, only to see them succeed so far as to be virtually living on a different planet from you, not to mention making you and your own experience incomprehensible to your Gold Coast grandchildren. The whole mess was thoroughly aired again at the November Parents’ Council meeting, and Rue apologized again.

The parents, mostly moms, then got into a long discussion of the value of scholarships, and found that they were good. Rue ventured to mention the importance of trying to raise faculty salaries. Most, though not all, came to agree that it was wrong for your child’s teacher to be paid an annual wage that was less than the cost of your car. So, in the end, a fairly strong consensus was reached that Annual Giving should continue and discussion moved on to the subject of the auction. Its theme: the Merry Nineties.

Chandler was thoroughly put out when he heard about the meeting. He did not for a moment believe that it was not Rue who had opened the Annual Giving discussion to the parents. He felt Saying Grace / 109

undercut, he said, completely unsupported by her, taking a complex issue of Board business and airing it in public. Furthermore, he was turning the pressure up again about Catherine Trainer. At this year’s Indian Overnight, two children were almost hurt when Nicolette Wren’s father, helping Catherine with the Sweat Lodge, chose the wrong kind of rocks to heat and one of them exploded.

“It was Catherine who nearly lost an eye,” Rue pointed out.

“That’s her problem. What I’m concerned about is her judgment.”

“It was Buster Wren’s poor judgment. Catherine told him what kind of rocks to get, and he didn’t admit he couldn’t tell the difference.”

“She was in charge. It was her fault.”

“I am in charge, so it’s my fault,” said Rue. “As it happens, no one was hurt, though I agree, somebody could have been. We go through our Doomsday Preparedness drill before every outing, and now we will add this to the list. What do we do if war breaks out? What do we do if someone gets appendicitis? And what do we do if the rocks blow up?”

“Do you think you’re being funny?”

“Not at all. I assure you. Last year, the upper school science trip was unable to get back from Santa Catalina because there were riots in Los Angeles and no one could get to the airport. We were prepared. Blair Kunzelman rerouted the whole trip through the Ontario Airport in Orange County because in our Doomsday List, we asked,

“What if we can’t use the LA Airport?”

“Do you know,” said Chandler, “that three different times this year, when I’ve approached people about joining the Board, I was asked if I know why we don’t fire Mrs. Trainer?” Rue felt cold. She had not known this, and unfortunately, she could believe it. Silence seemed like the only safe response.

After a moment Chandler added, “If you’re going to insist on the Annual Giving thing, you’re going to have to give in somewhere else.”

“I will when I can, Chandler. There are times I can’t.”

“You work for me, you know.”

“All too well.”

110 / Beth Gutcheon

“Well…think about it.” He brushed the crumbs of his tuna fish sandwich from his knees, rose from the couch in Rue’s office, where they had been closeted for lunch, and walked out. Rue could have told him before he left that he had a piece of lettuce between his teeth, but she was too annoyed.

A
s Rue’s birthday approached, her first in nineteen years without Georgia in the house, she began to suspect that Henry was up to something.

“If you give me a surprise party, I’ll file for divorce,” she said one morning at breakfast.

Henry looked distressed. “But you loved the party Janet TerWilliams gave Carl.”

“Carl likes surprises. I don’t. I have enough of them all day long.”

Henry looked sad, and when he trudged off to work, she had a feeling he had a few phone calls to make.

For her part, she arrived at school that day to discover that a school parent, Jerry Lozatto, the local BMW dealer, whose daughter had complained that Bobbie Regan teased her too much, had concealed himself in some bushes on campus, waited for eleven-year-old Bobbie to come along, leaped out, and attempted to beat him to death. You could hear the yelling halfway to town.

Fortunately, the PE teacher jumped in and wrestled Mr. Lozatto to the ground. Rue arrived just in time to see this edifying sight, a member of her faculty rolling around in the dirt outside the science lab, trying to get a hammerlock on the father of the Pink Fairy of last week’s middle-school pageant. The fifth- and sixth-grade boys were entranced, especially at discovering that Mr. Kunzelman was so inept at wrestling. The girls were stealing fascinated looks at the expression of horror on poor Patsy Lozatto’s face.

“Say Uncle!” Blair Kunzelman was yelling, though it was by no means clear that he was winning.

“Get off me, you asshole!” was Mr. Lozatto’s considered response.

“Would you both get up, please?” said Rue.

After some more shoving and grunting, they did. They were 112 / Beth Gutcheon

both red in the face and covered with twigs and dirt and stains from dried chokecherries.

“I was just trying to teach this kid some manners when this
asshole…
” Mr. Lozatto suddenly uncoiled and gave Blair a shove as Blair began to yell, “You were
killing
him! He’s
eleven!
”

Rue put her hand on Mr. Lozatto’s arm and drew him away from Blair, who continued to glare and stand poised, fists clenched.

“When this
asshole
jumped me,” Jerry Lozatto went on.

“Mr. Lozatto…I think we should talk about this in my office….”

Mr. Lozatto made one more halfhearted lunge at Blair, who jumped backward. “I don’t want to
talk
, there’s nothing to talk about!” Rue was walking him away from the children. Mike Dianda, who was standing behind her to be sure she didn’t get hurt, began to herd the children off to class.

Rue walked Jerry Lozatto to the parking lot, talking reasonably about making an appointment to talk everything out, but he was still blustering and quacking and erupting in cries of how he was just teaching some manners to that little Mick from Hell.

Rue then spent the morning on the phone with the boy’s parents, trying to reassure them.

“He has guns, you know,” cried Angela Regan. “He’s insane. He wears a handgun strapped to his leg. Ann Rosen went in to buy a car from him, and he showed it to her.”

Rue thought she wouldn’t be surprised if the Regans took Bobbie out of school, but instead, just after lunch, she received word that it was Patsy Lozatto who was being withdrawn and, furthermore, that the Lozattos were suing the school for “failing to provide a safe environment for their daughter.”

Since the conversation about surprises, Henry had made no more mention of her birthday, and Rue began to think he might really have forgotten it, which would be another kind of surprise and not a good one. On the morning of the day, he failed to wish her happy birthday when he kissed her good morning. He had gone off to work whistling.

When Rue arrived at school feeling rather sad, and missing Georgia keenly, there were flowers on her desk from Mike. Cards Saying Grace / 113

and cookies and grubby little pieces of candy were handed to her all morning by various preschoolers, which raised her spirits. Then she went out to collect attendance, and Janet TerWilliams’s second grade presented her with a book they had been working on for a week. It was dedicated to Mrs. Shaw on her Birthday, and was a book of proverbs. Janet had given each child the first half of a maxim, asked each one to complete it, and to draw an illustration to go with it. Rue sat down in the class and examined each page while the author of it squirmed and beamed. The children all crowded up to her when she had finished, wanting to know which one she had liked the absolute best.

“I can’t choose at all, I have so many favorites,” said Rue. This was a lie, however. She had two clear favorites. Ashby McCann advised, “Don’t cut off your nose…to see what’s inside,” and Chelsea Malko wrote, “You can lead a horse to water…but you can’t make him walk backwards, unless you pull the heels just right.” “Thoughts to live by,” she told the children.