Lost in the Meritocracy Part 2

Once the race had narrowed to Karla and me, I tried to move more swiftly through the cards by reading the questions at the bottom first and circling back to the essays to find the answers. This trick worked so well that I wondered if IBM was really the marvel people said it was. From January until the gra.s.s turned green, I stayed a full color ahead of Karla, who seemed baffled by my continued lead and finally resorted to a dirty trick.

"Walter," she said to me, pointing at her card, "I'm having a little trouble with this word. What's 'radiate'?"

"You should use your pocket dictionary."

"The print's too small and my gla.s.ses haven't come yet. I just had an eye exam. I didn't do well. It's why I've been getting headaches, the doctor said."

I didn't believe her, but the damage was done: I lost my ability to concentrate. An essay on coral reefs that I should have completed in ten minutes took me almost twenty, mostly because I kept glancing over at Karla, who was playing her blind act to the hilt, holding her card at a distance from her face, squinting, then bringing it closer, then moving it back again. I couldn't help thinking it was a masquerade arising from some intense determination that exceeded even my own.

I decided to be gallant. I slowed my pace, but by degrees, forcing Karla to struggle to surpa.s.s me and granting her a seemingly honest victory. As I'd expected, she gloated afterward, not out loud but in her manner, affecting a strut when she pa.s.sed me in the hallway and habitually raising her hand in cla.s.s whenever I raised mine. But I gloated, too-for my chivalrous refusal to dispel her illusion of superiority. What a prince I'd been, I thought, and how n.o.ble to bow before those one might have vanquished.

But then something happened that knocked me off my perch. As we cleaned out our desks a few days before vacation, filling the wastebaskets with pencil stubs and plugged-up bottles of Elmer's glue, Karla appeared in the aisle beside me holding out a small pink plastic case.

"My gla.s.ses came," she said. "You want to see?"

She settled the frames on the thin bridge of her nose and gazed at me through a pair of lenses whose formidable thickness and convexity spoke strongly of optical necessity. A p.r.i.c.kly flush spread up my neck; the girl was a visual cripple, she'd told the truth, and the fort.i.tude it must have taken to grapple with the SRA cards was painful to consider, as was the margin by which she would have bested me if she'd had the gla.s.ses all along. She knew this, too. She had to. Who'd spared whom? She was a queen, this girl. Moral royalty.

But then she had to rub it in by telling me what I was, which I didn't appreciate at all. It didn't decrease my respect for her-it raised it-but it did guarantee I'd avoid her from then on.

"Students who read the questions first are only cheating themselves," she said. "I'm glad I'm not you. I really am. When I realized what you were doing, it ticked me off at first, but then I decided to pray for you instead. It softened my heart. I'm really glad I did it. I just wish you'd pray for yourself sometimes. You need to."

I wasn't sure what a person should say to this, or if he could be expected to say anything.

"Well, have a fantastic summer," Karla said.

"You, too," I mumbled. She smiled and turned to go. I was struck by an impulse to stop her and apologize-our talk seemed emotionally incomplete somehow-but I wasn't certain what I was sorry for, because I hadn't harmed her, it turned out, and the harm that she seemed to feel I'd done myself (finding an angle, and then playing it) wasn't within my power to give up.

MIDWESTERN COUNTRY SUMMERS, ALL ALIKE, BROAD GREEN immensities of humid tedium, nothing to do but wade barefoot in the river, nowhere to go but to the store for Popsicles, no one to talk to but the dog. By July, I stopped heeding the shrill tornado sirens and couldn't be bothered to slap the fat mosquitoes drilling my neck behind my ears. There were pickles and mayonnaise on every sandwich, a dying wasp in every cup of Kool-Aid. I built a model rocket. It failed in flight. I sent away for a slingshot. It never came. On weekends, I went fis.h.i.+ng with my father, hypnotized by the ripples around my bobber, and in the firefly evenings after supper I pitched rocks into the trees just to hear them go ripping through the leaves. I sat on a stump with a immensities of humid tedium, nothing to do but wade barefoot in the river, nowhere to go but to the store for Popsicles, no one to talk to but the dog. By July, I stopped heeding the shrill tornado sirens and couldn't be bothered to slap the fat mosquitoes drilling my neck behind my ears. There were pickles and mayonnaise on every sandwich, a dying wasp in every cup of Kool-Aid. I built a model rocket. It failed in flight. I sent away for a slingshot. It never came. On weekends, I went fis.h.i.+ng with my father, hypnotized by the ripples around my bobber, and in the firefly evenings after supper I pitched rocks into the trees just to hear them go ripping through the leaves. I sat on a stump with a Playboy Playboy from a trash bin, rehearsing the party jokes, relis.h.i.+ng the nipples. There was always the library, my mother said, and she brought me there at every excuse, but the books were in poor condition, missing pages, and the best ones, like from a trash bin, rehearsing the party jokes, relis.h.i.+ng the nipples. There was always the library, my mother said, and she brought me there at every excuse, but the books were in poor condition, missing pages, and the best ones, like A Wrinkle in Time A Wrinkle in Time and the Hardy Boys series, seemed to be permanently checked out. Instead I ran off to the woods to break an arm or sped away on my bike to gash a s.h.i.+n. In August there was always a week in bed, a stretch of seclusion, Tylenol and root beer. There was always a murder on my AM radio, a shouting match in my parents' bedroom, a grandparent dozing on our sofa. And then it was over. Time to buy new shoes. Time to start school again, to wake back up, with nothing to show for the summer but a fresh haircut and a bird skull I'd found in a puddle. But nothing learned. and the Hardy Boys series, seemed to be permanently checked out. Instead I ran off to the woods to break an arm or sped away on my bike to gash a s.h.i.+n. In August there was always a week in bed, a stretch of seclusion, Tylenol and root beer. There was always a murder on my AM radio, a shouting match in my parents' bedroom, a grandparent dozing on our sofa. And then it was over. Time to buy new shoes. Time to start school again, to wake back up, with nothing to show for the summer but a fresh haircut and a bird skull I'd found in a puddle. But nothing learned.

Math had always been a cinch for me. My teachers said I had a head for numbers. But then, in fifth grade, math turned into something else. Letters were added. Symbols. Diagrams. "Problems" that had once had "answers" became "equations" with "solutions." Mysteries emerged. The value of pi, we learned, could only be estimated, and we were informed that it was possible to count backward from zero, not just forward from one. I kept up with these puzzles, but I didn't like them; they seemed to be pointing toward a realm of darkness, toward a less reliable reality.

It didn't help that Marine was changing, too. The town's adults, including my mother and father, were throwing more parties than in years past, and the parties were running later into the nights. My brother and I could feel them roaring beneath us as we lay in our beds watching talk shows from Los Angeles whose naughty banter and eccentric guests-a willowy hippie who strummed a ukulele, a bearded fat man who performed bad card tricks, a Spanish bombsh.e.l.l in a sequined sheath who s.h.i.+mmied her hips and yodeled nonsense-seemed to echo the strange vibrations we'd been feeling for a while by then. The first shock came when Marine's new Lutheran pastor showed up for services one Sunday morning driving a motorcycle with a chrome gas tank and a suntanned girlfriend on the back. Soon afterward, someone set fire to the bandstand and spray-painted peace signs on the general store. Then the elm trees started dying, whole majestic arching columns of them, the cores of their trunks chewed to sawdust by foreign beetles. This blight coincided with the news that the parents of three of my best friends, three separate couples, were filing for divorces, and that one of the wives planned to marry one of the husbands. But the most jolting development, to my mind, was the appearance of a b.u.mper sticker on two of my mother's best friends' station wagons: BAN THE BRA! BAN THE BRA! Was it a joke? The slogan seemed ominously juvenile. Our parents, I began to fear, were no longer in any condition to protect us. Was it a joke? The slogan seemed ominously juvenile. Our parents, I began to fear, were no longer in any condition to protect us.

School was no refuge. The math units disturbed me, and Mr. Applebaum, our fifth-grade teacher, who was younger than the others, made me jumpy. His manner was boyish and exuberant, but there was a savagery to his vitality, especially on the subject of Vietnam. He supported the war. He loved it, actually, and those who didn't love it disgusted him. He called them names. They were sissies, perverts, traitors. To counter the damage he said that they were doing to our national morale, he had each of us write a letter to a soldier. To fire us up, he described the distant GIs as n.o.ble giants beset by tricky peasants too cowardly to fight them man-to-man. Instead, the fiends used b.o.o.by traps that fired poisoned shrapnel through our guys' feet or snared their boots in coiled vines and s.n.a.t.c.hed their bodies up into the tree-tops. The letter I wrote after hearing about these horrors was short and lazy. I a.s.sumed that the soldier it was addressed to would be dead by the time that it arrived.

Because it allowed him to talk about the war and other topics he found infuriating, Mr. Applebaum's favorite subject was social studies. At first the units were textbook-based, but later he dismissed the books as biased and adopted an informal approach using stories from the news. He emphasized student riots, gun control, and violent crimes committed by drug abusers, coming always to the same conclusions: American men were becoming "soft old ladies," young people weren't getting enough exercise, and no one knew the value of money. When he stopped ranting, he asked for our opinions, urging us to argue with him, but we knew better than to comply. We confined ourselves to asking questions formulated to inspire fresh diatribes. Most of these questions were asked by me, since few of my cla.s.smates followed current events and knew just which subjects (the Arabs, ecology, acid rock, Jane Fonda) were most likely to arouse him.

In return for playing to his obsessions, I expected good grades from Mr. Applebaum. I got them. But I didn't quite win him over. On the comment line of my first-quarter report card, and again in a parent-teacher conference, he remarked negatively on my "adjustment" and the quality of my "detail work." I felt betrayed. I also felt exposed. The charges seemed vague to me but also justified, pointing to a weakness in my makeup that I'd grown increasingly aware of. Something was missing in me. Some central element. Not intelligence but whatever guides intelligence. Self-discipline? I wasn't sure. What stung was that someone as nutty as Mr. Applebaum could see into me at all. I feared this meant that I was crazy, too.

In February, the man got worse. He became obsessed with Wounded Knee, a violent confrontation in South Dakota between a group of radical Indians and a squad of FBI men backed by armored vehicles and helicopters. Our social-studies units turned into updates about the developing situation. Shots fired from inside the compound. Fire returned from the perimeter. No casualties among the lawmen, an unknown number of wounded among the Sioux. As Mr. Applebaum described him, the Indians' leader, Russell Means, was a threat to the Const.i.tution, whatever that meant, as well as a secret ally of Russia. Photos of Means were pa.s.sed around the cla.s.s, presumably so we could focus our revulsion and maybe so we could spot him in a crowd should the Pine Ridge rebels break the cordon. Mr. Applebaum took this possibility seriously, and he encouraged us to do the same. South Dakota bordered Minnesota, also the home to many Indians.

"This thing might go national," he said one day.

When there was no news from the front, Mr. Applebaum strove to place the crisis in a wider, historical perspective. The Indians, he told us, were a proud, resourceful people who'd ruled the Great Plains from before the days of firearms, but when the white man entered the scene with his forged metal tools, conflict between the groups became inevitable. War was to history, he said, what rain was to a garden. Without it, society would wither. He praised the Indian fighters for their fierce spirit, but he lambasted them for not accepting defeat. America's tribes, he let us know, had never formally, legally surrendered. Having retreated to their reservations, they were still plotting a final campaign.

"We have tanks, though," a kid beside me said.

"But will we use them? Do we have the will?" Mr. Applebaum turned to me, his telepath. "Explain to Brian why today's Americans don't have the guts to use tanks on Indians."

"We don't work hard or get enough fresh air."

My complicity in these dialogues left me feeling dirty when the bell rang. Eager to breathe fresh air myself, I asked my father to take me fis.h.i.+ng one evening, a few days after the season opener. The frosty stone steps from our house down to the river demanded careful footwork as I followed him to our fibergla.s.s boat. We hadn't used it since last summer and it had deteriorated, like everything. My friends' parents' divorces were final now, the elms along Judd Street were mostly gone, and the b.u.mper-sticker plague had worsened, its slogans having grown blunter and more jolting (BACK OFF, a.s.sHOLE; STICK IT, TRICKY d.i.c.kY (BACK OFF, a.s.sHOLE; STICK IT, TRICKY d.i.c.kY!). No one went near the bandstand anymore because of a hypodermic needle that had been found in the gra.s.s beside its steps.

My father and I didn't say much on the river. We tried all our lures, from a silver-bellied Rapala to a rubber-skirted Hula Popper, but didn't attract any strikes. I didn't care. I liked staring at the moving water. It beat imagining letters to dead soldiers soaking up rain on the floors of Asian jungles. It beat hearing Mr. Applebaum describe the role of LSD and devil wors.h.i.+p in a recent California murder.

My father cast his Hula Popper. "How's school?"

"The same, pretty much. I'm doing fine."

"Comfortable yet with algebra?"

"Adjusting."

"How about that lunatic young teacher?"

I grinned. I hadn't realized my father knew.

"All he talks about is Wounded Knee."

My father cast his lure again. I didn't know which side he'd taken in the battle with the Indians. The government's, probably. He voted Republican. Then again, he'd grown a mustache last fall and let his sideburns creep longer and go all bushy.

"What does Applebaum think?" he asked me.

"Shoot them. They never surrendered. Make them pay."

My father fell silent, reeling in his lure. It spluttered noisily along the surface, meant to imitate a crippled minnow. The effect drove ba.s.s crazy, supposedly. Not tonight, though.

"They're Americans, too," my father finally said. I waited for him to say more, but that was it.

He yanked the cord on our Johnson outboard motor and headed down the river, away from town, toward the maze of sloughs we called Rice Lake. We'd be out for at least another two hours, this meant, in jackets too thin for the chill of springtime dusk, but I wasn't ready to go back. The water seemed safer than the land these days.

The Indians dropped their weapons soon after that and Mr. Applebaum wheeled in a TV set so we could enjoy the scenes of their surrender. Heads down, in handcuffs, lines of captives shuffled toward armored wagons, guarded by FBI agents with rifles. Mr. Applebaum paced the aisles between our desks and made a fist as the wagons rolled away, pulling dust clouds behind them down a straight dirt road.

"Walter, tell us something."

I didn't look up.

"Why is our nation safer and better off-socially, const.i.tutionally, in all ways-than it was at this time yesterday?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Oh, please. Come on."

But I couldn't do it, not this time. I was through, and my social-studies grade reflected it when I received my report card a month later. I didn't mind for once. I didn't care. I could afford this slipup, I decided, because there would probably never be another one. I wasn't brave. I just happened to be tired.

TO OUR PARENTS, WHO JUDGED PEOPLE BY THEIR ACTIONS rather than their looks, Mr. Hulbertson was a good man, a doer of many civic-minded deeds, but to us, his sixth-grade students, whose senses remained unclouded by notions of virtue, he was an ugly man with noxious breath. But that was just our first impression. As the school year went on and contact displaced impact, a few of us, and eventually a lot of us, revised our view of him. He wasn't ugly, he was loathsome. With his mouthful of stumpy, charred-looking gray teeth and his mildewed rag of lank black beard, he was abominable on every level, and what we'd initially thought of as his "bad breath" was neither rather than their looks, Mr. Hulbertson was a good man, a doer of many civic-minded deeds, but to us, his sixth-grade students, whose senses remained unclouded by notions of virtue, he was an ugly man with noxious breath. But that was just our first impression. As the school year went on and contact displaced impact, a few of us, and eventually a lot of us, revised our view of him. He wasn't ugly, he was loathsome. With his mouthful of stumpy, charred-looking gray teeth and his mildewed rag of lank black beard, he was abominable on every level, and what we'd initially thought of as his "bad breath" was neither his his, we discovered, nor truly breath breath, since it stank not only on the exhale but slightly prior to the inhale, when a breath isn't even a breath yet, only air.

"Forget about algebra today. It's time we discussed something real," he told the cla.s.s a month or two into the year. He put down the chalk stick he'd been using, grabbed an eraser, and wiped the blackboard clean with an abrupt and aggressive Z-shaped stroke that loosed flecks of gray dandruff from his beard.

"Those of you who read the paper," he said, "may have gotten wind of this already. The rest of you, I'll catch you up. Just recently, in one of our large cities, a handsome, healthy, athletic adult man decided that he'd prefer to be a female."

Mr. Hulbertson gave us time for questions then, but he was being premature since no one yet knew what he was talking about. When no questions were asked, he located his only stick of chalk that wasn't a splintered, snapped-off stub (he bore down like crazy when he used the stuff) and sketched on the board an enormous drooping curve that looked like a wind sock when there's no wind.

"I can make this whole business much clearer with a story. Sometimes a man at a restaurant or a bar will excuse himself to empty his bladder. He'll go to the restroom. He'll stand over a urinal. He'll guide his p.e.n.i.s through his open fly (let's be mature today; not his thing thing, his p.e.n.i.s) p.e.n.i.s) and as he's holding it and aiming his urine stream, he'll look down and think: this doesn't feel like and as he's holding it and aiming his urine stream, he'll look down and think: this doesn't feel like mine mine. Sometimes I wish I didn't even have have it. Sometimes I wish a surgeon could just it. Sometimes I wish a surgeon could just remove remove it and give me something else that feels more ... natural." it and give me something else that feels more ... natural."

I can't describe the cla.s.s's reaction because I was so absorbed in mine, which was to find myself wondering-intensely, after a lifetime of barely caring-if my Levi's were securely zipped.

Mr. Hulbertson reached out with his chalk and slashed a bold X through his p.e.n.i.s diagram. He'd turned it from a drawing into a diagram by labeling it "Adult Male Genitalia."

"The man wants to be a woman-he's made his mind up. No more acting. No more masquerading. If he has to, he'll do the surgery himself." himself."

Shockingly, a hand went up. It appeared at the far edge of my vision, and all I could see was the motion, not who made it. "He'd need to sterilize his knife and have a first aid kit with lots of gauze and iodine. He'd want a tube of sunburn cream for pain, but only if it was sterile and brand-new." The voice, it turned out, belonged to Jenny Johnson, who'd been campaigning for teacher's pet that year.

"I'm grateful. I thank you, Jenny," the monster said. His policy was to thank her for speaking up, pretty much no matter what she said, as a way of reproaching the rest of us for cowering at our desks. "At this point in history, fortunately," he said, "such risky procedures aren't necessary. Specialists can perform the operation in a modern hospital environment."

More time was bestowed on us for questions. None came. Our teacher sighed, a thin expulsion of vapor which, if it hit your face, could make your eyes sting. He shook his bulb-shaped, itchy-looking head, erased the p.e.n.i.s diagram, and carved a fresh equation into the blackboard, the tip of his chalk stick crumbling from the pressure.

Then, without pausing, he erased the numbers.

"Screw it-I'm not in the mood for math today. Independent reading time," he said. "I'm getting coffee in the lounge."

Once his absence had lasted a few minutes and had begun to feel dependable, a kid named Warren said, "He dreamed that up."

"How would you know?" a kid beside me asked him.

"Think about it. Use some common sense. There's doctors who'll cut off your c.o.c.k if you just ask?" ask?"

The discussion ended there. Afterward, I pretended it hadn't occurred. Then a week later, while standing in the lunch line, I got a whiff of sour, beard-stained air and felt a limp arm being laid across my shoulders. It was a left arm with a dangling hand that brushed against the breast pocket of my s.h.i.+rt, then inched its way between the top two b.u.t.tons, across the skin of my bare chest, and tweaked my left nipple with two chapped fingertips.

"Does that feel nice?"

"Mr. Hulbertson!"

He fled.

But he came back. When we returned to school the following morning, there he was again, standing by the door, taking attendance on a clipboard with streaks of what looked like egg yolk in his beard. It appeared there was no G.o.d. This left only our parents to protect us. A troubling thought. Our parents adored the man.

Ever since kindergarten, school and home had been very different places, but during my first semester with Mr. Hulbertson they became opposite opposite places, mirror worlds. Sometimes at dinner I'd watch my father eat while my left nipple, which had never recovered, p.r.i.c.kled and tingled beneath my s.h.i.+rt. How could he just sit there cutting his steak? How could my mother just stand there boiling broccoli? How did they manage to carry on at all without somehow sensing that their oldest son had spent his day imprisoned in a cla.s.sroom with someone whose hands roamed under students' clothes? places, mirror worlds. Sometimes at dinner I'd watch my father eat while my left nipple, which had never recovered, p.r.i.c.kled and tingled beneath my s.h.i.+rt. How could he just sit there cutting his steak? How could my mother just stand there boiling broccoli? How did they manage to carry on at all without somehow sensing that their oldest son had spent his day imprisoned in a cla.s.sroom with someone whose hands roamed under students' clothes?

"Has he chosen a play yet?" my mother asked me.

"It's between My Fair Lady My Fair Lady and and Tom Sawyer Tom Sawyer."'

My mother was referring to Mr. Hulbertson's annual sixth-grade musical comedy, a beloved inst.i.tution in Marine. Its rehearsal and production took several months, during which normal schoolwork was suspended. The play was supposed to represent a treat for kids, a kind of grade-school graduation present. It was also considered a gift to the community, due to its lavish, semiprofessional scale. Oliver! Oliver!, last year's show, had been a hit, running for three straight sold-out nights at the historic auditorium inside Marine's pioneer-era town hall. My family, like most families in town, attended all three shows to help recoup the cost of the spectacular. Those had been grueling, restless nights for me, tinged by a dread of the fraudulent hysteria that broke out every few minutes in the hall. Whenever someone's rouged-up son or daughter missed a note or flubbed a line, the crowd would burst forth with cras.h.i.+ng gaiety, stomping their feet and slapping their neighbors' backs, while Mr. Hulbertson, visible in the wings, pantomimed a look of pained perfectionism and dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief.

"No contest," my father said. "He'll choose Tom Sawyer Tom Sawyer. We're thirty miles from the Mississippi here, same basic landscape, almost the same town."

"The same as what?" I asked.

My father looked at my mother. She read, he didn't. "That place in Missouri, Millie."

"Hannibal."

"Interesting. Rhymes with 'cannibal,'" I said. I was giving them a clue. I didn't expect them to understand its meaning, but I wanted to get it out there in case something terrible happened later on.

After announcing the play would be Tom Sawyer Tom Sawyer, Mr. Hulbertson held tryouts for its two main roles.

"Toms should line up over here," he told the cla.s.s, "and all of you panting, blus.h.i.+ng little Beckys should gather up close here to my left."

An hour-long kissing compet.i.tion ensued. Mr. Hulbertson called each boy to stand in front of him and had the girls step forward one by one to let the boy embrace them and to embrace him back. Through a humiliating process of personalized coaching ("Greg, lean in more," "Diane, relax your torso," "Brian, let's have you stick that handsome chest out," "Open your mouth, Kim, you're not a snapping turtle!"), the six potential Tom-and-Becky pairs which Mr. Hulbertson deemed most "convincing" were isolated from the rest. None of the duos made sense to me. Two were composed of well-known enemies, one involved a freakish fat-and-thin match, and the other three seemed to be cruel experiments in emotional incompatibility.

Bitter scenes arose as the six couples were winnowed to a final three. Two of the Toms fell into a scuffle after having to swap their Beckys. When the fat Becky learned she wouldn't make the cut because her kissing style, as Mr. Hulbertson said, was "hesitant and indirect," she crossed her arms and sat down on the floor and vowed not to budge until he changed his mind. Moments later, Leslie, the cla.s.s beauty, wrested herself from the arms of the delinquent whose filthy mouth she'd been urged to stick her tongue in and ran off bawling to the lavatory. Sarah, her overdeveloped, shy best friend, who remained in compet.i.tion (paired with lucky me), was dispatched by our lecherous teacher to coax poor Leslie back into the torture chamber. When Sarah returned, she said Leslie wanted to talk to Paula, whom our teacher had matched with Brian, the schoolyard dreamboat, whom Leslie had a well-known crush on. Mr. Hulbertson said to Paula as she left: "Tell that brat to drag her sweet a.s.s back here and get with the f.u.c.king program. No more c.r.a.p."

As we waited for the mission to play out, Mr. Hulbertson gazed out the window in the fas.h.i.+on of an irritable genius let down by a world of silly dullards. When Sarah returned-alone, no Paula-he turned on his heels like an army officer and marched into the hall, trailed by everyone but Edward, a detached Jehovah's Witness. We gathered at the girls' room door, whose customary guarantee of privacy our teacher chose to respect, amazingly. He knocked on it, he spoke loud words through it, but he didn't touch its k.n.o.b, even when a fight broke out behind it that was audible all through the hall. Paper towels went screaming off their racks, curses were hurled, a trash can banged a wall, and Leslie screamed, "Brian's mine, you little witch!"

As everybody was bunching up to listen, I chanced to glance down and see my teacher's right hand plunged into a front pocket of Sarah's jeans. The hand wasn't still; it was grabbing around down there, stretching and distorting the tight denim. I lifted my gaze to Sarah's face, which seemed to be in the process of disappearing. Her eyes, squeezed shut, were little wrinkled patches, her cheeks were skin stuck flat to bone, and her nose had shriveled into a pink b.u.mp.

The door to the girls' room opened and the Beckys stepped forth as if nothing had happened, like perfect friends, though Leslie was pressing a bloodstained clump of toilet paper tight against her nostrils. Mr. Hulbertson spread his arms. They let him hug them. They walked back to the cla.s.sroom as a trio. Then the kissing tournament resumed. I was cut in the end, demoted from Tom to Huck, but I knew by then a lead role would probably require many hours of special rehearsal alone with the director, and I wasn't disappointed.

Two decades later, the night before the funeral, my mother sat in her kitchen and described to me Mr. Hulbertson's last day as a teacher. Responding to a complaint filed by a female student's mother, a deputy sheriff showed up in his cla.s.sroom and asked him into the hallway for a chat. When he returned, he crossed behind his desk to one of the tall windows that faced the playground, heaved it open, vaulted over the sill, and took off running past the jungle gyms toward the parking lot. Ten minutes later, a mile west of town, on the hill where the Soo Line freight trains ran, a diesel locomotive hit its brakes too late to avoid destroying the compact car parked in the middle of the tracks.

My mother predicted the funeral would be crowded and that the cause of Mr. Hulbertson's suicide, and even the fact that it was a suicide, would probably go unmentioned-"To spare his memory." Then I shared with her some of my own memories, as well as my disgust with my hometown. I suspect that such conversations were common that day, but I don't know. Perhaps the silence held. In any case, like most of my old cla.s.smates, I skipped the service. My mother reported afterward that even more people attended than she'd antic.i.p.ated and that the mood had been one of relief, of finally putting to rest a tortured soul. I set down my cup of coffee as she said this, rose from the kitchen table, left the house, and walked a few blocks to the town hall, a two-story white clapboard building with a bell tower, where I'd performed in Tom Sawyer Tom Sawyer as an eleven-year-old. Its doors were locked, both front and back, but I was able to climb over a gate and mount a staircase on the building's south side which led to a third door fitted with a window. I looked into the empty auditorium, at the century-old painted curtain in the front which depicted a summer river scene of paddlewheel steamboats sailing up a channel lined with leafy, overhanging trees. I thought back to the night I'd stood behind the curtain, huddling in the wings with Mr. Hulbertson as two of our cla.s.s's strongest boys tugged hand over hand on a stout rope, revealing, in one continuous, long motion, an audience made up of everyone I knew. Their faces were smiling, their postures straight and patient, and on their laps and in their hands were white paper programs printed with all of our names. as an eleven-year-old. Its doors were locked, both front and back, but I was able to climb over a gate and mount a staircase on the building's south side which led to a third door fitted with a window. I looked into the empty auditorium, at the century-old painted curtain in the front which depicted a summer river scene of paddlewheel steamboats sailing up a channel lined with leafy, overhanging trees. I thought back to the night I'd stood behind the curtain, huddling in the wings with Mr. Hulbertson as two of our cla.s.s's strongest boys tugged hand over hand on a stout rope, revealing, in one continuous, long motion, an audience made up of everyone I knew. Their faces were smiling, their postures straight and patient, and on their laps and in their hands were white paper programs printed with all of our names.

Thrilling. Astonis.h.i.+ng. It couldn't help but be.

Then my teacher touched one of my shoulders and I flinched.

"Tonight," he whispered to me and those around me as we peered out through our makeup at our town, "be proud of yourselves. That's all I ask. Is everyone ready?"

We touched our costumes, nodded.

"Terrific," he said. "Now go put on a show!"

MY FATHER HAD A SPELL. HE QUIT 3M. HE DECIDED America's future lay out West, moved the family to Phoenix in a U-Haul, flew off to Tampa to watch his own dad die, lost weight, lost his marbles, opened the Yellow Pages, turned to a page headed "Churches," and called the Mormons. They came over right away. They came in the form of a pair of clean-cut missionaries with clip-on neckties and wrinkle-free white s.h.i.+rts. They asked us to kneel. They asked us to do a lot of things. There were also some things they asked us not to do. For me, the main one was to not touch myself. When we understood all the instructions, we were baptized. Then, a month later, my father bought some wine, which was one of the things he'd been asked not to do. His att.i.tude was: "The h.e.l.l with it." Ours was: "Oh, G.o.d, what's going to happen now?" especially after my father lost his new job and called the Mayflower moving people. They parked a semitrailer in front of our house and loaded it full of our belongings, but my father couldn't tell them where to take them. He couldn't decide where we should move. He said he had a good feeling about Idaho, but he also retained a fondness for Minnesota. The Mayflower people grew impatient, padlocked the trailer that held our stuff, detached the cab, and drove the cab away. America's future lay out West, moved the family to Phoenix in a U-Haul, flew off to Tampa to watch his own dad die, lost weight, lost his marbles, opened the Yellow Pages, turned to a page headed "Churches," and called the Mormons. They came over right away. They came in the form of a pair of clean-cut missionaries with clip-on neckties and wrinkle-free white s.h.i.+rts. They asked us to kneel. They asked us to do a lot of things. There were also some things they asked us not to do. For me, the main one was to not touch myself. When we understood all the instructions, we were baptized. Then, a month later, my father bought some wine, which was one of the things he'd been asked not to do. His att.i.tude was: "The h.e.l.l with it." Ours was: "Oh, G.o.d, what's going to happen now?" especially after my father lost his new job and called the Mayflower moving people. They parked a semitrailer in front of our house and loaded it full of our belongings, but my father couldn't tell them where to take them. He couldn't decide where we should move. He said he had a good feeling about Idaho, but he also retained a fondness for Minnesota. The Mayflower people grew impatient, padlocked the trailer that held our stuff, detached the cab, and drove the cab away.