The Best Thing That Could Have Happened

The next afternoon the girl without a school is back in the parlor sitting at the piano, wearing just her robe, her dance tights, and ballet slippers. She is passing the time of day trying to get the change right in Dollar Down Blues when the baby-sitter comes in waving a letter and a refund check certifying Gloria’s discharge from Saint Bernard’s.

“They made it official, Baby, you’re expelled. When you were young you were good, but I swear you’re getting worse with age. When you get in trouble it looks bad for me, as if old Laudette didn’t raise you right. Look here, Mrs Twinkler put it in writing. She says your mental health may not be so good, and that you should be professionally evaluated. Now what am I supposed to do with you? Expelled! No easy feat in a school that charges such undue tuition. Baby, I’m afraid I’m going to have to find a private reform school for you, where spoiled little rich brats go to have their screws tightened.”

Gloria puts her head down while her sitter reads her the riot act, and she sweats when she hears the threat of reform school, but doesn’t let Laudette see it. “Lawdy,” she says calmly, with exasperation in her voice, “are you through? You’ve got to stop worrying about me. Didn’t the doctor tell you it’s what’s giving you those warts on your feet? Getting kicked out of school is the best thing that could have happened to me. Why do I need to go to school? I’m not ignorant, am I? We’re rich. Why can’t we hire a tutor to tell the state I’m keeping up with my work at home?”

Miss Lord knows Gloria can read and write and figure, and what the girl doesn’t know about history, geography and science she more than makes up for with her special appreciation of the arts. “No, Baby, you’re too darn smart, that’s the problem. You think you know it all. There’s other things that school teaches you, things you can’t learn from yourself.”

“Like what?”

Although Laudette has only a sixth grade education she knows the answer. “Like how to get along with other people, that’s what!”

The queen-to-be bops her head to the beat of a new generation and is aware of sounds to come, harmonies and progressions that reject the conventional and fly way-out, like a bird off a limb. Ideas whose times have come put their light in many minds simultaneously. Without ever reading modern philosophy, Glory knows what a pain in the ass other people can be. “Lawdy, as far as I’m concerned other people are hell. They’re all about meetings, ceremonies, churches, corporations, schools, nationalist states. Put people together and they race around like rats, ruining the peace and quiet of the natural world. Look at these damned Nastis. They’re trouble because they’re so well organized. Daddy-o once told me a great man said, ‘Civilization is a thing society will never achieve.’ And I believe it. You always told me Emanual said we’d be better off like children or goofing off all the time like lilies of the field, didn’t you? And I read in The Good Book myself that other people won’t be judged for my life, only I will. You’re too goddamn good, Lawdy. Now tell the truth, weren’t you happier when you were taking care of the hot seven than you are now worrying about about how I do in school or whether the staff is working or going to hell? You can lose your soul by worrying about things that don’t matter.”

Well spoken, young anarchist. Like the devil she can even use Scriptures to get her point across. The baby-sitter is not so blinded by self-assuredness that she cannot admit that there is something in what Gloria is saying, even though she doesn’t like some of the words she uses to say it. “Well for the time being, while I’m thinking about it, I’ll call up a tutor agency and get you one. But you have to promise to get properly dressed and stay that way, and read some books and magazines about the world around you.”

Gloria starts breathing easier. When Laudette leaves, she skips up and down the keyboard, singing and counting the quarter notes in the Dollar Down Blues.