Professionally, my “teaching” amounted to no more than speaking pointlessly into a din while babysitting young adults too old to need minding, but I was still determined to address the educational shortfall in our own home. Halfway through third grade, Lucy was making no headway on learning to read. I didn’t care if she wasn’t interested, or if her school wasn’t interested. I was interested. For all the digital whathaveyou in which our citizenry was immersed, even online you still had to be able to tell the difference between F-A-C-E-B-O-O-K and T-W-I-T-T-E-R. No daughter of mine was going to be raised illiterate.
Yet during our weekend tutoring sessions Lucy had become fiercely oppositional. No matter how much I sweetened these lessons with healthy treats and leavened instruction with games, Lucy dug in her heels, as if every ort of learning she digested despite herself was a point lost. Clearly, her school was reflecting on a micro level the same aggressive anti-intellectualism that was spreading through every American sphere. To know anything was to make a claim of superiority in relation to anyone who didn’t know it, and therefore to risk pariah status as a fathead. Lucy continued to bring home a variety of deformed crafts projects, but no books.
Besides, I may have given the wrong impression about my youngest. She was in no way exceptionally slow. If nothing else, she possessed a slyness whose relationship to IQ could be a bit tangential. I suspected that she was indeed learning to read whether she liked it or not, but that she applied all that cleverness to hiding her own mastery. She wasn’t remotely stupid, but she was a mastermind at pretending to be. This tussle over tutoring resembled the often unavailing parental force-feeding of children who are anorexic. When I refused to release her until she wrote out every letter of h-o-u-s-e, she’d resentfully comply in the end. But in our next session, she’d go right back to feigning that she couldn’t spell the structure we lived in, much as the self-starved who’ve been bullied into finishing their tiny meals will run to the bathroom to throw up.
I’m not a perfect person, much less a perfect mother. So I sometimes grew short. “You’re a phony little brat!” I exploded in February. “We’ve read this same story over and over, enough times for you to have memorized it, and you probably have! I can understand students who pretend to have studied their lessons when they haven’t, but I am dumbfounded why anyone would fake being—incapable!” I was trying to watch my language, though I shouldn’t have said “dumbfounded,” at whose mention Lucy’s eyes narrowed to accusatory slits. But this was hardly the way I wanted to spend my own Saturday afternoon. In fairness, much of my frustration was misdirected at my daughter, because I was paying substantial property taxes for this municipality to educate my children, and I wasn’t getting my money’s worth.
“Now, please,” I continued more calmly. “Write out one short sentence for me. Just one. Then we can quit for the day.”
Sure enough, Lucy wrote shakily but discernibly in her notebook, “mi mome iz meen.”
Well, I told you that Lucy is wily, and she obviously wanted our tutoring sessions to stop. When finally she made her move, she’d bided her time for many months, and the ability to delay gratification—think that classic marshmallow test—is supposedly one of the signs of a high IQ. So when I received a letter from Pennsylvania’s Child Protective Services, I had to wonder whether I’d underestimated my younger daughter’s intelligence by a good measure.
Emory urged me to take our “home visit” more seriously than I was inclined to at first, because I considered the prospect of a social worker intruding on our stable, middle-class, two-parent home the height of farce. Social workers were for alcoholic single mothers on food stamps whose children got their only hot nourishment through free school meals. Social workers were for the world of juvenile delinquency, intermittent homelessness, and families with multiple fathers, all of whom were in prison—a world with which I was familiar only via soulful television miniseries. But I inferred from my best friend’s outsize alarm that maybe Emory was better positioned to have a finger on the pulse than a cloistered literature instructor, especially now that she was in television journalism and therefore in the way of those relentlessly unpleasant stories on the news. So when Emory offered to sit in on the meeting as a “character witness,” I thought she was being overcautious, but I accepted the offer.
Emory arrived early, looking “nice” rather than sexy, and she immediately marched me into our bedroom to get out of my jeans and sneakers and into a skirt and pumps. “And do yourself a favor,” she advised. “Let me do as much of the talking as possible.”
Wade had also warned me the night before that our daughter was not the only member of this household who had a problem with being “oppositional,” and he’d implored me to be warm, cooperative, and “onside.” Don’t talk back, he’d ordered. Don’t get defensive and don’t contradict. Most of all, don’t get mad. I was nonplussed by how no one seemed to trust me to behave like a grown-up.
Because officialdom didn’t want to put children “on the spot,” the appointment was scheduled for while the kids were in school. My head was crowded with clichés, so when I met this perfectly reasonable, rational-seeming woman in her midtwenties at the door, I was relieved that Sonia Whitehead—herself wearing jeans and sneakers—didn’t seem especially strict, suspicious, or judgmental. Still, she was just young enough to have earned her professional qualifications while the last great civil rights fight was being waged. At a glance, too, she belonged to that strangely populous category of young women whose symmetrical, proportionate features were all in the right place yet who, for dismayingly subtle aesthetic reasons, didn’t qualify as pretty. Perhaps this constituted the very class of females who went into social work.
“It’s so good of you to take time out of your busy workday for our family,” I gushed, as if she were doing us a favor. “But I assure you whatever this is about, it’s clearly a misunderstanding.”
“Yes,” Sonia said with careful neutrality. “Most of my cases start out as misunderstandings.” In retrospect, we may have differed on which party didn’t get it.
Before I had a chance to introduce my character witness, Sonia had walked into the living room and stuck out her hand. “Good lord, Emory Ruth!” she exclaimed. “I watch your show on YouTube every week!”
I may have turned a blind eye to Emory’s broadcasts, but she had mentioned casually that the clips from New York One posted online were racking up hundreds of thousands of hits per episode. Increasingly when we walked together down the street, strangers smiled or waved. Now I better understood why Emory wanted to be present. She was perceived as an MP true believer, and the association would make Wade and me look good.
“I’m only here as a longtime friend of the family,” Emory said. “In the hope that I can assure you Lucy is being raised in a caring, supportive environment. I know better than most how passionately Pearson and Wade cherish every person’s special wisdom. But it’s always great to meet another fan.”
No one wanted tea. I offered to show Sonia around our home, declaring gleefully, “No infestations of rats! No black mold! No whole rooms filled to the ceiling with hoarded newspapers and dirty deli containers! No kidnapped neighbors manacled to heating pipes in the basement!” Okay, I was nervous and may have been a little manic. I figured I could jovially corral this woman into seeing our misunderstanding as comical. I was staying onside. But Emory shot me a rigid shake of the head.
“That won’t be necessary,” said Sonia. “I’m not here about mold.”
“My friend Pearson is just a little anxious, as you would be, too, in her place,” Emory explained. “She cares fervently about her daughter and wants nothing more than to allay your concerns. She’d also welcome any professional advice on how to be an even better mother.”
Wade had promised to take a break from his current job to demonstrate shared involvement in our daughter’s welfare, though it didn’t help that he arrived ten passive-aggressive minutes late covered head to toe in mulch and sawdust. I could tell from his silent nod and stiff posture when we all sat down that he wasn’t going to be much use. This was exactly the kind of encounter with authority that he went out of his way to avoid. He remained perfectly still and quiet as if huddling in a hunting hide, trying not to startle the local fauna.
I nattered on about how Wade and I had been together for over ten years and although we’d never got married that was just a matter of, you know, not ever remembering to get around to it and though he had also never formally adopted Darwin and Zanzibar that was also just inattention or procrastination . . . Sonia waited patiently for me to run out of steam.
“The report from the Mental Parity Champion at Gertrude Stein Primary is quite grave,” she said, lifting the file folder in her lap. State and local government agencies were still notoriously dependent on paper documents and even fax machines. “Lucy confided that her own mother called her the D-word.”
“Which D-word?” I asked. “There are lots of them.”
“You keep lists in your head of slurs that begin with the same letter?”
“No, it’s just . . .” I backed off. “There’s something about the letter ‘D.’ It’s associated with . . . I guess it’s that thudding sound. It’s kind of weird.”
“All that matters is the word is harsh,” Sonia said. “The department has strict guidelines on this point. Use of language of such a derogatory character with minors is classified as child abuse. We take verbal laceration as seriously as we do the physical kind. The scars are less visible but, if anything, longer-lasting. We’re especially concerned when parents lash out at a child as young as Lucy. The remark as Lucy recounted it was exceptionally destructive, too, because it depreciated her intelligence in comparison to her supposedly smarter siblings. I can’t think of a better formula for crippling a vulnerable child’s sense of self, setting siblings against one another, and destroying family cohesion. This episode alone is potentially grounds for removing a child to foster care.”
“Hold on here,” I said, sitting up. “Who said anything about removal?”
“Maybe I can help,” Emory intervened. “Ms. Whitehead, I was here during the ‘episode’ that seems to have sparked this investigation. We three adults were talking among ourselves. Lucy had long before gone to bed, and the other two children were upstairs. Pearson was sharing her concern that because Lucy processed information in a slightly untraditional manner, she was in danger of being persecuted by her classmates as . . . Well, as you noted, Pearson did use the D-word, or”—Emory shot me a confected smile—“a D-word. Though honestly? I don’t remember her saying anything about the older two children in comparison. I’m sure you’re highly trained in psychology, so you of all people must know how touchy kids can get about this kind of rivalry. I wouldn’t be surprised if a little history between the three of them could have, well, influenced Lucy’s recollection. We don’t want siblings to compare themselves to one another, but they do.
“Unfortunately, Lucy woke up and came into the kitchen at the tail end of Pearson’s expression of concern. Lucy clearly misinterpreted what she only partially overheard. Maybe our mistake was not clarifying at the time that no one, least of all her own mother, was actually aiming that terrible word at this adorable and thoroughly capable little girl. In fact, I blame myself. Instead, we kept chatting, and Wade took Lucy back to bed. We blithely assumed that if she’d gotten in on much of our conversation, she’d probably heard enough to get the context.”
“Why was Ms. Converse using the D-word—or a D-word—in the first place?” Sonia inquired.
Emory sighed with a practiced theatricality. “Ms. Whitehead, I deal with this issue in the workplace all the time. It’s true that to my great personal relief, our peers and, more importantly, our nation’s children are no longer casually brutalized by vicious, medically unfounded labels that can permanently devastate their self-esteem. We’ve all turned a huge social corner. But to be fair? It seems as if we’ve always thought this way, but by the calendar we didn’t come to our senses all that long ago. Older Americans grew up during a time when this kind of coarse, defamatory language was not only commonplace but acceptable. We’ve all tried to inculcate a more civilized vocabulary. We all appreciate that our old ways of talking about others were terribly hurtful. But after decades of slovenly speech hygiene, those filthy habits die hard. We sometimes slip up. Why, I’ve caught myself calling myself one of those words from time to time, in frustration under my breath. You know, ‘Oh, Emory, you so-and-so!’ In fact, I did a whole editorial on that topic last month, urging everyone to stop insulting their own intelligence. In some ways, that’s the last frontier. Still, I can assure you that I come to this house all the time. I socialize with this wonderful family and this wonderful couple all the time. They’re respectful. They embrace cognitive egalitarianism. The kind of language Lucy overheard that night almost never gets an airing here, and in this case the lapse was only due to anxiety on Lucy’s behalf. Such a lapse is very, very rare. If Pearson ever lets a word like that slip out, she immediately apologizes, and she hardly ever has reason to.”
“And she’s sorry now,” Wade said, looking at me pointedly. “Right?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah what?” Wade said.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry now,” I said. “I’ve felt nothing but regret and despair for four solid years.”
“But Lucy’s version of the verbal climate in this household isn’t ‘respectful’ or ‘egalitarian,’” Sonia said. “Lucy told the MPC a string of colorful invective that she hears, it would seem, constantly in the home. Reading the report made me blush.”
“Might little girls sometimes exaggerate?” Emory proposed. “Unfortunately, these expressions haven’t been expunged from the schoolyard. When you suppress hate, it often goes underground and then squirts back up like crude oil. Lucy could have learned those words any number of places.”
“Are you calling Lucy a liar?” Sonia asked.
“Lucy can be—a bit of an imp.” Emory’s word choice was judicious. “Imp” was laced with affection.
Doubtless thrilled to be engaging with a television personality, Sonia turned to address me, the real subject of the state’s concern, with reluctance. “Ms. Converse, I’m afraid there’s more damning testimony in this report. The MPC infers from Lucy’s stories of what you call ‘tutorials’ that you’re ‘browbeating’ your little girl on weekends with information you’re intent on shoving down the poor girl’s throat; also, that you berate your daughter when she doesn’t process this information in exactly the fashion you require. Lucy claims to be kept captive for hours on end, never allowed anything to eat or even to go to the bathroom, and she says she’s released only when she reproduces information in a form that’s to your satisfaction—often through her tears.”
“Lucy is embellishing somewhat,” I said. “Our tutorials sometimes last up to one hour. I provide snacks. Lucy is free to go to the bathroom whenever she needs to. I’m teaching my daughter to read. Does the state now regard that as child abuse, too?”
“If this private obsession of yours is pursued in the manner Lucy describes? Yes. We at CPS are worried that your parenting is too rigid, and you’re not allowing your daughter to be wise in her own way.”
“I’m not allowing her to be ignorant in her own way, that’s for sure,” I said.
“What Pearson means,” Wade intruded again, “is she promises to quit the tutoring.”
I turned to my partner in incredulity. “Excuse me?”
“Isn’t that what you meant?” Wade pressed, staring me down. “That you’re going to totally give up on teaching Lucy anything. So she’ll be free to be wise in her own way.”
I harrumphed back in my chair. “Seriously?”
“Maybe Wade has a point,” Emory said delicately. “The extracurricular sessions . . . don’t seem to be going that well. Maybe giving them a rest would be . . . prudent. And it might improve your relationship with Lucy. You could spend the time instead . . . baking. Make some cookies.”
“Emory, even baking would entail teaching her to measure a cup of flour,” I said.
“Then let her measure flour in her own way,” Emory pleaded.
“So I’m supposed to raise a wild animal,” I muttered.
“What did you say?” Sonia asked.
“Pearson said, ‘So I’m supposed to raise a wise antelope,’” Emory clarified. “Lucy is always leaping and cavorting. Gracefully. Like an antelope.”
Sonia looked at us back and forth mistrustfully, then turned to formally address me and Wade. “There’s more than enough evidence in this report to justify placing Lucy in a more nurturing environment. But I’m heartened by wholesome social influences here. Lucy’s lucky to enjoy the counsel of an opinion former like Emory Ruth, who’s widely admired as a moral beacon. So I guess for now, I’m going to recommend a wait-and-see approach. Ms. Converse, per standard practice, you’ll be required to complete a course in Cerebral Acceptance and Semantic Sensitivity—at your own expense. I’d also agree with you, Mr. Haavik, that these weekend browbeatings have to stop. And I should warn you both that this case isn’t closed. If Lucy or, for that matter, anyone else reports additional red flags, foster care wouldn’t be only one option. It would probably be the preferred option.”
We saw her out. Wade waited a cautious beat before announcing, “Well, dodged that bullet. For now.” He touched my arm. “And no thanks to you.”
“I’m supposed to apologize for maintaining even a modicum of self-respect?”
“You bet,” Wade said. “In that situation? They’re threatening to take one of our fucking kids away? We can’t afford your self-respect.”
“Wade’s right, I’m afraid,” Emory said. “The name of that game was contrition. At which you don’t exactly shine, Pearson, my dear.”
“I thought I exercised admirable self-control!” I protested.
“In that case, I’d hate to see you lose it,” Wade said.
After we debriefed with a pot of coffee, I said goodbye to Emory on the front porch. “You’ve been rescuing me since I was sixteen!” I exclaimed, clutching her in a bear hug. “Thank you, thank you. I’d never have come out of that interrogation with all three of our children without your help. And I thought you were weak on foreign languages. Thank God it turns out you speak fluent horseshit.”
Wade remained behind a few minutes after Emory left, and it was jarring to find being in the same room with a man I’d lived with for a decade so cut-it-with-a-knife uncomfortable. I was too grateful for the coffee dishes to clear off, but Wade said sternly, “Leave them.” For once, Mr. Avoidance wasn’t eager for distraction.
“This isn’t just offending a dinner guest or assigning a book that’ll ram a cattle prod up your students’ asses,” he said. “This is on a whole other level.”
“Look, I know, I know, I don’t need a lecture—”
“I’m not sure you do know.”
I sheltered behind a hand at the side of my face, so that Wade wouldn’t see if I started to cry. “This may be all my fault, but please don’t blame me. Not right now. I can’t bear it. If only we were living in a sane world, this would never—”
“Sane or not, it’s the only world we’ve got.” He wasn’t softening. “There aren’t many things you might do that I couldn’t forgive you for, but if Lucy—”
“Are you threatening me?”
“It’s not a threat but a fact. The way things are. What’s also a fact is from now on you’re going to be perfect. And not in your terms. In theirs.”
Wade returned stiffly to his tree-removal job. Once Lucy got off the bus, I let her tear around the house to exhaust herself before finally luring her to the kitchen table with a glass of root beer and a plate of Fig Newtons. I didn’t allow the kids much sugar, and I worried too late that the snack might appear a reward for the last behavior I sought to reinforce. I felt strangely leery of my own daughter, fussing over fetching her a napkin by way of putting off our little talk. It was dawning on me that our family was now hostage to the caprices of an eight-year-old, as if we were trapped in a harrowing episode of The Twilight Zone.
“Lucy?” I pulled up a chair while she stuffed her face with a cookie. “Did you know that a lady came by today to talk to us about you? The lady was afraid you might feel sad or hurt.”
“My MPC said they’d make you be nice to me,” Lucy said through the crumbs.
“You don’t think we’re nice to you?”
“You’re not.”
Lucy had an adversarial relationship with her mother because I was the only person in her life who made her do anything she didn’t want to. “It’s true that our story times are sometimes hard. But later, I think you’ll be really glad that you can read signs, and web pages, and even whole books, instead of only seeing a bunch of lines and circles that don’t make any sense. It doesn’t always feel that way, but I am being nice to you, Lucy. Almost nicer than anybody.”
“My MPC said I won’t have tuna-royals anymore. She said they were brown beatings.”
“Well, we don’t have to keep having lessons on weekends if you don’t want to. But you may be sorry later. It’s much easier to learn to read when you’re little than when you get older.”
“I’m not that little.”
“Yes, I’m starting to appreciate you’re a lot more grown up than I thought,” I said. “But here’s the thing. You might not realize that when you complain to your MPC, it can get very serious. Do you like living here? Do you like living with me and Daddy and your brother and sister?”
“Darwin and Zanzbar think they’re better than me.”
“Come on. They’re just older. When you get bigger, you’ll catch up with them.” (No, she wouldn’t.) “But answer me. Do you want to stay in our house?”
Lucy may have had her problems with me, but she was ferociously attached to her father, whose ankle she loved to wrap herself around while he walked her across the room. “I guess,” Lucy said reluctantly.
“Then it’s probably better if you don’t tell your MPC there’s anything wrong. If you’re unhappy about anything, then you should come straight to me or Daddy. Because I don’t want to scare you, but the lady who came today can take you away from us.”
“I know,” Lucy said blithely, grabbing another Newton.
I was extremely surprised that the authorities would have shared with a child herself any talk about “removal,” which seemed emotionally cavalier. Such institutional sloppiness indicated a level of casualness possible only if children were now plucked from their homes because of what Emory called poor “speech hygiene” all the time.
“If they did take you away,” I said, “we’d all be very sad. I think you’d be sad. Someday I’ll tell you about it, but I got separated from my family when I was a teenager, and it definitely made me sad.” Sad enough that even at forty-two I seldom allowed myself to think about it.
Lucy wasn’t interested in my sob story. Besides, she seemed intent on reestablishing who was in control here. “You say tons of wrong words. S-words and I-words and D-words and ‘IQ.’ My MPC said that means you’re a hate person. She said I should tell her whenever you say wrong words. And then you’ll get in trouble.”
When Wade came home and could keep an eye on Lucy, I slipped upstairs to knock on Darwin’s door, behind which he and his sister were conferring in the usual hushed tones. Standing in the doorway—heaven forbid my own children would invite me in—I laid out the situation, trying not to alarm them but being somber enough that they’d take seriously what was at stake.
“Ever consider,” Darwin said after I’d described Sonia Whitehead’s visit, “that maybe you should let them put Lucy in foster care?”
“Darwin, that’s a terrible thing to say!” I exclaimed. “She’s your sister!”
“Half sister,” Darwin said. “And she feels more like a quarter sister. Or a not sister.”
“Lucy spies on us,” Zanzibar said.
“Well, maybe if you weren’t so secretive,” I said, “she wouldn’t have to. She can’t help the fact that she’s still a little girl. When you get older, take it from me: you’ll be grateful to have another sibling you’re in touch with and get on with.”
“Gosh, I can hardly wait.” Darwin was developing a sour side I didn’t care for. “Kids like Lucy don’t change.”
“Your younger sister has been surrounded by this Mental Parity twaddle from kindergarten,” I said. “She doesn’t know any other way of thinking, and she has no reason to imagine there’s anything dubious or malign in what she’s taught. It’s not her fault. I try to expose her to a more traditional perspective, but nothing I say will drown out the chorus of the whole world.”
“She’s a type,” Zanzibar said. “It’s bad enough there’re so many of them at school without coming home to another snitch.”
“I’m afraid that’s related to the main point I wanted to underscore with you two,” I said, keeping my voice down. “Because we’re all going to have to watch the mouth. Even at home, okay? That goes for me and your dad, too. No ‘stupid this’ or ‘dopey that.’ Only say in the house what you’d be comfortable saying in public. If it gets back to the authorities that we make ‘hateful’ and ‘bigoted’ remarks at home, they could snatch your sister from this house in a matter of days.”
At a singsong behind me in the hallway—“Uh-uuuh!”—I jumped. Lucy was indeed getting good at creeping up on people. “Not only me-ee!”
“What are you talking about?” I snapped.
Lucy announced with satisfaction, “My MPC says they can send Darwin and Zanzbar to forest care, too.”