RUMOR SPREAD IN the Valley about the Girl in the Reading Trance. There was a girl, it seemed, who couldn’t get herself out of her book. She sat in the front of the school bus and sometimes she waved to her classmates as they got on and off, but she herself didn’t move, and though she recognized them as they came and went, she could not make further contact with them.
At night while the others slept in their beds, the girl stayed on the bus in the bus field, and the next day she would wave to her classmates again. Only when the book was over did she get up and stretch her legs a little and get off the bus and look at the stars. Then the girl, lost in the book, accompanied by her dog Shimmer, would jump and play and run by the river.
The next morning the girl would begin another book, and even though it was the same book, each time she read it, a different story emerged, or something she had not seen before came to the fore—for the right book and the right girl are endlessly replenishing. It was the magic of the girl and the book. The children grew old and were replaced by other children, who passed her and waved and grew old, but the girl in the book was eternal and eternally new, and forever all things were possible.
THE PIANO TEACHER arrived all right angles and flying hair, and the child immediately adored her. The piano teacher stood stern over the child and divided the air into beats and measured phrases, and the silence was flooded with music and numbers and beauty. On some occasions, the piano teacher had to stop the child from getting up and dancing. She pressed with her long fingers on the child’s shoulders every time it looked like she might rise up.
More and more the mother felt she had to struggle to stay alive in any room, but not in the room filled with music and the child crooning and the lithe fingers of the piano teacher. In that room for a moment all human genius moved through the child, who was belting out the Ode to Joy as she shimmied on the bench.
The piano teacher revered the great composers and had spent a lifetime with them. The child recognized this from the moment she had stepped into the house. Like the great river, it was a privilege to sit next to her. She handed the child Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, a child’s version of Mozart to play. Some things vanish, the mother thought, but not all. A few things will never die.
And one day, the teacher said, she would teach her to play Bach.
AT FIRST ALL the children flocked to the side of the tiny crushed girl who was their classmate. In a matter of a weekend she had gone from a tiny, running, laughing girl to a tiny crushed girl in the hospital. The first word had been in the form of a cry heard ringing through the stables. One of her horsey classmates had gotten the news first.
The helicopter came and took the girl away. She had fallen off an enormous horse. As if that were not bad enough, the enormous horse had then fallen and landed on top of her. Word from the hospital where she lay in a world of white was that there was to be one operation and the possibility, sometime later, of another. After a long time, the girl returned to school and the children fought to be near her, to wheel her around the periphery of things and to slip her sweets. They knocked each other down trying to get to the little broken girl first.
Later the children learned from the tiny girl that before she had gotten on the enormous horse for the last time, she had developed a fear of horses, a horse phobia, but her mother urged her back anyway because that is what one did in a new country such as this. The mother who was from a different, sadder country encouraged the girl to get back on the horse, as it was, she said, the American Way. In her first country, it would have been okay not to get on the horse again, but here it was not an option. This made it all the worse, somehow.
And it was only a matter of time before the children tired of the tiny crushed girl—in part because it is how children are, always ready to move on to the next thing, and in part because the tiny girl in her crushedness was becoming a tyrant. No one could give her what she wanted, which was two legs walking again, and so she would demand other things, and after a while when the children saw the big, slowly moving wheels of the wheelchair, they would pivot away and run in the opposite direction before the tiny girl could spot them. Increasingly it was only the girl, her mother, the teacher, and a tiny horse, which had somehow insinuated its way onto the crushed girl’s lap.
In the solitary, increasingly hostile place she finds herself, she tries to recall a time only a short while ago when she felt impervious to pain. In her mind she goes out into the fields in search of an echo from her other life. She works to recall when she had friends for real, and there was pliable ground. Pity this suddenly isolated, crushed child. She yearns for the time before her mother failed her, the time when she ran in the field with the others, the times before she was not broken or crushed—still a whole girl.
THE TEACHER DESPISED the children, a fact that the mother was well aware of, and now the first Parent-Teacher Conference was upon them. The mother entered the room and sat in the small chair and waited for the teacher to speak. All was silent. She had drained the room of all ambient sound so she might hear more precisely every word the teacher had to say.
The teacher believed it was her task to point out what she perceived as the weakness in each of the children and locate it for the parent. She would call one child disingenuous, another dimwitted, yet another ingratiating. She despised each child in his or her own unique way, and she was determined to find a way to slip this disdain casually into the conference, as they sat across from the other on the small chairs. Gleefully the teacher would wait for the perfect chance, the exact right place so as to create the maximum possible shame in the parent. It was this utterly mesmerizing moment in each conference that the teacher lived for; it transfixed and sustained her.
The mother sat silently waiting for the inevitable pronouncement, but while she waited, she isolated the skinny, mean-spirited teacher on the ever-darkening stage of her psyche. Soon in the quiet, the teacher began choking on a fishbone and was forced to excuse herself. While the mother waited, she focused on the small Bunsen burner in the back of the classroom.
When the teacher returned, the mother began her polite inquiry. Where most parents were rendered helpless in the face of the teacher, the mother enjoyed such encounters, as she was not reluctant to assign the word evil where it applied. Identified as such, the mother serenely proceeded.
Woe to the teacher who abuses her station, the mother thought to herself. A teacher possesses great power and so had to be held to a more rigorous standard than others in the community, and as such, a teacher’s trespasses when they come are far greater than most of the trespasses of others. She holds a child’s life and self-esteem in her hands, and as a result, a teacher must always be prepared to pay. Please rise, the mother commanded her, and the teacher, caught off-guard, got to her feet.
Isolated that way and standing against a blackboard, the mother took away her poker and eraser, her pink slips, her dunce caps, her reason to be. Woe to the teacher who abuses her station. It is unpleasant, the mother thought, but sometimes necessary, to watch an entire teacher go up in flames. For a moment the teacher stepped behind Miss Archway, the headmistress, her firewall, who had come in to help, but alas, to no avail.
NO ONE KNEW why the South American doctor had appeared in the Valley and was sitting on a twirling seat at the diner next to the mother and child unless it was to deliver his soliloquy, which he now did. He was one of those Doctors without Borders doctors, and he did not know what he would do now that he had seen what he had seen in the borderless world.
The Doctor without Borders on the swivel seat in the diner seemed to be spinning faster and faster when the mother finally looked up from her teacup and said, look, slow down. He seemed more hyperactive child than doctor, and she imagined after all he had been through that he was probably going mad. Clearly he had spent a long time in the various denizens of disease throughout the world. He could not look at this child without seeing the other children, the ones with hallucinations and deliriums and fevers and tremors, wide fluctuations of pulse and blood pressure—everywhere he saw their seizures, their delusions: their fear of water and their fear of air. The ones said to be possessed by demons, the ones bitten by bats. She heard a kind of falsetto coming from somewhere deep within the tin of the diner and then a whooshing sound.
The Age of Funnels arrives in many guises. The anti-cyclones have come! he shrieks. Already whole villages have been swept away. One hundred thousand people at a clip! And with that the doctor spins away.
Demented, spacey, he calls out from what was once Burma, Can-You-Still-Hear-Me? His swivel seat still madly spinning next to the mother and the child who is stirring her chocolate milk. Yes-We-Can, the child calls through a paper megaphone.
CASPER THE BABY, along with Igor the Giant, appeared one evening at the Spiegelpalais. Casper was sleeping and Igor was dispensing leaflets and singing a gentle song. Igor’s heart, the leaflet said, weighed a full pound and a third. When he saw the child, he showed her the baby and then gently cooed. Why is it giants are always gentle? the child wondered, but The Guinness Book of World Records had nothing to say about the gentleness of Igor. They cared only about his height, and his girth, and the size of his hands and his feet and his head. The mother, who kept a record of such things, said she prized Gentleness above all.
OKAY BUNNY BOY, the mother says, making little strangling motions as he runs triumphantly in. Do not ask what he carries in his mouth. It is always something different. PUT THAT DOWN, she yells, or I’ll throttle you.
THE WARRIOR CHILDREN from suburbia’s darkest heart were coming to the country day school to display their expertise in Tae Kwon Do, an ancient art of war.
The children looked a little sickly, the mother thought. They seemed to move through a chemical haze of performance-enhancing drugs and pesticides that were the minimum requirements for life in their excellent, leafy, perfectly serene wonder world.
There is something wrong with children from America’s very own heart of darkness coming to the Valley in busloads and putting on shows, the mother thought. There is something wrong with children saying Yes Master, No Master on a stage. Prowess in combat is not something one should display. Public censure should rise up at these sorts of shows.
A Black Belt means that you have become impervious to darkness and fear. In the upside-down and backward world where they all live now, the warrior children who excel at unarmed destruction styles from three rival Korean villages are raised up on the shoulders of the others and praised. It should be remembered that Tae means to destroy with the foot, Kwon means to strike or smack with the hand, and Do means an art or a way of life. Tae Kwon Do: the art of destroying with the foot or the fist.
Where, she wonders, have all the Scholar-Fathers gone? And the Scholar-Artists? As always she has an insatiable hunger for the Scholar-Artists. Even one Scholar-Artist, amidst all these fists, in a time like this, would go a long way. There is something obscene, the mother thinks, about a display of this sort of prowess, especially when the country is at war.
At the end of the Tae Kwon Do show, the mother felt the need to make a small speech. She made her way to the stage. Couldn’t these children find something better to do with their time? she wondered. It made the child remember the other time the mother had felt compelled to stand up. It was in church after the singing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic at the end of the Mass on the Fourth of July. Didn’t they know there was a war being fought at that very moment that they were singing their fool heads off?
When the mother spoke like this, people often turned away. She had a very special way of saying: shame on your heads. The mother spoke for something she called pacifism, and after that, the other people looked at her like someone they could no longer understand. They shunned her. She was not the person they thought they knew. She had made hot cross buns, and in winter she made soup for the poor. She sang at the top of her lungs. Regardless of what they thought, she continued every Sunday to sit in the front pew with the child, and the war song was never sung again, probably because they did not want to see the mother stand up anymore.
When they were done, the corps of child warriors returned to their shiny wonder world carrying the mark the mother had made on their heads, and although it could not be seen, it was there, and they would have to bear it for a long time. It was not so bad because with all the technologies—the electronic whirring and beeping and instant messaging they were occupied with on the ride home—the children did not have to notice it so much.
A while back, when the Girl Scouts had come to town in a bus, the child had learned how to send smoke signals. Inefficient as it was, so far from the suburban warriors’ ways of doing things as it was, the child loved this way of sending messages. Falling asleep that night, the child was glad not to have the mark of the mother on her head. The wind blew and the fire burned and the smoke rose high up over the Valley. Are you there? was the message she sent. Would you like to be friends? And she waited for a response.
There is a deer wading in the pond, she wrote in smoke. I enjoy beading, do you?
Like this, the child is not so lonely.
At night in dreams, the suburban warriors return, texting and emailing as they come. The show begins. Gracefully, with upgraded combat methods, they toss enriched uranium and plutonium atoms back and forth to one another in a kind of slow motion.
There is much applause.