The
School (by Donald Barthelme)
Well, we had all these children
out planting trees, see, because we figured that… that was part of their
education, to see how you know the root systems… and also the sense of
responsibility, taking care of things, being individually responsible. You know
what I mean. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why
they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the
stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve
got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant, and
we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown
sticks. It was depressing.
It wouldn’t have been so bad
except that just a couple of weeks before the thing with the trees, the snakes
all died. But I think that the snakes—well, the reason that the snakes kicked
off was that… you remember, the boiler was shut off for four days because of
the strike, and that was explicable. It was something you could explain to the
kids because of the strike. I mean, none of their parents would let them cross
the picket line and they knew there was a strike going on and what it meant. So
when things got started up again and we found the snakes they weren’t too
disturbed.
With the herb gardens it was
probably a case of overwatering, and at least now they know not to overwater.
The children were very conscientious with the herb gardens and some of them
probably… you know, slipped them a little extra water when we weren’t looking.
Or maybe… well, I don’t like to think about sabotage, although it did occur to
us. I mean, it was something that crossed our minds. We were thinking that way
probably because before that the gerbils had died, and the white mice had died,
and the salamander… well, now they know not to carry them around in plastic
bags.
Of course we expected the tropical
fish to die, that was no surprise. Those numbers, you look at them crooked and
they’re belly-up on the surface. But the lesson plan called for a tropical-fish
input at that point, there was nothing we could do, it happens every year, you
just have to hurry past it.
We weren’t even supposed to have a
puppy.
We weren’t even supposed to have
one, it was just a puppy the Murdoch girl found under a Gristede’s truck one
day and she was afraid the truck would run over it when the driver had finished
making his delivery, so she stuck it in her knapsack and brought it to school
with her. So we had this puppy. As soon as I saw the puppy I thought, “Oh
Christ, I bet it will live for about two weeks and then….” And that’s what it
did. It wasn’t supposed to be in the classroom at all, there’s some kind of
regulation about it, but you can’t tell them they can’t have a puppy when the
puppy is already there, right in front of them, running around on the floor and
yap-yap-yapping. They named it Edgar—that is, they named it after me. They had
a lot of fun running after it and yelling, “Here, Edgar! Nice Edgar!” Then
they’d laugh like hell. They enjoyed the ambiguity. I enjoyed it myself. I
don’t mind being kidded. They made a little house for it in the supply closet
and all that. I don’t know what it died of. Distemper, I guess. It probably
hadn’t had any shots. I got it out of there before the kids got to school. I
checked the supply closet each morning, routinely because I knew what was going
to happen. I gave it to the custodian.
And then there was this Korean
orphan that the class adopted through the Help the Children program; all the
kids brought in a quarter a month, that was the idea. It was an unfortunate
thing; the kid’s name was Kim and maybe we adopted him too late or something.
The cause of death was not stated in the letter we got, they suggested we adopt
another child instead and sent us some interesting case histories, but we
didn’t have the heart. The class took it pretty hard, they began (I think,
nobody ever said anything to me directly) to feel that maybe there was
something wrong with the school. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with
the school, particularly; I’ve seen better and I’ve seen worse. It was just a
run of bad luck. We had an extraordinary number of parents passing away, for
instance. There were I think two heart attacks and two suicides, one drowning,
and four killed together in a car accident. One stroke. And we had the usual
heavy mortality rate among the grandparents, or maybe it was heavier this
year—it seemed so. And finally the tragedy.
The tragedy occurred when Matthew
Wein and Tony Mavrogordo were playing over where they’re excavating for the new
federal office building. There were all these big wooden beams stacked, you
know, at the edge of the excavation. There’s a court case coming out of that:
the parents are claiming that the beams were poorly stacked. I don’t know
what’s true and what’s not. It’s been a strange year.
I forgot to mention Billy Brandt’s
father, who was knifed fatally when he grappled with a masked intruder in his
home.
One day, we had a discussion in
class. They asked me, where did they go? The trees, the salamander, the
tropical fish, Edgar, the poppas and mommas, Matthew and Tony, where did they
go? And I said, I don’t know, I don’t know. And they said, who knows? And I
said, nobody knows. And they said, is death that which gives meaning to life?
And I said, no, life is that which gives meaning to life. Then they said, but
isn’t death, considered such a fundamental datum, the means by which the
taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction
of—
I said, yes, maybe.
They said, we don’t like it.
I said, that’s sound.
They said, it’s a bloody shame!
I said, it is.
They said, will you make love now
with Helen (our teaching assistant) so that we can see how it is done? We know
you like Helen.
I do like Helen but I said that I
would not.
We’ve heard so much about it, they
said, but we’ve never seen it.
I said I would be fired and that
it was never, or almost never, done as a demonstration. Helen looked out of the
window.
They said, please, please make love
with Helen, we require an assertion of value, we are frightened.
I said that they shouldn’t be
frightened (although I am often frightened) and that there was value
everywhere. Helen came and embraced me. I kissed her a few times on the brow.
We held each other. The children were excited. Then there was a knock on the
door. I opened the door, and the new gerbil walked in. The children cheered
wildly.
To Do (by Jennifer Egan)
1. Mow lawn
2. Get rid of that fucking hose
3. Wash windows
4. Spay cat
5. Dye hair
6. Do tarot cards
7. Pick up kids
8. Drop off kids at Mom's
9. Buy wig
10. See if small removable portion
of fence can be cut QUIETLY
a.
Kinds of clippers
b.
Metal solvents
c.
Electrical devices
1.
How noisy?
2.
Flying metal chips?
3.
Danger of electrocution?
a.
Rubber gloves/goggles?
b.
Lethal?
1.
Sign will
c.
Does it make the body look really shitty at death?
1.
Get tooth capped
11. Send warning letter
a.
Newspaper cutouts?
b.
Get kids to write it?
c.
Write with left hand?
d.
Be vague. "Certain unpleasant things"
12. Mail letter
a.
Or drop it off while wearing wig
13. Renew meds
14. Investigate poisons
a.
Flammable
b.
Powders
c.
Gasses
d.
Pills
e.
Herbal
f.
Chemical
g.
Musical
1.
Ask kids
2.
Hamlet – ear
h.
Ingestible
1.
Cookies?
i.
Must look INNOCENT
15. Research cameras
a.
Affixed to fence
b.
Propped in hole cut in fence
c.
Small, undetectable
d.
Implanted in flowers
e.
How to use?
f.
Must be REASONABLY priced.
g.
Take no shit from photo man.
1.
Remind him of ruined prints.
16. Pick up kids
17. Make dinner
18. Get ready for party
a.
Polka dots
b.
Black gloves
c.
Hair ribbon
d.
Veil
e.
Bring seltzer
f.
Remind Stan of party
g.
Plan two funny stories
h.
Breathing exercises to prepare for seeing THEM
1.
Kiss kiss
2.
Hug hug
3.
Remember:
NO ONE CAN SEE YOUR THOUGHTS
For whom is the
funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers. For Ambrose it is a place of fear and
confusion. He has come to the seashore with
his family for the holiday, the occasion of their visit is
Independence Day, the most important secular holiday of the United States of
America. A single straight underline is the
manuscript mark for italic type, which in turn is the printed equivalent to oral emphasis of words
and phrases as well as the customary type for titles of complete works, not to
mention. Italics are also employed, in fiction stories especially, for
“outside,” intrusive, or artificial voices, such as radio announcements, the
texts of telegrams and newspaper articles, et cetera. They should be used sparingly.
If passages originally in roman type are
italicized by someone repeating them, it’s customary to acknowledge the fact. Italics
mine.
Ambrose
was “at that awkward age.” His voice came out high-pitched as a child’s if he
let himself get carried away; to be on the safe side, therefore, he moved and
spoke with deliberate calm and adult
gravity. Talking soberly of unimportant or
irrelevant matters and listening consciously to the sound of your own voice are
useful habits for maintaining control in this difficult interval. En
route to Ocean City he sat in the back seat
of the family car with his brother Peter, age fifteen, and Magda G —‘ age
fourteen, a pretty girl and exquisite young lady, who lived not far from them
on B — Street in the town of D —, Maryland. Initials, blanks, or both were
often substituted for proper names in nineteenth-century fiction to enhance the
illusion of reality. It is as if the author felt it necessary to delete the
names for reasons of tact or legal liability. Interestingly, as with other
aspects of realism, it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means. Is it likely, does
it violate the principle of verisimilitude, that a thirteen-year-old boy could
make such a sophisticated observation? A girl of fourteen is the
psychological coeval of a boy of fifteen or
sixteen; a thirteen-year-old boy, therefore, even one precocious in some other
respects, might be three years her emotional junior.
Thrice
a year — on Memorial, Independence, and Labor Days — the family visits Ocean
City for the afternoon and evening. When Ambrose and Peter’s father was their
age, the excursion was made by train, as mentioned in the novel The 42nd
Parallel by John Dos Passos. Many families
from the same neighborhood used to travel together, with dependent relatives
and often with Negro servants; schoolfuls of children swarmed through the
railway cars; everyone shared everyone else’s Maryland fried chicken, Virginia
ham, deviled eggs, potato salad, beaten biscuits, iced tea. Nowadays (that is,
in 19-- , the year of our story) the journey is made by automobile — more
comfortably and quickly though without the extra fun though without the camaraderie
of a general excursion. It’s all part of
the deterioration of American life, their father declares; Uncle Karl supposes
that when the boys take their families
to Ocean City for the holidays they’ll fly in Autogiros. Their mother, sitting
in the middle of the front seat like Magda in the second, only with her arms on
the seat-back behind the men’s shoulders, wouldn’t want the good old days back
again, the steaming trains and stuffy long dresses; on the other hand she can
do without Autogiros, too, if she has to become a grandmother to fly in them.
Description
of physical appearance and mannerisms is one of several standard methods of
characterization used by writers of fiction. It is also important to “keep the
senses operating”; when a detail from one of the five senses, say visual, is
“crossed” with a detail from another, say auditory, the reader’s imagination is
oriented to the scene, perhaps unconsciously. This procedure may he compared to
the way surveyors and navigators determine their positions by two or more
compass bearings, a process known as triangulation. The brown hair on Ambrose’s
mother’s forearms gleamed in the sun like. Though right-handed, she took her
left arm from the seat back to press the dashboard cigar lighter for Uncle
Karl. When the glass bead in its handle glowed red, the lighter was ready for
use. The smell of Uncle Karl’s cigar smoke reminded one of. The fragrance of
the ocean came strong to the picnic ground where they always stopped for lunch,
two miles inland from Ocean City Having to pause for a full hour almost within
sound of the breakers was difficult for Peter and Ambrose when they were
younger; even at their present age it was not easy to keep their anticipation, stimulated
by the briny spume, from turning into short
temper. The Irish author James Joyce, in his unusual novel entitled Ulysses,
now available in this country uses the
adjectives snot-green and scrotum-tightening
to describe the sea. Visual, auditory
tactile, olfactory, gustatory Peter and Ambrose’s father, while steering their
black 1936 LaSalle sedan with one hand, could with the other remove the first
cigarette from a white pack of Lucky Strikes and, more remarkably, light it
with a match forefingered from its book and thumbed against the flint paper
without being detached. The matchbook cover merely advertised U.S. War Bonds
and Stamps. A fine metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech, in addition to
its obvious “first-order” relevance to the thing it describes, will be seen
upon reflection to have a second order of significance: it may be drawn from
the milieu of the action, for example,
or be particularly appropriate to the sensibility of the narrator, even
hinting to the reader things of which the narrator is unaware; or it may cast
further and subtler lights upon the things it describes, sometimes ironically
qualifying the more evident sense of the comparison.
To
say that Ambrose’s and Peter’s mother was pretty is to accomplish nothing; the reader may acknowledge the proposition,
but his imagination is not engaged. Besides, Magda was also pretty, yet in an
altogether different way. Although she lived on B — Street she had very good
manners and did better than average in school. Her figure was very well
developed for her age. Her right hand lay casually on the plush upholstery of
the seat, very near Ambrose’s left leg, on which his own hand rested…
(the story continues…)
No comments:
Post a Comment