7. Tracked
For a child who already knows how to read, the experience of being taught how to read in school turns out to be one of life’s more baffling ordeals. In 1963, when I began first grade, Modern Science (ever marching toward perfection) had recently refined and expanded the systematic approach to reading instruction known as Phonics, which exhaustively analyzes the component sounds of human speech into “phonemes” and gives explicit instruction to youngsters who in some cases still suck their thumbs or wet the bed on the correct correlation between these phonemes and the “graphemes” of written language. Ever heedless of Modern Science, I became the scourge of my first-grade teacher Mrs. Neff by proving that it was quite possible to be bad at phonics even if you already know how to read.
Mrs. Neff would stalk about the room angrily insisting that the letter “B” made the “/b/“ sound — here she would put her lips together and make a strangled sound like someone stifling a belch–– not the “buh” sound. The “buh” sound, it was made known to us, contained two separate phonemes, the strangled belch plus the “–uh” of someone being punched in the stomach. It was similarly imperative that we say “/p/” and not “puh,” “/ssss/“ and not “ess,” “/t/“ and not “tuh,”and so on. The consequences of failing to grasp this principle were severe. Thirty-two pairs of anxious eyes followed Mrs. Neff’s iron-haired figure around the room as she drilled us in the strangely amputated allophones of our mother tongue. A stalwart few clung faithfully to the belief that the meaning of all this would become clear at some future time, while most abandoned all hope and simply began the frantic search for adequate means of evasion and defense.
One fateful day Mrs. Neff turned on her thick heels and ordered us to give her an example of a word that began that began with the /ch/ sound. Venetian-blind-striped light reflected off her bifocals, barring the windows to her soul, as she wrathfully repeated /ch/, /ch/, /ch/. Suspecting by this point that the whole thing was a trick, I ran my mind over the obvious wrong answers –– chip chunk church child chat charming chicken chipmunk –– and landed on what I was sure was a truly ingenious example: “Chrash.”
(In other words, “trash,” which, if you stop to think about it, is pronounced by many small American children with a sound closer to /ch/ than to either the aspirated, unaspirated, alveolar tap, or full glottal stop phoneme /t/.)
Chrash. The beauty of this answer was that it was not obvious; it was clever, perhaps even brilliant. My heart filled with intellectual excitement.
Intrepidly I raised my hand; boldly I pronounced my answer.
Mrs. Neff turned slowly to look at me. The light-bars disappeared from her glasses. Her back to the window, the banished day making an iron halo of her hair, she fixed me in her gaze.
“What did you say?” she slowly asked.
Like a wounded zebra in the eyeshine of a lion, I froze.
“…Chrash,” I whispered.
The expression her face assumed at this point was to play out in slow motion in my six-year-old brain for many a sleepless night and sweat-tossed dream that long year –– a soul-searing mix of intellectual scorn, menopausal irritation, and furious desire for early retirement that made the earth shift nauseatingly beneath my feet. Suddenly my mother’s blank looks seemed like the sweetest, dearest, most comforting expression of adult reassurance and care that could possibly be bestowed upon a beloved child. Mrs. Neff shot me down like a sniper in a street fight, efficiently and without mercy.
“Wrong!” she shrieked. (At least, I feel that she shrieked. She may not have shrieked. But in my heart, her words pierced and reverberated fully as though she had shrieked.) “T-rash begins with a /t/!! /T!!/ T-rash!”
“…But that’s not how you say it,” I protested faintly. “Ch-rash. Ch-rash. Chrash.” Apparently I thought by repeating it I would drive my point home.
“Chuh-rash,” I mouthed, under my breath, the way anxious children do when first developing the early ritualistic symptoms that sometimes later blossom into a full-fledged psychological disorder. “Chrash.”
“No,” Mrs. Neff finished me off:
“Wrong.”
I began to realize we’d been had.
Norbrook Hills Elementary School was to be my personal Gulag as the Forest Glen Garden Apartments had been to my mother. Architecturally it was of the same ilk; gray linoleum on the floor, whitish-gray cinderblocks on the walls, bluish-gray fluorescent lights flickering overhead, and, naturally, grayish-white venetian blinds that granted to the thirsty eye a few thin, noncommittal stripes of light and tree and sky.
Kindergarten had been the lure, lulling us into a false sense of security with finger paints and graham crackers and the laissez-faire approach to early childhood development that still prevailed in the early nineteen sixties. But now the heavy doors clanged shut behind us. Gray corridors stretched out long and dark, the light at the end of them receding farther and farther away.
Mrs. Neff was here to break our little spirits. I believe that was in the job description of first grade teachers in those days; like the red-faced sergeant at boot camp, theirs was the task of making thirty-two small children understand that the fun and games were over. Nowadays they sometimes lull you a bit longer, keep you pliable and undefended through the early grades with sweet-faced sugar-voiced teachers who talk like little children themselves and sit with you in circle time and tell you that you’re awesome! But underneath it all the mechanism is unchanged, and sooner or later they bring in the soul-crusher, the gnawer of bones, the ghost of the machine.
I thank Mrs. Neff for making it all very clear. She was a naked light bulb flipping on in the shadowy engine room of the public education system. Every gear in the mechanism was illuminated. For example:
My best friend Franny Baker, for some reason, could not subtract. She could add the numbers together that we had to add, but when we had to reverse it and subtract them, she got it wrong. She didn’t know why she got it wrong; she didn’t understand when it was explained to her why she was wrong; she couldn’t explain what she was thinking that made her wrong. She was just wrong. There was wrongness in her mouth and ears and eyes; she held wrongness in her small pale hands; the odor of wrongness rose like smoke from her soft skin. Like someone tumbled in a sea of wrongness, she could not see the sky; she could not speak or stand or run.
Was it because there was something wrong with her brain? Was it because she was born three days after Christmas and so was the youngest of all the children in our class, almost a full year younger than me? Was it because her mother worked long hours as a cashier at the grocery store and her feet hurt at the end of the day as she drank a canned beer and smoked cigarettes in silence alone on the front porch in the gathering dusk? Was it because her father was never mentioned and never came to see her, because her older sisters scolded her in harsh voices and screamed and slapped each other when they fought, because the oldest was dating a creepy-looking guy in a leather jacket whose car made a loud noise when he drove up the street and her sister went out to lean into his window talking to him while he smoked a cigarette and flicked ashes onto the oil-stained pavement?
Whatever the reason that Franny could not subtract, the engine of the public school system churned on undeterred like a bulldozer over a nest of baby rabbits. It mattered not at all that any normal person can subtract well before adulthood makes its inescapable arithmetical demands; young Franny Baker had to subtract in mid-November of 1963 at the age of precisely four years and eleven months, and if she could not do it then and precisely then there would be a lifetime of hell to pay.
Day after day Mrs. Neff tried to make Franny subtract; day after day I sat beside her and felt my heart twist and founder like a hooked trout in a shallow bucket. Mrs. Neff would lean over Franny, her iron shadow blocking not only sun but even fluorescence; she would demonstrate the problem precisely as though she were setting a rat trap. Willy nilly, Franny would walk into the trap. She would do it wrong, and do it wrong again, and then do it wrong again.
Again and again and again the trap would snap shut.
I remember the street we’re walking down when we open our report cards. We’re halfway down the block; Franny is on my right. Soft brown hair falls across her pale cheek. Late afternoon light shines through her gray eyes so they look like pools of clear water. Slowly she rips open the envelope, her small fingers tear the paper a little bit and then a little bit more. Slowly she pulls the paper out and looks down.
There is a B, a sprinkling of C’s; a D. A shadow falls across her face. The light leaves her eyes; they look like fog. I watch her shrink back deep inside herself, her face smooth, impassive, lifeless.
Her lips move slightly, and say nothing.
Michael Cosentino could subtract but he could not read. Later we would be segregated into reading groups; we would have our spelling scores posted publicly on the walls, with rows of shiny stars for the good spellers and empty blank spaces for the bad ones. After first grade, I would never be in a single class with either Franny or Michael again, although we attended the same schools for thirteen years. But before these first great segregations left their red-hot burning brands on our little souls, we were all still thrown in together, so I saw what they did to Michael.
Michael Cosentino was the most beautiful boy I have ever seen. His eyes were the color of creekwater flecked with light, dark lashes draped over them like willow branches over a stream. His brown arms curved in sinuous lines, lean muscles curved over little boy bones, doe-brown skin like silk. Outside of school, in the glorious world of children, Michael was first at everything that we all cared about — first to ride a bike with no hands, first to catch a crayfish without getting pinched, first to light a fire that kept burning, first to fix a bicycle chain when it was broken, first to do a flip into the deep end of the pool, first to climb the weeping cherry tree and leap from the big branch that stuck out to the other slender springy branch and catch it with his hands and swing three times to the ground and land on his feet like a cat.
When you take a boy like that, a truly magnificent, luminous, electrical boy, and put him in a cinderblock room under fluorescent lights all the long day, while outside the trees reach their brown arms to the sky, bright leaves sprouting from their many fingers, and creeks run rushing and rocks and boulders tumble down to the water, their rough faces alive with lichens and glowing green ferns -– when you force a boy like that to stay indoors and be still and not move— how is this not obvious to everyone? A terrible breach occurs. An electrical circuit is cut. A magnetic bond is weakened and lost. It is the beginning of a great disease, a disintegration, a humiliation of life itself.
When Michael is made to read aloud in class, I see him twisting around in his chair, his eyes rolling to the side to look at anything but the teacher. I see his foot jiggling, I see his hands fingering an object, twisting a piece of paper, rolling a pencil between his fingers and then dropping it to the floor. He tries to laugh it off; a sideways laugh directed just to the left of his eyes, as his torso spirals away his glance and his smile and his hands and his feet are pointed in different directions like the the broken treads of a spiral staircase.
His words are stammered, choked. Neff has him in her power.
I would love to tell you that this cartoon figure is a comedy character, a rocky road to somewhere, a defeatable ogre, a trickable troll. But she is not. She is a sledgehammer, a one-eyed giant, a dull blade in a relentless machine. She forces Michael. She humiliates him. She breaks him.
In the sixties we don’t have dyslexia or ADHD; we have dumb kids and we have bad kids. Michael is neither bad nor dumb, nor dyslexic nor ADHD for that matter: this is a boy who could grow up to build things, to fix things, to grow things, to sail the ocean, to climb mountains, to fight fires, to run rivers. But none of these things will happen. You know what will happen. You have seen it again and again. By sixth grade he'll be reading just fine, but he won’t read what’s assigned; he'll be good with numbers, quick to calculate batting averages and lengths of lumber and even angles for building, but he won’t do his math homework; by seventh grade he will know how to rebuild a bicycle, to change the oil and the spark plugs on a Chevy, to catch a trout and cook it on an open fire; but by then he will also be a D student, smoking cigarettes and shoplifting, then drinking Colt 45 Malt Liquor in parking lots; then smoking pot, then selling pot, then PCP, then cocaine. You know that kid. You know where he’s headed. It’ll be a miracle if he stays out of jail.
If.
Nobody told us we were being tracked, but children always know these things; they smell it. We had three classes in each grade at Norbrook Hills, a little over thirty kids to a class, and we called them the Smart Class, the Medium Class, and the Dumb Class. The Smart Class was pretty much all the kids who lived in Norcrest Estates, with its mature arching oaks and modern split levels with four bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms and sunken living rooms with wall-to-wall shag carpeting; the Medium and Dumb kids lived in Norbrook Hills, in three-bedroom tract houses with 1 ½ bathrooms and scrawny treelets tied to stakes by the curb. The Dumb Bad kids lived in Norwood Gardens, the apartment complex back between the Drug Bazaar parking lot and the big vacant lot with broken glass and cigarette butts and dead nettle and shepherd’s purse growing and then turning brown and dying in the hard red dirt.
The correlation between real estate values and grade point averages was almost perfect, a statistical relationship that holds reliably true to this day across the nation from sea to shining sea (with just enought exceptions allowed to slip through to create a mirage of fairness.)
How does real estate value convert itself into academic success? Oh, in the usual ten thousand ways; a room of one’s own, books on the shelf, scrambled eggs for breakfast, regular trips to the dentist. And now, of course, laptops and smartphones and high-speed internet. From a real estate standpoint I should have been a medium kid at best, although of course I did not understand this clearly at the time. I only knew that my friends from Norbrook Hills were never in my classes, and the kids in my classes always lived in Norcrest Estates.
The “smart kids” at school were dull, stolid, methodical as cattle. Chewing their cud of worksheets and multiple choice quizzes day in and day out, they pushed their pencils in neat circles and straight lines and lived in fear. Out of fear, I became one of them, but I could not socialize with them. When I spent the night at Emily Wellman’s house in Norcrest Estates, with her white-and-gold four-poster canopy bed and lavender carpeting, I felt like we were pretending to be children, imitating the gestures and cries of children, dutifully eating candy, dutifully watching TV, dutifully playing Truth or Dare. The questions were so cautious and so dutifully yet evasively answered that there was never a dare. I fell asleep early.
When I slept over at Franny’s we would be up all night long. On weekends or over the summer, her school mask would slowly lift, she began to twitch and flash with life again. Franny was skinny to the point of looking malnourished, she had stringy pale hair the color of dust or wild rabbits, always a strand hanging in her eyes or over her mouth, her skin fair and translucent, pale blue circles under her eyes. Inside she was afire. The freckles on her nose were like burn marks from the sparks that showered from her clear pale eyes; her crooked smile with the littlest tweak could take a serious thing and make it funny. When you played dolls with Emily Wellman the dolls would make sandwiches and then sit and eat with polite little chewing noises; when you played dolls with Franny the dolls would be kidnapped by monsters, they would live in caves, where the monsters would bring them strawberries and lemongrass and worms from the garden, they would make wet juicy slurping noises as they sucked down the worms like spaghetti, they would trick the monsters by poisoning them with bright red berries that made them fall asleep (but not die) and then make mad escapes on horseback or by swimming across raging rivers or by flying away on the backs of giant eagles.
Outside we would race cartwheeling across the grass, our bikes would be wild horses, we would put ropes on the handlebars and ride holding them like reins. We ranged through the woods, hunting for secret caves and hiding places and gathering dry sticks to light miniature doll-sized fires. We formed a secret spy club, lurking behind bushes and up in trees, dashing furtively from juniper to willow, keeping detailed diaries of secrets. Like all little girls, we swore we would always be friends.
We never spoke of grades. But the thing was bigger than us. Over time, slowly, inexorably, it deepened its mark, recruiting us, separately, into a larger agenda, a structure so vast it was invisible. All we knew was that at school we slowly began to act as though we didn’t see each other.
We were becoming citizens of alien nations, traveling on ships bound for different ports.