Language Arts Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Pointing at the Moon

  ABSENT CHILD

  Cloud City

  Signare

  Natal Charts

  Ephemera

  Enigmatology

  The Boy in the White Suit

  Password Strength: Weak

  Homo Scriptor, Homo Factum

  A Good Hand

  Art Without Boundaries

  Storybook Cottage

  Alluring Objects

  Where Are They Now?

  Teacher’s Pet

  THE PALMER METHOD

  Giorgia’s Boys

  The Art of Ukemi

  We Now Conclude Our Broadcast Day

  Claim Check

  Club Membership

  First, Middle, Last

  Homo Faber

  Egg-SHEP-Shun-All!

  101 NAMES OF GOD

  Personal Reflections on the Value of Penmanship as a Biographical Tool

  You’re Carrying Some Slight Magic

  Things Like Fingers

  Notice of Proposed Land-Use Action

  Fictional Masterpiece

  That Arrow Grinding

  It’s a Girl!

  Unbind the Body

  Are You My Father?

  The Dream-Ladder Kitchen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2015 by Stephanie Kallos

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Kallos, Stephanie.

  Language arts / Stephanie Kallos.

  pages; cm

  ISBN 978-0-547-93974-2 (hardcover)

  1. Divorced fathers—Fiction. 2. Life change events—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3611.A444L36 2015

  813’.6—dc23 2014034439

  eISBN 978-0-547-93997-1

  v1.0615

  Jacket illustration by Anna & Elena Balbusso

  Jacket design by Martha Kennedy

  Excerpts from Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina, copyright © 1940 and 1947, © renewed 1968, by Esphyr Slobodkina, are reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins.

  Lines from “Handwriting Analysis” are from The Alphabet Not Unlike the World by Katrina Vandenberg (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2012). Copyright © 2012 by Katrina Vandenberg. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. www.milkweed.org.

  The lyrics from “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin, copyright © 1940, 1942 by Irving Berlin, are reprinted with the permission of the Irving Berlin Music Company.

  Lyrics from “The Bigger the Figure,” words and music by Marshall Barer and Alec Wilder, copyright © 1952 (renewed) by Hampshire House Publishing Corp. & Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, New York, are reprinted with permission of Hampshire House Publishing Corp. & Ludlow Music, Inc..

  Per il mio dolce Bill …

  dalla tua baffuta, con amore

  Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth can be likened to the bright moon in the sky. Words, in this case, can be likened to a finger. The finger can point to the moon’s location. However, the finger is not the moon. To see the moon, it is necessary to gaze beyond the finger, right?

  —Zen master Hui-Neng

  You may in fact be wondering what I even mean when I use the word “prayer” … Let’s say it is communication from one’s heart to God. Or if that is too triggering or ludicrous a concept for you, to the Good, the force that is beyond our comprehension but that in our pain or supplication or relief we don’t need to define or have proof of or any established contact with … Nothing could matter less than what we call this force … I called God Phil for a long time … Phil is a great name for God.

  —Anne Lamott

  Love, and be silent … I am sure my love’s more richer than my tongue.

  —William Shakespeare, King Lear

  Pointing at the Moon

  When my brother Cody was about two years old (and for reasons our baffled parents were never able to fathom), the word God entered his vocabulary.

  Where could he have heard it? Certainly not at home.

  Early one weekend morning, my mother and father were awakened by the surprising sound of Cody’s clear, piping voice repeatedly proclaiming Hello, God! from behind his closed bedroom door.

  Hello God hello God hello God hello God hello God HELLO!

  Coming into Cody’s room, my parents found him standing in an erect, commanding attitude—his hands positioned a couple of feet apart, grasping the crib rail, his stance wide, his face rascally—addressing a spot on the wall above his window. The overall effect was of a pintsize politician delivering an especially entertaining whistle-stop speech while being buffeted by a bracing wind.

  Hello Mama hello Daddy hello God HELLO! Cody proclaimed with great largess, as if to a crowd of cheering constituents whose votes had already been won.

  For the next few weeks, this set of behaviors became a morning ritual. Cody’s consistently presidential manner of greeting the day inspired my parents to start calling him Mr. POTUS. This in turn provided my brother with a game that very young children love: the opportunity to catch adults in a mistake.

  Good morning, Mr. POTUS!

  Poh-Tuhs, no! Cody would assert with offended pride. COH-Dee! COH-Dee!

  Who? Who did you say you are?

  COH-Deeee!

  When it came to improvisations like this, my mother was game enough, but reserved; extemporized hilarity has never been her strong suit.

  My father, however, thanks to the advent of parenthood, had discovered a previously unexpressed thespian alter ego—

  Oh! Of course! COH-Deee!

  —a kind of nineteenth-century burlesque funnyman that he trotted out at every opportunity for my brother’s entertainment and delight.

  COH-Dee! COH-Dee! my father would emote, mock horrified, feigning news of some biblical-size calamity, smiting his forehead and falling to his knees. How could I have forgotten? Can you ever forgive me?

  Daddy! So-kay! No sad! So-kay, Daddy!

  Likewise, at bedtime, whenever my father read that lengthy, comforting litany of farewells from one of our favorite childhood books, Goodnight Moon, Cody chimed in:

  “Goodnight cow jumping over the moon …”

  —Goodnight God, Goodnight God—

  “Goodnight light and the red balloon …”

  —Goodnight God, Goodnight God—

  Sometimes, long after my parents assumed Cody had fallen asleep, they would hear his small voice wishing God a good night.

  What do you make of it? my mother asked.

  It’s probably what we deserve, my father joked.

  We? my mother countered, archly. You’re the atheist. I’m still on the fence.

  Ha! my father replied. Point taken.

  A few months later, the symptoms of Cody’s illness began to emerge; among the most obvious of those symptoms was regressed speech.

  Language left him gradually, a bit at a time. One would expect words to depart predictably, in reverse order—the way a row of knitting disappears, stitch by stitch, when the strand of working yarn is tugged off the needle—but that was not the case.

  Cody’s earliest and most used words—mama, daddy—were the first to go, while more recent acquisitions lingered.

  Eventually, though, all of his words abandoned him.

  God was the last holdout; at least,
that was the word my parents assumed Cody was trying to say when he’d let loose with a long, agonized Gaaaaah! at the usual times: first thing in the morning and again at day’s end.

  He began applying that amorphous sound to everyone and everything: rice cakes, peas, string cheese, sippy cups; shoes and hats and coats and mittens; Thomas the Tank Engine; Babar the King; his pull-toy pony and plush orca whale; his library of board books; wooden puzzles; foam blocks; eyes, ears, nose, mouth …

  It was Gaaaah! as well—not sister or Emmy (two words my brother never acquired)—that was his name for me.

  PART ONE

  ABSENT CHILD

  Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

  Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

  Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

  Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

  Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.

  —William Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John

  Cloud City

  It was such a small news item—a few hundred words in the Around the Northwest section—that even a scrupulous reader like Charles might have missed it altogether if the headline hadn’t included the name of the school he’d attended from kindergarten through fourth grade, a name so charmingly archaic that it could easily figure into a work of nineteenth-century literature:

  FORMER NELLIE GOODHUE SCHOOL SLATED FOR DEMOLITION AND SALE BY SCHOOL DISTRICT

  Up to the moment he noticed the headline, Charles had been happily settled at his favorite café table, wedged into a windowless corner beside a big-leafed philodendron that was in such dire need of transplantation that its roots, black and thick as cables, had begun to extrude from the potting soil; nevertheless, the plant seemed to be thriving. Situated thus, he enjoyed a camouflaged obscurity, a public solitude.

  Cloud City Café was a bustling establishment within walking distance of Charles’s house. It was where he spent every Monday through Friday morning (except holidays) from six o’clock until seven fifteen—even when school wasn’t in session, as was the case on this day, a Wednesday in mid-July.

  As it happened, it was also his daughter Emmy’s birthday.

  He had just finished his regular breakfast—black coffee, a pair of poached eggs (one whole, one white), unsweetened oatmeal—and gotten his cup refilled. He’d been making his way through the Seattle Times at perhaps a slightly more leisurely pace than usual.

  Seattle Public Schools will sell the former Nellie Goodhue School, a 3.2-acre property in North Seattle that real estate advisers estimate could fetch at least $2.75 million.

  During the summer months, Charles adhered to his workday routines as much as possible, refusing to drift into the never-never land of exotic locales and amorphous time as did many of his teaching colleagues: sleeping in, socializing on weeknights at trendy downtown bistros, taking spontaneous trips to the beach or the mountains, attending midday street fairs and festivals, going to movie matinees; in short, letting themselves go completely, making it that much harder for them to get back into the swing of things come September. Charles pitied them, really. How could they reliably forget on an annual basis that the disciplines of day-to-day living, so hard won, are so easily unraveled?

  Nellie Goodhue is the sixth and last of the school district’s major surplus properties to be sold.

  It startled him, seeing the name of his alma mater in print after all these years—up for sale and slated for demolition?

  Charles checked his watch. He imagined that, back home, Emmy would be awake by now and getting ready to go to one of her jobs: she had a part-time internship at the Gates Foundation; twenty-five hours a week, she managed the neighborhood video store where she and Charles had been renting movies since she was two; and she was a frequent volunteer at Children’s Hospital, giving swim lessons and leading games in the hospital’s therapy pool. Not surprisingly, her social life was limited (her best friend was her brother), and at her request, the birthday celebration was to be low-key, family only.

  After laying the newspaper aside, Charles refolded his napkin and began consolidating the tabletop clutter—actions he habitually undertook after he’d finished reading the paper and was about to walk out the door but that today for some reason he felt impelled to expedite.

  The Nellie Goodhue School was featured in a 1963 story in the Seattle Times, “Fourth-Graders Predict the Future.” In conjunction with the recent World’s Fair, the students of Eloise Braxton’s Language Arts class were asked to reflect on what they thought life would be like in the 21st century.

  Perhaps if Charles had returned for fifth grade, there would have been an entire unit centered around Miss Goodhue, an innovative syllabus in which reading, writing, and social studies (and maybe even math, science, and art!) were all linked to a single remarkable historical figure, a course of study that included screenings of old newsreels, fascinating classroom visits from living descendants, and multiple field trips to the Museum of History and Industry, where an extensive, interactive exhibition about Nellie Goodhue’s impact on the Pacific Northwest would be on permanent display. Even typically dreary tasks like memorizing vocabulary lists and writing reports would be enlivened by the subject at their center: the indomitable, brave, visionary, self-sacrificing, and beautiful Nellie Goodhue.

  The Nellie Goodhue property, which was converted to a warehouse space in the late 1970s, is now known as the North Annex.

  But Charles hadn’t returned. Abruptly, a few weeks after the end of the 1962–63 school year, he and his parents moved out of their Haller Lake rambler to a house where the neighborhood school was Greenwood Elementary and where he navigated fifth grade at an under-the-radar altitude, achieving neither academic success nor social distinction—which, after his experiences at Nellie Goodhue, was exactly what he wanted.

  The district tried to sell the North Annex two years ago, but the soil was contaminated from heating oil leaked from underground storage tanks.

  Charles’s mother told him at some point that even if they hadn’t moved, he would have been enrolled in a different school. After what happened on that playground, she declared, there was absolutely no question of you going back. Your father and I were in complete agreement about that … Charles could never tell whether these statements were offered as reassurance or blame; his mother could be hard to read that way.

  When he dreamed of her, she was rarely in view but standing within the presumed enclosure formed by hundreds of bulging cardboard boxes, stacked too high, mildewed, dangerously unsteady. Charles knew she was in there, somewhere, unspeaking, inscrutable, her presence revealed by the occasional sound of agitated ice cubes and the intermittent appearance of cigarette smoke signals telegraphing mild to moderate distress.

  Charles took a sip of coffee. His stomach suddenly felt raw, abraded, ulcerous, as if it were empty, as if there were nothing down there to absorb the acidity.

  As soon as the district completes its plans to tear down the former school, the property will be ready to put on the market.

  He’d read the article several times, not because he couldn’t retain its contents—in fact, by the sixth reading, they were practically memorized—but because an enchantment had befallen him: whenever he tried to move on to a different story, the words were incomprehensible; he might as well have been reading Urdu or Arabic.

  Could he be having a stroke? He looked up and across the room and was relieved to discover that he could still decode the title of a framed poster near the café entrance: 100 WAYS TO BUILD COMMUNITY. He leaned forward in his chair and squinted, seeing whether or not he could make out anything else. Eventually he noticed two women sitting beneath the poster were staring at him in a way that suggested they were thinking of alerting the manager.

  Charles ducked behind the philodendron. A blade of sunlight sliced across the café; the temperature of the room shot up and his face began to sweat. He reached for his water glass, but even though he felt parched, he was mout
h-breathing so deeply and erratically that the thought of forcing himself to take a drink made him even more anxious.

  The women were no longer staring; they’d resumed their conversation. Their torsos tilted toward each other, intimately, foreheads almost touching, so that they formed the A-frame shape of a pup tent. Every now and then, one of them sat back and made a broad, sweeping surveillance of the room that always included Charles’s corner, no longer camouflaged, no longer safe.

  Feeling a panic of indecision—His routine had been so thoroughly disrupted, but how? Why? What had gone wrong?—Charles stood up, intending to bus his table. His water glass was still full; so was his coffee cup. How would he manage everything in one trip?

  He dumped the contents of the glass into the philodendron pot; instantly, water began pouring out of the bottom, forming an expanding puddle beneath his feet and drawing the stares of several other café customers, who probably thought he was incontinent or—worse still—one of those unhinged, misanthropic types who urinate in public as a demonstration of defiance and rage. The police could be on their way at any moment.

  Charles downed the rest of his coffee, shouldered his school satchel, and arranged the dishes—plate, then bowl, then cup, then glass, then cutlery—in a precarious but manageable stack. Like the Cat in the Hat! he thought, feebly trying to jolly himself by imagining how Emmy might describe his predicament.

  He made it to the BUS YOUR DISHES HERE cart without incident but, experiencing another attack of empty-headedness, found he couldn’t manage the complicated task of separating the items into their appropriate receptacles, so he dumped everything into the cutlery tub; the noise was astonishing, a cymbalist’s egregious error amplified by microphones and broadcast over the civil air defense system. By now, the entire population of Cloud City had fallen silent and was staring at him.

  When he started to walk, he discovered that his knees had locked, as if immobilized by orthopedic steel braces, so that he was forced to execute a series of mini–goose steps across the room and out the front door, no doubt looking exactly like a man who’d peed his pants.

  Had he even paid the bill?