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CHAPTER 1
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 mouth- 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?
Halfway home, still breathless and hot (although having thankfully regained the full use of his legs), Charles realized with a sinking heart that he'd forgotten the newspaper. The most cherished part of his morning ritual was making a start on the daily crossword puzzle and then bringing it home to Emmy.
Today he'd grappled unsuccessfully with a four-part quote by Albert Einstein, getting only as far as
ACROSS
But even the most obvious answers eluded him — retire for "quit the rat race," avenge for "retaliate," hedges for "suburban barricades"— so he was never able to finish without her help.
CHAPTER 2
Signare
How many times over the course of a life do you think a person writes his or her name?
It's probably an unanswerable question — unless we're considering someone like Cody; during the brief period my brother was capable of making those four letters, I'm guessing he managed it fewer than a dozen times.
My father, Charles, however: fifty-nine years old, reared at a time when cursive was a required element of an elementary-school curriculum, someone who, as a child (for reasons of his own), took great pains to develop that expression of identity known as the signature — from the Latin signare, "to sign, to seal" — and for whom writing by hand is still a common practice, as he insists on conducting his personal correspondence via pen and ink (he's been writing to me since I was a baby), paying by check for groceries and dry cleaning, and eschewing the convenience of online banking ... surely he has penned his name thousands, if not tens of thousands, of times.
Consider now the fact that every time my father writes his signature, he is reminded of a distant era that he wishes he could forget — all because his surname happens to end with a w.
To explain: the Palmer Method of handwriting, in which my father was rigorously schooled, requires that the letters t, w, and g be written differently when they occur in a terminal position.
For years, he considered making a small alteration by adding a final, silent e. Such things are done. He did some investigating and was surprised to discover that the process of legally changing one's name is fairly simple; it takes only a few weeks.
But in the end he realized that, in this situation, a silent e would be anything but silent.
Besides, it would make his name look like a placard of pretension or irony: Harbour View Pointe. Sweet Thyme Tea Shoppe. Ye Olde Charles Marlowe.
One cannot crowd out pain with pomposity. One can't obliterate memory with artifice.
The first time he wrote the word father in a fresh context — on a hospital release form, on an occasion of great joy — he was, of course, legally required to write his signature as well.
In that moment, he realized that even in the light of a new, much-yearned-for identity —
— he was still obliged to authenticate himself with that old sign. It wasn't fair.
On that occasion, my father tried to alter his signature — just a little — by changing the way he inscribed that terminally positioned w:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Three years later, when hospital protocol again mandated that he write the word father — under very different circumstances, on an occasion of great sorrow
— he realized that escape was impossible. He might be able to change his signature, but he would never be able to alter the invisible seal of a condemned life.
CHAPTER 3
Natal Charts
Dear Emmy,
It's a relief to know that you've safely arrived at JFK and are on your way into the city. I've been thinking and worrying about you (I know, I know, but it's a father's prerogative) ever since I put you on the redeye.
When I got home, the house was already too silent. Not in an overtly discernible way obviously — although there's surely an instrument sensitive enough to register the reduction in decibel level resulting from one fewer set of inhales and exhales. You've always been a quiet dreamer, never a snorer or a chatterer, although you sometimes laugh in your sleep, have done since you were a baby, and I have to say that's a trait that speaks volumes about you.
I stretched out on the living-room sofa and tried to fall asleep, but every time I closed my eyes, I pictured you winging your way across the country buckled into an aged Boeing 747 that, somewhere over Kansas, was beset by unexpected turbulence. This created a "thunderous silence" — a phrase I use in my ninth-grade Language Arts class as an example of oxymoron, along with Shakespeare's "ravenous lamb" and "beautiful tyrant" — as well as a palpable heaviness in the region of my solar plexus. I felt like one of Salem's accused, being bullied into self-incrimination by the laying on of stones.
I confess: there was a moment when I thought I was experiencing cardiac arrest.
Instead of dialing 911, I called your mother, who in her wisdom advised me that I was probably having a panic attack and should take a few deep breaths and ingest two of those nonaddicting homeopathic sleep- aid tablets she buys for me, allowing them to dissolve, slowly, under my tongue.
"You can't chew them, Charles," she reminded me. "They're not Tums. They won't be completely effective unless they mix with the enzymes in your saliva and are ingested sublingually." I heard her stifle a yawn; ever polite, your mother, even when roused from a sound sleep in the wee small hours by her hypochondriac ex-husband. "Just think of them as under-the-tongue Communion wafers, okay?" Between you and me, I've not had the heart to tell her that although the tablets do indeed induce sleep, they often incite very disturbing dreams. I'll choose insomnia over nightmares any time.
I breathed deeply. I brewed some chamomile tea — another one of your mother's suggestions — and am drinking it now as I write this, sitting outside on the front steps. It's a beautiful night, really, unusually clear; even against the bleached background of an artificially lit city sky, the constellations are asserting themselves in a rare, vivid way.
I'm reminded of a girlfriend I had in college (the only other serious girlfriend I had besides your mom) who was a great devotee of astrology. Her name, appropriately, was Ursula, from the Latinursus, meaning "bear," the name given to the greater and smaller star formations also known as the Big and Little Dippers.
While the rest of our crowd worked part-time jobs flipping burgers at Dick's, parking cars at Canlis, or shelving books at Suzzallo, Ursula earned an impressive under-the-table, tax-free income from the comfort of her dorm room by reading fellow students' natal charts.
Her clientele — a fifty-fifty coed mix — came to her with questions like, Which fraternity should I pledge? Should I change my major from premed to business? Is this a good time to lose my virginity? Is it pointless to try and make my 7:00 a.m. class when Mercury goes retrograde?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Language Arts"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Stephanie Kallos.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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