“Why,” I
asked, ”she seems perfectly fine to me.”
“Well, they
say I’m doing a terrible thing by home-schooling her. They say that she needs
contact with other kids, and that she won’t get socialized, and I don’t know
what all. Anyway, I’m a terrible mother.”
“Naïa’s
more normal than I am,” I say. “At least on the face of it. I think kids are
tremendous conformists, most of them. Remember that time I spilled something,
and we had that argument about the “wet caution floor” sign?”
“Hunh?”
“Maybe you
were off painting houses,” I said.
Yes, Lady
is also a house painter, but a sensible woman as well. So why get outside and
climb ladders in the blazing tropical heat when you can sit at the bar, drink a
beer, chat with passersby, and paint little decorative plaster casitas? Lady does good business selling these
for sixty bucks or so—given the obvious advantages, you’ve got to be seriously
dumb to do the other kind.
“Anyway, I
spilled some water, and it was a big thing at Wal-Mart: everyone, even
the English teacher, knew that if you spilled water, one person had to stay at
the site and warn people, the other person had to get the “wet caution floor”
sign.”
“Wet
caution floor?”
“What is
this, genetic? Or is it a girl thing? Haven’t you ever read your own sign?’
Of course I
have to go get the sign—why can’t I back away from a fight?—and we take a look
at it. You’ve seen it a zillion times, of course, and if I had Internet—it’s
Sunday, so the damn thing is taking the day off—I’d show you a picture of it.
But there it was, the yellow collapsible thing that says:
Wet
Caution
Floor
“Caution,
wet floor,” says Lady.
Right, Marc
is now in complete fight or flight, because guess what? I know the argument,
which is that the “caution,” being bigger, means that it goes first. It’s sort
of the bully argument.
“Caution,
wet floor,” repeats Lady, and you know what? I decide to drop it….
“Anyway, I
think Naïa has great social skills,” I say. “Every time someone comes to talk
to Neruda, she runs over and gives them an in-service on the bird. Complete
strangers, and she’s chatting away. I was seven before I worked up the courage
to address my own mother….”
Neruda, at
least in the Poet’s Passage, is the green
Dominican parrot who, having nothing else to do, squawks at any passerby.
“Yeah?”
“Well, not
really, but I was really shy. The point being that Naïa talks to anyone, but
she’s also pretty savvy.”
“Well, Nico
wants to put her in the Episcopal
Cathedral School…”
“WHAT?!”
I see these
kids on the bus, and they’re all wearing a little blue uniforms and black Mary
Jane shoes. Naïa wearing flowing blouses, pants, and Crocs. If it were the
sixties, you’d find her on Haight-Ashbury.
The Episcopal Cathedral School is definitely Junior League.
“Well, she’d
get a good traditional education,” says Lady.
“To my
mind, she’s already getting a good, traditional education. I’m amazed,
really, that nothing seems to have changed in the half-century since I was in
school. You know, she has spelling tests—of which I approve, generally—but I
really wonder about that. Short of writing thank-you notes to Michelle Obama
for a lovely dinner, is she ever going to need traditional spelling? Spell
check has done away with that, in a sense.”
“So what
would you do?”
“Put a lot
more attention on those words like “their / there / they’re” or “adapt / adopt”—words
that have to be used correctly, and can’t be detected by spell check. Anyway,
it’s incredible, some of the stuff she has to learn.”
“Like what?”
“’Lebanon
is a country roughly the size of New Jersey’,” I recite.
“Hunh?”
“It’s one
of the sentences I heard her tutor read her, and I thought it was one of the
dumbest things I had ever heard.”
“Why?”
“Look, has
she ever been to New Jersey? How many kids are reading that sentence and
memorizing it, so that they can answer the question: ‘What is the approximate
size of Lebanon?’ on the test. Anyway, why don’t they teach her the real dope
on Lebanon?”
“And that
is?”
“Lebanon
was a paradise for centuries, a paradise that is part of the region called the Levant. And it was famous for
its civilization, for tolerating all religions, all views, for accepting Jews,
Christians, Muslims equally. People walked around, arm in arm, ideological
enemies cordially having passionate discourse on the most violence-producing
topics, and eating dates!”
“Yeah?”
says Lady, who has a good nose for when I go a little off.
“OK, but
you know what I mean.”
“So what
happened?”
“Exactly.”
“What?”
“You know,
that’s exactly the question I would ask Naïa. How, in a remarkably short time,
did the country fall into a terrible
civil war? What happened? Then I’d go off and write something and she’d
research it and come back tell me. But telling Naïa that Lebanon is the size….”
“Hey, why
don’t you tutor Naïa?”
“Wouldn’t
work,” I said. “First, I’m not good with kids. Second, well, Naïa takes school
with all the seriousness it deserves. She wants to be told the
approximate size of Lebanon, because it’s perfectly easy to park that fact in
her mind just long enough to drive it out onto the test. Remember her answer
when I asked her the state capital of Oregon?”
“What?”
“That was last
year!”
It’s not
just the Levant, I think. How fragile all societies are! How changing one thing
would change everything—what if Jorge were not making the coffee and Neruda
were not squawking and Lorca, the toy Chihuahua, were not begging for food?
Could we have the Poet’s Passage without Naïa, flopped on her tummy, absorbing
the fact of the approximate size of Lebanon?
She ain’t
going anywhere!
