It was an improbable thing to do, which may have made it
probable, since who can predict what a poet named Lady will do? She disappeared
for a month in France—OK, it wasn’t really a disappearance, since she appeared
from time to time via Facebook sitting in front of châteaux,
or
drinking wine, or contemplating courtyards: you get to do stuff like that if
you marry French guys. But whatever possessed Lady to put her child in a
regular school?
The point was that the 12-year old Naïa, was homeschooled—home being in
this case the café / gift shop owned by her parents. And though her tutor was a
pillar of ordinary, her adopted uncle, who sat writing nearby? Definitely less
than a steadying influence.
“She won’t last a week,” said Montalvo, as we were reading—as an exercise
in use of punctuation—a letter of recommendation I had written for Naïa.
“She’ll take one look at the playground, hate it, and retreat into a corner,
never speaking to anybody.”
This had to be protested—there are limits to disloyalty that even I have
to respect. We did, however, briefly discuss whether we could start a little
pool, with everybody chipping in a buck or two and betting on the likely day of
balking.
Because how could it not happen? For one thing, Naïa has never been seen
to sit—her one mode of repose is a flop. From this vantage, whatever education
had to be poured into her was done so like a dowager duchess dispensing tea. It
stayed there long enough to be dribbled off onto a test, and then the space was
given off to more interesting affairs like dinosaurs and dragons.
From time to time, questions arose to which—mistakenly—I was thought to
have the answers. What was the predicate of a sentence? And what then was a
predicate nominative?
“It is that,” I said, “which follows a copulative verb….”
The tutor sputtered, the tutee twittered, I maintained a haughty silence.
I know, I know—the very same English teachers who draped the lascivious
legs of the grand piano (you know men and their lustful ways….) came up with
the term “linking verb,” but so? Could you resist using the word “copulative”
to a twelve-year old?
“I don’t know what that means,” said the tutor.
“Easy,” I tell him. “Birds do it, bees do it, and baby, verbs can REALLY
do it.”
So we got that sorted out, and then proceeded to the next question, which
is why would anybody care?
Answer—because it’ll be on the test.
“I greatly fear,” I tell them, ”that one day some horrid educator will
make an enormous blunder and put something you’ll actually want to know on the
test. And since your habit of forgetting everything on the test—for which I
salute you, by the way—has now gone through ‘instinctual’ and is well into the
territory of ‘congenital,’ what will you do?”
Twelve-year olds? They know when to ignore you.
Which Naïa did yesterday, after I told her she had blown her chances of
paying her way into Yale or Harvard: she’ll have to rely on a dragon
scholarship. Why? Because she told me she had fallen at school
“Excellent,” I told her, “though it may have been a bit more subtle to
have waited for the third week. As it is, it could seem just a bit mercenary.”
“I don’t know what that is….”
“The point is whether you filed an incident report?”
“Marc, I just got up. Some kid helped me….”
I’m appalled.
“You allowed a non-medically trained person to attend you? You should
have stayed in place, groaning loudly, speed-dialing your mother’s lawyer, and
clamoring for a neurologist to see you immediately! Naïa, how can you not know
that?”
“It was just a little fall, and it doesn’t hurt as much know as it did an
hour ago.”
“That’s a terrible sign,” I tell her, “since it’s very clear that your
nerve cell are necrolysing.” She doesn’t know the word, nor does the computer,
but that hardly matters.
“It means that your nerve cells are slowly dying, as a result of this
trauma, and that at any minute they will explode, releasing the deadliest
toxins into your bloodstream. It’s actually quite improbable that by tomorrow
you’ll be able to walk. Amputation, even here with a kitchen knife, is probably
the only solution.”
Lady comes by to kiss Naïa.
“Remember this moment,” I tell Lady, “since this will be the last moment,
in life, in which you’ll kiss your daughter! Ah, there’ll you’ll be, in the
cemetery, flung down on the raised ground of your daughter’s grave, wailing and
showering the tombstone with your tears. Hah! See what you’ve done?”
“No it won’t,” says Lady, and to prove it kisses Naïa again.
“You’ve no one to blame but yourself,” I tell her. “And don’t look to me
for support! No, I’ll be right there in the cemetery, raking you to coals. ‘You
cast your daughter to certain death, woman, and see now how you pay! Wail,
wail, but to no avail! Ne’er more will she flop on the red sofa, fiddling with
her iPad, and animalizing her imaginary zoos! Nay, she is gone, gone—killed by
the mother who rashly thrust her into that deathtrap of a school! Weep, wench,
weep—no tears will bring her back!’”
Mothers of 12-year old girls? They know how to ignore you too….
“It’s completely not right,” I tell Jorge a moment ago. “I keep looking
over to where she should be, and then I realize, she’s in some dumb school.”
“I know,” says Jorge, “I miss her too….”
“You know what worries me? Where will this end? What if she decides to
put Lorca, the pet Chihuahua, in school? Will we just have to put up with that?
And what if Neruda, the green Dominican parrot, gets it into his head to stop
screaming?”
“That bird can die,” says Jorge so quickly that we both know: it’s true.
So forget the bird, here’s what we’re going to do: we’re dognapping Lorca
until Naïa returns.
Oh, and can we start a pool on that?
