Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel (12 page)

Nobody’d seen Dan or his family for a long time. Presumably they were happily ensconced and doing okay. The lawn looked recently trimmed; water was running as usual over the rooftop; everything seemed fine. I proceeded past the Rainbow Pillbox, past Bob and Linda Hamilton’s amusingly named, two-bedroom “Beaver Dam,” and after that, Ed and Jane Shapiro’s “Fort Ed and Jane” (not such a finished job, Fort Ed and Jane—an eyesore actually, resembling nothing so much as a complex split-level plywood clubhouse hammered together by stoned teenagers), arriving, finally, at 57 Manatee, the home of the Jordans. This was a house that was still, to the naked eye, a house. Which gave me pause. I stood for a moment on the sidewalk, peering at the grass and the small bushes lining the driveway, searching, among the ubiquitous purple flowers, for what if anything might befall me upon setting foot off public, onto private, property. But there was nothing out of the ordinary here, only porch furniture parked up on the porch, and a couple of toy trucks and other children’s play objects littering the walkway. I stepped over one truck. Then another. At the foot of the steps rested a Big Wheel. I breathed out the tension before gripping the Day-Glo plastic trike and rolling it gently from my path. And at the door, rather than thumbing the buzzer, which could be hot-wired for electric shock, I knocked.

“Hello?” The voice of Jenny, calling from deep inside the house. I heard her approaching footsteps, and hollered back, brightly:

“It’s me, Pete! Pete Robinson? From the library the other day?”

“Oh, hi,” opening wide the door, gesturing me into a living room crowded with matching furniture and more kids’ toys, and smelling like a hamper. “You’ll have to excuse me, the house is a mess. I’ve got the kids all day and there’s only so much a person can do.”

She wore that haggard young-mother look. Messy blond hair, bare feet, a wrinkled blue sundress hanging from bony shoulders. Susy, her seven-year-old, peered from around a hallway corner. I waved to her and said, “Hi there, bet you don’t recognize me with a shower and a shave.”

Susy made a face. Her mother asked her, “Pumpkin, did you finish your cereal?”

“No.” Followed by: “Yes.”

“Go finish.”

“Okay,” vanishing, with the refreshing sound of small feet. I complimented Jenny, “Great kid.”

“Isn’t she? We have a lot of fun, me and Susy. Brad’s around here somewhere too. He’s still kind of in the labor-intensive phase.”

“How old is Brad?”

“Going on five. You want to sit down? Watch out for that stuff on the sofa. It’s part of Brad’s Erector Set.”

I picked up the debris in question, a constructivist replica of what appeared to be a mobile missile launcher, complete with retractable blast shield, tractor wheels, the works. “Brad built this?” It seemed incredible. Jenny explained, “With help from his sister.”

“Ah.”

“Do you, Mr. Robinson, have children of your own?” She smoothed her dress in her lap and leaned forward, attentive. Her naked feet, pressed side by side on the floor, were narrow and smooth, and showed strong arch support and excellent toes.

“Meredith and I have decided to wait. We’re both teachers, so, you know, it isn’t like we don’t get to enjoy the company of children.”

“It’s so terrible about the schools.” At that moment there was a great crash in the back of the house. Jenny jumped up, called, “Sweetie?” and jogged down the hall.

Her absence gave me a chance to peruse the bookshelf. The usual assortment of paperback classics, plus a surprising amount of hardcover new fiction. Not many people buy hardcovers these days. I pulled down a few volumes, then put them back as Jenny came in, smiling. “Would you like a cup of tea, Mr. Robinson? Why don’t we go in the kitchen where I can watch the monsters.”

“Call me Pete,” following her into the warm kitchen that smelled of a mixture of foods; smelled also, like everything in this house, of the children, just now visible through the screen door, out back naked and splashing each other in a small blue inflatable pool shaded by a tree bearing round fruit. Brad was blond and fat, Susy dark and thin. Their mother held a kettle beneath the faucet. “Unfortunately, my drain is clogged. You don’t know anything about clogged drains, do you, Pete?”

“Hmn. Did you try chemicals?”

“I poured Drāno down there but that stuff worries me. You’re not supposed to use too much, but how much is too much? Linda Hamilton down the street used Drāno and it ate through the pipes.”

“Their drain’s clogged too?”

“Yup.”

So it
was
a community problem. How widespread? And what could be causing it? “Do you have a snake?”

“A snake?”

“It’s a thing that bores through the drain, to dislodge whatever’s in there. A long metal thing, but pliable. My drain was clogged, and I used a snake.”

“Your drain was clogged?”

“Yes.”

“Recently?”

“A few days ago.”

“Weird.”

We peered together into her sink drain, I over her shoulder, gazing down. It was the closest I’d ever come, I think, since I’d gotten married, the closest I’d come to pressing myself, front to back, against a woman not Meredith. A smell of soap rose from Jenny’s freckled neck. The small hairs behind her ears were quite appealing. We stood there, breathing. Kids splashed, sink water stood. The kettle whistle blew and I backed off into the middle of the room as Jenny, in a voice hard to read, a little sharp, a bit curt, said, “Don’t worry about it. Dave will take care of it when he gets home.”

“When does Dave get home?” What a stupid thing to say. It sounded like a line. But it wasn’t a line. Not entirely. “I mean, what kind of work does Dave do?”

“Junior administrator at the junior college.”

“You guys wouldn’t happen to know a visiting anthropology professor named Bob, would you?”

“Bob Barrow?”

“Skinny guy, deep-set eyes.”

“Sure, we know Bob.”

I sipped tea. What was the right tack? Were Barrow and the Jordans friends? Or did Dave’s business bring the Jordans routinely into contact with faculty, in which case it mightn’t be personal. Test the waters.

“He seems like a nice person.”

“Bob’s brilliant. His theories about intracranial cross-speciation are groundbreaking. But the psych research community is very hostile to people like Bob. He poses a threat. That’s why he’s guest-lecturing at the jaycee, and not holding an endowed university chair.”

The splashing of the children was becoming intense. Dripping faucet water plinked in the sink basin. We sat at the kitchen table. I spread my legs and leaned back. Jenny held her teacup at chin level, near her face, giving herself a miniature steam facial. We talked about this and that. Jenny’s breasts showed beneath the fabric of her dress. She had graceful arms and slender hands. What kind of animal might she be? Ocelot? Sea otter? Certainly not a ruminant. Her breath blew steam from the top of her cup. I maintained an expansive lounging posture of alpha male insouciance, keeping my distance while subtly displaying, in the language of the body, mild assertiveness, a sexual openness. And I allowed my feet to come close to hers beneath the table—I was sure Jenny was aware of them by her chair. Her elbows rested on the table, her face floated. Her voice was mellow and inviting. “Well, Mr. Robinson, I mean Pete, what brings you on this visit?”

“School.”

“School?”

“Grades K through six, starting next week, at my place.” I put down my cup and leaned forward, facing Jenny across the table. We were inches from one another. I told her everything about the school except the political part, the “junior achiever” mayoral-campaign strategy. Also, I didn’t mention Freedom Field. My plan was to avoid that thorny subject altogether. I spoke freely on topics like moral guidance, A. S. Neill and alternative education, the Jeffersonian concept of the honor system, box lunches, and so on. It was a pretty speech, lasting about ten minutes, which was a pleasant surprise to me, seeing as I’d neither planned nor rehearsed. I wrapped up, “Jenny, let me assure you, it’s going to be amazing.”

“What’s this going to run?”

“Tuition will be enrollment-dependent. We’re looking to offer top-dollar education at economy rates. That means special emphasis on each child’s distinctive needs, within a friendly, traditional, family-style setting. That’s the home school advantage.”

“Susy! Brad! Come in here!” Suddenly the two sopping pink children ran howling from pool to porch to kitchen; the screen door slammed and daughter and son stamped in, streaming water. They stopped and stood in the dirty puddles they made, before us.

Jenny leaned over to address them at eye level, “Susy, Brad, what are you supposed to do before you come in the house after swimming?”

“Um, dry?” This from Susy, assuredly the leader, by virtue of age and intelligence, of the sibling pair. She clasped her brother’s arm and began tugging him roughly back toward the screen door.

“Hang on,” called her mother.

Without letting go of Brad, Susy turned, her quick and forceful motion requiring Brad to race around her in a half-circle, like a cruelly led dance partner. He almost slipped and fell. Jenny scolded, “Brad, be careful, the floor’s wet. That’s why you’re supposed to towel off.”

Susy said, “I’ve got him, Mom. I won’t let him fall.” It was one of those beautiful family moments, the elder child’s urge to nurture and protect.

“Guys, this man wants to be your teacher. How do you feel about that?”

I couldn’t believe it. Was Jenny going to leave the education of her children, aged five and seven, in
their own hands?
The kids watched me with blank expressions. Susy seemed to be squeezing down on Brad’s arm—she was giving him an Indian burn. I smiled benignly, winked in a charming, avuncular, fun/conspiratorial way, generally nodded and grinned, as Jenny pressed her offspring, “What do you think? Want to study with Mr. Robinson?”

It was all about trust. I was being judged. By babes. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might have to win over the kids. But of course that’s always the way. Parents seem to embrace, almost unquestioningly, this bizarre, superstitious belief in infant clairvoyance, as though their “innocent” offspring have access to deep truths lost to them, to the parents—lost to maturity, cynicism, compromise. It’s one of our most esteemed cultural archetypes: the Prescient Child.

Brad and Susy didn’t strike me as a couple of oracles. In fact, they looked a little stupid. Even Susy looked stupid. Her mouth hung open, her hair stood up in wet spikes. I wanted to come to her defense, to hers and to Brad’s, to say to their mother, Don’t lay this on them, it has to be your choice, you’re their mother.

But then Susy spoke, in syllables soft and quiet, too quiet, almost, to be heard. “Okay.”

It was sweet, I could’ve hugged her. The home school was now officially in business. Enrollment, two.

“What will you call your school, Mr. Robinson?”

Good question. “We’ll see when we get farther along. A school is a place to make sober inquiry into the workings of the world and the mind. The name of the school, the right name, should reveal itself through this inquiry.”

Robinson Country Day? The Robinson Academy of Arts and Letters? The Robinson Institute? It was, after all, my idea, my ideology. It was
my
school, in
my
house.

I made a total of seven recruitment visits that day and the next, was successful at each, and in danger of dying only once, when Deborah and Carl Harris’s automatic garage door/catapult discharged a fusillade of calcified coral fragments, missing my head by inches.

Deborah Harris cooed apologies from the house, “Yoo-hoo, Pete, sorry about that. I
told
Carl to turn that thing off. He must’ve forgotten.”

“I’m fine,” rising from the Harrises’ lawn and brushing myself off. “That’s quite a device.”

“Hey, Pete.” It was Carl Harris, emerging from the dark garage with a crescent wrench in his hand. This man had once spent twenty days adrift on the high seas in a rubber raft, with no fresh water, surviving on the blood and flesh of fish caught bare-handed.
LOST PLEASURE BOATER LIVES! ORDEAL CALLED “HARROWING,”
ran the headline. Looking at Carl now, you wouldn’t guess such a thing possible. His skin was white, he had a gut; he ambled splayfooted on short, bowed-out legs. “Almost plugged you, Pete. I’ve been experimenting with a new garage-door-to-air gyroscope.”

We shook hands, and I said, not discourteously, “I guess it’s a good thing you’re still experimenting.”

“Hell, Pete. I had no idea you were out there. Please believe me. Please, accept my apologies.”

“Apologies accepted. It’s my fault, too. We’ve all got to be more careful these days.”

After that it was easy to get Deborah and Carl to commit their ten-year-old twin sons, Matt and Larry, to the school. I felt no remorse about playing on the Harrises’ contrition—they
had
almost killed me. Besides, the important thing was the education of the children. “Okay. School starts next Monday at eight. We haven’t worked out busing, so for now it’ll be the responsibility of parents to provide transportation to and from, and also you’ll need to supply Matt and Larry’s lunches. I recommend a sandwich, Pop-Tarts, and a piece of fruit. You might stock up on eight-ounce cartons of low-fat milk. Additionally, we ask all students to bring along a favorite toy. I typically kick off the year with an open play session, in order to implant the idea that learning is fun.”

Deborah said, “The boys’ favorite toys are their bow-and-arrow sets. Is that going to be all right in class?”

“What kind of arrows? Do they have metal points, or those rubber suction cups?”

“They’re carbon steel shafts with two-bladed broadheads and helical fletches. They’ll shave a hair,” said Carl.

“Tell you what. Have Matt and Larry bring their bows and quivers, and we’ll work out something in the way of a target range out back.”

Which is exactly what we did, come Sunday—we affixed, Meredith and I, to the tangerine tree out back, a round piece of cardboard painted eggshell-white and crayoned with an imperfectly round, lavender bull’s-eye. I held the flimsy target against the trunk and queried, “Higher? Lower?”