Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (4 page)

“Mr. G.” was Chris Goddard, the headmaster of the entire school; the high-school kids interacted with him more than they did with their own principal. “There are laws about indecent exposure,” I pointed out. I wished that we could talk like this forever. We were facing a year of constant nagging—SAT prep, college essays, senior projects. First-semester senior year hadn’t been fun even with our dutiful Jeremy; it was going to be a nightmare with Zack. “Don’t forget we have that meeting with the college counselor tomorrow.”

He made a face. “Is Dad coming?”

“Of course.”

He scooped up his backpack. “We had another theme before this one. ‘Senior Year: It’s All Hype.’ ”

“I don’t get that one either.”

“HYPe. Capital H, Capital Y, Capital P.”

Oh. HYP. Harvard, Yale, Princeton. The three highest-ranked colleges in the country.

“And some girls in the costume department,” he continued, “found this really thin silver fabric that you can see through. They were going to make Harry Potter Invisibility Cloaks. The deal was that Invisibility Cloaks were the only way that most of us could get into those places, but the fabric was pretty expensive.”

“Those schools are pretty expensive, too.”

“Oh, come on, Mom,” he scoffed. “Don’t you think if I could get into Princeton, Dad would pay anything it took?”

He was right about that, but even if his transcript showed only his much improved second-semester junior grades, Zack
could not have gotten into Princeton. “Let’s see what this counselor has to say.”

“If he uses the word
package,
I’m walking out.”

“Me too.”

Zack slumped in his chair and kicked at his backpack. Where were the Harry Potter Invisibility Cloaks when you needed them?

Zack hadn’t done well at Selwyn. Small for his age when he’d started in fourth grade, he’d never had the gang of friends that Jeremy always had. Nor did he do well academically. He never brought the right books home from school; he never knew what assignments were due when.

We’d had him tested for everything—auditory processing disorder, attention deficit disorder, sensory integration disorder. You name it, we tested for it, he didn’t have it.

These results should have been good news, but Mike was frustrated by the absence of a diagnosis. He was a goal-oriented, problem-solving person. If Zack had a diagnosis, a label, then we could design a protocol and set out to fix him. Even better than a protocol would have been a pill—Ritalin, Adderall, Concerta. Mike kept hearing about how other people’s kids had been transformed by one of these ADD medications.

So Mike did research. “Zack’s not hyperactive,” Mike said. “That’s why they missed the diagnosis, but he’s impulsive and inattentive.”

And if we give him a pill, he will be “fixed.”
That’s what Mike really wanted—a pill that would turn Zack into Jeremy.

Reluctantly I dragged the poor kid in for yet more tests during his middle-school years. The results were the same. One of his scores on the TOVA—Test of Variables of Attention—was borderline
, but the rest were fine. Zack did not need to be “fixed.” He was Zack, not Jeremy, and the sooner Mike realized that, the better.

Then Mike left, moving out four days before Zack started high school.

Zack’s grades immediately got even worse. He started sneaking off with upperclassmen to those kids’ parked cars where they would, at best, smoke cigarettes. His teachers were frustrated with him because he would start ambitious projects and not finish them. The school’s athletes shunned him, disappointed that he wasn’t going to contribute what Jeremy had. He was miserable. I had no idea how to motivate him to work harder, to care more . . . because I was miserable myself. My mother had died, my husband had left, my younger son was floundering. I had no advice for anyone.

Finally, after an incident that involved storing another kid’s Jell-O shots—little pockets of Jell-O made with more vodka than water—leaving them in his locker overnight so that they melted and attracted ants, the school suspended him for three days and strongly encouraged us not to re-enroll him in the fall. He wasn’t formally expelled, but the school staff told us that he would be happier someplace else. Both Zack and I agreed.

His horrible grades were going to make transferring a problem. Tense and angry, believing that he was the reason Mike had left, he insisted that he didn’t care where he went. Wilson, our local public high school, was fine with him—fine as in “fine, Mom, fine; now leave me alone.”

The one school that interested him was Alden. Although its philosophy was as traditional as Selwyn’s, the student body, especially in the high school, was very different. The school had a strong arts program, awful athletics, and what Zack had described as a “kick-ass” light board in its theater. This was the single most positive thing he had said in three months.

Apparently the Chair of the Performing Arts Department at Alden had the pull that athletic coaches have at other schools. She went to the admissions office and said, “This is a kid we need.” So he was admitted with the condition that he work with a coach to improve his organizational skills. That helped him some. He also did some self-esteem-building therapy. I have no idea if that helped.

What really made things work for him were the other kids. At many schools the theater kids are a dark bunch, given to risky behavior. But at Alden the best students were those involved in the performing arts. They wanted to go to Juilliard and Tisch, so they kept out of trouble and were determined to get good grades even in their much-hated math classes.

In this case, peer pressure was a good thing. Wanting to fit in is a great motivator for a teen. The theater kids at Alden were not slackers, so Zack stopped slacking. He proved to be unusually adept at the mechanics of the light board and the wiring of the sound system. “Let’s find that new kid,” people were saying when he had been at the school less than a month. “He’ll know how we can pull that off.”

That built his self-esteem far more than any of the expensive therapy did.

His grades during his first year at Alden were erratic, which was an improvement over his Selwyn grades, and by the end of junior year he was doing fine—and not just “fine, Mom, fine.”

Nonetheless, finding the right college for him was not going to be easy.

He’d been assigned to Alden’s newest college counselor, Travis Jackson. Travis was very young and very new to his job. I was sure that over the years he would see families far more messed up than ours, but he might not have yet.

“Mr. Van Aiken,” Travis said carefully after Mike had asked
about packaging Zack as if he were a new species of Fig Newtons, “let’s set the goal first. We want to identify the type of school that would be best for Zack; then we’ll start talking about individual schools and their admissions standards.” He turned to Zack. “What kind of environment do you best learn in?”

We got nowhere. Zack was completely uncommunicative. Travis tried asking him about his involvement with the theater, about his community service, about working with the organizational coach. Zack gave the briefest answers, never looking at the counselor. I knew what he was thinking—that no decent school would want him, the whole “I would never join a club that would have me as a member” thing.

The bell rang, and Zack shot out of his chair, desperate to get out of the interview. Travis followed Mike and me into the outer office. “He isn’t always like that,” I said, still the mom, still needing to apologize, still needing to explain.

“I’ll talk to him alone. He may be more responsive if his parents aren’t in the room. And if you take him to visit a variety of schools, he’ll get a feeling for what’s right for him.”

“I’ll be taking him,” Mike said.

Rather than have the seniors miss class to visit colleges, the school adds a Senior Travel Day to the long weekend in October. Mike had already announced to me that he would take Zack to his college visits. Clearly he didn’t trust me to do it.

The two of us headed down one of the paths that skirted the old mansion in which the high-school students took their classes. Mike was shuffling through the brochures Travis had given us.

“It’s hard to get excited about these schools,” he said. “I’ve never heard of half of them.”

“But a really big or really competitive school—the ones we have heard of—might not be right for Zack.”

“He’s doing so well now. He can handle anything.”

“He is doing great,” I said. “But if he gets in an environment where he’s just one of six thousand, he may find it hard to keep motivated. He has this burden of years of underperformance. He still struggles with that. It could drag him down.”

“Like it does you.”

“What?” I stopped in the middle of the path. How dare he say that? How
dare
he? “I hope you aren’t saying that
I
am underperforming.”

I am an advanced-practice nurse with a specialty in intensive care. I have a master’s degree. I am one of the most respected nurses at a major teaching hospital. I was
not
underperforming.

“Not now. Of course not. But when you were his age, you were. You know you were.” He took a breath. “Darcy, when you and the counselor were talking about Zack and this coach who usually works with the ADD kids, you said something— Are
you
ADD?”

I started walking again. It wasn’t politically correct to say that someone
was
ADD. Attention deficit disorder was something you
had,
not something you were. “I don’t see that it’s any of your business, Mike.”

“When did you find out? Why didn’t you tell me? Are you taking those pills?”

I didn’t answer.

“Darcy, come on. After we split up, you started getting places on time; you were making lists and not losing them . . . is it because you’re taking pills?”

I still didn’t answer. Of course I had ADD.

It was ironic, wasn’t it? For years and years we’d been testing Zack to see if he had ADD. I’d researched the medications, but I hadn’t read much about the diagnostic criteria.

Then, when he had been applying to Alden, the admissions counselor had said that he had some habits similar to—and this
phrase seared through me—“even modeled on” ADD behavior. Whose behavior would he have modeled but mine? I borrowed a book from the counselor. I started paging through it on the way to the car. Ten minutes later, still in the parking lot, I knew that I was the one who needed to be tested.

I made an appointment with the educational psychologist who’d tested Zack. My parents had kept all my elementary-school report cards, and the psychologist later said that he’d almost been willing to diagnosis me from the evidence they provided. But he had me take the computerized test. The results were unquestionable, and so I, a woman in her forties, got a prescription for Ritalin.

I was already seeing my nice mom-type therapist, and she had been important. She’d helped me identify the behaviors I had wanted to change and craft a regime to implement those changes, but actually sticking with that regime day in, day out, that had needed Ritalin. The Ritalin alone wouldn’t have been enough, but the therapy alone wouldn’t have been either.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Mike was close now, his shoulder just behind mine, and his mouth close to my ear. “I thought we were making progress.”

I jerked away from him. “I know what you’re thinking—the medication ‘fixed’ me, and I would have been worthy of your return. Well, it didn’t ‘fix’ me. Yes, it made me a better housewife. It made me better able to stay on task while I complete routine chores.”

I didn’t need Ritalin at work. The intense atmosphere of the ICU kept me focused in a way that unloading a dishwasher didn’t.

“But I’m still the same person,” I continued, “and even more important, you were totally the same person. You would have found something else to criticize about me. The laundry would have been done, the cabinet doors would have been closed, but you would have found something wrong.”

“Darcy, why didn’t you tell me? We were still trying to work things out.”

“No,
I
was still trying. You had stopped.”

“Oh, the therapist.” He didn’t have a good answer for that.

“My being diagnosed would have fed into your myth that I and only I was the problem. You hadn’t learned anything. You hadn’t changed. That wasn’t good enough.”

“You didn’t even give me a chance. Why didn’t you say something?”

Because I was too angry. And I was tired of being that angry. And tired of feeling that all the choices were yours, that I had no control. Not telling you gave me power.

The pointless, stupid power of a two-year-old.

We were in the parking lot now and had to stop talking. There were three women standing by the side of a car, talking. One of them was leaning against the car; another had set her purse on the hood. They must have been talking for a while. Two more women came out of the middle-school building and went to join the conversation.

I did not understand how women could stand around a parking lot, talking for so long. What did they talk about? After “you bring the juice, I’ll bring the cupcakes,” what was there?