The Bigness of the World (22 page)

“I don’t know, sir,” he said. He was one of the politer boys, the type who gets along largely on manners, by jumping up after a movie to reopen the blinds or rearrange the desks. He added miserably, “I’m sorry, sir. I’ve never been much good at geography.”

That is when I produced the sigh, the sigh meant only to alleviate my own frustration. Still, as I sat in Thorqvist’s office the next day, listening to him emit a similar sigh, I did experience a twinge of remorse regarding young Peterson.

Thorqvist and I are both great believers in civility, and so we chose to disengage briefly, to turn our attention away from the matter of names while we both calmed down. Casting around his office for a momentary distraction, I noticed a new sampler on the wall behind his desk. “More of your wife’s work?” I asked. Already his wall featured six of her embroideries, each containing a proverb whose message she apparently found so inspiring that she felt compelled to reproduce it in small, exact stitches.

Thorqvist nodded, sheepishly dare I say? He is no genius, my principal, but neither, I believe, is he the sort to be swayed by the bland, lowest-common-denominator wisdom of proverbs. It is true that he has a fondness for clichés, but proverbs are a far different species. Clichés are a speaker’s convenience, a linguistic shortcut uttered, in most cases, entirely without thought and received in the same fashion. They are like mosquitoes, ubiquitous and annoying but ultimately harmless. A proverb, however, is much stealthier: like the bite of a snake, it is meant to change a life.

I stood before his wife’s seventh contribution, a Slovenian proverb according to the final line of stitches. “Thorqvist,” I said, fumbling for words. “Have you actually read this … this Slovenian nonsense?” I proceeded to read his wife’s sampler aloud: “An ant is over six feet tall when measured by its own foot-rule.” Still he did not reply, and so I turned to him and spoke urgently: “Thorqvist, don’t you see that this message is antithetical to our very mission as educators? Certainly our boys would all like to be measured according to their own
foot-rule
as it were, but that is precisely the point, is it not? The boys must understand that it is the world’s
foot-rule
that matters.”

The sampler hit on a sore spot with me, for it reinforced a growing trend in education — namely, the notion that we are the keepers of our students’ self-esteem and, as such, must never allow them to feel that they have failed. Just recently, for example, we were expected to spend an entire day being lectured at by one of these ponytailed
pedagogy types hired from the university for an exorbitant fee to beat the latest theories into us. He began the session by waving a handful of red pens about.

“Who can tell me what these are?” he asked, and when enough of my colleagues had taken the bait, calling out, “Red pens,” he announced theatrically, “Ah yes, everybody is familiar with red pens I see. Well, teachers, I am here to tell you that the red pen, bleeding its way across the students’ work all these years, is finally and fully finished.” With a flourish that underscored his rhetoric, he tossed the entire handful of pens into a nearby trash can.

“May I point out,” I said, raising my hand, “that red allows the student to differentiate his work from my corrections and thus to see clearly his mistakes.”

He regarded me for a moment, yanking on his ponytail as though, I could not help but think, trying to start a motor. “I believe that I hear a bit of the
sage-on-the-stage
mentality in your comments, Mister …”

“Doctor,” I corrected him. “Dr. Deneau. Mathematics.”

“Dr. Deneau,” he repeated, patronizingly of course, as though I were a child who had informed him that I was not six years old but rather six and a half.

“If by
sage-on-the-stage mentality
you are referring to the fact that I know math and they do not, then I must confess that I see no problem with that
mentality
. Indeed, I see no alternative.”

“This,” he said gravely, spreading his hands wide, “is why these professional development days are so important.” The implication, of course, was that something I had said was the referred-to “this” that demonstrated his point.

He consulted his watch. “I was not expecting quite so much discussion on the topic of red pens,” he quipped. A few of my colleagues chuckled, obedient,
baa
ing laughter, and he glanced in my direction to see whether I had noted it. I looked around at my colleagues, who
fell largely into two camps: the older teachers, who viewed professional development as something to be sat through whilst offering up the least possible resistance, and the new teachers, impressionable, enthusiastic note takers who were having their beliefs shaped by ideologues such as this, this
sage on the stage
as it were.

“Gang,” he called out. “Take ten minutes, and then we’ll reconvene to role-play some of our new ideas.”

I did not partake of the ten-minute break. Instead, I went home and took to my bed for the afternoon, overcome with fever at the thought of role-playing.

After I had let Thorqvist know my opinion of his wife’s sampler and he had refrained from replying, we returned to the matter of names. I was about to offer up
the Penguins
as a compromise when he said, “The vice principal and myself have come up with a name for the group in question. I hope that it will be to your liking, Dr. Deneau.” He paused, and I knew what this meant — that the name would be so far from my liking that he hesitated even to speak it aloud.

“Well?”

“The Cheetahs,” he declared.

“The Cheetahs?”

He nodded, presenting a wolfish smile.

“I am being asked to reward them for their sluggishness? No,” I said, and then even more vehemently, “No, I cannot do it. I will not take part in this emperor’s-new-clothes approach to education.”

“I am afraid the decision has been made.”

“By the vice principal and
yourself
?” I replied peevishly, making a jab that went unnoticed and thus offered me no pleasure. A moment later, I turned desperate. “Can we not compromise?” I asked and, inspired by his smile, said, “How about
the Jackals
? I believe that they are also known for their speed.”

He showed me the wolfish smile yet again, though I think that he considered it wistful, even worldly. As I rose to leave, he said, “One catches more flies with honey than with nectar, Dr. Deneau.”

The Provinces
, we called places such as this when I was a lad growing up in New York City, meaning it to sound sophisticated I suppose. Such are the foibles of youth. I have been living here, in the Provinces, almost twenty years. How I came to be here would be of little interest to most; suffice it to say that it involved love of an unrequited nature and that I brought myself here as a means of penance, penance for having allowed myself the folly of unrequited love. Here, to be more specific, is Minnesota, a stultifyingly cold place offset by good manners. I have been able to get by with a series of houseboys, young men who value age and education. Do not misunderstand me, though: houseboys must be paid.

Marcos, my current houseboy, is studying to become a teacher himself. I flatter myself to think that my influence has led to this career choice, though on more lucid days I understand that he has made this choice despite me, despite my constant complaining, despite the late-night phone calls, sometimes two or three in a week, filled with snickers and threats and commentary of a flatulent nature. At night, after he has served our meal and we have eaten it while speaking of our days, after he has washed the dishes and I have attended to my paperwork, we return to the table, where we spend an hour preparing him for the state teachers’ exam. He will be leaving me soon, and though I do everything within my power to help him, I do so with the knowledge that I am working against myself. The other night, he opened the exam book to a math question and looked up at me expectantly, as he always does.

“Start with the extremes,” I reminded him. Only then did I glance
down at the question: “Which measurement would be most appropriate to use when discussing the weight of a pencil? A. ounce B. quart C. pound D. ton.”

“But surely this is not a real question?” I said, pointing to the words
pencil
and then
ton
to make my point. In doing so, I brushed his hand where it rested on the page, a brief and largely accidental touch but deeply sustaining. He smiled at me gently because that is his nature. He is sweet and kind, more so than any other houseboy whose services I have enlisted, and so he did not begrudge me this fleeting touch of skin, this small morsel of pleasure. I worry about Marcos, worry about what kind of teacher he will be if he can so easily be convinced to give himself up in this way.

Marcos arrived from Brazil five years ago, and when I employed him two years later, he was still pronouncing his past tense verbs as though the “-ed” were an extra syllable to be emphasized emphatically as he spoke: “Yesterday, I talk
-id
to my friend and then I walk
-id
to the school.” We spent the first months of his employment undoing this habit, but others have been harder to break, particularly his tendency to translate from Portuguese with no thought as to whether it will make sense in English.

“Doctor, truly I do not know whether to get married or buy a bicycle,” he will say when faced with a dilemma. He knows the English equivalent, which places one between a rock and a hard place, but does not care for it. “Why a hard place, Doctor?” he asks. “It is not very poetic, I think, to say ‘a hard place.’” His tone, as always, is delightfully unsure.

Somewhere along the way, he has developed a penchant for the expression “Close, but no cigar,” which he finds numerous opportunities to use. “Are we having lamb this evening, Marcos?” I will ask, and he will reply, “Close but no cigar, Doctor,” even when I am not at all close, when it is not lamb but fish that he has prepared. I do not have the heart to correct him, to tell him that this expression
has gone the way of carnivals, from whence it derives, and cigars themselves.

Each evening when I arrive home, I sit in my armchair and flip through the paper, acquainting myself with the day’s events while Marcos bustles about, making the final preparations for dinner and fixing my cocktail. Tonight, he appears promptly with my martini, carrying it on a tray as he has been taught.

“Doctor,” he greets me, setting the drink down.

I nod. “Thank you, Marcos. What are you preparing for this evening’s meal?”

“I am roasting a chicken,” he says happily, and when I nod again, he sweeps back into the kitchen.

Certainly Marcos is not the most talented houseboy that I have ever employed. The chicken will be tough, the breasts, in particular, so dry that they will become edible only after being diced and tossed with mayonnaise and mustard. Jung was my most capable cook, though he favored garlic a bit too strongly. I do not like the smell of food on my body, and the garlic was always there, each time I opened my mouth or lifted an arm.

My martini is fine but not exceptional, for Marcos lacks consistency. I drink it anyway while passing through the first several pages of the paper, which I do quickly, as much of the news is devoted to the upcoming elections. I will vote, of course, for I am a firm believer in civic duty, but I do not wish to have these people intrude upon my daily life.

In the back section, which contains the local news, my eye is caught by a photograph of a young man standing beside an airplane, his hand resting on the wing in a proprietary manner. The headline attached to the article reads, “Pilot Plummets to Death,” but I notice this only later, so struck am I first by the photograph and then by the text beneath it, which, incredibly, gives the young man’s name as Thomas Jefferson.

One of my colleagues recently told me that his unusual first name, Gifford, was chosen by his grandparents, fanatical campers wishing to pay homage to Gifford Pinchot, the man largely responsible for establishing park conservation under Theodore Roosevelt. It strikes me that living up to a name such as
Gifford
is possible and, more importantly, that not living up to it can at least remain a private defeat, for most people have never heard of Gifford Pinchot — which is not the case with a name like Thomas Jefferson, a name that will always leave this young man feeling hopelessly inadequate.

I skim the article, wanting to know what minor accomplishment this young Mr. Jefferson has achieved, and thus learn that the young man staring back at me, a twenty-four-year-old pilot from White Bear Lake, attempted his third solo flight yesterday. I say
attempted
because shortly after takeoff, a bird flew directly into Mr. Jefferson’s cockpit windshield, shattering the glass and blinding Mr. Jefferson, ending his career as well as his life. I sip from my martini, but my hand is shaking, and I end up spilling far more than I consume. I try to imagine his final moments, how he felt as he went to his death in this way, sitting in his beloved cockpit contemplating the ineluctability of gravity, robbed of the one sense that could save him while the other four flailed to offer assistance, all of them, even taste, focused single-mindedly on the moment of impact, his life reduced to that one certainty.

I am reminded of Miriam, a woman I knew many years ago in graduate school. Several years before she and I met, her husband was killed by a speeding truck after he pulled over on a Los Angeles freeway and stepped from his car. The police were not able to figure out why he had stopped that night, but Miriam said that she was haunted less by the mystery of this than by the constant replaying in her mind of the moment when her husband looked up and saw the truck nearly on top of him, saw reflected in the driver’s eyes his imminent death. Miriam was a rational woman in every other way,
a student of mathematics like me, but she could no longer drive on or near the highway — a main artery of Los Angeles — on which her husband was killed. She told me this story as we studied together over coffee late one night, by way of explaining why she had left Los Angeles, where even attending to simple errands had become complicated and draining.