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"Ashputtle"
People think that teaching little children has something to do with helping other people,
something to do with service. People think that if you teach little children, you must
love them. People get what they need from thoughts like this.
People think that if you happen to be very fat and are a person who acts happy and
cheerful all the time, you are probably pretending to be that way in order to make them
forget how fat you are, or cause them to forgive you for being so fat. They make this
assumption, thinking you are so stupid that you imagine that you're getting away with this
charade. From this assumption, they get confidence in the superiority of their
intelligence over yours, and they get to pity you, too.
Those figments, those stepsisters, came to me and said, Don't you know that we want to
help you? They came to me and said, Can you tell us what your life is like?
These moronic questions they asked over and over: Are you all right? Is anything happening
to you? Can you talk to us now, darling? Can you tell us about your life?
I stared straight ahead, not looking at their pretty hair or pretty eyes or pretty mouths.
I looked over their shoulders at the pattern on the wallpaper and tried not to blink until
they stood up and went away.
What my life was like? What was happening to me?
Nothing was happening to me. I was all right.
They smiled briefly, like a twitch in their eyes and mouths, before they stood up and left
me alone. I sat still on my chair and looked at the wallpaper while they talked to
Zena.
The wallpaper was yellow, with white lines going up and down through it. The lines never
touched--just when they were about to run into each other, they broke, and the fat thick
yellow kept them apart.
I liked seeing the white lines hanging in the fat yellow, each one separate.
When the figments called me darling, ice and snow stormed into my mouth and went pushing
down my throat into my stomach, freezing everything. They didn't know I was nothing, that
I would never be like them, they didn't know that the only part of me that was not nothing
was a small hard stone right at the center of me.
That stone has a name. MOTHER.
If you are a female kindergarten teacher in her fifties who happens to be very fat, people
imagine that you must be very dedicated to their children, because you cannot possibly
have any sort of private life. If they are the parents of the children in your
kindergarten class, they are almost grateful that you are so grotesque, because it means
that you must really care about their children. After all, even though you couldn't
possibly get any other sort of job, you can't be in it for the money, can you? Because
what do people know about your salary? They know that garbage men make more money than
kindergarten teachers. So at least you didn't decide to take care of their delightful,
wonderful, lovable little children just because you thought you'd get rich, no
no.
Therefore, even though they disbelieve all your smiles, all your pretty ways, even though
they really do think of you with a mixture of pity and contempt, a little gratitude gets
in there.
Sometimes when I meet with one of these parents, say a fluffy-haired young lawyer, say
named Arnold Zoeller, Arnold and his wife, Kathi, Kathi with an i, mind you, sometimes
when I sit behind my desk and watch these two slim handsome people struggle to keep the
pity and contempt out of their well-cared-for faces, I catch that gratitude heating up
behind their eyes.
Arnold and Kathi believe that a pathetic old lumpo like me must love their lovely little
girl, a girl say named Tori, Tori with an i (for Victoria.) And I think I do rather love
little Tori Zoeller, yes I do think I love that little girl. My mother would have loved
her, too. And that's the God's truth.
I can see myself in the world, in the middle of the world. I see that I am the same as all
nature.
In our minds exists an awareness of perfection, but nothing on earth, nothing in all of
nature, is perfectly conceived. Every response comes straight out of the person who is
responding.
I have no responsibility to stimulate or satisfy your needs. All that was taken care of a
long time ago. Even if you happen to be some kind of supposedly exalted person, like a
lawyer. Even if your name is Arnold Zoeller, for example.
Once, briefly, there existed a golden time. In my mind existed an awareness of perfection,
and all of nature echoed and repeated the awareness of perfection in my mind. My parents
lived, and with them, I too was alive in the golden time. Our name was Asch, and in fact I
am known now as Mrs. Asch, the Mrs. being entirely honorific, no husband having ever been
in evidence, nor ever likely to be. (To some sixth-graders, those whom I did not not
beguile and enchant as kindergartners, those before whose parents I did not squeeze myself
into my desk chair and pronounce their dull, their dreary treasures delightful, wonderful,
lovable, above all intelligent, I am known as Mrs. Fat-Asch. Of this I pretend to be
ignorant.) Mr. and Mrs. Asch did dwell together in the golden time, and both mightily did
love their girl-child. And then, whoops, the girl-child's Mommy upped and died. The
girl-child's Daddy buried her in the estate's church yard, with the minister and
everything, in the coffin and everything, with hymns and talking and crying and the
animals standing around, and Zena, I remember, Zena was already there, even then. So that
was how things were, right from the start.
The figments came because of what I did later. They came from a long way away-the city, I
think. We never saw city dresses like that, out where we lived. We never saw city hair
like that, either. And one of those ladies had a veil!
One winter morning during my first year teaching kindergarten here, I got into my car--I
shoved myself into my car, I should explain; this is different for me than for you, I
rammed myself between the seat and the steering wheel, and I drove forty miles east,
through three different suburbs, until I got to the city, and thereupon I drove through
the city to the slummiest section, where dirty people sit in their cars and drink right in
the middle of the day. I went to the department store nobody goes to unless they're on
welfare and have five or six kids all with different last names. I just parked on the
street and sailed in the door. People like that, they never hurt people like
me.
Down in the basement was where they sold the wallpaper, so I huffed and puffed down the
stairs, smiling cute as a button whenever anybody stopped to look at me, and shoved myself
through the aisles until I got to the back wall, where the samples stood in big books like
the fairy-tale book we used to have. I grabbed about four of those books off the wall and
heaved them over onto a table there in that section and perched myself on a little tiny
chair and started flipping the pages.
A scared-looking black kid in a cheap suit mumbled something about helping me, so I gave
him my happiest, most pathetic smile and said, well, I was here to get wallpaper, wasn't
I? What color did I want, did I know? Well, I was thinking about yellow, I said. Uh-huh,
he says, what kinda yellow you got in mind? Yellow with white lines in it. Uh-huh, says
he, and starts helping me look through those books with all those samples in them. They
have about the ugliest wallpaper in the world in this place, wallpaper like sores on the
wall, wallpaper that looks like it got rained on before you get it home. Even the black
kid knows this crap is ugly, but he's trying his damnedest not to show it.
I bestow smiles everywhere. I'm smiling like a queen riding through her kingdom in a
carriage, like a little girl who just got a gold and silver dress from a turtledove up in
a magic tree. I'm smiling as if Arnold Zoeller himself and of course his lovely wife are
looking across my desk at me while I drown, suffocate, stifle, bury their lovely,
intelligent little Tori in golden words.
I think we got some more yellow in this book here, he says, and fetches down another big
fairy-tale book and plunks it between us on the table. His dirty-looking hands turn those
big stiff pages. And just as I thought, just as I knew would happen, could happen, would
probably happen, but only here in this filthy corner of a filthy department store, this
ignorant but helpful lad opens the book to my mother's wallpaper pattern.
I see that fat yellow and those white lines that never touch anything, and I can't help
myself, sweat breaks out all over my body, and I groan so horribly that the kid actually
backs away from me, lucky for him, because in the next second I'm bending over and
throwing up interesting-looking reddish goo all over the floor of the wallpaper
department. Oh God, the kid says, oh lady. I groan, and all the rest of the goo comes
jumping out of me and splatters down on the carpet. Some older black guy in a clip-on bow
tie rushes up toward us but stops short with his mouth hanging open as soon as he sees the
mess on the floor. I take my hankie out of my bag and wipe off my mouth. I try to smile at
the kid, but my eyes are too blurry. No, I say, I'm fine, I want to buy this wallpaper for
my kitchen, this one right here. I turn over the page to see the name of my mother's
wallpaper--Zena's wallpaper, too--and discover that this kind of wallpaper is called
"The Thinking Reed."
You don't have to be religious to have inspirations.
An adventurous state of mind is like a great dwelling-place.
To be lived truly, life must be apprehended with an adventurous state of mind.
But no one on earth can explain the lure of adventure.
Zena's example gave me two tricks that work in my classroom, and the reason they work is
that they are not actually tricks!
The first of these comes into play when a particular child is disobedient or inattentive,
which, as you can imagine, often occurs in a room full of kindergarten-age children. I
deal with these infractions in this fashion. I command the child to come to my desk.
(Sometimes, I command two children to come to my desk.) I stare at the child until it
begins to squirm. Sometimes it blushes or trembles. I await the physical signs of shame or
discomfort. Then I pronounce the child's name. "Tori," I say, if the child is
Tori. Its little eyes invariably fasten upon mine at this instant. "Tori," I
say, "you know that what you did is wrong, don't you?" Ninety-nine times out of
a hundred, the child nods its head. "And you will never do that wrong thing again,
will you?" Most often the child can speak to say No. "Well, you'd better
not," I say, and then I lean forward until the little child can see nothing except my
enormous, inflamed face. Then in a guttural, lethal, rumble-whisper, I utter, "OR
ELSE." When I say "OR ELSE," I am very emphatic. I am so very emphatic that
I feel my eyes change shape. I am thinking of Zena and the time she told me that weeping
on my mother's grave wouldn't make a glorious wonderful tree grow there, it would just
drown my mother in mud.
The attractiveness of teaching is that it is adventurous, as adventurous as
life.
My mother did not drown in mud. She died some other way. She fell down in the middle of
the downstairs parlor, the parlor where Zena sat on her visits. Zena was just another lady
then, and on her visits, her "social calls," she sat on the best antique chair
and held her hands in her lap like the most modest, innocent little lady ever born. She
was half Chinese, Zena, and I knew she was just like bright sharp metal inside of her,
metal that could slice you but good. Zena was very adventurous, but not as adventurous as
me. Zena never got out of that town. Of course, all that happened to Zena was that she got
old, and everybody left her all alone because she wasn't pretty anymore, she was just an
old yellow widow-lady, and then I heard that she died pulling up weeds in her garden. I
heard this from two different people. You could say that Zena got drowned in mud, which
proves that everything spoken on this earth contains a truth not always apparent at the
time.
The other trick I learned from Zena that is not a trick is how to handle a whole class
that has decided to act up. These children come from parents who, thinking they know
everything, in fact know less than nothing. These children will never see a classical
manner demonstrated at home. You must respond in such a way that demonstrates your
awareness of perfection. You must respond in a way that will bring this awareness to the
unruly children, so that they too will possess it.
It can begin in a thousand different ways. Say I am in conference with a single
student-say I am delivering the great OR ELSE. Say that my attention has wandered off for
a moment, and that I am contemplating the myriad things I contemplate when my attention is
wandering free. My mother's grave, watered by my tears. The women with city hair who
desired to give me help, but could not, so left to be replaced by others, who in turn were
replaced by yet others. How it felt to stand naked and besmeared with my own feces in the
front yard, moveless as a statue, the same as all nature, classical. The gradual
disappearance of my father, like that of a figure in a cartoon who grows increasingly
transparent until total transparency is reached. Zena facedown in her garden, snuffling
dirt up into her nostrils. The resemblance of the city women to certain wicked stepsisters
in old tales. Also their resemblance to handsome princes in the same tales.
She who hears the tale makes the tale.
Say therefore that I am no longer quite anchored within the classroom, but that I float
upward into one, several, or all of these realms. People get what they need from their own
minds. Certain places, you can get in there and rest. The classical was a cool period. I
am floating within my cool realms. At that moment, one child pulls another's hair. A third
child hurls a spitball at the window. Another falls to the floor, emitting pathetic and
mechanical cries. Instantly, what was order is misrule. Then I summon up the image of my
ferocious female angels and am on my feet before the little beasts even notice that I have
left my desk. In a flash, I am beside the light switch. The Toris and Tiffanys, the
Joshuas and Jeremys, riot on. I slap down the switch, and the room goes dark.
Result? Silence. Inspired action is destiny.
The children freeze. Their pulses race--veins beat in not a few little blue temples. I say
four words. I say, "Think what this means." They know what it means. I grow to
twice my size with the meaning of these words. I loom over them, and darkness pours out of
me. Then I switch the lights back on, and smile at them until they get what they need from
my smiling face. These children will never call me Mrs. Fat-Asch; these children know that
I am the same as all nature.
Once upon a time a dying queen sent for her daughter, and when her daughter came to her
bedside the queen said, "I am leaving you, my darling. Say your prayers and be good
to your father. Think of me always, and I will always be with you." Then she died.
Every day the little girl watered her mother's grave with her tears. But her heart was
dead. You cannot lie about a thing like this. Hatred is the inside part of love. And so
her mother became a hard cold stone in her heart. And that was the meaning of the mother,
for as long as the little girl lived.
Soon the king took another woman as his wife, and she was most beautiful, with skin the
color of gold and eyes as black as jet. She was like a person pretending to be someone
else inside another person pretending she couldn't pretend. She understood that reality
was contextual. She understood about the condition of the observer.
One day when the king was going out to be among his people, he asked his wife, "What
shall I bring you?"
"A diamond ring," said the queen. And the king could not tell who was speaking,
the person inside pretending to be someone else, or the person outside who could not
pretend.
"And you, my daughter," said the king, "what would you
like?"
"A diamond ring," said the daughter.
The king smiled and shook his head.
"Then nothing," said the daughter. "Nothing at all."
When the king came home, he presented the queen with a diamond ring in a small blue box,
and the queen opened the box and smiled at the ring and said, "It's a very small
diamond, isn't it?" The king's daughter saw him stoop forward, his face whitening, as
if he had just lost half his blood. "I like my small diamond," said the queen,
and the king straightened up, although he still looked white and shaken. He patted his
daughter on the head on his way out of the room, but the girl merely looked forward and
said nothing, in return for the nothing he had given her.
And that night, when the rest of the palace was asleep, the king's daughter crept to the
kitchen and ate half of a loaf of bread and most of a quart of homemade peach ice cream.
This was the most delicious food she had ever eaten in her whole entire life. The bread
tasted like the sun on the wheatfields, and inside the taste of the sun was the taste of
the bursting kernels of the wheat, even of the rich dark crumbly soil that surrounded the
roots of the wheat, even of the lives of the bugs and animals that had scurried through
the wheat, even of the droppings of those foxes, beetles, and mice. And the homemade peach
ice cream tasted overwhelmingly of sugar, cream, and peaches, but also of the bark and
meat of the peach tree and the pink feet of the birds that had landed on it, and the
sharp, brittle voices of those birds, also of the effort of the hand crank, of the
stained, whorly wood of its sides, and of the sweat of the man who had worked it so long.
Every taste should be as complicated as possible, and every taste goes up and down at the
same time: up past the turtledoves to the far reaches of the sky, so that one final taste
in everything is whiteness, and down all the way to the mud at the bottom of graves, then
to the mud beneath that mud, so that another final taste in everything, in even peach ice
cream, is the taste of blackness.
From about this time, the king's daughter began to attract undue attention. From the night
of the whiteness of turtledoves and the blackness of grave-mud to the final departure of
the stepsisters was a period of something like six months.
I thought of myself as a work of art. I caused responses without being responsible for
them. This is the great freedom of art.
They asked questions that enforced the terms of their own answers. Don't you know we want
to help you? Such a question implies only two possible answers, 1: no, 2: yes. The
stepsisters never understood the queen's daughter, therefore the turtledoves pecked out
their eyes, first on the one side, then on the other. The correct answer--3: person to
whom question is directed is not the one in need of help--cannot be given. Other correct
answers, such as 4: help shall come from other sources, and 5: neither knowledge nor help
mean what you imagine they mean, are also forbidden by the form of the
question.
Assignment for tonight: make a list of proper but similarly forbidden answers to the
question What is happening to you? Note: be sure to consider conditions imposed by the use
of the word happening.
The stepsisters arrived from the city in a grand state. They resembled peacocks. The
stepsisters accepted Zena's tea, they admired the house, the paintings, the furniture, the
entire estate, just as if admiring these things, which everybody admired, meant that they,
too, should be admired. The stepsisters wished to remove the king's daughter from this
setting, but their power was not so great. Zena would not permit it, nor would the ailing
king. (At night, Zena placed her subtle mouth over his sleeping mouth and drew breath
straight out of his body.) Zena said that the condition of the king's daughter would prove
to be temporary. The child was eating well. She was loved. In time, she would return to
herself.
When the figments asked, What is happening to you? I could have answered, Zena is
happening to me. This answer would not have been understood. Neither would the answer, My
mother is happening to me.
Undue attention came about in the following fashion. Zena knew all about my midnight
feasts, but was indifferent to them. Zena knew that each person must acquire what she
needs. This is as true for a king's daughter as for any ordinary commoner. But she was
ignorant of what I did in the name of art. Misery and anger made me a great artist, though
now I am a much greater artist. I think I was twelve. (The age of an artist is of no
importance.) Both my mother and Zena were happening to me, and I was happening to them,
too. Such is the world of women. My mother, deep in her mudgrave, hated Zena. Zena, second
in the king's affections, hated my mother. Speaking from the center of the stone at the
center of me, my mother frequently advised me on how to deal with Zena. Silently, speaking
with her eyes, Zena advised me on how to deal with my mother. I, who had to deal with both
of them, hated them both.
And I possessed an adventurous mind.
The main feature of adventure is that it goes forward into unknown country.
Adventure is filled with a nameless joy.
Alone in my room in the middle of Saturday, on later occasions after my return from
school, I removed my clothes and placed them neatly on my bed. (My canopied bed.) I had no
feelings, apart from a sense of urgency, concerning the actions I was about to perform.
Perhaps I experienced a nameless joy at this point. Later on, at the culmination of my
self-display, I experienced a nameless joy. And later yet, I experienced the same nameless
joy at the conclusions of my various adventures in art. In each of these adventures as in
the first, I created responses not traceable within the artwork, but which derived from
the conditions, etc., of the audience. Alone and unclothed now in my room, ready to create
responses, I squatted on my heels and squeezed out onto the carpet a long cylinder of
fecal matter, the residue of, dinner not included, an entire loaf of seven-grain bread,
half a box of raisins, a can of peanuts, and a quarter pound of cervelat sausage, all
consumed when everyone else was in bed and Zena was presumably leaning over the face of my
sleeping father, greedily inhaling his life. I picked up the warm cylinder and felt it
melt into my hands. I hastened this process by squeezing my palms together. Then I rubbed
my hands over my body. What remained of the stinking cylinder I smeared along the walls of
the bedroom. Then I wiped my hands on the carpet. (The white carpet.) My preparations
concluded, I moved regally through the corridors until I reached the front door and let
myself out.
I have worked as a certified grade-school teacher in three states. My record is spotless.
I never left a school except by my own choice.
When tragedies came to my charges or their parents, I invariably sent sympathetic notes,
joined volunteer groups to search for bodies, attended funerals, etc., etc. Every teacher
eventually becomes familiar with these unfortunate duties.
Outside, there was all the world, at least all of the estate, from which to choose. Two
lines from Edna St. Vincent Millay best express my state of mind at this moment: The world
stands out on either side/ No wider than the heart is wide. I well remember the
much-admired figure of Dave Garroway quoting these lovely words on his Sunday-afternoon
television program, and I pass along this beautiful sentiment to each fresh class of
kindergartners. They must start somewhere, and at other moments in their year with me they
will have the opportunity to learn that nature never gives you a chance to rest. Every
animal on earth is hungry.
Turning my back on the fields of grazing cows and sheep, ignoring the hills beyond, hills
seething with coyotes, wildcats, and mountain lions, I moved with stately tread through
the military rows of fruit trees and, with papery, apple and peach blossoms adhering to my
bare feet, passed into the expanse of the grass meadow where grew the great hazel tree.
Had the meadow been recently mown, long green stalks the width of caterpillars leapt up
from the ground to festoon my legs. (I often stretched out full length and rolled in the
freshly mown grass meadow.) And then, at the crest of the hill that marked the end of the
meadow, I arrived at my destination. Below me lay the road to the unknown towns and cities
in which I hoped one day to find my complicated destiny. Above me stood the hazel tree.
I have always known that I could save myself by looking into my own mind.
I stood above the road on the crest of the hill and raised my arms. When I looked into my
mind I saw two distinct and necessary states, one that of the white line, the other that
of the female angels, akin to the turtledoves.
The white line existed in a calm rapture of separation, touching neither sky nor meadow
but suspended in the space between. The white line was silence, isolation, classicism.
This state is one half of what is necessary in order to achieve the freedom of art, and it
is called the Thinking Reed.
The angels and turtledoves existed in a rapture of power, activity, and rage. They were
absolute whiteness and absolute blackness, gratification and gratification's handmaiden,
revenge. The angels and turtledoves came streaming up out of my body and soared from the
tips of my fingers into the sky, and when they returned they brought golden and silver
dresses, diamond rings and emerald tiaras.
I saw the figments slicing off their own toes, sawing off their heels, and stepping into
shoes already slippery with blood. The figments were trying to smile, they were trying to
stand up straight. They were like children before an angry teacher, a teacher transported
by a righteous anger. Girls like the figments never did understand that what they needed,
they must get from their own minds. Lacking this understanding, they tottered along,
pretending that they were not mutilated, pretending that blood did not pour from their
shoes, back to their pretend houses and pretend princes. The nameless joy distinguished
every part of this process.
Lately, within the past twenty-four hours, a child has been lost.
A lost child lies deep within the ashes, her hands and feet mutilated, her face destroyed
by fire. She has partaken of the great adventure, and now she is the same as all
nature.
At night, I see the handsome, distracted, still hopeful parents on our local news
programs. Arnold and Kathi, he as handsome as a prince, she as lovely as one of the
figments, still have no idea of what has actually happened to them--they lived their whole
lives in utter abyssal ignorance--they think of hope as an essential component of the
universe. They think that other people, the people paid to perform this function, will
conspire to satisfy their needs.
A child has been lost. Now her photograph appears each day on the front page of our sturdy
little tabloid-style newspaper, beaming out with luminous ignorance beside the columns of
print describing a sudden disappearance after the weekly Sunday school class at
St.-Mary-in-the-Forest's Episcopal church, the deepening fears of the concerned parents,
the limitless charm of the girl herself, the searches of nearby video parlors and shopping
malls, the draggings of two adjacent ponds, the slow, painstaking inspections of the
neighboring woods, fields, farms, and outbuildings, the shock of the child's particularly
well-off and socially prominent relatives, godparents included.
A particular child has been lost. A certain combination of variously shaded blond hair and
eyes the blue of early summer sky seen through a haze of cirrus clouds, of an endearingly
puffy upper lip and a recurring smudge, like that left on corrasable bond typing paper by
an unclean eraser, on the left side of the mouth, of an unaffected shyness and an
occasional brittle arrogance destined soon to overshadow more attractive traits will never
again be seen, not by parents, friends, teachers, or the passing strangers once given to
spontaneous tributes to the child's beauty.
A child of her time has been lost. Of no interest to our local newspaper, unknown to the
Sunday school classes at St.-Mary's-in-the-Forest, were this moppet's obsession with the
dolls Exercise Barbie and Malibu Barbie, her fanatical attachment to My Pretty Ponies
Glory and Applejacks, her insistence on introducing during classtime observations upon the
cartoon family named Simpson, and her precocious fascination with the music television
channel, especially the "videos" featuring the groups Kris Kross and Boyz II
Men. She was once observed holding hands with James Halliwell, a first-grade boy. Once,
just before naptime, she turned upon a pudgy, unpopular girl of protosadistic tendencies
named Deborah Monk and hissed, "Debbie, I hate to tell you this, but you
suck."
A child of certain limitations has been lost. She could never learn to tie her cute but
oddly blunt-looking size 1 running shoes and eventually had to become resigned to the sort
fastened with Velcro straps. When combing her multishaded blond hair with her fingers, she
would invariably miss a cobwebby patch located two inches aft of her left car. Her reading
skills were somewhat, though not seriously, below average. She could recognize her name,
when spelled out in separate capitals, with narcissistic glee; yet all other words, save
and and the, turned beneath her impatient gaze into random, Sanskrit-like squiggles and
uprights. (This would soon have corrected itself.) She could recite the alphabet all in a
rush, by rote, but when questioned was incapable of remembering if O came before or after
S. I doubt that she would have been capable of mastering long division during the
appropriate academic term.
Across the wide, filmy screen of her eyes would now and then cross a haze of indefinable
confusion. In a child of more finely tuned sensibilities, this momentary slippage might
have suggested a sudden sense of loss, even perhaps a premonition of the loss to come. In
her case, I imagine the expression was due to the transition from the world of complete
unconsciousness (Barbie and My Pretty Ponies) to a more fully socialized state (Kriss
Kross). Introspection would have come only late in life, after long exposure to
experiences of the kind from which her parents most wished to shelter her.
An irreplaceable child has been lost. What was once in the land of the Thinking Reed has
been forever removed, like others before it, like all others in time, to turtledove
territory. This fact is borne home on a daily basis. Should some informed anonymous
observer report that the child is all right, that nothing is happening to her, the
comforting message would be misunderstood as the prelude to a demand for ransom. The
reason for this is that no human life can ever be truly substituted for another. The
increasingly despairing parents cannot create or otherwise acquire a living replica,
though they are certainly capable of reproducing again, should they stay married long
enough to do so. The children in the lost one's class are reported to suffer nightmares
and recurrent enuresis. In class, they exhibit lassitude, wariness, a new unwillingness to
respond, like the unwillingness of the very old. At a schoolwide assembly where the little
ones sat right up in front, nearly every one expressed the desire for the missing one to
return. Letters and cards to the lost one now form two large, untidy stacks in the
principal's office and, with parental appeals to the abductor or abductors broadcast every
night, it is felt that the school will accumulate a third stack before these tributes are
offered to the distraught parents.
Works of art generate responses not directly traceable to the work itself. Helplessness,
grief, and sorrow may exist simultaneously alongside aggressiveness, hostility, anger, or
even serenity and relief.
The more profound and subtle the work, the more intense and long lasting the responses it
evokes.
Deep, deep in her muddy grave, the queen and mother felt the tears of her lost daughter.
All will pass. In the form of a turtledove, she rose from grave-darkness and ascended into
the great arms of a hazel tree. All will change. From the topmost branch, the turtledove
sang out her everlasting message. All is hers, who will seek what is true. "What is
true?" cried the daughter, looking dazzled up. All will pass, all will change, all is
yours, sang the turtledove.
In a recent private conference with the principal, I announced my decision to move to
another section of the country after the semester's end.
The principal is a kindhearted, limited man still loyal, one might say rigidly loyal, to
the values he absorbed from popular music at the end of the nineteen sixties, and he has
never quite been able to conceal the unease I arouse within him. Yet he is aware of the
respect I command within every quarter of his school, and he has seen former
kindergartners of mine, now freshmen in our trisuburban high school, return to my
classroom and inform the awed children seated before them that Mrs. Asch placed them on
the right path, that Mrs. Asch's lessons would be responsible for seeing them successfully
through high school and on to college.
Virtually unable to contain the conflict of feelings my announcement brought to birth
within him, the principal assured me that he would that very night compose a letter of
recommendation certain to gain me a post at any elementary school, public or private, of
my choosing.
After thanking him, I replied, "I do not request this kindness of you, but neither
will I refuse it."
The principal leaned back in his chair and gazed at me, not unkindly, through his granny
glasses. His right hand rose like a turtledove to caress his graying beard, but ceased
halfway in its flight, and returned to his lap. Then he lifted both hands to the surface
of his desk and intertwined the fingers, still gazing quizzically at me.
"Are you all right?" he inquired.
"Define your terms," I said. "If you mean, am I in reasonable health,
enjoying physical and mental stability, satisfied with my work, then the answer is yes, I
am all right."
"You've done a wonderful job dealing with Tori's disappearance," he said.
"But I can't help but wonder if all of that has played a part in your
decision."
"My decisions make themselves," I said. "All will pass, all will change. I
am a serene person."
He promised to get the letter of recommendation to me by lunchtime the next day, and as I
knew he would, he kept his promise. Despite my serious reservations about his methods,
attitude, and ideology--despite my virtual certainty that he will be unceremoniously
forced from his job within the next year--I cannot refrain from wishing the poor fellow
well.
Excerpted from MAGIC TERROR: Seven Tales © Copyright 2001 by Peter Straub. Reprinted with permission by Fawcett Books. All rights reserved.
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