It is only mid-mo ming but I feel as if I have been at work a week. I can’t wait to start returning phone calls. A cattle-prod killer and a rat burner. I’m off to a great start.
“Mr. Page?”
I nod. The girl speaking to me must be one of Sarah’s dorm assistants. She is wearing a red T-shirt and looks serious and responsible. I have brought the Blazer around to the dorm to pick up Sarah and now am trying to find her in the crush of girls and their parents. I squint at the girl’s name tag. Jenny Lacey.
“I just wanted to say how much I like Sarah,” she says, smiling.
“She’s doing fine.” “I ‘m glad to hear it,” I tell this child as if she were Sarah’s physician instead of a college student somewhere. Actually, this news is not unappreciated. Since I have been up here on the campus of Hendrix College for the parents’ session to learn what Governor’s School is supposedly all about and to take her home for a three-day break, Sarah has been uncharacteristically anxious.
“It must be quite an experience,” I say, eager to confide in the girl in order to gain information about my daughter.
“She’s written some interesting letters.”
At the session this morning for parents, a panel of her teach ere stressed that they were not trying to break our children down! The man next to me leaned over and whispered that it was nice to know we haven’t sent them off to a concentration camp.
Jenny, whose dark eyes are magnified by lenses framed in red, says blandly, “It can be a real eye-opener. Sarah’s handling it pretty well though.”
I nod but look around for Sarah. Handling what? Have they told her she has terminal cancer? One of her social science teachers, a guy who teaches at Southern Arkansas University during the year, smugly told us that after three weeks many of the kids were beginning to learn how to justify their prejudices in a rational manner. As solemn as owls, the parents (myself included) eagerly moved our heads up and down in unison as if he had announced that a cure for AIDS was imminent. I wondered but did not have the courage to ask if there was some inconsistency in this statement. Can a prejudice be justified rationally? I got a C in a course in formal logic in college, so I kept my mouth shut.
I see Sarah by the door waving at me and I catch up with her as she says fervent goodbyes to friends she has known for three weeks at most. She will be back in three days, but she is behaving as if she is departing on a jungle expedition and is not expected to survive. She insists on driving but then falls silent until we are on the main drag in Conway.
“Did you get my letter?” she asks, checking the mirror. To judge Sarah by the clothes she wears, you would never suspect that she is stunningly beautiful. She is wearing cutoffs with a hole on the thigh, and a T-shirt that says “Lobotomy Beer.”
“I get it,” I say, pointing to her shirt.
“Is that what smart kids drink?”
Sarah glances down at the stitching and grins.
“We trade clothes a lot, I guess. I think one of the guys got it in Florida.”
Great. At their parties do they undress in front of each other and hand over their underwear, too? I am beginning to wonder if Governor’s School is getting out of hand. I fight down a desire to tell Sarah about my friend Amy Gilchrist.
Alcohol and sex have a way of ending up in the same bed.
“Your letter made it sound like you talk about some pretty heavy ideas,” I say, hoping that I have not used a hopelessly outdated expression.
Sarah tilts her head and instantly becomes distressed.
“I’m a real idiot. Even those kids from real small towns have thought about stuff I’ve never spent five minutes on.”
I clear my throat, apparently hoping to scrape up some wisdom. Instead all I get is a mouthful of phlegm. Reluctant to gross out my daughter in the first minute, I swallow it.
“Sarah, a lot of these kids are probably pretty shy and introverted and don’t do much but sit around and read all the time. You probably have a lot more friends.”
This is not the right thing to say. Sarah looks at me as if I’ve just voiced the most trivial concern ever uttered by a human being. She says crossly, “My friends at home and I don’t talk about anything but who likes who, and how mean our teachers are, and what we’re going to do on the weekend, which is nothing.”
I look out the window at downtown Conway and see two teenagers standing idly on the corner and resist the temptation to roll down the window and yell at them, “Which way to the public library?” Adults talk about the same things, and the world is still spinning, but I don’t say this. It would just confirm her worst suspicions. I offer, “People have been thinking deep thoughts for at least three thousand years and the world is still in a mess. I don’t think we’re going to be able to think our way out of it.” As Martin Heidegger allegedly said, but I don’t say. Let Being Be!
Sarah turns onto the street leading to the interstate. How would you know? her expression says. I wonder whether I should tell her that I was fired. I guess she was too busy thinking to see me on the tube the last couple of nights. I hate to worry her when she sounds so depressed.
“That’s the problem!” she says passionately.
“Nobody really thinks. They just shoot off their mouths, and if it’s glib enough, people go all to pieces like they’ve really heard something special.”
Glib? Not one of Sarah’s words. At least not around me.
One of her teachers? Or one of the words from a misunderstood small-town genius? Possibly the owner of a can of Lobotomy Beer? I’ll have to start doing a glibness check before I speak. As we pull onto 1-40 and head east, I say, “It’d be kind of quiet if people had to first figure out before they opened their mouths whether their words had a decent shot at immortality.”
Sarah laughs, the first sign of normality since I’ve seen her, but she says, “That’s exactly the kind of flip remark I’m good at. I can make people laugh, but that’s all. Nobody takes me seriously, and I don’t blame them.”
Her cheeks are red. If I weren’t in the car, she’d be crying.
This is absurd.
“You wouldn’t have been selected if they thought you were the village idiot,” I protest.
She shakes her head but does not take her eyes off the road.
“I got nominated partly because the teachers like me. Be sides, I probably count as a minority.”
I have thought this, too, but so what? No matter how you slice it, there’s more to success than just brains even in a so-called gifted and talented program. I have never really thought of Sarah as a member of a minority before. At the rate my career is going, I won’t care if she claims to be a full-blooded Hottentot if it will help her to get a scholarship to college. But maybe it bothers her.
“If that’s true,” I ask carefully, “does the minority part bother you?”
She clinches the steering wheel.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“I’ve never thought about what I am. I have Negro blood, don’t I?”
“Some,” I say.
“Is that a big deal?”
Sarah runs her right hand through her curly ebony hair.
She surprised me by getting it cut short before Governor’s School. Her haircut shows her ears and looks good. For fifty bucks it ought to. I wanted to choke her when she told me how much she had spent. But it was her own money. She got a job in the spring at Brad’s Health Shoppe as a checker bagger.