“Will that be one of the questions?”
“I can’t tell you the questions, Judy. That wouldn’t be fair to the others. But for your own information, what is magma?”
“Like comes from volcanoes?”
“I’d accept that. Magma is igneous rock in its molten state. And here. Name the three types of rocks.”
“Will you ask that?”
“I can’t tell you, Judy. You understand that. But what are they?”
“Sentimentary…”
“Igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. Give me an example of each.”
“Granite, limestone, and marble,” I said. Judy looked over at me in fright.
“Or basalt, shale, and slate,” my father said. The dull girl looked from me to him to me as if we had ganged up on her. For the moment, we had. There were happy moments when my father and I became a unit, a little two-ply team. “You want to know something interesting, Judy?” my father said. “The richest deposit of slate on the continent is right next door to us in Pennsylvania, in Lehigh and Northampton counties.” He tapped with his knuckles the blackboard behind him. “Every blackboard from coast to coast comes from around there,” he said.
“We aren’t expected to know that, are we?”
“It’s not in the book, no. But I thought you’d be interested. Try to get interested. Forget your grades; your father will survive. Don’t knock yourself out, Judy; when I was your age, I didn’t know what it was like to be young. And I’ve never learned since. Now Judy. Listen to me. Some have it and some don’t. But everybody has something, even if it’s just being alive. The good Lord didn’t put us here to worry about what we don’t have. The man with two talents didn’t get sore at the man with five. Look at me and Peter. I have no talents, he has ten; but I’m not mad at him. I like him. He’s my son.”
She opened her mouth and I expected her to ask “Will that be on the quiz?” but nothing came out. My father ruffled the book. “Name some erosional agents,” he said.
She ventured, “Time?”
My father looked up and seemed to have taken a blow. His skin was underbelly-white beneath his eyes and an un natural ruddy flush scored his cheeks in distinct parallels like the marks of angry fingers. “I’d have to think about that,” he told her. “I was thinking of running water, glaciers, and wind.”
She wrote these down on her tablet.
“Diastrophism,” he said. “Isostasy. Explain them. Sketch a seismograph. What is a batholith?”
“You wouldn’t ask all of those, would you?” she asked. “I might not ask any of them,” he said; “Don’t think about the quiz. Think about the earth. Don’t you love her? Don’t you want to know about her? Isostasy is like a great fat woman adjusting her girdle.”
Judy’s face lacked ease. Her cheeks were packed too tautly against her nose, making the lines there deep and sharp; and there was a third vertical crease at the tip of her nose. Her mouth, too, had this look of too many folds, and when she spoke it worked tightly, up and down, like the mouth of a snapdragon. “Would you ask about the Protozone or whatever those things are?”
“Proterozoic Era. Yes, ma’am. A question might be, List the six geologic eras in order, with rough dates. When was the Cenozoic?”
“A billion years ago?”
“You live in it, girl. We all do. It began seventy million years ago. Or I might do this, list some extinct forms of life, and ask that they be identified, with one point for the identification, one for the era, and one for the period. For instance, Brontops: mammal, Cenozoic, Tertiary. Eocene epoch, but I wouldn’t expect you to know that. It may interest you for your own information that the brontops looked a lot like William Howard Taft, who was President when I was your age.”
I saw her write “No Epocks” on her tablet and draw a box around it. As my father talked on, she began to ornament the box with triangles. “Or Lepidodendron,” he said. “Giant fern, Paleozoic, Pennsylvanian. Or Eryops. What would that be, Peter?”
I really didn’t know. “A reptile,” I guessed. “Mesozoic.”
“An amphibian,” he said. “Earlier. Or Archaeopteryx,” he said, his voice quickening, sure we would know it. “What’s that, Judy?”
“Archy what?” she asked.
“Archaeopteryx.” He sighed. “The first bird. It was about the size of a crow. Its feathers evolved from scales. Study the chart on pages two-oh-three to two-oh-nine. Don’t tense up. Study the chart, and memorize what you’ve written down, and you’ll do all right.”
“I get so sort of sick and dizzy just trying to keep it straight,” she blurted, and it seemed she might cry. Her face was a folded bud, but already in her life it had begun to wilt. She was pale and this pallor for a moment swam around the room whose shades of varnish were like shades of honey gathered in a sweetly rotten forest.
“We all do,” my father said, and things became firm again. “Knowledge is a sickening thing. Just do the best you can, Judy, and don’t lose any beauty sleep. Don’t get buffaloed. After Wednesday you can forget all about it and in no time you’ll be married with six kids.” And it dawned on me, with some indignation, that my father out of pity had hinted away to her the entire quiz.
When she left the room, he got up and closed the door and said to me, “That poor femme, her father’ll have an old maid on his hands.” We were alone together.
I stopped leaning against the windowsill and said, “Maybe that’s what he wants.” I was very conscious of wearing a red shirt; its flicker on the floor of my vision as I moved about the room seemed to instill my words with an enigmatic urbanity.
“Don’t you believe it,” my father said. “The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That’s one thing about your mother, she’s never been bitter. You won’t understand this, Peter, but your mother and I had a lot of fun together.”
I doubted this, but the way he said it rendered me silent. One by one, it seemed to me, my father was saying good bye to all the things he had known in this world. He took a sheet of blue paper from his desk and handed it to me. “Read it arid weep,” he said. My first thought was that it was a fatal medical report. My stomach sank. I wondered, How could he have gotten it so soon?
But it was just one of Zimmerman’s monthly visitation reports.
OLINGER PUBLIC SCHOOLS
OFFICE OF THE SUPERVISING PRINCIPAL
1/10/47
teacher: G. W. Caldwell
class: 10th grade Gen. Sci., sec. C
period of visitation: 1/8/47 11:05 am.
The teacher arrived in the classroom twelve minutes late. His surprise at finding the supervising principal in charge was evident and was remarked upon by the class. Ignoring his students, the teacher attempted to engage the supervising principal in conversation and was refused. The students and the teacher then discussed the age of the universe, the size of the stars, the origins of the earth, and the outline of organic evolution. No attempt was discernible on the teacher’s part to avoid offending religious conceptions on the students’ part. The humanistic values implicit in the physical sciences were not elicited. The teacher at one point stopped himself from pronouncing the word “hell.” Disorder and noise were present from the beginning and rose in volume. The students did not seem well-prepared and the teacher consequently resorted to the lecture method. A minute before the final bell, he struck one boy on the back with a steel rod. Such physical procedure of course violates Pennsylvania state law and in the event of parental protest could result in dismissal.
However, the teacher’s knowledge of his subject matter seemed good and some of his illustrations relating subject matter to his students’ everyday lives were effective.
Signed,
Louis M. Zimmerman.