Otherwise, you really couldn't argue with Happy Salamander, or you could, but you would get nowhere with its idealistic and adamantine young educators. They had a smug ideological tinge about them, a minor Red Brigades vibe, which often angered Maura, but which I chalked up to an abiding love for children, or an abiding hate for what children eventually become.
Splotched toddler art pocked the walls, the usual stick figure families standing in green yards under multi-colored skies, as though to assure the anxious customer that here, despite rumors to the contrary, a healthful focus on heteronormative rainbows obtained. Posters of butterflies and chipmunks curled damp from tacks, along with Polaroids of the kids on their various excursions to the nearby playground, or the local handball court, or the cracked fountain near the subway where bums liked to sun themselves and smoke. I'd seen the kiddie-diddler there, snarling and remonstrative with his duller peers.
Today the seven or eight kids in Bernie's class were scattered about the room at various stations, or, in Salamanderspeak, activity nodes. Some played office, shuffled telephones and scraps of printer paper across a squat table in approximation of future misery. Others stood smocked at easels, or hovered over wooden puzzles. A few teachers fluttered from cluster to cluster, mother sparrows with their beaked seeds of approbation. I spotted Bernie's pal Aiden sitting alone in a corner. He wore the bitter look of a boy dealt a time-out, a bad baby bird.
Bernie sat nearby on a pink mat. His shirt was off, his eyes closed. He hummed quietly. Maddie, his slender, slightly elfin teacher, knelt beside him, whispered in his ear. I watched as she lifted a chrome-colored clothespin, seemed about to affix it to my son's nipple.
"Hey!" I called.
Soft faces swiveled.
"Daddy!"
Maddie smiled.
"Hi, Bernie's Dad!" She knew my name, but this form of address was protocol, meant, if I remembered the manifesto correctly, to maintain contextual integrity for the other children.
"Hi, Maddie!"
"Bernie asked me about Indians. Or, as I explained, Native Americans."
"Oh?" I said.
"Yes, and we started talking about the Plains tribes in particular."
"They're the fun ones," I said, regretted it at once.
Maddie seemed to waver between confusion and scorn.
"Yes, well, Bernie wanted to know about the lives of the Plains tribes, and we touched upon the famous Sun Dance."
"Sun Dance?"
"Yes."
"What's with the clothespin?"
"Well, Bernie's Dad, it was all I had on hand. I wanted to give Bernie a sense of the ordeal. The piercing of the skin and the looping of rawhide straps through the wounds. They would fasten these straps to the sun pole. The young warrior would have to tear through his own flesh to free himself."
"Oh," I said, "like that movie."
"Movie?"
Maddie seemed unfamiliar with the medium.
"Before your time," I said. It was a phrase I was trying not to rely on so much these days. "Anyway, I hope you weren't going to make Bernie tear through his flesh."
I chuckled, caught a trace of Purdy in the sound.
"Daddy, I don't want to tear my flesh."
"You don't have to tear your flesh, Bernie, I promise."
Maddie made a stern face. I grinned, felt somehow chastened, though for what I couldn't be sure.
"No, obviously we wouldn't tear his flesh."
"I was just joking around."
"But I hope you've read our newest Statement of Pedagogical Goals. It was emailed as an attachment over the weekend."
"I don't think, well, now, not all of it, no."
"Oh," said Maddie, "because we assumed no response meant tacit agreement with our change in direction."
"Change in direction?"
"It's in the attachment, Bernie's Dad."
"Right."
"We believe that many of the problems children suffer from-sensory integration issues, boundary instability, lack of impulse control-stem from our collective refusal to expose children to certain dark edges of experience."
I felt my phone pulse in my pants again. I wondered if it could be Purdy, or Vargina. It was probably important. I couldn't answer it down here because the reception was sketchy, and besides, it was bad form. But I was just here to pick up Bernie, not to listen to Maddie prattle on about child development theory. I was in a hurry, and anyway, Maura handled the theory. I just wrote the checks. Or used to write the checks. Maura had borrowed from her folks for the last installment.
"Yes, edges of experience," I said. "Sounds good."
"I'm glad, because it's what we voted on at Blue Newt. A parent rep was present."
"Blue Newt?"
"Our upstate retreat."
"Right. Sure."
"I hope you'll read the attachment in its entirety."
My phone pulsed again. I lifted Bernie into my arms, carried him to the stairs.
"I definitely will!" I called. I wondered if I should try to get Nick a job here. He had the dark edges down.
"Bye, Maddie!" called Bernie.
"Bye, Bernie and Bernie's Dad!"
Out on the sidewalk I took out my phone. My carrier had called, probably with some intriguing amalgam of offer and threat.
"Dad?" said Bernie.
"Yeah?"
"Is Maddie going to tie me to the sun pole?"
"No, Bernie," I said. "Not if you're good and take your bath without screaming tonight."
"Okay," said Bernie.
"How about some pizza?"
"With torn flesh on it?"
"What about pepperoni?"
"Is that torn flesh?"
"Yeah, there must be some tearing involved. There's definitely some grinding of flesh, not to mention slicing. But I'm sure there's some tearing."
"Are there eyeballs in it?"
"Do you want eyeballs in it?"
"I do."
"Then eyeballs it is."
"Raw eyeballs?"
"Absolutely."
"Thanks, Daddy."
"Hey," I said, remembering now a tip from one of the parenting manuals Maura and I had read a few months ago. "I really liked how you just said 'Thanks, Daddy.' That was wonderful."
"Pansy," said Bernie.
Fourteen
Bernie fed, bathed screamlessly (perhaps for fear of Sioux pain), read to, sung to, and tucked in, I poured a glass of Old Overholt, turned on the TV. It was not often I had the run of the remote this early in the evening, but after a few moments I stopped clicking and settled in with a romantic comedy from the late nineties, the rare thing Maura would have maybe lingered on, caught up in some memory of watching this movie with old friends. It was strange to sit here and watch it alone. A few years, or even months ago, I would have scoffed, begged Maura to pop up the dial for some punditry or playoff scores or a breakdown of cavalry tactics in the Crimean War.
This wasn't just some macho reflex. Stuff me in a tutu and let's screen experimental videos all day, I always said, because I believed in Art (I harbored a secret capital, like a secret Capitol), but don't ask me to endure the corporate weeps. When it came to cinema, I sold out my aesthetic principles only for zombie flicks, monster mashes, jelly-tentacled beasts who lived in toilets, slurped out our kidneys the hard way (watching Bernie get born, that angry purple mango plunging out of Maura, only further lubed my oozing worldview, my drippy grid), or else those special-ops terror soaps, the nutter mullahs and Glock minuets.
I'd never conceded to the rom-com pone, the coffee bars and turtlenecks, all that greeting card ontology. We were all garbage eaters, but there were too many varieties heaped. The idea was to limit yourself to one or two, or else you'd become an American.