And now in his weak and scratchy whine of a voice he be gan to tell my father something of the sort. “I ain’t no enemy, Mr. Caldwell. I like you. All the kids like you.”
“That’s my trouble, Deifendorf. That’s the worst thing can happen to a public school teacher. I don’t want you to like me. All I want from you is to sit still under me for fifty-five minutes a day five days a week. When you walk into my room, Deifendorf, I want you to be stiff with fear. Caldwell the Kid-Killer; that’s how I want you to think of me. Brrouh!”
I turned from the window and laughed, determined to interrupt. The two of them, the chipped yellow desk between, hunched toward each other like conspirators. My father looked sallow and nauseated, his temples glazed and hollow; the top of his desk was littered with papers and tin-jawed binders and paperweights like half-metamorphosed toads. Deifendorf had stolen his strength; teaching was sapping him. I saw this helplessly. I saw helplessly in the smirk on Deify’s face that from my father’s whirl of words he had gathered a sense of superiority, a sense of being, in comparison with this addled and vehement shipwreck of a man, young, clean, sleek, clear-headed, well-coordinated, and invincible.
My father, embarrassed by my angry witnessing, changed the subject. “Be at the Y by 6:30,” he told Deifendorf curtly. There was a swimming meet this evening and Deifendorf was on the team.
“We’ll dunk ‘em for ya, Mr. Caldwell,” Deifendorf promised. “They’ll be cocky and ripe for an upset.” Our swimming team had not won a meet all season: Olinger was a very land kind of town. It had no public pool, and the poorhouse dam’s bottom was lined with broken bottles. My father was, by one of those weird strokes whereby Zimmerman kept the faculty in a malleable flux of confusion, the team’s coach, though his hernia prevented him from ever going into the water.
“Do your best is all we can do,” my father said. “You can’t walk on water.”
I believe now that my father wanted this last statement to be contradicted, but none of the three others of us in the room saw the need.
Judy Lengel was the third student in the room. My father’s view of her was that her father bullied her beyond the limit of her mental abilities. I doubted this; in my opinion Judy was just a girl who being neither pretty nor bright had spite fully developed a petty ambitiousness with which she tormented the gullible teachers like my father. She seized the silence to say, “Mr. Caldwell, I was wondering about that quiz tomorrow-”
“Just a moment, Judy.” Deifendorf was attempting to leave, sated. He all but belched as he got up from his chair. My father asked him, “Deify, how are you and cigarettes? If anybody reports you smoking again you’re off the team.”
The feeble primitive voice whined from the doorway. “I ain’t touched a weed since the beginning of season, Mr. Caldwell.”
“Don’t lie to me, kid. Life’s too short to lie. About fifty-seven varieties of people have squealed to me about your smoking and if I’m caught protecting you Zimmerman’ll have my neck.”
“O.K., Mr. Caldwell. I got you.”
“I want the breast stroke and the two-twenty freestyle from you tonight.”
“You’ll get ‘em, Mr. Caldwell.”
I shut my eyes. It agonized me to hear my father talk like a coach; it seemed so beneath us. This was unfair; for wasn’t it after all what I wanted to hear from him-the confident, ordinary, world-supporting accents of other men? Perhaps it hurt me that Deifendorf had something concrete to give my father-the breast stroke and the two-twenty freestyle-while I had nothing. Unwilling to expose my skin, I had never learned to swim. The world of water was closed to me, so I had fallen in love with the air, which I was able to seize in great thrilling condensations within me that I labelled the Future: it was in this realm that I hoped to reward my father for his suffering.
“Now. Judy,” he said.
“I don’t understand what the quiz will be about.”
“Chapters Eight, Nine, and Ten, as I said today in class.”
“But that’s so much.”
“Skim it, Judy. You’re no dope. You know how to study.” My father flipped open the book, the gray textbook with the microscope, the atom, and the dinosaur on the cover. “Look for italicized words,” he said. “Here. Magma. What is magma?”
“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.”