Q

by Christina Dalcher

It started with fear, and it ended with laws.

knees, shaking, refusing to leave. “You have to, honey,” I said. “Everyone has to take the tests.” “Why?” Why? I tried to think of an answer that would calm her. “So they know where to put people.”

I want to tell her failing a test doesn’t make her a failure. But it does. In this age, it does.

If they didn’t, there was the tiered school system: best, better, and somewhere around mediocre.

Evil or not, they won. They yelled and voted and screamed for stricter anti-immigration policies. They voted down No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Not that people didn’t want to give a leg up to the disadvantaged or the differently abled. They did. They just didn’t want them in the same classrooms with their own kids.

I’ve heard of teachers in the green schools, like the one Freddie attends, who lose sleep over the numbers. One-tenth of a point makes all the difference. Freddie’s geometry teacher explained it all to me at our last meeting. “It gives them a chance, at least,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “And if they don’t have a chance, it gives everyone in the family time to deal with it. They can spend their last weekends together going on picnics, taking a final trip to see the grandparents, riding a roller coaster at the Six Flags park. All that shit they haven’t been doing for the past few years. That way, when the Q sinks below eight and the yellow bus comes, they’ve had some quality experiences. Memories.” It wasn’t always this way.

It’s the Shit Out of Luck test because two months ago I stood in front of thirty faces. Today I stand in front of twenty-seven. The three empty desks are still here, though, scattered about. No one bothers to remove them, or consolidate them in the back of the classroom. Or maybe that’s the plan—to leave the empty desks, the ones that used to be occupied by Judy Green and Sue Tyler and a ghost-pale boy named Antonio who kicked ass at chemistry but couldn’t hack it in number theory. Maybe the empty desks are here as a carrot. Or a stick.

The faculty is good enough that every once in a while a green school student scores out of the ballpark, ends up with a silver card, and transfers to a first-tier school. Most of the time, though, there’s only one way for a kid to go once she’s in a green school. Down.

Nothing is easy these days. The Fitter Family Campaign created obstacles I never saw coming, which is a testament to my own optimism. Or stupidity. Who knows? Maybe optimism and stupidity are siblings.

A month later, a gray van arrived, and Moira’s boys clambered in, suitcases in one hand, while Moira cursed and threatened from her front porch. “We’re doing fine!” she screamed at the gray women. “One parent is as good as two!” The Fitter Family Campaign disagreed. Moira went to court, not once but three times. She ended up representing herself because no lawyer would take her case, not as a single mother. She lost before the hearing even started.

“They told me you have to get the fitter parent to testify,” she said after the third day in court. “Can you believe that? The fitter parent—meaning the one who earns more, the one who takes less annual leave, the one with the higher Q rating. I can’t even find my ex-husband, let alone get him to show up before a judge. Fucking laws.” I felt for Moira then. I feel for her more now as I realize that Malcolm, with double the income I bring in and half the late days, will always be the fitter parent. Most men are—even the ones who aren’t.

“You’re not serious about sending Freddie off to one of those schools,” my father says, slicing cold cuts. He punctuates every other word with a stab of his knife. “Monthly testing in the first grade was bad enough, but I thought we left segregation behind a while ago.”

“No one’s complained so far,” Malcolm says. My father doesn’t say a word, but his fists tighten, and the muscles in his forearms stand out like cords. “No one ever does until it happens to them,” my mother says, offering me the icing knife to lick clean. “You know the old story about boiling the frog? If you put the frog in a pot of boiling water, he’ll jump out.” She silences Malcolm with a hand and smiles. “If, on the other hand, you put the frog in a pot of cold water and turn up the heat one degree at a time, well, before long you’ll have a boiled frog. And he’ll never know what’s coming.” Then, taking my father’s hand in her own, she says, “Our parents saw the frog boil in Germany. One degree at a time.”

“This is why she needs to go, Elena. She’s not right in the head.” Every limb in my body seems to respond at the same time. My feet carry me down five steps in what feels like a single movement. My left arm arcs backward, part of me and not part of me at once. My mouth opens and forms the syllables of “bastard” as a fist I didn’t know I was capable of strikes Malcolm squarely in the jaw, slanting off, hurting. Malcolm says nothing, only pushes a bundle of coats and shoes into my chest. They’re heavy, but not as heavy as my rage. “You fucking son of a bitch,” I whisper.

“It’s all right, baby,” I say in my soft voice, a voice that struggles to emerge as my ugly voice, the one I want to use toward my husband, boils up and battles for control. “Ice cream at home. And then we’ll watch the movie about the princess, okay?” Ice cream and princesses are the last fucking things on my mind. Brass knuckles and Amazon warriors, though, yeah.

Then, out of the blue, a question. “Do you love Daddy?” I can’t lie. And I can’t tell her how things really are. So I dodge. “I did once.” “But not anymore.” Out of the mouths of babes come brutally honest truths. Before I can answer, Freddie asks another question. “Why did you love him?” The bedtime story I could tell her would start like this: Once upon a time, Elena was a stupid little shit.

She shakes her head, crushes the half-smoked cigarette under a Bally pump, and jangles her key fob nervously in one hand. Lexus SUV, Swiss shoes, monogrammed Tiffany key chain. No daughter, though. So much for the cocooning effects of money.

Now I worry I screwed it all up, laid patchy groundwork for a situation no one could see coming. My protectiveness backfired, leaving my girl unprotected. I scribble more nonsense on a blank page of my blue book, put my pen down, and raise my hand. I’m done being Malcolm Fairchild’s brilliant wife.

Petra clears it all up for me in a few sentences. “Beginning next month, WomanHealth will offer no-cost pregnancy management services to any woman referred by the Genics Institute. Your income won’t matter. And by any woman, we mean any woman, regardless of where she is in her term. If you don’t like your baby’s Q score, we’re here to help.” There’s smiling in her voice, and little mm-hmms of approval from the interviewer. The words “no child left behind” take on fresh, terrible meaning: It’s impossible to leave a child behind if the child doesn’t exist.

Maybe all mothers are semi-insane. Maybe that’s part of the deal we make when we decide to let our bodies become hosts,

“How did you come up with the name for your company, the Genics Institute? I’ve always been curious about that.” I’m not curious, not after Oma told us all about Uncle Eugen, not after I looked up his institute and discovered its real name. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics. Eugenic. Well-born. All Madeleine Sinclair’s talk about a better America and better families and better humans weaves itself into one horrible, sickening concept.

The colors have meanings. Terrible meanings, like the mark of Cain. Or the scarlet letter. My grandmother detested things like this, any sort of badge or button that defines a person. As a girl, I only thought she was being mean when she tore off the green shamrock I came home with on St. Patrick’s Day, when she tossed the little Mexican flag our Spanish teacher gave us on Cinco de Mayo into the kitchen trash bin. “Don’t wear those, Leni,” she said. “Don’t ever wear them.”

I should be shocked, but I’m not. Appalled, maybe, and all the other words I can think of that go with it, but not shocked. We’ve always done this, we humans in our little societies. We categorize and compare and devise ways to separate ourselves into teams, not so differently from the rituals of a grade school gym class. I pick her, we say. But not him. Someone is always last; someone is always at the bottom of the barrel, the last to be chosen. You’d think we’d grow out of that nonsense.

“You see the way they look at each other? The way their hands touch when they think no one’s watching?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “Those chicks are in love, Elena. Like with a capital L.” Once again, I hear Sarah Green’s voice screaming at me on the street. How did she lose the Q points? Tell me that, El. The only answer I have is this: Judy Green didn’t fail anything. No fucking way.

To Malcolm, I was still me, still Elena Fischer Fairchild. There was no way to explain to him that I wasn’t, and that I hadn’t been since the day Anne was born. These babies of mine took something when they left me, thin slices of myself, leaving empty spots. Dead spots. I think I died a little when Anne was born, and I think I died a little more this time around. With Freddie sleeping on my bare breast, I whispered to her. “I’ll do anything for you, baby girl. That’s a promise.” When she stirred and stared up at me with those big eyes, those eyes that would be the same size at three and at sixteen and at eighty, that would see all of her life through the same physical lens, I cried.

We tell our girls when they start their periods that they’re women. We say trite things like You’re a woman now. Does the converse also hold? At the other end, when nature stops us, do we become unwomen?

I search the room for another door, a window, an air-conditioning vent. Any escape that will carry me out of this and back to the apartment with Lissa and Ruby Jo. How strangely one hell becomes a sort of heaven.

Because as soon as I get back to Washington, I’m going to make sure it’s blasted over the airwaves so loud they’ll hear it on the fucking moon.

And then, I said something without thinking, something I’d one day regret. “Wouldn’t it be great if all the people we hated could carry their crappy GPAs around for life?” Malcolm agreed. And he smiled.