Q

by Christina Dalcher

We are not all the same.” Once again, she looked out from the screen. “Tell me, parents, do you want your child in a classroom with students who are two standard deviations out? With children who don’t have the capacity to understand the kinds of struggles and challenges your five-year-old faces? With teachers whose time is pulled in so many directions that everyone—everyone—ends up falling through the cracks?”

Somewhere in the middle of the country, in that expanse of former dust bowls and farmland that no one pays attention to, it started. Somewhere in the champagne-communism salons of Boston and San Francisco, it started. Somewhere in suburban living rooms where upper-middle-class mothers gather to share stories of sore nipples and sleepless nights, it started. And spread. And mutated like a virus, weaving into itself, reduplicating. A few voices turned into a chorus of voices, all calling for education reform. What we needed, they claimed, wasn’t more special programs in the schools; we needed more buckling down, more effort, more recognition that throwing money at a problem wasn’t going to solve it. We needed to move on from the one-size-fits-all mentality.

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 watch Freddie’s green bus pull away through a veil of rain and wonder if I would have done things differently ten years ago if I knew then what I know now.

“So? When are you going to do it?” It. This single word covers all kinds of sins, from backseat gropes after a high school dance, to putting the dog down when he’s too old and too needy, to taking a fetus from a woman’s belly. Sex, euthanasia, abortion. All conveniently collected under the umbrella of It.

“If they tell me its Q is one-hundredth of a point lower than nine-point-five, I’m getting rid of it,” said a pale woman behind her mask of painstakingly applied cosmetics. “Just like I did the last time.”

I wonder if we’ve all been playing the old out of sight, out of mind game. I wonder if we’ll keep playing it until the game pieces start coming into view, shifting from Their playing boards to Our playing boards. Like they did this morning, when Sarah Green’s perfect teenager was demoted to a pawn.

The problem here is childishly simplistic: The jobs are disappearing and the people aren’t.

Changes trickled along, a drop or so at a time. I figured by the time my girls were teens, everyone would have joined in on the diversity dance. I was wrong. Diversity never made it past a slow, awkward shuffle.

The problem, I think, is that I’ve got a husband who’s so intensely wrapped in his überintelligence bubble that imagining any world outside that cocoon is impossible. The idea of failure in our family doesn’t enter into Malcolm’s equations of reality, and Anne lives in the kind of blissful oblivion that only teenagers can live in.

He’s the same as when I met him over twenty-five years ago. Same angular, often emotionless face; same square-set shoulders, as if he’s preparing for a wrecking ball to hit him and plans to hit back just as hard; same dark blond waves of hair framing his face, although there’s gray curling around his temples and at the nape of his neck. The glasses he wears have gone through a few more thicknesses over this past quarter century, but otherwise, Malcolm’s the same. It must be me who’s changed, because when I see him now, I don’t see anything to love.

I wasn’t sure how to answer, whether to get the question right and win the big prize of a wide Malcolm smile, or say what I wanted to hear. I wanted him to think I was beautiful. We’re not taught that, we girls and women. We’re taught to look for men who want more than just a pretty face. Make sure he’s interested in what’s upstairs. The body goes; the mind stays. Love is cerebral.

We’re supposed to believe all this, to want it, to crave men who love our minds more than our flesh, men who are blind to our outer beauty and see only our inner, cerebral gorgeousness. All the women we’ve ever trusted tell us this is what’s good and right, and I suppose if I had to pick, I’d rather have a lover with eyes that saw deep inside me, past the laugh lines or the sagging bum or the matching set of stretch marks. The thing of it is, why should I have to choose? What’s so fucking wrong about wanting to be wanted? In all the ways.

Once, a boy named Joe kissed me and said I was beautiful. I don’t know. Maybe I was. Am. Was. There’s a little swell now where a flat belly used to be, a few more laugh lines or frown lines or stretch marks, some spider’s-web strands of gray curling around my ears. Malcolm has never mentioned any of these.

Children are resilient, I think. And that’s good in so many ways—they fall down, they dust themselves off, they get back up and do it all over again. But resilience brings a sort of callousness with it, an acceptance and tolerance that piggyback along.

Lying in bed next to Malcolm, who says he’s dog-tired tonight, I fantasize about Joe. Maybe not even Joe himself, but a good guy, a Jimmy Stewart, a man who might run his hands over me tentatively at first, who would kiss me softly before trying anything beyond first base, and then, once things started smoking, would take me to the moon and back. I think about how much I’d like that, and how, at forty-something, those are nothing more than fantasies, experiences I’ll never have again.

“I figure you for an English teacher, ma’am.” Ruby Jo says “figger,” not “figure.” It’s new to my ears, but endearing all the same. “Nope. Biology and anatomy. You?” “Chemistry.” You’re kidding, I think, and as soon as the words are in my head, I regret them. They sound too judgmental, too needlessly surprised, too much like Malcolm.

I never spoke to Rosaria again, and I made sure my friends didn’t. It was easier than I thought, making up stories about Rosaria Delgado’s family and where they lived. We sneered at her outfits and mimicked her accent. If our teacher put one of us in a group with her, we ignored her input and did things our way. We did this from January until June. In September, Rosaria didn’t come back. We’d won.

the cameras once again scan the crowd. There’s an irregularity in the sameness, and I’m just now seeing the problem. Every cheering person is like the next—clean-cut, dressed in that fresh-from-the-ironing-board urban casual look, mostly white, slim, and attractive—the utter antithesis of what populated the cafeteria only an hour ago. Madeleine Sinclair’s idea of the new upper class. And Malcolm’s idea. Even my idea, once.

“Is this how we are? Humans? Because if it is, I think I want to be something else.” Anything but an overeducated, overconditioned human being. Anything at all.

“I think we all have some of the creature in us. Some hardwired instinct that tells us to beware of anything too strange or different from us. That’s part of what made us fit to survive. But.” She raises a finger before I can agree or disagree. “I know we can turn off the xenophobia switch if we want to. It’s one of the aspects of humanity. Does that answer your question?”

I feel a sense of disgust when I think about humans turning against humans, one cold shoulder and one “my kid is better than your kid” at a time.

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.

Patriotism does not require turning a blind eye to the darker chapters of our country’s history; if anything, the opposite.