Brock Clarke - Exley

“What do you want to know?” M. wants to know.

“About K., for instance,” I say. M. glances over his shoulder at the classroom, then down at his feet. “Your father’s student,” I add.

“She’s my student now,” he says, looking up at me. M.’s eyes dare me to tell him that K. isn’t his student. But a good mental health professional never accepts a patient’s dare, which is fortunate, since I never dared to accept a dare before I was a mental health professional, either.

“I know she is,” I say. “But how did you know K. was your father’s student?”

“What do you mean?” M. says, and then before I can tell him what I mean, he says, “I’m teaching my father’s class. She was in the class when I started teaching it.”

Yes, and how did you come to teach your father’s class in the first place? I think but do not say. Instead, I ask, “Did your father ever mention K. before he went to Iraq? Did he ever talk about her around you or your mother?”

“No,” M. says quickly, much too quickly, and so I know the answer is yes. How to prove what I know, however, is a more difficult matter.

“Are you still journaling?” I ask M.

“Am I what? ”

“Journaling, ” I repeat. This is another way I am certain that M. is not really teaching his father’s class. If he were truly an English professor, then he would know what it means to journal. Because I know from an article in one of the mental health profession’s leading periodicals that English professors no longer have their students write essays on literary matters — literary matters and, indeed, literature — and instead have their students journal, a process which privileges feeling and emotion and devalues such less essential matters as form and style. The point of the article was that English professors, like the rest of society, are better off rejecting their former standards and practices and embracing the standards and practices of mental health professionals like myself. “Are you still writing down everything that’s happening to you?”

“Pretty much,” M. says, and then twists his face into a question mark. “Why?”

“Just curious,” I say, and then attempt to flatten my face into an answer.

A Moronic Device

It was seven o’clock when I got home that night, the time I usually got home on Tuesdays. Mother’s car was in the driveway. The garage floodlight was on, but the rest of the house was dark. I put down my kickstand and parked my bike in the driveway, walked inside, turned on the kitchen and living room lights, and yelled out, “Hello, I’m home!” but no one answered. This wasn’t a big deal. I figured Mother was next door talking to the neighbors or something. To kill time, I went to my dad’s study, took out my “journal,” and wrote down everything that had happened to me that day so far. When I was done, I put the “journal” back in the window seat, walked outside, crossed my arms, and leaned against Mother’s car. As I did, I caught a whiff of myself. I smelled like K. The smell made me feel sad and lonely. But the air smelled cold and clean. I tugged on the front of my coat to make it like a tent and then started flapping it, right there in the driveway. I did this for a while, until the horn in Mother’s car honked. Twice.

“What the.?” I said. I jumped up away from the car and bumped into my bike. It fell and made a soft crushing sound as it landed on the crushed stones in the driveway. My heart fluttered; I could actually feel wings beating in my chest. I was standing next to the back passenger door, and I leaned down a little and looked through the window toward the front seat. Mother was sitting in the driver’s seat. Her arm was hooked over the back of the seat. Her body was half turned toward me, and she was grinning.

This reminded me of a nice thing that happened. I was in kindergarten. Mother and my dad picked me up from school. I don’t remember why or where we went afterward. I got in the backseat. Mother was driving. My dad was in the front passenger seat. We hadn’t gone anywhere yet. We were just sitting there, parked on the street outside Knickerbocker Elementary. My dad turned around in his seat and asked me, “What’d you learn today, bud?” He asked the same question every day, and so I knew to have an answer.

“I learned the planets,” I said, and then recited them in order, Mercury through Pluto.

“Jesus H. Keeriiisst,” my dad said. He was smiling at me. He stuck his hand over the seat, and I slapped it. Mother was nodding at me in the rearview mirror in an impressed way. “How’d you remember that? I always get Uranus and Neptune confused.”

“What do you mean?” Mother said. “They’re totally different planets.”

“I know that, ” my dad said. “But I can never remember which one is next to Pluto.”

“Ms. O. taught me how,” I said. Ms. O. was my teacher. I recited what she’d taught me. “‘My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.’ That’s how you remember.”

My dad repeated what I’d just said. “That’s good,” he told me. “I won’t forget anymore.”

“I know,” I said. “I asked Ms. O. what you called the trick, and she said it wasn’t a trick. She said it was a moronic device.”

“A what? ” Mother said. She swiveled around to look at me, and as she did, her eyes caught my dad’s. Both their faces looked like they were trying to hold on to something. My dad put his right hand over his mouth; Mother’s lips were pursed, her eyes crinkled. I knew something was funny, but I didn’t know what it was yet, so I said, “A moronic device. It helps you remember things.”

“I think it’s a mnemonic device,” Mother said gently. “Not a moronic device.”

“It’s a moronic device,” I said, starting to guess I was wrong, but mad about it and not wanting to admit it. “The kind of device you need when you’re a moron.” Because I knew what the word moron meant, pretty much.

“Are you sure?” Mother said. “Are you sure it’s not a mnemonic device?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “You must be talking about another kind of device.”

My dad lost it then. He started laughing through his hand. And then Mother started laughing, too. Then my dad started laughing harder because Mother was. I wasn’t going to laugh, because it wasn’t funny. But I don’t think I’d ever seen the two of them laugh together like that. I didn’t want them to stop. So I started laughing, too. It might have been the nicest thing we ever did as a family. There’s a picture in a frame in my bedroom of the three of us. It’d been taken at Sears, at the Salmon Run Mall, when I was seven. We were all dressed up in clothes we’d never worn before. It was clear we were unhappy, because we were all grinning and trying too hard to look happy. Mother and my dad had probably fought about something right before the picture was taken. We looked unhappy, and we were. But no one had taken a picture of us in the car. Why hadn’t anyone taken a picture of that?

Mother pushed a button and the back passenger-side window rolled down. I leaned into it and said, “I wish someone would take a picture of us right now.”

Mother cocked her head a little and said, “You can be a strange kid sometimes, Miller.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, especially since Mother must have seen me leaning against her car and flapping my clothes like a maniac a minute earlier. I said, “What are you doing sitting in the car anyway?”

“I was watching you sit at your dad’s desk,” she said. “You reminded me of him.” I wondered if Mother was going to say more than that — like ask what exactly I was doing, sitting at his desk — but she didn’t. So I said, “What were you doing in the car in the first place?”