Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

She said her child had been old enough to know better, and what she could not get over was that her girl’s last reaction to life had been — she didn’t know—"terror," she said, as if for a moment she were not the mother.

Gordon had known almost as soon as it happened. But some ten years later, after he had moved to another school, a boy’s school, and graduated and gone to college, this woman Mrs. Hollander said the very thing about death and terror to him that she had said to his parents, who had liked her for her strictness and humor and an awful bravery that was maybe a secret comprehension and control of what had happened to her in this incident of her nine-year-old daughter who could run so fast. Maybe the kid’s reaction feeling herself go over would have been simple shock. But Gordon wouldn’t have said so to Mrs. Hollander.

Gordon sometimes said too much. Mrs. Hollander had told him so. She’d known how to. She’d been good to him and he’d been a favorite of hers.

Mrs. Hollander was the sixth-grade teacher when Gordon skipped into sixth. He had lost a friend or two at the moment when she entered his life— or thought he had lost a friend or two. And somewhere in there he had almost learned to keep quiet.

Because at this time in his life some things unsaid hurt. But hadn’t hurt less when they got said.

One thing especially. Which Gordon had only thought he minded.

Thought? asked Mayn so quietly it might have been thought.

Well, he thought he minded, but later decided he didn’t.

Minded what? said Mayn.

It came out; it had to. You don’t say that kind of thing yourself. Which was why when Dickie said it as they bounced a ball between them walking down Montague Street, with the harbor in view out ahead of them, the thing Dickie said made Gordon feel like shrugging and saying, "I’ll see ya," and turning in at the paper store to see if a new Submariner comic was in — the sleek hero with the slanted eyes and the long, adept face.

He’d heard the words all day, that first day he’d skipped. Heard them in the boys’ washroom, in the playground where he was kidded about skipping and had good comebacks out in the open air. Heard them almost in the insect scratching of steel nibs and in the pauses when they were being dipped in the blue-stained volcanoes on each desk, and now and then a unanimous pause came as if the amplified insects had taken off.

"You thought that then?" Mayn said.

"I think it now," said Gordon. He’d heard the words also when he and his new sixth-grade classmates some of whom he’d already known had passed down the hall to the stairs and the floor below for Art at one-fifteen, passed the fifth-grade doorway and a couple of kids who were his classmates the day before looked up from their desks at this activity in the hall and saw him, they must have, and the change had been like nothing except in the greasy wood smell of the old, dark floors and the corn soup coming up sweet and humid from the cafeteria in the basement of the school, a decision had passed without his taking it — either sixth grade or fifth grade; not both.

But the actual words in the air hadn’t been said until Dickie said them coming home.

Dickie said, "So you must be smarter than me."

A heavy conclusion they had put together through shared thought.

Well, Dickie was a wise guy. What did you answer to a thing like that?

Gordon was a quieter wise guy. The right answer passed into his head, but he said, "There’s lots of ways of being dumb."

Yes, the right answer had passed into Gordon’s head and out.

Dickie swore at Gordon for the "dumb" remark, yet was kind of serious. "So you must be smarter than me."

Gordon said to Dickie, "Come on, that’s not what it means. I happen to read a lot—"

"— a lot of comics," said Dickie.

"— and I always was a good speller, and I work hard. And I read a lot," said Gordon.

Dickie said — and they laughed at this—"I mean, you must be smarter than I thought you were."

Mayn laughed. Gordon liked getting a laugh.

Gordon’s parents, really his father, had put the decision to Gordon the night before — definitely a Wednesday — and so what the hell, it was a decision already made. Yet then taken, he felt, by him behind his own back. His father said the teacher Miss Gore thought fifth grade wasn’t enough of a challenge for him (or was she fed up with his whispering?) and his father agreed, and sixth grade would not be too much for Gordon even with the year already begun; and skipping a grade, he’d be that much ahead.

They were into November already. His father pointed this out. Gordon had been thinking about the fifth-grade Christmas pageant. It had been cast and he had ended up an angel and not Joseph. It was by secret vote of the class but also by choice of the teacher. Parts had been announced by Miss Gore, and two girls had looked at each other and one girl who got what she wanted had put her hands over her face, and Gordon had thought Goddamn it he’d wanted to be Joseph and should have been, he was taller than all but one of the boys in the fifth grade, and he had wanted to be Joseph but was going to be an angel in the pageant instead. Or this was what he was still angry about when his father told him he was going to be skipped into sixth grade starting the next morning if it was O.K. with him. At the Christmas pageant the sixth grade would carry electric candles like the rest of the Lower School except for the fifth grade, who always played the parts and took turns reading out the Bible story at a lectern with one small shaded lamp up at the front of the auditorium, and those who had parts wore costumes and stood in a tableau of the stable and the manger, Mary and Joseph, shepherds, wise men, angels and two little kids from kindergarten to complete the picture. Gordon was out of it now. He didn’t mention this to his father and didn’t mention it to his mother.

So the next day happened, and so did the days after it. He was in sixth grade. Everything else was the same. Sixth grade was like new clothes, a new book. But seemed the same. It was like a privilege. One he deserved but now didn’t need to earn. Though he had to make up fifth-grade work he would now miss.

Mrs. Hollander helped him. He felt like her favorite for a while. His father corrected his answers and, checking Gordon’s scratch paper, showed him a trick for finding the larger denominator necessary for adding and subtracting fractions. It was pretty easy. His father said Gordon was careless, Gordon felt it was hard to argue that one, and yet it wasn’t fair, and there was one time when his father would not say what was wrong but sent him back to his room to figure it out. His father had stayed home in bed for a week in October and read the newspaper and said that we’d missed our chance with Willkie in ‘40, and Dewey was the next President, and when he got sick again in November he took to his bed again (and Gordon’s mother would talk for a long time on the phone to a friend of hers), and at school Mrs. Hollander thumb-tacked news clippings to the sixth-grade bulletin board every morning with pictures of Spitfires taking off against German fighter planes with crosses on them, and barrage balloons over England and maps of Europe, and on Monday she put up the Sunday Times "News of the Week" current-events quiz that Gordon’s father usually got twenty out of twenty on.

"Can I cut a picture out of the paper to put on the bulletin board at school?"

His father was in bed and said Gordon could wait till he was finished with the paper. Which meant the clipping would be a day late. But then his father asked what it was about and when he told his father it was current events and it was a picture of a tank and a map of Europe, his father said, Very well, if he cut it out neatly — and asked if they were studying regular history in the sixth grade.