Authors: Elizabeth Collison
What we do here is make up stories. Fanciful, structured adventure yarns that teach early readers to read. Tales of thrill-seeking sweet rolls on the loose from their box, whooping field mice in hot pursuit, a large grinning calico at their heels, all bent on a spirited progression throughout of hard consonants and long and short vowels.
It is a project Dr. Steinem, School of Education, proposed over a decade ago. That children must learn to read “oh” sounds before “oo,” single vowels before pairs, and so forth. That children learn best through imagination, through goal-oriented flights of fancy. And that fancy can be organized into bound basal readers, in turn grouped into grade-level series.
“Basal readers,” Steinem said to anyone who listened. And reiterated in grant proposals. He, Henry Steinem, had seen the future of learning, and the future was basal readers. “Get them early,” said Steinem. “Get them basal, and by god, you have got yourself readers.”
We consider ourselves lucky at the Project. Although Dr. Steinem's ideas were not new, his proposals were surprisingly well
funded. So two years ago, the Project was officially birthed, and I and the series editors were hired. Following which, with the help of our university and state, we all moved here to Elmwood S.I., fourth floor, in a wing of once-private suites.
There are advantages to working in sanatorium suites: the windows are large, we have a fine view. Our offices are all roomy and sunlit, with lovely high carved plaster ceilings. We each have a set of French doors looking out with our own wrought-iron balcony. And each office as well has a full attached bath with a porcelain tub and brass handrail. I have filled my tub with a terrarium of small palms, but Celeste brings bath oils for hers and soaks in lemon verbena on lunch hours.
We have no complaints at our sanatorium, we are happy for all we've been given. That is, we all say, with the possible exception of Earnest. Earnest is our new part-time Tuesday night janitor, recently come out of retirement. He is old and claims to have worked at the sanatorium years ago when it was in its tubercular heyday. Earnest is no longer right in the head. Moreover, he is a big talker, droning on about the old days here. He rambles and says things hard to believe, and if you must work late on a Tuesday, Earnest will most certainly find you. Then he will put down his pail and stand in your light and insist on telling you his stories, about all the long bloody nights that he's seen, how each patient here suffered and died.
On this floor in particular, he'll say. Screamers' wing, that's what they called it. They moved the incurables here, ones whose fever had taken their minds.
“Screamers' wing. You got that?” Earnest says. “Why do you think you're way off on fourth floor?”
That is the kind of thing Earnest says. “Oh the stories,” he'll say. “The stories. Things happened here you could not guess.”
That balcony there for instance, he will say, when he has come up with his mop to surprise you. “That balcony,” he'll say, “that's where the girl in the nightgown jumped.” Then he'll leave it at that, and go back to his pail.
It's disconcerting at best, and ever since he arrived, we all try not to listen to Earnest. We just unlock our French doors in the mornings, let in the sun and fresh air. Then we sit down at our desks, pick up our pens, and begin our important days. We have our work after all, our deadlines.
We are busy, engaged people at the Project. Series editors mostly, our offices arranged down one side of the hall, precisely ordered by grade level. Sally Ann for first grade, Lola for second, Frances, in the big suite, for third. Next my suite and next door the verbena-drenched Celeste, editor of the gifted and talented. Then working freelance from home are two illustrators and a nice man named Cliff, editor of reader satisfaction. Only Steinem and Marcie are not editors here, Steinem as he is the director of course, and Marcie as she's his assistant. Actually, what Marcie is is administrative assistant and sometimes acting receptionist, there is no pretending she's anyone's editor.
As for me, I'm the assistant editor of design, a name Dr. Steinem gave me. I am not sure why he calls me all that, in fact what I do here is paste-up. It is not much of a job; generally I just ink lines in tables, wax galleys and burnish them down. At my age I should be doing more. But it is a job I can do, the hours are right, almost never do I have to work weekends. And so for the most part, I've been happy to stay.
That is, until lately. Since Ben Adams, in fact, disappeared. Ever since Ben so abruptly took off, I cannot seem to keep my mind on my work.
He has rented a farmhouse outside of town. It is not the same house, but it is big and square and white like the other. So for a while he will live in this farmhouse, and it will be like it was before. He will make it like it was before.
This house, a neighbor has told him, once was a Mennonite church, then for a while a school. It is plain and wood-sided with a cupola on top where sometimes he sits late at night. On the north side, two wood swings hang by chains from a tree. And outside the front door, an American flag flies from a twenty-foot pole.
The house sits on a big rolling farmyard. The grass there is thick and deep green, and white lilacs line a long gravel drive that leads up to the house from the road. He has started a garden to the south of the house. And in the back in a stand of tall pines he keeps a pair of gray geese.
Beyond the yard are his landlord's wide fields, acres of soybeans, seed corn, a barn, and a pen for some black-spotted pigs. The landlord has moved to a house in town, he is almost never around. He only stops by the farm early mornings and leaves again always by dawn.
So for most of his days he, the renter, has this yard and the
fields to himself. It is quiet the way it once was. There is time here to think, to remember.
Now, about this matter of paste-up, something I'd like to get out of the way. Why I hold on to this job as I do, how I came to it in the first place. It is not unlike how I came upon Mott Street, in fact the two are related. The story of which is sometimes tricky to tell, not that I'm often asked to. But when I am, and I have to say something, I say well here is a story about someone I know, a person a little like me. Let me tell you about her instead.
The tale begins a few years ago when this person I know, a young woman, first arrived in the Midwest and this town. She came, as many here do, to study at the university. At the age of twenty-one, she applied as a graduate student of art, specifically painting and drawing, and was accepted on scholarship and waivers. Admissions took a shine to the portfolio she turned in, granting her out-of-state tuition. In return, they said, they expected her work to be worthy, to show talent and most especially vision. They expected a life of beauty and truth. A life spent in pursuit of, well, art.
At first the young woman believed what they said and set out boldly to paint. She believed it a calling, a duty, she believed that eventually art saved. But here is the catch to the story. In fact her life at the school was confounding. Others there did not feel as she did, they had come to do art for other reasons. They had come
first of all to be noticed, to attract. They had come for careers, for degrees. And they looked at her oddly when she spoke of art for what she believed was art's sake. Wise up, they all told her. Art can get you somewhere. You have only to name your price. After which, and some thought, the woman in fact did grow wiser. She knew then to never again talk of art, and certainly never to bring up vision. That is, to be clear, visions.
To explain: For years off and on, at that point maybe always, this woman had been having visions. Or, more precisely, visionettes. Better yet, she decided, dioramasâinfrequent brief flickers of startling scenes, three-dimensional, full color, stock-still. As though at some ominous surprise celebration, the hall dark, filled with invisible guests, some trickster among them lights a flare. And suddenly there they all stand, frozen in light, heads back and mouths open mid cry, before everything goes to black again.
They were dioramas all right. Twisted glass boxes of moments in time. In their silent, still way they stood out. A man with great feathered wings at his back, his forehead against a stone wall. A woman in pink diaphanous tulle, wild boars where her legs should be. Bloated bodies in rivers. Eyeless white heads. Severed hearts wet and still beating. Alarming scenes, pained and askew.
The young woman, this artist, had no idea where they came from. Were they guideposts, warnings, predictions? Or just wayward nerve axons firing, signifying nothing at all? She had not a clue, she knew only she must somehow lay hold of them. So she drew and she painted each, one by one, recasting as best she knew how.
And although they turned out abstract and off course, nowhere
close to what she had seen, soon her paintings attracted attention. It was the light, people said. Or no, the shadowsâsomething, well, something strange. How did she do it, they wondered. But the woman did not disclose. She did not admit to the visions she saw, there was really no way to explain them. And soon they made her a School of Art star.
It was not what the woman intended. It was not why she'd come to art school. But there were missteps, miscalculations. When you are young you cannot always know. And sooner or later, despite herself, she bought into the others' misguided praise and began hanging with fellow art stars.
They invited her to the Hogshead, the artists' dive bar in this town. She joined them most nights at their table, learned to drink beer and play pool. Learned all the names of the others who drank there, learned to say things that amused.
And then over time at the Hogshead, the woman got to know a few faculty too. They had heard of her work, its vogue disaffection, its dark pitch-perfect aberrance. It behooved them to know the town comers. So they asked her to seminars and coffees off campus, to dinners at their homes as well, small casually pretentious affairs. They wanted to know this rising star better. They wanted to talk painting with her, they wanted to talk music, film, books. Then they wanted to talk of food, of wine, then of their crystal wine goblets, the correct shapely stem of each imported glass that cost more than two monthly phone bills. Oh they longed to stay up talking till dawn.
At first, despite how these evenings seemed to her, the artist wanted to believe them a boon. She had hope that in one way or another they would eventually lead somewhere new. So whenever
she was invited to party or dine, always she gratefully accepted. And always she thought then this might be the night, that at last the evening would rise. That sensing it, people would gather around. That someone would say something essential, there would be some small act of wonder. Or that, short of these things, her inevitable silence partway into dessert would not dampen anyone's spirit.
But the nights never worked out any better, while the invitations accrued. And in time, the artist began to fear she would not be able to keep pace. She didn't know there would not always be more. She didn't know she was only just this year's art star. She knew only that she wanted both art and life. It seemed to her that couldn't be wrong. And not realizing then that indeed it could, that the life she was choosing was all wrong, she continued to paint and to party, and let others continue to marvel. Such
élan vital
, those in her circle would say. Such eerie fecundity.
Until when, halfway into her second year of school, she felt a shift, then a shudder. And without knowing just why or even how, she watched the light in her visions start to dim. The drop-off continued, the decline grew steep, she tried to rekindle, illumine. But at last all that flickered were just some old stills, returned to loop for a while.
So she tried then to paint without them, without any vision at all. She painted and then she painted. But she found that the mysterious light in her art, like her visions, had disappeared. There was nothing beyond the fine colored surface, the strong technique she had learned. And after a few more last attempts, she knew it had to be true. All her art now amounted only to sketches, disjointed series of things, incomplete, weak, of no interest.
At which point she understood her School of Art work was through. She was not, it turned out, an artist after all and no longer had reason for painting. In fact had no business painting or for that matter acting the genial star. It was time the young woman stopped trying.
Which was also when I myself just stopped trying and settled onto Mott.
The point here being this: It is a strange thing all right to come to one's end. That is, to come to the end before it is over. To meet one's destiny early in life. To find at the age of twenty-eight, it has all come down to Mott, that Mott Street was one's fate all along.
Of course, viewed in a certain light, there is, you might think, a kind of bravery in this, in living your life already knowing your precise lot in it. Living it through, all the while sensing how poorly it will actually turn out. A bravery, yes, you would like to think. Or possibly let others think. But here is the truth as I've found it: There is also a deep, profound comfort. A divine confirmation life is just what it is and indeed you're not all that you thought. That so it will go, day after day, with no surprise or for that matter striving.
Because so it has been for me for five years, a settled, lengthy life lull. A plateau in effect, a high arid place with horizons wherever one looks. Not the new sort of horizons optimists wake up to, oh look a new horizon. Rather the comfortable same old horizons, boundaries on every side. From a plateau they are easy to see.
Although here is the thing I have found out as well. They are deceptive, these plateau's hard edges. They can make you believe,
if you're not careful, your flatland is all that there is. And that if you just simply stay where you are you can calmly go on forever.