“Sit, Victor! Heel. Heel!” I demanded. “Jeez, can’t somebody get that dog to mellow out?” I turned back to the papers but Sarah was leaning into me with the Christmas list she’d already made, a Pokémon stadium leading a long computerized column. I reminded her it was October (this didn’t register) and then started going down the list with her until I looked to Jayne for help, but she was on her cell phone and bagging the kids’ lunches (the sugar-free graham crackers, the bottles of Diet Snapple) while saying things like “No—the kids are booked solid.”
Sarah kept explaining to me what each item on the list meant to her until I casually interrupted. “How’s everything with Terby, honey?” I asked. (Had I really been so afraid of it last night? Everything seemed different now in the light of morning: bright, clean, sane.)
“Terby’s okay” is all she said, but it worked: she forgot about the Christmas list and moved over to finger paintings she’d made yesterday for show-and-tell and carefully started sliding them into a manila envelope. Robby was checking his palm pilot while swaggering around the kitchen—his way of acting tough.
I suddenly noticed a paperback of Lord of the Flies in the mass of school gear on the table and picked it up. Opening the cover I was shocked to find Sarah’s name handwritten on the first page. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I can’t believe they’re letting first-graders read this.”
Everyone—except Sarah—glanced at me.
“I don’t even understand this book now. Jeez, why don’t they just assign her Moby Dick? This is absurd. This is crazy!” I was waving the book at Jayne when I noticed Sarah staring at me with a confused expression. I bent toward her and said, in a calm, soothing, rational tone, “Honey, you don’t need to read this.”
Sarah glanced fearfully at her mother. “It’s on our reading list,” she said quietly.
Exasperated, I asked Robby to show me his curriculum.
“My what?” he asked, standing rigidly still.
“Your schedule, dummy.”
Robby tentatively rummaged through his backpack and pulled out a crumpled computerized list: Art History, Algebra 1, Science, Basic Probability, Phys Ed, Statistics, Nonfiction Literature, Social Studies and Conversational Spanish. I stared at the list dully until he sat down at the table and I handed it back to him. “This is insane,” I muttered. “It’s outrageous. Where are we sending them?”
Robby suddenly concentrated on his bowl of muesli—having pushed aside the oatmeal Marta had placed in front of him—and reached for a carton of soy milk. Jayne kept forgetting that Robby couldn’t stand oatmeal, but it was something I always remembered since I couldn’t stand oatmeal either.
He finally shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“The school counselor said that getting a child into an Ivy League school starts in first grade,” Jayne said casually, as if not to alarm the children, who I assumed weren’t listening anyway.
“Actually earlier,” Marta reminded her.
“She’s hyping you, baby,” I sighed. “Don’t play dat game, sistah.”
Robby suddenly giggled, much to my gratification.
Jayne scowled. “Don’t use fake rap talk around the kids. I hate it.”
“And I hated that counselor,” I said. “You know why? Because she was feeding off your anxiety, baby.”
“Let’s not have this conversation now,” Jayne said, washing her hands in the sink, her neck muscles taut. “Are we almost ready, kids?”
I was still dumbfounded by Robby’s schedule and I wanted to say something consoling to him but he had finished the muesli and was reloading his backpack. He studied a computer game, Quake III, as if he didn’t know what to do with it, then pulled out his cell phone to make sure it was charged.
“Hey, buddy, what are you doing taking a cell phone to school?”
He looked nervously over at Jayne, who was now drying her hands with a paper towel. “All the kids have them,” she said simply.
“It’s abnormal for eleven-year-olds to have cell phones, Jayne,” I said, hitting what I hoped was the right tone of indignation.
“You. Are. Wearing. A. Sheet,” Jayne said—this was her response.
Robby seemed lost, as if he didn’t know what to do.
Finally, thankfully, Sarah broke the silence.
“Mommy, I brushed my teeth,” she offered.
“But don’t you brush after eating, honey?” Jayne asked, pointing out something to Marta in her datebook concerning the trip to Toronto next week for the reshoots. “I think you should brush your teeth after breakfast.”