into night, and rap-tap-taps down the hall. You sit back up. You drink half your bottle. Never more. You crawl into the farthest corner. Press your back against the bars. Chant the alphabet – you know most of it. Just keep chanting. Hum. Sometimes when he hears how good you are at ABCs, This Man changes his mind. There’s the slow crunch-thud, crunch-thud – his step in the hall. Sing louder. ‘A-B-C-D … ’ There’s the slower grind of doorknob. ‘E-F-G.’ Can’t you see me? ‘L-M-N-O-P!’ He looks right at you and lowers the bar. Such a racket! Surely This Lady must hear it This Time? He yanks the bottle from your hands. He grabs your feet and drags you to him by the ankles. It hurts to kick him, but you try. A damp palm clamps your mouth, smothering ‘W-X-Y and – ’ ‘Shut up, you little bastard!’ He smiles.
For now, dear reader, let’s stop for sorry. You see, in order to understand Derwood’s smile, you had to see that other smile too. It needs to hang over your head and menace each moment the way it did ours. So later in this story, when you chastise me for reading Jordan’s diary, please remember, so have you. It’s a cruel violation of her privacy, but she left us little choice. I’d say no choice, but there’s no such thing. You’ve opened this book in time and you’ve got plenty of it. My mistake? Thinking I did. At fourteen, unlike yours truly, Jordan already saw time like an adult, as a finite ball of yarn. To recast an analogy my crafty sister loved: ‘Find fallen loops. Go back to knit forward.’ To do so, you need to know that one of us could knit and the other never had a clue about loop one. Now, in this telling, I’m holding the needles, but back then I was the one with hands outstretched, watching the yarn unravel.
What’s that? Narrators aren’t supposed to admit to spinning a yarn, let alone recuse themselves for doing so poorly? Says who? Says the single best reason I did not become an English teacher: the decrepit Miss McElfiend. She who stood so ramrod straight at the blackboard my hockey buddies swore she’d rammed a goalie stick up her ass in an attempt to score the pickle. She who lectured with the wattles of her hairy neck in full pontification: ‘Modern exposition craves artful invisibility! As Tarzan would put it, “Show good. Tell bad.”’
Well, flow schmo. You won’t convince Jane or Boy or even Cheetah that Tarzan was merely in the story – Tarzan was the story. Show a movie, a horse or your good side, but by definition, a story is told. The view contains the viewer; any artful dodger is still a thief. And as for invisibility, I’d bet everything I am that it’s overrated. I’m always exactly what I appear to be: a fifty-something math teacher, an old dog with no body for new tricks. These are my lesson plans. This is my day book; it’s written the way I teach. So, how does one teach math, particularly the hybrid skill of problem-solving?
For any problem, there are always an unlimited number of often tempting but incorrect answers. But, as I promise all my students, there’s also one shining right answer, waiting. I can’t just set a problem and stand aside. It’s quackery to pose at the blackboard and silently show off how Mr. Smartypants Me gets that answer all sigh my belf. You have to get it, for yourself. If I slap chalk on the board, sit back and assign seatwork, I’m no teacher. A teacher revises each time. Out loud. By multiple examples. When my natural inclination is to speed up, I have to slow down, to go step-by-logical-step until I’m blue in the face, until you see both the answer and, more importantly, the reasons for it. Even math has a backstory. I tell and retell it, hoping to hit on the version that hits you, hoping to hear your Eureka Moment: ‘Hey, I get it!’
Then to ensure you keep it, we do some metacognition, a.k.a. thinking about thinking. Both show and tell. Jordan would agonize each semicolon of this story; I just want it told. And I don’t want you to forget for a second that it’s being told by me, a teller with a very vested interest in how you hear, what you hear, and what you never hear. I struggle to knit the truth for myself, let alone the reading public. ‘So why am I knitting Jordan’s yarn?’ you ask. ‘Why knit, period, when you can’t recast her holes?’ Good question. Here are my reasons three:
Reason 1: Because I promised. Holes are the story.
Reason 2: Because BS can’t be trusted. To quote Ms. Dickin-son, she’d tell the truth but tell it slant, and you wouldn’t be allowed to lean any way but hers.
Reason 3: Because BS Fundamentalism is born-again boring.
‘Not can we squash ants,’ she’d insist. ‘Should we?’ The Should Question made all things relative – as in related to her – even A + B = C. For Jordan, they’re sentient. This was one of the givens in her life that the likes of me couldn’t see, so she elected to enlighten me. I can still hear her: ‘You should not add A to B. Has A been consulted about the impending loss of her individual identity? Have you no conscience? To make this new C creature permanently schizophrenic! To rename the living! Who died and made you Noah? It won’t work; they’ll remember.’ When I tried to tell her that sometimes a number is just a number, she shook her head. ‘Nonsense. It should always be seen as a symbol, as a sum of final reckoning.’
So just because it’s her story doesn’t mean she gets to tell it. She’d lemniscate, word without end, no amen. When you’re fourteen, everything’s an outrage. When you’re full of it, releasing it takes forever. Take ‘Extemporaneous,’ a BS invention in point: open dictionary, point and begin speechifying. Her kind of fun. I got to hold MC’s stopwatch, to time BS BSing. Would you let that Little Miss Mouthful tell your life story? I think not. The driven don’t make sympathetic narrators; you’d hate her by page two. In all probability, you’ll hate me once you add it all up and ask yourselves, ‘What’s a bit of wind and a dead bear between friends?’
But till that final metacognition, dear ants, be grateful. At least my book is finite, bearable, able to be borne in hand. Hers would take a month of Sundays – that’s five of them, from Moonwalk to Woodstock. See? I’m great at lists and dates, but can’t pretend her insights into why. BS flashed from A to B to See so fast she damn near teleported. Or here’s a better image, one she’d have enjoyed: like a tesseract from A Wrinkle in Time, her mind instantly folded all distance between any two points. My mind’s adrift on MC’s ‘slow boat to China.’ This math teacher can’t add things up. I eventually see, but there are twenty-plenty brackets first. This is memory, importunate but imprecise; it’s wrinkled but it’s not time travel.
Too bad. We could sure use a Wavelength Acceleration Bidirectional Asynchronous Controller – a WABAC machine. Remember it? Jordan’s favourite part of Rocky and Bullwinkle: ‘Peabody’s Improbable History.’ Something I guess in hindsight she knew more than a little about. It featured Mr. Peabody, both a genius and a short white dog – probably a Westie – who time-travelled upright, sporting horn-rimmed glasses and a bow tie. To right the small events that caused colossal wrongs, he’d say, ‘Sherman, set the WABAC machine to the year 1969!’ Dials would be twisted, heroes would arrive and, presto, wrong would be righted. Instead, we’re stuck with the imperfect machine of memory. You’re stuck with me, Jordan’s far-from-perfect Sherman: Mr. P’s adopted boy, a mostly useless sidekick whose only real contribution was to be amazed by bespectacled genius and shout, ‘Gee willikers!’ Sherman lives a day late and a dollar short, blindsided at the end of each episode by yet another of Mr. P’s atrocious puns. He never learns. He runs to the rescue only to find that genius is always faster. That’s me in a sidekick nutshell. So don’t get too attached to me. Enough said.
In your binder – the one you’re knitting right now, purling pages in your head – cast on seven tabs. You’ve met Tab A: the bear. You’ll need Tab B: the hurricane, Tab C: the families, Tab D: Polk Salad, Tab E: the diary, Tab F: the bastard and Tab G: the ghost. Odd tabs for a math binder? Correct. This math-English hybrid requires a recalculation of Ye Olde Leap of Faith to sum up the ever-popular Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Assumptions about right and wrong, fact and fiction, good and evil – suspend those too, or you’ll be jumping to some pretty inaccurate conclusions. Expect some seriously difficult multiple-choice questions – my favourites. And yes, the answer’s in the back
