The Crane Wife(6)
Author: Patrick Ness

Take his one anomalous school year. Even that wasn’t a simple story, as if there were any such things. He had sailed through kindergarten (though who doesn’t sail through kindergarten? he thought. Wasn’t it basically just showing up and not choking on things?) and performed above his level through first and second grades – indeed, occasionally being sent up to fourth grade reading groups just to keep the boredom from setting in. The teachers loved him, loved his big blue eyes, loved a compliance that bordered on the slavish, loved a complexion that looked like he was about to grow a beard, aged six.

‘Sensitive’, they called him in Parent/Teacher Conferences. ‘Dreamy, but in a good way.’ ‘Always with his hand in the air.’ ‘Such a special, tender little guy.’

‘Not special at all,’ said Miss Jones, in the first Parent/Teacher Conference of third grade, a scant two weeks after he’d started. ‘And far too much of a smarty-pants. No one likes a know-it-all. Not the other students and certainly not me.’

George’s parents had sat there in polite astonishment, his mother clutching her handbag as if it were a dachshund about to leap down and soil the carpet. His mother and father exchanged a look, his mother’s face especially retreating into that shocked expression she always got when unexpectedly confronted by life. Which essentially was every time she left the house.

George knew all this because 1) they were the kind of parents who would go to every Parent/Teacher Conference (he thought it might be the ‘only child’ thing; they didn’t want to miss even a moment, lest they irreparably screw something up) and 2) they’d been unable to get a sitter that night, despite the vast squadron of teenage girls usually on offer at the church, so he quietly drew with coloured pencils at a spare desk while his mother and father crouched, comically low, in the plastic children’s seats before Miss Jones’s desk.

But Miss Jones was only getting warmed up. ‘I just cannot tell you how tired I am,’ she said, lifting her eyes to Heaven as if praying for an answer to her tiredness, ‘of every single parent coming in here and telling me how their little Timmy or Stephanie or Frederico’ – she said the name so scornfully even George knew she was talking about Freddie Gomez, the only other boy who’d gone up to higher-grade reading groups with him and who smelled eye-wateringly of soap – ‘is special and talented and God’s gift to third grade knowledge.’

His father cleared his throat. ‘We’re not the ones saying it, though,’ he said. ‘The school–’

‘Oh, the school, is it?’ Miss Jones leaned forward, coming nearly all the way across her desk. ‘Let me tell you something, Mister Duncan,’ she said. ‘These boys and girls are six and seven and eight years old. What do they know about anything except how to tie their shoes and not wet themselves when the bell goes? And not that all of them are so great at that, I can tell you.’

‘Well, what does that have to do with the price of milk?’ his mother said, in a tense, strangled tone that made George’s ears prick. She was a nervous lady, his mother. She’d clearly been thrown off balance by Miss Jones’s forthrightness, her volume, her – let’s face it – blackness, and already he could see that things weren’t going to go well. He went back to colouring every quadrant of Snoopy the same shade of green.

It was just this moment when Miss Jones made her mistake. ‘Now, you listen to me, Mrs Duncan,’ she said, and she stuck out her finger and shook it in George’s mother’s face. ‘Just because your boy doesn’t eat paste doesn’t mean he’s gifted.’

George’s mother’s eyes never left the end of the dark brown finger wagging so close to her nose, following it as it bobbed up and down in righteous instruction, invading George’s mother’s space in a way that even George found obscurely upsetting, and just as George’s father said, ‘Now, you listen here,’ in his authoritative, construction foreman voice-of-doom, George’s mother leaned forward and bit the end of Miss Jones’s finger, snapping it hard between her teeth and hanging on for a surprising second or two before all the screaming started.

Now this story, when George told it, always made him nervous in that it gave slightly the wrong impression of his mother. Biting an obnoxious teacher’s finger – though not drawing blood and not quite so painfully that Miss Jones couldn’t be talked out of an assault charge by a principal who acted for all the world as if this wasn’t the first biting-of-Miss-Jones incident to come across his desk – could easily be read as a heroic action. His mother was the star of this story, and why shouldn’t she be? As family anecdotes went, it was a corker, retold with gales of laughter and at frequent request.

‘And I thought,’ his mother would say, blushing with horror and delight that every eye in the room was on her, ‘someone’s gonna bite that finger one of these days. So why not today?’

But George knew, really knew in his heart, that the biting wasn’t the act of someone mastering a situation and bringing it to a close with the perfect outrageous resolution. His mother had actually bitten Miss Jones because of a certain detachment from reality, a certain panicky falling-away from things. She was anxious to the point of brittle, like a champagne flute – when, age nineteen, George finally saw his first champagne flute – that needed wrapping and packing away. His father performed this function, taking care of every emergency, handling every possible crisis. His love of his wife – and George was quite certain that he loved her – took the form of ongoing protection that perhaps, in the end, did her more harm than good.

When Miss Jones waggled the finger, George was pretty sure his mother hadn’t felt insulted, she’d felt attacked, as if the world was tipping beneath her, and she’d bitten Miss Jones not as an act of triumphant assertion, but because she was trying to hold on. By her literal teeth. Life was unravelling under the threat of a single, terrible finger, looming as large as a coming apocalypse from which there would be no mercy, no forgiveness, just everlasting despair. Who wouldn’t lash out in the face of such a terrible affront?

That his mother had gotten it accidentally exactly right, well, that seemed to be just one of those things, and a part of him was pleased for her that, for once, she had. But the story that was told and the story underneath that story were different things, and perhaps irreconcilable.