This question seemed to puzzle him. He dropped his hand to his side and lifted his duffel bag. “I was getting this from the car.”
Calvin kept the beam of light trained on their father. “It’s late!” Calvin said.
The light fell in a circle around him. Beyond that, Beatrice could make out the shape of trees rising up, and the untidy bushes, and the lopsided skeleton of the gazebo that he had begun building in the fall, but didn’t have time to finish. She thought she spied something rotund in the darkness, loping toward the trash cans. She saw the marks her father’s feet had left in the snow and the sharp shadow that his body threw onto the lawn. It was only her father. But something inside of her still clenched. It was only her father creeping about in the dark, and now he was standing there, holding his duffel bag, wearing her fir tree, his footsteps heading in one direction.
Tonight, she knew, he would go back inside. He would raise his voice, move furniture across the floor, and in the morning, around the table, the four of them would look into each other’s tired faces. But one night, another night—soon, she thought—there would be an apartment.
And suddenly it was no longer her word, her idea.
“Calvin,” she said. “Turn it off.”
Without the flashlight, her brother wouldn’t be able to see. She wrapped her hands around the cold cylinder and pulled.
But he did not let go. “No.” He said fiercely, “It’s late.”
From behind her came the sound of the radio, speaking into the emptiness of her bedroom. The voice said, “This kid who keeps calling me, he wants to hear the Clash. Now normally, I would never play the Clash. Yes, I know, we wouldn’t have punk rock without them, but I mean, you can hear the Clash on other radio stations. You can hear the Clash on oldies stations. We just don’t play the Clash here on the Rock Hotel,” Shred explained. “But this kid who called, he got me thinking about when I was his age, when I heard the Clash for the first time. I had never heard anything like them. London Calling—that record changed me. I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you if it wasn’t for that record. So I’m going to play that song, for that kid who called. What can I say? It’s a song of my youth.”
Crossing
MR. MEACHAM, THE DEPARTMENT chair, offered to buy Ms. Hempel a lemonade after school. If you are a person of passion and curiosity and ferocious intellect, he told her, you are a born history teacher.
“I teach English,” Ms. Hempel said.
“You don’t teach English,” Mr. Meacham corrected her. “You teach reading, and writing, and critical thinking!”
It seemed, to Ms. Hempel, a grand way of putting it. Through the wide café windows, she watched her students come barreling out of the school’s front gates. Did she really teach them anything? Or was she, as she often suspected, just another line of defense in the daily eight-hour effort to contain them.
“What’s wrong with the way history is taught in this school?” Mr. Meacham asked.
“Not relevant to the kids?” Ms. Hempel ventured.
“Relevant!” he cried. “Whoever said history had to be relevant?”
He then spoke in a pinched, miserable voice that Ms. Hempel had never heard before. “Look, kids, the ancient Egyptians aren’t so different from us after all! Look, kids, when we study the ancient Egyptians, we’re studying a reflection of ourselves!
“All this fuss about relevance,” he said, restored to normal, “is a process of erosion. There won’t be any history left by the time they’re through. Just social studies.” And Mr. Meacham leaned back on his stool, nervously, as if he were History and Ms. Hempel were Relevance.
“When students look at history,” he said, “they shouldn’t see their own faces; they should see something unfamiliar staring back at them. They should see something utterly strange.”
But that’s what they do see when they look in the mirror, Ms. Hempel thought. Something strange.
“So, no, that’s not what I had in mind,” Mr. Meacham continued, somewhat more cheerfully. “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the way history is taught in this school: not enough writing. A lot of reading, a lot of talking, but not much writing. And that”—Mr. Meacham smiled at Ms. Hempel—“is where you can help.”
“Me?” Ms. Hempel asked.
“You can teach them. Not only how to think about history, but how to write about it.”
Ms. Hempel saw that Mr. Meacham was mistaken. He had confused her with someone who liked teaching seventh graders how to write, who felt happiest and most useful when diagramming a sentence or mapping an idea or brightly suggesting another draft. This was not the case. The thought of increased exposure to seventh-grade writing made Ms. Hempel worry. What happened when one read too many Topic Sentences? Already she could feel how her imagination had begun to thicken and stink, like a scummy pond.
If only she could develop for her subject the same dogged affection that Mr. Meacham felt for his. People approached her, possessed by their enthusiasms, and Ms. Hempel would think, How beautiful! She loved enthusiasm, in nearly all its forms. For this reason she found herself scorekeeper for the volleyball team, facilitator for the girls-only book group, faculty adviser to the Upper School multicultural organization, Umoja. And now, teacher of seventh-grade United States history.
Mr. Meacham handed her a book that weighed approximately ten pounds. Its title, she noted, was full of enthusiasm (America! America!).
FIRST ASSIGNMENT. CHOOSE three people, of different ages (in other words, don’t grab the three seventh graders sitting closest to you), and ask them the following question: Why is it important to learn about American history? Record your findings. Include the name, age, and occupation of your interview subjects. Bring in your results and share them with the class.
“‘To help us better understand ourselves,’” Tim read from his binder. “Alice Appold. Forty-two. Chiropractor.”
“I didn’t know
