Part 47: Susan

Tuesday brought a minor crisis: Dylan B. was now going out with Jessica F., one of the “popular girls” in Becca’s class. She had apparently forgotten she had ever declared her crush on him “deader than a dead dog” (not her best use of figurative language, Susan noted, but then again, her class was reading Where the Red Fern Grows, which had followed Balto and Shiloh; fourth grade was apparently a dog-centric year.) Becca liked Dylan B.; Becca had always liked Dylan B. She who controls the present controls the past and so on.

On the ride home from school (Becca refused to take the bus, because “no one” takes the bus, though they always seemed to be packed with children) Susan had tried to press her on another sticking point: the word “popular.”

“What do you mean, popular?” she had asked. “What makes her popular and you not popular?”

Thankfully, Ashlee wasn’t with them or this would have just gotten eyerolls and laughs.

“I mean she’s popular, she’s got a lot of friends--”

“You have a lot of friends.”

“Yeah,” Becca conceded. “But I’m not popular.”

That was as far as she would get. But maybe, Susan hoped briefly, her question would prompt Becca to think about it a little bit more; a delayed effect. Maybe two or three weeks from now Becca would come to her and announce, with the majesty of divine revelation, Moses descending from the mountain, that it didn’t make sense to call Jessica F. popular and her not popular since they both had plenty of friends. And if she did, Susan would just have to congratulate her on her original insight. Part of parenthood was abandoning any claims to intellectual property.

Thinking about it, Susan remembered the time at dinner when David had interrupted one of Becca’s monologues to ask what it meant for fourth graders to be “going out.”

“It means they’re going out,” Becca had responded promptly. She was hardly a walking thesaurus.

“But, but they don’t actually go anywhere, do they? Like on dates?”

“Dates? That’s what grown-ups do. And teenagers.”

“So what do kids do when they ‘go out?’ Like, hug, kiss, hold hands, what?”

“Ewwww, Dad, you’re disgusting!” she had squealed. “It just means they’re going out, that’s all!”

And so that interaction, too, had ended in tautology.

The difference, though, was that David really didn’t understand. He was actually asking. She, on the other hand, knew exactly what Becca meant when she said Jessica F. was popular. It meant she was cool. It meant people paid more attention to her than they did to other people, people like Becca. Whether that attention was positive or negative was irrelevant. Indeed, from what she had gathered, most of the class disliked Jessica F, and she decided that would be a good point to bring up to Becca next time the subject arose (naturally, organically.)

But right now Becca had replaced her with Ashlee, on the phone, even though Ashlee had been the one who asked Dylan B. out for Jessica F. Somehow she had convinced Becca that this wasn’t a betrayal: she was actually a double-agent or playing some sort of long-game, three-dimensional Candy Land. Or maybe she had fallen back on that childhood staple: “I had to.” Or maybe, Susan considered briefly (chopping a cucumber) the politics of fourth grade were actually more complex and nuanced than she, with only her occasional porthole, could actually grasp.

Putting away the salad (it was only four o’clock), Susan’s thoughts turned to her other child. James wasn’t home. He had come home after school just long enough to toss his backpack on the computer chair, grab a soda, tell her he was “going out with friends,” and look at her fixedly for a few seconds, challenging her. He wanted her to object; he wanted her to ask “which friends” (not “what friends?” - that would be cruel, although if he was still fighting with Hannah and Sean, it would have been reasonable.) But all she had said was, “Okay, be home before dark.” A test, maybe, or an experiment.

She suspected that he didn’t actually have plans and she had called his bluff. “Before dark” was good. She congratulated herself on it. It meant he would stay out until it was getting dark, so she would think he had been dragged home against his will by the recognition of the darkening sky, by deliberate obedience to her orders rather than desire. But it didn’t allow him to paint her as a total tyrant. It wasn’t a specific time; it didn’t come paired with a threat. It was the sort of thing her parents said to her growing up in the city, which he clearly romanticized - that was the one useful insight she had gotten from their Talk this past weekend, the latest target of his teenage angst was anything suburban.

Not that she loved the suburbs herself, but there were some good things about them. Such as . . . such as . . . The phrase “good schools” floated into her mind, but it wasn’t her own. It was memetic.

Susan found herself going upstairs for no particular reason. Certainly not to eavesdrop on Becca and glean entertainment from fourth-grade drama, that would be pathetic. No, she must have been going up there to get something from her own bedroom. This shirt - sure, why not. It might as well be put with the rest of the laundry instead of strewn about on the floor like that.

“Are you talking to Jake?”

Talking. That couldn’t mean on the phone - it had to mean the computer. And there was the first sign that soon Becca’s social life would migrate from the telephone to the computer, and soon she and James would be fighting over it the way they used to fight over the TV just a few years ago. How had that ended? Of course, they’d bought James a TV. Would they have to repeat the same narrative again? It was just so disgustingly capitalist, to solve problems with a purchase. But it had worked so well.

So the future was decided: they would buy James a new computer. The only question that remained was when. Did they do it preventatively - for his birthday maybe? Or did they wait until Becca actually started butting into his computer time (and her own, Susan remembered, thinking of the Our Beautiful Misery fan forums, which she had started checking daily) - actually play out the whole story?

She hardly knew why she had been holding out this long against his pleas for his own computer. It wasn’t pornography that scared her, as he always seemed to assume, although both of them were extremely careful to tiptoe around the word. Nor was she worried about him talking to strangers. Hell, he could be doing that now for all she knew. It was more the knowledge that, if he had a computer in his room, they would never even see him, which would be just too potent a symbol of his separation.

Plus, if she did buy him a computer now, you could frame it as her just trying to get the computer to herself, which would be extremely, disgustingly selfish. To sacrifice her son like that. She was no Abraham. No, much better to just steal moments like this one, when everything was all squared away: the shirt in the laundry basket, the salad already made.

Picking up James’s backpack from the chair (she would put it back just so when she was done) and tossing it onto the couch, she saw a paper fall out. He must not have even zipped it when he left school. Well, the forums could wait; reading this instead would be following the vicissitudes of chance, coincidence, what a more superstitious mind might have called fate.

Who is the most important character in To Kill A Mockingbird? Why? Make sure to support your answer with a quote from the book.

Ever since people have been writing books, other people have been trying to decide who the most important character in those books is. When it comes to the Bible, some people say the most important character is Jesus, others say Moses, or Adam and Eve, or even the snake. The same thing happens with Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. While most people would say the most important character is Scout or Atticus, in reality it is Dill.

Without Dill, none of the events of To Kill A Mockingbird could happen. For example, he is the one who comes up with the idea of trying to get Boo Radley to come out of his house. He also makes up most of the games that he and Jem and Scout play during that fateful summer.. When Dill isn’t around, Scout and Jem are dull and lifeless. Even though he’s not actually from Maycomb, he is the one who gives Maycomb its life. He is like the sun that lights up the Earth. Scout proves this when she says “life with him was routine; life without him was unbearable.” This shows how important Dill was to her during this time of her life. In fact, maybe he is the only reason she remembers that summer so well and decided to write about it.

We can only wonder if Harper Lee had a specific person in mind when she was writing about Dill. Some people think he was based on her friend Capote Truman. But I think we have all known someone like Dill, who is full of so much energy and creativity that they transform the world around them. A river is no longer just a river: it’s a magical adventure. And if you have never had a Dill in your own life, then at least you can read Harper Lee’s magnificent work of literature and get a little bit of an idea of what it is like through the character DIll.

James, interesting argument here, and good use of a quote (and a simile!) but I have to wonder. . . have you read past the first part of the book? There are many other things that happen to Scout that summer that explain why she’s telling this story. . . 3- / 4

For such a smart kid, he certainly didn’t come across that way in writing. “In fact, maybe?” A river is an adventure? Was that really how they were teaching kids to write nowadays? In the famous “good schools” of the suburbs?

But obviously it wasn’t a real answer to the question, it was a love letter to Hannah. Susan felt like she had been reading her son’s diary; even though it had never been meant to be private, and he'd taken no steps to conceal it - he’d left the backpack open on the chair - it had obviously been a deeply personal act of creation. She could easily imagine him, scratching it out in some silent classroom, his face blank, but his insides burning with passion. What was embarrassing, though, was that he probably thought the second layer of meaning was obscure. He thought he was speaking words that had two meanings - one public, one private. But how transparent!

Or at least it was to her. Had the teacher caught it too? Which teacher was this again? And how well did he or she know James and Hannah? Did they have English together? These were things she probably should have known, but - well, she might not know all the facts, but she knew her son well enough to understand what these three paragraphs were really about. And to know that he wouldn’t be home tonight until just before dark.