DISTORTION, by Ellen Hunnicutt
I. VOICE: Thin People
When the doctor took out Jana’s diseased tonsils, her soft palate came with them. That was how the doctor put it. “The soft palate came with them.” His voice implied that Jana had been neglected, left untreated too long.
Her mother put it differently. “He took the soft palate too,” suggesting the doctor was inept or, at the very least, indifferent to patients with subsidized medical care where he had to take a set fee.
Jana said, “Aaaaaah.” She was nine.
“Will she learn to talk again?” her mother asked.
“Oh, of course,” said the doctor. “One thing compensates for another. It’s like a broken leg where you have to learn to walk again.”
Jana’s mother told the woman in the downstairs apartment, “It’s not like a broken leg. A leg doesn’t have to grow back. Do you think that little thing will grow back?”
“It’s no heat in the building,” said the woman, who was an alcoholic and always cold. She blamed the landlord for Jana’s condition, and referred to her palate as a “platelet.”
Jana practiced: “Aaaah. Eeeeh. Ooooooh.” When she tried actual words she sounded like the old man on the third floor who had lost his mind. Her throat was very sore and did not seem to get better. Her mother fed her soup, then put her head down on a pillow and put ice packs on her neck. Jana became convinced the pain came from the ice packs and pictured the cubes of ice inside the towel as sharp and jagged.
An official from the courthouse heard about Jana and came to the apartment. “Did the father run off?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Jana’s mother who was suspicious of all officials.
Jana’s father actually lived across town. He was down on his luck but once he came at night and brought Jana a popsicle. He’d heard about her throat but did not know she thought of ice as painful. Jana tried to eat the popsicle to please her father. “It’s okay,” he said, seeing she could not.
“Yes,” Jana’s mother said again, “he ran off.”
“Aaaaah,” said Jana. She was growing quite thin from eating only soup, and they were all thin people to start with, a family tendency.
“This is bad,” said the man from the courthouse.
Jana dreamed of mountains made of gray jagged ice. Ferocious animals were hiding in the mountains, like on a television show.
A social worker was sent to the apartment, a woman with tinted glasses and a mole on her cheek near her lips. “I can come one hour a week,” she said to Jana’s mother. “I have a very heavy caseload. She bent over Jana who could not go to school and lay in a recliner. “Can she talk at all?”
“No,” said Jana’s mother.
“Did the doctor leave instructions?”
“No.”
“This will take time,” said the social worker who was trained in social work and had served with distinction in the Peace Corps. “Say, ‘Ah,’” she said to Jana.
“Aaaah,” said Jana. When the woman leaned close, the mole beside her mouth seemed to quiver and looked to Jana like a dollop of chocolate.
II. SIGHT: Linden Tree
He reads in the morning paper they want to rebuild the Philadelphia airport. It’s grown that old and shabby. He’s troubled because he was only just there, and the airport seemed fine. Has he failed once again to notice his surroundings? Moving to a bench on the sidewalk, he sits down to read the article again. He has time, his students do not begin arriving until four. Violin students. But he is actually a composer, he works at his piano every day. He will be returning to Philadelphia soon and needs to be current on the city.
His bench faces the newsstand, piles of papers fanning out from a dark mouth of a door. The newsdealer, a small man with owl glasses, emerges from his shadowy cavern and sells a paper, then pauses to examine the tree he is growing in a pot of soil. It is a linden, exotic to this climate. The tree requires constant care. Then he retreats inside.
But the second reading of the article is exactly like the first. His difficulty with spatial orientation is to blame, a shameful condition in a young man. In public places, he dare not look about him and take in the panorama or he will become lost. He must ask directions and follow them closely. Otherwise he will choose a course and walk with determination only to discover he has reached a service entrance, an infant nursery, once a tanning salon. Although he reads music perfectly, following the most complex melody line unerringly, grasping at the instant the contour and content of any chord.
He likes this newsstand because the wide apron of sidewalk before it, the benches, the newsdealer’s tree, remind him of Paris where he studied. His composition teacher lived in a house on a broad sidewalk like this one. A brass plate on the door told the number. No nameplate was needed. Everyone knew who lived there. Beside the door was a tall window with a broad sill. A pot of geraniums sat on the sill, carefully tended each day by the housekeeper. Arriving, he always paused at the door to listen to the music coming from the window. It seemed music rather than the breeze that carried the gauze curtain fluttering before it. One day his teacher peered at his page, raised her face and seemed for a moment to be studying the bust of Haydn on the mantle shelf, then pointed to a single arch of notes he had written, quarters and eighths in a dotted rhythm. “This is unique,” she said. “This phrase tells me everything. Do not let the world deform you. Continuons.” It was a difficult word that did not translate readily, about going forward, about distraction and diversion. All of that, certainly, but he had understood her meaning with perfect clarity. Continuons. He too had looked from the page of notes to the mantle shelf, and back again, as if Haydn were present in the flesh, casting a vote in the matter.
His memory of the Philadelphia airport is vivid. As he sat waiting for his flight, he studied a score given him by a Brazilian woman composer he had met at a party. The top three finalists in the competition had been invited to Philadelphia, to the party. The woman, who had a coarse heavy accent, told him, “When I came to America, I worked on my English just enough to make myself understood, then I stopped.” She seemed to think confessing her shortcomings would endear her to him. Fresh from France where purity of language was prized as much as purity of music, he was startled by her brashness and her clumsy speech. She thrust the score into his hand. “I think you are someone who will understand what I am doing.” He felt as if she were attempting to direct the course of his life. Later, he saw her give copies of the score to nearly everyone at the party.
In the airport, he studied her lines of notes with an eye to flaws, as if trying to put a stop to something. As he read, he heard the sound of her voice. It rose, insinuated itself into the melody, then coiled around the music like a weed strangling a flower. He threw the score into a trash basket, bought himself coffee in a foam cup at a standup counter, walked back to the trash basket and stared down at the sheets of music. The woman had won, leaving him no recourse but to return to his mother’s house. He did not retrieve the score.
But the competition is held each year. In music, a year is nothing. Already it is April. In one month he can submit his entry. His music is ready.
He hears the fragile click of high-heeled shoes on the sidewalk, and looks up to find a young woman standing beside his bench. She is striking, with high color and chestnut hair, a full bosom, slender hips. Stirred, he moves at once to make room for her on the bench.
“Poppie?”
While he does not always see, his hearing is exquisite. At the sound of her voice, he discovers it is only his granddaughter come to fetch him home for lunch.
III. MEMORY: Field Experience
Standing before his first class on his first day, Professor Stark feels he’s still in motion, and puts one hand on the lectern to steady himself. But four hundred miles of driving is nothing. He’s young, he’ll get used to it. And he’s come to a great city on a great lake, judging by the bumper stickers he followed across the interstate last night. He considers beginning his lecture by telling the students he’s still in travel mode. But his trip wouldn’t mean much to them. It’s September, they’ve just come too; but travel looks entirely different to them. Then he sees the birds on the window ledge, and feels he’s been given a gift. “I direct your attention,” he begins, “to the window of this graceful old building, to the pigeons you see there.”
The students, mostly sophomores – a sea of ragged denim, dirty sneakers, hair either very long, or short and spiky – turn obediently to the window. On the sill two pigeons, necks arched, peer through the glass into the room. Caught in a shaft of autumn sun, their iridescent heads shimmer green and gold above their dusky bodies and dainty pink feet.
Stark teaches education majors, teaches teachers to teach. He’s good at it. Except for his youth and lack of seniority, he would not have been cut. “Even as we speak,” he continues, “pigeons are defecating on roofs and window sills all over this campus.” No one laughs. At his last university, this was one of his best stories. He used gulls. But, going on two hours sleep, he forgot the build-up to the birds. The joke’s about how children learn. “Until I pointed out the pigeons,” he struggles on, “you did not even see them. We select from a vast array of stimuli what we will notice and remember. Because you’re concerned about your grade in this class, in the next five minutes you will have forgotten all about the pigeons.” But now it’s too late. Four rows of students stare solemnly back at him. His own children, ages seven and eight, are in an unstructured school. They don’t sit in rows. Stark chose the school, but he fears Sylvia, his ex, will move them now that he’s gone. Neatness counts, says Sylvia. If the economy picks up, he may be able to find another job back East. “The mind that cannot focus,” he tells his students, “cannot function.” He told his own children, I’ll be back every other weekend, you’ll hardly miss me, I’ll come back. He told himself he could drive the miles by sheer willpower. “The mind,” he declares, “excludes what is not essential.”
A boy with one of the spiky haircuts raises his hand and says, “I always notice pigeons. I don’t exclude anything. Does that make me insane?”
The boy beside him – long black hair with a skunk streak – guffaws in admiration. “Fuck off, Kelski!”
“Hey!” says Kelski. “I have great peripheral vision!”
But Stark knows these kids. He moves around the lectern to be closer to them, body language. “Are you a Fine Arts major?” he asks Kelski, and gets his first laugh. Stark knows that practical types in the school of education fear and despise any suggestion of elitism. He pretends he’s waiting for an answer, and savors the laughter. This is an urban university, nothing’s gentrified. His chairperson told him thirty percent of the students are poor kids who ride the city bus in from the South Side. He tries to pick the locals out of the group before him. They might see distance differently, the wonder of it, and the horror. He might find someone to talk to.
When the laughter ends, he says, “I hate grades. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t give any.” But the students have heard that one before, it earns him no smiles. He wonders how to spot the locals, and looks for brown bag lunches, but of course everything’s in the backpacks.
A girl with silvery bleached hair to her shoulders raises a hand. “Will you talk about the field experience? It says field experience on the syllabus.”
“You will be going into elementary and secondary schools,” he explains, “to observe students, then to interview them and write case histories. Three case histories, six to eight pages.”
“Each?” the girl asks.
“Yes, six to eight pages each.”
“I don’t have a car,” the girl says.
“All of the observation schools will be on bus routes,” Stark tells her, vaguely annoyed, “and all will be nearby.” He was halfway across Pennsylvania before he began to wonder if his car would hold up to it, eight-hundred mile round trips. And now they’ve given him Monday and Friday classes, bracketing his weekend, locking him in.
Kelski, the boy who sees everything, looks at the blonde girl with interest, then raises his hand. “Professor Stark, I have a car. If you’ll schedule us together, I can give her rides.” Already he has forgotten the pigeons.
Ellen Hunnicutt is the author of the novel, Suite for Calliope (Dell paperback), and her story collection, In the Music Library (Ecco paperback), won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her recent stories appear in StoryQuarterly, River Oak Review, and Crab Orchard Review.