Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant - Anne Tyler [90]
“It’s extremely lucky,” he said, and he patted her hand and asked for the mustard.
“Isn’t it amazing how school always smells like school,” Jenny told Slevin’s teacher. “You can add all the modern conveniences you like—audiovisual things and computers—it still smells like book glue and that cheap gray paper they used to have for arithmetic and also … what’s that other smell? There’s another smell besides. I know it but I can’t quite name it.”
“Have a seat, Dr. Tull,” the teacher said.
“Radiator dust,” said Jenny.
“Pardon?”
“That’s the other smell.”
“I called you in for a purpose,” said the teacher, opening the file that lay before her. She was a tiny thing, surely not out of her twenties, perky and freckled with horn-rimmed glasses dwarfing her pointed nose. Jenny wondered how she’d learned to be so intimidating so quickly. “I know you’re a busy woman, Dr. Tull, but I’m genuinely anxious about Slevin’s school performance and I thought you ought to be informed.”
“Oh, really?” Jenny said. She decided she would feel better if she too wore glasses, though hers were only needed for reading. She dug through her purse and a pink plastic pacifier fell out. She pretended it hadn’t happened.
“Slevin is very, very intelligent,” the teacher said. She glared at Jenny accusingly. “He goes straight off the top of the charts.”
“Yes, I figured that.”
“But his English average …” the teacher said, flipping through papers. “It’s F. Well, maybe D minus.”
Jenny clicked her tongue.
“Math: C. History: D. And science … and gym … He’s had so many absences, I finally asked if he’d been cutting school. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said—came right out with it. ‘What did you cut?’ I asked him. ‘February,’ he said.”
Jenny laughed. The teacher looked at her.
Jenny straightened her glasses and said, “Do you think it might be puberty?”
“All these children are going through puberty,” the teacher told her.
“Or … I don’t know; boredom. You said yourself he’s intelligent. Why, you ought to see him at home! Monkeying around with machinery, wiring stereos … He’s got a tape recorder of his own, he worked for it and bought it himself, some superduper model, offhand I can’t think of the name. I’m such a dunce about these things, when he talked about head cleaners I thought he meant shampoo; but Slevin knows all about it and—”
“Mr. Davies suggests,” said the teacher, “—that’s our assistant principal—he suggests that Slevin may be experiencing emotional problems due to the adjustments at home.”
“What adjustments?”
“He says Slevin’s mother abandoned him and Slevin was moved to your household almost immediately thereafter and had to get used to a brand-new mother and sister.”
“Oh, that,” said Jenny, waving her hand.
“Mr. Davies suggests that Slevin might need professional counseling.”
“Nonsense,” Jenny said. “What’s a little adjustment? And anyhow, that happened a good six months ago. It’s not as if … why, look at my daughter! She’s had to get used to seven new people and she’s never said a word of complaint. Oh, we’re all coping! In fact my husband was saying, just the other day, we should think about having more children now. We ought to have at least one joint child, he says, but I’m not so sure myself. After all, I’m thirty-six years old. It probably wouldn’t be wise.”
“Mr. Davies suggests—”
“Though I suppose if it means so much to him, it’s all the same to me.”
“The same!” said the teacher. “What about the population explosion?”
“The what? You’re getting me off the subject, here … My point is,” Jenny said, “I don’t see the need to blame adjustment, broken homes, bad parents, that sort of thing. We make our own luck, right? You have to overcome your setbacks. You can’t take them too much to heart. I’ll explain all that to Slevin. I’ll tell him this evening. I’m certain his grades will improve.”
Then she bent to pick up the pacifier, and shook hands with the teacher and left.
On the wall in Jenny’s office was a varnished