City Kid. Mary MacCracken
the wall.
“Let’s go in,” I said.
Luke hesitated. He obviously hadn’t planned on this, but he followed me through the door – Counter or table? Counter. Better view of the doughnuts. Luke and I sat silently admiring them.
A waitress swished a wet rag in front of us. “What’ll it be?” she asked.
Should I go first? Had Luke ever ordered?
“Do you have a menu?” I asked. That would give us a little time.
“A menu? Uh – yeah, I guess so.” She was back in a minute and handed me a pink and white cardboard menu.
“Thank you.” I spread it out between Luke and myself. We read in silence the information inside. TETE HEARTY WESTERN (two eggs any style, bacon, hash browns, and muffins), THE PICK ME UP (tomato juice, one egg, cottage cheese), THE CONTINENTAL (orange juice, Danish, and coffee).
“Where are the doughnuts?” Luke whispered.
“There I guess.” I pointed to the bottom. DONUTS – 35¢.
“Oh,” was all he said, but I could hear disappointment behind his voice.
Suddenly I remembered Howard Johnson’s, and how I had loved hearing the flavors of ice cream.
I looked at the waitress. “Could you tell us what kind of doughnuts you have?”
“Cinnamon, sugared, raised, potato, chocolate, jelly, cheese, or plain.”
It was wonderful. Almost like a litany. I wished she’d do it again.
“Cinnamon, chocolate, raspberry …” I said, making the mistakes easily, purposely.
“Cinnamon, sugar, raised, potato, chocolate, jelly, cheese, or plain.”
Wonderful, wonderful.
I looked at Luke. He was smiling. I had never seen him smile before.
“Jelly for me,” I said, “and coffee.”
“Me too,” said Luke.
“Two jellies. Two coffees. Be right back.”
Luke poured two containers of cream and four spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee and held it between his two hands. Nutrition experts would have a stroke, but sometimes there are more important things than too much sugar.
It was nice, sitting there in the sunlight, sipping our coffee, nibbling at our doughnuts, and licking jelly from our fingers. I wished we could have stayed all morning, but the wall clock said 10:00. We had already used up thirty-five minutes and I wanted to be back on time so we could get out again.
On the last block before school, Luke stopped beside a telephone pole and dug deep in his pocket. He brought up his fist closed tight. He looked up at me and then opened his hand. A shiny gold shell lay in the center of his palm. My stomach lurched. A bullet shell?
But Luke was talking to me. “See? I got it at the factory and shined it. You can see your face if you want.”
“The factory?” I asked.
“Yup. The lipstick factory. I go by it on my way home. I got a secret place there.”
An empty lipstick tube. Not a bullet after all. But I still couldn’t find my voice.
Luke touched me this time. He put his hand into mine and turned it upside down. “It’s a secret place. But you can keep this one if you won’t tell. I got more. Look. See if you can see your face.”
I peered at the gleaming shell, and sure enough, there I was, distorted and oval around the empty tube.
“Thank you,” I said. “It’s nice. Lucky, too. I can tell.”
“Yup,” said Luke. “It’s luckier than anything.”
March meant midterms at college. Background of Mathematics II. Not too bad. We were studying probability.
Current Methods of Teaching Mentally Challenged Adolescents was easy. A take-home exam, plus an interview with someone who was willing to hire a mentally challenged person. I interviewed Cal. He had several people, good people, in his plant with IQ’s in the seventies.
Counseling and Guidance. Even easier. Lunch with Norm Foster to report on the Special Education Independent Study Project. My project, of course, was Luke.
Reading practicum. The exam read, “Discuss causes of reading disability in four categories.” I knew those. I even knew five. Meeps: mental, emotional, educational, physical and social.
But Statistics and Orientation to Psychological Testing was not so easy. We had spent an inordinately long time on bell curves and standard deviation. The curve I understood. Its normal distribution curve did seem normal
It seemed right that there would probably be more average people than other kinds. Professor Frye said that a random sample of a thousand people in Times Square yielded 68.26 percent (2/3) with IQ’s between 85 and 115. However, the curve wasn’t always normal; sometimes it skewed to the right, sometimes it skewed to the left. Then beware the mean and trust only the median.
Worst of all was σ. This simple little sign stood for standard deviation, and Professor Frye was determined that we all be able to figure out standard deviations mathematically, although there are perfectly good charts in the test manuals that are readily available.
But day after day we memorized the formula and did the computations. If I did them carefully, two or three pages of numbers and many minutes later it was possible to arrive at the measure of the variability of a group of scores independent of the mean.
Where was Ian Michaels? And what did all this have to do with helping Luke?
My head steamed like an overheated teakettle.
I wrote everything on index cards and laid them on the floors through our apartment. Then I walked through my carpet of cards picking up the ones I thought I knew, piling them on the dining room table, then picking up the others and studying them once again. The steaming in my head turned out to be mostly due to the flu, and I staggered from bed to exams and back to bed again. I called School 23 Monday morning to explain to Mrs. Karras that I was ill and couldn’t come until Friday. Mrs. Karras was out, but her secretary said she would relay the message to Lisa, Luke, and Mrs. Karras.
I finished my last exam on Thursday afternoon. My temperature was down, and on impulse I drove to School 23.
John Hudson was in the music room with Vernon when I arrived. They were playing catch with a tennis ball over the piano.
Hud said, “Christ. I’m glad it’s you. Come on in.”
Hud and I hardly ever saw each other anymore. Our schedules at the school were on different days and our group meetings were dwindling.
Vernon pegged a hard ball at Hud’s stomach. Hud dug it out with his left and sent it looping back.
“Nice,” I said to Hud.
“You know him?” Vernon asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Kin he bat? He say he bat as good as he throw. That true?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hey, Vernon,” Hud said, “come on, man. You gotta have faith.”
Vernon threw the ball hard, harder than ever.
“We’ll see, man. We’ll see …” he said.
Hud grinned. “What do you think, Mary? Am I convincing?”
“I believe