[Excerpt from "Brains", a novella]
You wouldn’t call it contempt, would you?
Diana Lipton knew more. By natural order this meant others knew less. There was nothing wrong with this. Certainly it wasn’t her fault: Nature was never really fair or wise in its assignment of genius. Her parents, who’d effectuated self-reliance with videotapes and tutors and well-planned, well-policed schedules of chores, raised their daughter quickly to the point where she was able to finish the job on her own. And nothing was wrong with this.
Under this program of laissez-faire parenting she bypassed the third, sixth, and ninth grades, finishing her junior and senior years concurrently. At each skipped grade she faced anew the collective spurt-growth of her classmates; conversations began to necessitate head craning. In the transition from middle school (where she shared an age bracket with the general school population) to high school (where she trailed behind the next-youngest by three years), Diana peaked at 4’ 11” and a hundred-odd pounds, crimp-haired and narrow-nostriled, her voice stranded in the upper piccolo register. In spite of this, she carried herself with brahmin loftiness through high school. Orthodontia compounded shyness—when she thought about her classmates at all, it was with a zookeeper’s forbearance at their axillary reek, girls and gum, men and mud, sex whispers, headlong glandularity. It was unclear whether they shunned or were merely unaware of her. Only the religious kids, who constituted a sub rosa, cross-tucked-into-shirt minority, paid Diana any attention; mistaking her studiousness for piety, they reached out to her with flyers. But Diana also scorned religion, its gravitas without rigor. She took pleasure in disregarding their invitations and crumpling their flyers, as if the prerogative to spurn their companionship had been hers all along.
At fourteen, with her GPA omitted from the grading curve in the interest of fairness, Diana should have been an easy call for valedictorian; yet concerns about the commencement speech had become public in the spring, as the white event tent unfurled across a shaded quadrant of the field hockey green and congratulatory banners hung across the colonnade at the front entrance. A sentimental contingent of seniors became concerned that their big occasion would be tarnished by a certain shrimpster valedictorian. Would she need to have a teacher adjust her microphone at the podium? Would she give some kind of chess- or math-themed speech, or come to think of it, could she speak or was this a case of that smart-type autism, Whatever’s Syndrome? Rumor grew of an informal campaign to reform school tradition, and the Academic Dean, seeking to address the complaints received on the matter, called a special midday assembly entitled “What is a Valedictorian?”, during which students were allowed to submit inquiries in an enlightened town hall atmosphere.
Headmaster Harman, why shouldn’t students decide who gets to speak at Commencement? This is our ceremony, so why should some random custom, some marker of status based on meaningless test performance and some retarded (pardon me, sir) some lame measure of academic “success” determine who gets to represent our class? Since when does the so-called smartest student make the best representative? Shouldn’t the most representative student be the representative?
As such proceedings go, the special assembly affected no policy change, but succeeded in drafting the battle lines: abolish vs. maintain. Diana remained uninvolved, though objected tacitly when pro-election campaign flyers crammed her locker, some with ad hominem venom: “Commencement ‘99: Revenge of the Nerds?”; “Best, Not Brightest”. One featured a rendition of a short, bespectacled girl with Pleistocene buckteeth: “Don’t Let Little Miss Smartypants Wreck Your Graduation”. For support, the abolitionists turned their many eyes to Mari Castillo. Water polo captain in the fall and softball captain in the spring, head of the Kiwanis Key Club, the Gay / Straight Alliance, the Film Appreciation Club, Student Council Co-Chair, Mari had never uttered a word that hadn’t met with approval. She was energetically hospitable: a human puppy. In the one class Diana shared with Mari (“World and Cross-Cultural Literature[s]”—a requirement) Diana would watch as she bloviated her way through class discussions with interpretations which, while not unfactual, insinuated that she’d actually done the assigned reading: “To me, what Farewell to Manzanar is about, in my view, is the entire experience of the Asian-American peoples, during wartime. Like for example, I’m half-Japanese, and also half-Latina, and probably the number one thing I felt when reading this book was that, hey, this is probably exactly how I would have felt if I was also in the position of the protagonist, so in the end, I discovered I could really relate to it—and wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Kemfer, that this book was, in many interesting ways, similar to the film Memoirs of a Geisha? Did anyone else see that movie and love it? Am I alone here?”
Though she remarked on how “rewarding” it might be to “experiment with new traditions”, Mari maintained a conciliatory approach on the valedictorian controversy, keeping mum on the issue in her public capacities and tactfully dismissing her friends’ entreaties to usurp the school legislature. In one of her grander gestures of outreach, Mari caught up to Diana in the dining hall antechamber, holding the door open while Diana struggled with a heavy tray and the wheeled briefcase she used to carry her books.
Mari was smiling.
“You’re Diana, right? I mean, of course you’re Diana. I sit across from you everyday. Ha-ha-ha!”
Mari’s laughter was tourettic, non sequitur, oddly machine-like, and with it she ingratiatingly punctuated other people’s sentences no matter what had been said. Diana seemed to be the only one who noticed this queer tic of Mari’s, certainly the only one to object. If Mari’s laughter contained a self-deprecating aspect, then the laughter she received in reply was indulgently approving: You’re dumb, but we like you dumb. Diana made effort to not encourage it with politeness, and said nothing.
But Mari rolled with Diana’s dropped cue: “You prefer eating alone, huh?”
“I guess I must.”
“Oh, that’s funny! Where is that from?”
“Where’s what from?”
“That line.”
“It’s not ‘from’ anywhere. It’s not a line. It was me talking.”
“Still, that’s awesome. So, Diana, I hear from everyone that you’re going to be the valedictorian, which is so great. Because you’re so young! It’s awesome. Are you nervous?”
“No.”
“Well I just want to let you know that if you start to feel nervous, I am totally here for you. I can help you with your speech, if you want it to be funnier. Not that you aren’t funny, you’re hilarious! I mean, come on, right? But what I’m saying is, I’m pretty experienced with speechwriting, being on Council and whatnot. And if you wanted a writing partner, like if you wanted to bounce ideas around—or you could do it like a skit, like, ‘Wow, Mari, I can’t believe we’re graduating…’”
“I’ve already prepared a speech,” Diana said, though she hadn’t.
“Awesome! Well, still, let’s hang out sometime. In all these years I’ve talked to you maybe three times, which I find ridonkulous. Okay, I gotta go eat lunch! Ugh, cafeteria food, right? Seeya!”
A week later, the informal agitation became formal—formal, at least, in that a petition was drafted demanding a Student-Run Commencement. Eager to encourage these rare gestures of civic participation, the faculty accepted the proposal, and a month before commencement it was announced that the Commencement speaker would be decided by vote. Diana might have taken offense at this parting snub, but she was busy preparing for finals.
And so Mari was elected not to the defunct office of Valedictorian, but to the new student-initiated appointment of Fellow Speaker. Commencement Day made Diana restless, dreading the indignity of the speech, but also anxious to witness Mari’s self-immolation. In her white dress and maroon honors’ sash (only one stripe, Diana noted), Mari took the podium without any paper or notes before her. She was going to improvise.
Taking a moment to survey the audience, Mari began: “Thank you, Headmaster Harmon, Mr. Persshon. And thanks to my fellow students, to whom this speech is dedicated. Today, I don’t want to talk about the future, like you might expect of me on this occasion. We each follow our own path in life, and as well as I know you all, it would be impossible to predict our individual fates. The most talented of us may fail. The quietest and shyest of us will find their voices. We can acknowledge the future, but never anticipate it.
“Instead, I see this as an opportunity to remember, and, if you’ll allow it, to consider our regrets. I have personally made several mistakes. I studied less than I should have, I didn’t make friends I should’ve made. I cut class. Always there will be regret, and only more as we get older. When two months ago I was diagnosed with Stage III non-Hodgkin lymphoma, I remember feeling angry and afraid, and bitter about losing my youth and my time, but as I became more and more familiar with the idea and the feeling of death, more than anything else, I felt responsible. I thought there was something I could have done to avoid my situation, and that my life hadn’t yet been lived. This is not just a cancer thing—it’s what everyone feels when they approach the end of something, a way of looking back and wondering how your life could have been better than it was.
“Of course, the question is not whether we have regret, but whether we have benefited from experience. Arthur Miller said, ‘Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.’ There is a lot to admire in that quote, but more than anything, the idea of hope—for even if circumstances aren’t ideal, even if life gets in the way of living, still, we can carry on.”
For another five minutes, Mari rounded out her paean, shaping the air musically with her arms, and her final words (“—I wish each of you the very best of regrets”), sent the gymnasium to a squall of applause, a racket of hooting and floor-stomping that rivaled the speech in duration, prompting quelling gestures from the headmaster.
Diana could not hear her own subdued clapping over the noise, or the echo of her thoughts. Not bad. Not poorly done. Her heart had quickened, her temples and hairline burned and felt damp. From her vantage onstage, where she sat among faculty and other student honorees, she saw classmates wiping contrails of mucus and tears on their arms, mothers leaning across their spouses’ laps to whisper to other mothers.
Finally the focus of the proceedings fell upon Diana, who’d swept the departmental awards in Math, Biology, Chemistry, Latin, English, History, Spanish, and CCWL[s]. She alone was called to receive each award, and she held her triple-striped honors’ sash fast against her hip as she gained center stage and turned to face the audience. There was a camera’s solitary click-and-twinkle from somewhere in the crowd—her parents had not told her where they would be seated. She returned to her seat with eight leather-bound certificates to stack under her folding chair.
That was it. It was hushed and ceremonial; the applause was merely tactful. Not as it should have been. Something was wrong, or else, something about reality had always been wrong. Mari, in spite of her tragedies, would always be applauded; for Diana there would be the eye-roll; the condescending smile and pout of amusement and soft coo of endearment—aww. Yes, there was the aww, but where was the awe?
On the drive home, Diana’s whole back sweated, and she was afraid that she had stained her shirt. She removed her sash. The hostile sensation of time: time passing, advantages eroding, each second of motion through time dimming the great glittering halo of prodigy. By the time she turned forty, to remain a prodigy would require the mental age of a sixty year-old, and in her final years, when her senescent generation would have trouble recalling the names of its dead spouses and grown-up children, Diana would need to have advanced to a mental age beyond the length of life, the mental age of someone long dead.
[Excerpt ends]
—Apr 21, 2008