although grown-ups can sometimes look good in photos or in movies or from far away, up close there is always something blotchy or hairy or saggy, and most grown-ups, even the ones who don’t smoke, smell.
The big exception was his great-grandmother, Ginia, whom he’d met only once, when he was six. Ginia was old but her face was freakily beautiful, like something carved out of soap, with eyes like Blue Jay marbles. She was teensy. A grown-up no bigger than himself! He could not see how anyone could stand, let alone walk, on such matchstick legs. When he thinks of her now, he thinks of an egret.
But she, too, had a smell. And in general old people are the ugliest and smelliest people of all.
He has always been sensitive to smells, but since his illness he is more so. His memory may be worse, but his senses seem to have got better. He is sure he hears better than he used to. PW says it’s because Cole has never lived so far out in the country, where it’s so quiet, especially at night. But being in the country is not a whole new experience for Cole. He has been to the country on vacations, and he has been to summer camp.
From school he knows that Native Americans had much sharper vision and hearing than the white settlers had, and he likes to pretend he is one of them, a brave (how he loves that word), able to hear a fly land on the windowsill.
Riding a horse, he has also imagined himself a brave, nothing between him and the horse’s warm, broad back. He has never understood why white people invented the saddle.
Tracy and PW say the Indians were not the first people in America, there were white people here before them. Cole is surprised to hear this. He is sure that’s not what he learned in school—unless it’s one of the things he no longer remembers.
It was his mother who’d pointed out that it was only human smells that bothered him, which is true. But then it is also true that he likes animals more than he likes people. He does not mind the smell of horses or dogs; in fact, he thinks horses and dogs smell good. He has never been bothered by the smells in a zoo. He could stay in the monkey house all day long. But once when he was sitting on a park bench and a homeless man sat down beside him, he had jumped up and fled without even caring that the man’s feelings might be hurt. He does not feel so guilty about this because he knows he’s not the only one who’d find the man’s smell worse than a monkey’s. But he has always wondered: why was that?
Besides keeping house, Tracy does church work, of which there seems to be no end. She is good with her hands, and in every room of the house there are things—quilts, pillows, ceramics—that she has made. Though constantly busy, she is always looking for more to do. (“Devil ain’t gonna catch this lady with idle hands.”) Yet the word Cole is unable to separate from Tracy is lazy.
They don’t read, and they can’t write to save their lives. They’ve never heard of most of the presidents of the United States, they think America won the war in Vietnam, they think Prohibition was a law that made it illegal to own slaves.
That was Cole’s father, fuming about his students. Cole suspects at least some of this could also be said about Tracy.
And it’s not just what they don’t know, it’s what they don’t want to know.
Tracy is what his father would call intellectually lazy.
Every time this thought occurs to Cole, he feels guilty.
Not that he would even care, if Tracy wasn’t his teacher.
The hours he spends on lessons with her are torture. He cannot hide his feelings completely, but fortunately everyone thinks he’s just a normal red-blooded boy who’d rather be off riding his bike, say.
Though he has shared some of his secrets with PW, about Tracy he knows he will never be honest.
HE REMEMBERS HIS LAST DAY OF SCHOOL as if it were yesterday, and at the same time as if it were very long ago. He was still the new boy then. He and his parents had moved from Chicago during Christmas vacation.
His father said, “I know how hard it is for you to leave all your friends and jump in with a whole