Magic Terror. Peter Straub
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instant. ‘Tori,’ I say, ‘you know that what you did is wrong, don’t you?’ Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the child nods its head. ‘And you will never do that wrong thing again, will you?’ Most often the child can speak to say No. ‘Well, you’d better not,’ I say, and then I lean forward until the little child can see nothing except my enormous, inflamed face. Then in a guttural, lethal, rumble-whisper, I utter, ‘OR ELSE.’ When I say ‘OR ELSE,’ I am very emphatic. I am so very emphatic that I feel my eyes change shape. I am thinking of Zena and the time she told me that weeping on my mother’s grave wouldn’t make a glorious wonderful tree grow there, it would just drown my mother in mud.
The attractiveness of teaching is that it is adventurous, as adventurous as life.
My mother did not drown in mud. She died some other way. She fell down in the middle of the downstairs parlor, the parlor where Zena sat on her visits. Zena was just another lady then, and on her visits, her ‘social calls’, she sat on the best antique chair and held her hands in her lap like the most modest, innocent little lady ever born. She was half Chinese, Zena, and I knew she was just like bright sharp metal inside of her, metal that could slice you but good. Zena was very adventurous, but not as adventurous as me. Zena never got out of that town. Of course, all that happened to Zena was that she got old, and everybody left her all alone because she wasn’t pretty anymore, she was just an old yellow widow-lady, and then I heard that she died pulling up weeds in her garden. I heard this from two different people. You could say that Zena got drowned in mud, which proves that everything spoken on this earth contains a truth not always apparent at the time.
The other trick I learned from Zena that is not a trick is how to handle a whole class that has decided to act up. These children come from parents who, thinking they know everything, in fact know less than nothing. These children will never see a classical manner demonstrated at home. You must respond in a way that demonstrates your awareness of perfection. You must respond in a way that will bring this awareness to the unruly children, so that they too will possess it.
It can begin in a thousand different ways. Say I am in conference with a single student – say I am delivering the great OR ELSE. Say that my attention has wandered off for a moment, and that I am contemplating the myriad things I contemplate when my attention is wandering free. My mother’s grave, watered by my tears. The women with city hair who desired to give me help, but could not, so left to be replaced by others, who in turn were replaced by yet others. How it felt to stand naked and besmeared with my own feces in the front yard, moveless as a statue, the same as all nature, classical. The gradual disappearance of my father, like that of a figure in a cartoon who grows increasingly transparent until total transparency is reached. Zena facedown in her garden, snuffling dirt up into her nostrils. The resemblance of the city women to certain wicked stepsisters in old tales. Also their resemblance to handsome princes in the same tales.
She who hears the tale makes the tale.
Say therefore that I am no longer quite anchored within the classroom, but that I float upward into one, several, or all of these realms. People get what they need from their own minds. Certain places, you can get in there and rest. The classical was a cool period. I am floating within my cool realms. At that moment, one child pulls another’s hair. A third child hurls a spitball at the window. Another falls to the floor, emitting pathetic and mechanical cries. Instantly, what was order is misrule. Then I summon up the image of my ferocious female angels and am on my feet before the little beasts even notice that I have left my desk. In a flash, I am beside the light switch. The Toris and Tiffanys, the Joshuas and Jeremys, riot on. I slap down the switch, and the room goes dark.
Result? Silence. Inspired action is destiny.
The children freeze. Their pulses race – veins beat in not a few little blue temples. I say four words. I say, Think what this means.’ They know what it means. I grow to twice my size with the meaning of these words. I loom over them, and darkness pours out of me. Then I switch the lights back on, and smile at them until they get what they need from my smiling face. These children will never call me Mrs Fat-Asch; these children know that I am the same as all nature.
Once upon a time a dying queen sent for her daughter, and when her daughter came to her bedside the queen said, ‘I am leaving you, my darling. Say your prayers and be good to your father. Think of me always, and I will always be with you.’ Then she died. Every day the little girl watered her mother’s grave with her tears. But her heart was dead. You cannot lie about a thing like this. Hatred is the inside part of love. And so her mother became a hard cold stone in her heart. And that was the meaning of the mother, for as long as the little girl lived.
Soon the king took another woman as his wife, and she was most beautiful, with skin the color of gold and eyes as black as jet. She was like a person pretending to be someone else inside another person pretending she couldn’t pretend. She understood that reality was contextual. She understood about the condition of the observer.
One day when the king was going out to be among his people, he asked his wife, ‘What shall I bring you?’
‘A diamond ring,’ said the queen. And the king could not tell who was speaking, the person inside pretending to be someone else, or the person outside who could not pretend.
‘And you, my daughter,’ said the king, ‘what would you like?’
‘A diamond ring,’ said the daughter.
The king smiled and shook his head.
‘Then nothing,’ said the daughter. ‘Nothing at all.’
When the king came home, he presented the queen with a diamond ring in a small blue box, and the queen opened the box and smiled at the ring and said, ‘It’s a very small diamond, isn’t it?’ The king’s daughter saw him stoop forward, his face whitening, as if he had just lost half his blood. ‘I like my small diamond,’ said the queen, and the king straightened up, although he still looked white and shaken. He patted his daughter on the head on his way out of the room, but the girl merely looked forward and said nothing, in return for the nothing he had given her.
And that night, when the rest of the palace was asleep, the king’s daughter crept to the kitchen and ate half of a loaf of bread and most of a quart of homemade peach ice cream. This was the most delicious food she had ever eaten in her whole entire life. The bread tasted like the sun on the wheatfields, and inside the taste of the sun was the taste of the bursting kernels of the wheat, even of the rich dark crumbly soil that surrounded the roots of the wheat, even of the lives of the bugs and animals that had scurried through the wheat, even of the droppings of those foxes, beetles, and mice. And the homemade peach ice cream tasted overwhelmingly of sugar, cream, and peaches, but also of the bark and meat of the peach tree and the pink feet of the birds that had landed on it, and the sharp, brittle voices of those birds, also of the effort of the hand crank, of the stained, whorly wood of its sides, and of the sweat of the man who had worked it so long. Every taste should be as complicated as possible, and every taste goes up and down at the same time: up past the turtledoves to the far reaches of the sky, so that one final taste in everything is whiteness, and down all the way to the mud at the bottom of graves, then to the mud beneath that mud, so that another final taste in everything, in even peach ice cream, is the taste of blackness.
From about this time, the king’s daughter began to attract undue attention. From the night of the whiteness of turtledoves and the blackness of grave-mud to the final departure of the stepsisters was a period of something like six months.
I thought of myself as a work of art. I caused responses without being responsible for them. This is the great freedom of art.
They asked questions that enforced the terms of their own answers.Don’t you know we want to help you? Such a question implies only two possible answers, 1: no, 2: yes. The stepsisters never understood the queen’s daughter, therefore the turtledoves pecked out their eyes, first on the one side, then on the other. The correct answer – 3: person to whom question is directed is not the one in need of help – cannot be given. Other correct answers, such as 4: help shall come from other sources, and 5: neither knowledge nor help mean what you imagine they mean, are also forbidden