The Error of Our Ways by David Carkeet

Author:David Carkeet [CARKEET, DAVID]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000, LAN009000
ISBN: 9781468302943
Publisher: ABRAMS, Inc. (Ignition)
Published: 2012-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

Cook stopped at a used bookstore on his way home and found what he wanted without any difficulty. When he arrived home, he heard Paula singing, after a fashion.

“Wrong!” she sang out from her study. She was grading student exercises. He took off his coat and called out a hello, but it was drowned out by another “Wrong!” He heard a third one as he stepped into her study.

“The Great Vowel Shift,” she said, throwing down her pen. “They’re crashing and burning.”

“It’s a tough change for beginners.”

Paula slowly turned her head to him. “What are you saying? That I’m pushing them? Of course I’m pushing them. They’ve never been pushed in their lives. These people can’t think, and they sure can’t write. Look at this.” She rummaged through a pile and pulled out a sheet. “This guy, Bob. Instead of ‘all of a sudden,’ he writes ‘all of the sudden.’ What the hell’s that about?”

Cook stepped forward and looked at it. Bob had written, “All of the sudden, the vowels moved.” The penmanship was sad and vulnerable. It seemed to say, “Hurt me.” Paula had obliged in the margin: “Not English!”

It’s a developmental relic,” said Cook. “When Bob was little and first heard ‘all of a sudden,’ he interpreted the ‘a’ as a reduced form of ‘the’ because it gets so little stress.”

“I know that. But his theory should have been contradicted the first time he read the correct form.”

“Maybe he doesn’t read enough.”

“He should read more. I’m punishing him for not reading enough. That’s part of my job.”

He suspected Paula was punishing the lad for a different reason: for being average, like Buford U. itself.

“Excellence in all things,” said Paula. “That’s my new motto.”

“Oh?” To Cook it sounded like a General Electric motto.

“For example”—she reached across the desk for a thick manila file—“the conference. I’m running it now. My goal is to blow everyone away with the excellence of it.”

“What happened to Ted?”

“He stepped aside. We’re close to getting long-term funding for the new center from this one branch of the Buford family, a pair of twins with a ton of money. They’re very straitlaced, a brother-sister pair who live together.” She laughed softly. “They look like the couple in ‘American Gothic.’ Anyway, I’m running the show now because of them.”

Cook was having trouble following this. “Why you instead of Ted?”

“Because he’s gay.”

Many thoughts besieged him. He felt out of the loop—that was one. Another was about Susan: she had a gay brother. In his complicated mind, this enriched her. But the main thought he had was still confusion. “Why does Ted’s being gay disqualify him from running the conference?”

“It doesn’t disqualify him. It’s just politic under the circumstances to have a heterosexual at the helm.”

Cook imagined the phrase in an ad for a cruise line for fundamentalists: “A Heterosexual at the Helm.” The language was as odd as her “Excellence in all things.” He said, “This doesn’t sound like you.”

“It’s not. It’s Chairman Sam’s idea.”

“How does Ted feel about it?”

“He’s pissed off.

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