Back two rows, keep quiet,” bellows Mr. Lingles, the principal, his face entertaining its customary expression of exasperation.
It is Awards Day at Lingles School, a private institution named after the principal, and the objects of Mr. Lingles` wrath are the oldest boys, the 9th- graders, who occupy the two back rows. They are in a taunting mood, a not unusual state of affairs. There are 10 boys in all, and only one of their number sits apart, David Montalvo.
This is a school where many of the students have what are called behavior problems, which translate more than anything into an inability to sit still and concentrate.
David Montalvo is here for other reasons. ”He couldn`t go to a public school,” says his mother. ”They would eat him alive.”
Not that the same sort of cannibalism doesn`t exist at Lingles. The setting may be smaller, but there is plenty of the cruelty of boys. It is that special radar for defect.
The room, a windowless library, is charged with the roiling energy of kids on the last day of school. The boys who do not win awards try to disguise their disappointment with hooting contempt for those who do.
In the 9th grade at Lingles everyone has a nickname. About all that can be said about the nasty names is that they satisfy a certain democratic urge that assures that everyone gets one. No one is exempt.
”Tits,” they call the boy who is overweight.
”Baldylocks,” for the kid with a crewcut.
”Urine,” pronounced loudly as You`re-In, is for the classmate who drank some (by mistake) at a party (a long story, typically adolescent in plot and not worthy of a full recounting here).
It is time for the Most Prolific Reader award, an honor that might be coveted in some settings, but here is so hopelessly out of reach for the majority, for whom reading is an overwhelming obstacle, that the notion of reading for pleasure is as far-fetched as electric shocks for the fun of it. And besides they figure that this year`s award will go to the same boy who won it last year.
They`re right.
”David Montalvo,” says Mr. Lingles.
David rises.
His appearance is startling. The eyes are a little too high in the head;
and the eyelids are oddly skimpy, leaving a part of the eye always exposed, even in sleep. Both eyebrows are interrupted in the middle by a bald patch. His face, from the side, appears flattened, and there is a scarred marbling above the lip and on the chin. A vertical slash in the middle of his forehead fosters an impression that his face is like a piece of fruit chopped in half and then rejoined haphazardly. (”Can`t he have plastic surgery?” people sometimes ask his mother. ”Can`t the doctors do something?”) (She sometimes answers: ”Do something? He`s had 40 operations just to get to this point.”) ”E.T.,” hisses one of the boys.
He is in many ways the boy who fell to Earth, and this extraterrestrial quality is not lost on his classmates with their diabolical perspicacity when it comes to ridicule.
David appears not to hear.
They hiss another name.
He peers through thick glasses at the certificate. His thumbs are fine, but the fingers on both hands and misshapen and stunted.
They hiss yet another name.
He starts to lift his unfinished fingers as if to cover his ears.
”Stubs,” they call him.
”Zipperface.”
When David was born his eyes had no lids.
They were set disproportionately–weirdly–apart, one higher than the other.
His nose was a flattened protuberance that looked as if someone had smashed it with an ax.
His mouth was a gaping hole that overtook the lower half of his face.
All his fingers were deformed, and the big toe on his right foot was missing.
His skull was misshapen.
He was exactly as one doctor described him, in language remarkably direct, devoid of fancy polysyllabic evasions, shocking and colloquial:
”He`s a mess.”
To his mother his face looked like a volcano had erupted or a bomb had gone off in it. It was red and angry-looking.
In another era, the best and only hope for a child like David was the circus.
David Montlavo was born without a face.
Now he has one.
The operation that saved David from a life as a freak came into prominence in 1968, the year he was born. It is called a cranio-facial.
It is a life-threatening procedure. They open the skull from ear to ear and peel the forehead down like an orange. It requires up to 12 hours under anesthesia.
David has had this operation. Twice.
For David, modern operating theaters are a miracle of ingenuity, of true creation: Where there was nothing, there is now something.
”They took the bone from the hip and put it here,” he says, pointing to his upper jaw. ”They took two ribs out and put them here and here,” he says, pointing to the cheekbones.
He touches his nose: ”The skin for my nose came from the back of the ears.
”Let`s see. They took the skin from inside my right arm and built eyelids with that.”
He places his hand on his chin: ”My chin was fine, but it was too big compared to everything else so they removed some bone and I can`t remember where they put it, but I know they put it someplace; they never waste anything.”
Ultimately, David relied on his own resources to cure his condition. Parts of himself were used to make other parts.
”Most children with clefts have a cleft lip or a cleft palate or a cleft lip and a cleft palate. David,” says Dr. William Silver, who to this day supervises his orthodonture, ”had a cleft face.” Silver has promised him a set of perfect teeth, as long as he puts in his rubber bands.
Dr. Gilbert Snyder, the surgeon who did the first procedure that in many ways saved David`s life, says, ”I wish you could have seen his mother 16 years ago. She had this quality of absolute innocence. A virginal quality like a character out of a Henry James novel. I remember that when I first saw David, I gave her a booklet on clefts that I gave to all the parents of children with this problem, and there was one thing that made her stand out:
She read it. And later she asked me question after question. She wasn`t going to give up.
”You know, to this day, no one knows why there are clefts. As far as we know, they are something that falls from the sky.
”There was a popular movie at the time of David`s birth about a woman who had given birth to a monster that pretty much explains the position David`s mother was in.
”She had Rosemary`s Baby.”
She was a girl of 19, and he was her first baby. At 17 Sandy Montalvo had run away from home and moved to Florida. Why Florida? ”Where else if it`s January in Indiana?” Her father was an officer in the Navy. The family was living in South Bend, where he was in charge of the ROTC program at the University of Notre Dame. Sandy used to believe her parents were perfect. But if they had been perfect, what would have prompted her to run away?
Now she says her father had an officer`s need to control everything, and her mother had the need of an officer`s wife to redound to her husband`s credit, to trade continually in veneer and create at any cost the impression of a happy household. ”Beneath the picture of false perfection was a real inability to communicate with me, and with my brothers, too.”
She landed in Palm Beach. She found a job as a bookkeeper for a company that sold parts for cars. She lived in a one-bedroom furnished walk-up over a garage. She moved in with her sneakers and her jeans and some old towels and dishes, mismatched, from her mother. Her parents had finally given their blessing: ”At least if they went ahead and agreed with what I wanted to do, at least they`d know where I was. They wanted me to go away to college, belong to a sorority, fulfill their dreams for my childhood. Looking back, I wish I would have.”
She met Gary right away, through a friend.
If she thinks about it really hard, she can almost remember what she liked about him: ”He appeared to be gregarious and fun. And, one other thing: He was always in trouble like I was in trouble. We were both the type who did everything the hard way and had to always walk the extra mile.”
They were both 18 when they decided to marry. Both sets of parents opposed the match but gave in. Gary got a job with the University of Miami as an air-conditioning mechanic. When she got pregnant with David, they moved into a trailer along South Dixie Highway by the Serpentarium. Her mother-in-law gave her a shower before the baby was born, and she was gifted with the usual paraphernalia.
Around the third month she had the Hong Kong Flu.
She took no drugs.
She had no alcohol.
”I wasn`t even old enough to drink. In those days you had to be 21.”
If the baby was a boy, he was to be named Gary, but when she saw her child for the first time, she changed her mind and named him David William, for her two brothers: ”I had a
feeling Gary wouldn`t be hanging around long, but my family would.”
To this day she keeps the obstetrical notes that describe her progress during labor and delivery, as if there must be some special way to read them to decode what happened, to divine the course of events that resulted in David.
Date of onset of labor: June 7, 1969.
Duration: First stage, 9 hours and 40 minutes; second stage, 28 minutes;
third stage: 3 minutes.
Condition of infant prior to transfer to nursery: Infant has several anomalies. Resp. color and cry app. satis. on transfer to nursery.
After any birth, especially one in which the mother is anesthetized, the first time she awakens and the baby is not nearby, there is a moment of emptiness and panic.
Nurse`s bedside notes:
1:30 p.m. Pt. asking abt. baby–becomes very upset. Physician called. Pt. medicated.
”I remember that,” she says now. ”I remember waking up in this skinny little room, or maybe it just seemed skinny because I was on a stretcher and looking up at all the nurses, this sea of faces, and nobody was saying a thing.”
The next day she is described as eating fairly well and sleeping much of the morning. By midafternoon she was staring at the walls again, this time
”with intensity.” At 3 p.m. Sandy had her first visit with the baby, right before he was to be taken to another hospital and given his first operation so he could be fed. She insisted on dressing the child in a blue and green flowered sleeper with booties to match. She concentrated on the parts of him that were normal and was grateful to her tears for blurring the rest.
Later in the day, the baby gone, forever for all she knew, she ate lightly, showered with assistance and was visited by her parents, who flew in from Indiana. (”Please come,” she had said to her father on the phone, when she found out about her son`s condition. ”Daddy, I had an ugly baby.”) When she first saw them, she stared beyond them as though in a trance. After they left, she watched TV for a while, complained of pain, received some medication, drifted off to sleep and then, at 10 minutes after 2 in the morning, awakened, sobbing. She would cry out in a loud wail, then be quiet, then cry out again. The nurses tried to calm her, but whenever they left the room, they could hear her talking to herself, babbling, until finally one of the nurses asked her what was wrong.
”They took my baby and put it in a can and put the lid on,” she kept saying. ”They put it in a can.”
Then the notes say, ”Reassured pt. baby was OK,” and finally it was reported that at 6 a.m. the patient fell asleep for the night.
Postpartum course: ”Uncomplicated except for reactive depression.”
Sandy remembers: ”When my mother took me home from the hospital, I couldn`t even dress myself.”
The patient knew the truth:
The baby was not okay.
The phrase ”Infant has several anomalies” reverberated in her mind; she would come to loathe those words.
”It was as if his features had developed autonomously and there
was no central steering committee,” says Dr. Snyder, a plastic surgeon who operated on David, when the child was 8 days old, at Children`s Hospital. He attempted to repair the cleft in both lips, and Dr. Silver fitted him with a device so he could eat. Without these two interventions a baby like David would not be able to create enough pressure to swallow and might end up starving.
These two doctors were the only two at the very beginning who suggested to David`s mother that he might, if not prosper, at least survive. They were the only two who offered their support.
The others talked one game: permanent institutionalization in a home for profoundly retarded children. Sunland. Orlando.
They said he wouldn`t walk, wouldn`t talk, he was hydrocephalic, he would lie on a mat all day long, and no mother could love him. They were, in many ways, victims of a prejudice as primitive as it is ancient: If someone is deformed on the outside, he must be deformed on the inside as well.
Sandy`s baby had just turned 16.
Turning 16 is a symbolic event for any child, but for one like David the portents weigh even more heavily. It has been a summer of reckoning, an interlude aching with growth and the fear of it. If you`re still a kid, summer is supposed to be, theoretically at least, heavy with aimlessness, but in Sandy Montalvo`s small suburban house near Dadeland, Fla., even the slow time of the year isn`t slow.
”My mother,” says David, ”is overprotective, loud, and she has a temper. And if she decides to do something, it gets done.”
”Listen, David,” says his mother. ”You`re 16. I don`t want you living at home forever. If you want to get your license, you`re going to have to study the booklet and show us that you know all the answers before we take you for the test. We`re going to have to find a new school for the fall, and I want you to get some vocational counseling. And now that you are getting older, it`s up to you to decide whether or not you want any more operations. When you were a little kid, it was my choice. But now that you are older, and the doctors have done most of what they can do, you`re going to have to help us decide. There`s a lot of pain and a lot of risk.”
”Mom, can I play my tapes?”
”Not until you`ve finished your chores.”
”Don`t forget,” says David, ”her father was a commander.”
She has a long history of stubborn behavior.
When David was born, she allowed him to be placed in Sunland. But, against nearly all the advice, she made plans to visit him on Labor Day, the first three-day weekend. She and Gary drove to Orlando, rented a hotel room, and she took the baby out of the facility and held him all weekend long. There are pictures of a young woman, her hair pressed straight in defiance of the natural curl, clenched back with a wide headband, wearing loud shirts and bell-bottoms in the style of the day. Photographed from a distance there was nothing unusual about the bundle in her arms.
That weekend she made a curious discovery: Despite predictions to the contrary, her son was responding very much the way she supposed a normal baby would respond. He loved to be held, his deformed eyes fastened on her perfect ones and she was certain that from time to time his contorted mouth shaped itself into a smile.
She became pregnant again. When David was a year old, she gave birth to a second son, Todd Michael, who was fine.
Seven months later, her marriage ended.
More and more she would take David out of Sunland for longer and longer periods of time.
David`s grandmother, Gary`s mother, would sometimes bring the boy down to Miami. ”Even when he was little, he was sharp. He always wanted me to read to him. I told Sandy, `There`s nothing wrong with that boy`s brain. He`s too sharp for that place.` ”
After Gary left, David`s mother got a job processing checks at the Southeast Banking Center`s computer center from 5 in the evening until 2 in the morning. A high-school girl who went to school on the afternoon shift spent the night with the children.
That`s when Sandy met Rafael Montalvo. He was in charge of teaching new employees how to use the computers.
”He had an instant dislike for me and tried to get me fired. He went to the supervisor, who told him there was no way I`d be fired, so he ought to settle down and teach me what I had to know.”
To smooth things over, Rafael Montalvo invited Sandy out to dinner. As subsequent events would demonstrate, he discovered he didn`t dislike her as much as he had originally thought.
On Christmas Day, when David was 2 1/2 and his brother 1 1/2, an event occurred as inexplicable as David`s defects. Sandy put her younger son to bed, and several hours later when she went to check on him, he was not breathing. He was a vicitm of crib death.
It is a struggle for Sandy to speak of Todd Michael, and her words are choked:
”When Todd died, it was one of those experiences, it`s very difficult for me to explain to other people, the pain, the complete desolation, it`s something you never get over.
”There isn`t anything else you can do because it`s so final.
”Todd was perfect, and he died. David has all these problems, and he lived.
”This is not something I can talk about easily.”
She would go on to have one more baby, this time a perfectly formed girl, Cecilia, who is now 11. People often tell her mother that Cecilia
looks like that actress, the one with all the eyebrows; what`s her name?
Hemingway? Her beauty is similar to her mother`s; she has a wide-open face and shining complexion.
When David gets on Cecilia`s nerves, she waits for him to make a phone call and then she does everything she can to distract him, from making loud noises to claiming that the house is in great danger.
When Cecilia gets on David`s nerves, he goes into his room and locks the door and lets her bang on it as much as she wants.
David`s stepfather is strict with Cecilia and easy on David. David`s mother is strict with David and easy on Cecilia.
David is considered by everyone in his family to be lazy, and the most commonly proffered argument to prove this point is made by his mother. ”He would never clean his room if I didn`t make him.”
Parents always remember certain incidents in the lives of their children with the force of a photograph, a split second lifted out of the continuum and preserved for all of time in the mind`s eye:
David`s mother always remembers the time when he was 4 or 5 and he appeared to be very sad one morning as she washed the dishes:
”What`s the matter, David?”
”I don`t want to go to school today.”
”Why not? You always liked school.”
”Well, I don`t want to go today because no one likes my hands.”
Cecilia`s father always remembers the time when she was 4 or 5 and she was bringing a new friend home. She stood outside, the door was swung open, but she waited to enter while she cautioned her friend: ”When you see my brother, you will see he is different, but I don`t want you to stare.”
David`s and Cecilia`s mother likes to think they have for each other a profound sense of loyalty.
David attended public schools through the 6th grade. His mother petitioned the south area office of the Dade County school district to see that he was properly placed, and when it was first suggested that he be assigned to a classroom of children with physical disabilities, she refused.
”But,” she was told, ”your son is different.”
”That`s right, he is different. But he`s not in a wheelchair. You will make him feel more different than he is. David can ride a bike, he can climb a tree. He can hold a pencil.”
At a certain point when David was still in grade school, Sandy Montalvo was taking her son to a different doctor every day.
”I realized I had to let up. With a child like David, if you`re not careful, he will take up your entire life, and that`s not good for anybody.
”As it is, we have this strange twinness. When David`s doing fine, I`m doing fine. And when he`s not doing well, I`m not doing well.
”Every time he goes into surgery, as they wheel him into the operating room, I literally feel as if something is being ripped out of me.
”I went to see the movie `Mask` with David, the one about the child with the deformed face. Cher played his mother. There are major differences between that movie and our life. In the movie nothing could be done to improve that child`s condition, so there was no sense of the kind of problem that can take over your life and dominate it if you`re not careful. And in the end the child died, so everybody in the theater could leave the movie feeling great: The problem is over.
”With David the problem is never over. It just takes on new forms.”
David`s biological father does not see him often. For his 16th birthday he gave David $50 in cash, delivered to him by his grandparents. He took David to a concert, once.
”Most kids, they call their stepfather by his first name and they call their father Dad,” says David. ”For me it`s just the opposite.”
Rafael Montalvo, David`s stepfather: ”Seeing David for the first time really was a shock. He was a monster back then. I did not feel at first a tremendous amount of attraction to the kid.
”The first time I started feeling something for David was when he was going up to New York for surgery the second time and Sandy said, `I think you should come with us.` They were preparing to give him a shot to sort of calm him down, and as I understand it, it is a very painful thing.
”I always had this thing in my head: Boys don`t cry, and David knew this, and I could see him fighting back the tears, and I saw these big things coming down his cheek, and he said, `Dad, it hurts,` and for the first time I began to wonder what he was going through. I felt respect.”
”Dennis,” says David, turning to his best friend. ”Do you remember Leah? Well, there`s a girl in my school this summer who`s so pretty she puts Leah to shame.”
They look like typical teenagers, sitting on a curbstone, watching girls go by. David`s mother may have thought of it as a summer of reckoning, but to David, it was just plain summer. David never acts as if he has any special problems. It is at once admirable and frightening. By refusing to appear vulnerable, he might be making himself more so.
Most of David`s conversation during his 16th summer, at least that conducted outside his parents` earshot, centered on one thing.
”What I look for in a girl,” says
David, ”is blond hair and personality.”
He is trying to work up the courage to ask the preacher`s daughter, who happens to have been blessed with many beguilements including the evocative name Lana, for her picture. He might succeed. One reason he likes her: ”Her father always says she`s supposed to set an example.”
When his mother took him to Atlantis Academy to look over his new school and to sign him up for a couple of summer courses, he was given a copy of the most recent yearbook to keep. His mother was heartened by the enthusiasm he showed toward this document, although she was not sure why he found it so captivating.
”One, two, three, four, five, maybe six, definitely seven, absolutely definitely eight. Wow. Eight really good-looking girls. Wait until Dennis sees this.”
He has only one faint complaint about girls:
”A lot of them don`t say a word while they slow-dance.”
”My biggest fear about David is, what is he going to do? Can he function without being taken advantage of by everybody?” says Rafael Montalvo.
”David likes to talk. If he could, he would just sit around all day talking.
”I always tell him, `David, you have to prepare yourself for something. Now is the time you should be preparing.` ”
David`s stepfather also saw the movie ”Mask.” This time it was a father-and-son outing, and afterwards they want to Burger King and sat and talked.
”I told David that one of the things in the movie that impressed me and I thought we ought to talk about is that the boy is attracted to one of the girls in his high school, not just as a friend, but as a man to a woman, and she likes him, but only as her friend. Does that happen to you? He said, `Not really.` I asked him about does he ever feel he would like to go to bed with a girl, kiss a girl? Have you ever felt that way toward a girl? `All the time.` ” `But,` I said, `you haven`t really tried to kiss a girl.`
” `Not yet.`
”And so I told him, it`s going to take a special type of person to have a physical relationship with him. At your age, I said, it will be very difficult, but later in life it will not be so hard. And then I made sort of a joke. In the movie the boy meets a blind girl and I said, `Maybe you could meet a blind girl.`
”And he said, `I wouldn`t want someone like that.` ”
David and his mother visited the office of Dr. S. Anthony Wolfe to discuss David`s future. The doctor reached over, cupped the boy`s chin and tilted his head upward. He was examining the results of the most recent surgery in which two of David`s ribs were used to make his upper jaw protrude more in an effort to diminish the crushed flat look to David`s face, especially in profile.
”Good,” said the doctor. ”Good.”
The doctor had just cut the wires, but David still had trouble moving his mouth so it still sounded as if he were speaking through clenched teeth.
”So, Doctor, can I have steak for dinner?”
”Steak? I don`t want you eating anything that will stress your jaw. For right now I`m going to prescribe an edentuous diet; that means a diet for people with no teeth. What a baby or a 75-year-old lady might eat.”
David`s mother stirred in her seat. ”David,” she said, ”do you want to show Dr. Wolfe the list you brought?” Then she addressed the physician. ”Now that David is turning 16, it is going to be more and more up to him whether he chooses to have any more operations. There is a lot of pain and a lot of risk. He wrote down some of the things he wants to ask you about.”
David started to read from the list.
”Chin scar: remove.
”Eyebrows: more.
”Nose: some nostrils.
”Forehead scar: make smaller.”
Dr. Wolfe listened intently. He has a handsome face, and because he is a plastic surgeon, the handsomeness creates an impression of someone endowed with a beauty he generously wishes to universalize. He nodded thoughtfully.
”We`re down to the final buffing. Everything sounds possible. The hardest will be the nostrils. But, let`s see . . . if we take a little bit of skin from here,” he said, leaning over and touching the back of David`s left ear, ”we might do all right.”
It was time to leave, and David turned to the doctor and politely, hesitantly said:
”Doctor, may I ask one more question?”
It was a solemn moment. His mother looked at him with pride, and relief:
A mantle had been passed. David was taking charge of his medical destiny.
The doctor hunched forward. ”You can ask as many questions as you want.”
David cleared his throat and shifted in his seat.
”Can I eat French fries?”
+ + +
The night shift. Children`s Hospital. Miami.
”Sit still, Jeremy, sit still.”
The nurse is gently holding the child, coaxing him to take medicine from a dropper she inserts in his mouth.
”That`s a good boy.”
Her voice is a continuous exhortation with one goal in mind: the alleviation of his suffering. He has a condition known as failure to thrive. At the age of 2 he weighs less than 20 pounds. He is bones and eyes.
The nurse, glowing with purpose, in white slacks and a loose white sweater, glides on soft shoes from one room to the next: For Jonathan there is insulin, for April an adjustment of the complex tubes providing her with nourishment, for another child, who is sleeping, a simple touch of the hair.
Four years ago Sandy Montalvo entered nursing school. She received her accreditation this spring.
For a while she had thought about becoming a recreational therapist.
”That`s someone who plays with the kids at the hospital. When David was little, I remembered those places as the one place where I felt peace. But at the time there were a lot of federal cutbacks for that type of program.”
The decision to become a nurse was the decision ”to do something for myself.”
An accident forced upon her a professional`s familiarity with medicine and hospitals and children who are ill. By going to school, she made it formal. Now her knowledge is recognized, in the uniform and the respect and the salary. She loves her work.
”I wanted to do for other people the same kinds of things I was getting from the nurses when I brought David to the hospital.”
She starts work at midnight, and it is now almost 8 in the morning, time to punch out.
But before leaving, she must brief the incoming nurses on the patient load. She has a folder, which she flips through. The technical language rolls off her tongue, a code she speaks with fluency and comfort: Vital signs are stable, afebrile, DV.2; 50 cc. an hour; the tent is functioning well.
She comes to one more patient, a little girl.
She wants to explain that the child isn`t docile. She squirms during shots. Only someone who knows Sandy`s history might wonder about a connection between the description of the patient and a description of herself, and detect the note of admiration in her voice:
”She`s a real fighter.”
+ + +
I wonder,” said Cecilia, as she sat beside her brother at the Department of Motor Vehicles licensing station one July day, ”if Mom and Dad will take us out to dinner if you get it.”
”Will you quit saying that?” David replied.
”Saying what?”
”If you get it.”
The process of obtaining his driver`s permit took David 5 1/2 hours, but to him every minute was weighted with tension and theater. Cecilia kept fidgeting and telling David, ”This is the most boringest thing in the world,” to which her mother replied, ”I`ll remind you you said that when it`s your turn to get your license.”
At least part of the time was spent racing around town to obtain forgotten documents. They discovered upon arrival that the licensing people require two forms of identification, so David`s mother drove home and got three; school records, a birth certificate and a copy of the 1974 court order making David the adopted son of Rafael Montalvo. She has fought insurance companies for 16 years to get David`s operations covered. (”This isn`t just plastic surgery. This is survival.”) Getting three instead of two was instinctive: She is used to the vagaries of bureaucracies, the sudden introduction of new rules.
During the first two hours of waiting David kept checking his wallet to make sure he had enough money; his mother had made it clear that the cost of a license was his responsibility. He kept showing Cecilia the spot in his wallet he had taken care to clear for the license if the day proved to be a success. ”Wait: Not if, when. Cecilia, I really mean it. Don`t say `if you get it`
anymore.”
It took David about 20 minutes to finish the test.
He stood by while the examiner corrected it.
She looked up and said something, and the significance of his smile was unmistakable.
”So far so good,” he said to Cecilia.
He asked the examiner if he could keep his copy of the test as a souvenir, but she politely explained that it was against the law.
Next, the eyes.
He was asked to look, close up, and identify some letters in a machine. The examiner made a face, indicating displeasure. She turned to the tall, gangly boy, fragile and thin in a muscle shirt that revealed few muscles, his CAT cap with the Jack Daniels insignia, hiding his face. ”That`s the best you can do?”
An hour and a half later, after an emergency visit to an opthamologist, David presented a form saying just that.
She stared and squinted and seemed to pore over every squiggle in the fine print.
David kept brushing the back of his hair with his hands in one of those useless adolescent campaigns to defeat nature, in this case to tame what is clearly a beautiful and natural curl.
”This is restricted to daylight hours,” said the examiner.
It was, for David, better than nothing.
He grinned in ecstasy and entertained the delicious fantasy of going home, the proud possessor of this magical plastic rectangle and finding his friend Jimmy and ”really smearing it in his face.”
+ + +
Time to wait in line for the chance to pose for the official photo.
”Mom, do I look all right?” he said, pressing his hair flat.
”David, you look fine.”
And then she paused as if to curb her tongue, but in the end could not resist issuing one of those maternal edicts: ”You know, I don`t know why you keep combing your hair down like that. It would look great all curly.”
”I don`t,” said David, his patience obviously taxed, his voice lowered so as to reduce the public nature of the discussion, ”like curls.”
He was summoned for the official photo and instructed to remove his hat and his eyeglasses, both of which provide proportion and symmetry to his face, and without which the scars and misshapen parts take on a cruel prominence.
”Can`t I at least wear my glasses?”
”Sorry,” said the examiner. ”Gotta see the eyes. That`s the rule.”
Then David had to wait to see whether the picture turned out all
right.
He was summoned once again to the counter, and with a routine casualness that did a disservice to the meaning of the moment, the examiner handed David down his license.
David turned toward his mother and Cecilia and made a thumbs-up gesture.
”Oh, Mom. Look, they gave it to him,” shouted Cecilia. ”He passed. He passed.” And then, with the peculiar tenacity of an 11-year-old, she revived the subject of the evening`s repast. ”Please, Mom, please.”
”But I went to the grocery store last night and I`m going to make meatloaf.”
”Oh, Mom, I`m just not in the mood for that. Why can`t we take David to his favorite restaurant. Why can`t we go to the Red Lobster?”
Her mother looked doubtful. ”We`ll have to see what your father says.”
On the way home David kept opening and closing his wallet and scrutinizing the license. He said he didn`t like the picture very much. Nobody likes the picture on their license, his mother said.
”I hate mine.”
”It`s not the picture,” she said, ”it`s the status.”
”David,” said Cecilia, ”I have a question.”
Her voice was lofty with fake objectivity, as if the inquiry were utterly idle and not designed to recruit him in the insurrection she hoped to stir.
”What would you rather have for dinner tonight? Meatloaf,” she said in a low, drab, meatloaf sort of voice, ”or,” and here the voice was coy and musical, light and lilting, ”would you like to go out and. . . celebrate?”
”If there has been any benefit to having a child like David. . . ” his mother started to say, and then she paused.
”Benefit is an odd word. What I mean is. . .”
She paused again, and then seemed to change the subject.
”Let me tell you something that happened while we were on vacation. We were at the beach and there was a man there who had cerebral palsy and he had it bad. He moved in this tangled way, and you could see how much effort it took. He was with his wife and a toddler and a newborn baby. I could hear other people commenting on him. `Don`t you feel sorry for someone like that?` and `That looks awful!` I was thinking: People who have everything, people who are used to having everything work, have no idea of the adjustments a man like that has to make.
”He took his family to the beach!
”The beach is not the most comfortable place in the world, all that sand and sun and heat and oil, and still he was able to enjoy his life. It`s incredible, that people have the gift for this, the energy. The will.”
The dream that plagued David`s mother in the days and nights following her son`s birth, in as much detail as she can summon:
”I would dream they put the baby in a garbage can, one of those big ones you put on the sidewalk for the garbagemen to take, and it had a black plastic bag inside and they put a top over it. I would be looking for the baby and couldn`t find him. After I had looked everywhere, I would lift the top off the can and there he was. I never saw the baby`s face when I opened the can, I just saw a hole. I would wake up screaming, `You have to take the baby out of the can!` ”
Awards Day. Part Two. Lingles School. After an end-of-the-year banquet consisting of hot dogs and chocolate cake consumed with great haste, the students reconvened in the school library for the final formal ceremony of the year. The paper awards had all been bestowed; now it was the big time, now it was the trophies.
When Mr. Lingles stood before them and said that he was now going to make his final award, chastened silence reigned.
The break had a calming effect, and even the bullying swagger of the older boys earlier in the day had given way to a different mood: Paying attention was their way of showing sentiment.
”I have one more award, but before I tell you who it is for and why this student is receiving it, I want you to take a good look at the muscleman on top.”
He held high the last trophy. He was careful to cup his hand over the part of the pedestal engraved with the name of the recipient.
It goes to a student who has done a lot more growing in a short amount of time than a lot of us will ever do, someone who was born with something they could not control but they had to live with and overcome.
”Some of you have given this student a pretty hard time.
”You`ve taken his book bag and hidden it.
”He has taken more guff and teasing and insults than anyone should ever have to take from anybody.”
The principal paused, he looked directly at the 9th-grade boys in the two back rows, and gave them each, one by one, a level gaze for what seemed like a very long moment.
”Some of you have helped him simply by being you.”
Then one of the boys spoke back. His voice was clear and low and filled with something that sounded remarkably like deference. The others looked at him with approval, and he seemed to represent the whole group when he said, so everyone in the room could hear, ”All right, David Montalvo. Come up and get your award,” and the headmaster nodded in the direction of David, who slowly stood and walked toward the podium.
In one hand he gripped the trophy, and with the other he shook the hand of the headmaster, finally turning so everyone could see his prize, and at that moment applause began to fill the room, following David as he moved down a corridor into the school parking lot, where he was surrounded by students who wanted to congratulate him, including girls, some of whom were blond, with personality. And as he left Lingles School for the last time, starting on the walk home, he thought to himself how his mom was really going to like this, and there was about him a jauntiness, a bounce to his step, that teenager`s conviction that life is as light as sneakers, and every now and then the sun would catch the shiny part, the part with the engraving, which David couldn`t help reading over and over again, and he didn`t even care if it was corny; it was better than being called E.T., or Stubs, or Zipperface:
David Montalvo.
Mr. Courage.
