Beauty. Occasionally, on those nights when we were all reading together,
a train would thunder by, shaking the house and rattling the windows.
The noise was thunderous, but after we'd been there a while, we didn't
even hear it.
MOM AND DAD enrolled us in the Mary S. Black Elementary School, a
long, low building with an asphalt playground that turned gooey in the
hot sun. My second-grade class was filled with the children of miners
and gamblers, scabby-kneed and dusty from playing in the desert, with
uneven home-scissored bangs. Our teacher, Miss Page, was a small,
pinched woman, given to sudden rages and savage thrashings with her
ruler.
Mom and Dad had already taught me nearly everything Miss Page was
teaching the class. Since I wanted the other kids to like me, I didn't raise
my hand all the time the way I had in Blythe. Dad accused me of
coasting. Sometimes he made me do my arithmetic homework in binary
numbers because he said I needed to be challenged. Before class, I'd
have to recopy it into Arabic numbers, but one day I didn't have time, so
I turned in the assignment in its binary version.
"What's this?" Miss Page asked. She pressed her lips together as she
studied the circles and lines that covered my paper, then looked up at me
suspiciously. "Is this a joke?"
I tried to explain to her about binary numbers, and how they were the
system that computers used and how Dad said they were far superior to
other numeric systems. Miss Page stared at me.
"It wasn't the assignment," she said impatiently. She made me stay late
and redo the homework. I didn't tell Dad, because I knew he'd come to
school to debate Miss Page about the virtues of various numeric systems.