America's Report Card: A Novel - Hardcover

From Part One

The Test

1995

Without fail they arrive every year. Dozens of men in black suits unfurl themselves from white panel vans parked in front of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Grade School. The mornings they arrive are usually overcast, sometimes rainy -- typical fall weather for this southwest Chicago suburb. There are five men to a van, and each man carries a heavy box into the school. Together, they wait in the lobby for the principal to greet them. These men are test administrators sent by the United States government, and they will spend the entire day here, distributing thick booklets and then, every half-hour or hour, imparting new information for yet another test. These tests, which will be evaluated at secret locations across the nation, will reveal critical information about the education of our country's children. How, for instance, does one state stack up against another state? How do entire regions of the country compare to other regions? How are our country's children doing this year compared to four years ago? This test is America's Report Card -- a massive, ongoing project that costs millions, if not billions, of dollars. What's at stake is the nation's future.

And this is exactly what Jainey O'Sullivan's third-grade teacher, Mrs. Rutkowski, has told her students: that if they don't do well on the test, the Russians will take over, and if not the Russians, then the Chinese. If they think life is tough now, just wait until the Chinese take over. When the Chinese take over, Mrs. Rutkowski says, there will be no more Art class, no more Music, nothing fun, and all of the boys will have to join the Army. "No more cheeseburgers," she says. "No more pizza." Furthermore, they will no longer be allowed to speak English. They will have to learn a new language or suffer the consequences. Have they ever heard Chinese or Russian spoken? It's no cakewalk, she tells them. It's no day in the park.

Jainey sits quietly at her desk, ten perfectly sharpened Number 2 pencils lined before her. Her palms are as moist as her tongue. Jainey watches a lot of reruns on TV with her father, and the men who come to her school remind her of the men on Dragnet. This year, the man assigned to her classroom, who looks like the man who came to her second-grade classroom last year (and who could very well be the same man, for all Jainey knows), heaves his heavy box onto Mrs. Rutkowski's desk. He tells the students that they should relax, that there are no winners or losers, but how can Jainey relax, knowing that if she gives the wrong answer, the Russians or the Chinese will bomb the country and take over? Furthermore, the man in the black suit doesn't look relaxed himself. Beads of sweat appear on his forehead, and Jainey can smell his sour breath each time he walks by.

Jainey is a good student -- not the best student but better than most -- so why is it that she doesn't understand most of the questions on the test? The reading passages are too long to read within the time permitted. The questions for each reading passage are even more troublesome. Often, every answer seems to be right. For other questions, none of the answers appears correct. She can't remember if leaving the answer blank is better than filling in a bubble for something she clearly doesn't know. The Math test is even harder. Nothing looks familiar except for the numbers themselves. Why are there tiny numbers sitting on the shoulders of larger numbers? Why are there letters where there should be numbers? Jainey is so angry at her Math teacher for not teaching her what she needs to know that she breaks the tip of her pencil while filling in one of the bubbles.

Not until near the end of the day does she realize that she made a mistake early in the morning and has been filling in the wrong bubbles throughout the test. For question number eight, she has filled in bubble number nine. For question number nine, bubble number ten. For ten, eleven. For eleven, twelve. And so on. By now, only thirty minutes before the end of the school day, she has incorrectly filled in hundreds of bubbles.

Jainey tries erasing her filled-in bubbles, but she realizes that this is a futile task, that this would mean retaking the entire test, which she began at eight-thirty this morning. She flips through the thick booklet, turning back to tests that she has been warned not to look at anymore. She needs to look at those sections, though, to see where she made her first mistake. Where? Where? The pressure inside her head builds, as if her eyes are being gently squeezed between forefingers and thumbs, but she manages to keep most of her tears at bay. Still, her vision blurs over, and her ability to concentrate surges, going in and out, everything swirling, a sensation not unlike being tossed head-first into the deep end of a pool on a moonless night.

She is not sure when they came over, but here they are, Mrs. Rutkowski and the test administrator, both staring down at her. Jainey's hands are smeared with lead. Her test booklet is open to the first test. Half of her pencils are on the floor. But all Jainey can think about are the Russians and Chinese, bombs whistling down from warplanes, life as she's known it coming to an end, everything new and awful about to begin, and all of it is her fault.

Spring 2004

After finishing his master's degree, Charlie Wolf decided to remain in Iowa. Why not? He had no job, no prospects, nothing lined up. It wasn't uncommon in university towns to find such people -- students or visiting professors who arrive for what should be a finite period of time but then stay on an extra year, an extra two years, sometimes never leaving at all. Often, these were the same people who, upon their arrival from New York or San Francisco, found the locals too provincial, the selections of restaurants and bookstores frighteningly limited, the landscape flat, depressingly spare. But then something would happen. They'd fall into the rhythms of life in a small prairie town, slowly warming to it all, only to wake up one day and realize that fifteen years had come and gone, and here they still were: Iowa! Of all places!

Well, Charlie wasn't going to be one of them -- he wouldn't be here fifteen years from now -- but what was wrong with hanging out for a year? Or two? Besides, his girlfriend didn't have any plans, either. They could get part-time jobs. They could continue spending lazy afternoons on the couch watching B movies. They could do what they did best -- loaf. It would be a much-needed break -- a break from everything -- before diving back into the uncertain murk and sludge of real life. And what was wrong with that? At twenty-three years old, their entire lives were ahead of them.

Iowa City was a town full of large, drafty turn-of-the-century houses, and Charlie lived in a rambling Victorian that had been divided into twelve apartments. You could rent a room barely large enough for a futon and a coffee table, or you could rent a three-bedroom with bay windows and a roaring fireplace surrounded by a marble mantle. Charlie's apartment fell somewhere in between -- one bedroom but no fireplace, a small kitchen but no dishwasher, a claw-footed tub but no shower. He liked its shoddy charm, the pocked hardwood floors, the spiderwebbed cracks along the ceiling, the way the faucets creaked when he turned them on or off. It was exactly how he'd fantasized life would be in graduate school, a kind of shambling, just-above-the-poverty-line existence, a world where the life of the mind overshadowed everything else.

And Petra was exactly the sort of girlfriend he'd always hoped for. Some days he wondered if he had conjured her out of the muggy Iowa air, this pale, dark-haired daughter of Russian immigrants, this feisty and beautiful young woman who could quote Gorky without blinking, but who also knew verbatim entire episodes of Hogan's Heroes, who at parties smoked cigars and drank vodka straight from the bottle, glug-glugging two or three shots' worth, who had taught Charlie a thing or two in bed ("No, no, twist your hip to the right and put your left foot right there, yes, right there!"), and who, wearing her father's tall fur cap, the kind of cap that Siberian soldiers wear, inspired everyone in a bar or a restaurant or a movie theater to turn and smile, an entire room full of men and women falling instantly in love with this girl they'd never before seen. Petra Petrovich. It was as though she'd stepped from the pages of a thick Signet-edition classic, a Russian character in full bloom, smelling of cold, frosty air and, faintly, of brittle pages from a mildewing book. Petra Petrovich. He whispered her name into her ear, over and over, and on those nights she didn't spend with him, he whispered her name alone, again and again, until he fell headlong into the knotted fist of his own unconsciousness, into a sleep so strange and woolly, he often woke up sweating and out of breath, the too-bright sun punching through the mini-blinds, the new day already begun.

Jainey O'Sullivan, seventeen years old and a senior at Reavis High School in the southwest Chicago suburb of Burbank, had been hearing about America's Report Card all year long, but what her teachers failed to understand was that none of her classmates gave two shits about the test. There was too much else going on in everyone's lives right now. In the past few years alone, Jainey's body had gotten hairier, she'd grown nearly a foot taller, her voice became weirder, more cartoonish, she was having to buy, along with her boxes of tampons, condoms at Walgreen's from the old guy with liver-spotted hands and a huge spongy nose, her shoes never fit anymore, she dyed her hair new colors, like purple and green, her body gave off odors that were sometimes interestingly foreign and sometimes outright revolting, pimples appeared on her face like thugs crouching in a dark alley, jumping out of nowhere and scaring the piss r...