Free Liberty Street by Dianne Warren Page A

hardly think ‘slow learner’ is the right term. What are the teacher’s qualifications for making an assessment like that? (A pause, listening.) Well, yes, we do know that . . . she’s an only child, remember? . . . yes, I know she has trouble paying attention. (Another pause.) A psychologist? Really? I hardly think that’s necessary. (Long pause.) Well, at least he sounds more qualified than your teacher—or you, for that matter. I will agree, yes, but for no other reason than to prove you wrong.”
    â€œWho was that?” Frances asks as she hangs her coat on a hook by the door, even though she’s guessed it was the principal.
    â€œJust some divvy,” her mother says. “Never mind.”
    Ha ha. Frances knows what a divvy is. An idiot. Her mother has just called the principal an idiot.
    On the day of her appointment with an educational psychologist who is making his rounds of the rural schools, Franceswears new brown corduroy pants and a blue sweater with buttons. She likes the blue sweater and agrees now with her mother that blue looks good with her red hair. It would look better still, she thinks, if she had her new front teeth. She worries every day that they won’t grow back, and that she will have no teeth all her life. No other kids in her class have had to have all their teeth pulled. Why her?
    Once she gets to school, she doesn’t have to wait long before the teacher takes her to the principal’s office and introduces her to Doctor Somebody-or-other. Not a medical doctor, he explains to Frances—not someone you go to with measles or chicken pox—but a different kind of doctor. He sits with her at a child-size table looking funny because his knees are almost up to his chin. He has a briefcase with papers and pencils in it, and he tells Frances that she’s lucky because she has been chosen to play a few special games with him. He gets out some activity papers that require her to match shapes and do things with numbers, which she is happy to do—very happy, because now she’s in a quiet room, just her and this doctor.
    After she’s done, he says, “Now, Frances, your teacher tells me that you are reluctant to talk in class. I’m going to ask you some questions about school, and I hope you will try to answer them. Is that all right?” She nods. He begins to ask his questions and she practically explodes with talking: the teacher is nice, the other students aren’t very, she doesn’t like being called Looney-Moony, she likes swimming and knows how to do the dead man’s float, she’d like to know how it feels to be a fish, she wishes her teeth would grow in, her mother sings with the radio even though she sounds like a frog, her father might go blind someday.
    â€œThank you, Frances,” the doctor says when she seems to be done. “Do you have any questions you would like to ask me?”
    She tells him about Uncle Vince dropping dead in front of the post office and asks him if he knew that could happen— bango —dead as a doornail and lying on top of a letter from his girlfriend in England.
    â€œAnd I wonder,” she says, “does Uncle Vince, even though he’s dead, know that Bertie’s going to marry someone else? And is Uncle Vince still wishing, even though he’s dead, that he’d waited to keel over until after he’d opened the letter so he could see what was in it? Or once you’re dead, can you read right through the envelope? Is that possible? Even though you’re in the ground?”
    â€œWhat do you think was in the letter?” the doctor asks.
    â€œI don’t know for sure,” Frances says. “But here’s something else I wonder: Do people write their letters with accents? The way they speak. Do they write that way?”
    The doctor studies her and Frances wants to drop her eyes, but she doesn’t. She looks right back at him. He places