Cheating Lessons

Book by Cappo Nan Willard

Chapter One

Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser.

-- Knute Rockne

Bernadette Terrell came home from school and caught her mother snooping in her room.

It was an accidental bust. Bernadette got home at 3:30, her usual time, wolfed down a handful of cookies, then headed upstairs to drop her backpack on her desk the way she did every afternoon. She knew it was her mother's day off because the old Suburban stood in the driveway, and overhead the vacuum cleaner droned.

As she reached the stairs, the roar of the vacuum stopped. Thick carpet deadened her footsteps in the sixteen seconds it took her to climb the stairs and cross the hall to her room, which today smelled faintly of Lemon Pledge. Martha Terrell had her back to the door and was busy reading the application essay Bernadette planned to customize for every college on her list.

Bernadette's eyes narrowed. Her room was always the cleanest in the house, through no choice of hers. She gave her mother five seconds to get more deeply incriminated before she said softly, "I'm home."

Only a guilty person would have screeched like that. Pages scattered as her mother collapsed into the desk chair.

"Bernadette Terrell, are you trying to give me a heart attack?" Martha patted her blouse in the general vicinity of her left breast. "What were you thinking?"

Bernadette let her backpack thud to the floor. "I'm thinking you should stop spying on me."

"I was not spying, I was cleaning. If your papers are so terribly confidential you shouldn't leave them lying around in plain sight." Martha abandoned her haughty tone. "You aren't really going to send this, are you?"

"What's wrong with it?"

Martha picked up the pages around her feet. "Well, let's see. 'The entire Pinehurst case was a stinking mess of half-truths and distortions. They gave us a rookie debate judge who thought "negative" was a blood type. She claimed the first affirmative had an appealing speaking manner, but I thought he sounded like a Hitler Youth.'" Martha's eyebrows lifted almost to her hairline. "What's wrong with it? It's too harsh, that's what. I'm not saying you shouldn't write about debate -- I know you love it, and God knows you're good at it." She flicked a hand at the tops of the bookcases lined with plaques and trophies. "But you're not debating here."

Bernadette moved a stack of folded laundry off the bed and sat down. She was one of the five best high school debaters in Michigan. This did not impress her mother, with whom she had yet to win an argument. "Our guidance counselor said we should let our personalities shine through."

Her mother threw up her hands. "Of course! But not your true personality. God bless us! I know you hate Pine-hurst, I know you can't stand to lose at anything, but ranting about it on paper isn't very attractive." She pointed a finger at Bernadette. "You catch more flies with a teaspoon of honey than a gallon full of vinegar."

"I don't want flies."

"Colleges, then." Martha leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. "If your own mother won't tell you the truth, who will? And the truth is, sweetheart" -- she sighed here, as if a terrible secret were being dragged from her -- "you are too critical. Your father and I are worried about it."

Bernadette gave a gasp of part outrage, part grudging admiration at her mother's nerve. She was too critical? If that wasn't the pot calling the kettle black, as Martha herself liked to say. And Bernadette's father thought she was perfect -- he often told her so.

"You are. Of everyone. If a person can't spell every little word perfectly, or doesn't realize you're quoting poetry -- and they better get the poet right if they know what's good for them -- you write them off. You treat them like, I don't know what, servants -- on probation."

Bernadette lay back and pulled her pillow over her head. "I'm not listening," she said into its comforting softness. But her mother's words thumped through like the roar of a distant waterfall.

"People pick up on that. They might not say anything, but they notice. Just look at you this minute. You can dish it out, but you can't take it. And then you wonder why you don't have more friends!"

This stung Bernadette into lifting the pillow. "I don't need a lot of friends. I have Nadine." She wished, as she often did, that life was conducted more like a debate, with flow sheets and rules, timekeepers with stopwatches, and judges who punished illogic with low scores -- preferably branded on the losers' foreheads.

"Nadine is like your father and me, honey -- she's been your debate partner so long, she overlooks your faults. What if she moves away, or meets some boy? Hmmm? Then where will you be?"

"At Vassar. On full scholarship."

"Not with this essay."

There followed a pause so long, Bernadette peeked out from under the pillow. Her mother's eyes were half-closed as she continued reading, and she had her lips pursed up and out in what Bernadette called (to herself) her "contemplative trout" face. Suddenly Martha gasped, and Bernadette braced herself. Her mother had reached the last paragraph. "My greatest accomplishment at this stage of my life will be to beat Pinehurst Academy in debate. They say character comes with defeat. I intend to help Pinehurst develop as much soul-building character as I can."

Martha lowered the paper.

"Mr. Malory says I write with ease and imagination," Bernadette blurted.

"Does he." Martha's puckered lips stuck out still farther, as though she did not share the opinion of the best teacher ever hired by Wickham High.

Bernadette sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. "You like Mr. Malory. You told Dad it was high time Wickham got a teacher who would push the kids."

This hit home, she saw. She'd watched her mother at Open House. Martha's skeptical face had said plainer than plain, oh, come on, a handsome, single young man, in a classroom with teenaged girls, what was the principal thinking? and then Mr. Malory came over and shook her hand and commended her on raising such a marvelously questioning student as Bernadette. "She sets the whole room thinking, it's really quite helpful," he'd said, in the upper-class British accent that reminded Martha, as she confessed later, of Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, and after that it was all right. Mr. Malory was an O.O.O., one of ours, a Bernadette supporter.

Now Martha said "hmmmm," which was as close as she ever came to admitting Bernadette might have a point, and turned in her chair to study the wall over the desk. Sooner or later everyone did that. Burlap-covered fiberboard stretched from desk to ceiling. Her father had helped Bernadette carry it up from the basement last October. Pushpins impaled more than a hundred three-by-five-inch index cards on an expanse of blue burlap, each containing a single sentence or paragraph printed in meticulous black fine-tip felt pen. It was a quote-board, Bernadette explained, like the one in Mr. Malory's classroom. It hung between ceiling-high bookcases crammed with books, as though the authors had cried out a few of their favorite sentences for special notice.

"We didn't have those in secretarial school," Martha had commented, but not as though she minded, for afterward they heard her on the kitchen phone telling her sister-in-law in Cleveland about it, the pride behind "Did your boys ever do anything like that, Cynthia?" as obvious as an elephant to Bernadette and her father, who exchanged knowing smiles.

Suddenly Martha sniffed as though she'd spotted a quotation she didn't believe for a New York minute. "Speaking of Mr. Malory, why don't you show this essay to him and see what he thinks? Since he's so educated and I barely finished high school."

"Maybe I will."

Martha rose to her full height of five feet eleven inches. With the briskness that characterized her movements and her judgments, she briskly wound up the vacuum cleaner cord. "We're having lasagna for dinner," she announced as she trundled the vacuum out into the hall, "and coconut cream pie."

The vacuum thumped down the stairs.

Bernadette's mulish look changed to one of interest. Lasagna and coconut cream pie happened to be what she'd order for her final meal, even if they were the frozen kind. Which these would be. In spite of having received last Christmas the latest edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook (Bernadette had even sprung for hardback), Martha had not made lasagna from scratch since the last neighborhood wake.

During countless phone calls, when they were not settling the finer points of immigration law for debate or arguing the exact color of Mr. Malory's eyes, Bernadette and Nadine sometimes touched on Bernadette's mother's job. She was the office manager of a family counseling clinic. Nadine insisted that Mrs. Terrell saw so many dysfunctional teenagers all day at work, she probably felt guilty because her own daughter was so beautifully adjusted. No drugs, no pregnancies, no suicide attempts. "Maybe," Bernadette said doubtfully. "But she sure keeps looking. I make president of the National Honor Society and she checks my arms for needle marks."

Now, stretched out on her comforter, Bernadette stared up at the ceiling. Too critical, her foot. Suddenly she scrambled off the bed. From under her desk blotter she slid out a plain white envelope and reverently unfolded a closely typed sheet. Mr. Malory had given her a copy of the college recommendation he'd written. She would not actually mail her first application for four months -- she had to wait for her junior grades -- but Bernadette believed in thorough preparations.

"Ms. Bernadette Terrell is a quietly tough-minded, intelligent young woman." She liked that: tough-minded.

She could have recited the rest: "...work that is consistently superior...displays an intellectual curiosity...most refreshing...." Ah, here it was: "Both in her writing and her class participation, Ms. Terrell is courteous and fair, though she will criticize in an honest and forthright manner when she feels it is deserved. She sets a high standard for herself and for others -- a challenge that will make her a stimulating presence in any classroom."

She sighed happily. Take that, Martha Terrell. Her gaze traveled over the quote-board, and she played the tranquilizing game of letting a random quotation inspire her.

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true;

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

Bernadette read it out loud, but it was her teacher's voice she heard, as though he and not Yeats had written the words -- for her. She shivered.

A card on the far edge of the board made her frown, and she clambered onto the desk to see better. That was not her writing. "Before honor comes humility. -- Book of Proverbs." Bernadette stared at the firm, nun-taught penmanship, then at the doorway through which the vacuum cleaner had exited. The gall of some people. She unpinned the card and dropped it in the wastebasket.

Paper crumpled. She was kneeling on her college essay. She sat down and considered it one more time. Perhaps the wording was a tad strong for debate-impaired admissions officers.

She crossed out "Hitler Youth." In a tough-minded, forthright manner she drew a little caret above it and printed "smug, arrogant rich kid."

She could too take criticism.

Copyright © 2002 by Nan Willard Cappo