Teenage
Wasteland
by Anne Tyler
H
e used to have very blond hair-almost white-cut shorter
than other children's so that on his crown a little cowlick al-
ways stood up to catch the light. But this was when he was
small. As he grew older, his hair grew darker, and he wore it
longer-past his collar even. It hung in lank, taffy-colored ropes around
his face, which was still an endearing face, fine-featured, the eyes an un-
usual aqua blue. But his cheeks, of course, were no longer round, and a
sharp new Adam's apple jogged in his throat when he talked.
In October, they called from the private school he attended to request
a conference with his parents. Daisy went alone; her husband was at work.
Clutching her purse, she sat on the principal's couch and learned that
Donny was noisy, lazy, and disruptive; always fooling around with his
friends, and he wouldn't respond in class.
In the past, before her children were born, Daisy had been a fourth
grade teacher. It shamed her now to sit before this principal as a parent,
a delinquent parent, a parent who struck Mr. Lanham, no doubt, as un-
seeing or uncaring. "It isn't that we're not concerned," she said. "Both of
us are. And we've done what we could, whatever we could think of. We
don't let him watch TV on school nights. We don't let him talk on the
phone till he's finished his homework. But he tells us he doesn't have any
homework or he did it all in study hall. How are we to know what to
believe?"
From early October through November, at Mr. Lanham's suggestion,
Daisy checked Donny's assignments every day. She sat next to him as he
worked, trying to be encouraging, sagging inwardly as she saw the poor
quality of everything he did--the sloppy mistakes in math, the illogical
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