Matthew Pullar
The Pencil Test
The question “to bra or not to bra” can be easily answered if the undecided woman will apply this test to herself. Take an ordinary woodcase pencil…
~ Response to Ann Landers’ column, from “One Who Flunked” (1971)
1.
You never got your pen license. Moving interstate at age eleven, you skipped the transition from primary to secondary, that formative leap from childhood to teenage years signalled educationally by the permission to write in pen. Instead, you woke up one day allowed, without any test of penmanship, to use ink for all your work, yet ill-equipped for this world of adult certainties in which even maths calculations need not be done in pencil. When you found yourself, much older, lost in pages of first-principals-of-calculus, you felt, even then, that a pencil would have been handy. But when you write stories, you delight in the permanence of pen. Always before this point, your stories felt childish, etched in tentative graphite, like mistakes that could easily be forgotten or lost. Now, you feel, your writing can last. Now, you feel, your words have weight,
though biro ink, you later suspect, might be much less hardy than carbon, much less fundamental to life in all its forms.
2.
One day, now a teacher, you hear a student speak on beauty standards, and this is the first time you hear of thigh gaps. Girls, the student shares, are taught early by their peers to place a pencil between their thighs.
The pencil stays: lose weight.
The pencil falls: beauty.
It reminds you of a film you saw once, a teen comedy, in which girls squeezed pencils between their breasts to see if they needed bras. You Google to fact-check: the real test, you learn, places the pencil beneath the breast, not between. But even further down you see plastic surgeons tout the test as a measure of pertness, lasting beauty. You have nothing, as you see unfold this sequence of ever-increasing pencil tests set before the girls you teach.
What can you do, but
snap the pencils in half, and give them all
computers?
3.
At dinner one night you talk with your eight-year-old scientist about the toxic elements that once snuck inside our everyday lives, hidden in everyday things:
arsenic in paint, mercury in hats, lead in petrol and pencils.
You tell him of your classmate who
used to chew his pencil and
one day slipped, cutting his cheek,
how fearful you were that he
would die until
your parents assured you: the
“lead” in the pencil’s name misled.
Only, in truth, graphite.
“I know,” says your son. “Pencils are basically made of diamonds.” If, he proclaims, you put a pencil under enough pressure it would turn into a diamond. And so, for that matter, would any organic life, when pressed hard enough. Fruit, vegetables. All could, in the end, yield diamonds of their carbon. Even, you must admit, could we.
And you remember Katherine Johnson,
scratching away with
her pencil and slide-rule, a
“human computer” when
“computers wore skirts”; how
her penciled calculations sent
humans to the moon
and back, her
pencil charting
the way to heaven.
So much constraint.
So much squeezed into such compact space.
So much produced with pressure that
cannot be erased.
4.
An old wives’ tale:
a pencil dangled with string above
an expectant mother’s wrist reveals
the future child. The child’s future.
Dangle up and down: a boy.
Dangle left to right: a girl.
Your boys play around you.
The floor is their open universe,
open roof set before them, sky-limit lives.
But the floor too is lava and
exploding with pencils and textas
without lids. Where is
the eraser, to erase
the ill-charted lines
of lives set out from birth?
Broken pencil in hand, you
sketch some better lines: some
trajectory to a new kind of
heaven, some new kind of
earth.
The paper too is ripped.
Through the rip you see
a ceiling. A sky.
Stars and black, blank space,
revealing
unveiling
a hole in the leaden
prison we have
wrought.
5.
Your duties call.
Change demands another
working, straining day.