Portable Childhoods Read online

  “Watch!” she says before I can even ask. She picks up an abbreviated deck, maybe twenty cards in it, and with a flair that would make Doc Holliday proud, shuffles it expertly and arches it into a bridge that riffles like the wind.

  “That’s great. I’m impressed.”

  “Yeah, isn’t it cool?” she says.

  She’s beaming, grinning from ear to ear. And I decide to keep her.

  4 Cursive

  The child has a paper due for school on Monday. It has to be two pages long, all written in cursive. They’re studying cursive this year, what we used to call script, and the word has come down from on high that printing is only for babies, not big boys and girls. I doubt that Ms. Whiteman phrases it just like that, but that’s the message.

  It’s not true, of course. Part of the path to being a grown-up is figuring out your own handwriting. The days of Spencerian penmanship and the Palmer Method are long gone. My own handwriting is semi-legible on good days—a mix of printed letters and some connected loops that are not really cursive, not the nicely rounded, beautifully connected shapes that ran across the top of the blackboard on long manila strips. It’s also full of a fair number of odd, personal shorthand symbols that even I can’t always translate out of context.

  If someone were to blow up bits of my journal and put them on an overhead projector and ask a room full of people to decipher them, the guesses would be random and amusing. I doubt if many of them would be correct.

  I think, if I put my mind to it, I could probably eke out an entire page in proper, fourth-grade cursive. It would look very much like hers. Mine hasn’t changed much since I was nine. I don’t use it. Don’t practice that particular art form. It’s never necessary, and mostly I type. When I have to write a note that I want someone to understand, I print.

  I want to explain this to the child, how, once you’re out of school no one—really, no one—cares whether you can write cursive. Because you’ll either never write much again, except for filling out forms (where you’re required to print neatly in the little boxes), or you’ll learn to type.

  But this is not a truth about the world that Jackson Elementary is ready to have its fourth-graders know. Neither is the fact that no non-teacher adult ever writes a capital Q in cursive. It looks like a mutant 2. Avoid it, I tell her. Just don’t write sentences that start with a Q.

  I think she appreciates the support. But she’s also seen my chicken scratches, has been decoding my grocery lists and scribbled phone messages since she’s been able to read. So she knows full well that I have never been a member of the Illustrious Handwriting Guild.

  She is just getting to the age where she believes that she has abilities and knowledge that are far superior to mine, and has taken to giving me pitying looks now and then. When she is in full cursive mode, every glance at my handwriting is withering.

  She’s sitting at the kitchen table now, a stack of blank notebook paper in front of her. Wide-lined, of course. No one in their right mind does a two-page paper on narrow-ruled paper. More lines. More words. More work.

  Her paper is on spelunking. It’s a nice big word, and she gets to spend about six lines defining it, on the off chance that her teacher doesn’t know it. Doubtful, but possible. Ms. Whiteman strikes me as one of those pert, well-meaning women whose teaching credential is mostly a stopgap between college and being a mommy. It’s catty of me, but I’m underwhelmed by her pedagogy.

  I suspect the child is too, or she wouldn’t have told me about the word spelunking with such glee.

  She’s done her research—two different encyclopedias and an old issue of National Geographic—and has written out a first draft. The draft pages are scribbled, x’d-out hybrids of printing and cursive, a nascent version of what I suspect will turn out to be her actual handwriting.

  But that’s not good enough for the report, which is due Monday morning. Tomorrow morning. It’s now five o’clock on Sunday, and her bedtime is 8:30. She has not begun copying her first draft, turning it into the finished piece. She has topped off her root beer, and gotten a napkin, so that if the glass sweats she can dry her hands and not smear the ink. She has stacked her blank paper neatly three times, and gone to get another pen—just in case this one runs out in mid-sentence. It’s a clear blue Bic; we can both see that the barrel is full. She explains each trip in a flurry of self-justification.

  I know exactly what she’s doing. I’m a writer. I recognize the intensity of her procrastination. She’s at the sit-down-and-write part, the hard part, the butt-to-the-chair-until-it’s-done part. And there’s no getting around it. Deadline time.

  What’s worse is that Ms. Whiteman expects two pristine pages of unblotched penmanship. No cross-outs. The child has told me that twice. NO cross-outs. Not a single one. Which means that if she makes a mistake, she has to start over. The whole project is too daunting to even begin.

  So I tell her the secret. Do the first page. And when it’s done, put it in an envelope, a big one, where it will stay clean and unwrinkled and nothing can happen to it. Then you’ll deserve a dinner break. We’ll go to McDonald’s or Burger King, depending on which one has the better Happy Meal deal this week.

  And when we come back, half of it will be done. You can reward yourself again when the second page is safely tucked away. We’ll watch The Simpsons. Just take it one page at a time.

  But you’re out of slack, I tell her, rubbing her shoulders. You have to sit down and get that first page out of the way, right now. Because until you do, the task will get bigger and bigger and bigger. Trust me. I’m an old hand at putting things off until they’re almost impossible.

  5 School Picture

  Tomorrow is school picture day, the child informs me. She has a xeroxed sheet of instructions about what to wear—or not to wear. The guidelines haven’t changed much since I was in fourth grade. No white blouses, unless you have a colorful sweater or cardigan to wear over it.

  I’m not sure the child even owns a white blouse, the staple ritual garment of glee-club recitals and other group events of my childhood; everyone matched. White t-shirts were not okay. And at camp, for the council fire on Friday night—a white blouse and blue shorts and a red Camp Fire Girl tie. We would have been indistinguishable from a communist youth group, except for shouting Wo-He-Lo.

  The child’s school has a dress code so liberal that I’m sure my elementary school principal, Ralph M. Northenberg, would sneer and consider it no dress code at all. She can wear t-shirts, as long as they’re clean, in good repair, and have no advertising or offensive slogans on them. But she wore her Milk Duds t-shirt last week, and no one seemed to care, so I don’t pay much attention, as long as she leaves the house with shoes on.

  A school picture, however, requires a little more thought. “What are you thinking of wearing?”

  She shrugs. “What did you wear?”

  Seems irrelevant to me, the fashions of 1963 being somewhat out of date. “A red corduroy jumper and a white blouse.”

  She makes a face. “Sounds dorky. Can I see?”

  The album with all my school pictures in it is in the cupboard next to my desk. I bring it out and put it on the kitchen table. In most of the elementary pictures, I am wearing a dress or some sort of sleeveless jumper with a white blouse under it. Many of the garments are plaid.

  I think there was some sort of law in the late ’50s that required all female schoolchildren under the age of ten to have a wardrobe with a minimum of six plaid items. I remember a red Stewart tartan skirt that had straps with white buttons. They crossed at the back, making it hard, almost impossible, for me to dress myself without help. Today the only plaid item I own is a Black Watch comforter cover.

  The child has turned the album page to fourth grade. That year I had moved on to solid-color jumpers. Sure enough, this one is red corduroy, and yes, I’m wearing a short-sleeved white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. It would be a couple of years before I discovered Oxford-cloth button-downs, which I called shirts an
d my mother still called blouses.

  “That’s you? ”

  I nod and she shakes her head in disbelief. She cannot imagine me as her peer, any more than, as a child, I could imagine that my own mother had ever been nine.

  I’d seen pictures of my mother’s childhood too, but they were so overlaid with who she was in my reality that the best I could do was imagine a very small woman who wore her hair in sausage curls but also drank scotch on the rocks when the sun was “over the yardarm.”

  “Did your mom make you wear that?” She’s heard enough stories about my mother, who died before the child’s conception, to know that her young life and mine were under very different managements.

  “She had final approval.”

  “So what do you think I should wear tomorrow?”

  Hmm. This may or may not be a loaded question. “Depends. What look are you going for?”

  She wrinkles her face in confusion. “What do you mean?”

  “There are probably ten copies of my fourth-grade picture in various family albums. And it was taken forty years ago. Yours will follow you around for a long time, too. So how do you want to remember fourth grade? Are you a geek? A jock? Class clown? Teacher’s pet?” As far as I know, the child is not actually any of these, is a fairly balanced composition of many of them. “Those all require different outfits.”

  “Okay,” she says, warming to this game. “Let’s say I’m a geek. How would you dress me?”

  “Well, first of all, we’d have to go out right now and get some geeky clothes, because I’ve been trying really hard not to buy you any. Who’s the geekiest girl in your class?” This is San Francisco, in the 21st century, so I’m not sure if there even is a truly geeky girl, but the child answers immediately.

  “Samantha Richards. She’ll wear like a sweater with rosebuds on it, with too-short brown pants, and tell everyone her grandmother made them or something.”

  I smile. I can see Samantha. “Okay, then I’d dress you in that outfit that Aunt Lindsay sent you for Christmas, if it still fits. The one with the pink puppies chasing each other around the shirt.”

  The child shudders. “How about if I just want to be me?”

  “Just you? I’d say you should dress yourself, Toots. ’Cause if I dressed you, it’d just be my idea of you. But if I had to pick, it’d be your black jeans and that pale green t-shirt and maybe your black cotton kimono, to give you that cool look you kind of like.”

  She looks at me in amazement. “That’s exactly what I was thinking!”

  It’s only been her favorite “kind of dress-up” outfit for two months now. But I score major points.

  6 Columbus Day

  “Tomorrow is Indignant People Day,” the child says casually. She has just come home from school, and is making herself a light snack of Wheat Thins and milk. I stifle a smile and hope she’ll go on.

  “Why is that?” I ask, trying to sound innocent.

  “Well, it used to be called Columbus Day, on account of on October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus came here. Not here, here. But America. Florida, I think. It’s got beaches.” She pauses to take a bite of Wheat Thin. “Anyway, he discovered America and then sent news back to Spain. That wasn’t really where he was from, but he got a job driving the boat for the King and Queen of there.” She looks at me to see if I’m following this so far. I nod.

  “Except he didn’t really discover America. Not like somebody else found it first, but there were already people living here. And they didn’t want to belong to Spain. I don’t think they even wanted to be Americans, because they were already something else. I don’t know what.” She eats another Wheat Thin slowly, contemplating all this ancient history. I put the kettle on to make tea.

  “It’s sort of like if some guy rang our doorbell this morning and said he’d discovered our house, so it belonged to him, and then he called us another name. We wouldn’t like that much, so we’d be really mad at him.” A long drink of milk.

  “Which is pretty much how the Indians felt. Except they weren’t even Indians. Columbus just called them that because he thought he was driving the boat to India to get spices. I guess Florida looks a lot like India.” She shakes her head. “But the Indians didn’t want to be Indians or Americans or Spanish, and they didn’t want to have a king, because they already had chiefs. So they were indignant.” She looks over at me. “That means p.o.’d for a good reason, right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Anyway, it used to be called Columbus Day, the holiday tomorrow. But now we’re supposed to call it Indignant People Day, on account of maybe Columbus wasn’t such a big hero if he discovered something that was already there.” She finishes with a great deal of emphasis, then leans back in her chair.

  I am having a lot of trouble breathing. I have been biting my cheeks for several minutes and holding my breath, off and on, trying desperately to stifle the guffaw or raging fit of giggles that I know will explode out of me if I drop my vigilance for even a moment. I do not dare to take a sip of tea.

  It is one of the most righteous, stone-cold accurate wrong answers I have ever heard. The child has done her homework. She’s paid attention, and I’m quite proud. But I feel like I’m raising little Emily Litella, and the punchline is, of course, “that’s indigenous, not indignant. Indigenous.” Except that I like it better her way.

  I waffle. I do not want to make her feel bad. But at the same time, I feel a responsibility to inform her of the actual word, maybe have a small vocabulary lesson. How can I accomplish both at the same time?

  I take a sip of tea, the threat of giggles now past, and once it’s safely swallowed, take a deep breath. “You know a lot about Columbus and history. I’m impressed.”

  She looks up from the comics section of the newspaper and smiles. “We’re studying explorers in school. They start with him because most kids have heard of him, and they named a whole big city Columbus. The other foreign guys, like Cadillac, discovered smaller stuff, like rivers and lakes, and just got cars named after them.”

  I nod. I’m really pretty impressed by the level of information that Ms. Whiteman has managed to include in her curriculum. “That’s great,” I say, meaning it. “But there’s one little thing you should probably know.”

  The child’s eyes widen a little. She is curious. “What’s that?” There is wary caution on the rest of her face—a subtle tightening of her mouth as her eyebrows move toward each other, just a fraction.

  “The holiday? It’s not actually called Indignant People Day.”

  She looks at me with a mixture of relief and condescension. “I know that. Officially it’s still Columbus Day. Like on the sign at the bank and the calendar and stuff. But it should be Indignant People Day.”

  I sigh and pull a piece of scratch paper off the pile that lives on the kitchen counter. I carefully print inDigenous on it and hand it to her.

  She looks at it, frowns, and then her mouth contracts into the O of sudden comprehension. “That isn’t indignant,” she says slowly.

  “Nope. But I really liked your explanation.”

  “Yeah. Except for it was wrong.” She looks down at her lap.

  I put my hands on her shoulders and lean down to nuzzle the top of her head. “It wasn’t wrong. You had all the facts right about Columbus, and you are absolutely right that a lot of people do feel indignant about the whole thing. Not a wrong answer in the bunch.”

  “So what does indigenous mean?” She gives it a hard G, like indignant.

  “Native, more or less. The people who were born in the place Columbus thought he discovered. He called them Indians, but it’s more politically correct these days to call them indigenous people.”

  She takes all this in. After a few seconds she tilts her head back to look up at me. “But they were indignant, weren’t they?”

  “Absolutely. Extremely indignant.”

  “I thought so,” she says.

  7 Lonny-with-a-Y

  The child comes in the
door with a friend in tow, a smallish girl with very curly, carrot-red hair. Her name is Lonny. With a Y. The child has talked about this new friend a lot in the last few weeks, but never used a pronoun. For some reason, I’d assumed Lonny was a boy. Never assume.

  The two of them are sitting at the kitchen table, drinking Dr. Pepper—the caffeine-free kind—talking about homework and school and other things that I don’t much understand. It’s nine-year-old shorthand for events and people that are foreign to me.

  That it doesn’t concern me is something they are making very clear. Neither of them has said anything, but Lonny just gave me a sidelong glance, then looked back at the child as if to say, “She’s not listening, is she?” Now the child is grimacing at me, clear body language for “Don’t you have something you need to be doing?”

  I can take a hint. I grab a can of Diet Coke and go off to my office, where I check my email. Two replies from friends. A message from my editor wanting to know if she can have the galleys back a week earlier than we’d discussed, in order to allow for the copy editor’s vacation.

  No, she can’t. I’m on schedule, more or less. I’ll meet the deadline. You deal with the copy editor. I don’t say—or type—that. He’s a great copy editor, although he tends to be a bit conservative about adjectives, and I love the little buggers. It’s just that I’m not willing to bust my butt so he can have a week in Bermuda.

  The sounds from the kitchen are giggles—high-pitched, raucous, entirely self-absorbed. In an hour or so, I can legitimately go in there to fix dinner. Actually, as the ranking grown-up, I can just go in there now, if I want, taking over the kitchen by eminent domain and banishing the kids to another room, instead of shutting myself up in exile in my office.

  But eminent domain doesn’t set well in a two-person household. The fact is, the child is entertaining a guest, and that’s a proper use of shared space. So I click on the icon for my guaranteed time-suck—Hearts—and kick back in my chair with my soda. I space out for a while in the contemplative yet competitive way that games with my imaginary, silicon-based friends induces.