Portable Childhoods Read online

  They say that everything on earth is a carbon-based lifeform, but I don’t think it’s true anymore. The characters on my computer screen are as real to me as the child in the kitchen, at the moment. And they’re winning. Again.

  Pieces of conversation drift in from the hallway.

  “No, it’s okay. She’s not really working. She’s just playing this weird game on her computer.”

  Damn. I turn off the sound—blips and beeps and occasional bursts of canned applause—so that I can listen better.

  Tiny Reebok-clad footsteps approach my door. A pause. A tentative knock. I hit Pause and the screen freezes as the child opens the door.

  I turn around. “What’s up?”

  “Will you teach Lonny how to bet?”

  Wow. That was nowhere on my list of expected questions. The child and I have been playing poker for about six months now, not for money, just beans and M&Ms. But other people may not think this is such a hot idea.

  I look at Lonny-with-a-Y, who is standing a step behind, waiting for the verdict. She doesn’t look like she’s from a fundamentalist family. She’s wearing an Earth Day t-shirt, and has two earrings in one ear. Which doesn’t mean liberal in San Francisco, but doesn’t shout conservative, Bible-thumping, games-are-the-devil, either.

  I hit QUIT—the pixel people had me soundly beaten—and turn my chair so I’m facing Lonny. “How come?”

  She shuffles from one foot to the other. “I’ve got two brothers—Danny and David. And they won’t let me play poker ‘cause they say girls don’t know how. But I do, sort of. I mean, I know what cards are good, and what beats what. But she said you could…”

  “…Teach her the rest,” the child finishes, fiddling with the bowl of paper clips on my file cabinet. “You know, betting and bluffing and all that.”

  I consider it further. Do her parents care that their sons are playing? Is that different than if I taught their little girl to play? I start to get caught up in a burst of righteous feminist indignation, based on nothing but my own fantasy, then catch myself.

  “Okay, sure. Let’s see what you know.” The three of us troop into the kitchen. I pull the shuffling practice deck out of a drawer and toss it to Lonny-with-a-Y. We all sit down at the kitchen table.

  “Shuffle up and deal out three hands of whatever game you know how to play. Only deal them face-up.”

  “Wait—that’s not how my brothers…”

  The child interrupts. “It’s like training wheels.”

  I nod. “Right now, we’re just watching the luck happen.”

  Lonny shrugs and starts to shuffle. I get out the jar of dried poker beans and issue us each about fifty.

  “Five-card draw?” she asks. I nod and she deals.

  It only takes a few hands for me to realize Lonny doesn’t really get betting. She’s stuck on the idea that you only bet if you’ve got good cards. I replenish her supply of beans and we keep playing.

  About midway through her second pile of beans, I can almost see the light bulb go on in her brain. Sometimes you bet on what you’ve got; other times you bet for intimidation, or to make someone think she knows what you have. The only sure thing is when you have the nuts—when no one else’s cards can possibly beat you. The rest is where skill and cunning come in.

  I like Lonny-with-a-Y. She has spunk, she’s intelligent and isn’t overtly bossy or whiny. I approve; when she goes off to the bathroom, I ask the child if she wants to invite her friend to stay for dinner, since it’s Friday, and not a school night. She does.

  I call Lonny’s mother, whose name is Marjorie. It’s fine with her, but both her boys have scouts tonight, and could I bring Lonny home? Around nine? Done.

  I make fish sticks and salad for dinner. I start to sprinkle bacon bits on the salad, but Lonny asks, quietly but firmly, if I’ll leave them off hers. Her family’s Jewish, she explains, and they don’t really keep kosher, but they don’t eat pork, and is that okay?

  If it’s okay with God, it’s fine with me.

  There’s one last Corona in the fridge and, miraculously, a lime as well. The kids want to split another can of Dr. Pepper, but it’s too late in the day for more sugar. I pour two glasses of milk. When I put hers down, Lonny informs me, a bit apologetically—and a little late—that she is also lactose-intolerant. The milk goes back into the carton. I give them orange juice with a few drops of raspberry Italian syrup and a splash of club soda for fizz.

  Lonny has a second helping of salad, and asks if we can play some more poker after the dishes are done.

  I check the clock. It’s a little after 8:00, and her house is about ten minutes away. “Sure. But don’t worry about the dishes. You’re a guest. Just stack them in the sink. I’ll take care of them later. We can play for another 45 minutes.”

  Lonny gets a look on her face like someone’s just made her queen, and I realize that with two brothers she probably pulls more than her share of KP.

  “Can we play the real way now?” she asks. “Face-down?”

  Fine by me. They clear the table. I deal three hands. The child bets five beans before the draw. I see Lonny hesitate, fingering her pile of beans.

  I want to tell her, honey, they’re only beans, and there are plenty more where those came from. But that’s not the point, and it’s not a lesson I want either of them to learn. The danger is that later on, getting one more twenty from an ATM machine will seem just about as easy as getting another handful of beans. I stay quiet, let Lonny make her own decision.

  She bites her lower lip and pushes five beans into the pot. Me too. The child takes one card. Lonny draws three; so do I, hoping to improve a pair of eights. I don’t. The child, the opener, bets fifteen beans.

  The kitchen is completely silent. Lonny looks at her cards, at her beans, at the child. And then she surprises me. She raises another fifteen beans, counting them out one by one, thirty beans. That leaves only four beans in front of her, but the pile in the center of the table is impressive.

  I fold. The child sits with her arms crossed over her chest, staring at Lonny. Then she smiles, a wicked smile, one I’m not sure I like, and says, very quietly, “I’ll raise your last four.”

  Showdown at the fourth-grade corral.

  Lonny pushes her last beans in. “What’ve you got?”

  The child looks pretty damn smug as she turns over her cards. “Two big pair. Kings and tens.”

  There is a pause. I have one hand on the jar of beans, expecting to see Lonny’s face crumple in disappointment, but it doesn’t. Instead she grins, a huge, ear-to-ear grin.

  “Too bad,” says Lonny-with-a-Y. She turns over her three 3s and scoops up the whole pile of beans.

  Her brothers may be in for a surprise.

  8 Seven-Card Stud

  The child took a deck of cards to school and taught the class how to play seven-card stud for Talent Day. She didn’t tell me about this plan beforehand. I probably would have talked her out of it, although part of me wants very much to have been there to watch.

  She walked in the door a few minutes ago, bearing a note from her teacher. Poker is gambling. “Stud” is not an appropriate vocabulary word in the fourth grade. These are not family values.

  The child is confused. She was showing off a skill that she’s been patiently learning for several months. Up until now, this has always been a good thing.

  It’s my fault, I tell her. I have neglected to mention that poker is not at the top of the list of Essential Things Every Nine-Year-Old Girl Should Know. I get her an unleaded Dr. Pepper and settle in for what may be a lengthy chat.

  She asks about “stud” first. “How come Ms. Whiteman says it’s a bad word? Isn’t that the name of the game?”

  “It is. But it means other things, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “Lots. But the one I think your teacher doesn’t like is…” I parse my sentence carefully. “A kind of horse. A stud horse is a stallion who’s rented out to farmers who want their mares to have
babies. So a guy who looks like he’s only interested in sex is sometimes called a stud.”

  The child absorbs this information. I wonder if it’s too early for a glass of wine.

  We haven’t had THE major sex talk yet, just touched on random bits and pieces as they’ve come up: how she was conceived; me having my period; a flasher in the park one day; yes, a penis is different from what you have. But we haven’t gotten to SEX yet, certainly not seamy, x-rated stud-like sex.

  And now we do, a little. She’s not interested in any details at the moment, just the basic concept of what’s “dirty” and what’s not. And why a card game would be named after a horse that does…that sort of thing.

  I decide that it is not too early for a little Cabernet after all. I’ve already lost my shot at Role Model of the Year.

  I go get the dictionary, and we learn just how versatile a word stud is—horse, virile guy, upright board in a wall, nail or rivet in blue jeans, small pierced-ear earring, metal protrusion in a snow tire. Not, alas, an explanation of why the poker game is called that.

  It becomes a research project, a quest. I drag out many reference books: a slang dictionary, Hoyle’s Rules of Games, two poker books, and the P volume of the encyclopedia. We learn that stud poker is the opposite of draw poker, and that the term originated in 1864. An hour later, we still don’t know why.

  “I got in trouble for saying stud once.” I tell her, as I refill my wine glass.

  “How come?”

  “You know how if something’s really great you’d say it was cool. Or neat. Or groovy?”

  She giggles at groovy.

  “Well, when I was in sixth grade, the word was ‘stud.’ Like: Wow, your new shirt’s really stud! All my friends said it. I said it. Then one day I said it at home, and my mom hit the roof.”

  “The horse thing, right?”

  “Maybe. I was just as baffled as you were. I didn’t know it was a dirty word. I just wanted to sound cool.”

  “Stud,” the child corrects me.

  “Yeah. I wanted to sound stud. Anyway, my mom got mad and swatted me and told me to never, ever, ever use that word again, and sent me to my room.”

  The child looks at me for a minute and then says, very quietly, “I’m glad you didn’t hit me or yell at me on account of I took the cards to school.”

  “Oh, hon.” I get up and hug her. I would never, in a billion thoughts, punish her for being innocent and confused. She reaches up and pats my arm. I stroke her hair, then begin to cry into it.

  “Are you crying?”

  “A little.”

  “How come?”

  “Bunch of stuff. The grown-up part of me is crying at the idea that anyone would yell at you or hurt you. And I’m also remembering the ‘stud’ day, and how it felt to get punished when I hadn’t done anything wrong.”

  “But you didn’t know it was a bad word and say it on purpose, did you?”

  “Not the first time.” I disengage and sit back in my chair so I can look at her. “But after that, I did, sometimes, just to piss off my mom. She was going to yell at me anyway. Hand me a Kleenex?”

  She does, and then is silent for a while. I start to worry that I’ve just dumped too big a load of old angst on her tiny shoulders. She finally reaches over and pats my hand. “I’m glad she’s not in charge of me,” she says. “You’re lots better. Can I have some Triscuits?”

  I nod. I’m glad I’m not passing on the legacy of intolerance—or whatever it was—that made life a minefield between my mother and me.

  She comes back with the yellow box of Triscuits. “So what are you going to do about my teacher?”

  Damn. I pull myself back to the present. “How does this sound? I’ll write her a letter, and tell her about all the other things that stud means. I’ll tell her that she’s going to have a hard time stopping the whole fourth grade from talking about building a house or getting pierced ears. Or that when she reads a story that talks about the star-studded sky, she really doesn’t really want thirty kids giggling and thinking that it’s dirty.”

  The child nods solemnly. “That is very true.”

  “But I’ll also promise her that you won’t give the other kids any more gambling lessons, and that you’ll leave the deck of cards at home. What do you think?”

  She makes a face. “It sounds like you’re telling her she’s right and that it really is bad to play poker.”

  “Some people think any kind of gambling is wrong. I’m just not one of them. We can play poker at home all you want, but it’s not a school game—okay? I’m letting Ms. Whiteman have that one. She’s probably terrified that next week you’ll be running a little casino out on the playground and cheating first-grade kids out of their lunch money.”

  “I never cheat!” the child says indignantly.

  I burst out laughing. True, and so irrelevant. “I know. I was kidding. So, do you want to play a little seven-card—STUD—” I give it a real leering emphasis, “after dinner?”

  She smiles. “I think there might be a deck of cards in my knapsack.”

  9 Gargling

  The child has a cold. Not a miserable, stay in bed, too sick to move cold, just the sniffles. But her throat is scratchy, one ear is stopped up, and her head is filling with Jell-O; she’s rapidly losing the ability to breathe through her left nostril and is wheezing softly.

  I give her the Tylenol cold stuff for kids—two spoonfuls because she’s an older kid—and a handful of chewable vitamin C. All that helps. But her throat is still sore, so I take her into the bathroom to gargle with salt water.

  Gargling isn’t something I think a lot about. It’s not an activity I do on a regular basis. I gargle when my throat’s sore. It certainly never occurred to me, until this very minute, that it would be yet another skill I would have to teach someone.

  But how hard can it be?

  She sits on the toilet while I stand over the bathroom sink. “I’m going to take a mouthful of salt water,” I tell her before I actually do. “Maybe two-thirds of a mouthful. I’ll just hold it in my mouth, not swallowing. Then I’ll tip my head back, so my mouth is pointing up towards the ceiling, and sort of gurgle it in my throat, like this.”

  I try to make the gargle noise, but it’s not a sound you can make dry. The muscles in my throat contract; nothing either visual or vocal happens. I have to demonstrate, fully loaded. Three times. My powers of description are severely limited once my mouth is full of salt water, and the child is full of questions.

  “Why do I have to do this?” She gives me the kind of look usually reserved for someone who is teaching you the penguin mating dance on the hope that you will join their cult.

  “Because there are germs in your throat. Salt water kills them.”

  “They’re not germs. A cold is a virus. We learned that in Health.”

  Point for the small one. “You’re right. But viruses don’t like salt water either. Look, it works. Trust me.”

  She is skeptical, but agrees to try. I put some salt in her Harry Potter cup, fill it midway with warm tap water, stir it, and hand it to her.

  Now she looks at me like I’m Lucretia Borgia, and she knows what comes next, but takes the glass, gets a mouthful, tilts her head back and makes a sound like a broken garbage disposal.

  Water comes gushing out of her mouth and down the front of her sweatshirt, soaking a good five inches of it. She glares at me. “Yuck. It tastes really bad!”

  I remove the sweatshirt and wrap a towel around her shoulders. “I know. Will you try again? It’s really pretty easy, once you get the hang of it. It’s a useful thing to be able to do.”

  Such a look. I can tell that, in her book, this making a rude noise with your mouth stuff cannot possibly be useful. I am the only grown-up in the world who does this, and I’m just trying to make her as weird as I am.

  “Please,” I say. “Give it another shot?”

  She rolls her eyes, but complies. More water down the front of her. Most of it misses the
towel completely and runs down into the elastic of her sweatpants.

  “One more time?” I ask faintly. I don’t remember it being this difficult.

  She shakes her head and folds her arms across her chest.

  “Just once more? I’ll call Tien Fu and we can have hot-and-sour soup for dinner. I’ll even rent a movie.” Ordinarily, I try not to stoop to bribes. But I was thinking of renting a movie anyway, figuring that an afternoon of lying on the couch under the big comforter will give the Tylenol a fighting chance. And hot-and-sour soup, as far as I’m concerned, is the second most powerful remedy for blasting a sore throat out of existence.

  Unless this gargling bout improves in the next few minutes, the soup will take sole possession of first place.

  The child eyes the glass of salt water warily. “Okay. But this is the last time.” She scrunches her eyes tightly shut, takes a mouthful of water and tilts back her head. The horrible noise starts, then turns into a gargle. A real gargle!

  “That’s it!” I am, perhaps, a bit too enthusiastic.

  She is startled, makes an uh of surprise—and inhales.

  Damn.

  The salt water goes “down the wrong pipe” as my mother used to say. The child gags and coughs. Water spews everywhere. It’s hard to imagine an entire bathroom being hosed by one child-sized mouthful of water, but it can be done.

  She is gasping and snorting, trying to expel all the fluids from her breathing parts, which were wheezy to begin with. I pat her on the back, which is entirely ineffectual, but makes me feel marginally better.

  After a minute, the chaos subsides. The child, who started out with the sniffles, is now red-faced, teary-eyed, and soaking wet. She stares at me for a few seconds and then says, with wounded dignity, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to change my clothes now.”

  I can only nod. I’ll clean up the bathroom, which looks like a steerage cabin on the Titanic half an hour after the iceberg. We’ve taken on water. I get a sponge and a roll of paper towels and begin to mop. I’m glad she was using a plastic cup. This could have been worse. Really.