“Mood is especially important for children because of the ways in which they view television and overhear remarks… There is no framework of understanding into which their reflections can be placed. It is as if children’s education were dominated by the overheard remark… It is not as if they see the adult world as separate and of no interest to them. On the contrary, they show such interest that they struggle hard to make sense of it in their own way…” Cedric Cullingford, Children and Society, quoted in PowerPlay: Toys as Popular Culture
I am two years old, maybe three. We live in Maine, out in the country. Very modern house which seems at times to be built around a long, almost untraverseable passageway. Fat, glossy wooden planks under my bare feet. I run up and down that hall in plastic pants.
I come into the living room. Big bulls-eye shag carpet in seventies browns and oranges. Mom and Dad are watching TV. I know the theme song. The name sounds good on my tongue. McNeil Lehrer News Hour. I am only half listening, and none of it makes sense. I cheerily pretend it does.
“Did he say Dow Jones Imbustrials?” I ask, grinning, hands on my hips. My parents will repeat this incident for years to come. I will repeat the performance again and again, because it has gotten a laugh.
I have no idea what I’m saying.
* * *
Bad words. I have learned them. Probably at the dim brown house of the woman who has been taking care of me while Mom is at work. I don’t know how I know they are bad. Later, I won’t even remember which ones they are.
It’s a winter day. I leave the yellow dollhouse which is taller than me for a moment, because I want to get these words out of me before I say them when I shouldn’t. In the hall I crouch down by the radiator strip, and whisper all the bad words into it.
* * *
We are all of us busily working out who everyone is and what it means. In my new kindergarten at San Rafael School, there is a girl named Guadalupe who has diamond earrings and shorter hair than I have ever seen on a girl. She amazes me. I watch her closely. One day she goes running off the asphalt kickball diamond, yelling to the teacher that she has a hangnail. Soon I have what I think is a hangnail too, and I run to the teacher for help. But it turns out a hangnail is actually something else, and whatever I have, it’s not fatal.
Another day Guadalupe squints at me and asks, “Are you a Mooslim?” I tell her I’m not. She tells me her dad has told her about Mooslims. She thinks I’m a Mooslim, and so she doesn’t like me. I tell her I think she’s a Mooslim. I really can’t tell what she is. Maybe she is calling me a Mooslim because she’s worried about being one herself.
The next year I am in a different school. I am in the green reading group. The color is a code: nobody outright says it, but we know that we are the best readers, reading thick chapter books. You can hear it, because we sound like my mom when she reads bedtime stories. The other kids sound like they don’t even know what they’re saying when they read.
Janice is in the green group too. She comes over to my house once, and climbs the slick place where the bark was skinned off the avocado tree, to get to my cat. She never comes back, because after that she always asks how my cat is, and I think that’s creepy.
In third grade I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and then, because I loved it, I read its lesser-known sequel. There is much international intrigue in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator; at one point, the president of the United States gets on the phone with the premier of China and starts cussing him out.
Janice finally aggravates me one too many times and I yell at her, “You crazy Mandarin!” I am quoting from the book. “Cantonese!” she yells back. “Mandarin!” I yell at her. “No, I’m Cantonese!” she yells back.
* * *
I’m eight. I have only been in California three years, and I am still highly skeptical about most of the kids here. Most of them seem to be loud and rude to me. They like toys I think highlight their stupidity. I am pretty sure they don’t like me because I am from Maine.
There are two girls Allison and Margaret who are a grade older, and who are genuinely mean. They tease me for my clothes, and for bringing My Little Ponies to school. Out by the drop-off area after school, I am busily stomping on the metal plate which everyone knows makes a great noise, minding my own business. They singsong and tease and won’t leave me alone.
There is a situation I read about which I think will be useful here. I read a book it was by William Steig, I remember the jittery illustrations about a fox who is trying to eat some mice. One of the mice is a dentist, so he devises a trap to lure the fox to his office and incapacitate him. The fox, mouth aching, leaves the office looking resentful and tetchy. “Frank oo berry mush,” he says to the dentist. Thank you very much.
“Frank oo berry mush,” I say to Allison and Margaret, through gritted teeth. They look scandalized. “What?!” they say, the laughter building. “Frankenberry Mush? Frankenberry Mush! Frankenberry Mush!”
Now every time we pass their class coming back from the gym, they sing this at me.
Hunter is in my class for the first time. This year he is inseparable from Eliot and Tim. Hunter is trouble. Any group of boys he attaches seems galvanized to trouble. He will continue to be trouble on into high school, where the family of a friend of mine will consider legal action against the school as the teachers fail to stop him from singling my friend out for torment, calling her a bitch, calling her ugly, making comments about her body. Later, Hunter will come out of the closet. Later, we will find out his father spent time in jail for white-collar crimes.
This year, though, Hunter is just a small and angry force of nature, racing around the wooden play structure with Eliot and Tim. On my way to the tire swing, they leap out in front of me, blocking my path.
“We’re not gonna take it,” they sing. “No! We ain’t gonna take it! We’re not gonna take it! Anymore!” They flex and pose like pro wrestlers, then run off.
These California kids listen to awful pop music. I’ve never heard that song, and yet somehow I know that’s what it is. I know a lot of folk music. That’s what my mom sang to me when I was little. There was one song that went:
Muskrat, oh muskrat
What makes you smell so bad?
Comin’ under the farmer’s fence
Eatin’ up all he had, lord
Eatin’ up all he had.
A new boy named Peter has moved to my neighborhood. He’s kind of weird. Me and this other girl don’t want to play with him, but we’re not about to say it to his face. Instead, as evening creeps in and he scours the neighborhood looking for us, we hide behind the low stucco wall enclosing my front porch. I teach her the song and we change it so instead of saying Muskrat it says Peter. I sing as many lyrics as I know. The other girl can’t get the hang of them, and just ends up singing “Peter, Peter!” over and over again.
In the attic, I choreograph secret routines to a tape of folk songs some friends back in Maine sent:
Oh the Erie was a risin’ (rise from beanbag chair)
And the gin was a gettin’ low (sink back down, bob shoulders in exhaustion)
And I scarcely think we’ll get a drink (pant like a dog who has not had enough water, because I am imagining that is what the songwriter meant by “drink”)
Til we get to Buffalo-oh-oh
Til we get to Buffalo.
* * *
Fourth grade. An overcast day. A yellow Beetle pulls up to the curb in front of my house. I see it through the striped curtains of the breakfast nook and get excited. I overheard Mom say a friend of her friend Becca’s was coming to visit. I like Becca. She is beautiful and warm, and when she comes to town we get to swim in hotel pools and raid her minibar.
The woman who emerges from the car wants to ask us questions. One at a time we go with her into the breakfast nook.
Mom coaches us: Now, if she asks you if anyone has ever touched your private parts, you know what to say, right? Only my doctor. It is very important you answer that when she asks, or they might take you away from us.
The social worker has lots of questions about sex. I perform fine. When it is Ariel’s turn, I hear her crying as the woman interrogates her.
Later I ask my mom, That was Becca’s friend? No, she says, looking troubled. Becca’s friend came a while ago, and we didn’t get to see her.
Later — much later — they tell me they think they know who called the social workers on us. There was an incident with neighbors across the way — my sisters were over at their house, their son was in the bathtub, words about somebody’s peepee were exchanged, never clear whose. The twins say the son brought it up. That is one explanation. Another explanation, Dad says, is the father of the family is jealous of his job.
It’s the eighties. Every other week I overhear news about a molestation scare. Directly, they tell us not to talk to strangers, not to go to the neighbors’ without telling them where we are going, to tell an adult if anyone wants to touch our private parts.
When Mom explains how sex works, I think to myself, I already knew that, somehow.
In the attic of the yellow dollhouse, now my height, I enact a rape scene between two My Little Ponies.
* * *
I’m eleven years old. My parents are going through their divorce. I had guessed it was going to happen. I’m old enough to know it’s not my fault, and I don’t have any of a younger kid’s delusions that it means they will stop loving me and leave me. What sucks for me is having to carry baggage to school every Wednesday to switch houses; that visible sign of my family’s awkward condition, which I would rather hide.
Star Trek: The Next Generation airs for the first time this year. My friends and I adopt it as a way of life, holding screenings and signing up for the fan club. We learn Klingon. I hear from someone that Michael Dorn, who plays the Klingon Worf, has the nickname “Speedbumps” around the set.
My parents take my sisters and me in for therapy together; as a family; alone; with one of them. I refuse to talk. The therapist searches me with questions. I can feel her looking at me even though I’m staring hard at my sneakers. My mom, ever one for pop psychology, asks questions too.
I say, “Speedbumps.” They ask what that means. I say, “Speedbumps.” I smile cynically to myself. They ought to get it.
What I mean is, “I’m angry. Why the hell am I in therapy? You’re the ones who are messed up, and yet here you are, taking me to a shrink, essentially telling me that I may not know it, but there is something wrong with my mind, with who I am. Imagine if the kids from school heard about this. Yeah, I’m angry. That’s the only thing wrong with me. Get me out of here and that problem’s solved. Here, let me give you another reason to get me out of here: I’m not talking. I’m going to be stoic like a Klingon.”
I write a song in my head about being a Klingon. Cold as a Klingon. Bitter as the Q. Something about Romulans. Then I overextend the metaphor, and there’s some line about having teeth like a Ferengi.
* * *
The misunderstandings transcend childhood. The friends who were into Star Trek (Janice among them) have grown into a group of surprisingly thoughtful teenagers. We like to talk about the ineffables, but we still eff them up a little. Somewhere along the line we hear a song called “Existential Blues,” a nonsensical talking-blues riff on the Wizard of Oz. Thereafter, until corrected, we refer to all surreal material as “existentialist.”
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