“What’s wrong with her?”
“She has cerebral palsy.”
“What’s that?”
“She can’t control her muscles, but there’s nothing wrong with her mind.”
Madeleine blinks. Inside Elizabeth’s head, she is perfectly normal. What must it be like to watch your hands try to pick something up? To hear your mouth slurring words when you know perfectly well how to say them? Like living in a very small room with a very big window.
“Can you catch it?” she asks.
“No, no, you’re born with it.”
“Oh.”
“It doesn’t mean you can’t have a good life,” he says. “She’s a pretty happy gal, don’t you think?”
“… Yeah.”
Grown-ups are never frightened by things like that — horrible things that people are born with. Whereas, when you are going on nine, it’s as though things from before you were born could still reach out and grab you by the ankle. You can feel the whoosh of how they just missed you.
“Have a good sleep, old buddy.” He kisses her forehead.
“Kiss Bugs,” she says, and he does.
She does not ask him if Mr. Froelich is a Nazi. It’s a rude question to ask so late at night, after such a nice day. And she knows what he’ll say: “No-o-o, what gave you that idea?” And she will have to answer, “Mike did,” and Mike will get in trouble. Still, she would like to hear it from her own father that there is not a Nazi living across the street. “Hitler’s still alive, you know,” said Mike. And he told her how Goebbels killed his children with poisoned cocoa. Goebbels. It’s what turkeys say. “Mr. Froelich could be a Nazi hiding out here,” he said. “You can tell if he’s SS, ’cause they have tattoos.” But you can’t see any tattoos on Mr. Froelich because of his long sleeves.
Dad switches off the light. “Sweet dreams.”
“Dad, is Hitler dead?”
“Dead as a doornail.”
She slides down under her blanket, savouring the smell of grass stains on her knees and elbows. A summer holiday night; she rode on a red motor scooter with a real live teenager, Hitler is dead, Elizabeth Froelich is not retarded, and school starts next week.
~ ~ ~
ONCE UPON A TIME, in a country that no longer exists, there was a mountain cave. And inside the cave was a treasure. Slaves worked to mount up more and more and more treasure. They worked day and night in the bowels of the earth, and fashioned the things of the earth into something celestial. They used the products of the earth: animals that had died billions of years ago were exhumed and refined; chemicals that had hidden in earth and air were caught, distilled and carefully recombined — these became its fuel. Minerals that had been harvested from the earth were purified by fire until they were strong and stainless, then forged into many shapes — this became its skin, its brain, its vital organs.
Everything has come from Mother Earth in this way. Cars, ploughs, televisions, clothes, electricity. Ourselves. Gathered, processed, moulded, ignited. If all this had happened in a flash, we would call it magic — lions freeing themselves from the clay, soldiers springing up from serpents’ teeth, lightning snaking from the tip of a wand, language from our mouths.
But it did not happen in a flash. It happened over time. The age of the earth was necessary to create it all, and the minds and bodies of many people, and so it is called science. Humans can only work the magic in reverse. Returning it all to the earth and atmosphere in one great flash.
STORYBOOK GARDENS
Teacher: “It’s harder teaching kids the alphabet these days.” Second Teacher: “That’s right. They all think V comes after T.”
THE LITTLE ORANGE TENT in the Bouchers’ backyard casts a magic glow in the afternoon. It’s almost like being in a movie. The canvas smell, the close-up sound, full of promise, the frisson of truth-or-dare. Strewn with Archie Comics and Classics like Water Babies, and the jewel of Auriel’s collection: the stack of True Romance comics which she inherited from her babysitter at their last posting, worn but intact, with their lavish drawings of blondes, brunettes and men with brutal jaws and sleek automobiles. The illustrated women cry gushy white tears. “It looks like Jergens,” says Madeleine.
The opportunities for scorn are as endless and absorbing as the comics are seductive. The pup tent begins to feel like a den of iniquity. Madeleine is frozen, fascinated and appalled when Lisa closes her eyes, crosses her arms over her chest and says, “Oh Ricky, I’m dying, please kiss me.” And Auriel does, right on the lips. Then Auriel dies, and Lisa is Ricky kissing her. Madeleine says, “Pretend I’m a spy and you’re torturing me, okay? And I kill you and escape and Auriel is waiting with a stolen Nazi uniform….” Mrs. Boucher always calls them after about half an hour. “Come and get some fresh air now, girls.”
It is not wholesome to spend the entire afternoon in a pup tent.
These are the dying days of summer. This time next week, we’ll be writing compositions entitled, “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.” Our mosquito bites will still be itchy, still chalky pink with calamine lotion, but we’ll be wearing shoes and socks, packaged into our new clothes, inserted at our desks in a row in a grade four classroom. Grade four. The bewildered days of kindergarten are so far behind. We are losing sight of the retreating shoreline of early childhood. It felt like the whole world; it was merely a speck. On the horizon is a land mass called adolescence. And between here and there, an archipelago of middle childhood. Swim from island to island, find the edible fruit, luxuriate in lagoons of imagination but don’t get caught in a riptide close to shore, do not yield to a warm current; you’ll be swept away with the sea turtles, who live so long and swim so far and don’t know how to drown. When you are eight going on nine, you get stronger every day. You wake up more and more into the real world and yet it’s as though, around your head, there still float remnants of fairy tales, tattered articles of faith in talking animals and animated teacups. A rag-halo of dreams.
Madeleine was kneeling next to her father on the couch, rubbing his head while he read Time magazine. She asked, “Dad, what’s a dyke?”
“You know what that is, you saw them in Holland—”
“No,” and she reads over his shoulder from the cinema listings. “‘When a rake and a dyke fall in love with the same girl, almost anything can happen—’”
“Oh, that’s a — that’s a — a type of garden tool.”
Unconvinced but reluctant to hurt his feelings, she asked her mother while she was helping to set the table.
“It’s a woman who’s sick in the head,” answered Mimi flatly. “Where did you hear that word?”
Madeleine replied, in the aggrieved tones of the wrongfully accused, “I read it in Time magazine!”
“Lower your voice. Jack? What’s she been reading?”
Jack said he figured it was about time to plug in the television set. Madeleine cheered and ran outside to find her brother.
When Jack adjusted the rabbit ears, not one but three channels came in clear as a bell, a fourth snowy but watchable. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — CBC — and three from New York State: NBC, ABC and the fuzzy one, CBS.
Maman’s rule: “There’s to be no eating dinner in front of the TV in this house.”