by Jean Hegland
Of course Father scoffed at those platitudes, though even his contempt was halfhearted. If Mother had still been alive, I’m sure the patriotic rhetoric we culled along with the other tidings from town would have inspired some grand tirades on his part about humanity’s gullibility and politicians’ banality. As it was, he was mostly too sad to care.
Even so, he sent a voluntary donation along with his income tax payment that spring, and he, too, predicted that by fall the worst of our hardships would be over. In fact, the one conviction that all but the most wild-eyed extremists shared was that this situation is only temporary, that the world we belong to will soon begin again, and we will be able to look back on the way we are living now as a momentary interruption, a good story to tell the grandkids.
Once Father quit going to work, we were so isolated from even Redwood that it was sometimes hard to remember anything unusual was happening in the world beyond our forest. Our isolation felt like a protection. Last June when the moon shone red from the fires of Oakland, it seemed like a warning to stay close to home, and the news we got on Saturday nights reinforced its message. So we settled in to wait for fall. As Father kept reminding me whenever I longed for town, at least out here we have a well-stocked pantry, a garden and orchard, fresh water, a forest full of firewood, and a house. At least here we have a buffer from the obsessions, greeds, and germs of other people. At least here some recognizable shape remains—even now—to our interrupted lives.
The B’s begin with fighter planes—B-17, B-24, B-29, B-52. Next is ? Cassiopeia. Then comes Ba, the human-headed falcon believed by the ancient Egyptians to symbolize the immortality and divinity of the soul after death.
Fighter planes and supernovas and the falconlike divinity of the soul: death and flight, Heaven and the heavens. Even though it’s only an alphabetical accident, there is a serendipitous rightness to that juxtaposition, and for a moment I wish my father were here so I could prove him wrong.
My father always scorned encyclopedias.
“There’s no poetry in them, no mystery, no magic. Studying the encyclopedia is like eating carob powder and calling it chocolate mousse. It’s like listening to lions roaring on a CD-Rom, and thinking you’ve been to Africa,” he used to complain after an afternoon spent trying to convince the fifth-grade teacher to let her students learn about scientific research by raising tadpoles and growing molds instead of copying articles from the encyclopedia.
“Education is about connections, about the relationships that exist between everything in the universe, about how every kid in Redwood Elementary has a few of Shakespeare’s atoms in his body.”
“Along with Hitler’s,” my mother added wryly, but my father ignored her, intent on his own idea.
“The encyclopedia takes any subject in the world and dissects it, sucks the blood out of it, rips it from its matrix. What does that teach little Tommy? That research is dry and boring, that it’s much more fun to watch TV, steal candy, and destroy private property. And if your sole introduction to research has been an encyclopedia, it’s a fairly bright conclusion.”
“Now, Robert,” my mother would answer as she set the table for dinner, “encyclopedias have their place. Maybe Janice is just showing those kids how to use them before she turns them loose on their own projects.”
“She’s not. She thinks research is dry and boring, too. And Janice’ll never turn them loose on anything—they might come up with questions she can’t answer.”
“Dinner’s ready.”
“First let’s burn all the encyclopedias!”
But our set had come to him as a gift from his faculty the year he walked with them up and down in front of the school with a picket sign, so it was never in much risk of being burnt, and sometimes one of us actually did heave out a volume to look up something.
Still, they probably hadn’t been used more than a dozen times before I got them out a few weeks ago. When the public library in Redwood closed last spring, the librarian let me take an extra armload of books. “You go ahead, honey,” she said, because my mother was dead, because my father was on the Board of Directors of the library, because I had been checking out books from her since before I could talk, because I had gone to her for the address of the Office of Admissions at Harvard.
“No one else will be reading these this summer if you don’t take them,” she said, stamping the books with a date three months in the future. “This should be enough to keep you busy until we open up again in the fall.”
But I had worked my way through that stack by July, we buried our father in September, and it was the end of November by the time Eva and I were finally recovered enough for her to return to her dancing and me to my studies. Then for a full day I sat at the table, my letter from the Harvard Office of Admissions lying beside the Official Register of Harvard University while I looked back and forth between them, staring at the same few phrases over and over again.
Although we do not accept students more than a year before they are due to matriculate, we have reviewed your file and are very favorably impressed with both your outline of study and your intellectual and verbal abilities, as evidenced by your Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, said the letter. If your College Board Achievement Test scores are similarly high, we would encourage you to make a formal application to Harvard at the appropriate time next winter.
But in the Register I read, Although College Board Achievement Tests taken through the January series will satisfy our requirements, we urge you to complete your testing by December, since by applying early, you will ensure that the Committee has time to give your application the most thorough consideration.
It was like a calculus derivative I was unable to solve, a passage from Saint-Exupéry I couldn’t translate. “What will I do?” I finally wailed to Eva when she emerged from her studio that afternoon.
“About what?” she asked, grabbing her extended leg and pulling it up so that it was almost vertical against her torso.
“I’m supposed to have taken my Achievement Tests by now.”
“Well, you aren’t the only one who hasn’t. I’m sure even Harvard is going to have to bend their rules this year.”
“But what if things have already started up again back there?”
“We’d know about it.”
“How?”
“There’d be a plane or something. Something.”
“Even if the lights come on tomorrow, I won’t be ready to take the tests.”
She set her leg down and rose into an unwavering arabesque. “Why not?”
“I can’t use my computer or my language tapes; the batteries are dead in my calculator. I don’t even have any paper left.”
“Then read. Books don’t need batteries.”
“I’ve already read everything in the house. Twice.”
“Have you read the encyclopedias?” she asked, sweeping down from her arabesque into a deep curtsey.
I wish I had started sooner. I can’t believe how much I’m learning. It’s all there—every date, every place, every artist and philosopher and scientist, every statesman and king, every star and mineral and species, every fact and theory, every bit of human knowledge. It’s all in one place, everything that matters, everything I’ll ever need, and all I have to do is turn the page. It may be a little dry, but it’s no drier than my calculus text or my French tapes. It’s no drier than what Eva does hour after hour alone in her studio.
Our parents never structured our studies. “Let ’em learn what they like,” my father used to say. “A child will eat a well-balanced diet if she’s given a choice of wholesome foods and left alone. If a kid’s body knows what it needs to grow and stay healthy, why wouldn’t her mind, too?”
To his friends he explained, “My girls have free run of the forest and the public library. They have a mother who is around to fix them lunch and define any words they don’t know. School would only get in the way of that. Besides, if they went to school, they’d spend over two hours a day in the
car. Lord knows I could use company on those drives, but it’s better for my kids to stay in the woods.”
So while other children were reciting their times tables and asking permission to get drinks of water, Eva and I were free to roam and learn as we pleased. Together we painted murals and made up plays, built forts, raised butterflies, and designed computer games. We made paper, concocted new recipes for cookies, edited newsletters, and caught minnows. We grew gourds and nursed fledglings and played with prisms, and our parents told the state that what we did was school.
For years I studied what I wanted to, when and how I wanted to study it. One book led to another in a random pattern, meandering from interest to interest like a good conversation, and the only thing that connected them was their juxtaposition on the bookshelves in Mother’s workroom.
Because our father sometimes brought home tests for us to take, by the time I was twelve I knew I was at least four or five grades ahead of the schoolkids my age. I also knew that if you went to school, you had to sit in rows, do long assignments in dreary workbooks, and ask to be allowed to go to the bathroom. But there came a time when I didn’t care, when I yearned for the life contained in those swaying yellow school buses, longed to be part of the jostle of other kids with their armloads of slick-paged books and easy laughter, and I began a campaign to demand that my parents send me to school.
It was not long after Eva discovered ballet, when I was still smarting from the hole her dancing had carved in my life, and I think I tried to convince my parents to let me go to school as a way of easing my loneliness.
“If I don’t have Eva, I need someone,” I said. “It’s too boring here all day by myself.”
“I’m around,” my mother answered.
“But you’re always busy with your tapestries.”
“You could help me. I think you’d like working with the dyes. And I could use another set of hands to help me warp my loom.”
When I rolled my eyes and slumped in my chair, she answered briskly, “I know you can figure out what to do with yourself, Nell. We didn’t keep you out of school for all these years just to let you start now. Junior high school’s one of the most toxic experiences I can imagine.”
The battle continued and every skirmish ended in hot indignation and resentment on my part and in pained bafflement on the part of my parents, who claimed they wanted me to be happy but who wanted me to be happy in the way they chose.
I sulked and balked, but finally I stumbled across an article about another family of homeschoolers who lived even farther out than we and whose children had all attended Harvard. I decided that if those kids could do it, so could I. If Eva wouldn’t stop dancing, then I would go to Harvard; if I couldn’t attend public school in Redwood, then it would serve everybody right when I matriculated at the best college in the country.
I asked for a computer with a modem for my thirteenth birthday and started pestering my father to bring home history and science textbooks, French tapes, math workbooks. He always complied with my requests—though he usually managed to slip a few mystery novels into the stack. But whenever I mentioned Harvard, his response was noncommittal. “Don’t know if that particular institution’s all you’ve cracked it up to be, Pumpkin, though I have to admit I’d be proud if you got there under your own steam. But remember, that was quite a while ago when those other homeschoolers got in.”
“Harvard likes students from unusual backgrounds,” I said.
“Back then it did. Who knows what the admissions policy looks like now. Anyway, what makes Harvard so special? What’re you going to study there?”
It had seemed to me that getting into Harvard was goal enough, but I had just finished reading a biography of Sir Alexander Fleming, so I answered the first thing that came to mind, “Medicine.”
“You want to be a doctor?”
“Maybe,” I answered, “or a researcher.”
“Well, more power to you, Pumpkin. I know you’ll be a whiz at whatever you decide to do. I just don’t want to see you limit yourself before you get a taste of all that’s out there in the wide, wide world.”
As time passed I worked even harder, studying everything I thought Harvard would expect me to know, and last spring, when I received my reply from the Admissions Office, I thought I knew a lot. Now, page by page, volume by volume, the encyclopedia is revealing all I need to learn before I’m ready for Harvard.
I’m trying to be disciplined about my reading and not skip articles that don’t interest me or don’t seem pertinent to my education. I want to study the encyclopedia from beginning to end. But today is New Year’s Day, so I let myself jump ahead to the C’s to check that the calendar I’m making is accurate.
The problem with calendars is that nothing fits precisely. The rotations and revolutions of the Earth and sun and moon don’t coincide, and everything ends in unwieldy decimal points: there are 365.2422 days in a solar year, 29.53059 days in a lunar month, and weeks exist nowhere but in our superstitious human heads.
The encyclopedia gave me an algebraic formula for telling on which day of the week a particular date will fall, so I figured out when the next leap year will be and then sacrificed a whole sheet of notebook paper to make a calendar. As I drew those twelve grids, numbered their squares, and labeled the holidays and birthdays they represented, I couldn’t help but wonder which one of those yet unlived days will turn out to be the biggest festival of all—the lucky day on which the world will return to us and make my homemade calendar obsolete.
We wake each morning to the flat light that seeps through the January rain. We rise from our mattresses, trade the tee shirts in which we sleep for sweaters and jeans. Eva feeds the fire and I go outside to open the chicken coop and bring in more wood. For breakfast we eat milkless oatmeal or leftover rice, sweetened with the smallest possible dusting of cinnamon.
After breakfast we do our chores—chopping wood, cleaning, or adding to the inventory we are making of what we own. Eva dances all afternoon while I study and write. When the threat of darkness stops us, we coax the hens back inside, eat our supper of beans or lentils or one of the unlabeled cans from Fastco, and then take turns indulging in the day’s greatest satisfaction.
The only soap we have left is the sliver we’re saving for our victorious hike to town when we can fill our empty gas can and start our lives anew. Even so, a bath is one of the few pleasures in which we can completely revel, for not only is it not a weaker version of what we remember a bath to be, it is also renewable. As long as the spring continues to fill the water tank and the water tank can send its trickle through the pipes into the house, as long as the fire can heat another kettle, there can always be a bath at the end of the day, a bath to try to soak the nightmares out, to leave me so limp I almost have to crawl through the darkness to my mattress opposite Eva’s by the stove.
But even the hottest, deepest, longest bath won’t work forever, and there comes a time in almost every night when my dreams chase me from my sleep, so that I burst through to wakefulness still saturated with their horror.
I dreamed about worms again last night. Not the little, rosy things we find in the pantry these days, but the maggots that in my dreams fill my father’s grave. Paralyzed and voiceless, I am lying next to him in that clammy hole, and our two bodies—his dead and mine living—are writhing with maggots. His body cannot comfort me. And I am unable to help myself, as I lie there, eaten alive by death.
I woke to blackness and the sound of my sister’s voice, the solid feel of her hands.
“It’s okay,” she promised. “You were dreaming.”
Even as she said it, and my conscious self was nodding in reply, I think we both knew that dreams come from somewhere real, that any dream can only echo what’s already been lived.
“Want a cup of tea?” she asked.
“I’ve already had yesterday’s,” I fretted, “and I don’t want to waste today’s now.”
“I’ll give you my today’s cup.”
> “But that wouldn’t be fair to you.”
“It’s okay.”
When I didn’t answer, she rose to open the stove door, and, working in that half-light, she filled a mug with hot water from the kettle on the back of the stove and added the smallest possible pinch of tea.
“Thanks,” I said when she handed me the steaming mug.
“What else are sisters for?” she answered wryly.
I know she meant it. But she spoke so lightly, I couldn’t respond as my heart wanted, couldn’t bury myself forever in her arms.
Ballet is a form of dance that developed out of the court spectacles of the Renaissance. Its characteristic movements emphasize a stylized and ethereal grace. In order to achieve this effect, the aspiring dancer must begin at a very early age to train his body to perform in ways that are not within the natural range of movements for the human body.
Sometimes when my head feels so thick I know I can’t retain another word, I’ll abandon the encyclopedia, leave my place at the table by the front window, and migrate down the hall to Eva’s studio. The door is always open, though she hardly seems to notice when I slip inside, and seat myself against the wall.
Usually she’ll be at the barre, working her way through the endless chain of exercises that began with her first wavering, stiff-armed plié and won’t end until she quits dancing. Watching her there, lowering and rising with the plies she’ll never finish, reminds me of the Bolshoi ballerina during that period of Russian martial law in the early nineties who said: “Revolutions will come and go, but we will still be here doing our battements tendus.”
That dance continues—pliés, releves, battements tendus, ronds de jambes, développés, first at the barre and then in the center, that same little alphabet, over and over and over again to the relentless tick of the metronome, until now, a million repetitions later, each move is pliant, fluent, perfect. Even something simple as her leg stretching in tendu or her arm opening out to second position speaks to some longing or delight or knowledge far beyond words.