The Upstairs House

by Julia Fine

“Of course I’ll clean it up,” I said. I took a step down and stopped, bracing myself against the door, which had returned to a comfortable temperature. I felt my pelvis splitting, all the climbing I’d done earlier catching up to me. I didn’t want to ask anything of Arthur, let alone ask him to carry me. I didn’t want to drown him in this deluge of motherhood—this young man who I’d watched kissing the bartender from the bougie restaurant down the street, the two of them pressed against the far garage, Arthur’s hands on the other man’s cheeks. He’d never have to know the sagging and the full weight of the body after hurling out a child; here I was now, inconveniencing him.

  I didn’t want to ask anything of anyone. I wanted to carry myself through the turquoise door and lock it tight behind me, smoke a pipe with the woman in her wide-legged pants, take up her hammer. I would replace her, on that ladder, and lean out the picture window into the gray day, announcing myself. I would bang until Clara cried her throat raw, until Ben called the condo association, demanding consequences. But I wouldn’t go back down. I would stay with the woman. I’d build whatever house she wanted.

  Instead I said, “Can you go get my husband?”

  Table of Contents

  List of Imagesxi

  Introduction1

  Chapter 1: Theories of Language Development15

  American Childhood in the 19th Century18

  The Dawn of Early Childhood Education24

  Lucy Sprague Mitchell and the Bureau of Educational Experiments27

  Chapter 2: The Modernists at Work38

  Linguists and the Postwar Classics40

  The Visionaries and Their Mentors49

  The Fairy Tale Wars55

  Chapter 3: Reaching Out Across Genre70

  Making Space for Children76

  Dear Ms. Stein81

  The Major Impact of a Minor Publisher92

  Chapter 4: Book Sales and the Zeitgeist103

  Ursula Nordstrom’s New Rule104

  1980–Today110

  Statistical Analysis115

  Epilogue117

  Bibliography124

  Acknowledgments146

  4

  There was a door in the stairwell. There was a turquoise door in the stairwell, and nobody was talking about it.

  “Get some rest,” Ben had said after coming to collect me, his mother behind him with a pinched face, certain she had never expelled week-old afterbirth onto a neighbor, that she’d never expelled anything unpleasant, just two perfect pink children who’d come out clean and easy, her stomach still smooth.

  I didn’t care what Linda thought of me. Truly, I didn’t. I didn’t crave Ben’s family’s approval. I knew that he would choose me over them, whether in matters of religion or vacation destination or style of home. I knew, and took the sort of pride in knowing that comes from a petty victory—being first to a parking space or winning a board game that I hadn’t even wanted to play. The feeling was shallow, and I liked not feeling deeply. I cultivated not feeling too deeply when it came to Ben. That was the whole point of him, of being married to him in particular, of choosing him over somebody I’d picked out for passion, not companionship, not ease. Somebody who could hurt me. Being married to Ben was nice. From the Old French nice: stupid, senseless; from the Latin nescius: unaware.

  I couldn’t help but feel deeply about the woman and her door. In no state to perform my usual dissection of the things that I wanted too much—dismantling and divesting until I’d pulled apart the essence of them, whittled them down into indifference—I spent nursing sessions watching HGTV with my eyes glazed over, thinking of her. Did she belong to me? Had I been specially chosen as the only one to see her? No surprise that Arthur was oblivious: he was a single man with no need to be watchful. Arthur didn’t deserve her, and anyway she wouldn’t want him. Ben was different. Ben was—as my sister said—a catch. Ben’s response was more deliberate. I’d see him startle at a loud noise, then settle as if it had been nothing, because he wanted it to be nothing. He’d built his career on examining problems and deciding which were worth his attention. Ben was adept at setting aside minor concerns, and he’d decided these concerns were minor. They were not minor to me.

  She was building a house, which to me made perfect sense. How nice to build a house, with a true picture window, and furs on the floors. Real furs on the floors and draped across the chairs, which had adult-sized seats but had been cut off at the legs so that they looked like they were meant for obese children. This wasn’t the house she was building. This was the house she lived in, the house she already had—a house that looked out over the ocean. A fishing boat would come at dawn and a grizzled man would raise an arm in greeting, and the frothy swimmerets of the lobsters would tickle her toes when she went barefoot in the sand. At night the sky would swirl with stars, and her life would stretch wide across the water. Nearby, she would build the house for Michael.

  On the television, a chirpy couple covered an old woman’s kitchen in subway tile. Ben sat reading a book about the history of the stock market, one socked foot resting on Solly. In my arms, Clara made her newborn dolphin sputter. She sneezed, butting her head against my breast.

  “Have you ever been to Maine?” I asked Ben.

  “Vermont,” he said, not looking up.

  “Yeah,” I said, “Me neither.” For some reason this caught his attention. He put a gum wrapper down to mark his page.

  “Should we take a trip?” he asked me, and I laughed, because I hadn’t showered in three days and was pretty sure it would be years before I fit into my bathing suits. But I liked the idea of a trip. I liked the idea of feeling the swimmerets on my feet, of putting Clara in a little blow-up boat and sending her off to see the ocean.

  BEN GOT UP with Clara on the morning he was leaving for Houston so that I could sleep in. I woke up too, of course, since she’d been sleeping right next to me, and I heard him run the water to heat her bottle and heard her whimpering, impatient to eat. He was good with her, so steady. She liked him. She only liked me when she was gorging on me—I couldn’t have her in my arms without her nose questing my chest, her head surveying back and forth like a metal detector. She’d sit there with her lips latched, not even sucking, and then when I slipped her off the breast, she would howl. The habit made it difficult to love her. I lay in bed for a while, thinking about this.

  “Don’t bother Arthur,” Ben said as he was leaving. He said more than that, to give him credit—talked about how sorry he was to be leaving, how he’d never have gone were it not the firm’s highest-paying client, how he’d make it up to me when he got back. I nodded along, because what else was I supposed to do? I didn’t necessarily want him around, but I didn’t really want him gone either. I didn’t want to be alone with Clara. Ideally he could just take her with him, and I’d stay here with Solly, watching bad TV in bed. Getting some work done. Actually sleeping.

  Not ten minutes after he’d gone Annie called to check in on me. I knew that Ben had texted her, but she played it cool: Just thinking of you, maybe I’ll stop by.

  “No,” I said, “don’t stop by.” Clara was sprawled in her bouncer. When people took professional photos of their newborns, the babies were scrunched up to fit into a cocoon or a bucket, or the shape of a heart with their hands on their chin and their tiny diapered buttocks stuck straight in the air. My baby didn’t scrunch—she elbowed out of her swaddle, she rolled and she spread. She was a baby, not some strange fleshy doll. I had a doll once whose eyes only opened when you held her completely upright. When Clara’s eyes opened, she looked at me suspiciously.

  “It’s gross here,” I said. “Everything’s dirty and I’m dirty and the baby isn’t even cute yet.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “She’s still all yellow. She’s smushy.”

  “Megan, you’re not supposed to say that about your own kid. You’re supposed to give her vitamins or something.”

  “Well, it isn’t her fault,” I said. “How’s work? Did you meet up with that
dude from the coffee shop?” I had always lived vicariously through Annie, her bucolic romantic entanglements, her therapy sessions, her good taste in clothes.

  “He didn’t call,” she said. Normally I’d say something stupid like “More fish in the sea,” but I said nothing. One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. Why hadn’t coffee-shop guy called my sister? Annie was pretty, she was smart. I felt a void I thought was sadness swirling deeper in my chest. Burrowing. I pictured bunnies burrowing. Bunnies running in a field, chased by hounds, chased by humans. Boots and a breeze and a horn to start the hunt. Pet bunnies with ears that flopped down. Wild hares with mange, their ears erect. Good dogs lining up their kills, tongues out, Look at me, praise me.

  “He still could,” said Annie, her voice rising at the end, making it a question.

  “Yes, he could,” I agreed.

  IN THE LAST months of my pregnancy, I had effectively abandoned my dissertation. We use abandon to mean leave, but what it actually means is surrender. In thirteenth-century France: mettre sa forest à bandon, a phrase from feudal law that meant the public opening of a forest or pasture for all who needed to come cut wood or graze. My work was open to the elements, available. By leaving it alone, I’d rendered it no longer solely mine.

  There’d been an expectation of progress while I was carrying Clara, but I’d blithely missed the last check-in phone call with my advisor, telling him I was having “complications” and instead eating a carton of rocky road ice cream in my underwear, some stupid teen soap opera streaming on TV. The next morning I opened a Word document, flipped a comma back and forth for twenty minutes, and then closed it.

  Now I was officially on maternity leave, saddled with a tiny, actual, human complication and too tired to do much of anything. Somehow I was not too tired to feel guilty about feeling tired. I dreamed that the rest of my graduate school cohort had shared a massive hotel suite at a conference in Bruges. I hadn’t been invited. I had no need to go to Bruges, but in this dream the need had not been the determining factor in my lack of invitation, rather my breast pump, which they told me couldn’t fit on the plane. In this dream my cohort called me from the hotel bathroom, Skyping me from the whirlpool tub where they all sat, sipping champagne.

  I woke up and fed Clara, thinking about all the conferences I would be missing, the classes I would not be asked to teach, the parties and the networking dinners I wouldn’t attend, the deferred tenure-track jobs. I didn’t especially like my cohort—the two actual friends I’d made were casualties of attrition—but I still wanted them to like me. I still wanted to be relevant, for people to think of me, to google myself and find praise. It was hard enough being tied to Ben’s job. We had to live by his office. No research sabbaticals or postdocs abroad for me. The best I could hope for was a part-time position at a school in Chicago, or a dissertation interesting enough to turn into a book. Neither would happen, unless I kept writing.

  Clara was ten days old, and time felt both inconsequential and absolutely vital. She was pretty much a blob, and I still wasn’t sure if I loved her, but I knew that at one point I’d loved my work, I knew my work was still there, waiting. What would my obituary look like, what would they write on my tombstone, were I to go up through the turquoise door and free-fall out the picture window? Megan Weiler, survived by sixty unwritten pages and a round or two of revision. Also a baby. That wouldn’t do.

  With Clara in her bouncer, I opened my laptop at the kitchen table, a suction attached to either breast. I was still trying to up my milk supply, and when Clara wasn’t eating, I was pumping. I hadn’t wanted to spend money on the bras that let you pump hands-free, which seemed silly now that I thought about the other gadgets I’d bought without question. Did I imagine there was shame in not holding the nozzle to the breast myself? Did I need to be involved in my own milking, the surprisingly arousing tug of nipple, the splat of fluid in the cloudy plastic cup? I sliced holes in an old sports bra and leaned forward, pressing the back of what the manual called “the pump parts” against the edge of the table. If I was careful, if I didn’t move, this jerry-rig worked.

  I was ready, yet I found myself uncertain. How would I find my way back in? I had to make my work accessible. My advisor said he wasn’t “convinced” by my latest draft. I wasn’t sure what that meant.

  Scrolling through my document, I landed on a chapter about the Bureau of Educational Experiments, the Greenwich Village bastion of progressive education I was using to support my central ideas about modernist literature and early childhood education.

  “Colloquially known as Bank Street School for Children, the bureau championed the notion that children develop language to communicate not with people but with the sensory world around them,” I read aloud to Clara. I looked at her. She gave me nothing. “Well, put it that way, and who wouldn’t be convinced?” Clara sniffled, then yawned.

  For years I had been reading about how children should be taught to communicate, and for years I had been struggling to make other people care. I’d always had a love for words, but I had never been a very good communicator. I hoped this would be different for my daughter.

  “Language,” I said slowly to Clara. “Sensation.”

  Bank Street’s founder, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, claimed that young children experimented with language regardless of meaning, that when meaning did come, it was in service to their own insular experience. I liked this: language as selfishness, language as categorization. An intangible sound making the tangible world real.

  Clara whimpered. The little line at the front of her diaper that indicated urine had turned from yellow to blue. “You peed yourself,” I said to Clara. “Your own insular experience.” Her nose twitched.

  I could put down the pump and change her. She was wet. Ben would want me to change her. But the number of diapers I’d already used that morning was unconscionable. Ben wouldn’t want me to waste resources. And my milk was really coming now, finally splurging through the valves.

  I kept reading. Clara kept whining.

  At the end of the chapter I had copy-pasted my images, as if including them brought me closer to a finished draft. “Here,” I said, using an elbow to angle my laptop screen downward. “I’ll show you the pictures. Let’s find out if you’ve learned how to see.”

  I showed Clara a few screenshots of original pages from the books I’d described, an imposing gray building, the New York Public Library lions, a snapshot of two Bank Street School teachers walking through the West Village. Two young Bank Street School teachers, one in a fur coat, one in a trench. One with a beret, one hatless and looking remarkably like someone I had recently seen smoking a cigarette.

  I pushed my chair back. The shields fell off my breasts, sending the little collection bottles to the floor and immediately contaminating my freshly pumped milk. I didn’t care. I pulled up the search bar on my computer, and while drops fell from my goose-pimpled nipples, googled Margaret Wise Brown.

  There she was—the woman from upstairs, who I had not seen at the corner coffee shop or on a friend’s Facebook feed or riding the bus. There she was on my computer, grinning out at me. Holding a black dog. Wearing a brooch. Cheeks like apples.

  Margaret Wise Brown had moved in upstairs.

  Solly came over to sniff around the breast pump. I’d have to boil everything before I could use it again.

  Clara’s cries were strengthening. I rocked her bouncer with my foot, which made my pelvis hurt but didn’t calm her.

  Someone who looked remarkably like Margaret Wise Brown had moved in upstairs. Someone who, like the real Margaret Wise Brown, had a close friend named Michael. Had a fluffy black dog. Had fluffy hair and fancy period clothing.

  “Hush,” I said to Clara. “Mommy’s thinking.”

  A Margaret Wise Brown impersonator, hired for kids’ parties. An actress, filming for a TV show—just the other day a camera crew had blocked our street. That didn’t make any sense. That didn’t explain the turquoise door.

  Margare
t Wise Brown lived upstairs.

  And why shouldn’t she be the real Margaret? Sleep was a distant memory, and I was a cow, and a human had come out of my vagina. Why shouldn’t Margaret Wise Brown live upstairs?

  Clara, still howling.

  Life was nothing like it had been, nothing like I’d ever thought it could be. Why the hell not add Margaret?

  Introduction

  In 1934 the children’s author Margaret Wise Brown wrote a letter to her mentor about Gertrude Stein’s metafictional novel The Making of Americans: “In this book I am given new solutions,” said Brown, “brand new ideas. . . . There is a rhythm of American day to day existence and relationship that is as certain as the rhthm [sic] of the ocean and as binding as the relationship of the ocean to the little waves that crash on our shore.”1 This brand new rhythm of day-to-day existence marked not only a shift in Brown’s own thinking but a shift between the golden age of children’s literature of the Romantic period, and the modern here-and-now school. Instead of allegory and fantasy, Brown and her colleagues in post–World War I children’s publishing would focus on the realities of sensory experience, the sounds of language, and the particular worldviews and communicative abilities of the very young.

  Historians have argued that the cultural shift away from fairy tales in popular children’s literature reflected both the growing threat to the concept of idyllic childhood posed by World War I, and the influence of early childhood education reformers like Lucy Sprague Mitchell and Bank Street School.2 But few have focused on the impact of literary modernism on those writing for children in the postwar years. What I propose to call the modern age of children’s literature (1926–1945) was not, as most often described, a direct contradiction to the whimsy of the prior golden age, but a dialectic between golden-age thinking and new theories of education and literacy that remodeled the burgeoning modernism of writers like Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein for elementary audiences.