by Tara Neilson
What I heard was: “Write a two-page report on nightly sports.”
It seemed like a strange request to me, but I rallied to the challenge and came up with the most outrageous, ridiculous nighttime sports I could think of, and added an illustration in full Crayola color.
Linda laughed and gave me an A for creativity before explaining the mistake.
Later, when I thought about it, I was glad I’d misunderstood. I didn’t want to glorify knightly sports that were play battles, men playing at war, making it sound honorable and free of consequences. I was glad that I’d accidentally spoofed it.
• • •
Because neither Mom nor Linda was confident of their math skills, it was left to Dad on the weekends to help us through the arithmetical labyrinth.
The problem with this was: 1) Dad had zero patience for fumbling, intimidated kids, and 2) Dad didn’t know how to teach—he knew how to do a thing, but not how to explain it. He would do one of our math problems while we watched and then figured that would be sufficient for us to pick it up.
“I learned by watching others do things. So should you,” he’d say.
This didn’t work for me. I had to know the why of a thing before it made sense to me. I loved the idea of math. I loved that there was a language of numbers that could describe everyday things around me, that could describe the universe, space and time, but I needed to know the logic behind the rules.
He didn’t have the words to explain it.
Instead, I studied the books, digging and figuring, until I could answer my own questions and work out how to get the same solution he had. Later, as I grew up, I learned to keep asking him questions that would eventually make him give me the piece I needed to make it all make sense. I learned by making connections, not by watching and then doing.
Which was interesting in itself. There are different ways of learning. Each person is reached by something else, I thought, suggesting that we construct our perspectives of the world with different tools and materials. No wonder no two people see the same event the same way. No wonder there are so many misunderstandings and wars in the world.
And then I was presented with the paradoxes in my math book’s appendix, apparently put there to mess with students’ minds just as they figured they’d learned what the world was about.
The writers of the math books ripped the rug right out from under us by going on about an ancient philosopher who mathematically hypothesized that motion and change was an illusion.
Speedy Achilles and the slow tortoise have to cover the exact same distance, so no matter how fast or slow they go neither ever gets ahead of the other.
Or something like that. I couldn’t quite get their point because it seemed to me that they were leaving out necessary, real-life facts in their illustration. Change and motion were not solely physical. There were intangibles present that couldn’t be grabbed and pinned like an insect to a board to be studied with a magnifying glass. Motion and change involved some sort of transformation, a breaking through the barrier of space, some way to merge space and time to provide movement and change.
These were concepts I felt but couldn’t argue because I didn’t have enough knowledge. I had the feeling I was meant to be intimidated into submission by the authors referencing a Greek named Zeno who’d lived in 490–430 BC “The Ancients,” after all, were to be revered and never contradicted; at least that was the impression I got from the Calvert’s Correspondence Course designers.
Just learning about “BC” should have been a mind-trip. Modern time, the time we lived in, flowed forward, according to our calendar dating from Jesus’s first birthday; while time marched backwards from that date for the long dead ancient world.
In other words, time could flow in both directions, despite our science books only teaching a single direction of time, from past to future.
The truth was, I had no problem with time flowing in either direction. In fact, my mental image of time was of a river flowing from the future while our bodies were temporal units meeting that turbulent current of possibilities. However we reacted to what that river of time brought to us—in that split second there were countless options—the present was created by whatever action we took. What flowed behind were the consequences of our actions: they became the irreversible past.
Since no teacher insisted it was otherwise, taking it for granted that we all viewed time the same way, I grew up with this idea of time. It set me on a collision course with the outside world that would one day traumatize me for a long time to come.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“‘You are incorrigible,’ he exclaimed. Lucretia, walking up the staircase in front of him, had the last word. ‘Is that not a much more interesting thing to be than conformable?’”
—The Bored Bridegroom by Barbara Cartland
WE COULDN’T expect to keep Linda with us forever, and so it went. A local fisherman friend named Art Forbes snatched her up, and once more it was just Mom and the five of us kids.
Mom sank deeper into depression and became more of an absentminded companion than a mother. She immersed herself in books after a brief enthusiasm for redecorating the floathouse’s living room (painting the floor aqua and laying down a blue-andgold oriental rug that covered almost the entire floor, situating large pink and turquoise vases near the two couches that faced each other, hanging a Dutch wall clock—with heavy brass weights—that had to be wound daily).
After all the years of dreaming about Alaska and then finally having the dream come true, she lost herself in a world other than the one she lived in.
We adapted to the change and took shameless advantage of her state. We’d wait until she was deeply into one of her books before casually asking if we could help ourselves to some rationed item of food.
“Hmm?” she’d say.
We’d repeat our request.
“Mm-hm. Sure.” Her eyes never budged from the page. Later, when she came up for air and realized we’d eaten what we weren’t supposed to, we were able to tell her truthfully she’d given the okay.
One of Mom’s favorite subjects was English history. She had shelves full of books on the kings and queens of England and talked about them like they were modern celebrities. She had a major crush on Charles II. Anne Boleyn, whom Mom seemed to identify with, was another obsession. Besides the weightier tomes, her need for escapism demanded lighter fare, so she had subscriptions to British paperback romances: Harlequins and Regency novels.
Megan and I dove headfirst into the world of Barbara Cartland and became enamored of the Regency period. We developed as a character a snobby, aristocratic matriarch named Madame Moonlea. We’d swish majestically around our Alaskan floathouse home that was perched above the tide surrounded by evergreens, and peer down at our younger brothers through pretend lorgnettes, saying all manner of stuffy, superior things to them in our best upper-crust British accents. We let them know that odds were not great that they’d be invited to Almack’s for the supper dance.
We tooled around outside on driftwood logs, pretending we were in phaetons and curricles, snapping riding whips (thin red cedar limbs divested of needles) over the horse’s backs, and chatting about the latest balls and plays at Covent Garden. We sat side saddle (in our ragged jeans that magically transformed into gorgeous riding habits of the finest satins and silks) on logs with weathered, broken branches, hooking our leg around ones that took the place of a saddle horn, and trotted around Hyde Park exchanging witty remarks and the latest on dits.
“Lady Dalgliesh has behaved insupportably,” I shared, my voice a languid, congested drawl. I moved my body on the log as if I was aboard a walking horse. “She was quite in her cups during the Michaelmas Ball, I gather.”
“Oh, not Lady D again.” Megan yawned delicately, patting her lips with her pinky raised. “If I hear another word about her, I daresay I shall be bored to distinction!”
I cleared my throat in my most genteel manner. “Pray forgive me, m’lady, but I bel
ieve you mean bored to distraction, or possibly extinction?”
Megan caught my eye and we burst into laughter.
Naturally such delicious young debutantes had admirers. We each had one in particular, two Lords of the Realm named Smith Darcourt (for Megan) and Reuben Challonly (for me). They were more of the athletic, Corinthian type rather than refined dandies. They were always betting on things like pig races.
Megan and I managed to keep up with them when they went out steeple chasing—though we didn’t really know what that was about. We gathered that it meant a lot of galloping around the beaches, so we held invisible reins in our hands and jumped logs or the creek that ran beneath the floathouse. We artistically lurched when we leapt, acting out a body’s movement on the back of a horse in motion.
We also had a few duels. We stood back to back holding our driftwood guns sternly in front of us, while Robin and Chris stood by as our seconds. As one of the boys counted off, we marched with measured strides away from each other, the gravel beach and clam shells crunching underfoot, the musk of seaweed in our nostrils. Off to the side the tar-blackened pilings of the old cannery haul-out marched down the beach in soldierly formation arranged by size, from tallest to shortest.
On the count of ten we turned and shot. Somehow we survived to do it all again, though we weren’t so bourgeois as “the babies” who ran around shooting each other with their fingers and yelling “new guy” every two minutes. (“New guy” was their magical reset phrase that allowed them to unceasingly come back from the dead while playing cops and robbers.)
SISD had sent out clay with our school supplies, and while we all loved to make food from it (hamburgers and hotdogs were particular favorites) Megan and I focused on using it to mold an entire London Season’s worth of ton people.
We had men in tails and top hats tapping crops against their high Hessian boots. Ladies who perched side saddle on prancing steeds (splayfooted so they’d stay upright) wore flowing riding habits and hats with veils. Little boys in sailor suits chased after barking dogs, and people of all descriptions in their Regency attire (and, anachronistically, Victorian dresses complete with exaggerated bustles) strolled about or rode in two-wheeled, open vehicles pulled by one or more horses.
We filled the plexiglass windows that overlooked the raw beach and bay with these preening clay people from Barbara Cartland’s world.
I wondered what aristocratic Barbara Cartland would think, as she drifted about her ornate British mansion, if she could see two ragamuffin wilderness girls lifting lines from her books to put in the mouths of our clay people and Barbie dolls.
All that Barbara Cartland reading would come in handy in future school years, we found. Her books were packed full of historical facts and settings, and when it came time to study Western European history in high school we were way ahead of our schoolmates and aced every test.
• • •
I loved horse books, having the typical girl obsession with horses. I’d devour a book about a cowgirl at the rodeo, and when it was finished I’d race onto the beach and do tight turns around the double lines of pilings that marched down the beach.
When my little brothers asked what I was supposed to be playing at, I thought they were incredibly dim. “Barrel racing—obviously,” I’d retort, and whip that quarter horse around the next piling more tightly than the last one.
While Megan sketched pretty much everything and liked to work with water paints, I stuck to mainly horses, sketching them with pencils, or writing the kinds of equine stories I wanted to read and then illustrating them with brightly colored pens. I stapled or sewed the pages together and read the results to my indiscriminating little brothers.
Megan liked books about girls our own age, ones with a moral or a principle to be learned and upheld, like Blubber by Judy Blume.
“You have to read this,” she told me after she finished it. “It’s got an important message. I think every kid should read it.” There was a zealot’s gleam in her eye that didn’t bode well for my enjoyment of the book, I was sure.
I did try. I wasn’t able to finish it. “I didn’t like any of the characters.”
She shook her head at me. “They’re not supposed to be likable, they’re relatable!”
“I didn’t find them relatable. I found them a bunch of rotten, stinking, selfish bullies.”
“But that’s the point! You’re supposed to realize that any of us can be bullies if we’re not careful.” Megan was always trying to pass on these lessons she gleaned from books to our little brothers—without notable success. If anything, they went out of their way to do the exact opposite of her helpful pointers.
I was more in the “let them learn by example” camp, so they favored me since it allowed them to follow their own course. This worked well for happy-go-lucky, always-smiling-and-singing Chris (he liked to make up lyrics on the spot about whatever was happening around him and sang all day long). Robin, however, could only take this for so long. He understood, if no one else did, that a growing, perpetually-up-to-no-good boy required boundaries and needed some discipline to maintain them.
He’d push and push and drive everyone crazy with his deliberately escalating bad behavior. But Mom was the furthest thing from a disciplinarian. She tried all the noncorporal punishment, child psychology tricks she could drum up, but Robin always saw through them. She tried threatening that when Dad came home on the weekend he’d take care of it. But although we all had a lively interest in avoiding Dad’s blacker moods, he wasn’t a disciplinarian either.
I finally had enough.
“Pilgrim,” I told Robin, adapting a quote from a favorite John Wayne movie, “you’ve caused a lot of problems and what you deserve is a darned good spanking. But I won’t give it to you. I won’t, I won’t—the heck I won’t!” And then I spanked him.
Robin loved it. He loved the humor, he loved the quote, but most of all, he loved the discipline. Afterward he told me, “I love you, Tara. You’re the best sister ever.” And he’d be a perfect little boy for a week or so, before he started pushing to receive some more of that good old John Wayne discipline again.
In addition to the book subscriptions Mom got for herself, she also got Jamie started on The Hardy Boys, me on Nancy Drew, and Megan with The Bobbsey Twins—but we all read each other’s books, just as we had with each other’s textbooks.
Mom also got a subscription for Dad. He’d been brought up on TV Westerns—it was the one thing he shared with his own dad—so she had Westerns written by Louis L’Amour arriving in every batch of mail. When I tired of Barbara Cartland’s mannered Regency world, I dove headlong into the two-fisted, gunslinging, cayuse-riding world of L’Amour’s Old West. It was a toss-up which one I liked more, but in the end L’Amour won the contest.
For one thing, I related more to the people in his books. They used kerosene lamps like us; the frontier they lived on had few people scattered throughout a huge, empty land. Women were left alone with their children to homestead while the men went off to make money. Guns were an accepted tool of life and people had to cope with the weather in a visceral, life-and-death way. Food and other luxuries were hard come by. And books, anything written, were treasured more highly than money.
Before bed, Mom read to us Down the Long Hills, the one book L’Amour wrote primarily from a kid’s point of view. The grizzly encounters in it did not help my sleep issues, but there was no lack of identification we felt for the young protagonist, who, in a lot of ways, resembled Jamie.
Despite Jamie’s various ways of torturing us, we never questioned his survival instincts or his resourcefulness, like the kid in the book. And even the boy’s protectiveness and care of his little sister rang true. Though Jamie wouldn’t have been anywhere near as kind and patient about it, there wasn’t a one of us kids who doubted that he’d be there for us and risk his own life to save us.
He was only about four when he saved my life during a family outing on a lake in Montana. The moment our pare
nts weren’t looking I crawled into the water and would have drowned if Jamie hadn’t gone after me. When Mom checked on us she nearly had a heart attack when she didn’t see either of us on shore. Then she looked in the lake and saw Jamie standing in water lapping at his face, holding me above the surface. His head kept going under in between waves, but he never let me drop.
I suppose this gave him a certain proprietary attitude about me, like in the saying that if someone saves your life, you belong to them. Perhaps that’s why he felt free to torture me with the news that I was in the top ninety percentile of humans mostly likely to suffer spontaneous combustion.
• • •
We older kids loved school and didn’t require much oversight after Linda left. Robin and Chris resisted, but Jamie, Megan, and I loved to go up to the school and follow the course program on our own.
This allowed Mom to be an on-again, off-again kind of teacher. She did it in spurts and we, naturally, took advantage of this. To prank her we deliberately filled our workbooks full of random words, crazy phrases, and whatever stray thought entered our brains. We knew the right answers, but what fun would writing them down be? Every few weeks she went through our textbooks and was beside herself at our apparent laziness and/or lack of intelligence.
We had to erase everything and put in the right answers before Tom Aubertine made one of his surprise visits; but it was worth it to us, and we did it all over again to win one of her ever-reliable baffled tirades.
Mom was a woman of extremes about any of her enthusiasms, even during the worst of her depression, so when she took on something she tended to go all out. Like the time she showed up for school one day to teach us about her favorite subject: Literature.
She chose Robert Louis Stevenson to talk about, since she was reading us Treasure Island every night. She became animated as she shared snippets from a biography she had about him, scratching out points on the chalkboard, and analyzing in great detail every single book he’d ever written, fitting in how they had emotionally affected her.