“What’s new with you?” her father asked as he loaded saag paneer and tandoori chicken onto his plate.
That word again! Nora had never before reflected on how much people cared about new things, greeting each other every single day by asking, “What’s new?”
“We’re going to be planting a class garden,” Nora told him.
“Excellent! Is everybody planting the same thing?”
“No, we can plant whatever we want, so long as we pick something that can survive frost and grows pretty fast. I’m going to plant peas.”
“Peas?”
“Because of Mendel,” Nora explained. “I’m going to try to do the same experiments he did. I’ll plant purple-flowered peas and white-flowered peas, and I’ll cross-pollinate them—you know, get pollen from one kind of plant and put it on the other kind—and then when they make their seeds, I’ll plant those seeds, and see if they grow up to have purple flowers or white flowers. And I’ll either show that Mendel was right about genetics or that he was wrong.”
She paused.
“Well, probably I’ll show that he was right. Because he did these things in the eighteen hundreds, and if he had been wrong, someone would have probably found it out by now. But it will be interesting to see, won’t it?”
“Definitely!” her father said. “I’m not sure, though….” He trailed off.
“Not sure what?” He’d better not be going to say that Mendel’s experiments were too hard for a fourth grader.
“You might not have enough time between now and the end of the school year to plant your peas, germinate them, grow them to maturity, cross-pollinate them, harvest the seeds, plant the second generation of seeds, and grow them to maturity. It might take too long.”
“Dad, that’s why Mendel picked peas! Because they grow so fast!”
“Okay,” her father agreed. “But fast can mean different things to different people. That’s all I’m saying.”
Mildly annoyed, Nora switched topics. “We’re going to be writing poetry, too.”
“I know a poem about peas,” her father said. “It goes like this: ‘I eat my peas with honey; I’ve done it all my life. It makes the peas taste funny, but it keeps them on the knife.’ ”
“Dad!” Nora said again.
She knew her parents respected her as a scientist. They told everyone how proud they were of her for being a ten-year-old myrmecologist. But sometimes she had the feeling they didn’t take her seriously.
Emma was waiting for Nora on the Plainfield Elementary School playground the next morning before the first bell.
“I brought you a present,” she announced.
“Oh,” Nora said. “It’s not my birthday.”
“I know. We talked about that once, remember? You’re a Scorpio, and I’m an Aries.”
Nora remembered that Emma was interested in astrology, that fake “science” based on the belief that the personality you had depended on the month you were born in. Nora’s mother got irritated when people who didn’t know better thought she was an astrologer instead of an astronomer. As if everyone born between October 23 and November 22 would have the same personality! As if the same predictions could be made about what would happen to millions and millions of people on any given day!
“Why do you have a present for me?” Nora asked. But she had a feeling she already knew the answer.
“It’s a ‘just because’ present,” Emma told Nora. She set her backpack on the ground and unzipped the outer compartment.
“Does it have something to do with ants?” Nora asked.
Nora’s sister used to like turtles, so everyone kept giving Sarah turtle-shaped earrings, turtle-topped pencils, T-shirts from the Galápagos Islands with pictures of those huge famous tortoises on them (apparently thinking tortoises were the same thing as turtles, or close enough). So far, no one had ever given Nora any ant-themed presents.
“No!” Emma said. “It’s something I made. Close your eyes and stick out your hand.”
Nora obeyed. She felt Emma’s deft fingers tying something around her wrist.
“All right,” Emma pronounced. “You can open your eyes now. Ta-da!”
On Nora’s left wrist was a thin bracelet made of bright blue and yellow threads knotted together.
“It’s a friendship bracelet,” Emma said. “And it’s the best kind of friendship bracelet because it’s the wishing kind. So think of what you’re wishing for most in your life right now, and wear this twenty-four/seven until it’s totally worn out and falls off by itself. You can’t make it fall off because that would be cheating. And then when it does fall off, your wish will come true. See, I made one for me, too.”
Emma held out her own wrist, where a similar pink-and-purple bracelet was fastened.
“Do you like it?” Emma asked.
What could Nora say?
“Sure. Thanks, Emma. That was a nice thing to do for me.”
But it would have been nicer if it hadn’t been so painfully obvious that Emma was trying to turn Nora into the best new thing in the class.
“My pleasure!” Emma replied. “So think hard about what you want to wish for!”
If there was anything Nora didn’t believe in, it was a wishing bracelet. How could a bunch of knotted threads have the power to alter the course of reality? But suppose it did. What did Nora wish for most?
It would be too mean for Nora to use Emma’s friendship bracelet to wish that she wasn’t so unmistakably Emma’s project for Coach Joe’s newness challenge.
But if she was honest, that was the first thing that popped into her head on this April morning with a bunch of blue and yellow threads tied to her wrist.
The garden, Coach Joe told the class during the morning’s huddle, was behind Plainfield Elementary School in a plot of land big enough for each student to get three feet of soil to plant a crop.
“That’s not much,” Coach Joe said. “So we’re going to have to plan carefully. Some of the factors to consider are the time it will take for your crop to grow to maturity, how far apart the plants need to be spaced, how much sun they require, and how tall they are expected to grow. You can find that information here.”
He held up a seed catalog with a picture of big, red, ripe tomatoes on the front cover.
“All right, team, back to the dugout.” That’s what Coach Joe called their pods, when he was in an extra-sporty mood. “I have a catalog for each pod, so take one with you.”
Nora let her pod mates look first. She already knew she was planting peas.
Thomas W., the quietest kid in the whole class, picked radishes. Nora watched as he marked a green circle around one of the half dozen varieties on the radish page. He didn’t actually speak aloud the word radish.
“Why did you pick radishes?” Nora wanted to know.
He shrugged without speaking.
Mason picked radishes, too. “Since I hate all vegetables equally,” he said, “I might as well plant radishes. They’re small, at least. So there’ll be less to go to waste when I don’t eat them.”
“I’m going to grow flowers,” Emma said. “And I’m going to talk to them to make them grow better. Did you know plants grow better if you talk to them?”
“No,” Nora said. “Flowers don’t have ears. Flowers don’t have brains. So flowers can’t hear human speech.”
She didn’t want to be rude, but she had already stopped herself from commenting on zodiac signs and wishing bracelets.
“I heard it on a television program,” Emma said, as if that made it true. “I did!” She turned back to the catalog, sighing over the page of pansies. “Pansies have the sweetest faces!”
She held the catalog open so Nora could see. The markings on the flowers did sort of look like two dark eyes, a yellow nose, and an open mouth. But it was a stretch, at best, to call that a face.
The pictures showed pansies in different colors: purples, pinks, blues, yellows.
“Which one are you going to get?” Nora as
ked.
“I don’t know. Maybe Sunrise.” Emma read aloud the catalog description: “ ‘All the hues of early dawn.’ Or ‘Ocean Breeze. Shifting shades of sea and sky.’ ”
“You’re picking them based on their names?” Nora asked.
Emma nodded. “Shifting shades of sea and sky. All the hues of early dawn. Early dawn. Sea and sky. Okay, shifting shades of sea and sky.”
Across the room, Nora could hear Brody saying, “I want to grow radishes and spring greens and Asian greens and baby carrots. If the carrots take all summer to grow, I can come back and water them, right? And wait to pick them until they’re completely ready.”
Amy wandered over to check on Nora. Coach Joe didn’t mind quiet visits from one pod to another.
“I’m doing radishes,” Amy reported. “My whole pod is doing radishes. They’re fast, they’re easy, and my rabbits adore them. Did you pick out your peas?”
“No.” Nora hadn’t had a chance yet because Emma was too busy exclaiming over the names and faces of pansies.
“Here, Nora.” Emma offered her the catalog. “You can pick now. Are there any plants you could grow that your ants would adore?”
There were things Nora could grow that her ants would eat. For a moment, she felt guilty she hadn’t even thought about ant preferences in choosing her crop. She wasn’t being as considerate of her ants as Amy was of her rabbits. But she couldn’t say there was anything she could grow that her ants would adore.
“I think they’d like peas,” Nora said. She couldn’t imagine they wouldn’t.
She turned to the pea page of the catalog.
There were so many kinds! If only she knew exactly what Gregor Mendel had grown. Sugar Daddy peas? Goliath peas? Super Sugar Snap peas? She wished the catalog had pictures of the pea flowers as well as of the final pods plump with the peas themselves. Were the flowers on Sugar Daddy peas purple or white? How could she breed for flower color if she didn’t even know what color flowers she was buying?
Then her eyes fell on the Maestro pea facts.
Sun: Full sun.
Height: 26 inches.
Time to maturity: 61 days.
Sixty-one days? Two months?
Quickly she scanned the peas on the page. The shortest time given was fifty-five days. Or in other words, forever.
Either Gregor Mendel had grown some special, super-speedy peas or fast did mean different things to different people.
She hated when she was wrong and her parents were right.
If Nora planted peas, she’d be eleven or twelve before she had planted and harvested enough generations of peas to find out if Mendel had been correct about plant genetics. She’d be all the way to middle school!
So much for plants as her new thing. Amy had been right about that, too. Well, if the peas had worked out, they would have been new enough. Or maybe not. Nora would have been one of thousands of scientists who had copied Gregor Mendel, and nothing special at all.
She might as well grow radishes like Thomas, Mason, Brody, Amy, and, apparently, half of Coach Joe’s class.
But she would not grow pansies picked on the basis of a poetic name. And she would not talk to her plants as they grew.
That much she knew for sure.
Nora was hardly in the mood for poetry during language arts time.
Coach Joe had a poem up on the board for the class to read. It was a poem about spring by someone named e. e. cummings.
“Why is his name spelled like that?” Brody wanted to know.
“He was born Edward Estlin Cummings,” Coach Joe said. “So that’s what e. e. stands for. You’ll notice that the poem itself has hardly any capital letters in it. None of the lines begin with a capital, do they?”
Nora studied the poem. What Coach Joe had said was true.
“What did he have against capital letters?” Mason asked, as if relieved that someone else had a negative attitude against something most people liked.
“Maybe it wasn’t that he had a grudge against capitals, but that lowercase letters had some special appeal for him,” Coach Joe answered. “Why do you think that might be?”
“He wanted to be different,” one kid said.
“He didn’t want to have to remember where to put the capitals,” Dunk suggested. Dunk was notoriously lazy.
Elise was the best writer in the class, so when she raised her hand to offer an idea, Nora was interested to hear it.
“It sort of looks kidlike,” Elise said. “Little kids might not know how to write with capitals. Capitals look big and official. Without capitals, the poem looks more little and friendly.”
“Good, good,” Coach Joe said.
He read the poem aloud. Nora didn’t understand the point of it. There was a lot about a balloon man whistling “far and wee.” Why would someone want to write a poem about that? And he used strange phrases like “mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful.”
“The poem has a lot of signs of spring in it,” Coach Joe said. “What are some of them?”
People raised their hands to point out mud and puddles, kids playing hopscotch and jump rope, the balloon man whistling.
“The balloon man isn’t a spring thing,” Nora said. “You can have balloons any time of year. So that’s not really a sign of spring.”
“I think it is,” Elise said. “I don’t think the balloon man would be out selling balloons in the middle of winter. And the way he keeps whistling far and wee—it’s as if he’s happy it’s spring and he can be outside with his big bunch of balloons.”
Well, Elise knew more about poetry than Nora did, that was for sure.
Coach Joe pointed out that e. e. cummings used several of the five senses in the poem. You could see the balloon man and hear his far-and-wee whistle and feel the squelch of the mud and the splash of the puddle.
“All right, team,” Coach Joe said. “Take your list of signs of spring and work on putting them into a springtime poem the way e. e. cummings did. Use as many senses as possible. And see if you can make up any phrases of your own like ‘mud-luscious’ and ‘puddle-wonderful.’ Okay, play ball!”
Nora hadn’t added anything else to her Signs of Spring list. Ants were enough. She had already filled one of her many notebooks with fascinating facts about ants. Surely she could write a poem about them.
But writing a poem turned out to be harder than writing a list of facts, Nora found out as she sat chewing on her pencil and wondering how to begin. Much harder. How could you take facts and make them sound poetic instead of just factual? She could think of words that rhymed with ants: dance, pants, plants. But e. e. cummings had written his poem without using rhyme. Maybe she could sort of copy his, but stick in ants instead of a balloon man. She could write without capitals and use the word wee to mean little.
After a few minutes, she read over what she had written.
in just April
when the snow is wet-melting
and the pavement is sun-steamy,
the ants come marching
Nora crossed out that last line. She was already copying e. e. cummings. She wasn’t going to copy “The Ants Go Marching” as well.
the ants come out
wee but many
wee but mighty
wee and hungry
ready for spring
Nora’s mother returned from Budapest on Friday, and Nora’s sister, Sarah, and Nora’s niece, Nellie, came over on Saturday morning to spend the weekend. Sarah’s husband, Jeff, wouldn’t be home from his tour of duty as an air force pilot until June.
As soon as Nora collected Nellie from Sarah’s arms, she noticed something amazing.
Nora smiled at Nellie.
And Nellie smiled back!
“She smiled at me,” Nora crowed. But maybe it wasn’t a real smile. She had learned that sometimes when babies look as if they’re smiling, it might be a reflex reaction to rumbles in their digestive systems. But at six weeks old, Nellie wasn’t a newborn anymore.
“Was that a real smile or a gas smile?” Nora asked, worried she had crowed too soon.
“A real smile,” Sarah replied, with an equally big smile of her own.
Nora’s father and mother each took turns holding Nellie, smiling huge smiles at her, and getting toothless grins in return.
It was odd to think of smiling—just smiling—as a new thing for Nellie: a thing she once hadn’t been able to do but could do now.
“Nellie’s doing something new every day,” Sarah said, as if reading Nora’s thoughts.
“Like what?” Nora wanted to know.
“Like, she can hold her head up so well by herself these days. She slept six hours straight last night. And when I read to her, she listens.”
“How do you know she’s listening?” Nora had to ask.
“A mother just knows,” Sarah said serenely. “I brought some of her books. I’ll read one to her and you’ll see.”
Nora’s mother handed Nellie back to Sarah, and Sarah tucked her into the crook of her arm. With her free hand, she fumbled in her overstuffed diaper bag and produced a sturdy board book.
“ ‘Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon. The little dog laughed to see such a sight, and the dish ran away with the spoon,’ ” Sarah read.
Was Nellie listening or not? Not, Nora decided. The baby screwed up her face and began to cry. Or maybe she had been listening, and didn’t like poetry. Or didn’t like this particular poem. The poem was misleading, in Nora’s opinion. It would give Nellie wrong ideas about cats, cows, the moon, dogs, dishes, and silverware, all in six lines.
“Maybe she doesn’t like poetry,” Nora suggested.
The Trouble with Friends Page 2