It seems impossible to write about Starring Sally J. using a straightforward plot synopsis, because, like some glorious dish of kreplach, its mighty stuffing of detail exists in a symbiotic relationship with the soup of the plot. Instead, you hear about curtains being run up on sewing machines and you can’t help but be transported right into Sally’s apartment, with its Murphy bed and courtyard fountain with goldfish, and in the kitchen you sit, being spoken to by Ma Fanny entirely in Yiddish, reverse-syntax English and ellipses. There’s your grade-school teacher Miss Swetnick over there, with her heart-shaped glasses and chipped tooth, and there’s your sundae at Herschel’s, with just a little cherry juice on top. That’s the ring on your four-party phone (one long ring, followed by two short), and there you are in the grade-school bathroom pulling down your Esther Williams-esque coronet to make Margaret O’Brien braids and stuffing your white socks into the garbage to look more like the girls in Florida and not the ones in NJ. (And hoping God will forgive you this one time, when the starving children in Europe could probably—right?—use those white socks.)
But I wonder if another reason we swoon for Sally J. is that, as readers, we were very much at the same level of detail comprehension—not only in our real-world lives, but in our reading of the book itself. After all, not only did I also have no idea what an “addition” might mean to a family or what “creme de cacao” was (though I too tried to approximate it with Hershey’s and whiskey) I was also ignorant of so many of the ready references of Sally J.’s world that she understood perfectly well: Jolly Roger, dog tags, “Swells,” Esther Williams, Margaret O’Brien, open-sided pinafores, Admiral Halsey. (To be perfectly honest, I still have no idea who Admiral Halsey is.) Given Ma Fanny’s frequent lapses into Yiddish, I can only assume that goyishe readers must have been even more ferblondzet!
Of course, by twenty years later or so I had realized who Esther Williams was. (I confess it was a recent reread that allowed me to realize that Ma Fanny borrowed Sally’s English book to practice English and THAT’S why it was in the pantry). But even as an eight-year-old, I understood that Sally realizing Peter Hornstein liked her, or that she was more adventurous than her mother, was a great leap forward for my beloved character. And though, at age 8, I may not have known yet who Eva Braun was, or where Union Woods could be found, I knew when Sally made peace with the fact that, probably, Hitler was not running amok in them, I too could set aside this childish dream.
Still longing for a finished basement, though!
OVERDUE
Harriet the Spy
By Louise Fitzhugh 1964
Diary Land
By Anna Holmes
That night at dinner everything was going along as usual, that is, Mr. And Mrs. Welsch were having an interminable, rambling conversation about nothing in particular while Harriet watched it all like a tennis match, when suddenly Harriet leaped to her feet as though she had just remembered, and screamed, “I’ll be damned if I’ll go to dancing school.”
It’s hard for me to imagine that anyone who loved—or still loves—Louise Fitzhugh’s 1964 classic Harriet the Spy does not love that passage, for it perfectly encapsulates everything I love about young Harriet, namely her powers of observation, her tendency toward impulsiveness, her wealth of opinion, and her unapologetic outspokenness.
Although she’s been compared to the most famous female sleuth of children’s literature, Nancy Drew, Harriet, in fact, has long reminded me of another precocious young tomboy of classic literature who goes through a loss of innocence: Scout Finch. Like Scout, she is scrappy, primarily male-identified (Harriet’s father seems to play a more influential role in her life than her mother, who is neither career woman nor homemaker), obsessed with spying on her neighbors (birdcage designer Harrison Withers is Harriet’s Boo Radley), and, is among other things, the recipient of a role as a foodstuff in a school holiday pageant (Harriet is an onion to Scout’s ham).
I’ve often wondered if Ms. Fitzhugh—like Harper Lee, a Southern “belle” transplanted to New York—took inspiration from her contemporary’s book, which was published just four years prior. For what it’s worth, the illustrations provided by Ms. Fitzhugh imply that, like Ms. Lee’s Scout, Harriet is a brunett with a utilitarian, androgynous hairstyle, and a love of denim and sneakers.
In short, Harriet is no young lady.
Eleven-year-old Harriet Welsch—excuse me, Harriet M. Welsch—is a precocious, bossy, privileged 6th grader on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with a beloved, strangely named nanny, Ole Golly, a preference for sneakers over Mary Janes, an appetite for both the culinary (cake, and tomato sandwiches), and an after-school “spy route” that takes her from the city’s leisure class in her upper East 80s street to the working poor who live just a few blocks away.
As the story begins, Ole Golly (can someone explain to me exactly how “Ole” sounds—IS IT “OLD” OR RHYMES-WITH-OLAY? ) takes Harriet and her best friend, Sport (In Fitzhugh’s world, boys and girls on the cusp of puberty maintain close friendships without a hint of sexual tension) on a long subway ride to Far Rockaway, where the two children meet Golly’s obese simpleton of a mother—and, to borrow a phrase from Jacob Riis, catch a glimpse of how the other half lives.
The trip, although short, is the first clue as to the dichotomy between Harriet’s privileged, cloistered existence—Manhattan townhouse, fulltime cook, exclusive all-girls private school—and the ugly reality of the world outside, where street urchins beg for handouts from the stockroom boys at local grocery stores. Harriet’s privilege does not mean that she is unprepared to face the many New Yorks in which she lives. As the book’s title suggests, she is a young girl of limitless curiosity. But it is a curiosity tempered by a distinct lack of empathy. Before she even gets home to scribble her thoughts in a notebook, she describes Ole Golly’s mother as “fat,” “stupid,” and resembling a “balloon.” She continues:
I THINK THAT LOOKING AT MRS. GOLLY MUST MAKE OLE GOLLY SAD. MY MOTHER ISN’T AS SMART AS OLE GOLLY BUT SHE’S NOT AS DUMB AS MRS. GOLLY. I WOULDN’T LIKE TO HAVE A DUMB MOTHER. IT MUST MAKE YOU FEEL VERY UNPOPULAR. I THINK I WOULD LIKE TO WRITE A STORY ABOUT MRS. GOLLY GETTING RUN OVER BY A TRUCK EXCEPT SHE’S SO FAT I WONDER WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO THE TRUCK. I HAD BETTER CHECK ON THAT.
As comedy, Harriet’s scribblings in her notebook—at just 11 years of age she has already filled a baker’s dozen of them with her observations—are pure gold: brash, honest, and often deliciously nasty and judgmental. Another gem about her school’s dean:
MISS WHITEHEAD’S FEET LOOK LARGER THIS YEAR. MISS WHITEHEAD HAS BUCK TEETH, THIN HAIR, FEET LIKE SKIS, AND A VERY LONG HANGING STOMACH. OLE GOLLY SAYS DESCRIPTION IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL AND CLEARS THE BRAIN LIKE A LAXATIVE. THAT SHOULD TAKE CARE OF MISS WHITEHEAD.
Unlike most girls’ scribblings, Harriet’s notebook is less diary than dossier, more concerned with the exterior than the interior. It is also what, a little over halfway through the book, gets her in a heap of trouble. When her group of friends—including Robert Oppenheimer-in-training Janie Gibbs—get ahold of her notebook, they turn on her, having discovered that even they are not immune to Harriet’s critical eye.
Up to this point, Harriet has lived her life confidently and unapologetically: there is no sense that she feels any sort of discomfort over the fact that she is an opinionated soap-adverse tomboy who, as she explains to Janie’s flummoxed, harried mother Mrs. Gibbs, moves “fast.” (As fans of the book will remember, Harriet has a tendency to run pell-mell into her family’s cook.)
Narratively speaking, a crisis is understandable—especially as the beloved Ole Golly has moved onto Montreal and marriage. But it is also lamentable, because part of what makes Harriet The Spy such an amazing, groundbreaking book is that it presents a young female protagonist who is damned if she will conform.
After the notebook scandal, Harriet suffers a crisis of confidence and social banishment for which I am not sure I ever forgave Ms. Fitzhugh. Certainly, growing up can be a
painful reality, both in life and in books, but does Harriet have to suffer the consequences of her actions so quickly and so harshly?
In the end, of course, Harriet is both able to hold onto her sense of self (“I LOVE MYSELF” she writes in her notebook) while adding a new skill to her already formidable repertoire: empathy. And in doing so, she becomes not only one of the most well-rounded female characters in the book, but one of the most well-rounded female characters in children’s literature—less interested in dance classes, attracting boys or playing bridge or mahjong than sating her own appetite for curiosity about the world around her.
But back to that notebook, the driving engine of Fitzhugh’s plot. It is to Fitzhugh’s credit that her young charge does not give it up altogether, even after it has brought her to her lowest point. Three pages before the book’s conclusion Harriet is still practicing, still observing, still writing…albeit with a more compassionate, inward-directed eye. Perhaps the end of a dossier and the beginning of a diary? Maybe it’s the end of spying and the beginning of writing:
I HAVE THOUGHT A LOT ABOUT BEING THINGS SINCE TRYING TO BE AN ONION. I HAVE TRIED TO BE A BENCH IN THE PARK, AN OLD SWEATER, A CAT, AND MY MUG IN THE BATHROOM. I THINK I DID THE MUG BEST BECAUSE WHEN I WAS LOOKING AT IT I FELT IT LOOKING BACK AT ME AND I FELT LIKE WE WERE TWO MUGS LOOKING AT EACH OTHER. I WONDER IF GRASS TALKS.
EXTRA CREDIT
Farmer Boy
By Laura Ingalls Wilder 1933
Thrashing, Threshing, Whitewash, Blacking
Had I not already known from my older brother’s perennial head-in-the-fridge pose that the two major activities of prepubescent boys are eating and getting into trouble, Farmer Boy would have driven home the point forever. Rerun junkies may forever envision a sun-kissed Dean Butler as Almanzo James Wilder (a.k.a. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s First Dude), but those in the know understand the pre-Half Pint schoolboy depicted in the second book of the Little House series, Farmer Boy, is truly the one to watch. Nearly 9 years old, clad in fullcloth underwear woven by his mother, able to “tuck away” a piece of pie on top of pretty much any meal, in-print Almanzo is the young exemplar and guide to all that the rich earth can offer to its most hardworking, prosperous citizens.
Which is to say—have you EVER read a book that contains so much cropland transmuted into so much good to eat? Thick stacks of pancakes! Apples ’n’ onions! Piping hot potatoes! Baked beans with crispy bits of pork meat! Cream rising from milk pans! Plump brown sausage cakes and fluffly chicken pie and cold beets—Good God! I’m even sold on headcheese!
And besides all this bringing-in-the-sheaving, there are Almanzo’s many, many adventures—not licking a tempting frozen water pump, letting his oxen run away, secreting an unsheared sheep (mmm…sheep), feeding candy to a piglet (candy!), winning with a milk-fed pumpkin (milk…!), saving the crop from an early frost; and, in a most touching (retouching?) scene, being saved by his sister Eliza from a fit of pique involving some blacking and white-and-gold wallpaper.
Lost in all the succulent food and house porn, I’m not sure I noticed as a girl what’s truly wonderful about this book—that, as an adult, Laura Ingalls Wilder felt close enough to her husband to write his childhood with as vivid an eye as she wrote her own. Okay, most of that relates to food, too. But, as my worn edition’s back-cover copy submits, “Was there ever a boy with a bigger appetite?” Reader: I humbly submit—was there ever a work, outside Proust, in which every single meal was as affectionately and brilliantly depicted? I’m not particularly romantic, but something of that old affection for one’s husband must transfer, like osmosis, to the reader—because, of my old boxed set, Farmer Boy is the only one whose too-oft-turned-front cover, oxen-illustration and all, is long gone.
EXTRA CREDIT
Danny, the Champion of the World
By Roald Dahl 1975
Raisin D’etre
Somewhere between Roald Dahl’s wicked writing for children and far wickeder writing for adults (try Switch Bitch—not a golden ticket to be found!) lies Danny, Champion of the World, the only unexpurgated paean to an adult in all of Roald’s work. (And likely one of the few in young-adult literature.) A book about, of all things, a father’s teaching his son how to properly poach a pheasant, it’s also a book about a father’s secrets. But refreshingly, these aren’t the kinds of dark family secrets that tend to hound the under–10 set. Instead, they’re the wonderfully bizarre stuff of a boy’s dreams, like how to make a pheasant stand still using horsehair, the best way to drive in the dark, and that you can tickle a trout to sleep to catch it. They’re not only things Danny is thrilled to know. They’re things that your average 12-year-old American girl—say, me—was not likely to find tickling through stacks of records at Sam Goody.
Tickling one’s way through an act less-skilled mortals would achieve by force, in fact, could well serve as the book’s overarching theme. The view of Danny’s father—and of the town’s other unregenerate poachers: the vicar, policeman, and doctor—is that stealing is an act of style, ideally carried off with wit, panache, and most important, cleverness. Danny, who hatches (ba-dump! ) the greatest pheasant-poaching plan of all time, takes the raisins that pheasants, as his father puts it, are “mad for” and stuffs each with a bit of sleeping-pill mixture, to stupendous success, at least temporarily. That’s also, apparently, how one justifies stealing from wealthy landowners resting on their fat, greedy haunches. “It never pays,” comments the doctor, gazing on Danny’s avian victims, completely ko’d by their raisin booty, “to eat more than your fair share.”
EXTRA CREDIT
Ludell
By Brenda Wilkinson 1975
The Peach State
I found a copy of this book in the nurse’s office of my middle school, and I still, all these years later, don’t feel at all guilty that I filched it immediately. (Especially as, twenty years later, someone filched it from me from my college dorm room and never gave it back—library karma’s a bitch.) The story of Ludell, a young dreamer who’s being raised in rural Georgia in the 50s by a strict churchgoing grandmother, it was one of the few books of its era to depict young black characters—and definitely one of the only ones also written by a black author. (The only other one that comes to mind is Ernest J. Gaines’s wonderful A Long Day in November, a book-length story of a difficult day in the life of a boy whose parents aren’t getting along, all taking place on a sugarcane farm in rural Louisiana.)
Ludell—which continues with Ludell and Willie, the story of her not-particularly-approved-of-by-grandma boyfriend, and with Ludell in New York, when Ludell goes to live with her mother, Dessa—is one of those portraits of a time so detailed, from everything from snack foods (peanut patties) to dialect (working “from caine see to caine see,” which took me a few months to puzzle out, confused as I was by Gaines’s sugarcane) that it would make an admirable addition to any time capsule. But it’s also wonderful because Ludell, like Meg Murry, is both smart and too smart for her own good; both easily angered and filled with a sense of righteous justice; and both awkward and hopeful for the day when she can finally get beyond it, though her strict upbringing makes her a little dubious that that day will ever come. And, like the Little House books, it’s also a wonderful portrait of a time—filled with alternately funny, sour, and surprising insights about segregation and poverty and the roles of young women in the 1950s. Unlike some of the more conscientious books of today, these insights have nothing explictly uplifting or educational about them—but because they’re so interesting and true, are all the more so.
Now, who took my goddamn first edition, and give it back!
EXTRA CREDIT
The Great Brain
By John D. Fitzgerald 1967
Brain Food
Should I be ashamed that most of what I remember about this series about a Beave-like troublemaker from a large Mormon family at the turn of the century is the food? Homemade ice cream, fried chicken, pickles, and Aunt Bertha’s apple pie. Oh, yes, the
first indoor water closet. Also, endless mayhem. Well, that pretty much covers anything your average turn-of-the-century boy would be interested in, anyway.
Chapter 2
She’s at That Age
Girls on the Verge
Driving Force
Can you pinpoint the day when you looked at your family and realized soon, strangely soon, all of this would end? (I’m not speaking of the many days you looked around the dinner table and wished it would end.) If childhood is a long, leisurely car ride during which one has all the time in the world to take in sights and pester parents about when you will get there, puberty comes with the brute force of a Driver’s Ed instructor who places you behind the wheel and gazes sourly at your attempts to park. Like signs on the highway mapping a distant destination, intimations of the future pop up at regular intervals (Breasts, Exit 12. For Menarche, Take Route 48), but no one, least of all you, really has any idea where you are going.
Enter the heroines below, much-welcomed fellow travelers on a very long road with a car that’s suddenly making weird noises.
Keeping us company, first of all, is Margaret Simon, easily the most famous pubescent heroine of all time, confessional in matters both corporeal and divine. We have Beverly Cleary’s Barbara McLane, struggling with the nature of personal liberty alongside whether a short or long veil is appropriate for a spring bride. Vicky Austin has gone from using a potato to stop a dripping radiator to debating how much joyful love is appropriate in the face of death, while Tiger Eyes’ Davey Wexler, after the murder of her father, needs to know if growing up means always being afraid.
Make no mistake, the changes wrought by puberty—on both the mind and the pysche—are paramount to these novels, but to miss each character’s simultaneous examination of larger philosophical issues of humankind is to do them discredit. Alongside chanting “We must increase our bust,” Margaret is struggling with the issue of dual religious identity. The Long Secret’s Mouse, alongside her period, has acquired an interest in adults’ capacity for self-deception, and Vicky, when given a chance to ask the universe a question, has a far more powerful one than whether Adam Eddington likes her.
Shelf Discovery Page 4