“If you’re so afraid of the cow, why don’t you just climb the fence?”
As it happens, Jess is afraid—although he doesn’t realize it until he sees his new schoolmate Leslie flout all of the conventions that have held him back heretofore. On her first day of school Leslie shows up in old tennis shoes and shorts, in stark contrast to all the country children in their faded best. A child of a world where pride would keep anyone from showing up that way in public unless they had to, Jess is embarrassed for her—but then finds himself defending her when she breaks yet another barrier:
Gary stopped walking and wheeled to face him. Fulcher glared first at Jess and then at Leslie Burke. “Next thing,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “next thing you’re gonna want to let some girl run.”
Jess’s face went hot. “Sure,” he said recklessly. “Why not?” He turned deliberately toward Leslie.
“Wanna run?” he asked….
…For a minute he thought Gary was going to sock him, and he stiffened. He mustn’t let Fulcher suspect he was scared of a little belt in the mouth. But instead Gary broke into a trot and started bossing the threes into line for their heat…. See, he told himself, you can stand up to a creep like Fulcher.
No sweat.
Of course, Leslie then goes on to beat the pants off all of the boys in the school. It’s not a particularly feminist moment, though: she is honestly confused when they refuse to accept her win, as they will refuse to accept every other aspect of her that doesn’t fit in with their world. Beating them in running, they must understand, is only one of the examples in which Leslie is literally ahead—not due to her economic and cultural advantages, but in how those freedoms have enabled her to be utterly herself.
Jess, attempting to break boundaries himself, is bitterly disappointed to lose, but still differs from his peers in that he can see that Leslie’s open embrace of life isn’t something to be feared, but admired: “She ran as though it was her nature. It reminded him of the flight of wild ducks in autumn. So smooth. The word ‘beautiful’ came to his mind, but he shook it away and hurried up toward the house.”
And here Jess makes a decision to no longer be bound by his distracted parents or by the teachers in the school, to embrace the people in his life who seem to be interested in other aspects of him than in how well he’s milking the cow: not only his “hippie, peacenik” music teacher, Mrs. Edmunds, with whom he’s been in love for ages despite the scorn of the school for her hippie pants and makeup, but Leslie herself. This happens, appropriately enough, as they’re singing “Free to Be You and Me” in class (and did you KNOW that those lyrics were by Bruce Hart of YA titan Bruce and Carol Hart fame, by the way?):
Caught in the pure delight of it, Jess turned and his eyes met Leslie’s. He smiled at her. What the heck. There wasn’t any reason he couldn’t. What was he scared of anyhow? Lord. Sometimes he acted like the original yellow-bellied sapsucker…. He felt there in the teachers’ room that it was the beginning of a new season in his life, and he chose deliberately to make it so.
And thus begins a friendship in which Jess finds a freedom to be himself he hasn’t considered before, and Leslie finds a friend in the sea of a school population with a knee-jerk scorn for girls who don’t wear dresses, own TVs, or stand on the sidelines cheering during races. This friendship finds its apex in the imaginary world of Terabithia, a kingdom in the woods conceived by the visionary Leslie, reached only by a rope swinging across a river, located physically and philosophically just on the cusp of where Jess’s fears begin:
There were parts of the woods that Jess did not like. Dark places where it was almost like being under water, but he didn’t say so…. Jess agreed quickly, relieved there was no need to plunge deeper into the woods. He would take her there, of course, for he wasn’t such a coward that he would mind a little exploring now and then further in amongst the ever-darkening columns of the tall pines. But as a regular thing, as a permanent place, this is where he would choose to be….
…There in the shadowy light of the stronghold everything seemed possible. Between the two of them they owned the world and no enemy, Gary Fulcher, Wanda Kay Moore, Janice Avery, Jess’s own fears and insuffiencies, nor any of the foes whom Leslie imagined attacking Terabithia, could ever really defeat them.
As has often happened when I’m rereading the novels in the 1970s period, I’m struck by how the class distinctions are far more explicit than I noticed as a child. Take, for instance, the Burkes, whose world cannot be further than Jess’s and those in the town, a world of milking, hard-earned dollars, canning, trucking, beating your children, and then dressing up for church on Sunday:
Leslie’s parents were young, with straight white teeth and lots of hair—both of them. Leslie called them Judy and Bill, which bothered Jess more than he wanted it to. It was none of his business what Leslie called her parents. But he just couldn’t get used to it.
Both of the Burkes were writers. Mrs. Burke wrote novels and, according to Leslie, was more famous than Mr. Burke, who wrote about politics. It was really something to see the shelf that had their books on it. Mrs. Burke was “Judith Hancock” on the cover, which threw you at first, but then if you looked on the back, there was her picture looking very young and serious. Mr. Burke was going back and forth to Washington to finish a book he was working on with someone else, but he had promised Leslie that after Christmas he would stay home and fix up the house and plant his garden and listen to music and read books out loud and write only in his spare time.
They didn’t look like Jess’s idea of rich, but even he could tell that the jeans they wore had not come off the counter at Newberry’s. There was no TV at the Burkes’, but there were mountains of records and a stereo set that looked like something off Star Trek. And although their car was small and dusty, it was Italian and looked expensive too.
They were always nice to Jess when he went over, but then they would suddenly begin talking about French politics or string quartets (which at first he thought was a square box made of string), or how to save timber wolves or redwoods or singing whales, and he was scared to open his mouth and show once and for all how dumb he was.
But what’s interesting to me now is how, especially after the tragedy of Leslie’s death, Paterson refuses to judge either family. (I think there must be a hint of the Patersons themselves in there.) Yes, the Burkes with their Italian car, their love of books and art and all that is beautiful and deeply thought, the Burkes who are not ashamed to paint their living room gold, are a revelation to Jess, but then, so is the kindness of his own parents in the face of Leslie’s death—his mother making him pancakes and refusing to allow his sisters to torment him, and his father reassuring him, albeit roughly, that whatever his mean older sister says, Leslie didn’t need to be baptized to be all right in the afterlife. (“Lord, boy, don’t be a fool. God ain’t gonna send any little girls to hell.”)
One of the book’s beautiful, delicate illustrations of Jess’s father carrying him home (does ANY book besides this and “A Taste of Blackberries” have more weep-inducing artwork?) showcases the stability and love Jess doesn’t realize he has at his own disposal at home, as well.
Leslie, who is unafraid of scuba-diving, who is not afraid of the dark woods, of the world of imagination, of striding out on the edge, distant and alone, does die because she’s unafraid. But she’s also given Jess life:
He thought about it all day, how before Leslie came, he had been a nothing—a stupid, weird kid who drew funny pictures and chased around a cow field trying to act big—trying to hide a whole mob of foolish little fears running wild in his gut.
Leslie was more than his friend. She was his other, more exciting self—his way to Terabithia and all the worlds beyond.
But Jess has also learned something very important—that Leslie was scared, too. Rescuing his sister May Belle from the same river in which Leslie drowned, he forgives himself for not saving Leslie and for being too cowardly to be there fo
r her the day she died. “Everybody gets scared sometimes, May Belle. You don’t have to be ashamed.” He saw a flash of Leslie’s eyes as she was going into the girls’ room to see Janice Avery. “Everybody gets scared.” After Leslie’s death, the bridge Jess builds to cross the river into Terabithia isn’t only to protect anyone else from falling into the river and drowning. It’s to make the leap he’s made—into a world of art, imagination, life beyond his small town—safe for anyone else who’s afraid.
EXTRA CREDIT
Tell Me if the Lovers Are Losers
By Cynthia Voigt 1982
Blind Faith
I have an ignominious history with this odd Cynthia Voigt classic, one based entirely on an offhand remark I made before having read it at all. During sixth-grade recess, as my friend, turning back the page, flipped the cover my way—three girls intently conversing on a college green, while behind them the leaves turned gently yellow and shadows lengthened on the grass—I said, almost without volition, “She dies at the end.” My friend gasped angrily and (because it was, of course, true) didn’t speak to me for nearly two weeks.
By my second year of high-school English, I probably could have told you my prediction was based on several transparent aesthetic signifiers—the sun almost setting, the world turning to winter, hint, hint—and could have probably pinpointed the girl in question: a blond whose hair was already charged with light as if haloed, and who leaned forward on her bike as if impatient to get going on this journey to the hereafter, already.
But just the evocation of a genteel New England college campus might have been enough, since, if you judge by similar work, it hardly seems worth placing young women in such close quarters—the female equivalent of army barracks—unless, as with soldiers, you could guarantee that one would lose either her virginity, her timidity, or her life.
Voigt, in fact, achieves all three, although not in the traditional fashion. If we look at the history of similar works, like Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, or Rona Jaffe’s Class Reunion (even nonfiction college memoirs, like Loose Change) we see several inviolate categories: the frigid preppy; the mousy, sexually neuter intellectual; the sultry, often Southern, siren; and the wholesome creature who’ll have her rose-colored glasses knocked off by the world, just you wait. These avatars have crept into prime time in shows like The Golden Girls and Sex and the City for good reason—we women are sure to relate to one or another (or all) of them, at some point in our lives.
But in her triumvirate of Ann, Niki, and Hildy, first-year students at the Seven-Sisters-esque Stanton College, Voigt creates three characters who are distinctly themselves. When the reader meets them, instead of feeling the automatic shock of recognition, we, like trembling freshmen ourselves, have to swallow our trepidation and get to know the other girls.
Ann, a trim preppy bookworm with good shoes and an impressive knowledge of Shakespeare, is the biggest “type” of the work—something her new roommate Niki makes sure to point out: “Don’t kid yourself. You are a type.” (Told you!)
“And you aren’t?” Annie was growing tired of denigration.
“No, ma’am. Not me. There are lots of you around, with tans and square jaws and that wavy hair. You all move the same way, muscular but not strong, somebody’s idea of femininity. It’s a prep-school type.”
Um…nice to meet you, too! But although Ann—unlike Niki and her other new roommate, Hildy—has a built-in peer group already from her private-school past, she is the most insecure of the three. Niki, whose parents are divorced, is both bold and scornful, competitive and judgmental (see above). She falls just shy of being a bully—but only because, at the end of the day, all Niki demands is that people be better than themselves, not worse than her. An almost obsessive athlete, on the first day she challenges Ann to a tennis match, then proceeds to beat the more skilled Ann simply by fighting with sheer grit for every point—a pattern she continues anywhere she can, incredulous at Ann’s seemingly endless capacity to say uncle.
Hildy is another story. Tall, blond, and beautiful, Hildy was raised on a farm in a small rural community, and she speaks not only with an oddly formal syntax (there is not a contraction that can be found), but also with the kind of patient, humorless commonsense that can nonetheless easily poke a hole in a more ironic, antic intellect, like Niki’s:
“Didn’t anybody ever tell you you talk funny?” Niki demanded.
“Oh, yes,” Hildy said.
“What did you say?”
“I asked if they could understand me,” Hildy answered patiently, “and like you, they said yes.”
Voigt also departs from the standard formula for what causes a conflict among the girls—namely, boys, of whom there is not one to be found. (Niki loses her virginity somewhere off-scene, and Hildy, as it turns out, already has, to the local farmer she plans to marry.) Instead, the girls work out their relationship on highly unnatural turf: a volleyball court, which is an arena they all scorn, until Hildy, who knows its mysterious and dig-deep laws, introduces the other girls to it.
Volleyball is a standin for what Hildy herself represents—the underappreciated skills of teamwork, as well as balance, between one’s own side and the enemy’s. For Niki, accustomed to beating people down in one-on-one sports or simply making team sports one-on-one by grabbing every shot and taking it, having to acknowledge that she can be part of something larger than herself is humbling—and a bit terrifying. For Ann, it’s quite the opposite. She’s used to being part of something—a “type”—but only when it helps her to disappear. She may not be center stage in volleyball, but she’ll be called up for service on a regular rotation, like everyone else, and what happens to the team will depend on her. Ann learns, with surprise, that at first this is almost unbearably frightening—but then that she can’t imagine living without it.
More interesting—as the girls learn, Hildy, in fact, plays blind, which she’s legally been for years. Ann, after much urging and manipulation, finally forces her to buy a pair of glasses, but as the freshman team rises in the college matches, Hildy, unaccustomed to twenty-twenty vision, finally throws them away. Ann compares her mind to that of a forest, “wild and profuse in its growth…accidental, at least in human terms, in its self-management.” Ann knows she’s a type, but Niki, as much as she fights against it, is as well—as prosaic a radical, and as prosaically ambitious, as Ann is, in her own way. Only Hildy, whose entirely unique mind comes from an equally unknown world to which she’ll soon return, is outside the mainstream.
Which is why, of course, she has to die. (Dang, I did it again!) It’s rare for radical thinkers to be able to survive until the end of novels—like wild spores, they impart their crucial DNA to more well-rooted characters, then drift onward toward oblivion. But Hildy’s skilled deflection both of Ann’s inhibitions and Niki’s irritating exhibitions—very similar to the deadly way she rises up to block all the spikes headed her way—is almost a refutation of the limitations of the entire genre. When Niki, fresh from losing her virginity and thereby dismissive of the whole operation, declares she’ll master sex like the volleyball court, Hildy firmly stops her—“It is not like practicing volleyball. It is a human experience,”—then responds to Ann’s gleeful assertion that she’s taken the wind out of Niki’s sails by saying, “I hope not. I wanted to put the wind back in them.” Voigt, in presenting us with the entirely unquantifiable Hildy, has done something very similar.
EXTRA CREDIT
A Day No Pigs Would Die
By Robert Newton Peck 1972
Trough Times
I can say this with complete confidence: There are probably as many novels about Shakers as there are Shakers still rattling around. But Robert Newton Peck’s autobiography—written much like a novel—of his boyhood on a Vermont farm with a father who teaches him, alongside pig farming, how to not confuse “need” with “want” is a quiet, gentle story about how sometimes, when it involves your own family, you can’t choose betw
een the two. It’s one of those strange books where the totality of the circumstances are so likely beyond anything you’re familiar with—pig slaughtering, deep religiosity, a rural, barren surround—that the minds of the characters are almost more vivid, as if to make up for the difference. It’s also a stark story of a son and a father—one that takes on the difficulties of parenthood without lionizing anyone or making anyone the enemy.
EXTRA CREDIT
Beat the Turtle Drum
By Constance C. Greene 1976
Horse Sense
When I picked it up again, I was surprised to see how slight this novel about a younger sister, Kate, whose eldest sister Joss dies after falling off a horse, is—it’s almost skeletal in plot. When I read it as a girl, it seemed to me a full, many-chaptered epic, but in fact it’s but a series of small, brilliant characterizations and elegantly wrought scenes, ones that are as touching as the grayed-out, elegant illustrations that open each section. Characters I thought loomed large in fact only appeared in the narrative once or twice, but—as in the case of the woman Joss rents the horse from—visually unforgettable, spilling out of her silky top and offering the girls their first cup of creamy, sweet coffee. I also hadn’t remembered how sharp a tone Kate has for a child—“They said everybody’s born and everybody dies.” “That seems obvious.”—but her observations are born from a deep watchfulness that is the reverse of Joss’s ephemeral enthusiasms. It may well be that that stark difference is what really stays with you—not only how different we can be from those we love and are close to, but how the small choices we make can actually have enormously dangerous consequences. You’re much less likely to die talking about a tree than climbing it (or, for that matter, reading about it).
EXTRA CREDIT
Shelf Discovery Page 14