Blow Out the Moon

by Libby Koponen

  “They have laws against that sort of thing now,” my mother said.

  “But it would never have happened at all in America, because we had the Revolution.”

  My father laughed and asked how I knew that.

  “Well, I don’t KNOW — but I bet they thought it was better for chimneys to be dirty than for kids to be chimney sweeps. Or maybe they just had bigger chimneys! Our fireplace in America was big.”

  “Was that because of the Revolution, too?” he said in a teasing voice.

  “It’s not funny!” I said — saying anything else would just make him laugh more. He doesn’t really understand about the Revolution.

  Emmy said, “We learned this: ‘Nouns are just the names of things, Like birds and beasts and cats and kings …’ ”

  I forget the rest — she chanted it in the singsong way they did at school, imitating Mrs. Reed keeping time with her ruler, and Willy joined in. We all laughed, and then my mother started to clear the table, and we went to our room.

  I read in bed until my mother came in to get the others ready for bed and read a story. While she was reading, I took Henry’s last letter out of the white box and held it in my hand, and I thought about what I could say in my letter that wouldn’t be boring. I decided to tell about the Underground, and the red buses, and the soldiers in their red uniforms (real redcoats!) guarding the palaces. Henry was interested in soldiers. I’d tell him how stalwart they looked, no matter what happened or what anyone said or did; I was interested in that, too.

  The soldiers guarding Buckingham Palace always walked back and forth, back and forth, just outside the fence, and no matter what anyone watching them said or did, they never changed their expressions or said a word back. Except once, my mother told us (she read about it in the paper), an American tourist — a grown-up — walked next to one of these soldiers and shouted insults at him for over two hours, trying to make him talk or look at her. But he wouldn’t — until finally, after more than two hours, he kicked her in the shin. After that the soldiers marched inside the palace fence.

  Chapter Eleven:

  Another Good Thing

  I wasn’t very stalwart the next morning. The day started with one of those happy dreams I have just before it’s time to get up, only this one was very real.

  In the dream, it was a sunny fall afternoon in Pleasantville. Kenny and Peg and Pat and Emmy and I were in our front yard, hulahooping under the trees. The air was thin and the light was pale. It was hot and I could feel the sun on my face and dead leaves scratching my socks; the leaves above me blazed yellow and orange and red; I could see bright blue sky and sunlight shining through them all, especially the yellow ones.

  When I first woke up I thought I was at home in America, and I was happy — until I remembered.

  I was in London.

  I was in London, in the basement room with the black bars on the windows. In London, where when it wasn’t raining it was gray — gray all day and dark by the time I got out of school. London. I felt heavy and gray, like the buildings and the sidewalks and the sky and the air.

  I had the dream every morning. It was always exactly the same, and I always woke up happy from it, until I remembered where I really was.

  I was in London. One morning I looked up at the heavy gray sky (what you could see of it through all the black bars) and almost started to cry. I never cry. I didn’t even cry when I slit my knee open playing baseball and had to have thirteen stitches! I had to do something.

  There was a high bookshelf in the hallway outside our room. I looked up at the books and then carried a chair in from the dining room and stood on it to choose. The paint was peeling, and the heat pipes near the ceiling were dusty and so were the books. There were books for children and grownups; I took down some of each and started reading.

  The one I read first was about five sisters whose mother really wanted them to get married, and it was called Pride and Prejudice. One of the sisters (named Lizzy — her real name was Elizabeth, like mine) was lively and charming; she was her father’s favorite. She had very arched eyebrows and the question marks in the book were arched, too, and the author said Lizzy talked “archly” — it all fit together, and I liked that. The mother was very childish and silly (she was so ridiculous that she made me laugh, and I liked that, too) and the father made jokes about everything, and because Lizzy was smarter than all her sisters he thought she was great; all the men liked her.

  This is from the first book I read.

  This is what I always did on sight-seeing trips when we got to the sight my parents wanted to see.

  I loved that book. I brought it everywhere with me. I brought it to school and read it there, and on the Underground, and at home I read without stopping from the time I got home from school until dinner, and then from dinner until I went to sleep.

  On weekends, when my parents took us on sight-seeing trips, I’d stay in the car, reading it. If my father made me get out of the car, I’d sit down next to it and go on reading.

  If they made me get out of the car, this is what I did.

  As soon as I finished one book, I started another. After a while I read mostly books about girls going to boarding school: There were lots of those books in the apartment, and I loved them.

  The girls in those books slept in a room with other girls their own age and ate together and had lessons together. Usually in them a new girl came, and the other girls made fun of her and teased her and didn’t like her at first — and then she did something heroic and everyone liked her a lot.

  Or sometimes the girls had adventures together: The adventure usually started at night with someone putting on her dressing gown and getting a torch (that’s what they call a flashlight). I was surprised that they always had torches with batteries and bulbs that worked; each time they’d get the torch I’d wonder if this time the battery or bulb would be dead, but it never was.

  And there was always a scene of a midnight feast: In the middle of the night, they would get up, put on their dressing gowns, light their torches, and spread food on a blanket.

  So that was another good thing, reading. I read like that until one Saturday Jill took us to a toy store.

  Chapter Twelve:

  The Dolls

  It was more like a room in an old-fashioned house than a toy store.

  The best things were in a long wooden case with a glass top and glass front. Inside were dolls — not big dolls, but dollhouse dolls. I never liked dolls in America: Their faces didn’t look real at all.

  Two of the dolls, as they looked when they were in the store.

  But these were not like any dolls I’d ever seen — their faces had real expressions. They were about as long as my fingers: the children as long as my little finger, the grownups the size of my middle finger. We looked through the case for a long time, until the man behind it asked, very politely, if we’d like him to take any of the dolls out for us so we could “see them properly.” He talked to us just as though we were grown-up ladies and he was a grown-up gentleman — he almost bowed!

  The doll Libby, when she was very old, almost falling apart — I took the picture while I was writing this book so you could see her.

  We pointed to the ones we liked best, and he set them down on the counter and said we could hold them, and we thanked him and did hold them.

  The legs AND arms bent and so did the bodies, so you could put them in any pose. Their feet were in metal shoes, so they didn’t bend, and their heads didn’t bend, but the necks did. They would even be able to RIDE. We looked and looked.

  Finally, I picked out a boy with shorts and brown hair and kind of a sweet but mischievous expression. I decided to get him and a girl with a very short dress (yellow) and short curly brown hair. She had a sweet, wistful face. I got her and named her Emmy.

  Emmy got a girl and a boy, too. The girl had kind of an angry expression, curly hair, and a white dress with red and blue lines that made squares. She was a little taller than my Emmy; Emmy
named her girl Libby.

  There was also a baby with long, curly blonde hair and a long pink nightgown — but we didn’t have enough money to get her, or any grown-ups (the grown-ups cost more, and besides, we could wait to get them). And the things they had to go WITH the dolls! All kinds of furniture, with drawers that really opened; a pink telephone with a tiny dialer that really turned. … But we could get them later; the important thing was that we had the dolls. I could hardly wait to get home and play with them.

  Once we had the dolls, every day was fun — at least after school.

  The mothers were both very frivolous: They spent all their time going shopping and talking about clothes and going to the theater. The fathers were very quiet and spent most of their time reading (we made books by cutting out the pictures of books advertised in magazines and pasting them onto folded-up paper). None of the parents paid any attention to the adventurous children, so the kids could do whatever they wanted.

  THE BEST THINGS WERE:

  • a wooden case about half the length of my little finger. The outside was polished, shining wood; inside, it was lined with green baize (that’s like velvet, only rougher) and divided into three tiny compartments holding tiny silver knives, spoons, and forks.

  • a dark green wine bottle with a cork and a label you could really read. It came with a set of matching real glass wine glasses.

  • a silver tray (real silver) with two real glasses.

  • a silver-colored toaster with two pieces of toast: you could take the toast in and out, and there was a black rubber knob on the side that you pulled up and down to make the toast go in and pop out.

  • a china tea set with tiny dark pink flowers on everything: a round tray, teapot, creamer, sugar bowl, and two cups and saucers. The flowers have faded away, so now it’s plain white.

  There was also a crotchety old grandfather, who had black-and-white-checked trousers and a black tailcoat, a white beard, curly white hair, and glasses. He was very excitable (sometimes he got drunk and waved the green wine bottle around). There was also a doll with gray hair and a gray nurse’s uniform and a crabby face and wire glasses; she looked after the children when their parents were out, which was most of the time.

  The parents and nurse all spoke in English accents (though since the fathers hardly ever talked, they didn’t really count). The grandfather’s accent was sort of English and sort of Scottish; the children all had American accents.

  The dolls wrote letters to each other on tiny pieces of paper with tiny printing — we made envelopes by folding paper and then gluing the flaps. Usually the mothers wrote the letters.

  A letter from one of the mother dolls to the other mother doll:

  Darling: SUCH a bother! We’re going to a ball and I don’t have a THING to wear — I must go to London and get some new gowns. Would you like to come? Nursey can look after the children, of course. Ring me as soon as you get this: I hope the Post Office delivers it promptly. They’re getting so slow and lazy, like servants!

  Your friend,

  Sally Koponen.

  I read their letters to each other out loud in the proper accent for the person. Then, after I’d read the letter out loud, the dolls would do something.

  To make a doll envelope, cut a small square of paper, then fold in three of the corners and tape it, like this.

  Our favorite was to have the two mothers go shopping or to the theater in London. Then the children could go into the forest, where they would always end up at the witch’s house. It was sort of like “Hansel and Gretel” (only the dolls were never tricked by the witch!). We knew that we were copying the story, but we still liked to do it. And we didn’t JUST copy, we made it funny. I think in the real story it’s funny when Hansel and Gretel eat the gingerbread house — that their first reaction when they see a house is to start eating it, especially when the bird has just told them not to! Our children did even funnier things.

  “Hansel and Gretel,” from an old book.

  Emmy was fun to play dolls with — we hardly ever played alone with each other in America, but she was different in London. She acted different — she never talked in baby talk or fake-cried, and she did funny things when we were working the dolls. (“Working” is what we called moving them and making them talk; of course, she worked her dolls and I worked mine.)

  We wished and wished that the dolls were alive, and sometimes we pretended that they were alive and that they just ACTED like dolls. One day when I came home from school Emmy told me that she had sneaked back into our room very quietly and …

  “I saw all the dolls running back to their places,” she said.

  I wanted to believe her, and I almost did. I could picture Libby and Emmy running really fast and then lying down exactly where we had left them — but I knew it couldn’t be true. I wondered a lot if Emmy really thought it was, but I couldn’t ASK. It would be like asking someone if they still believed in Santa Claus. What if they did? So I didn’t say anything. And when, sometimes, she said, “That wasn’t where we left her!” I didn’t argue, either.

  Anyway, everything was better after we got the dolls, even school; until the six months were almost up — and we found out we were staying in England for another year.

  Chapter Thirteen:

  Something Big

  When Daddy told us, Emmy and I could hardly believe it. We just looked at him, and then he said, “Aw, Em, don’t cry. It’s only a year.”

  ONLY a year! ONLY! It was easy for him to say that! He loved London. But we hated it. Only a year! — as if he was asking us to wait fifteen minutes (though even that’s a long time when you want to go NOW). “Only a year.” What a stupid thing to say!

  I ran to my room and slammed the door. ONLY a year!

  Then, when I was sure no one could hear me, I did something I hardly ever do (and didn’t want to do then), because I was so disappointed and angry, too. ONLY a year! More than twice as long as we’d been here already before we could go home!

  I was still crying when my mother came in to put the others to bed.

  After she’d turned out the light, she came over to my bed. I could feel her sitting down on the edge of it before she gave my back a little pat.

  “Do you hate it here that much?” she said in her gentlest voice. I didn’t answer; I can’t cry and talk at the same time. But I did make myself stop crying.

  “Daddy and I thought you weren’t very happy in London. We’ve been thinking about that, and talking to our friends here, and we thought you might be happier in the country. How would you like to go to a boarding school in the country?”

  I thought of all the books about girls going to boarding school. It DID sound fun — and exciting, too.

  I sat up.

  “Could Emmy come too?”

  “Well — six is a little young for boarding school,” my mother said.

  “She’s almost seven. And in The Girls of Rose Dormitory the heroine’s little sister was only five and she was at the school. So were other kids her age.” (Though they were called “the babies.”)

  But when I asked Emmy, she didn’t want to go, even when I told her that some schools in the stories had their own horses and the girls could ride them.

  “That’s in a book, not real life,” she said.

  “Things that happen in books happen in real life, too!” I said. “I bet that IS true!”

  “Well even if it is I think we should all stay together.”

  But the more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea of going. Boarding school DID sound fun in the stories, and almost anything would be better than London. And if I found a really good school, one with horses, Emmy might change her mind. As my mother said, “Maybe when she’s a little older.”

  My mother and I had lots of time to talk because it was vacation (they called it the Easter holidays even though it wasn’t Easter yet), and we went to look at boarding schools almost every day.

  They were empty, because it was the holidays, so
of course that made them different from the books. But they didn’t LOOK like the schools in the books, either, or at least not at all the way I had imagined those schools.

  In real life, the rooms were little, and dark; and the people who showed us around were so old!

  And then suddenly spring came.

  Spring in England is different — maybe you have to live through an English winter to understand it. The days lengthen, far more than they do in America, and the sky is bright, bright blue, not gray. The air feels soft and clean, you can smell damp earth and see leaves sparkling in the sun wherever you go.

  It still rained, but there was sun every day.

  When I opened my eyes one morning, there was even sun on my bed, and that was the day my mother and I went to look at the Brighton School for Girls. Brighton, my mother told me, was a seaside town. When we got off the train, the air was sparkling and smelled like salt; and at the school — which was a very short walk from the sea — all the windows and the white front door sparkled in the sun.

  It looked like a clean, happy place. A comfortable-looking lady in a tweed skirt and two sweaters — one cardigan, one pullover — showed us around.

  I liked it all until she opened the door of a dormitory. The beds were covered with thin, pale green bedspreads (exactly the same pale green as the desks at St. Vincent’s) and pinned to each pillow was a small piece of lined white paper (not cut out with scissors, but ripped by hand — neatly, but still ripped) with a girl’s name on it. All the names were in the same handwriting.

  I took my mother’s hand and held it tightly; she looked down at me, a little surprised (I don’t usually hold her hand).

  “What’s the matter?” she said, as soon as we were back on the sidewalk.