My Austro-Hungarian mother did not believe in sour cream. Cream, maybe, and after Italy, not much of that. But my father (the Russian side) loved it too. My mother kept a bottle in the refrigerator for him. My father and I sometimes stood in the kitchen together and ate sour cream with teaspoons straight from the jar, one of the few disorderly, uncouth activities he was willing to indulge either himself or me in.
They met during their residencies in San Francisco. After Eustace died from psittacosis, A.A.’s mother moved to the West Coast, and when A.A. graduated from Harvard he dutifully went out there for medical school. To find Ingrid, fresh off the enemy boat, speaking her singsong Swedish English. She was going to be a psychoanalyst. A.A. decided he was going to be one too.
So there they were at the top of our hill, two psychoanalysts, one semi-brother, and a house full of oddities. I could trot over there in less than two minutes on a winter day; pedaling the bike uphill in summer took longer.
Roger was good at being a student. Tests were fun, he said. He liked to memorize things, and he did it automatically. If you told Roger something, he’d remember it in exactly the words you’d used. He also remembered entire pages from books and where to find those pages in the books. I envied him. Almost everything I heard and read in school fell right out of my brain or bounced off it, as if my brain were the opposite kind of magnet from the information, the repellent kind. Roger loved arithmetic; I was still doing multiplication as addition—on my fingers. Third grade is long division, and doing long division on your fingers is a laborious process. I didn’t like “arithmetic” in Cambridge any better than I’d liked “maths” in England.
A worse problem was that my classmates had begun to catch up to me in reading. I probably read more, and more difficult, books than they did, but it was no longer obvious that I was superior, because I wasn’t.
I was a good speller. That wasn’t much of a thrill. Also, the school was progressive enough to value spelling less than a regular school would. Content and comprehension: Those were the things. Spelling would follow, was their theory.
Theories were everywhere at that school, and they led to some pretty strange teaching. For instance, the Stick Man. He wasn’t a regular teacher. He came in a few times a week with his new way of explaining arithmetic: colored sticks. Different lengths and colors for different numbers. It was hateful because it added one more dimension to remember—in my case, to forget—about the intractable, confusing realm of numbers.
A white stick an inch long was one, a red stick a bit longer was two, and so forth. They were made of fragile, splintery balsa wood like Roger’s airplanes, and dyed with colors that leached out over the course of the year. The weightlessness of the wood bothered me. I wanted three to feel heavier than two, but they were indistinguishable.
This synesthetic theory had a name, now lost to me, that sounded like Cuisinart, though it must have been something else. Its proponent the Stick Man was cheerful, and we liked to see him appear at the door to the classroom. Nobody (except the teachers, of course) thought these sticks were helpful in any way, but his presence enlivened things.
I liked the Stick Man enough to confide in him, one day after class, that I detested arithmetic.
“It makes my head hurt,” I explained.
“That’s why sticks are good!” he said. “Sticks make the numbers visible.”
“Not to me,” I said. “Sticks are just a new way to feel mixed up.”
“Oh, no,” he said. “That’s terrible.”
He sounded so concerned that I started to cry.
What upset me was the feeling that he cared about my being mixed up. I didn’t think anybody cared—or I told myself that nobody cared. And once I’d started heaving and sobbing, I couldn’t stop. A big hot backlog of feeling sorry for myself and misunderstood and unappreciated and incompetent began to slither out of me.
Poor guy! He patted my eight-year-old shoulder and said, “There, there,” and probably felt put upon. He wasn’t a child psychologist or even a grade-school teacher, he was just a guy preaching the gospel of the stick.
“Let’s spend some time together working on this,” he said.
I could tell that he meant working on sticks, not working on how miserable I was.
So we did that for an hour in the dusty, deserted classroom. He was a nice, kind person. The only stick I liked at all was the number six, an intense blue-green wand. I held it tight in my sweaty, teary hand while he tried to soothe and engage me. My index finger was tinted a pale version of that green when we finished. But, as usual, nothing else stayed with me.
In addition to spelling, I had a talent for braiding hair. I spent a lot of the fall semester braiding the hair of the girl who sat in front of me. Her name was Meg and she had lovely, water-smooth light-brown hair down to her shoulder blades, the kind that slides shinily out of the braid as soon as you make it, even if you tie it at the bottom, which meant I had an excuse for braiding it again. My involvement with Meg’s hair gave me the idea that we could be friends. Face-to-face, though, we had nothing to say to each other. Better to stick to the braiding relationship. And then the teacher decided I was too distracted by Meg and her hair and moved my seat. In Purgatory, sitting near the door, I looked down the empty hall and squinted toward the future I could almost see, when the last bell would ring and it would be time to go home.
Being confined in school, in a classroom, in a particular seat, listening to a teacher, made me stir-crazy. It wasn’t that I couldn’t sit still; I could sit still for hours watching my ants tramp along the paths I made for them by pressing the grass down with my hand, or lie without budging on my stomach until I was completely numb reading the Narnia books. But I couldn’t sit still for all the school stuff. And beyond my physical restlessness was a more profound disquiet, which was: What is the point of all this?
I kept asking my father.
“What’s the point of all this arithmetic? Why do I have to know this? I don’t like this.”
“You need it in life,” he said.
“Why? What’s it for?”
“It’s like being able to read. It’s being able to read numbers. You must be able to read numbers as well as words.”
That made a little bit of sense. Just a little.
Then we started studying the Revolutionary War. We had to draw diagrams of battles. We had to learn lists of generals.
“I don’t care about this,” I said to my father. I never said these sorts of things to my mother. “I don’t want to know these things.”
“They’re interesting,” my father said. “The Revolution is interesting. And a lot of it happened right here.”
“I don’t care. I’m not interested.”
“You don’t give it a chance,” he said. “You get all riled up about it before you even try. Calm down.”
That sounded like something my mother would say. They were in cahoots.
I began to understand that, at bottom, school was a way to get me out of my mother’s hair for the day. Also, a way to break my spirit. It was meant to grind me down, bore me into submission, and lure me into accepting its values until all I wanted was to be the best at reciting lists of generals and battles of the Revolutionary War.
Roger was interested in learning new things just because they were new. A little anti-intellectual, I kept asking about utility with my What’s the point question. Nobody would address this question, which made me all the more intent on it. My father always put it back on me, telling me to relax and pay attention. Roger was worse than my father with his cheery “It’s fun!” and his game mentality, in which everything he encountered was a puzzle to be worked out and seemed (as far as I could tell) to have no emotional content. I didn’t even bother asking the teachers. I assumed they were totally brainwashed about how important all the stuff they were teaching was.
The only person with any sympathy for my position was A.A.
Sometimes when I ate dinner at the Bigelows’ (which I did two or three times
a week), Ingrid would start chastising me.
“You don’t pay attention at school,” she’d say. “Why don’t you pay any attention?”
This would cause me to wriggle around on my chair as if I were in school at that moment and mumble, “I’m not good at it.”
“It’s not that hard,” she’d say. “And you won’t even try. Your parents are worried about you.”
This information perked me up. It made me feel powerful.
One night A.A. came to my defense, in his languid way. When Ingrid told me it wasn’t that hard to pay attention and I told her it was, A.A. asked me why, exactly, it was.
“I can’t concentrate because it’s boring,” I said. “I don’t see the point of it all.”
“That does make it hard to listen,” he said.
“No, no, no,” said Ingrid. “You’re encouraging her.” She was a bit screechy, which was how she sounded when she was nervous or mad.
“Why not?” said A.A. “If she’s bored, she’s bored.”
“That’s no good to say!” Ingrid was really squeaky now.
“Oh, I don’t know.” A.A. turned to me again. “You might feel different someday. Things can change.” He paused. “Of course, sometimes they don’t.”
I did feel encouraged, enough to say, “I don’t want to know anything about that Revolution.”
This made A.A. laugh. “I never found it very interesting either,” he said.
“But you don’t get to just pick and choose,” said Ingrid.
“I like the Revolution,” Roger put in.
I glared at him. “You like everything.”
A.A. lit a cigarette and chewed on the smoke for a while. “It’s really just a question of time. Waiting it out. There has to be the right thing, something that feels so interesting you want to know all about it. Then things will change. I’m sure. No point worrying.”
“You don’t have to worry,” Ingrid said. “She’s not your kid.”
“It’ll be fine,” he said.
A.A. always thought things would be fine, and Ingrid always thought things would get worse. They disagreed constantly, which was yet another fascinating aspect of Bigelow life. My parents mostly disagreed in private. They liked to present a united, impenetrable front, and that made me feel they were ganging up on me.
This must have been in the fall, because as the weather got colder, the one interesting thing—which, when A.A. talked of it, sounded impossible to me—appeared at school. The one interesting thing was diagramming sentences. I was crazy for it.
I liked the way the dependent clauses and the phrases hooked off the main line, how almost every part of speech could have a little bracketed appendage to modify it, and how the skeleton of the sentence stood out bold and obvious while the extra parts thrummed along beneath it. The diagrammed sentence looked a bit like a long-division problem, and I liked that too, as if it conferred on words the seriousness and truth that had been reserved for numbers. I liked the nouns and their subcategories: the common noun, the proper noun, the collective noun, the abstract noun. Most of all I liked that what I took for granted—talking, reading, writing—could be rationalized and made scientific, and thereby be made real.
And so I was seduced into accepting the school’s values.
All that I had done perfectly and loved without thinking I now loved for corrupt reasons. Language, which had been my secret music, became a branch of knowledge—one at which I excelled. Now I could tell myself I wasn’t a dunce. Even the teachers could see I was good at it.
I didn’t have to learn the rules of grammar because I already knew them; the rules were just articulations of patterns and structures I’d already felt and enjoyed. In a way it was a relief to find out that other people, the ones who had codified these rules, had also detected these patterns. It made me feel less strange. The teacher kept saying, “You already know how to do this,” to the class. “You speak correctly without thinking about it,” she’d say. But it wasn’t true. Many of them didn’t speak correctly, and even those who did, didn’t hear what they were saying. They didn’t hear the way the language was made and how it fitted together.
So I became the good girl. I understood everything right away and could spout it back with no mistakes. I looked forward to English class as if it were a movie or a trip to the beach. A warm, jittery, zingy feeling would come over me, sitting in my hateful chair near the door and waiting for the teacher to begin. My hand was always up in class.
“I know! I know!” I’d say.
At first the teacher was delighted that at last I knew something. Soon, though, my enthusiasm began to irritate.
“Let’s give someone else a chance,” she’d say.
Sometimes she’d say, “I’m sure you know. Let’s see what everybody else knows.”
Even this felt like a compliment. It went without saying that I, the Queen of Language, would know whatever it was. But after a while, she wasn’t calling on me anymore. And my abilities didn’t impress my classmates. By spring, I was back to my old position: No Good.
When I think about it now, I wonder if I had excelled at numbers, some special arrangement would have been specially arranged for me—tutorials, advanced classes, something to congratulate me on my intelligence and to certify that I was ahead of the game. A talent to be nurtured, in the charmless parlance of pedagogy.
But my talent for words was discrete. It didn’t extend to my other capacities in any way. Still using my fingers for adding and subtracting at the end of the year, still not listening to the Revolutionary drivel, I had crept back underground. Just as well. I was immune to the seductions of achievement—or so I thought. I could tell myself that. I could claim outsider status, still, unsullied by my brief touch of success with dangling participles and complex sentences. I could keep growing and thinking and reading in secret, in my dark, sorry-for-myself basement of failure and neglect, like a little rat.
In Which, Vishwa
It was April before Frederika came over from Sweden. The trees had put out small leaves the color of lettuce, and the baby was walking around without help. My mother went into a whirl of repainting and refurnishing for Frederika’s room, which was next to mine on the top floor. It had been a staging area for cast-off clothes and boxes of books destined for the sale basement of the Harvard Book Store, rather Bigelow-like in its disorganization. Transforming it took her only a week. She loaded the car with boxes and piles, drove off, and returned with new boxes and piles. Black deck paint for the chipped, eroded pine floor, lengths of white curtain fabric with geometric cutouts, a butterfly chair with a black leather seat, a long red-and-white-and-black-striped cotton rug from India, a tiny octagonal bedside table from Morocco made of mahogany and mother-of-pearl. Some bookshelves—she’d need those, wouldn’t she? It would be nice to paint them red. No. Better black, and all along the low wall under the eaves. There. Done.
“Is it too much black?” she asked.
Frederika stood in the doorway with a suitcase (bulging, I was happy to see; she intended to stay a long time) at each ankle and started to sniffle.
“Nobody has ever done a thing like this for me,” she said.
I’d forgotten Frederika’s funny Swedish way of talking. “Nobody hass effer,” she said. Ingrid had lost her Swedish accent by now; her voice tipped up at the end of words and sentences, but that was all. Frederika still sounded like a singing crow, especially talking through tears.
My mother had been waiting for a compliment on her decor, not her kindness. I could tell she felt let down.
My mother was complicated, and she came from a complicated family. Her mother, Leah, was the eldest daughter of an anarchist agitator who spent a lot of time in jail, though he was at liberty enough to father an additional seven daughters. Then Leah’s mother, my great-grandmother, died young and left Leah in charge. This probably explains why my mother was an only child. There were many aunts for Leah to keep track of, some still children when my mother was born. My gran
dfather’s side was also a muddle—like the brother nobody would talk to because he was a communist and they were socialists; you had to go to the other side of the street if you saw him coming. (This political dynamic turned up again later in my mother’s life, since my father had been raised as a communist.) And somewhere along a cousinly branch of my maternal grandfather’s family was our notable artist: Richard Neutra, the modernist architect. He’d left Vienna in the twenties and passed through Philadelphia on his way to Taliesin (that didn’t work out) and then to Schindler in Los Angeles, leaving a deep impression of arrogance and a single snapshot in my grandmother’s desk drawer in which his eyebrows rivaled those of Edward Teller. Maybe there was something about Hungarians (even if they were only Austro-Hungarians) that made for eyebrow growth. My mother inherited them, along with the talent for design. My grandmother Leah sniffed when his name came up in conversation. “Richard,” she’d say. “Huh.” Nobody heard a peep out of him between 1924 and the early sixties, when my father was in the news for being on the diplomatic team that negotiated the first test ban treaty with the Soviet Union. Famous! Richard called. Could he stop by for lunch when he was next in Washington?
My mother had several thwarted or perhaps renounced ambitions. Maybe they were not ambitions, only talents. To say only, to call them talents, is entirely to misrepresent her and her abilities.
Renounced, in the case of the piano. She wouldn’t have studied for fifteen years and applied to conservatory if she’d had no ambition. When she was accepted, her mother the pragmatic anarchist had said, “Where’s that going to get you? You think you’re Horowitz?” My father had already proposed marriage, and my grandmother thought that was the way to go. “What else are you going to do with your life?” Leah said. Cruel, but a clear-eyed assessment of women’s prospects in America between the wars.
Yet my grandmother had paid for all those lessons, twice a week when it became clear how very good my mother was. She’d leased an upright, she’d leased a better upright, she’d bought one, in the end, on their strained budget. When we made our semiannual pilgrimages to Philadelphia (Christmas vacation, summer vacation), my mother would walk into her childhood home and go straight to the piano, open the keyboard, and bang out some Scarlatti. Black, tinny, usually out of tune, it was a far cry from the baby grand crackle-finish chestnut-colored Baldwin that had its own room in our house.
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