Going Home
… on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast …
— from “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold
Not long after that my family and I left England for France on another boat. We stood on deck, looking back at England. Behind the white, wall-like cliffs that rose — “glimmering and vast,” just as the poem said — straight up from the water, I could see the bright green of the downs, those grassy little hills I’d ridden on Frisky.
I looked at them, remembering that, and how hard riding had been at first. I’d been very bad at it: My first report said: “VF (for Very Fair). Far too stiff. MUST learn to relax.” And I had — my last report said: “FG (for Fairly Good). Libby has finally learned to relax and has really improved.” It had taken a long time, but I’d done it.
I’d gone to Sibton Park almost exactly a year ago. I thought about that first night, and Marza; the sack on my birthday, and Hazel Fogarty kicking her sheet up in the air. I remembered Matron and being ill with Clare, and snug afternoons in our study — pressing my face against the cold window, and then writing or chatting. But most of all I remembered those pale sunny summer mornings when Sibton Park was new and strange to me, and how hard I’d tried there, at everything.
“Today is April first,” I said. “The first day of summer term at Sibton Park.”
My mother looked down at me and said, in her gentlest voice, “Are you sorry your little nose isn’t there, being counted with all the other little noses?”
I looked up, and even opened my mouth to answer, and then stopped. “Yes” wasn’t right, but “no” wasn’t true either. It was a strange feeling.
Finally, after two months of driving around Europe, we took another boat, a Norwegian one, back to America.
For most of the voyage, I read on the deck with a blanket over my legs and the wind blowing my hair and the pages, too, when I didn’t hold them tightly.
Sometimes, I went to the very back of the ship and stared at the trail of white foam — like a wide, white, sparkling road getting wider and wider — that the ship left behind it. There was nothing around me but wind and sea and sky and sunlight and, sometimes, seagulls. I loved being alone with that sparkling, churning water and light, with nothing but water and space between me and America.
As soon as my mother unlocked the front door I ran into our house — the furniture was the same, the walls were the same colors, but it felt completely different.
I ran upstairs. The hall looked so short!
My father had warned us that everything would look smaller — places from the past always did, he said — but I wasn’t expecting it to FEEL different.
Emmy and I ran up to Kenny’s, where his mother was gardening. She hugged us and cried, and said, “I always knew you’d come back like this!” And when Peg and Pat and Kenny came home from school, they were as happy to see Emmy and me as we were to see them. We stayed up long after dinner, talking, in the Tampones’ front yard — the summer night sounds were just as I’d remembered them: the little insects, the leaves swishing whenever there was a wind, and, later, a baseball game on TV or the radio. …
The sky was dark enough to show lots of white stars when Mrs. Tampone said it was bedtime, and when everyone said oh no, not yet, she smiled down at us and said, as though she was really glad, too:
“Libby and Emmy are home for good now. You’ll see each other tomorrow.”
And we did: We walked to school together just as usual, except that there was lots more to tell each other.
And just as usual, we separated as soon as we got to the Big Rock. On the playground people from my class came running over, waving and shouting until almost everyone in the class was crowded around me — everyone but Henry.
I kept looking around for him, but he wasn’t there.
All the girls talked at once, telling the news and commenting on my English clothes (I was wearing my Sibton Park white-and-blue-striped summer dress) and my English accent (I tried not to have one but I couldn’t help it, it was just how I talked).
One of the boys said, looking a little puzzled, “All the girls have been going around telling the teacher: ‘A tomboy’s coming into the class.’ But you seem like a girl now.”
In the classroom, I looked again for Henry. Could he be absent?
The room was like the old one: big, with the same kind of desks and blackboards and bookshelves and windows. Even the pencil sharpener was in the same corner, at the edge of the windows!
And the teacher seemed nice. She said, “So you’re the famous Libby! I’ve heard so much about you!” The way she said that, and smiled, made her seem very warm-hearted. All the grown-ups I’d seen so far seemed warm-hearted, in fact. Kenny’s mother had cried and hugged us! “I’m Mrs. Sullivan.”
She showed me which desk was mine and then we all put our right hands over our hearts and said the Pledge of Allegiance:
I pledge allegiance
to the flag
of the United States of America.
And to the Republic
for which it stands,
one nation,
under God,
indivisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
Of course, I remembered the words — all of them. And I believed in them even more than I had before. Then we sang:
My country ’tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From every mountain side:
Let freedom ring!
Freedom! It wasn’t just a word in a song; I really did feel freer here, in America: freer to feel my feelings, freer to say what I was thinking.
Just as we were pulling out our chairs, I saw Henry standing in the doorway, and he saw me. We didn’t say anything (out loud), but his whole face said how glad to see me he was. I really, really like Henry.
We did signal whenever he turned around in his seat, which he did quite a lot.
Mrs. Sullivan shook her head, just a little; but she didn’t tell us not to. Still, I tried to listen to her properly — and after a while, I did.
She asked who had finished their “reports on transportation.” Hardly anyone raised their hands, only Henry and a few girls, and Mrs. Sullivan said she’d collect them after lunch. So I could do one at lunch and recess! I didn’t have to, but I wanted to. I wanted to do well, especially on my first day, especially at writing.
When it was time for recess Henry ran over, talking. “I saw you start to stand at attention when Miss Kelly came in. You had to do that in England when a teacher walked into the room, didn’t you?” he said with a big smile. “And you have an English accent!”
“I know,” I said. “It’s odd. I’m not English, but — I don’t feel all the way American anymore, either.”
He nodded, and frowned down at the ground, thinking.
“Maybe you will when you’ve been back for a while.”
“Maybe,” I said, not really believing it.
But I was still glad I’d told him.
“I know!” he said. “We can have an Iroquois re-initiation ceremony!”
“Like when we became blood brothers! Remember?”
He just smiled: of course, he remembered.
“And this will be even better,” he said. “Now I know what they did in the real ceremonies. I even have some real arrowheads.”
“We could use them in the ceremony — before the oath!” I said. “But let’s make up our own oath.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
We laughed – it wasn’t that funny, we were just happy. We talked until he went out for recess. (Now that we were older, Henry said, we didn’t line up: people just went — or stayed in.) He turned around at the door and I looked up from sharpening my pencil at exactly the same time.
“Remember that china barrel?” I said. “You were right. Not one thing in it was broken.”
“That’s good,” Henry said; he knew what a relief that was, I could tell.
The wildflower breakfast set, not broken.
I got some paper — nice big American paper — from the pile, and decided to write about riding horses! I’d start with the Romans — they invented saddles with stirrups to use in their wars in England and other places. I could describe what it felt like to canter, too.
I looked down at the paper on my desk (bright white paper, blue lines) and then around the classroom. The tall windows that went almost up to the ceiling were the same as the ones in our old classroom, but I’d never liked how MUCH sky you could see (it was too blank). Now I did like that blank bright blue sky. It was filled with light and wide open to anything.
I felt like that, too, and bursting with energy. English or American, both or neither: I was back. I shook the hair out of my face (like a horse shaking its head before it stretches its neck!), stretched my neck, and started to write.
The End