“How’d it go?” Leslie wanted to know once they’d all opened their eyes.
Hands shot into the air. Renu said she got an idea for a trickster in the form of a girl who was only a couple inches tall and would hide in her desk at school and give her all the right answers when she had to take a quiz. Carla said she got an idea for a trickster in the form of a talking wolf who gave bad guys the wrong directions on the subway. Edson said he got an idea for a trickster in the form of a giant forklift that could lift people’s buildings when they were asleep and set them down in a different country, so they would wake up near their fathers.
A flurry of overlapping voices. Cupboard doors banging open and shut. Stools scraping across the floor. “Leslie, Leslie, where’s the thingies you put in the glue gun?” “Can I get some of those pipe cleaners?” “Can we use the stuff in the cigar box?” The overhead lights snapped back on. Annamae remained on the floor.
“What’s up, Miss Annamae?” Leslie put a hand on her shoulder.
“I didn’t get any.”
“Any what? You need some supplies?”
“Ideas.”
“Oh. The visualization didn’t do it for you?”
Annamae shook her head.
“You know you have to believe for it work. You must not have believed enough.”
“I did,” Annamae replied in a small, tight voice.
“Never mind,” said Leslie. “I’m just playing.” She gave Annamae’s shoulder a little rub. “The only thing you really have to believe in is yourself.”
In the end, Annamae wound up using the Fairy Man/Ferryman. That’s what she called her trickster. She didn’t use any special supplies, just charcoal and a piece of cardboard. She drew him just as he was: a big bulky man with dark curly hair and a dark curly beard and a boat. And wings.
“Cool, cool,” said Leslie, looking over her shoulder. “What makes him a trickster?”
What made him a trickster was that he ferried things not only from shore to shore but from world to world.
“Like intergalactic? Like from Earth to another planet?” asked Carla.
“Or you mean from real life to pretend?” asked Renu.
“It’s all real,” said Annamae.
She pretended not to notice Renu and Carla exchanging looks.
Nor did she tell Leslie that she’d cheated: She hadn’t made the ferryman up.
That night after supper, Annamae asked her mother, “Do you believe in yourself?”
Her mother looked over the top of her readers. They were sitting in the living room part of the downstairs. Annamae was practicing dégagé, using the radiator as a barre. Her mother had been reading some student’s dissertation chapters, making notes on them with blue pencil. “In what sense do you mean?”
Annamae shrugged. “I don’t know. Leslie was saying today the most important thing is to believe in yourself.” Now she switched to frappé, which meant striking the floor like a match. “Which is pretty funny, because we were also talking about believing in leprechauns and stuff.”
“A whole different order of business.”
“Yeah. Why do you need to believe in yourself? You know you’re real.”
“You know,” her mother said musingly, and she paused to take off her readers. “The word belief, if I’m not mistaken, is linked to love. Etymologically speaking. The lief part—I’m pretty sure this is true—comes from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘to love.’”
Once again, Annamae was bowled over. Sometimes her mother’s endless trove of linguistics facts could be annoying. Other times it made her think of a whole enormous ring of shiny metal keys, each with the power to unlock a tiny door. Like that whole wall of tiny doors at the main branch of the post office. Whenever her mother said something like this, it was as if she’d fitted her key into one and pulled it open, and for a few seconds you could peek through—and see that the other side was a wide-open space, vast as night, where everything met up.
“In that sense of the word,” her mother said, reflecting, “I’d agree that belief in oneself is essential.” She slipped her readers back on and returned her gaze to the manuscript in her lap. Her gaze, but apparently not her attention. Because a moment later she lifted her head again to add, “Essential, but not sufficient.”
Annamae, who had moved on to practicing grand battement, grinned. She loved it when her mother argued with herself.
“As long as it’s understood as a starting point,” her mother went on. “Not the destination.”