Miss Evie Ward looked like a wren. She was plump in the breast and had a tidy russet head that was stripey, like a wren’s. Her hair was a mix of auburn and brown, thick, straight, and tucked neatly behind her ears. She was leaning against her desk, surveying us. “Let’s rearrange the classroom,” she said.
We all got up, clattering.
“Let’s make a circle,” she said. “I’ll stay here near the blackboard, and you be all around me.”
With more clattering, we made a horseshoe out of our desks and dragged our chairs into place.
“That’s better,” she said. “Now we’re all together and I can see everyone and everyone can see me.” She smiled. She had small teeth.
“This is the year of the Greeks,” she said. “This is the year you’re going to begin to understand the world, because everything that matters, the Greeks started it.”
Roger put his hand up. “Miss Ward, what about the Chinese?”
“Aha!” she said. “What about them? And you can call me Miss Evie.”
“Didn’t they invent lots of important things? Didn’t they invent paper and pottery and gunpowder?”
“Gunpowder,” said Miss Evie. “They certainly invented that. And you might be right about paper. But I’m sure they didn’t invent pottery. People all over the world invented pottery. I don’t think the Chinese can take credit.”
“Miss Evie!” Roger was wiggling his hand again.
She looked at her class list. “Are you Roger?” she asked.
Roger nodded. “But what I want to know is, didn’t they invent pottery, really?”
Miss Evie tilted her head at Roger. “I bet you like to read the encyclopedia,” she said.
“Look under Sumerians,” she said. “That’s S-U-M-”
“I know about the Sumerians,” Roger interrupted.
“Okay. Then see what the encyclopedia has to say about Sumerian pottery. Then look under India—”
“So you’re saying the Chinese didn’t invent pottery?”
Miss Evie looked as if she’d gotten irritated and had then decided not to be irritated. That took a minute.
“Roger, how about this,” she said. “You could look up pottery, and see when the Chinese started making it and when the Sumerians started making it, and the Indians and the Egyptians. You could make what’s called a timeline and bring that in to class. Would you like to do that?”
Roger was, I could tell, weighing the hours it would take to do that against the hours he’d planned to spend in the basement with his model airplanes. The Chinese won, for the moment. “Yes,” he said. “I can do that.”
“That will be good for all of us,” Miss Evie said. “Greek civilization didn’t just come out of nowhere, and this will show us about that. But the Greeks were especially devoted to beauty, and they thought hard about the best and the most beautiful way to do all the things everyone around them was doing, like making pottery and writing poems and building temples. They had a special affinity for balance and perfection.”
“Why?” I asked. It popped out. I hadn’t planned to say anything.
“It’s a mystery,” said Miss Evie. “Now and then there are big upheavals and changes, and nobody really knows why. These days, some historians think it had to do with food. There were plenty of farmers growing lots of food, so people in the cities could stop worrying about getting enough to eat. And that gave them the time and energy to think—to think hard.” She pointed at us. “So, if you want to be like the Greeks and think beautiful thoughts, eat a good breakfast, right?”
“Yes, Miss Evie,” the class intoned.
During the neither-this-nor-that week between our return from the Cape and the start of school, A.A. had taken me and Roger to the Museum of Fine Arts. He’d pitched the outing to Roger as a visit to some Bigelows—and there were several ancestral landscapes hanging in a dim corridor between Colonial furniture and Colonial silver. I thought A.A. and Ingrid had better ones. They had a picture of the big Venetian piazza and a picture of Mount Etna and a nice big waterfall somewhere in the West. The museum ones were just a bunch of lakes and woods in upstate New York. Then we headed to the Egyptians, where Roger and I liked to scare ourselves in the replica of a tomb, a narrow, stony universe whose walls were covered with thousands of tiny hawks and tiny cows and tiny people all walking in the same direction. There was a special Egyptian-tomb smell in there that added to the scare; it smelled like dead stone. Roger invariably extended his hands in a zombie way and said, I am a mummy and I curse you, and that always gave me the shivers even though I knew he was going to do it.
But we took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in the Far East.
“Gosh,” said A.A., “I haven’t been here in ages.”
“Papa, the tomb,” Roger objected.
“Well, let’s just see,” A.A. said, ambling down the hallway. “Look, that’s pretty good.” He stopped in front of a stone dragon on a pedestal. It was all curly, including its tongue, which was sticking out at us.
The next room was full of weapons: bronze semicircular axes incised with twisty designs, and shields that were discs with points in the middle that looked like bosoms to me. There were cabinets stuffed with armor, interlocked chips of stone or metal to cover arms and legs and sheets of metal curved to fit a chest and helmets with nose slits. I thought it all looked like dismantled insects and I didn’t like it.
“Wow,” said Roger. “Why didn’t we come here before?”
“I guess I forgot about it,” said A.A. “It’s been years since I ventured in here. Let’s go farther. The earliest stuff is in the back.”
We walked past a scroll that went on and on. I liked that. Part of what was interesting was thinking about the frame. It was as long as our living room.
“How did they make a frame like that?” I asked.
A.A. paused to look at it with me. “It’s very long,” he agreed. “What’s it about?” He leaned closer. “Oh,” he said suddenly, “what a great monkey.”
I had to stand on tiptoe to see. It was quite a large monkey, with snow on its head. To the left, some mountains. To the right, some other mountains. Even though the scroll was dozens of feet long, nothing seemed to be happening. Snow, mountains, some little people, and the monkey.
“It isn’t about anything,” I told A.A.
“Usually it’s about something,” he said. “And this one’s so long, it’s got to have a story. Often it’s the life of a philosopher.”
“And the monkey?” I asked.
“Wasn’t there a monkey king?” A.A. looked up at the ceiling, trying to remember. “Maybe I’m mixing it up with India.”
“Papa,” Roger called from ahead of us. “There’s a bell in here that’s bigger than you are.”
We spent the afternoon with the huge bells and the infinite scrolls and the other strange Chinese and Japanese things, and it was in these circumstances, rather than by reading the encyclopedia, that Roger had become fixated on them.
“Here’s what I know about the Chinese,” A.A. said as we leaned over glass cabinets filled with jade inkpots. “They invented paper and they invented gunpowder. And this is the best part—Roger, you’ll like this. What they did with gunpowder was make fireworks. They loved fireworks.”
“They didn’t use it for guns?” Roger asked.
“They didn’t even think of guns. It didn’t occur to them to use it for anything but fireworks. It’s like inventing glass but never thinking of making a window. Interesting, isn’t it? War just wasn’t on their minds that much.”
Roger looked around at the weaponry. “All they thought about was war,” he said. “Look at this stuff.”
“Hmm,” said A.A. “Well, I guess I meant something about categories of thought. Gunpowder was in the aesthetic category.”
A.A. and Roger were having a better time with the Chinese than I was. I thought the things were fussy. There were too many curlicues and embellishments for me. When we got to the bowls and plates, though, my opinion changed.
“Hey,” I said. “Look at this black-and-blue bowl.” It wasn’t very big, about the size of a cereal bowl. The black was on the lower part and then it oozed into being blue, and the blue went over into the inside.
“The Chinese invented porcelain,” A.A. said. “I don’t know how I could have forgotten that.”
Hence Roger’s contention, the following week, that the Chinese had invented pottery.
• • •
“Not pottery, porcelain,” Ingrid said on the weekend. “Pfffh.” She shook her head. Who couldn’t distinguish between pottery and porcelain?
“What’s the difference?” asked Roger.
“Big difference.” Ingrid took a white Rosenthal dinner plate out of the draining board and held it up. “Look. It’s so thin you can almost see through it.” She put that down and grabbed a teacup out of the cupboard. “And this is old Meissen my mother brought from Vienna and you can see right through that. Look.” She handed it to me.
It was painted with pink and blue morning glories and didn’t weigh anything.
“Hold it up, hold it up,” Ingrid told me.
I put it to my eye and looked toward the window.
“It’s true! I can see the window,” I said. The window looked pink and blue.
“Let me try,” said Roger.
“Pottery is heavy and thick,” said Ingrid. She looked around for some. “Here.” She dumped the oranges out of the blue fruit bowl onto the New York Times that lay half read on the table. “See? Can’t look through this. Breaks, too. Porcelain is strong.”
“Like if I dropped it, it wouldn’t break?” Roger asked, holding the teacup in a precarious, threatening manner with one finger.
Ingrid motioned him to give it back to her. When he did, she said, “Anything can break if you’re not careful.”
“Hey, Ingrid,” I said. “Is that why it’s called china?”
“What,” said Ingrid.
“Is that why china is called china?”
“I don’t know. Probably not,” Ingrid said.
When I got home I looked it up. That was why. China the thing was named for China the place. I thought how funny that was. Suppose there was a thing called cambridge—forks, or bread, or a roof? I sat in the window seat pretending that a roof was called a cambridge. It just didn’t seem workable. But it must have been strange at the beginning of calling porcelain china too.
Everybody loved fourth grade and Miss Evie except me, of course. I didn’t hate it, but I had some objections. Miss Evie bothered me. She reminded me of my mother. She sneakily made me like her, but underneath I didn’t actually like her. One reason was, I saw that she didn’t like Roger, though she paid a lot of attention to him. Roger was strange, even I knew that. But I loved him. I loved his obsessive, whiny, persistent ways. He was like a nice fly. When he decided he wanted something, buzz, buzz, he would pester until he got it. And he was funny-looking. His head was too big and too thin in some way. It looked like a skull, not a head. Sometimes I’d look at him in class (he sat a few chairs away in the circle to my right) and see him as if he were someone new: pale, skinny arms, big head, fuzzy, long, thick, pale eyelashes. Miss Evie probably saw that, when she looked at him.
So Miss Evie was a sneak who didn’t like Roger. Two bad things. Then there was the problem of the theme. It was like England, where we’d had to pretend we were living in caves because of early man. The Greeks were a thousand times more interesting than early man, but we were just as trapped. It was as if I’d been condemned to live in a world with only one color. Even if that color had been, say, green, my favorite color, I still would have missed the other colors.
And I had another problem. Parts of me seemed to be disappearing. I didn’t understand what was happening. Something was happening—something was eating up my insides or chewing up my past. It was hard to know what it was. It was even hard to know what it felt like. That was part of what was terrible about it. Was I asleep? Was I dead? Was I sick? I seemed to be asleep, mainly. But it wasn’t the sort of lively, hating sleep I’d had in second and third grade, when I’d slept because I felt school was a waste of my time. That had been intentional; this was out of my control. It came in waves, a death-wave of not-feeling, not-seeing, not-caring. Then I’d come back to life, but each time I felt I’d left something down there under the waves. I was getting smaller. I was getting quieter. I was getting—really, the only word for it was boring.
I’d come back from these death dives with a shred of a memory, like of my father putting me to bed when I was four. A little memory. He used to sing to me. He couldn’t sing at all. It was croaking. Every night he groaned out “The Skye Boat Song.” “Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing, Onward, the sailors cry. Carry the lad that’s born to be king over the sea to Skye.” When I was about five, my mother played this song for me on the piano and I learned its real tune, not my father’s croak-tune. Then I could sing it with him when he put me to bed. He told me about the prince who’d been hidden in Scotland waiting to get on the throne of England. In the dark, with the bulk of my father’s body making my narrow bed tilt to the side, I’d picture the island as blue and frothy, like its wonderful name. There was a line I specially liked: “Baffled, our foes stand on the shore, follow they will not dare.” Why were they baffled? I asked. Because they couldn’t navigate the waters, my father said. They weren’t from Scotland and they didn’t know how to get around in that part of the sea.
Now and then he sang a different one: “You’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland before you.” Why? I asked. I guess the low road was quicker for some reason, my father said. Then soulfully, sadly, croakily, he’d conclude it: “But me and my true love, we’ll never meet again, on the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.” Why? I asked. Why wouldn’t they meet again? He didn’t have an answer.
It was terribly sad. Even my father’s atonal rendition couldn’t disguise or subdue the sadness in that tune and those words, and sometimes I cried when he sang it. He didn’t sing it often.
Thinking of these things now, in fourth grade, I felt they had happened to somebody else. I wasn’t that person anymore. I could make myself teary by singing “You’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road” to myself, and I would do that, to try to be once again the little girl in the bed, with the tuneless father sitting by. But it didn’t work. I wasn’t that little girl, and me and my father would never meet again on the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.
Eventually I had to leave the Isle of Skye and Loch Lomond down at the bottom, under the waves I kept sinking into. Likewise the vivid pictures in Struwwelpeter, a book my father had adored when he was a child and had cajoled me into adoring as well, though it gave me nightmares. It frightened me, but I couldn’t leave it alone. I wanted to see the bad boy with his electrified hair and talon-nails, and the one who wouldn’t eat his dinner and turned into a stick, and the pair who were dipped in ink and became silhouettes. The very improbability of these stories, which offered some sort of protection, also made them scarier. That couldn’t possibly happen, I’d tell myself. Nobody is going to come and cut off my thumbs. So I don’t have to worry about that. Then I’d worry that because I was so sure it wouldn’t happen, it was going to happen.
But now I knew it wasn’t ever going to happen. If I thought of my thumbs being cut off, which I rarely did, I’d think: I used to be really afraid of that.
I’d been lots of things: scared and mad and curious, caught up in patrolling Cambridge on my bike and eavesdropping on grownups trying to figure out what they were up to. All that was over.
I wasn’t much of anything anymore. No matter how far down in myself I poked, I found empty, blank nobodyness. The worst part was the way the past seemed to have vanished. It hadn’t really vanished—or so I hoped. But it felt foreign. There wasn’t any continuity between now and what had gone before. I couldn’t even get nostalgic about it. The most I could manage was a sniffle over a Scottish song.
Only one thing could break through my stupor and make me feel something: my mother. She had decided to study Ancient Greek. She was horning in on my Greek year. Why was she doing it? It was like the piano. She wanted to make me look bad. She wandered around the house practicing. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon. She kept The Iliad in the kitchen and worked out lines while waiting for the water to come to a boil or the steak to be done. Zeta, eta, theta, iota. Her teacher was a dapper classics professor named Eli, with a dotted silk handkerchief in his sport coat breast pocket, who came Fridays. He had a devil-beard and green eyes and two-tone lace-up shoes. They sat on the sofa together and he read Pindar aloud and they laughed. Who did she think she was? Sometimes he stayed for dinner, just as Vishwa had in the old days.
But there was no more Vishwa. There was no more Frederika either. She’d gone back to Sweden. Their cross-country car trip in the Rambler had done them in, somehow. It had been a big September muddle. Frederika in tears, Jagdeesh coming over to discuss the situation, Vishwa not coming over. And now the house was quiet. I was alone on the third floor next to Frederika’s abandoned, dusty room, with her leftover, hand-me-down makeup from my mother in the cabinet above the bathroom sink.
The lipstick dried up and got waxy and the powder solidified into a cracked cake, and I plodded through my days. I didn’t care. It was easy to be dead. Now and then I got a jolt of hatred for my mother over the Greek competition, but that just encouraged me to enjoy my diminished self, because hating—and loving—took a lot of energy, and I didn’t have much of that.
I couldn’t understand what had happened between Frederika and Vishwa. I asked my mother about it, even though I didn’t want to talk to her. But it didn’t help. She couldn’t explain it. Maybe she didn’t know either. She had a lot of different versions of it.
“They are both stubborn,” she said.
Another time—I kept going back to her, picking at it—she said, “He is a fatalist and she is an optimist.”
“Am I a fatalist or an optimist?” I asked.
“You are more of a pessimist,” my mother said.
“What’s the difference?”
“A fatalist is cheerful. A fatalist believes that whatever happens was meant to happen and doesn’t fight it. A fatalist is brave and calm.” She looked at me with her intense eyebrows arched high. “You are not calm.”
She was right. I was pretending to be calm. I’d thought I was doing a pretty good job.
“And what about a pessimist?” I wanted to know. “What’s a pessimist like?”
“Just a disappointed optimist,” she said. “An optimist who doesn’t have enough backbone to stick to her beliefs.”
That didn’t sound good. I supposed she was talking about me.
“And that isn’t Vishwa at all,” she continued. “Which is why he’s a fatalist. Happy and resigned, unflappable, really. He always makes the best of whatever comes. Whereas Frederika is a big improver of things.”
Maybe she hadn’t been talking about me. Maybe it was like when she was making the shopping list and she’d stare at me until I thought she was angry and about to say a mean thing, and all she was doing was trying to think of what to get for dinner.
“I still don’t see what happened,” I said.
“I bet she tried to improve him,” my mother said.
The worst thing she said was, “What they love you for in the beginning is what they will hate you for in the end.”
I couldn’t get that out of my head.
It was a terrible idea, and I believed it. I had believed it before she said it, so hearing her say it was frightening because that made it true. I knew that inside me was an indigestible nastiness, which was bound to poke through and kill anything nice that had managed to grow between me and somebody else. I knew that my balkiness could be appealing at first. It made people want to help me, and plenty of people had tried: the man with the sticks in third grade, the solfège teacher, my mother at the piano bench. But one way or another, I defeated them all. I wore them down until they tired of me and my difficulty. My capacity for disappointing people was bigger than their capacity for putting up with me.
“Can you improve people?” I asked her.
My mother laughed. “You can bribe them to act better. Or try to scare them.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t work very well. Just look at you!”
What did she want from me? What was I supposed to be, that I so obviously wasn’t? I didn’t dare ask.
In late September I’d sat on Frederika’s bed while she cried into her open suitcase. She folded her shirts and skirts and her sweet lace-edged slips and packed them into tidy tear-splotched stacks. She rolled her marvelous Swedish tights that were red or lilac or dark green—colors American tights never came in—and jammed them into the toes of her shoes and sniffed and coughed from crying.
“Why?” I kept asking. “Why do you have to go away? I know you’re unhappy, but I could take care of you. Stay here.”
On a normal day Frederika would have laughed and told me that it was her job to take care of me, but that day she didn’t.
“I must go back home,” she said. “It isn’t really home, though, now.” This started more crying. “I’m not sure where I belong now. Am I a Swedish person? Am I a sort of half-Indian, half-Swedish person? Am I an American person?”
“American,” I said. “Anybody can be an American person. If you just stay here, you’ll be American.” This seemed like a good solution.
She shook her head.
“Did Vishwa do mean things?” I asked.
“Vishwa is never mean,” said Frederika.
“I know,” I said. “Then why do you have to leave?”
“It’s time to go,” said Frederika. “Every story has an end. It’s time for the next story. This wonderful story is over now.”
“But, Frederika,” I wailed, “does it mean you don’t love me anymore either?”
“Of course not! I always love you. Always and always.” She sniffed. “And I always love Vishwa too.”
“But what am I going to do without you?”
“You were fine without me,” she said. “It’s only a few years that you have me.”
“You said you’d make another gingerbread house for Christmas. And little paper baskets for cookies to hang on the tree. And I hate school so much! Please, please, Frederika.” I suddenly had an idea. “I’ll go talk to Vishwa. He’ll listen to me. I’ll tell him, Be nice! Don’t be bad to Freddy.”
“Don’t you dare to,” she said. “Don’t you talk to him about me at all. Anyhow, he never did any bad things.”
“Did you do some bad things?” I hadn’t thought of that possibility before.
“Nobody did bad things.” She sat down on the bed. “Sometimes love just dies, that’s all.” Then she sobbed, a huge sob that seemed to pull all the air in the room into her chest.
“How can love die?” I asked. “I don’t understand. How does it die?”
“I don’t understand either,” said Frederika.
My father took her to the airport. My mother stayed home with me and the baby. The new regime had begun.
But at least, maybe, with Frederika gone, Vishwa could come back and we could listen to records again.
My mother said no. “Vishwa is very busy now,” she said. “He’s conducting the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. It’s a big job and he hasn’t got time for lessons.”
I didn’t like Miss Evie but I had to admit that she understood some things about nine-year-olds. For instance, that we knew enough about hate and pride and envy to enjoy the story of the House of Atreus. It was one of the lead-ins to the Trojan War, but we could have studied the Trojan War without going all the way back to the cannibalism. However, that’s where Miss Evie started: Tantalus serving the gods a dinner made of his son, Pelops, whom he’d killed and cooked. What was amazing was that then Pelops came back to life and had two sons, Atreus and Thyestes, and the same thing happened again, only this time Atreus killed Thyestes’s sons and served them to him for dinner.
I thought this was very good. I liked that the story was the same but not quite—gods replaced by a man, two sons instead of one, nephew-murder, not son-murder. But the same thing kept happening, and something about that was satisfying. The horribleness was also satisfying. The storytellers hadn’t made even a gesture toward saying why. Tantalus cooked his son for dinner and that was that. Atreus had a bit of a motive. He was mad at Thyestes for stealing a ram with a golden fleece. But anyone could see that killing and cooking his children was an overreaction. It was clear that Atreus had to do what his grandfather had done. It was his fate, as the Greeks said. And it was the story’s fate as well, to repeat itself.
I wondered about the golden fleece, and whether it was the same one that had sent Jason off on his voyage with the Argonauts. I hadn’t liked that Jason story very much when I’d read it in Gods and Heroes during the early-man doldrums in England. I looked at it again now. The fleeces didn’t seem to be connected. For starters, Atreus’s fleece was still on the hoof. The fleece Jason was after had long before been stripped off its ram and nailed to a tree in Colchis, wherever that was. It wasn’t in Greece. The story was full of how special the fleece was, how there wasn’t anything like it anywhere else. But there was. There was a golden fleece in Greece too.
Poor Jason. He could have skipped the trip, I thought.
The further we went in the story of Atreus and his family, the more things happened twice. Or more than twice. First Aegisthus killed his uncle Atreus. Then Atreus’s son Agamemnon killed his uncle Thyestes, who was Aegisthus’s father. Later on, Aegisthus helped to kill his cousin Agamemnon. That was just the killings. There was also the sister and brother not recognizing each other. First Electra, Agamemnon’s daughter, didn’t recognize her brother, Orestes, when he came home (not surprisingly, he’d come home to kill his mother and cousin). Then Orestes didn’t recognize his sister Iphegenia when he found her in Tauris.
Iphegenia was a surprise. We’d assumed she was dead. Agamemnon had sacrificed her to get a good wind for his trip to Troy. That was the trouble! That had been the start of the whole second round of killings—third round, if you began with the cannibalism. Clytemnestra and Aegisthus would never have killed Agamemnon when he got back from the war if they’d known he hadn’t actually sacrificed Iphegenia. And if they hadn’t killed Agamemnon, then Orestes wouldn’t have had to come home and kill them. And all that mess could have been avoided.
But Iphegenia was fine. She was living as a priestess in Tauris. Artemis had saved her at the altar, right there, with her neck under the knife. A beautiful young hind had appeared to be sacrificed instead. That got my attention. Wasn’t this the same thing that had happened when Abraham was about to sacrifice Isaac? Except maybe it had been a goat, or—this would be funny—a ram, maybe one with a golden fleece.
On my ninth birthday my father had given me a King James Bible. The family tradition was to give presents with cryptic clues on them. You had to guess what it was before you could open it. The rule might be waived for extremely difficult clues. The Bible’s clue was: FROM JC TO THE JEWS. I didn’t get it. I was allowed to open it, but even then I didn’t get it.
“Who’s JC?” I asked.
“Jesus Christ,” my father said.
“But it’s the whole thing,” my mother pointed out.
“It’s true,” my father said. “Technically, it should have been only the New Testament. But the Old Testament is better.”
“We think,” my mother muttered.
“The stories are much better,” my father said.
It was hard to read those stories. Every paragraph had a number, which was distracting. The names were dotted with squiggles and slashes and accents, which was also distracting. And it was somewhat repetitive. I hadn’t made much progress.
I’d made enough, though, to get to the sacrifice of Isaac. I looked for it again. It had been a ram, caught in the thicket by its horns, said the Bible.
What did all these rams mean? I wondered. What did the sacrifice of children mean? Why did so many things happen twice?
I could have asked Miss Evie, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t think she would like my asking, and I was afraid she would tell me I was wrong—things weren’t happening twice. As for my parents, I didn’t ask them things like that anymore.
“You’re very sulky,” my mother told me often.
She was right. I was half dead and half sulky. But as the fall went on, I noticed that some of my deadness was being replaced by an intense feeling about the Greek stories and the Bible stories. They were similar. They were violent and arbitrary, and they didn’t explain. There was something naked about these stories. Terrible things happened, and then some more terrible things happened. The Greek stories were a lot easier to read, but I plugged away at the Bible too. I’d found a child’s illustrated Bible that I didn’t even remember owning (forgotten down under the waves with everything else), which was a good trot. When I couldn’t stand the numbers and the squiggles anymore, I’d leaf through the pictures of Daniel in the lion’s den and read the potted version of Joseph and his brothers. Then I could make sense out of the King James because I already knew the story.
Unlike me, my mother was in a good mood. She was playing a lot of cheerful Scarlatti. No agonizing Beethoven or abstract Bartók. Some days she’d try writing the shopping list in Greek, for practice. Kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi. But, “No Greek word for cottage cheese,” she said.
“Or vermouth,” said my father. “We’re out.”
“Oh, omicron. I always forget that one,” my mother said.
“Omicron and omega. Little o and big o. I am alpha and omega, the first and the last,” said my father.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“That’s what Jesus said,” he told me.
“Jesus spoke Greek?”
“No, he probably spoke Aramaic, which is a kind of Hebrew,” said my father. “But the Bible was written in Greek, so in the Bible he says it that way.”
That explained why the stories felt the same. “I didn’t know the Greeks wrote the Bible too,” I said.
“They didn’t,” said my father. “The people who collected the Bible spoke Greek, so they wrote it down in Greek. The New Testament.”
“And the Old,” my mother said. “Those seventy old Jews.” She shook her head at my father. “What’s the matter with you? Forgetting the seventy old Jews.”
My father shrugged. “Dumb?” he suggested, smiling. “Just a big dope?”
They seemed to be getting along nicely.
“What seventy old Jews?” I was lost.
“The ones who collected the Old Testament.”
“Was it lying around?” I asked.
“In a way, it was lying around,” my father said. “There were lots of different versions in various languages, Hebrew and Aramaic, and probably some others. These old Jews were the editors. They took all the versions and collected them into one version in Greek.”
“When did they do this?” I asked.
My mother and father looked at each other.
“Two hundred B.C.,” my mother said, firmly.
“It might have been earlier,” said my father. “It was before Christianity, anyhow.”
“Why were there seventy Jews in Greece?” I asked.
“They were in Alexandria,” said my father. “Have you gotten to Alexander the Great yet?”
“No,” I said. “We’re reading about the Atreus people and how they kill each other all the time.”
“It’s already November,” my father said. “You’ve got a lot of history to pack into the rest of the year.”
“And so what does it mean, ‘I am alpha and omega’?”
“It means I am everything. I am the beginning and the end and everything in between,” my father said.
I didn’t see how one person could be everything. But I’d had enough of sitting in the kitchen with my parents, so I said, “Oh, okay.”
Dapper-devil Eli was from Baghdad, like Aladdin in the fairy tale. My mother told me this in an effort to improve my Friday-night behavior. She also told me to address him as Professor Safar.
“He’s very formal,” she said. “He likes that.”
He didn’t seem very formal when he was sitting on the sofa guffawing with her all afternoon.
I didn’t like it when Eli Professor Safar came for dinner. He was a poor substitute for Vishwa. The main problem was he paid no attention to me. My mother’s instruction to address him by his title was needless; we almost never spoke to each other.
“You should be friendly to him,” my mother went on. “He hasn’t had an easy time. After the war he had to leave Baghdad and go to Israel, and then his wife died, and now he’s ended up here, where he doesn’t know anyone.”
“He doesn’t like me,” I said.
My mother tightened her mouth. “I’m sure he doesn’t think about you,” she said.
“Then why should I bother to be friendly?”
“To make him feel at home.”
“If he doesn’t know anyone, how does he know you?” I asked.
“Werner,” my mother said. “I was looking for a Greek teacher, and Werner Jaeger recommended Eli—Professor Safar—who’d just joined the department. Do you remember Werner? He gave you your copy of Gods and Heroes. He wrote the introduction to the English translation. He thought you would enjoy the stories. But maybe you don’t remember him. You were only about five when he gave it to you.”
“Does he have a mustache?” I asked.
“Yes,” said my mother.
“Like A.A.’s?”
“No. It’s the thin kind, the proper German kind.”
“Proper?”
“A certain kind of German professor has a thin mustache.”
I didn’t really care about mustaches. “How come all these people who teach Greek aren’t Greeks?”
“It’s too complicated to explain right now,” said my mother.
I persisted. “Aren’t there any Greek people to teach Greek?”
“It’s not the same language anymore,” she said. “What they speak in Greece now isn’t what they spoke then. It isn’t Ancient Greek.”
“What happened to the old Greek?”
“It died,” said my mother.
That was sobering. I hadn’t known that a language, like a person, could die. “How—” I began.
“Enough,” said my mother. “That’s enough now.”
We were in the kitchen. It was Friday, and Eli Professor Safar was returning for dinner at seven-thirty. My mother was salting the inside of a chicken and stuffing it with parsley and thyme, and then she was going to stab a shish-kebab skewer into its neck and close it up with a quick, nasty twist. Was Professor Eli Aegisthus? I didn’t want to think about that idea.
My mother finished assassinating the chicken and put it in the oven. She washed her hands twice. “Chicken is poisonous,” she told me. “Always wash your hands well after getting near chicken.”
Her plan was to poison all of us? “If it’s poisonous—”
“No. You know what I mean.” She was really fed up with me. “Raw chicken. Now go get ready. Go take a bath or something.”
I went upstairs and reread some of Gods and Heroes instead. I read the story about Zeus and Io, and how Zeus turned her into a cow. She knew she was a cow, and she didn’t want to be one. It was sad and worrisome, especially the part where she spelled out her problem with her hoof in the dirt. Luckily, her father understood her. But he couldn’t do anything. She was stuck. Eventually it worked out, but there were a lot of bad things first. The gadfly! What was a gadfly? It sounded terrible.
I had a vague memory of some other cow situation. I leafed through until I found it: Europa. Europa wasn’t the cow this time—it was Zeus. Zeus turned himself into a bull. He was an extremely beautiful bull, just as Io had been an extremely beautiful cow. The difference was he could switch back whenever he felt like it.
I had never been close enough to a cow to determine if it was an especially beautiful one. A black-and-white group in a field as we drove to somewhere in Vermont was all I could remember, seen through the car window at forty miles an hour. “ ‘I never saw a purple cow, I never hope to see one,’ ” my father would sometimes recite. “ ‘But I can tell you, anyhow, I’d rather see than be one!’ ” Then he’d laugh. I didn’t want to be one either. Purple wasn’t the problem. I thought about Io trapped in the cow’s body—but that wasn’t quite right. That made it seem like Jonah eaten by the whale. This was worse. She was imprisoned in cowness. She was the cow but she wasn’t; she was Io. The book talked about her piteous cries to be released.
If I were turned into a cow, I thought, I wouldn’t be able to read, because I wouldn’t have arms and I couldn’t hold the book. Maybe I could use my hoof, like Io. But I’d have to stand up all the time. I wouldn’t be able to talk and I would be enormous.
I looked around my room, with its sloping attic eaves all along the edge, under which I could still stand up. Frederika had been too tall to stand under her eaves next door. If I were a cow, how would I get up the stairs?
It wasn’t worth worrying about. Nobody was going to turn me into a cow. I was just enjoying myself by pretending to be afraid of it.
Except something about it was real: not the cow part, the stuck part. I was stuck as myself. I wasn’t going to turn into anybody else. Sometimes, when I was very angry or very happy, my feelings seemed to be bigger than I was, as if they were the size of giants, and I would have to break open, the way, I thought, I had been able to break open at the chest in England when I traveled at night back to Cambridge or up and down our grim, gray English street. But I didn’t do that anymore. I didn’t take those nighttime trips. Probably I was no longer able to. Whatever that had been, it was now underwater with the lullabies and the snipped-off thumbs. All that was left was making believe I might be turned into a cow while knowing it was never going to happen.
“Dinner,” my mother called up the stairs. “Come and set the table.”
I went down slowly. On the second floor, my father was sitting on the bed in my parents’ room unlacing his shoes, and the baby was in her cot singing a lullaby to her favorite new toy, a stuffed owl.
“Did you get to Alexander the Great yet?” asked my father.
“No,” I said. “It’s all about the Trojan War. Too many battles.”
“It picks up,” he said. “Have they gone back for Philoctetes?”
“Is that the guy with the smelly foot?”
My father nodded.
“No. They left him on an island.”
“Yes, but they go back for him. And then they win the war. Still, hundreds and hundreds of years are left to cover. I don’t understand the organization of this program of study.”
“Maybe Alexander isn’t in it,” I said.
“That’s impossible,” said my father.
“Hey!” my mother called. “What are you two doing? I need a hand here.”
My father put on his black Italian loafers, once sleek, now cracked and curled from their émigré life in arctic Cambridge, and we went downstairs to help.
“Put the salad plates on top of the dinner plates,” my mother said. “We’re having artichokes first.”
“Don’t forget the little cups for butter,” my father said.
“Ingrid always has mayonnaise,” I said.
“Ingrid makes her own mayonnaise,” my mother told me. “I’m not putting Hellmann’s out in a little cup.”
“Butter is better,” said my father.
I thought mayonnaise was better. A.A. used sour cream. He was as crazy about sour cream as I was. I’d tried that, but it drowned out the artichoke. I loved artichoke because it made everything else taste sweet. The best was eating bread afterward; it tasted like cake.
“Why do artichokes make things taste sweet?” I asked my father.
“Do they? I don’t think they do,” he said.
“Maybe it’s like asparagus pee,” my mother said. “Not everyone has asparagus pee.”
I hated asparagus pee. It made me think of mice or guinea pigs.
“That’s not true,” my father said. “Everyone has it, but not everyone can smell it. That’s the difference.”
“Those people are living in a fool’s paradise,” my mother said.
“Is that a good thing?” I asked.
“By definition,” my father said, “you’re a fool. That’s no good.”
“But if you’re happy …” My mother didn’t finish.
“Better to suffer and to know,” said my father.
Artichokes with melted lemon-butter. Chicken roasted on a bed of endive and leeks. Rice with currants—“What’s this?” my father asked.
“It’s a Persian sort of thing,” said my mother.
“Quite typical,” Eli Professor Safar said. “We often have this.”
“But Iraq—” my father began to object.
“Isn’t Persia,” Eli interrupted him. “But it’s a general cuisine. General to the area of Iraq and Iran. Jewish cooking in the Middle East is much influenced by the Arabic and Persian penchant for sweet-and-sour.”
“No,” said Eli.
If I’d had a plate of spareribs, I would have dumped them on his head. I had a penchant for doing things like that.
“I wouldn’t call this Jewish cooking,” said my mother.
“Chicken?” Eli was surprised.
“Why is chicken Jewish?” I asked.
My mother mouthed, It’s not, at me. To Eli she said: “I think chicken is universal.”
“Oh?” said Eli. “The prevailing meat is lamb.”
“There,” my mother pointed out. “In the area of Iraq and Iran. Right?”
“Also goat,” he went on. “In Greece as well, there is a great deal of goat. Some would say too much.”
“Now, is goat stringy?” my father asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever had goat.”
“Unfortunately, yes. But then, often, so is the lamb. Poor grazing country,” Eli concluded.
I was so bored my teeth itched. I banged my feet on the rung of my chair a few times. I knew if I looked up, my mother would scowl or shake her head, so I looked at my plate.
“You are studying Greece?” Eli was addressing me.
I nodded.
“Like your mother.” He looked across the table at her.
“I was doing it first,” I said.
“Greece is big enough for both of us,” she told me. “Anyhow, I’m studying Greek and you’re studying Greece.”
“You don’t study the language?” Eli asked.
“No,” I said. “Trojan War, that kind of thing.”
“There is no ‘that kind of thing,’ ” Eli said. “Nothing is like the Trojan War.” He smiled a scary, pinched smile. “You ought to be studying the language as well.”
“She’s only nine,” my mother said.
“At nine, I was studying Greek and Hebrew,” Eli said. He tucked his pointy beard into his neck like a pigeon.
If I’d said that, my mother would have told me not to brag. But to Eli she said, “Boy! That’s impressive. And I suppose you spoke Arabic as well.”
Boy was not one of her customary exclamations, so I decided she was just being polite.
“Of course,” said Eli.
“And then your English is beautiful,” my mother went on.
I wondered why she was making such a fuss.
He briefly pretended not to accept this compliment. “No, no, I merely stumble along.” He ate a bite of bread. “But it is imperative, you know. Or maybe you don’t really know.”
My father put his fork down. Something he didn’t know? “You mean a native speaker couldn’t possibly appreciate the importance of English?”
“I suppose.” Eli was willing to grant my father his version. Then he warmed up to the idea. “That is what I mean. It’s a passport, you see, a ticket out of the East.”
“I thought the East meant China,” I said.
“The East begins in Greece,” said Eli.
“Really?” My mother was genuinely surprised, not just pretending to be. “How can you say that, when we think of Greece as the foundation of the West? It is the foundation of the West.”
“Bribery, corruption, inefficiency, the attitude of letting it go until tomorrow, a tomorrow that never arrives. Pah!” Eli pushed his plate away. “Unbearable.”
“Greece?” my father said. “Hmm. But Israel wasn’t like that, was it?”
“Different but worse,” said Eli. “The—the—smugness, I believe you call it?”
“Probably,” my mother said, “from what I’ve seen of them.”
“But more efficient,” my father put in cheerily.
Eli didn’t say anything.
“So it was good to move here,” my mother said.
“It has been a great relief,” said Eli. “I must be a crypto-German. I like order. I like the rational. I even like the winter.”
“It’s only November,” my mother said. “You haven’t seen much winter yet. But maybe you are a touch German—I mean, perhaps you have German ancestors, and some sort of Jungian race-memory?”
“No. Safar, Sephardic. They came after the expulsion.” He squinted at my mother. “Are you a disciple of Jung?”
“It was a joke,” my mother said.
“Anti-Semite,” Eli mumbled.
“The Spanish expulsion?” my father asked.
“Yes,” said Eli. “We do not have an illustrious bloodline going back to the Babylonian Exile.”
My mother stood up and pointed at me. Time to clear the table. “What would people like for dessert?” she asked. “We have chocolate ice cream or orange sherbet. Or, I suppose, you could have both.”
“Sherbet, please,” Eli said.
“Continuing in the Persian mode,” said my mother. “Did you know that?” she said to me. “That the Persians invented sherbet?”
Standing in the kitchen stacking the plates beside the sink, I felt the chilly undertow, the tired, dim, muffled sinking into deadness coming over me. I didn’t like Eli; he was fussy and mean. I didn’t like the Trojan War. I didn’t like finding out that almost everything in the world had been invented, one time or another. Things were better when they were unexplained. Watery, super-cold sherbet was more wonderful before it was Persian. Before it was Persian, it was a miracle of nature. Now I had to imagine someone—and inevitably it was an Eli-like someone, with a pointed beard, pleased with himself—tinkering with fruit and water until—Bingo!—he’d invented sherbet.
Miss Evie had said that now we would begin to understand the world. I didn’t enjoy understanding it. I preferred the mysteries. She’d been wrong about a lot of things, anyhow. She said the Greeks invented everything important, but it turned out they hadn’t. They hadn’t invented the Bible, for instance, and that was a lot more important than some of the other things they hadn’t invented, like sherbet or porcelain.
“I’m tired,” I said to my mother. “Can I go to bed?”
“Sure,” she said. “You don’t want any sherbet?”
“No.”
“Okay. Say goodnight to Professor Safar. And take the dessert plates to the table.”
I took them. I said goodnight. I tromped upstairs to my attic room, where I sat on the bed and stared at the wall. From up there I could hear an occasional tinkle and murmur as they ate their sherbet and chatted about how important Eli Professor Safar was and how difficult his life had been. I stared at the wall until my vision became peculiar, as if I were looking through a dark, throbbing funnel and could see only a small circle at the narrow end. My ears were buzzing. I felt swirly and horrid, and I liked it. I wanted to feel even more horrid. It was comforting to have a body to represent the mind or the soul or whatever it was inside me that hurt.
I’m just too tired to go on with all this, I said to the wall.
That made me feel better. I don’t want to and I’m not going to, I said to the wall. Good-bye to the Trojan War and Chinese porcelain and people coming over to pay court to my mother and Alexander the Great and even to things I liked or had once liked—my bicycle, the blood-soaked House of Atreus, sour cream. I didn’t have the energy for any of it.
I wasn’t going to be transformed into a cow. I was going to turn myself into a kind of human seaweed that lived in the clammy dark where you don’t want to put your foot. I would hide there, wafting back and forth, cold and unseen. Maybe someone would come looking for me. Probably not.
Along with the Bible and perhaps in compensation for the loss of Vishwa, my parents had got me my own record player for my birthday. It was red and black and had two boxy speakers that hooked onto the sides but could be detached and pulled out several feet to create a somewhat stereophonic experience. It came with a pack of needles and a yellow cloth for wiping the records. A.A. and Ingrid had added a sophisticated damp roller of the kind A.A. used to clean his records and a small bottle of intoxicating acetone-tinctured fluid. They also gave me two records that Roger and I listened to a lot at their house, The Moldau and The Fountains of Rome and The Pines of Rome. And my mother gave me Petrushka.
Soupy, melancholic Smetana and agitated, overstated Respighi were more enjoyable over at the Bigelows’. Their sounds were part of the whole Bigelow atmosphere, and when I listened to them in my bedroom, I didn’t have the same sorts of feelings about them that I had in the crammed, dark Bigelow living room, where Roger and I would do what we called modern dancing to Smetana (Respighi was too unpredictable melodically for this). We’d whirl around, knocking into sofa arms and standing lamps and heaps of magazines and picture books while A.A. sat in his big black leather chair reading a psychoanalytic journal. Alone in my bedroom, listening to these records without using them as program music, I heard a cheesiness I hadn’t noticed before. A.A. was well aware of it. When handing them to me the day after my birthday, he’d said to my mother: Nice whooshy garbage the kids like.
Petrushka was another thing entirely.
It was about me! The simple sad melodies, the hurdy-gurdy interludes broken into by yelling brasses, the skipping about among many different tempos and moods—its surprising shifts and turns reminded me of myself. It sounded the way it felt to be me. It was familiar before I’d finished hearing it for the first time.
This made me irritated with my mother. How had she known I would like it so much?
I also liked looking at the photograph of Stravinsky on the record sleeve. He looked a bit like Eli Professor Safar, which was bothersome, but his expression was different, sad, like the songs in Petrushka, and tired out. He had enormous bags under his eyes. I liked that as well. I too had bags under my eyes, inherited from my mother. Sometimes I stood at my bathroom mirror and pulled the edges of my eyes upward until I’d eliminated the bags. They popped back the moment I let go. Stravinsky’s bags were so big and puffy that it looked as if he’d taken the opposite approach and decided to cultivate them.
Didn’t I have some things to cultivate? Couldn’t I find in myself some qualities that others might see as flaws but which I could make into the hallmarks of my specialness?
Winter. I’d sit in my room listening to Petrushka in the long dark that fell as soon as I got home from school. I knew it by heart and could sing it straight through; Vishwa would have been delighted with me.
The disappearing-underwater-seaweed act had been a bust. It had been too effective. As I’d feared, nobody noticed and nobody came looking for me. That clarified my goal: I didn’t want to disappear, I wanted to disappoint. I’d listen to Petrushka and list all the things that were wrong with me so I could figure out how to make them worse. I was going to be a failure: That was clear. I wanted to be the biggest failure possible.
One of my major faults was I had no interests. Interests were things people liked to do even if they weren’t good at them. Roger, for instance, liked to play the clarinet despite having little talent for it. He went to solfège and learned the names of the notes and didn’t care if he sang off-key. Whereas I, the solfège dropout with excellent pitch, would freeze when I sat down at the piano, furious that I couldn’t tear off a mazurka without practicing.
Another big fault was my attitude toward school. I didn’t want to bother learning things I’d decided (on nearly no evidence) were boring, and if there were things I wanted to know about, I couldn’t stand not knowing about them already. Trying to learn them in public humiliated me. The only way I could learn things was in secret, slowly building up knowledge by poking around in books with nobody watching or telling me what to read.
Sometimes I wondered what I would be like if I weren’t this way. A cheery little girl who changed her T-shirt every day and played the violin and could recite the times table up to twelve? I didn’t even want to know her, let alone be her. Other times I wondered how I’d gotten this way. But that was fruitless. I was this way, and I had to try to make some use of it.
What could I do, how could I parlay my incapacities and disinclinations into a successful position, an unassailable major badness that nobody could dispute or take away from me?
Even then, in the midst of this fourth-grade turmoil, I could see that my will to failure was an ambition, no different from the ambition that seethed in all the inhabitants of Cambridge, who dashed around me pursuing glory. I was just like them: determined not to be mediocre. I would stand out. I would, I would. My Nobel Prize—Worst Daughter, Worst Student, whatever it might be—awaited me.