vexation, another word for conflict, there’s no story. I’d held back for so long, erased so many years. Difficult as it might prove, maybe writing would be a way to reclaim them. The next day I began.
I’m straddling my red Schwinn bike, from which the training wheels have been removed. My mother holds onto the fender, steadying me. For nearly an hour I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to balance. I am eight years old, past when the training wheels should have come off. Younger kids, my six-year-old brother among them, are already whizzing around our cul-de-sac. Chipper keeps circling by on his orange two-wheeler with the banana seat. He’s gone from taunting me to shouting encouragement, realizing, I suppose, that something just isn’t right. Ready? my mother says, Keep peddling! She lets go. For two, three seconds I manage to stay aloft, then the bike wobbles and I skid on the asphalt, skinning my hands and knees. I struggle to my feet, and this time I do not pick up my bike. Let it stay there, let it rust. I go inside, find a book. I will try again, try all summer, before giving up entirely.
In elementary school I quickly learned that what matters occurs outside the classroom. On blacktops and playing fields, alliances formed. The race really went to the swift—and social prominence too. But I got tangled in jump ropes, couldn’t hit a ball, ran races too slowly (my right foot heading in a different direction altogether from the rest of my body). Sports were an impossibility; I didn’t even like to watch. Unless the game was basketball, where my height was an asset, I resigned myself to being last picked—the scrub choice. I was shy, uncoordinated, a socially awkward girl voted “Most Likely to Succeed” by sixth grade classmates who, like me, had little notion of adult success. I told myself being last didn’t matter. Eventually we’d return to the classroom where the team captain could barely stutter his way through a paragraph and the blacktop queen would flub the spelling bee. After school, though, no one rushed outside to play Spelling Bee.
The difference between my own shortcomings and those of my classmates seemed to me largely a matter of exposure. If someone flunked a test, that was between her and the teacher. No one posted the scores. But my lack of coordination was on display every single day. I felt this distinction keenly, never more so than during the annual Presidential Fitness Test.
This was actually a series of tests—chin-ups, push-ups, high jumps, sprints—most of which I failed. Each year I knew I was going to fail; my classmates knew it too. What I resented was the prominence accorded the tests—the theatrics of them, the applause for high scorers, the exhortations of our gym teacher with her stopwatch and bully’s whistle, her back slaps and admonishments. Don’t be a baby! Toughen up! Her formula was simple: tough kids aced the test; babies flunked.
I panted through races where I came in last. I clung to the chin-up bar, trembling, unable to hoist myself level. I toppled sideways trying to do cartwheels and forward rolls. And for what? At the time Lyndon Johnson was President, then Richard Nixon. I couldn’t picture either of them—the jowly cowboy, the shifty-eyed man with the raised shoulders—mastering even a single cartwheel, let alone the entire test. Yet each had become the most powerful man on earth. How much did fitness really matter?
The kids who could chin themselves repeatedly, hit homers, and run fast—where were they running to? Every night on CBS Walter Cronkite intoned the number of dead. Those who could not touch their toes or who were smart enough (and fortunate enough) to get into college were spared. The “tough kids,” blacktop bullies, had no use for books. They excelled at all things physical, and this was their time. But who, I wondered, would applaud these high scorers once they’d grown up?
They did not fail me. They opened new worlds and kept the existing one at bay. Books were my fortress; I could hole up inside of them. Better than that, they were portable. I brought books everywhere: summer camp, Sunday drives, errands with my mother, even the bathroom.
I read the usual suspects: Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, Black Beauty, Louisa May Alcott (whose Little Women made me cry, but whose Little Men I finished only from a sense of duty). I read indiscriminately. Dickens of course and Aesop and the My Book House series from my mother’s childhood with their elongated yellow and black illustrations of fairies and elves. But also Archie comic books, Bazooka Joe bubble gum wrappers, my grandparents’ Reader’s Digest, (“I Am Joe’s Kidney,” “Grizzly Bear Attack: Drama in Real Life”) and an entire gothic series about a family named Falcon that lived under a curse borne down generations by its female members, who were moody, beautiful, and extravagantly wicked. Weekends, summers, school vacations, I stayed in my room reading. If I were being punished, my mother would send me to Chipper’s room, where the only things to read were a children’s encyclopedia set, some Mad magazines, and a book about football. I read those, too.
My favorite book was D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Every week during fourth grade I checked it out of the school library except for one brief period when the librarian made me stop, insisting that I needed to give the other kids a chance to read it. For weeks the book stayed on the shelf, out of bounds, until, sick of my pestering, the librarian relented.
I loved the Greek gods. Their violence and glamour and pure weirdness topped anything in the Bible or on TV. They rode dolphins, wore winged sandals, turned themselves into animals. I lived in a world of banal heroes: flying, punching comic book figures with their masks and capes—Batman, Superman, Spiderman—boy heroes like Underdog with his simpering girlfriend, Sweet Polly Purebred; sports heroes who made my father jump up screaming from the couch during weekend games. On sitcoms there were heroines: genies and witches who yearned to be housewives. So what if Jeannie and Samantha had magic powers when all they wanted—all women were supposed to want—was to wash dishes and make beds?
The Greek goddesses, though, had no desire to stay on Mount Olympus baking pies. My favorite was Athena. Goddess of wisdom and the arts, she’d sprung fully formed from Zeus’s head. No one told her what to do and no one dared mock her. Just look at what she’d done to poor Arachne, shrunken to a spider for disparaging the gods. Yet Athena was not casually cruel like Artemis, nor jealous like Hera, and she certainly didn’t lose her head over men the way Aphrodite did. Not only that, she carried an owl on her shoulder and wore a breastplate made from Medusa’s severed head. I wanted to be just like her. D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths said she had gray eyes; mine were blue-gray, close enough. I pretended our cat was an owl and tried to balance her on my shoulder, which didn’t really work. I wore belts with giant buckles, imagining they were the Medusa head. One cross word, one dirty look, and I would turn my tormentor into stone.
Reading whetted my appetite. The more I read, the hungrier for words I became. In books, too, I found an inherent sense of justice, the triumph of the downcast. Andersen’s duckling may have been ugly, Oliver Twist abandoned, Jo March eccentric and poor, yet somehow they prevailed. The scorned, the deformed, the misunderstood, I rooted for them all. And, inevitably, I began to wonder about their creators. Someone had crafted each book I read, crafting in the process a writer’s life. Eventually it occurred to me that this making of books was a serious thing, a way of reshaping the world.
I began to write as randomly as I read: journals, lyrics, odes to nature, fairy tales, stories about girls overcoming all types of adversity. Aside from school assignments, I kept my writing to myself, suspecting, perhaps rightly, the perplexity it would cause my family. No one I knew wrote; why on earth would they? The adults I saw did serious, practical work. The women taught school or worked in beauty salons or as secretaries. The men had more exciting options. My father, who worked as a private detective, kept a gun in a shoebox on his bedroom closet shelf.
