is going to correct a very large man on the run for murdering a whole lot of non-colorblind people. I liked these drab towns where nothing much happened. I spent a lot of time staring intently at dirt, and this kept me plenty busy for years.
“Nothing” is still my best speed. It’s remarkable how much trouble a kid doing nothing can get into.
Around the age of eight, I ran across one of those lists that whittled down all the literature in the world into one hundred Great Books. I figured I should read them all and make up my own mind if they were any good, so off I trundled to the town library with my little red wagon, tracked down ten titles off my list, and hauled them to the front desk. “Hi Mrs. Lindner! I’d like to check these books out, please!” She opened up each book to the DUE DATE slip glued to the inside back cover, whacked down the stamper on the book, and sometimes, just for fun, she’d stamp my hand too. With my books piled in my wagon, I trundled back home, where I parked my books in the living room and started in on my chores. These included doing the laundry, making dinner, and pummeling my brother for control over the upright piano we were all three supposed to practice for at least an hour each day. Every once in a while, my mother would break up the fist fight and make us practice the dreaded four-handed piano pieces, which meant sitting next to my brother on the bench while my baby sister worked the pedals. At the sound of the music, my father would come out of his office, thrilled to the core at the sight of his prodigies draped on the piano as if it was an orca trained to give rides to Carnegie Hall. Then he’d turn around, go back into his office, and resume his conversations with God.
When I turned my gaze upwards, mine eyes did not behold His glory in the heavenly kingdom above. I saw the metronome parked on top of the piano, ticking like a time bomb next to the white floaty bustheads of Chopin, Beethoven, and Schubert. Mutely, they stared reproachfully at my square hands stamped with DUE DATE hitting all the wrong keys.
Tick . . . tick . . . tick. The metronome arm swung as stiffly as a pendulum in Wonderland.
One hour. Twenty minutes. Only ten minutes to go!
“Stop rushing!” my brother would howl in disgust. “You’re messing up the tempo!”
Then he’d shove me bodily off the bench and settle into the center, claiming the piano as his personal exercise equipment. Rubbing my offended bum, I’d hurtle upstairs and start sawing loudly on my violin just to drown out his interpretation of Chopin’s Mazurka in E Minor. Does he not understand the meaning of Lento, ma non troppo? We learned that years ago, I’d grumble to myself. Stupid brother!
Somewhat obviously, we never listened to pop music on the radio, because my brother had taken it apart and made it into a rocket launcher.
Thanks to the list of Great Books, I quickly developed the vocabulary of a fin-de-siècle aesthete obsessed with art and turtles. I also developed breasts. I don’t think the reading part was causative, or even correlative. It was just a coincidence that I was going through the Awful Eights and adolescence at the same time. However, the list does explain why I prematurely waded through Anna Karenina, the greatest novel ever written about a French-speaking Russian adulteress. I didn’t grasp the big themes but somehow, the story of her tragic affair put me off meat for almost two decades. It didn’t make any sense, but why does anyone expect that it should? Let’s just say that my sudden aversion to meat had something to do with the fact that all the women seemed to spend their time heaving their bosoms at innocent bystanders. The bystanders dined well on their free meal. All the women died.
I had a bosom in third grade. It seemed prudent to keep it to myself.
My parents did not understand my decision to become a vegetarian, especially since the fresh flesh of animals was the only food group I could safely eat. From almonds to zucchini, just about everything else produced unfortunate effects, ranging from discordant fits of sneezing to bouts of hyperactive screaming. Some of my earliest memories are of intense itching and being swaddled so I wouldn’t claw myself to bits. Using an old-fashioned washboard and wringer, my parents rinsed out daily dozens of cloth diapers dripping with diarrhea and frowned in confusion when my perpetual rash got infected because I was allergic to detergents. Fish? Allergic! Cats? Allergic! Sunshine? Allergic! Etc. For all that I was a surprisingly functional little kid, but being allergic to just about everything sets up a relationship to the world that is inescapably adversarial. You cannot take anything for granted, including God’s purported benevolence as he watches over the (hmmm . . . tasty?) sparrows. Me, I was being eyeballed by the Almighty of Abraham, the judgmental Old Testament God that was busy smiting sinners and turning unworthy women into pillars of salt. Sulkily sucking my thumb (not allergic. Safe!), I used to imagine that I was Lot’s wife reincarnated, which explained both my liking for salt as well as my instinctive aversion to marriage. It pissed me off that she was “Lot’s wife” instead of, say, Veronica or Betty. These things register when you come from a culture that keeps the family unit sorted by calling you “Oldest Daughter.”
Koreans don’t understand “vegetarian.” In general, people who’ve experienced starvation due to war find it odd when a willful child rejects a perfectly acceptable food group just because. What, no Spam with your eggs? But you love Spam! Dried squid is good! American chop suey is good! Aigu, aigu, my mother wailed. What is wrong with Oldest Daughter?
No eight-year-old has a food philosophy. Refusing to eat meat was just something I had to do. In retrospect, I am glad that my father was assigned to churches in tiny towns where psychiatrists did not practice, because in rural America, food allergies are still namby-pamby liberal myths, setting me up for exceedingly vexed relationships with human authority figures who insisted on making me eat home-grown tomatoes and hand-caught lobsters and did not connect the dots when I began crossly exploding into hives. Adding insult to injury, most of my allergies weren’t fatal. That would have been interesting. No, mine were the kind that merely damned me to the perpetual motions of misery: wiping snot off my nose, knobbling watery eyes, watching my tongue swell, lather, rinse, repeat. Boring!
My dream was to get away from grownups telling me to stop sneezing. My mantra was self-sufficiency, and I started going after it as soon as I was able to crawl. The faster I could learn to fend for myself, the sooner I could set out on my own. I started by running the back roads of Maine, observing the quirks of the local ecology: fiddleheads to eat, pine cones for weapons, and beer cans worth money if you redeemed them. I ran to get out of the house. I ran because I was jumping out of my skin. I ran so I could be alone, running on restless legs that walked in and out of homerooms, kicking bullies in the schoolyard and slamming my brother in the shins. My sister just sat back and watched me fight, blinking bewildered black eyes and sucking contentedly on cookies.
By the following year, we moved again, this time very far north to a town full of snow plows. Not only was Houlton the first town we’d lived in that had shops, it had a real downtown with a shoe store and a movie theater that showed Star Wars. I didn’t live there for very long, because school officials quickly decided that my brother’s brain was turning into a black hole, threatening to become a portal to another dimension. I thought this was super. I couldn’t wait for his cranium to become my own personal TARDIS. To prevent the impending rupture of the space-time continuum, school officials recommended “boarding school.” This was a peculiar institution that my parents had never heard of, but one that might kill a second bird—me—with one stone. My brother would attend Phillips Academy at Exeter, and I would attend the sister school, Phillips Academy at Andover. Insofar as I had no idea what boarding school was—the best approximation I could come up with was “orphanage,” in the manner of Oliver Twist—it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be admitted. In fact, I was sure I’d fit right in, what with my thrift-shop clothes and constant begging for gruel.
Off I went, content in my mediocrity, thrilled that I was no longer going to show up in class and hear, “How come she’s so bad at math? Her
