Vincent looked at the shiny green coupe in the driveway. Then he looked at the small mountain of luggage Pancakes had stacked in the driveway by the front door. He had yet to investigate the available space in the rear of the car, but even from this distance he could see that the entire interior of the vehicle would never hold all the bags Pancakes wanted to bring on their trip. They wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon.
“What exactly were you thinking when you rented this car?” Vincent asked.
Pancakes looked defiant. “I was thinking, basically, ‘go.’ You said to get a car, so I got a car.”
“And you also packed your bags. You were the one who knew how big the car was, and then you packed these enormous bags. I just don’t really get that,” Vincent said.
Pancakes turned to walk away. Since when did Vincent question her? This was unexpected and new. And unwelcome. That dumb girlfriend of his, Jalasso, had changed him somehow. She couldn’t believe those two hadn’t stayed broken up. “Vincent,” she said as she went back to the house, “you know what I don’t get? How your little girlfriend let you come on this trip in the first place. Isn’t she jealous?”
Vincent turned and followed her. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“Oh, you don’t? Well, what’d she say when you told her?”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah, right. Nothing?”
“Well, I didn’t tell her yet.”
Pancakes stopped and turned to face him. “Are you kidding? You didn’t tell her?” She was pleased by that, but she tried to sound appropriately outraged. “How could you not tell your girlfriend?”
Vincent shrugged. “I don’t have to,” he said. “We’re on hold for the summer.”
“On hold? What is that?”
Vincent shrugged again. “I don’t really know,” he said. “That’s what we agreed. She was going away for the whole summer, so we said we’d be on hold. I don’t have to check in with her on everything. She doesn’t check with me.”
Pancakes squinted at him. “This was your idea?” she asked.
“Not really.”
Their road trip together had been hastily arranged, and Pancakes hadn’t really done all that much planning other than securing a car and overpacking. Vincent was taking care of the details. She assumed he knew that. They hadn’t really discussed it in detail. She’d simply known that it was essential for her to get lost for a little while, and she especially needed to lose her boyfriend Brandon, who had grown a bit too serious about their undefined relationship. Apparently after a few months he felt the need to start asking her questions about her feelings and her intentions, and none of these questions were to her liking as she didn’t have ready answers for them. It was really, she thought, the wrong time to press her on anything. She didn’t know and she didn’t know and she didn’t know. All she knew for sure was that her college plans for the fall had been established, and for the moment she needed to prepare herself for the imminent onslaught of effort that would bring. A chain-smoking pseudo-boyfriend didn’t enter the picture. At least not in a good way.
One of the more irritating aspects of Brandon’s behavior was the increasing static he seemed to have with Vincent. It was funny at first. Pancakes liked the fact that, as she said to Pastina, “the boys are getting tough.” Given the temperaments of the two guys in question, it would never come to more than a battle of wits, but after a few months of that, Pancakes was tiring of the game. Vincent obviously had the upper hand, witswise, and that prompted Brandon to become a little meaner in his comments in order to hold up his end of the animosity. One moment in particular stood out to Pancakes as indicative of the degree to which things had devolved. In May, her long beloved cat Mourning Becomes Electra (she never tired of explaining that the cat’s name was not, in fact, “Morning,” as people tended to assume) had died. Pancakes had arranged a small funeral at her family home, and she had been astonished when, standing over the two-by-three foot grave, Brandon had intimated that Vincent might have had something to do with the cat’s demise.
“What are you, Charlie Chan?” Vincent had asked. “Are you going to explain the method, motive, and opportunity for my crime?” Brandon had been stymied for a proper reply, saying only, “Just so you know, I’ve got my eye on you.” Looking back now, Pancakes realized that was the beginning of the end for Brandon. She hated to admit that something like that was so important to her, but his inability to spar verbally turned her off. After all, Vincent wasn’t exactly a sarcastic knock-out artist.
A lengthy delay later, after which it was so late that they decided to eat lunch at Pancakes’s house rather than drive an hour down the road and stop somewhere far less inviting, the road trip finally got underway. “The only thing is,” Pancakes said as she settled into the passenger seat and leafed through the enormous cloth album of compact discs she’d brought, “we have to be back sometime in August so we can get ready for school.”
“That was kind of implied,” Vincent said. “Besides, Jalasso will be back at the end of August.”
“Who?” Pancakes asked innocently.
“Jalasso?”
“Your ex?”
“My on-hold,” Vincent corrected her.
Pancakes smiled. “We’ll see. We’re going to be out on the road for a long time together, Vincent. You may not want to go back to her after I’m done with you.”
Vincent looked a bit panicked and took a drink from his bottle of water. “I don’t know where that came from,” he said.
“Yeah, well, I don’t know why you’re not telling me something else, then,” Pancakes said. She selected a disc and slid it into the player. “If you’re in love with that girl, why did you let her go off all unattached? What are you doing out here with me, alone and unsupervised?”
“You wanted to go on a trip.”
“What did you want to do?”
“Get the hell out of there so I could stop thinking about how much I wanted Jalasso to be around.”
Pancakes sipped at a cup of watery iced coffee. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Vincent sighed and shook his head. “It’s pathetic, I know.”
“It’s not pathetic to be in love with her,” Pancakes said. She felt very strange making the statement. She didn’t really believe it, but at the same time she realized it was still true.
“But the ‘on-hold’ part. I don’t want us to be on hold. We can not-be-together, but that doesn’t mean that we have to suspend things officially.”
“I get it.”
“I mean, after the spring break thing.” Vincent didn't have to explain further. He and Jalasso had come close to the end then. She'd spent her break in Florida. Enough said.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry too.”
The two rode in silence for a while, letting themselves be distracted by the insistent pulse of the music Pancakes had selected and the blur of scenery sliding past them as Vincent drove. Finally Pancakes said, “Well, if it makes you feel any better, Brandon actually cried when I told him I was leaving.”
Vincent tried unsuccessfully to suppress a small smile. “Sadly, it does make me feel better. Not that he was a bad guy, but still …”
“Yes, I know. And for the record, I never for a second thought you were a cat murderer.”
“It was just his whole thing,” Vincent said. “And always with the cigarettes. God, I mean, after a while the casual way he smokes seems really self-conscious, you know? Didn’t you say he smoked in the bath tub?”
Pancakes made a face. “Don’t remind me. I can’t tell you how gross it is to be in the shower and realize there’s ash and tobacco all over the place. He used the soap dish as an ashtray, and he never cleaned it out.”
“So you stopped smoking?” Vincent asked.
“Well …” Pancakes looked out the window. “Okay, not totally. I’m working on it. I hope I’ll be done by the time we get back.”
Vincent’s eyes widened. He took his gaze off the road for a moment to give Pancakes a look of fearful astonishment. “Are you telling me that you’re going to go through withdrawals with me along for the ride? I thought we were friends.”
“We are,” she said. “That’s what I’m counting on in the hopes that you won’t end up killing me if I get too cranky.”
“You were waiting to tell me that until after we crossed state lines, weren’t you?”
“I didn’t think we’d hit on it so early. Why? Are you going to turn back?”
“I guess not,” Vincent said.
“Yeah, so here we are: two old friends out on the road, recently single—”
“One of us is single. The other’s on hold.”
“Two old friends, one recently single, one quote on hold unquote. And one of us is giving up smoking. What about you, Vincent? Are you giving up something?”
“At this point,” he said, “hope.”
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Detention Journal, part six
Did anyone realize that they take detention hall kids to lunch earlier than everybody else? So we don’t mix with the others, I guess.
It’s creepy being in the lunchroom when it’s empty. And the lunch-line ladies, who maybe never really noticed you before, are probably going, “Oh, look who’s in trouble now. She never looked like a delinquent, but I guess you never know.”
But apart from the unsettling feelings and the public shame—and much more important—who’s hungry for lunch at eleven o’clock? God, it makes the afternoon so much longer!
When they took us to lunch, the two burnout guys who’ve been trying to huff correction fluid all morning brought back a little plastic cup with a snap lid. Today was taco salad day, so it was one of the throwaway cups they give us with salsa in it. One of the guys washed his out in the water fountain when the teacher wasn’t looking. Then I saw him poking holes in the top with a pen once we got back in the room. It’s hard to see them very well from where I’m sitting, but it looks like they’ve made a major advance in their brain cell–killing pastime. Just pour the fluid in the cup, snap on the lid, and breathe in through the lid.
Wow. It’s moments like these when I’m particularly proud that my species is so adept at making tools. I felt the same way when this boy at summer camp a couple of years ago made a bong out of an apple. That’s the guy you want to have around if you’re ever stranded in the woods. He can’t find any fresh water or edible berries, but he can probably forage for the most psychoactive mushrooms in the forest.
And now those guys are back there look sleepy and pleased. You’d think the teacher would notice what’s going on with them. It’s hard not to. But I’m getting used to how naïve people are when they want to be. I mean, even if she did know that they were sucking up chemical fumes only about thirty yards away from her, what would she do? They’re already in detention. The school could suspend them, but then they’ll just go home and do the same thing. Or something worse. If they even wait long enough to get home.
Before today, I never even knew this detention hall was here. I mean, now that I see where it is, I realize it was here all along. I walked right by this spot on my way into the main building almost every day for nearly three years. But I never had a reason to walk through here, except one time my freshman year when I was trying to find a Coke machine and ended up in one of the hallways outside. Now every time I walk by this place, I’m going to know that behind these walls are some bored, bored people. And I’ll feel a little bit better about my day, no matter how crappy it is. At least I’ll be free to move around at will. At this moment, I can’t imagine wanting anything as much as I want that.
Hey, do you think that was part of the point of this punishment? Hmm. But look how effective. They’ve scared a straight student even straighter, all the while exposing her to outcasts, outsiders, and flagrant drug users. And what about them? I don’t think this is the first time in here for some of them. So how well does the system work? What’s the starting age for recidivism? (Yeah, that’s right. I said recidivism. Look it up.)
This afternoon is going to last FOREVER. And here I thought a fat Russian novel might distract me from isolation in the gulag. Yeah. Why didn’t I just bring some French existensialist writings along too? Almost as cheery. Today I am the most doomed girl in the history of doomed girls. See you on the Russian steppes.
It’s creepy being in the lunchroom when it’s empty. And the lunch-line ladies, who maybe never really noticed you before, are probably going, “Oh, look who’s in trouble now. She never looked like a delinquent, but I guess you never know.”
But apart from the unsettling feelings and the public shame—and much more important—who’s hungry for lunch at eleven o’clock? God, it makes the afternoon so much longer!
When they took us to lunch, the two burnout guys who’ve been trying to huff correction fluid all morning brought back a little plastic cup with a snap lid. Today was taco salad day, so it was one of the throwaway cups they give us with salsa in it. One of the guys washed his out in the water fountain when the teacher wasn’t looking. Then I saw him poking holes in the top with a pen once we got back in the room. It’s hard to see them very well from where I’m sitting, but it looks like they’ve made a major advance in their brain cell–killing pastime. Just pour the fluid in the cup, snap on the lid, and breathe in through the lid.
Wow. It’s moments like these when I’m particularly proud that my species is so adept at making tools. I felt the same way when this boy at summer camp a couple of years ago made a bong out of an apple. That’s the guy you want to have around if you’re ever stranded in the woods. He can’t find any fresh water or edible berries, but he can probably forage for the most psychoactive mushrooms in the forest.
And now those guys are back there look sleepy and pleased. You’d think the teacher would notice what’s going on with them. It’s hard not to. But I’m getting used to how naïve people are when they want to be. I mean, even if she did know that they were sucking up chemical fumes only about thirty yards away from her, what would she do? They’re already in detention. The school could suspend them, but then they’ll just go home and do the same thing. Or something worse. If they even wait long enough to get home.
Before today, I never even knew this detention hall was here. I mean, now that I see where it is, I realize it was here all along. I walked right by this spot on my way into the main building almost every day for nearly three years. But I never had a reason to walk through here, except one time my freshman year when I was trying to find a Coke machine and ended up in one of the hallways outside. Now every time I walk by this place, I’m going to know that behind these walls are some bored, bored people. And I’ll feel a little bit better about my day, no matter how crappy it is. At least I’ll be free to move around at will. At this moment, I can’t imagine wanting anything as much as I want that.
Hey, do you think that was part of the point of this punishment? Hmm. But look how effective. They’ve scared a straight student even straighter, all the while exposing her to outcasts, outsiders, and flagrant drug users. And what about them? I don’t think this is the first time in here for some of them. So how well does the system work? What’s the starting age for recidivism? (Yeah, that’s right. I said recidivism. Look it up.)
This afternoon is going to last FOREVER. And here I thought a fat Russian novel might distract me from isolation in the gulag. Yeah. Why didn’t I just bring some French existensialist writings along too? Almost as cheery. Today I am the most doomed girl in the history of doomed girls. See you on the Russian steppes.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Monday, April 24, 2006
“Tours of a Baguette with a Bag of Minotaurs”
I’m surprised, I quite find,
That I enjoy the Surreal
I can’t say, in a way,
What’s its precise appeal
The mundane I refrain
From encountering too much
Its veneer, I do fear,
Sometimes serves as a crutch
Some Dalis, if you please,
May seem willfully absurd
And Beckett could wreck it
With an ill-chosen word
But they show, don’t you know,
The subconscious’ upswell
Not reined in, contained in
The boxes of Cornell
They may stun, but they’re fun
Always good for a few laughs
With wordplays and Man Ray’s
Solarized photographs
It’s not real, some would squeal
And while Realism’s a feat
It reflects, but can’t vex
Like the views of Magritte
That I enjoy the Surreal
I can’t say, in a way,
What’s its precise appeal
The mundane I refrain
From encountering too much
Its veneer, I do fear,
Sometimes serves as a crutch
Some Dalis, if you please,
May seem willfully absurd
And Beckett could wreck it
With an ill-chosen word
But they show, don’t you know,
The subconscious’ upswell
Not reined in, contained in
The boxes of Cornell
They may stun, but they’re fun
Always good for a few laughs
With wordplays and Man Ray’s
Solarized photographs
It’s not real, some would squeal
And while Realism’s a feat
It reflects, but can’t vex
Like the views of Magritte
Friday, April 21, 2006
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Detention Journal, part five
I’m starting to fall right into their trap. They want this drab room to demoralize me . . . and it’s working. There’s a special kind of horribleness to it.
Part of it’s the lighting. In the regular classrooms, they have these same ugly fluorescent lights. They give off that weird, unnatural light, and they have this way of making this strange buzz that you can hear whenever things get really quiet. And things are supposed to be quiet in here, so it’s hard to miss that buzzzzzzzzzzz all day.
But at least in the other classrooms we also have windows so we can be reminded of the sun. And that reminds us of life. It’s the kind of light that first encouraged things to quiver to life in the primordial soup, after all.
But forget about it here. In here, they try to wipe out all hints of life-giving sunlight. They’ve actually painted over the glass! So not only are we denied the distraction of seeing the outside world, but we can’t even sense the sun. It could be nighttime out there. There might not even be an outside world anymore. We could be floating in space for all I know. I don’t have any evidence that the rest of the world is still there.
Some philosophies would say that it’s not there, because I’m not observing it anymore. Right now, those philosophies are very convincing. And not at all comforting.
You know, I’ve never played hooky before, and I end up here because I’ve been so damn good all my life. When I got home after the attendance office figured out our whole school-ditching scheme, I was ready for them. I know how to act contrite and play the good girl, but my parents must have been studying my book of tactics. So they go, “You want us to believe you’re an adult, so that’s the way we’re going to treat you. You make your decisions, you deal with the results.”
That’s why they didn’t even try to keep me out of detention. But otherwise they didn’t punish me at all. Instead, they just let me know that they now trust me just a little bit less. “If you want to regain our trust, you have to earn it,” my dad said. “We’re not going to punish you like a little kid.” Mom agreed. “You’re smart enough to understand that actions have consequences,” she said.
What do I do with that? I couldn’t even go off and feel angry and superior after all that. So I ended up just sitting in the dark in my room, listening to Fiona Apple sounding about as morose and hollow as I did. I think it was the creepiest, most subtle punishment I’ve ever had.
What’s worse, in my guilt I offered to cook dinner tomorrow night, so now there’s that joy to look forward to. Do you know how hard it is to feed former Midwesterners who no longer eat meat but still have a craving for all the horrible foods they grew up on? Fresh, light, and healthy foods are an insult to them. How much can you really do when your essential ingredients are potatoes, cheese, and cream of mushroom soup?
Whoa! News flash! It seems like I’ve made an ass out of “u” and “me”! Remember my new best friend, with the beads in her hair and the attitude and the humming? When we went to lunch, I got a chance to get a close look at her, and . . . she’s a guy! A total freak of a guy, sure, but definitely not female by nature. I have no idea where he got his personal sense of style, but I really think I can be forgiven for making a mistake.
Still, I don’t think things will ever be same between us. He led me on, and now he’s taken away my friend. All the humming games in the world can’t make up for it. But I still hope he’ll try.
Part of it’s the lighting. In the regular classrooms, they have these same ugly fluorescent lights. They give off that weird, unnatural light, and they have this way of making this strange buzz that you can hear whenever things get really quiet. And things are supposed to be quiet in here, so it’s hard to miss that buzzzzzzzzzzz all day.
But at least in the other classrooms we also have windows so we can be reminded of the sun. And that reminds us of life. It’s the kind of light that first encouraged things to quiver to life in the primordial soup, after all.
But forget about it here. In here, they try to wipe out all hints of life-giving sunlight. They’ve actually painted over the glass! So not only are we denied the distraction of seeing the outside world, but we can’t even sense the sun. It could be nighttime out there. There might not even be an outside world anymore. We could be floating in space for all I know. I don’t have any evidence that the rest of the world is still there.
Some philosophies would say that it’s not there, because I’m not observing it anymore. Right now, those philosophies are very convincing. And not at all comforting.
You know, I’ve never played hooky before, and I end up here because I’ve been so damn good all my life. When I got home after the attendance office figured out our whole school-ditching scheme, I was ready for them. I know how to act contrite and play the good girl, but my parents must have been studying my book of tactics. So they go, “You want us to believe you’re an adult, so that’s the way we’re going to treat you. You make your decisions, you deal with the results.”
That’s why they didn’t even try to keep me out of detention. But otherwise they didn’t punish me at all. Instead, they just let me know that they now trust me just a little bit less. “If you want to regain our trust, you have to earn it,” my dad said. “We’re not going to punish you like a little kid.” Mom agreed. “You’re smart enough to understand that actions have consequences,” she said.
What do I do with that? I couldn’t even go off and feel angry and superior after all that. So I ended up just sitting in the dark in my room, listening to Fiona Apple sounding about as morose and hollow as I did. I think it was the creepiest, most subtle punishment I’ve ever had.
What’s worse, in my guilt I offered to cook dinner tomorrow night, so now there’s that joy to look forward to. Do you know how hard it is to feed former Midwesterners who no longer eat meat but still have a craving for all the horrible foods they grew up on? Fresh, light, and healthy foods are an insult to them. How much can you really do when your essential ingredients are potatoes, cheese, and cream of mushroom soup?
Whoa! News flash! It seems like I’ve made an ass out of “u” and “me”! Remember my new best friend, with the beads in her hair and the attitude and the humming? When we went to lunch, I got a chance to get a close look at her, and . . . she’s a guy! A total freak of a guy, sure, but definitely not female by nature. I have no idea where he got his personal sense of style, but I really think I can be forgiven for making a mistake.
Still, I don’t think things will ever be same between us. He led me on, and now he’s taken away my friend. All the humming games in the world can’t make up for it. But I still hope he’ll try.
Friday, April 14, 2006
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Pancakes Dunst Hears Voices
Pancakes could hear her parents arguing. If she had asked, she knew, they would have said they were “having a discussion.” But their discussions sounded a lot like arguments to her, even if they weren’t all that loud. In discussions, people didn’t keep saying opposite things. They agreed about things a lot more. And nobody ever talked with their mouths half-closed like they were trying not to yell.
The reason she could hear their discussion wasn’t because they were being loud. It was because she had discovered a few months earlier that if she crawled into the large storage closet around the corner from the master bedroom, she could make her way all the way to the back and hear everything that was going on in there. One of the heating ducts to the master bedroom ran through part of the closet, and as long as the heat wasn’t on, the duct picked up the room’s sound. The only trick was getting out of the closet and back down the hall to her bedroom when her parents came out of their room and went looking for her. She hadn’t been caught so far, although a couple of times she’d been in such a hurry that she banged into the closet door handle and bruised her shoulder.
Right now her parents were arguing about her, or rather something that she had been playing with. A few days earlier, she had discovered a big deck of colorful cards in the house library. The cards were larger than regular playing cards, and there were more of them than the usual fifty-two. They had a lot of strange pictures of people and creatures on them. She had taken the deck out of their box and spread them out on the floor, looking at all the pictures and trying to figure out what they were for. All the cards were different, and she liked looking at them and making up stories about what was going on in each one. Knights rode horses and ships sailed into the distance. Kings and queens stared out at her. There were townspeople and people who lived in castles and all kinds of animals. Later when her father found her there on the carpet in the library, he explained that they were tarot cards. He said that some people used them to tell fortunes.
Pancakes felt disappointed when her father admitted that he couldn’t tell the future himself. There was a small booklet of instructions, and he paged through it for a few minutes, but after a while he told her it was a little too involved. Pancakes didn’t know what that meant. Involved with what? So Emiliano explained that telling the future with the cards was complicated. Every card meant something different, and they also meant different things depending on how you arranged them. Most of all, he told her, using the cards meant you had to study lots and lots of rules. That was enough for her. Rules meant not doing what she wanted, and she didn’t see any point in that.
Still, the cards were interesting, and Pancakes thought she might be able to figure out how to work them if she just thought about it for a while. She too the deck to her playroom, and every so often she took them out of their box, ignored the instruction booklet, and started laying them out in different patterns. She liked the storybook people from the kingdoms in the cards, but she grew more interested in the stranger cards. A big tower with a lightning bolt hitting it and a guy falling out. Some magical man with a wand or a candle or something. Flying people, Egyptian people, floating cups, people with swords. Every card had its own story, and she liked trying to figure out what was going on in them. And she really, really liked all the animals. It reminded her of the trip her class had taken to the zoo. Too bad the cards didn’t have any monkeys, though.
When her mother found Pancakes playing with the cards, however, she got upset. She took them away and asked where she’d gotten them. Pancakes had no idea why her mother was upset. Because of cards? It made her kind of mad, especially since Lorinda hadn’t been home all that long and she was already going around making rules as usual. “Dad let me,” she said. “I didn’t do anything.”
That had led to the present situation, with Emiliano and Lorinda “discussing” the matter in their bedroom while Pancakes listened from the closet.
“They’re just symbols, Lorinda. A bunch of pictures,” her father said. The sound was a little muffled. At first she though he’d said, “A bunch of pigtails.”
“Well, I know it sounds provincial, but I don’t like the fact that our daughter is dabbling in the occult,” her mother replied. Pancakes had a harder time with the end of that sentence. Something about a colt? Because there were horses on the cards? Horses weren’t bad. She knew some girls who even had their own horses, and no one got upset about that.
“She doesn’t even use any of the spreads or the interpretations,” her father said. “She just likes looking at the pictures.”
“And that’s fine,” her mother said. “But I don’t think she should be looking at some of those pictures. The devil? Death? She’s too young for those things, Emil.” Pancakes was surprised to hear this, and she wished she’d paid more attention to both of those cards. If she was too young for them, they must be a lot more interesting than she realized.
Emiliano sighed. Pancakes could tell it was his upset-sigh. He usually did that right before he told her that he’d had enough, and she always wished he had a sigh that meant he’d almost had enough so that she could stop whatever she was doing right before it was too late. “You’re coming in a little late for this kind of thing,” he said.
Lorinda paused. “What?” Pancakes recognized that “what” too. This discussion was getting a lot more arguey all of a sudden.
“For this level of parenting,” Emiliano said. “I’m not saying that you’re wrong about the tarot cards, but I never knew you felt that way.”
Now Lorinda sighed. It was a loud one. “Well, Pancakes hasn’t played with fortune-telling games before. Otherwise it might have come up.”
“But it wouldn’t have,” Emiliano said. “Because in all likelihood, you wouldn’t have been here to say anything about it. Pancakes could have been breathing the fumes in the cave of the Oracles for weeks at a time. Unless I called and told you, how the hell would you ever know?”
Pancakes didn’t realize the discussion was now over, but she knew it as soon as the bedroom door slammed shut and she heard her mother’s shoes clack angrily down the stairs. She really wished she hadn’t had her ear up to the duct at the time.
The reason she could hear their discussion wasn’t because they were being loud. It was because she had discovered a few months earlier that if she crawled into the large storage closet around the corner from the master bedroom, she could make her way all the way to the back and hear everything that was going on in there. One of the heating ducts to the master bedroom ran through part of the closet, and as long as the heat wasn’t on, the duct picked up the room’s sound. The only trick was getting out of the closet and back down the hall to her bedroom when her parents came out of their room and went looking for her. She hadn’t been caught so far, although a couple of times she’d been in such a hurry that she banged into the closet door handle and bruised her shoulder.
Right now her parents were arguing about her, or rather something that she had been playing with. A few days earlier, she had discovered a big deck of colorful cards in the house library. The cards were larger than regular playing cards, and there were more of them than the usual fifty-two. They had a lot of strange pictures of people and creatures on them. She had taken the deck out of their box and spread them out on the floor, looking at all the pictures and trying to figure out what they were for. All the cards were different, and she liked looking at them and making up stories about what was going on in each one. Knights rode horses and ships sailed into the distance. Kings and queens stared out at her. There were townspeople and people who lived in castles and all kinds of animals. Later when her father found her there on the carpet in the library, he explained that they were tarot cards. He said that some people used them to tell fortunes.
Pancakes felt disappointed when her father admitted that he couldn’t tell the future himself. There was a small booklet of instructions, and he paged through it for a few minutes, but after a while he told her it was a little too involved. Pancakes didn’t know what that meant. Involved with what? So Emiliano explained that telling the future with the cards was complicated. Every card meant something different, and they also meant different things depending on how you arranged them. Most of all, he told her, using the cards meant you had to study lots and lots of rules. That was enough for her. Rules meant not doing what she wanted, and she didn’t see any point in that.
Still, the cards were interesting, and Pancakes thought she might be able to figure out how to work them if she just thought about it for a while. She too the deck to her playroom, and every so often she took them out of their box, ignored the instruction booklet, and started laying them out in different patterns. She liked the storybook people from the kingdoms in the cards, but she grew more interested in the stranger cards. A big tower with a lightning bolt hitting it and a guy falling out. Some magical man with a wand or a candle or something. Flying people, Egyptian people, floating cups, people with swords. Every card had its own story, and she liked trying to figure out what was going on in them. And she really, really liked all the animals. It reminded her of the trip her class had taken to the zoo. Too bad the cards didn’t have any monkeys, though.
When her mother found Pancakes playing with the cards, however, she got upset. She took them away and asked where she’d gotten them. Pancakes had no idea why her mother was upset. Because of cards? It made her kind of mad, especially since Lorinda hadn’t been home all that long and she was already going around making rules as usual. “Dad let me,” she said. “I didn’t do anything.”
That had led to the present situation, with Emiliano and Lorinda “discussing” the matter in their bedroom while Pancakes listened from the closet.
“They’re just symbols, Lorinda. A bunch of pictures,” her father said. The sound was a little muffled. At first she though he’d said, “A bunch of pigtails.”
“Well, I know it sounds provincial, but I don’t like the fact that our daughter is dabbling in the occult,” her mother replied. Pancakes had a harder time with the end of that sentence. Something about a colt? Because there were horses on the cards? Horses weren’t bad. She knew some girls who even had their own horses, and no one got upset about that.
“She doesn’t even use any of the spreads or the interpretations,” her father said. “She just likes looking at the pictures.”
“And that’s fine,” her mother said. “But I don’t think she should be looking at some of those pictures. The devil? Death? She’s too young for those things, Emil.” Pancakes was surprised to hear this, and she wished she’d paid more attention to both of those cards. If she was too young for them, they must be a lot more interesting than she realized.
Emiliano sighed. Pancakes could tell it was his upset-sigh. He usually did that right before he told her that he’d had enough, and she always wished he had a sigh that meant he’d almost had enough so that she could stop whatever she was doing right before it was too late. “You’re coming in a little late for this kind of thing,” he said.
Lorinda paused. “What?” Pancakes recognized that “what” too. This discussion was getting a lot more arguey all of a sudden.
“For this level of parenting,” Emiliano said. “I’m not saying that you’re wrong about the tarot cards, but I never knew you felt that way.”
Now Lorinda sighed. It was a loud one. “Well, Pancakes hasn’t played with fortune-telling games before. Otherwise it might have come up.”
“But it wouldn’t have,” Emiliano said. “Because in all likelihood, you wouldn’t have been here to say anything about it. Pancakes could have been breathing the fumes in the cave of the Oracles for weeks at a time. Unless I called and told you, how the hell would you ever know?”
Pancakes didn’t realize the discussion was now over, but she knew it as soon as the bedroom door slammed shut and she heard her mother’s shoes clack angrily down the stairs. She really wished she hadn’t had her ear up to the duct at the time.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Monday, April 03, 2006
who speaks for the pigeons?
I have no idea what's going on here. I posted a pic of this sign back in mid-February, and now it seems to have become a favorite bulletin board for the activist-minded population of Cambridge. Which is to say Cambridge. These come from March 5 and March 21, respectively. Semioticians, please take note. There's a dissertation in there somewhere.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Behavior Unbecoming a Grade Schooler
Dear Mr. Dunst:
Please call me at your earliest convenience about arranging a meeting to discuss Pancakes's recent behavior in class. I don't mean to alarm you; she hasn't been misbehaving, exactly. But some of her responses of late have indicated that she may require a higher level of interactive teaching than we at Opal Anderson's Charter School for the Creatively Accelerated are prepared to give.
For instance, she has begun to incorporate what I believe some might interpret as performance art into her show-and-tell projects. Recently, the object she chose to share with the class involved a garish statuette of Bacchus that she had taken to various downtown office buildings and tried to get admitted for meetings with CEOs of major corporations. The photographs she took of baffled security guards and personal assistants confronting the ceramic figure were well executed, especially for an eight-year-old, but next to Billy Tompkinsonstein's new Tonka truck, her contribution seemed inappropriate and avant garde.
Additionally, she has been answering roll call by standing at attention by her desk, then offering up a quick aria. I congratulate you on her well-developed intelligence and fine singing voice, but I have to consider the disruptive effect such behavior has on the other children. It either baffles them entirely, or it spurs them to adopt such methods themselves. Melanie Grantalano answered a question about a story we were discussing with a few lines of gangsta rap last week. When I tried to admonish her for it (I should mention that the language she employed was entirely unsuitable for school-age children), Pancakes defended her by saying that she was merely “attempting to employ her skills across disciplines.”
These are just the most recent examples of what I'm afraid has become fairly regular and untenable behavior at this institution. I urge you to call me as soon as possible so that we may sit down to discuss better options for Pancakes's future than we here at this school are equipped to supply.
Sincerely,
Edna St. Vincent Carruthers Baxendale-on-Heath
Second Grade Instructor
Please call me at your earliest convenience about arranging a meeting to discuss Pancakes's recent behavior in class. I don't mean to alarm you; she hasn't been misbehaving, exactly. But some of her responses of late have indicated that she may require a higher level of interactive teaching than we at Opal Anderson's Charter School for the Creatively Accelerated are prepared to give.
For instance, she has begun to incorporate what I believe some might interpret as performance art into her show-and-tell projects. Recently, the object she chose to share with the class involved a garish statuette of Bacchus that she had taken to various downtown office buildings and tried to get admitted for meetings with CEOs of major corporations. The photographs she took of baffled security guards and personal assistants confronting the ceramic figure were well executed, especially for an eight-year-old, but next to Billy Tompkinsonstein's new Tonka truck, her contribution seemed inappropriate and avant garde.
Additionally, she has been answering roll call by standing at attention by her desk, then offering up a quick aria. I congratulate you on her well-developed intelligence and fine singing voice, but I have to consider the disruptive effect such behavior has on the other children. It either baffles them entirely, or it spurs them to adopt such methods themselves. Melanie Grantalano answered a question about a story we were discussing with a few lines of gangsta rap last week. When I tried to admonish her for it (I should mention that the language she employed was entirely unsuitable for school-age children), Pancakes defended her by saying that she was merely “attempting to employ her skills across disciplines.”
These are just the most recent examples of what I'm afraid has become fairly regular and untenable behavior at this institution. I urge you to call me as soon as possible so that we may sit down to discuss better options for Pancakes's future than we here at this school are equipped to supply.
Sincerely,
Edna St. Vincent Carruthers Baxendale-on-Heath
Second Grade Instructor
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