This Story I've been Meaning to Write

I have in mind to tell the story of my upbringing and the paths that led me to become –among other things--a French professor. I say paths as if I could look back, squint a bit and see patterns reveal themselves or see logical outcomes from the circumstances that shaped the world I came to know. But what happened to me the summer of 1967, the summer I turned 18, even from this considerable distance in time, looks more like a fairy tale than ever. Like Lucy and Alice and Aladdin, I stepped into the armoire in the spare room, climbed right through the looking glass, rubbed the magic lamp all innocent and ignorant. Pouf! and there I was, spending a summer with a countess in her chateau in the Loire Valley. Since every bit of the story was unlikely, fate and chance have come to mean just about the same thing to me.

It begins, though, when I was five because that is the year when my shyness finally got on my mother’s nerves.

In the spring of 1954 Mama sent me to a kindergarten three days a week. Kindergarten was composed of other children I didn’t know and didn’t much want to know, women who were not my mother and a despised daily dose of tomato juice. Every day lasted forever because I knew there would be tomato juice at snack time. The tomato juice ruined the morning; apprehension filled my stomach with dread. And the afternoon was ruined because I had drunk it; sour humiliation replaced the dread. I did like the easels set up outdoors on fine days and the long wooden paintbrushes. They were so long and delightful to wave in the air that I could imagine painting the sky or the grass and did once paint the girl next to me. But on rainy days there were no such comforts, only the dreary waiting until Mama would come for me.

I had no wish to make myself agreeable to anyone outside my family. The sole exceptions were our next door neighbors on either side whom I saw nearly every day. They were old people, slow-spoken and undemanding who rarely appeared to notice how I stood wrapped in my mother’s skirt while she stood talking by their door. We went to one neighbor for eggs and the other for cake and flowers. The chicken neighbors had barns and a Model-T and an old woman so old she never left her bed. Her grownup daughter Helen did all the cooking and cleaning and she made root beer that made my stomach stretch. The other neighbors had sold us our own big house and moved into a smaller one up the hill set back from the road in a grove of tall maples. They were a man and his wife and also his sister. Besides my brother,mother and father these were the only people in our town I let coax me into a few words. Sometimes the sister who was thin and a stooped and who always wore an apron would ask me to help her pick something sweet like lilies of the valley or even strawberries. Like me, she didn’t seem to like talking in front of people. In the garden though, our faces about level, she would gossip about the fairies who played hide and seek among the flowers. She showed me small secret things like the inside of a columbine blossom, its chambers all arranged in a circle, a good place, she said, for a fairy to keep a secret, special thing like the songs and stories they collected. This was a notion I’d never considered, but her clear, hazel eyes, so close to mine, could never lie. She never told me anything about herself. I knew she was my friend.