At the end of the day, Miss Lightstone returned to the board and again traced beneath the words Who are you? She turned to us and said, “What an interesting year this will be.”
On the bus on the way home, I sat with my friends. One of them, Margie, was agitated.
“But what does it mean? Why did she underline that question with her finger like that? Are we supposed to answer her question about who we are?”
Arif, sitting across the aisle, said, “Do you think it’s a test? Maybe tomorrow we will have to write an essay on who we are.” He drummed restlessly on the seat in front of him. “What should we say? Who are we?”
Margie pulled on my arm. “Are we supposed to know?”
While I had been in class, I liked not knowing why that question was on the board. I liked wondering about it. But now, listening to Margie and Arif, I started worrying. Were we supposed to be prepared for something tomorrow? I didn’t like being unprepared.
Sometimes my mother would say “Shiyou ga nai” when one of us was faced with something we couldn’t help or change. “So why worry? Shiyou ga nai. What can you do?”
I once asked her where she learned that foreign phrase, but it was my father who answered.
“She used to have a Japanese boyfriend.”
My mother batted at him with a dish towel. “You jealous?”
My father said, “No. Shiyou ga nai.”
Margie and Arif and Renaldo and Freddy and Me
Arif and Margie were the two students I clumped with most of the time. We weren’t tightly bonded but felt natural together. We weren’t like the strutting, confident ones or like the rough, loud ones or like the squeamish ones. We were just us.
Arif was a slight boy with long arms and delicate hands and golden eyes. When he was nervous, he tapped the sides of his legs or kicked absently at the seat in front of him. Each day before homeroom began, he stood in front of the board with his arms crossed and one foot kicking absently at the baseboard. He leaned in close, his nose nearly touching Who are you?
Margie, who sat in front of me, often rested her elbows on her desk, chin in her hands, head swiveling left, right and center. Each time her head turned, mine followed, not wanting to miss anything. Like Arif, she often fidgeted, chewing her nails or pulling on a strand of hair, and also like Arif, she was particularly curious about Who are you?
I was a skinny-legged and skinny-armed girl, with a mass of dark, thick hair—not curly exactly, but wavy and tangled. I think I was the only one in my class who had no brothers or sisters, and I envied those who did. My default mode was watching and listening and daydreaming and trying to slow my jumbled brain. When other kids spoke, their words seemed to float in the air, but I felt that when I talked, my words sank like stones, except when I was with Arif and Margie.
Who are you?
One day Margie asked Miss Lightstone if there was a right answer to that question.
“No,” Miss Lightstone said. “There is no right answer.”
“Is there a wrong answer?”
“I don’t think so, Margie. What do you think, Arif?”
Arif curled into himself. “Me? You’re asking me?”
“Or anyone,” Miss Lightstone said, glancing around the room. “What do you think?”
Renaldo’s hand shot into the air. “I know! I know!”
We all cringed, expecting one of Renaldo’s goofy jokes.
“And what is that?” Miss Lightstone said.
We all braced for the worst, for the dumbest joke, the most inappropriate answer.
“Maybe the answer is different every day.”
A few people groaned. Most of us turned to Miss Lightstone, to see what her reaction would be.
“Interesting possibility, Renaldo. What do you think, class?”
We all nodded dumbly, like a slew of bobbing frogs.
You could sense brains melting all over the room, partly at the suggestion that we might be different each day, but also because that was probably the first time we’d seen Renaldo so openly praised. He was so often joking and playing pranks that we didn’t take him seriously.
And then there was Freddy, the class cynic. Nothing impressed him. Nothing fully interested him. “Who cares?” he often said. “Who really cares?”
While I was wondering how I would answer the question about who I was, Freddy said, “Who cares? I don’t see what the big deal is. I mean who really cares?”
Miss Lightstone
Miss Lightstone was young and petite, with wild, unruly red hair. She had large, sparkly, hazel eyes and long, pale eyelashes. Her clothing was a colorful mix of yellow and orange or red and bright blue. Her lipstick was raspberry colored.
At first I did not know what to make of her. She did not begin with rules. Instead she asked us to help her sort books, and in the middle of that, she stopped to read the beginning of one.
“Oh, this one is a favorite,” she said. “I’ll just read the first page.” Her voice took on a different tone, one that we would soon recognize as her reading voice—a fluid, resonant, rich tone. When she stopped, the room was silent. She looked up from the page. “What? You want more? Maybe later.”
While we sorted and stacked books that morning, she frequently stopped to read from another “favorite”—sometimes it was a poem, sometimes a chilling opening paragraph, sometimes a humorous passage.
I was hypnotized. I’d only ever heard my parents read aloud to me, and it had been a few years since they had done so. My mother read so rapidly that my brain was always a few paragraphs behind. My father was blessed with many virtues, but reading aloud was not one of them, for he stumbled over long words and used the same voice for every character.
But Miss Lightstone was a master. By the end of the first week, she had us in the palm of her hand.
Well, most of us.
“What’s the big deal with the reading?” Freddy said. “Reading schmeading. I don’t have time for it.”
First Lines
One morning when we entered the classroom there were three or four books on each desk. Renaldo held one aloft. “This is way too hard. Anyone want to trade?”
“Wait,” Miss Lightstone said. “Wait a leetle min-oo-toe.”
She asked us to leaf through the books on our desks and to read the opening line of each (silently, to ourselves), and then to write down the one opening that most appealed to us. Then we were to pass the books to the person on our right and receive the books from the person at our left, and repeat the process of choosing the best first line, until we’d seen all the books.
So many books, each so different.
It was surprising how one sentence—the first sentence—of a book had the power to draw you in or push you back, but not everyone was drawn in or pushed back by the same sentence. We discovered this when we each read aloud our favorite openers.
“Makes you wonder what will happen.”
“Ugh. Bor-ing.”
“Sounds gooey, like it was meant for little kids.”
“The sounds of the words are hypnotizing.”
We each chose a line to add to the bulletin board.