The next day the pointy teacher canceled the family tree assignment. Many students were relieved, some were merely puzzled, but a few were frustrated and angry.
“What? I spent five hours on my tree. Five hours! And you’re going to cancel it?”
“Can I get credit for the one I already finished? It’s not fair if those of us who did them don’t get credit while the ones who didn’t do anything get away with being lazy.”
“I wasn’t lazy! My dad forbid me!”
On and on it went. It took weeks for people to settle down.
And then, a year later, came the day that Miss Lightstone unknowingly stepped into that old swamp.
That Old Swamp
It was at the end of class one day, after we’d been talking about characters in a book and how they were related to each other, that Miss Lightstone announced that it might be interesting to work on our own family trees.
Around the room came a collective groan, followed by:
“Ack!”
“No!”
“Please no!”
Arif raised a hand. “Not to be rude, Miss Lightstone, but in this school, we don’t talk about family trees.”
“You don’t?” She put a finger to her raspberry lips. “Hmm. Interesting.” She walked slowly around the room, studying each of us. “Hmm.” When she reached the front of the room again, she said, “As you know, I am new here, and therefore it may take me some time to learn—about—about—this school’s—erm—traditions.”
She stopped in front of the Who are you? written on the board.
“Would anyone like to tell me why the family trees are so . . . so . . . problematic?”
Some students looked down at their desks or bent to tie their shoes or anything to avoid her direct gaze. Others turned to Arif and Renaldo, the two most likely to speak up, but it was Margie who raised her hand.
“It’s complicated, Miss Lightstone, and it’s sensitive. Many parents object.”
Arif added, “Many get very, very angry.”
Others then chimed in:
“My dad said it’s too intrusive.”
“Like what if we didn’t have a father or a mother or—”
“If we had two fathers or three or—”
“If we were adopted or—”
Audrey and Ruby were crying.
Miss Lightstone held up both hands. “I see, I see. It’s okay.” Her quiet, reassuring voice was like a warm embrace. “I understand. We will not be doing family trees.”
Antonio was following all this with great interest, sitting straighter and straighter in his chair until it looked as if he might lift off and float to the ceiling. His hand rose into the air.
“I have an idea,” he said. “What if we do fictional family trees, you know, like make up our ancestors?”
“Make them up?” Miss Lightstone said.
“You can’t just go making up your ancestors!” Freddy said.
“I mean, for fun,” Antonio said. “Like if you imagined who you might want your ancestors to be, like, say, a king or queen or—or—pirate—”
Others chimed in immediately.
“Or basketball star—”
“Or president—”
“Or writer—”
“Or painter—”
“And then,” Arif suggested, “you could imagine who you might be if you had those ancestors, right?”
Miss Lightstone stood in front of the board and let her finger trace, again, under the words Who are you? and then she wrote another question below it: Who would you be?
She stood back and considered what she had written, and then she erased the word would and wrote could in its place: Who could you be?
Little brain cells collided in my head. Who could I be? It felt daring and revolutionary.
Arif slapped at his head as if his hair were on fire. “Wow! That is—wow!”
Renaldo looked wary, almost frightened, but then his expression changed and he grinned. “Yes!” he shouted. “Perfecto!”
Freddy said, “Stupid idea.”
Pasta and the Frails
“All this pasta!” Dad exclaimed one Saturday morning. “We’ve eaten some, frozen some, and still—so much left.” He pulled a few bowls from the refrigerator. “Come on, we’re going to visit the Frails.”
“The Frails” was Dad’s affectionate nickname for Miss Judy and Miss Marlene, the school secretary and her friend who had once entertained the empress of Japan with cookies and tea.
“Those Frails need some meat on their bones,” Dad said.
I was used to seeing Miss Judy at school, either in the office or hallways, and although she was thin, I didn’t think of her as frail because she always seemed so energetic. She would stride purposefully down the halls, swinging one arm as she balanced a stack of books or papers in the other arm. She had a cheerful greeting for all, and sometimes from our classroom you could hear her going by, calling out “Hello!” and “Howdy!” and “Beautiful!” and “Ciao!” and “Ta-da!”
Miss Judy and Miss Marlene were so happy with our pasta offerings that you might have thought we’d offered them a bowl of expensive chocolates. As they spoke, I imagined how their dialogue would appear on the page.
“How delightful!”
“Mmm, and it smells so very—”
“Delicious!”
“Scrumptious!”
“Delectable!”
“Did you make—”
“This yourselves?”
Miss Marlene and Miss Judy insisted that we stay for tea and—
“Cookies!”
“You’ll have cookies!”
“Like the empress of Japan!”
The hallway between the kitchen and the living room was covered with framed photographs that I hadn’t paid attention to before, but this time, as they were talking with Dad, I studied them. There were photos of young people and old people, of couples and families, of small groups and large. There were new babies and kids learning to ride bikes and to swim and older teens in graduation gowns. There was a teenage Miss Marlene on a sailboat and a young Miss Judy hugging a goat and photos of both of them at protest rallies.
How much life they must have seen. When they were young, what did they think and what did they see and what did they feel?
As we were leaving, Miss Judy placed a bony but strangely beautiful, almost translucent hand on my arm. She leaned in close and whispered, “Did I hear that Miss Lightstone assigned family trees? I do hope she will be careful.”
“It’s okay. We’re doing fictional ones, not real ones.”
“Fictional family trees? How can you—?”
“You know, like for characters in books—not for real, no, no, not for real.”
Miss Judy considered this. “I do hope she is careful.”
A Package
Back at home that same day, I was filling the bird feeders when Antonio’s cousin Carlotta opened their back door to let out the cranky cat, Mr. Blue. I had seen neither Mr. Blue nor Carlotta for weeks and was beginning to think they no longer lived there.