“Yes,” I said. “Just like Samantha.” I didn’t want to be so sensitive. I tried to say it teasingly, but it came out bitter.
lessons
IN TEACHING SCHOOL: A Handbook to Education on The Farm, Terry and Julia wrote that if students can’t focus it’s best to work with their energy, to be spontaneous and flexible, to meet them where they are. So, one morning when Lee fidgeted all through the math lesson, I said, “Buddy. Your legs look like they want to move.”
He grinned. “They do! They’re saying, ‘Please, please’!”
The field called to me through the window, wide and green and welcoming.
“How fast can they move?” I asked him. “Can they move faster than my legs?”
“Maybe,” he said shyly.
“Let’s race!”
So we rushed through the door and out onto the green, counted to three, and took off. I thought I would be faster. I was so much taller than Lee, after all. But he shot out ahead of me and kept his lead until we collapsed, panting, at the far edge of the field.
We raced again and again—he beat me each time—until we were both tired, lying on the grass.
“Lee,” I said when we had caught our breath. “Do you know any fairy tales?”
“Sure,” he said. “Plenty.”
“I was thinking. Maybe we should make up fairy tales of our own, from our own lives.”
“Like how?” he asked.
“We take things that happened to us, but we make them different.”
“Okay,” he said. “You go first. I think I almost understand.”
“All right,” I said, the cold, still-damp ground beneath me. I closed my eyes and I could just make out the sound of waves crashing. I opened them again to a flock of white birds passing soundlessly above. And then I was ready.
“Once there was a girl who was raised without a father, until her mother fell in love with a wolf.”
Lee turned. I could feel him watching me. I thought of what to say next.
“She took her daughter to a wild place, for what wolf ever lived between walls? Her mother said, ‘You must call him father. See how gentle he is?’ and the wolf showed them his sharp smile. He growled and the mother said, ‘Hear how kind he is? See how he loves us?’ and he tore out the girl’s heart with his teeth.”
Lee sat up, quick.
“Oh, buddy,” I said. “I’m sorry. Was it too scary?”
He pressed his hands together. Set them in his lap. Pressed them together again.
“No, I’m not scared,” he said.
“I’ll stop, though. I know it wasn’t a very good story.”
“No,” he said. “It was really good. You can keep going. How does it end?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t tell him. I had been thinking too much of myself, not nearly enough about him.
“Here,” I said. “Let me tell you a better one. A happier one.”
He nodded.
“I’ll get all that badness out of your head.”
Again, he pressed his palms together. “Thank you,” he whispered.
I almost cried, seeing how I’d scared him. I would need to be more careful. “Okay. This one takes place before all of that.”
Lee lay back down in the grass.
“Once, my mother was a girl of fifteen.”
“Like Emma.”
“Like Emma,” I agreed.
“Sorry for interrupting.”
I rolled onto my side and smoothed his hair. I did it the way a mother might, if he still had a mother. I said, “Once, my mother was a girl of fifteen. Just like our very own Emma. She met a boy at a party, and soon she found out that she was . . . going to have a baby.”
“You?”
“Me,” I said. “Yes. They didn’t mean for it to happen, but sometimes people make mistakes. She knew she wanted to have me, but she didn’t know if the boy should be my father.
“She decided to give him three tests. If he passed them all, the answer would be yes.
“She called him up to see if he wanted to go to the movies, and he did. He drove to her house, wearing clean clothes, and knocked on her front door instead of waiting outside. That was the first test, and he passed it.
“When it was time to buy tickets, she said, ‘I invited you to the movies, so I’m paying.’ The boy put his wallet away and smiled and thanked her. That was the second test, and he passed it, too.
“Once the lights went dark in the theater, the boy kissed her. She kissed him back, but then turned to the screen when the movie started. He put his hands on her. ‘Let’s watch the movie,’ she said. She already knew what his hands on her body felt like. She needed to learn other things about him.
“When the movie was almost over, she knew it was time for the third and final test. She found his hand in the dark and squeezed it. She wanted to know—Was this boy patient? But instead of squeezing back, his hand sat limp in hers as punishment. And so, after the movie was over, she said goodbye and never saw him again.”
“Then what happened?”
“Her daughter was born and raised by her mother and her grammy and grandpa. She grew to be a girl, and they were mostly happy, most of the time. Life was simple and good.”
“And then what?”
But I couldn’t tell him the rest, even as it unspooled in my mind. I looked up at the sky and let the story continue, but only silently now, only for myself.
My mother met a man who lived in a skeleton house, cold enough in wintertime that he spent the nights drinking coffee at the diner where she worked. Night after night, she refilled his coffee cup. They found places to be alone together, did the things people do when they are falling in love. She invited him home to meet her family. In he walked, tall and strong in a green flannel shirt meant to accentuate his eyes. He smiled and flattered, but my grandparents saw something in him that felt dirty and dangerous, and they told my mother not to bring him back.
So she went to him instead. And at home she argued with my grandparents behind closed doors late at night. Their voices grew louder, their silences sharper, until one day she packed her things and mine, and took me away to a house with tarps for walls and the sky for a ceiling and a man who would be our undoing.
I was thirteen years old.
But, of course, I would not tell Lee all of that. I knew enough to be careful with him now.