Homesick (17 page)

Miss Crofts put a bunch of history books on the first desk of each row so they could be passed back, student to student. I was glad to see that we'd be studying the history of Pennsylvania. Since both my mother's and father's families had helped to settle Washington County, I was interested to know how they and other pioneers had fared. Opening the book to the first chapter, “From Forest to Farmland,” I skimmed through the pages but I couldn't find any mention of people at all. There was talk about dates and square miles and cultivation and population growth and immigration and the Western movement, but it was as if the forests had lain down and given way to farmland without anyone being brave or scared or tired or sad, without babies being born, without people dying. Well, I thought, maybe that would come later.

After history, we had grammar and mathematics, but the most interesting thing that I learned all morning was that the boy across the room was named Donald Burch. He had sandy-colored hair combed straight back and he wore a sky-blue shirt.

The last class was penmanship. I perked up because I knew I was not only good at penmanship, but I enjoyed making my words run across a page, round and neat and happy-looking. At the British School we had always printed, so I had learned to make my letters stand up straight and even, and when I began to connect up my letters for handwriting, I kept that proud, straight-up look.

I took the penmanship workbooks from the girl in front of me, kept my copy, and passed the rest to Andrew Carr. The workbook was called
The Palmer Method,
but the title was not printed; it was handwritten in big, oversized, sober-looking letters, slanting to the right. If you pulled one letter out of a word, I thought, the rest would topple over like a row of dominoes.

“Jean,” Miss Crofts said after the workbooks had been distributed, “I expect you have not been exposed to the Palmer method of penmanship. The rest of the class will work on Exercise One, but I want you to come up to my desk while I explain the principle of Palmer penmanship.”

Slowly I dragged myself to the front of the room and sat down in the chair that Miss Crofts had pulled up beside her own.

“You see,” Miss Crofts said, “in the Palmer method you really write with the underside of your forearm. The fleshy part.” She pointed to her own forearm which was quite fleshy and then she put it down on the desk. “You hold your fingers and wrist stiff. All the movement comes from your arm. You begin by rotating the flesh on your arm so that your pen will form slanting circles.” She filled a line on the paper with falling-down circles. “When you have mastered the circles,” she said, “your arm will be ready for the letters.”

As Miss Crofts looked at me to see if I understood, she made a quick dive with her index finger into her waves.

I folded my hands in my lap. “I have very good penmanship,” I said. “No one has trouble reading it. I really do not care to change my style.”

Miss Crofts pushed a pen and a pad of paper in front of me. “The Palmer method has been proved to be the most efficient system.” She had so many years of teaching behind her I could see she wasn't going to fool around. “Just put your arm on the desk, Jean,” she said, “and try some circles.”

“I don't think I have enough flesh on the underside of my arm,” I whispered. “I'm too skinny.”

Miss Crofts reached over, picked up my arm, put it on the desk, and pushed a pen in my hand. “Just roll your arm around but keep your fingers stiff. Let your arm do the work.”

Sitting in front of the room with everyone peeking up at me from their workbooks, I was afraid I was going to cry. How could I stand to let my letters lean over as if they were too tired to say what they wanted straight out? How could I ever write a poem if I couldn't let the words come out through my fingers and feel their shape? I glanced at Donald Burch who, like everyone else, must have seen how miserable I was. He tapped his forehead to show how crazy Miss Crofts was. Then he shrugged as if he were saying, “What can you do with a nitwit like that?”

I moved my arm halfheartedly and produced a string of sick-looking circles.

“I think you have the idea,” Miss Crofts said. “You may go to your seat and practice.”

So I went to my seat but I didn't make a single circle unless I saw Miss Crofts watching me. I just hunched over my workbook, promising myself that I would never use the Palmer method outside the classroom. Never. I wouldn't even try hard in the classroom and if I flunked penmanship, so what? I kept looking at the clock, waiting and waiting for the big hand to crawl up and meet the little hand at
Twelve.
When it finally did, Miss Crofts tinkled her bell.

“Class—attention!” she ordered. We all stood up. “First row, march!” Row by row we marched single file out the door, down the stairs, and into the free world where the sun was shining.

Donald Burch was standing on the sidewalk and as I came up, he fell into step beside me.

“She's a real bird, isn't she?” he said.

“You said it!” I glanced up at him. He was two inches taller than I was. “Where do you suppose she dug up the Palmer method?”

“It's not just here,” Donald said. “It's all over. Every school in the country uses it.”

I stopped in my tracks. “All over
America?”

“Yep.”

I had a sudden picture of schools in every one of the forty-eight states grinding out millions and millions of sheets of paper covered with leaning letters exactly alike. “But what about liberty for all?” I cried. “Why do they want to make us copycats?”

Donald shrugged. “Search me. Grown-ups don't write all the same. Dumb, isn't it?”

As we walked on together, I began to feel better, knowing that Donald felt the same way as I did. Besides, I'd had a good look at him now. When he grew up, he might look a little like Charles Lindbergh, I decided, especially if he wore goggles.

“I guess you never had anyone as bad as Miss Crofts in your school in China, did you?” he asked.

“Well, I had one teacher who was pretty bad, but I think Miss Crofts has her beat.”

“Did you like living in China?” Donald asked.

“Yes.”
(Oh, please, I prayed, please don't let him ask me if I ate rats.)

“I bet it was nice. But you know something?”

“What?”

“I'm sure glad you came back to America.” He squinted at the sky as if he were trying to figure out the weather. “How about you? Are you glad you came back?”

“And how!” I didn't say it; I breathed it. At the same time I began mentally composing a letter to Andrea.

Dear
Andrea: I started school today and there's this boy in my class. Donald Burch. He is the CAT‘S!

We had come to Shirls Avenue now. I pointed down the hill. “That's where I live,” I said. “That's my grandparents' farm down there. Where do you live?”

Donald pointed over his shoulder. “Back there a few blocks.”

He had come out of his way.

“O.K. if I walk with you again tomorrow?” he asked.

I'm sure I said it would be O.K., although all I remember as I ran down the hill was thinking: Oh, I'm in love, I'm in love, and I think it's requited!

When I came to the bottom of the hill, I called out that I was home and my grandmother yoo-hooed from the vegetable garden. I found her among the carrots, standing up in her long white, starched apron, waiting for me, smiling.

“My, you look happy,” she said.

I grinned. “I made a friend,” I explained.

“Good! That's the best thing that could happen. And how about school?”

I came down to earth with a thump. There was no way I could look happy with a question like that to answer. I just shook my head.

“So it wasn't one-hundred-percent,” my grandmother said. “Few things are.”

“It was a flop.”

“Who's your teacher?”

“Miss Crofts.”

“My stars!” My grandmother put her hands on her hips. “Don't tell me she's still hanging around? Why, Margaret had her.”

“She's still hanging around,” I said.

My grandmother's face took on a sly, comical look. She put her index finger to her head and scratched carefully. “Still scratching, is she?”

Her imitation was so perfect, I burst out laughing.

“Still scratching,” I said.

My grandmother and I laughed together and once started, we couldn't seem to stop. We'd let up for a second, then look at each other, and one of us would scratch, and we'd break out again. In fact, it felt so good to laugh, I didn't want to stop.

“She must have cooties,” I gasped.

“She ought to have her head examined.” And off we went again!

By this time Josh, who had joined us at the first explosion, was throwing himself about in an outrage, but I couldn't let a rooster spoil the fun. Coming to the surface from my last spasm, I told my grandmother about the Palmer method.

“We're supposed to write with the underside of our arms.” I showed her where. “We can't move our fingers or our wrists.”

At first my grandmother couldn't believe me, but as I went on about the workbooks and circles, she dissolved into another round of laughter. She turned toward the greenhouse where my grandfather was working. “Will,” she called. “Oh, Will! Come and hear this!”

Well, I decided, the only thing a person could do about the Palmer method was to laugh at it. And listening to my grandmother telling it, making up bits as she went along about the imaginary Mr. Palmer who was so set on exercising the underside of children's forearms, I had to laugh again. We all laughed until we were laughed out.

My grandmother turned serious. “You can't move your fingers at all?” she asked, as if she might not have heard right the first time.

“Not at all.”

My grandmother shook her head. “They must be preparing you for a crippled old age.” She leaned down to comfort Josh. “Sh, sh, sh,” she said, smoothing out his feathers. “It's all right, Josh. It's all over. You don't know how funny the world can be, do you? Maybe even a little crazy. There are times when people just have to laugh.”

“Times when they have to eat too,” my grandfather added. “What are we having?”

My grandmother said she'd fixed apple dumplings, and together the three of us walked to the house. Past the cabbages and beans, down the path lined with gold and orange chrysanthemums. We stopped to admire the grapes, dangling in heavy clusters from the vines, fat and purple.

Then I ran ahead to put the plates on the table.

When my mother and father arrived in China in 1913, China had been a republic with a president for only a year. For thousands of years before this, China had been ruled by emperors and empresses who had tried to seal China off from the rest of the world. Early in the nineteenth century, however, Western nations had gradually been exerting their power and forcing their way into the country. In a series of “unequal” treaties, the foreign nations gained “concessions” in which Western law was practiced and Western police kept order; they put gunboats on the rivers to protect the interests of Western merchants. By 1907 there were thousands of foreign businessmen and foreign missionaries in China (3500 Protestant missionaries alone).

Eventually the Chinese rebelled not only against this Western imposition but against their own internal system which served a ruling class at the expense of millions of farmers and laborers. The leader of the revolutionary movement was a Chinese Christian by the name of Sun Yat-sen who had been educated in both Chinese and British schools. “China is being transformed everywhere,” he wrote, “into a colony of foreign powers.” Sun Yat-sen was in America when the revolution actually broke out on October 10, 1911, in Wuchang, across the river from Hankow. Sun went back to China and was sworn in as president of the Republic of China on January 1, 1912. But he needed military help to back up his government, so he consented to an agreement with Yuan Shih-k‘ai, a military leader in the imperial army. If Yuan completed the overthrow of the old imperial government, Yuan could be president of the new republic.

The trouble was that Yuan Shih-k‘ai did not share Sun Yat-sen's ideas for a democratic China. Once he became president, he was interested only in power; he even tried to get himself elected emperor. When he died on June 6, 1916, the country was no further ahead than it had been in 1912.

While warlords fought back and forth, Sun Yat-sen made another attempt at national unity. Although he was head of the Nationalist party, he still did not have the military support he needed to get rid of the warlords and do away with the special privileges of the foreigners. “The only country that shows any sign of helping us,” he wrote, “is the Soviet Government of Russia.” Beginning in September 1922, he allowed Chinese Communists to join his party, and the following year the Russians began sending advisers to China. Later they sent arms. Sun himself was not a Communist and had he lived, he might have been able to unite China in the way he wanted. Unfortunately, Sun Yat-sen died on March 12, 1925, and was later succeeded by Chiang Kai-shek as party leader. By August 1926, Chiang had marched the National Revolutionary Army north, gathering warlords on the way, and was at the Yangtse River.

Meanwhile Hankow, an industrial city, had become a central point for strikes, agitation, and anti-foreign demonstrations. Behind the scenes Mao Tse-tung was organizing peasants for a Communist uprising, but Chiang was against the idea of peasants taking violent action against their landlords. In order to ensure a united China, Chiang believed he had to make deals with Chinese capitalists, with members of China's underworld, and with foreigners who believed that with Chiang in charge, they could continue business as usual. He eliminated Communists from his party and in April 1927 (after the Nanking Incident), he set up his own government in Nanking. Foreign nations recognized this as the legal government of China. By August the Russians had left China and Mao Tse-tung and his small band of followers were hiding in the hills.