Life Among the Savages (19 page)

Sally habitually rode standing on her head in the back seat, and gave every sign of regarding me as perhaps an additional fixture to the car, a sort of extension of the steering wheel; her conversation included me casually, and my comments became a sort of counterpoint to which she attended when it was necessary, perhaps, to find a rhyme, or perfect a rhythm; we found ourselves one day on a back road, turning a corner suddenly into a herd of cows.

“Do you know who I am?” Sally was singing, on her head in the back seat, “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”

The cows were wandering vaguely—very much, I suppose, in the manner of cows unsupervised and not in the least pleased about it; they crowded the road and moved in all directions at once. “I'm a rat and you're a fish,” Sally sang, “and now you know who I am.”

“Do turn yourself rightside up,” I said. “The road is covered with cows and I can't see out the back window.”

There was nothing to do, of course, but stop the car and wait until some avenue opened itself through the cows. I am earnestly afraid of all large animals; I closed the car windows tight and cringed in my seat, entirely convinced that a cow was going to try to climb onto, or into, the car. “Look at all the cows,” I said to Sally with a sort of wild gaiety; I did not, after all, want to communicate to a small child my fears, which might possibly be unfounded; “I guess you never saw
this
many cows before.”

“
These
are not cows,” Sally said. “
These
are giants.”

“See how they stop and look at us,” I remarked airily, moving over into the center of the front seat. “I suppose
they
wonder what
we
are.” I grinned back convulsively at a bovine face next to the window. “Nice cow,” I said.

“Lots and lots and
lots
of giants, and when
I
see giants I know their mothers are coming to eat me.”

This corresponded so nearly to my own apprehensions that, wildly disregarding the probable suicidal result of frightening a herd of cows into a stampede, I slammed my hand down onto the horn and my foot onto the gas pedal. The cows backed away and turned, lumbering against one another, and finally determined unanimously on one direction, which was down the road ahead of us; running, so that with Sally calling encouragement from a rear window and me leaning on the horn, we found ourselves in the odd position of chasing a herd of cows swiftly down a country road. “Run, giants, run,” Sally shouted out the window. I made a broad screaming turn onto a side road and pulled up, panting and listening to the thunder of hooves as the cows made off into the distance. “Golly,” I said.

“Giants are very nice sometimes,” Sally remarked, turning herself upside down, “and sometimes giants are not very nice and sometimes giants are very nice and sometimes giants are—”

It was the day of Sally's fingers, I think, when we went to get the apples. There was a farm not far away where they sold an honest frost-bitten apple and had a speckled hen in a cage, and Sally and I made it, that fall, one of our regular stopping-off places; Sally was always given an apple to eat, and I always admired the speckled hen, and we came home with the car full of apples and their rich scent; on this day Sally had amused herself by counting the fingers on her left hand, which came out six, and the fingers in her glove, which came out five, and she was deeply involved in the problem of accommodating her fingers into the glove, which had unreasonably fit perfectly until now; the road was narrow and winding, and I was humming to myself and watching the way the sun came through the colored trees. We moved without any recognition of danger onto a scene of fire; I realized as we came around a corner that there had been a vague sense of activity and noise ahead, but as I slowed down the wild approach of the fire engine sounded behind me and I had no choice but to pull my car quickly over into the ditch as the engine rushed by. So there we sat, Sally and I, in the car, unable to turn and go back the way we had come, surely unable to go forward, and—I, at least—most unwilling to stay where we were. “Is it a giant?” Sally asked uncertainly, coming over into the front seat to look out, “is it a giant, or what?”

“It's a fire,” I said. “That farmhouse is burning.”

“Why?” Sally asked.

I thought fleetingly that perhaps this would be a good time to warn Sally against playing with matches, but my moment had passed; “It looks like a giant to
me
,” she said. “Are we going to stay here?”

“Until the road ahead is clear,” I said. “We've got to wait till those other cars get out of the way, because we can't turn around.”

“Then I will have another apple,” Sally said. She returned to the back seat, found an apple, and stood herself up on her head. “I am going to sing an apple song,” she said.

We had to stay there for over an hour; it was quite a fire. Had the farmer whose home was burning been of a philosophical turn—which I am fairly sure he was not—and believed that he was due for at least one fire during his lifetime and was having it now, he might have taken great consolation in the way this one came off; his livestock, I learned from brief bulletins from the firemen, was safe, his children securely at school, his wife and farmhands unharmed, his insurance invulnerable, and as we arrived they had been carrying out his television set. The sound country policy of letting the burning house go and trying to save the buildings nearby was being put into practice; the fire hose stretched nicely to Sally's river, and although the house and barn, which were close to one another and both hopelessly lost, flamed ominously, the firemen were successfully soaking down the other outbuildings and the one or two neighboring houses. There was not even a wind.

“I'm a sweetie,” Sally sang, “I'm a honey, I'm a poppa-corn, I'm a potato chip, all my days for you.”

My principal feeling, beyond the primitive terror of the fire itself, was of embarrassment. I was deeply concerned lest these people assume that we, my daughter and I, had come curiously to watch their fire. I wanted very much to catch hold of one of the firemen and explain that we were here entirely by accident, like the fire itself; we had been passing by, I would tell him, on our way home from buying apples, and had been caught by chance on this road; we did not ordinarily race fire engines to fires, I would go on, but in this case, what with the narrow road . . .

“Aren't they through
yet?
” Sally demanded over my shoulder.

“Almost,” I said. “The fire engine is getting ready to leave.”

“We shouldn't of stayed this long,” Sally said.

I pulled out of the ditch, and waved cheerily to the farmer's wife as we went by. We reached home to find the rest of our family waiting restlessly for dinner.

“We got apples,” I said to my husband, “and we saw—”

“Giants.”
Sally swung wildly on her father's arm,
“Giants.”
She nodded.

“Giants?” my husband asked me, staring.

“There was a big giant party and they were cooking marshmallows,” Sally said. She caught Jannie in a long ominous look. “
Giant
marshmallows.” Her voice dropped to a compelling whisper. “And the giants were all stamping around and the
mother
giant sat there and watched them, and the mother giant said ‘Wait till those other cars get out of the way and then we can go home.' And I had ninety-seven apples. And we came over the river and the mother giant went in and got drowned dead.” There was a short, respectful silence.

Finally Laurie inquired of his father, “Who was Aristides the Just?”

“Friend of your mother's,” my husband said absently. “Apple pie?” he said hopefully to me.

“I got to do a report,” Laurie said.

“Y'know something?” Jannie asked me. She glanced around at her younger sister and then went on in a low voice, “I don't believe it when Sally tells about giants. Do you?”

“Certainly not,” I said. “She's just making it up.” And recognized clearly that there was no ring of conviction whatever in my voice. “My goodness,” I said heartily, “who's afraid of
giants?”

During that fall the conflict of individual cultures in our family became explicit, and uncontrollable. My husband and I, a little frayed after a number of years spent—it seems—almost entirely in the society of small children, had managed to build up little sets of foibles which we were reluctant to sacrifice. Laurie had developed opinions which could only be called decided. Sally had not so far seen any reason for doubting that anything could be achieved if you just made enough noise about it. Jannie, who had never in her life doubted anything she said herself although no parental pronouncements sounded to her entirely impartial or, no matter how emphatic, reasonable, entered first grade that fall and came into contact with the public school system.

Now, I have nothing against the public school system as it is presently organized, once you allow the humor of its basic assumption about how it is possible to teach things to children, and my experiences with Laurie have convinced me that the schools are well enough, and my childdren are well enough, and it is only any chance combination of these two which is apt to become explosive. Laurie succeeded in fighting his way to the fourth grade without showing any noticeable signs of contact with education, but Jannie brought up against the school an impact which must have been felt in the very bedrock of learning, and which certainly put a crack in the family hearthstone.

I had been warned that when a little girl goes to school she prefers to wear dresses and pigtails, but Jannie thought she would rather wear shorts the first day, and an old baseball hat of Laurie's. I struggled out of bed on the morning which was to see Jannie off to school for the first time and combed my hair and dressed myself with the idea of appearing before teachers and other mothers, escorting my daughter, but Jannie told me at breakfast, “If I am going to go to school at
all,
I think I would prefer to go by myself.”

After five busy years I no longer attempted to argue with Jannie before breakfast; I nodded and slipped my shoes off under the breakfast table. “You don't mind my coming to the door to wave goodbye to you, I suppose?” I asked, and Jannie, considering, said, “If you don't cry or something.”

“Do I have to take her to school?” Laurie demanded. “On the bus and all?”

Laurie regarded the new school bus as his personal and exclusive conveyance. “She's got to go to school,” I said. “They don't let children grow up and not go to school.”

Laurie, regarding his sister, laughed bitterly, and Jannie said, “I believe I'll sit in the other end of the bus from Laurie. I don't care for unpolite boys.”

“Do I have to hold her hand?” Laurie asked.

“Certainly you do not,” Jannie said. “I prefer to go by myself, thank you. If I am going to school at
all,
that is.”

The notion that she might, upon consideration, decide not to go to school at all, was enough for me. “Will you be careful?” I asked.

“Once,” Jannie remarked exclusively to Sally, “I had a friend named Susan, and Susan went to the horse racing and she betted on a horse named Susan, and the horse fell through the side of the track and all the horses went to see if he was all right and he had broken the gate and all the men got away and the horses couldn't catch them to bring them back.”

“Ah,” said Sally intelligently.
“You
can't come to
my
house.”

I had no trouble not crying when Jannie left; after all these years during which I have seen one child or another go off to one place or another and managed to control myself except during major crises like Cub Scout award meetings and nursery school Dancing Days—after all these years my goodbye kiss and my wave from the front window no longer exhibit more than the mildest apprehension. Jannie climbed stoutly into the school bus, her brother behind her pretending unsuccessfully that she was just some girl who happened to get on at the same stop he did, and I saw Jannie's head move down the bus to a seat at the end. “Sister's gone to school,” I said to Sally.

“Ah,” said Sally. “And will she come home again?”

Laurie reported, when he came home at three o‘clock, that although he looked for her, and waited at the bus, and even, with some faint vestige of fraternal feeling, asked a couple kids if they had seen his sister, Jannie had not got on the bus, and at four o'clock I was driving back and forth between our house and the school for the sixth time when I saw Jannie wandering and singing along the side of the road. I stopped the car next to her and leaped out, babbling, and she took my hand amiably and said, “I think school will be all right for me, after all.”

“Where have you
been?
” I said.

“I followed my teacher home,” Jannie said. “I wanted to see where she lived.”

At the end of her second week in first grade Jannie remarked one evening at the dinner table, “Mrs. Skinner says paper napkins are vulgar.” Mrs. Skinner is the first grade teacher, and it had already, by then, begun to get through to the rest of us that Mrs. Skinner's opinions, relayed through Jannie, were inclined to be vehement, positive, and perhaps even a shade on the critical side. “Mrs. Skinner,” Jannie went on, eyeing her brother, “says little boys are made of snails.”

“Who's little?” Laurie demanded, stung. “Seems to me—”

“I
beg
your humble pardon,” said Jannie—“I beg your humble pardon” is another Skinnerism—“I beg your
humble
pardon, but Mrs. Skinner says that boys any size are made of snails and little girls like Sally and me—”