EntrapmentI think I should buy some notepaper for DEW. She can't shop on her own anymore and who knows what religious mess BJWL would get or what boating sop JCW. I'll find her something with cats or plants or both. The line that occurs to me is from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's The Yearling. Ma Baxter is making up a shopping list for Penny to take trading and she wants a blue check: "now a real purty blue." I don't remember her exact misspelling, but it was there. At the moment, this line evokes isolation of someone who has to trust someone else to gauge her taste and buy the fabric for the only new dress she'll have all year (or longer) while she must stay behind on a scrub farm.
I haven't told Jen yet, and maybe won't, but today's internal jukebox selection is the one line I know from any song in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita: "I kept my promise, you keep your distance." Luckily, this plays in my head from the Broadway soundtrack, not last year's Madonna version. From the Madonna version, the only line is "Don't cry for me, Argentina," which is the lyric o' choice in trailers and which I have not been able to avoid hearing. That single line needs a powerful voice and Madonna's didn't carry the power for it. Not that I considered the matter objectively or with any trained musical knowledge.
Tuesday night when I riffled through the mail, I overlooked a note from DEW. RDC put it on my Walkman later that night, and Wednesday morning I saw it and forgot my Walkman. I read Songs in Ordinary Time on the bus without getting that bad a headache. I have about 200 pages left and will send it to DEW when I'm finished. I wonder if it will distress her, all the relationship soap operaness of it, but it's a long enough and involved enough story that I hope it will last her a day or two.
CrueltyThis morning I made sure to remember my Walkman. I am enjoying Cat's Eye much more this time through. It has always been CLH's favorite Atwood, and I wonder now if she remembers her clique behaving to her as Elaine's did to her. Atwood focuses on a single brilliant truth when she describes Elaine and her three friends skipping rope as only looking like little girls. People can be brutal anywhere at any time, but young girls, all scrabbling toward the top of any given heap, can be among the worst. When EA moved away half way through fifth grade, I missed her; then HPV visited her, I think, or talked to her on the phone, and I asked her if EA had asked about me. Until I just now wrote of it, I have never before questioned whether HPV made up or accurately reported EA's question: "Does Lisa still wear baggy pants?" I doubt she lied.
I can't believe I remember this so clearly. It must have been in later sixth grade or even after that, after I had seen her for the last time, because I couldn't've looked EA in the eye after hearing that, as much as it hurt me, and EA's mother drove her down to Old Lyme for REB's sixth-grade slumber party, which I attended. Also it wouldn't've hurt me as much until the weight of middle school started dragging on me. Which is another reason this comment had to have been relayed to me well after EA was thoroughly gone: the middle school formed in March of my sixth grade year, transferring us from the top of the elementary to the bottom of the middle school without a summer of transition. Anyway. Why did this hurt me so? Because anything anyone said as an insult injured me; I lacked any power to discriminate the value or truth of the speaker's words or self. Because that's all she wanted to know about me.
CLH says she remembers me being a very accommodating child, always willing to do anything for anyone. I remember in first or second grade that Amy, a girl I would graduate with and whom I--at the time--considered a friend, whose house I played at, on more than one occasion had her lunch bag with its wax paper and sundry detritus with her at recess, instead of throwing it out as she should have, and she told me that if I wouldn't carry it in my lunch box (which might have been a Lance Link one, not that I currently remember who that character was), she wouldn't be my friend. And I remember thinking at the time that that was wrong but being unable to articulate why.
And I was equally, thoughtlessly unkind. There was an "other side of the tracks" kind of family who lived in a wretched, concrete-block house at the end of the bus route. If Old Lyme zoned for trailers, they'd've lived in one of them. In first grade, sitting in the bus with Penny one day, I began to tell her about the birthday party I was going to have. She said something like, "Oh, I'd like to come." And I was horrorstricken that this girl thought I had inviting her when I was actually just describing it in selfish, happy anticipation. I told her I wasn't inviting her, I was just telling her about it. My only excuse is that I was six.
Go to previous or next entry, the Journal Index, Words, or the Lisa Index
Last modified 9 January 1998
Speak your mind: lisa[at]penguindust[dot]com
Copyright © 1998 LJH