Hope and Other Luxuries (3 page)

And when that happens, Elena isn't just pretty anymore. She's beautiful. She's unforgettable.

I'm reserved. I put together arguments the way I put together logic puzzles: if A means B, then C means you're a jerk. In temperament, I'm more like Elena's older sister, Valerie, whose most damning comment, uttered in a deceptively casual tone, is “Hey, do whatever you want, it doesn't matter to me.”

To say that both sisters have brown hair and eyes is to make them sound the same, but to my eye, they don't look at all alike. Valerie's toffee-colored hair glows with warm highlights, and her eyes are the large, gentle eyes of a deer. Easygoing and cheerful, Valerie thrives only among friends and family. Without that sense of home around her, she quietly wilts.

Valerie was a calm baby, content to smile at her adoring father and me and occasionally laugh—when she wasn't blissfully asleep, that is. She talked extremely early and walked extremely late, and even then, only if she had a hand to hold. Walking wasn't exploration to little Valerie. It was a chance for the family to do something together.

Then, twenty months after Valerie came along to bless us with her sunshine, Elena ripped into the family like a tiny tornado, indignant from the very first moment of life over the ignominies of babyhood. And from that day to this, Elena has had the gift of the Italians: to love, hate, laugh, cry, work, and play with all her heart, and often within the same five minutes.

But if Elena inherited her fierce nature from her hot-tempered father, she inherited something very precious from me. I'm a storyteller. It's my central characteristic. It's how I see the world. Beethoven's brain worked in melody and harmony. Mine works in stories, little and big. All day long, my imagination shows me pictures and snippets of film no one else has ever seen.

When I was a little girl, the grown-ups around me often talked about the end of the world, when all the nuclear missiles would fly at once. Sitting quietly in a corner of the room, I could see the whole thing: the searing explosions, the rubble, the carnage, the hideous mutations, the breakdown of society, the looting and rioting . . .

I didn't sleep that well when I was a little girl.

Elena was just the same. From the time she was old enough to speak, I discovered that her imagination, too, was both a blessing and a curse. No matter how I tried to shield her, she got macabre ideas into her brain. A few Halloween masks in the grocery store or a casual joke from an acquaintance would be enough to set her vivid imagination churning with frightening images.

When Elena was very small, those half-understood hints about complicated subjects often took her into a fantasy world. Following my little daughter into her story-worlds back then could feel downright eerie.

“The man in the next car is a gangster,” she would announce ominously from her booster seat.

“Oh, yeah?” I would say. “How do you know?”

“Because he's a murderer,” she would state with absolute conviction. “He killed his wife, and he's running away from the police.”

Where does she
get
this stuff ?
I would think.
She's in preschool, for God's sake! The scariest thing she's allowed to watch is
Mister Rogers
!
But there it was: I'm pretty sure that, a few centuries ago, my four-year-old daughter would have gotten people burned as witches.

And God help us when Elena's grade school sat down to watch videos. The unimaginative staff there had no idea what kind of terror an old movie like
A Christmas Carol
could unleash in a sensitive six-year-old. I had to sit by Elena's bedside to save her from the ghosts, and she cried herself to sleep for several nights. Monsters in stories were more real to her than the trees outside her window. We routinely found her in bed in the morning with Valerie.

But at the same time, Elena's vivid imagination brought her in touch with the feelings of others and inspired in her a boundless curiosity. And even in early childhood, she began to detect true stories, beautiful stories, in the commonplace world around her.

I would like to be a rose
, she wrote on a school worksheet when she was six.
I would like to be a rose. It would be fun. I would hope a person would water and care for me and never pull me out of the earth. I would try not to get into a person's way, but I did! I loved to get pruned. I loved it in the soil, it felt
good. I did not like it when the kids pulled off my leaves, but I lived with it. I loved being a plant. I loved to watch the kids swing. I loved the soil. I loved the earthworms. Then I died a sad death. The end
.

Elena was the kind of child who saw a human soul in everything. She had conversations with ladybugs. She rescued injured bees. She once drew eyes and whiskers on a sweet potato that looked like a seal. Then she couldn't bear to let me cook it.

One spring afternoon when Elena was seven or eight, she and Valerie sat down at the kitchen table to sort through their Easter baskets. After a few minutes of digging through the crinkly green plastic grass, Elena mournfully announced, “I'm out of candy.”

Valerie, my prudent, practical girl, who asked for things like coats and desks for her birthday, had had the foresight to ration her treats. Now she took pity on her impulsive sibling. “Here,” she said, and she handed Elena a marshmallow-filled candy egg with a hard sugar shell. It was about an inch long, sealed in clear plastic, and it was bright blue.

Elena was delighted.

“Come here, little candy!” she ordered, marching it up her arm toward her mouth. “No, no!” in a high squeal, and the candy turned around and darted back down to the table.

This continued for several minutes. The candy ran away and hid behind the salt shaker and the napkin holder; it leapt into Elena's sweater pocket. Finally, in desperation, it begged for its life. As I remember, it was very eloquent.

Valerie watched this little romp with increasing irritation. “Are you going to eat that or not?”

“I can't,” Elena admitted. “It would hurt its feelings.” And the candy nestled trustingly in her hand.

“Well, then give it back! I'll eat it.”

“Nooo!” screeched the candy, bolting to the safety of Elena's shoulder, where it huddled, shaking.

“Don't worry,” Elena crooned, petting it. “
I'll
save you!
I'll
keep you away from the evil giant!”

And Valerie appealed to a higher power:

“MOM!”

But what could I do? Solomon couldn't have settled that one. It was the collision of two different world views.

As playmates, the girls weren't well matched. In fact, they couldn't have been more different. Elena was the queen of the split-second decision. Valerie liked to ponder and weigh and debate. In group play, Elena was quick to take offense and raise her voice, but if Valerie got her feelings hurt, she usually left without making a fuss and went home to have a quiet cry. On the other hand, it was Valerie who remembered these slights and acted on them for months. Neighborhood children wondered sadly why she wouldn't play with them anymore, long after they had forgotten about swiping a toy from her or refusing to help her tidy up after a game.

When Valerie was in fifth grade, she became interested in chess. Its complexity impressed her, and its unbending rules appealed to her practical nature. She got to be quite good at it—she could certainly beat me. But I didn't have much time to play, so Valerie decided to teach Elena the game.

Chess became the source of endless conflict.

It wasn't that Elena couldn't learn it. She did that pretty quickly. It was just that the chess pieces couldn't be chess pieces to her. They had shapes and titles and social status. They lived in their own little world.

Before long, every single chess piece had a name—including two pawns who were named Boogity Boogity and Shoo. Each piece came complete with a lengthy backstory. It had its own hopes, fears, likes, and dislikes.

So, when Valerie and Elena sat down to play, the game went something like this: First, Valerie would move. Then Elena's pieces would all huddle together and discuss.

“Did you see that? It's happening again! They're creeping up on us!”

“You're lucky! You're big and strong. We're half your size, and you've stuck us out here in front!” This was a common complaint from the pawns, who seemed to have their own union.

“Don't worry, my little ones. Nothing bad will happen to you. Butter Fat will save us.” Butter Fat was one of the knights.

Thusly appointed, Butter Fat would sally into the fray, and Valerie would move another piece.

“It's the queen! The evil queen! Queen Tiger Lily is coming! She'll turn us into statues for her garden!”

“Elena! Would you just shut up and
move
?”

Another couple of exchanges, and Elena would lose her knight.

“Aaaauuugh! The evil queen killed Butter Fat! She carried him away with her magic spells!”

“You have to protect us! We nominate you. You have to face her in single combat!”

“No, no! Don't make me go out there! Don't make me go out there
alooooone
!”

And Valerie would lose her patience.

“MOM!”

In spite of the difficulties of the refereeing process, watching my girls play together was one of the greatest joys of my life. Hearing their careless voices laughing or chattering healed a part of my soul that had been damaged long before they were born.

If I were to sum up my own childhood in one word, it would be
lonely
.

I was the last of three children born to a busy engineer and an absentminded English professor. My parents had both been perfectly happy to call their family complete with the two boys they already had. My brothers were close to one another in age but substantially older than I was, so for most of my growing-up years, I was barely an annoying blip on their radar.

My father commuted two hours a day in addition to his work time, and his own projects out in the garage involved activities like sawing and welding—not safe undertakings for someone watching a toddler. This threw me back on my mother's company, and she took a novel approach to the problem. Rather than do what some mothers do—set aside her career and life goals in order to look after this last small child—my mother did exactly the opposite. She taught me how to sit quietly and amuse myself with some small toys, and then she took me with her everywhere she went.

I went to appointments, meetings, and events. I went to faculty parties and long evenings with my mother's friends. I went to the enormous university library, where I sat next to the copy machine and colored while she copied endless pages, and into her office, where I played carefully with a sheet of carbon paper while she typed out exams and met with students. I went to movies far beyond my understanding. I sat through
2001: A Space Odyssey
when I was three. At four, I was attending my mother's summer-school Milton course, sitting in a desk at the back of the room and taking it all in.

It must have seemed strange to the other adults that the small me had such flawless manners. Those manners were flawless because I understood one simple fact: they were essential to my happiness. If I were to break down and have tantrums, my mother would have to leave me at home, and I didn't want that to happen.

I loved spending time with my clever, pretty mother. She treated me with respect, and she shared her life and her friends with me. When I asked her questions, she took them seriously and did her best to explain. As little notice as the rest of my family took of my existence, it was worth hours of silence to have the chance to go places with her.

My mother spent hours each week with her closest friends. Unused to children, those friends treated me like an odd but surprisingly thoughtful little adult. They greeted me fondly and made me feel at home. I identified with them more and more as I grew past my toddler years, and although I couldn't understand much of what they talked about, the images my imagination showed me while they held their scholarly discussions were absolutely enthralling.

By the time I was five, I was listening avidly to everything the grownups said, and I stored up questions to ask my mother on the way home. I could read the emotions of adults as they turned from earnest argument to angry sarcasm, and I could follow the details of their complex debates. Needless to say, my vocabulary skills were off the chart.

It seemed to me by this time as if I had been born understanding how adults thought. It was understanding children that I had trouble with. Their silly dramatics often surprised and baffled me. They didn't
understand my big words, so I couldn't have meaningful conversations with them, and they changed from hot to cold in a flash. My best friend in the morning might be swearing she'd never speak to me again by noon, and then the next morning, she'd want to be friends again.

Adult friends didn't do that sort of thing. They were loyal. They could be trusted.

As first grade crept by, I learned how to get along with my peers. I had a boyfriend and a group of friendly classmates who listened to my ideas about what game to play next. I grew to love recess in first grade. I ran and shouted and skipped rope and had a great time.

Nevertheless, the people who really mattered to me were the people I had grown up with. My mother's close friends meant more to me than the other members of my own family did. They had been a constant presence in my life, and they noticed my ups and downs. They asked how I was doing, and they listened to my sober explanations of my childish adventures.

I felt sure that these were people who really loved me.

Then, when I was in second grade, my mother went through a religious conversion of sorts, and she and her closest friends had a falling-out. From one day to the next, those friends were gone from my life.