Cambridge (17 page)

There was a showy burst of heat for Labor Day, but it was untrustworthy. The sun was low and the sand wasn’t hot. It had been almost too hot to walk on at the start of August. The top sand was still warm, but when I dug around with my toe, the sand underneath was cool and moist and a bit sticky. It clumped together, as if it were snow.

The gulls stood in a line looking out over the waves, guarding the water from our approach. It was their beach and they were reclaiming it right under our noses. Wind pushed their feathers out at odd angles. They looked messy and threatening. Tumble-weedy balls of eelgrass rolled around on the stiff, wind-starched sand. It wasn’t inviting out there anymore. It wasn’t ours.

On the last day, while the mothers were organizing and packing, A.A. took Roger and me to the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown. We walked up a hundred pee-smelling stairs to the crenellated tower top. The whole Cape stretched out below us, looking more like a map of itself than a real place, looking small and perfectly colored, as if by hand: pale green with scallopy white edges floating in a blue-tending-toward-black sea.

“It really is an arm,” Roger said.

“There’s Hyannis at the elbow,” A.A. told us.

“No, no, Papa, that’s Chatham.”

“Hmm,” said A.A. “You could be right.”

A.A. was so nice. Why was he so nice? Suddenly, I felt sad. Now it was all over, now we had to leave. We had to drive all the way up that arm and go back to the city.

As we walked down the hundred stairs I thought about how
I didn’t like life. Life was always something new. I didn’t like something new. I liked the same thing over and over. Even at that moment, I could see there was a logical flaw in this version of myself, since until I’d been on the Cape and had the bay-and-ocean thing over and over, it had been something new. That is, something I didn’t like. And I thought as well of how England had been the same thing over and over, but I hadn’t liked that.

“You know, I’m really looking forward to fourth grade,” Roger said.

The Greeks

Miss Evie Ward looked like a wren. She was plump in the breast and had a tidy russet head that was stripey, like a wren’s. Her hair was a mix of auburn and brown, thick, straight, and tucked neatly behind her ears. She was leaning against her desk, surveying us. “Let’s rearrange the classroom,” she said.

We all got up, clattering.

“Let’s make a circle,” she said. “I’ll stay here near the blackboard, and you be all around me.”

With more clattering, we made a horseshoe out of our desks and dragged our chairs into place.

“That’s better,” she said. “Now we’re all together and I can see everyone and everyone can see me.” She smiled. She had small teeth.

“This is the year of the Greeks,” she said. “This is the year you’re going to begin to understand the world, because everything that matters, the Greeks started it.”

Roger put his hand up. “Miss Ward, what about the Chinese?”

“Aha!” she said. “What about them? And you can call me Miss Evie.”

“Didn’t they invent lots of important things? Didn’t they invent paper and pottery and gunpowder?”

“Gunpowder,” said Miss Evie. “They certainly invented that. And you might be right about paper. But I’m sure they didn’t invent pottery. People all over the world invented pottery. I don’t think the Chinese can take credit.”

“Miss Evie!” Roger was wiggling his hand again.

She looked at her class list. “Are you Roger?” she asked.

Roger nodded. “But what I want to know is, didn’t they invent pottery, really?”

Miss Evie tilted her head at Roger. “I bet you like to read the encyclopedia,” she said.

“I do!” Roger was pleased.

“Look under Sumerians,” she said. “That’s S-U-M-”

“I know about the Sumerians,” Roger interrupted.

“Okay. Then see what the encyclopedia has to say about Sumerian pottery. Then look under India—”

“So you’re saying the Chinese didn’t invent pottery?”

Miss Evie looked as if she’d gotten irritated and had then decided not to be irritated. That took a minute.

“Roger, how about this,” she said. “You could look up pottery, and see when the Chinese started making it and when the Sumerians started making it, and the Indians and the Egyptians. You could make what’s called a timeline and bring that in to class. Would you like to do that?”

Roger was, I could tell, weighing the hours it would take to do that against the hours he’d planned to spend in the basement with his model airplanes. The Chinese won, for the moment. “Yes,” he said. “I can do that.”

“That will be good for all of us,” Miss Evie said. “Greek civilization didn’t just come out of nowhere, and this will show us about that. But the Greeks were especially devoted to beauty, and they thought hard about the best and the most beautiful way to do all the things everyone around them was doing, like making pottery and writing poems and building temples. They had a special affinity for balance and perfection.”

“Why?” I asked. It popped out. I hadn’t planned to say anything.

“It’s a mystery,” said Miss Evie. “Now and then there are big upheavals and changes, and nobody really knows why. These days, some historians think it had to do with food. There were plenty of farmers growing lots of food, so people in the cities could stop worrying about getting enough to eat. And that gave them the time and energy to think—to think hard.” She pointed
at us. “So, if you want to be like the Greeks and think beautiful thoughts, eat a good breakfast, right?”

“Yes, Miss Evie,” the class intoned.

During the neither-this-nor-that week between our return from the Cape and the start of school, A.A. had taken me and Roger to the Museum of Fine Arts. He’d pitched the outing to Roger as a visit to some Bigelows—and there were several ancestral landscapes hanging in a dim corridor between Colonial furniture and Colonial silver. I thought A.A. and Ingrid had better ones. They had a picture of the big Venetian piazza and a picture of Mount Etna and a nice big waterfall somewhere in the West. The museum ones were just a bunch of lakes and woods in upstate New York. Then we headed to the Egyptians, where Roger and I liked to scare ourselves in the replica of a tomb, a narrow, stony universe whose walls were covered with thousands of tiny hawks and tiny cows and tiny people all walking in the same direction. There was a special Egyptian-tomb smell in there that added to the scare; it smelled like dead stone. Roger invariably extended his hands in a zombie way and said, I am a mummy and I curse you, and that always gave me the shivers even though I knew he was going to do it.

But we took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in the Far East.

“Gosh,” said A.A., “I haven’t been here in ages.”

“Papa, the tomb,” Roger objected.

“Well, let’s just see,” A.A. said, ambling down the hallway. “Look, that’s pretty good.” He stopped in front of a stone dragon on a pedestal. It was all curly, including its tongue, which was sticking out at us.

The next room was full of weapons: bronze semicircular axes
incised with twisty designs, and shields that were discs with points in the middle that looked like bosoms to me. There were cabinets stuffed with armor, interlocked chips of stone or metal to cover arms and legs and sheets of metal curved to fit a chest and helmets with nose slits. I thought it all looked like dismantled insects and I didn’t like it.

“Wow,” said Roger. “Why didn’t we come here before?”

“I guess I forgot about it,” said A.A. “It’s been years since I ventured in here. Let’s go farther. The earliest stuff is in the back.”

We walked past a scroll that went on and on. I liked that. Part of what was interesting was thinking about the frame. It was as long as our living room.

“How did they make a frame like that?” I asked.

A.A. paused to look at it with me. “It’s very long,” he agreed. “What’s it about?” He leaned closer. “Oh,” he said suddenly, “what a great monkey.”

I had to stand on tiptoe to see. It was quite a large monkey, with snow on its head. To the left, some mountains. To the right, some other mountains. Even though the scroll was dozens of feet long, nothing seemed to be happening. Snow, mountains, some little people, and the monkey.

“It isn’t about anything,” I told A.A.

“Usually it’s about something,” he said. “And this one’s so long, it’s got to have a story. Often it’s the life of a philosopher.”

“And the monkey?” I asked.

“Wasn’t there a monkey king?” A.A. looked up at the ceiling, trying to remember. “Maybe I’m mixing it up with India.”

“Papa,” Roger called from ahead of us. “There’s a bell in here that’s bigger than you are.”

We spent the afternoon with the huge bells and the infinite
scrolls and the other strange Chinese and Japanese things, and it was in these circumstances, rather than by reading the encyclopedia, that Roger had become fixated on them.

“Here’s what I know about the Chinese,” A.A. said as we leaned over glass cabinets filled with jade inkpots. “They invented paper and they invented gunpowder. And this is the best part—Roger, you’ll like this. What they did with gunpowder was make fireworks. They loved fireworks.”

“They didn’t use it for guns?” Roger asked.

“They didn’t even think of guns. It didn’t occur to them to use it for anything but fireworks. It’s like inventing glass but never thinking of making a window. Interesting, isn’t it? War just wasn’t on their minds that much.”

Roger looked around at the weaponry. “All they thought about was war,” he said. “Look at this stuff.”

“Hmm,” said A.A. “Well, I guess I meant something about categories of thought. Gunpowder was in the aesthetic category.”

A.A. and Roger were having a better time with the Chinese than I was. I thought the things were fussy. There were too many curlicues and embellishments for me. When we got to the bowls and plates, though, my opinion changed.

“Hey,” I said. “Look at this black-and-blue bowl.” It wasn’t very big, about the size of a cereal bowl. The black was on the lower part and then it oozed into being blue, and the blue went over into the inside.

“The Chinese invented porcelain,” A.A. said. “I don’t know how I could have forgotten that.”

Hence Roger’s contention, the following week, that the Chinese had invented pottery.

•   •   •

“Not pottery, porcelain,” Ingrid said on the weekend. “Pfffh.” She shook her head. Who couldn’t distinguish between pottery and porcelain?

“What’s the difference?” asked Roger.

“Big difference.” Ingrid took a white Rosenthal dinner plate out of the draining board and held it up. “Look. It’s so thin you can almost see through it.” She put that down and grabbed a teacup out of the cupboard. “And this is old Meissen my mother brought from Vienna and you can see right through that. Look.” She handed it to me.

It was painted with pink and blue morning glories and didn’t weigh anything.

“Hold it up, hold it up,” Ingrid told me.

I put it to my eye and looked toward the window.

“It’s true! I can see the window,” I said. The window looked pink and blue.

“Let me try,” said Roger.

“Pottery is heavy and thick,” said Ingrid. She looked around for some. “Here.” She dumped the oranges out of the blue fruit bowl onto the
New York Times
that lay half read on the table. “See? Can’t look through this. Breaks, too. Porcelain is strong.”

“Like if I dropped it, it wouldn’t break?” Roger asked, holding the teacup in a precarious, threatening manner with one finger.

Ingrid motioned him to give it back to her. When he did, she said, “Anything can break if you’re not careful.”

“Hey, Ingrid,” I said. “Is that why it’s called china?”

“What,” said Ingrid.

“Is that why china is called china?”

“I don’t know. Probably not,” Ingrid said.

When I got home I looked it up. That was why. China the thing was named for China the place. I thought how funny that was. Suppose there was a thing called cambridge—forks,
or bread, or a roof? I sat in the window seat pretending that a roof was called a cambridge. It just didn’t seem workable. But it must have been strange at the beginning of calling porcelain china too.

Everybody loved fourth grade and Miss Evie except me, of course. I didn’t hate it, but I had some objections. Miss Evie bothered me. She reminded me of my mother. She sneakily made me like her, but underneath I didn’t actually like her. One reason was, I saw that she didn’t like Roger, though she paid a lot of attention to him. Roger was strange, even I knew that. But I loved him. I loved his obsessive, whiny, persistent ways. He was like a nice fly. When he decided he wanted something,
buzz, buzz
, he would pester until he got it. And he was funny-looking. His head was too big and too thin in some way. It looked like a skull, not a head. Sometimes I’d look at him in class (he sat a few chairs away in the circle to my right) and see him as if he were someone new: pale, skinny arms, big head, fuzzy, long, thick, pale eyelashes. Miss Evie probably saw that, when she looked at him.

So Miss Evie was a sneak who didn’t like Roger. Two bad things. Then there was the problem of the theme. It was like England, where we’d had to pretend we were living in caves because of early man. The Greeks were a thousand times more interesting than early man, but we were just as trapped. It was as if I’d been condemned to live in a world with only one color. Even if that color had been, say, green, my favorite color, I still would have missed the other colors.

And I had another problem. Parts of me seemed to be disappearing. I didn’t understand what was happening. Something was happening—something was eating up my insides or chewing up my past. It was hard to know what it was. It was even
hard to know what it felt like. That was part of what was terrible about it. Was I asleep? Was I dead? Was I sick? I seemed to be asleep, mainly. But it wasn’t the sort of lively, hating sleep I’d had in second and third grade, when I’d slept because I felt school was a waste of my time. That had been intentional; this was out of my control. It came in waves, a death-wave of not-feeling, not-seeing, not-caring. Then I’d come back to life, but each time I felt I’d left something down there under the waves. I was getting smaller. I was getting quieter. I was getting—really, the only word for it was
boring
.