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.
I’d come back from these death dives with a shred of a memory, like of my father putting me to bed when I was four. A little memory. He used to sing to me. He couldn’t sing at all. It was croaking. Every night he groaned out “The Skye Boat Song.” “Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing, Onward, the sailors cry. Carry the lad that’s born to be king over the sea to Skye.” When I was about five, my mother played this song for me on the piano and I learned its real tune, not my father’s croak-tune. Then I could sing it with him when he put me to bed. He told me about the p
rince who’d been hidden in Scotland waiting to get on the throne of England. In the dark, with the bulk of my father’s body making my narrow bed tilt to the side, I’d picture the island as blue and frothy, like its wonderful name. There was a line I specially liked: “Baffled, our foes stand on the shore, follow they will not dare.” Why were they baffled? I asked. Because they couldn’t navigate the waters, my father said. They weren’t from Scotland and they didn’t know how to get around in that part of the sea.
Now and then he sang a different one: “You’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland before you.” Why? I asked. I guess the low road was quicker for some reason, my father said. Then soulfully, sadly, croakily, he’d conclude it: “But me and my true love, we’ll never meet again, on the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.” Why? I asked. Why wouldn’t they meet again? He didn’t have an answer.
It was terribly sad. Even my father’s atonal rendition couldn’t disguise or subdue the sadness in that tune and those words, and sometimes I cried when he sang it. He didn’t sing it often.
Thinking of these things now, in fourth grade, I felt they had happened to somebody else. I wasn’t that person anymore. I could make myself teary by singing “You’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road” to myself, and I would do that, to try to be once again the little girl in the bed, with the tuneless father sitting by. But it didn’t work. I wasn’t that little girl, and me and my father would never meet again on the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.
Eventually I had to leave the Isle of Skye and Loch Lomond down at the bottom, under the waves I kept sinking into. Likewise the vivid pictures in Struwwelpeter, a book my father had adored when he was a child and had cajoled me into adoring as well, though it gave me nightmares. It frightened me, but I couldn’t leave it alone. I wanted to see the bad boy with his electrified hair and talon-nails, and the one who wouldn’t eat his dinner and turned into a stick, and the pair who were dipped in ink and became silhouettes. The very improbability of these stories, which offered some sort of protection, also made them scarier. That couldn’t possibly happen, I’d tell myself. Nobody is going to come and cut off my thumbs. So I don’t have to worry about that. Then I’d worry that because I was so sure it wouldn’t happen, it was going to happen.
But now I knew it wasn’t ever going to happen. If I thought of my thumbs being cut off, which I rarely did, I’d think: I used to be really afraid of that.
I’d been lots of things: scared and mad and curious, caught up in patrolling Cambridge on my bike and eavesdropping on grownups trying to figure out what they were up to. All that was over.
I wasn’t much of anything anymore. No matter how far down in myself I poked, I found empty, blank nobodyness. The worst part was the way the past seemed to have vanished. It hadn’t really vanished—or so I hoped. But it felt foreign. There wasn’t any continuity between now and what had gone before. I couldn’t even get nostalgic about it. The most I could manage was a sniffle over a Scottish song.
Only one thing could break through my stupor and make me feel something: my mother. She had decided to study Ancient Greek. She was horning in on my Greek year. Why was she doing it? It was like the piano. She wanted to make me look bad. She wandered around the house practicing. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon. She kept The Iliad in the kitchen and worked out lines while waiting for the water to come to a boil or the steak to be done. Zeta, eta, theta, iota. Her teacher was a dapper classics professor named Eli, with a dotted silk handkerchief in his sport coat breast pocket, who came Fridays. He had a devil-beard and green eyes and two-tone lace-up shoes. They sat on the sofa together and he read Pindar aloud and they laughed. Who did she think she was? Sometimes he stayed for dinner, just as Vishwa had in the old days.
But there was no more Vishwa. There was no more Frederika either. She’d gone back to Sweden. Their cross-country car trip in the Rambler had done them in, somehow. It had been a big September muddle. Frederika in tears, Jagdeesh coming over to discuss the situation, Vishwa not coming over. And now the house was quiet. I was alone on the third floor next to Frederika’s abandoned, dusty room, with her leftover, hand-me-down makeup from my mother in the cabinet above the bathroom sink.
The lipstick dried up and got waxy and the powder solidified into a cracked cake, and I plodded through my days. I didn’t care. It was easy to be dead. Now and then I got a jolt of hatred for my mother over the Greek competition, but that just encouraged me to enjoy my diminished self, because hating—and loving—took a lot of energy, and I didn’t have much of that.
I couldn’t understand what had happened between Frederika and Vishwa. I asked my mother about it, even though I didn’t want to talk to her. But it didn’t help. She couldn’t explain it. Maybe she didn’t know either. She had a lot of different versions of it.
“They are both stubborn,” she said.
Another time—I kept going back to her, picking at it—she said, “He is a fatalist and she is an optimist.”
“Am I a fatalist or an optimist?” I asked.
“You are more of a pessimist,” my mother said.
“What’s the difference?”
“A fatalist is cheerful. A fatalist believes that whatever happens was meant to happen and doesn’t fight it. A fatalist is brave and calm.” She looked at me with her intense eyebrows arched high. “You are not calm.”
She was right. I was pretending to be calm. I’d thought I was doing a pretty good job.
“And what about a pessimist?” I wanted to know. “What’s a pessimist like?”
“Just a disappointed optimist,” she said. “An optimist who doesn’t have enough backbone to stick to her beliefs.”
That didn’t sound good. I supposed she was talking about me.
“And that isn’t Vishwa at all,” she continued. “Which is why he’s a fatalist. Happy and resigned, unflappable, really. He always makes the best of whatever comes. Whereas Frederika is a big improver of things.”
Maybe she hadn’t been talking about me. Maybe it was like when she was making the shopping list and she’d stare at me until I thought she was angry and about to say a mean thing, and all she was doing was trying to think of what to get for dinner.
“I still don’t see what happened,” I said.
“I bet she tried to improve him,” my mother said.
The worst thing she said was, “What they love you for in the beginning is what they will hate you for in the end.”
I couldn’t get that out of my head.
It was a terrible idea, and I believed it. I had believed it before she said it, so hearing her say it was frightening because that made it true. I knew that inside me was an indigestible nastiness, which was bound to poke through and kill anything nice that had managed to grow between me and somebody else. I knew that my balkiness could be appealing at first. It made people want to help me, and plenty of people had tried: the man with the sticks in third grade, the solfège teacher, my mother at the piano bench. But one way or another, I defeated them all. I wore them down until they tired of me and my difficulty. My capacity for disappointing people was bigger than their capacity for putting up with me.
“Can you improve people?” I asked her.
My mother laughed. “You can bribe them to act better. Or try to scare them.” She shook her head. “It doesn’t work very well. Just look at you!”
What did she want from me? What was I supposed to be, that I so obviously wasn’t? I didn’t dare ask.
In late September I’d sat on Frederika’s bed while she cried into her open suitcase. She folded her shirts and skirts and her sweet lace-edged slips and packed them into tidy tear-splotched stacks. She rolled her marvelous Swedish tights that were red or lilac or dark green—colors American tights never came in—and jammed them into the toes of her shoes and sniffed and coughed from crying.
“Why?” I kept asking. “Why do you have to go away? I know you’re unhappy, but I could take care
of you. Stay here.”
On a normal day Frederika would have laughed and told me that it was her job to take care of me, but that day she didn’t.
“I must go back home,” she said. “It isn’t really home, though, now.” This started more crying. “I’m not sure where I belong now. Am I a Swedish person? Am I a sort of half-Indian, half-Swedish person? Am I an American person?”
“American,” I said. “Anybody can be an American person. If you just stay here, you’ll be American.” This seemed like a good solution.
She shook her head.
“Did Vishwa do mean things?” I asked.
“Vishwa is never mean,” said Frederika.
“I know,” I said. “Then why do you have to leave?”
“It’s time to go,” said Frederika. “Every story has an end. It’s time for the next story. This wonderful story is over now.”
“But, Frederika,” I wailed, “does it mean you don’t love me anymore either?”
“Of course not! I always love you. Always and always.” She sniffed. “And I always love Vishwa too.”
“But what am I going to do without you?”
“You were fine without me,” she said. “It’s only a few years that you have me.”
“You said you’d make another gingerbread house for Christmas. And little paper baskets for cookies to hang on the tree. And I hate school so much! Please, please, Frederika.” I suddenly had an idea. “I’ll go talk to Vishwa. He’ll listen to me. I’ll tell him, Be nice! Don’t be bad to Freddy.”
“Don’t you dare to,” she said. “Don’t you talk to him about me at all. Anyhow, he never did any bad things.”
“Did you do some bad things?” I hadn’t thought of that possibility before.
“Nobody did bad things.” She sat down on the bed. “Sometimes love just dies, that’s all.” Then she sobbed, a huge sob that seemed to pull all the air in the room into her chest.
“How can love die?” I asked. “I don’t understand. How does it die?”
“I don’t understand either,” said Frederika.