Growing Girls Read online

  Maybe one of the reasons I even had the prison fantasy was because of the notion of already having been convicted. Whew. Done. Now let me get myself into my cell, and, by the way, is there any chance I could upgrade to a padded one?

  And so. There we were sitting in our accountant’s office, and John Daller our accountant pointed to the poster of the time share in Aruba, a glorious photo of an azure blue sea with a little coconut-tree hut in the foreground. And that was that.

  When we got to Aruba, I sat in one of those very same huts and I wore a big hat and I tried to read a book. That used to be a very enjoyable activity but now it was a war of conscience. The problem is, a lot can happen to a four-and-a-half-year-old child while you are sneaking your way into a chapter, and even more can happen to a two-and-a-half-year-old. Every little paragraph felt like a naughty treat and then I would imagine explaining to the ambulance driver that I just had to turn the page to find out if the wife really was cheating or not—it was coming up on the next page!—and that’s all I did, I just read that one tiny next paragraph and then when I looked up my kid was hanging from the jaws of that shark; I swear I had no idea how she even got into the water in the first place!

  It’s not worth it, all the places your imagination takes you when you are stealing your way out of motherhood and into being a normal person who just wants to read a damn book on the beach.

  My friend Nancy told me that going on vacation wasn’t the same once you were a mom, but I think she held back telling me the whole thing. Her husband, Jack, is a good father, and so is my husband. These are not the type of men to go off to the casino or even to put back bourbons. They are “family” men who want nothing more than to be right there in family mode, sticking always by our sides. Even so, it always comes back to the mother to keep the kids from getting bitten by crabs or scorched by the sun or electrocuted by putting their fingers in the sockets of the little speakers put around so the vacationers can enjoy calypso music.

  In Aruba, Sasha wore a pink bikini with pictures of turtles on it. She wasn’t talking yet but I wasn’t worried. When people asked me how old she was, I said two, leaving out the “and a half” part, and I think that little slip, that omission, was probably a good indicator of the denial I was in. Kids at two and a half are supposed to have a vocabulary of about three hundred words. Sasha had seven, but only if you really stretched it. She had three reliable sounds: “Ma,” meaning “Mom,” “Dat,” meaning “Dad,” and “Iss,” meaning “this,” and which she would use while pointing to get whatever she needed. “Iss” was a refined version of her former “sss” sound she would use as her one and only all-purpose word.

  No, I told myself, I really wasn’t worried. After all, Anna had been very slow to talk, too. Anna said nothing but “ch” for an entire year. I was used to this, to Lisa, the speech therapist who would come to our house with her Pooh toys two times a week and clap as Anna learned new sounds. Plenty of kids who come out of orphanages from China don’t have speech delays at all, but plenty do. Lisa had seen her share. Her theory was simple and shared by many of those experts who write in language-acquisition journals: disruption at about a year old is at a critical stage in language development—the very time the child is starting to mimic the people in the world around her. So, imagine, one day it’s all music and tone and ee-ow, and then, bam, the next it’s a strange nasal mess of clicks and clacks. The development shuts down, while the pathways in the brain rejigger themselves. But soon enough, with patience and some speech therapy to boost and encourage, language emerges again, and anew.

  By the time Anna was three she was well on her way to speaking, although her path to language was the weirdest Lisa and her colleagues had ever observed. Rather than imitating sounds, the key for Anna was the alphabet. The actual symbols. She loved those things. We’d be at the grocery store and see a sign for grapes and Anna would run up and point. “G!” she’d say, looking at the sign and giving me a look of “Can you believe it? G is here!”

  The symbols were her friends. When Lisa couldn’t get her to say “ball,” she finally picked up a block with a “B” on it. “Buh buh buh,” she said, pointing to the letter. That got Anna’s attention. (“Yay! B is here!”) And so she would mimic “buh” and that got her revved up to go all the way into “ball.” And so came word after word.

  I was eager for Anna to speak because I felt she would have so much to say. I felt I would get to know her better when she finally had a spoken form for her thoughts. What, anyway, is a person without language? Who is a girl with nothing more to offer than “ch” or “sss”?

  When Anna finally started talking, the thing I learned was how much she loved the alphabet, the actual symbols, and she also loved numbers, the actual symbols, she loved them in blue and in pink and in red and in combinations aplenty.

  The thing is, she was the same girl she was when all she said was “ch.” She was just… a little more so. She was growing up and into herself. I’m not convinced words changed anything, even though the thought disappoints me. I wanted language to be the key, not for Anna so much as my exalted sense of language. I spend my days with words, putting my thoughts into written form. Giving language to my thoughts is the only way I even know what my thoughts are. Anyone knows that words are what separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Surely language is where people begin being people.

  This, anyway, is the indoctrination. This is the assumption you walk around with, having been schooled on the principle of words as the building blocks of communication. True enough. But what about the stuff underneath the building blocks? The rocks and the dirt and the mud of emotion? Like all babies, Anna laughed long before she spoke; she laughed in my arms the first day I held her. Jokes are funny in Chinese and in Arabic and in French and in Infant-ese. A bassoon can tell a joke and so can a flute and a cat can do something very, very funny. But among creatures, only people can laugh. Laughter, I think, is where people begin being people.

  I wanted Sasha to have a breakthrough just as Anna had had with the alphabet. Lisa started coming to our house in May of that year, when Sasha was twenty-six months old, and she tested Sasha every which way. Sasha proved to be on target for cognitive development as well as fine-motor development, while ahead of the game, testing at the level of a twenty-nine-month-old, for gross-motor skills. Today Sasha was observed to throw a ball at least three feet and walked along a line of tape on the floor. Sasha can do a somersault with ease.

  Language acquisition in children is divided into two components: receptive, meaning the words the child comprehends, and expressive, the words she can actually say. Sasha scored on target for receptive. She is beginning to respond to basic prepositions such as “in,” “out,” “on.” Sasha also can identify several body parts and will point to pictures in a book when asked. But her expressive-language development was placed at a paltry fourteen months. She was a toddler with the communication skills of an infant.

  There was one line in Lisa’s report that none of us made a big enough deal of at the time: Sasha tends to point and use gestures creatively to express her wants/needs.

  Creatively.

  In Aruba there was a playground on the beach near the little coconut-tree hut and my girls were playing and so were two older girls, maybe eight and ten, both with long blonde hair. Anna was busy smushing wet sand through her toes and fingers and then painting her legs with “A,” “B,” and “C” and then making designs on her cheeks like war paint. Anna has always been this way. She can entertain herself with a stone and a feather.

  Sasha was watching the blonde-haired girls. At first I thought it was their acrobatics that caught her attention. The older girls had mastered the swinging bridge made of hanging tires and soon enough they took to leaping off it and then diving into somersaults in the sand. Sasha watched and watched with those eyes that held so much, those eyes that held so much in China when she was in my arms for the first time, a frozen little girl with a bald head and arms curled int
o her chest in fear. And now here she was a nineteen-pound peanut in a pink bikini.

  In one swift motion, Sasha picked up a shell and walked over to the smaller of the two girls. She offered the shell to the girl. “Oh, thank you,” the girl said, taking it. And so Sasha picked up another shell and offered it to the other girl, who likewise took it.

  “Aw, she’s so cute!” said one to the other.

  Sasha did not smile. Instead, she held out her hands and demanded both shells back.

  The girls obliged, giggling.

  All three stood there for a moment.

  “Iss!” Sasha said, looking at the shells. Then she dropped them, one in front of each girl. She pointed to the ground. Iss!

  “She-is-so-cute!” the taller girl said to the other, both seeming to instinctively understand the order to bend down and pick up the shells. And so they obeyed.

  I felt as if I was watching some sort of mating dance, with Sasha in charge. All action, no language. And yet she was so willing and so able to communicate an invitation for friendship—a friendship on her terms.

  In time the girls were at the bottom of the sliding board, encouraging Sasha, who was at the top of it. “Come on! You can do it! We’ll catch you!”

  Sasha sat up there and pondered. Then she waved her hand in a wiping motion. “Iss!” she shouted.

  “You want us to wipe off the slide?” the short one asked her.

  Sasha nodded in the affirmative.

  “There’s sand on the slide!” the tall one said. “We have to get it off!”

  So they did, while the little peanut in the pink turtle bikini sat on high and watched and waited. A queen. A ruler. A girl for whom language was a royal waste of time.

  Eventually, the girls approached me. They told me they were cousins, Julia and Jennifer. “Will you be here tomorrow?” asked Julia. “Because we would like to play with her after Bingo.”

  I told them we would be and they jumped with happiness. “High five?” Jennifer said to Sasha, holding up her hand for a slap. Sasha had no clue what this meant and so the girls taught her.

  After that, we spent every afternoon in Aruba with Jennifer and Julia, both of them waiting on Sasha and occasionally waiting on Anna but just to be polite. The thing that got me was the realization that Sasha would spend her life being popular demanding it, getting it. I figured Anna would or wouldn’t be, but probably wouldn’t care.

  It was easy to see that Sasha’s claim on the world predated her mastery of spoken words. I wondered how much of that was true of all of us. Before we learn to say hello, have we learned how to be, how to manage who we are? I always thought language was the key to knowing, to understanding, and maybe that’s true except when it comes to knowing the self. We all cry and we all laugh before we speak. We are emotion first, thought second. And I suppose word whenever we get around to it.

  That summer Sasha said her first sentence. “Beez a beez a beez a beez?” This means, “May I please be excused?” We all knew it the minute she said it, thanks to her posture and beckoning with her eyes, but mostly because Anna confirmed it. Further complicating Sasha’s attempt to talk was the fact that Anna understood much of what she said. When you have an interpreter, you aren’t as motivated to learn the local lingo.

  There was still a lot of summer left so I decided to have the girls help me cut a path through the woods. Together we would snip, snip, snip through the sticker bushes and make it to the top of the hill.

  “Be careful of those jaggers,” Anna said to Sasha.

  “Jaggers” was a word she must have picked up in preschool. It’s a Western Pennsylvania word. I was born in Eastern Pennsylvania, where we said “sticker bushes.”

  “Anna,” I said. “We don’t say ‘jaggers’; we say ‘sticker bushes.’”

  “‘Sticker bushes’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sasha,” she said. “Be careful of the sticker bushes because they can hurt your fingies.” She paused. “Mom, do we say ‘fingies’?”

  “Sure.”

  This was how we talked. This was who we were. We never said “butt.” We said “bummy.” We always said please and thank you and before we left the table we all said, “Beez a beez a beez a beez?” ever since Sasha invented it.

  Every family has a language and this was ours. You bring jaggers or sticker bushes from your youth, and then there were all those invented words like “fingies” and “eggy-egg” and “niptydoops” that mysteriously fly in, if only for a little while, like colorful birds.

  “Momma,” Anna said. “Does Daddy say ‘sticker bushes’?”

  “Yes, he does,” I said. (Or he would now.)

  We were about three feet into the impossible thicket. I could see a small clearing on the other side of a partition of thorns, a break. A destination. We were working single file. I snipped, they stomped. We had never embarked on a project nearly this ambitious. I figured it would take months, a little each week. There was no rush. We didn’t need the path. There were plenty of other avenues up the hill. I loved the woods and wanted a reason to introduce the girls to them.

  I began to think of the woods in the same way I thought of Sasha’s language. A new path. A clearing. A deliberate attempt to get from here to there.

  “What about this one?” Anna asked, pointing to an innocuous branch on the ground.

  “Well, that’s the kind you just step over,” I said. “We don’t have to cut that one.”

  “We’re not going to cut this one?” she said, disappointed.

  “Honey, you can just step over stuff. We don’t have to cut every single thing.”

  “Come on, Sash,” she said. “We have to step over this one.”

  I imagined, one day, when the girls are ten and twelve or sixteen and eighteen, walking with them on this path, reminiscing about this time. I imagined a time when they’re thirty-four and thirty-six and I’m hobbled with arthritic knees, watching squirrels collecting acorns from the corner of my nursing home window. They’ll be out here together, just for old times, saying, “Can you believe Mom made us do this?”

  “Sasha, say ‘sticker bush,’” Anna said. “Sticker bush? Stiiiiicker buuuuush?”

  “Ssss,” Sasha said.

  “No, that’s not right, Sash.”

  “Ssss,” Sasha said more urgently. I looked to see she was pointing at a stick on the ground.

  “That’s right, sweetie, we’re not going to cut that one. That’s the kind you just step over.”

  “Sss! Sss!” Sasha said, her frustration growing.

  “Anna, what is she saying?”

  “I don’t know, Mommy. I don’t know!”

  “Sss!” Sasha implored. “Sss!” Her face got red. She began blinking furiously. “Sss!”

  And then she started to cry.

  “What is she saying? What? What is the matter?”

  “I don’t know, Mommy! I don’t know!” Anna kept saying.

  “SSS!”

  Anna started to cry.

  It went on like this, two children crying over nothing, or maybe one crying over something and the other over nothing, the one feeding the other.

  “Okay, okay, it’s okay!” I said.

  I picked up Sasha and I held Anna’s hand. We headed home and I never found out what happened.

  One day I was in the shower shampooing and I heard a horrible sound that might have been a tree falling on our house. But it was quicker than that. It wasn’t a boom or a thump or a pow, but a crack, sharp and angry. Then: nothing.

  I came charging out of the shower, ran down to the kitchen, where Alex and the girls were eating eggs. All three were mid-chew, their eyes bugged out. “What was that?” “Are you okay?” “What was that?” Something big had happened. Outside, the rain was beating on the geraniums.

  “My, what a big noise!” I said cheerfully, but the girls picked up my fear and reached for comfort. Together we tiptoed around the house, looking for the answer to the noise. In the living room we smelled smok
e. We saw a hole in the wall, about the size of a quarter, with scorch marks around the edges. “Okay, we were hit by lightning,” Alex said. Overreacting, but maybe not, I took the girls outside and we sat in the car above the safety of rubber tires while Alex investigated, making sure our home wasn’t about to blow up. After a few minutes he seemed pretty sure it wasn’t.

  So many things were … off. A clock had fallen off the wall. There were holes in the gutters. There were more holes in the living room walls. Ajar of peanut butter had jumped off the dining room table and landed upside down on a chair. It seemed the work of ghosts. Skippy, our mule, was out there chasing one of our four fat geese. The goose, white and flapping, appeared terrified. Skippy had never shown any interest in the geese before. “Skippy, leave that goose alone!” There had been a pot of petunias on the picnic table near where the goose was flapping—but the pot was missing. The petunias were right where they had been before the storm, centered on the picnic table, but the pot was four feet away on the ground. How did the pot get out from under the petunias?

  It seemed like a whole bunch of magic tricks were going on with no real purpose or scheme; the lightning had just done a random reformatting of things. Nothing seemed too crazy and so at one point I went and checked on Sasha to see if the lightning had given her the gift of speech.