says.
At school, I am famous. Though the papers haven’t mentioned my name, everyone seems to know that I was there when the baby was found. I am asked for details, easy to deliver. I tell about hearing the cries and finding the infant and going to the hospital and being questioned by a detective.
“The sleeping bag was bloody?” Jo asks me at my locker. Jo is nearly as tall as my father. She has blond hair that streams back from her face, like the goddess at the prow of a Viking ship.
“A little,” I say. “It was mostly the towel that was bloody.”
“So when you give birth, there’s blood?” she asks.
“Of course,” I say.
“Where does the blood come from?”
“The placenta,” I say, banging my locker shut.
“Oh,” Jo says, puzzled.
The fact that I’d come from New York was regarded as exotic when I first arrived in New Hampshire. And it was certainly in my favor that I wasn’t a Masshole, which is how some of the locals refer to the people who live one state south. Still, I’ve worked it out that it will take at least two generations, maybe three, before the natives stop referring to my father and me as newcomers.
I have two friends at school—the Viking goddess and Roger Kelly. The three of us eat lunch together and share some classes, and Roger and I are in the school band. Making arrangements to see Jo or Roger after school or on weekends is difficult, however: everything has to be thought about in advance. Jo’s mother has made no secret of the fact that she hates the long drive up to our house, and I think she regards my father as suspicious. If there’s to be a sleepover, I usually stay at Jo’s. I don’t have sleepovers with Roger, of course, but we sometimes play basketball after school, and I come home on the late bus.
When I lived in New York, I had more than two friends. There were four fourth-grade classes in my elementary school alone, and there were three elementary schools in our town. I went to sleepovers often and had them at my house as well. I took dance lessons and gymnastics and was a Brownie and a Girl Scout. I had a lavender-and-white bedroom with a canopy bed, and I could fit six or seven girls and their sleeping bags on the thick carpet. We watched movies in the living room and then went upstairs at eleven, which is the latest my parents would let us stay up. We did our nails or played Truth or Dare until after midnight, learning how to fall down giggling without waking my parents.
When Clara was six months old, she was moved into her own bedroom next to mine. My friends liked to play with her when they came to visit. They tried to braid her hair, but she never had enough hair for any braid to be satisfying. Her room was yellow and orange and blue, largely because I’d painted one wall with yellow and orange and blue fish, in different shapes and sizes, fish such as you’d never come across in a lifetime, even in the Caribbean. I sometimes used to wonder, after we moved to New Hampshire, what the new owners did with that room, if they left the yellow and orange and blue fish swimming through the water, or if they painted the wall white, erasing my artwork the way our family seemed to have been erased—with one large roller.
When I first moved to Shepherd, I was ragged and raw and prone to sudden fits of weeping, difficult to hide in a one-room schoolhouse. To compensate for my lack of emotional control, I pretended to an air of weariness and disdain, as if as a New Yorker I was so far ahead of my peers that I hardly need bother to pay attention in class. I was disabused of this notion in a gradual way, and by May I’d finally caught up in math.
In the scrub on our land were dozens of raspberry bushes that my father and I stumbled across one July day the first summer in New Hampshire. We picked the berries and brought them back to the house and, for a time, ate them with everything (on cereal, on ice cream, with steak). Because there were more raspberries on
At school, I am famous. Though the papers haven’t mentioned my name, everyone seems to know that I was there when the baby was found. I am asked for details, easy to deliver. I tell about hearing the cries and finding the infant and going to the hospital and being questioned by a detective.
“The sleeping bag was bloody?” Jo asks me at my locker. Jo is nearly as tall as my father. She has blond hair that streams back from her face, like the goddess at the prow of a Viking ship.
“A little,” I say. “It was mostly the towel that was bloody.”
“So when you give birth, there’s blood?” she asks.
“Of course,” I say.
“Where does the blood come from?”
“The placenta,” I say, banging my locker shut.
“Oh,” Jo says, puzzled.
The fact that I’d come from New York was regarded as exotic when I first arrived in New Hampshire. And it was certainly in my favor that I wasn’t a Masshole, which is how some of the locals refer to the people who live one state south. Still, I’ve worked it out that it will take at least two generations, maybe three, before the natives stop referring to my father and me as newcomers.
I have two friends at school—the Viking goddess and Roger Kelly. The three of us eat lunch together and share some classes, and Roger and I are in the school band. Making arrangements to see Jo or Roger after school or on weekends is difficult, however: everything has to be thought about in advance. Jo’s mother has made no secret of the fact that she hates the long drive up to our house, and I think she regards my father as suspicious. If there’s to be a sleepover, I usually stay at Jo’s. I don’t have sleepovers with Roger, of course, but we sometimes play basketball after school, and I come home on the late bus.
When I lived in New York, I had more than two friends. There were four fourth-grade classes in my elementary school alone, and there were three elementary schools in our town. I went to sleepovers often and had them at my house as well. I took dance lessons and gymnastics and was a Brownie and a Girl Scout. I had a lavender-and-white bedroom with a canopy bed, and I could fit six or seven girls and their sleeping bags on the thick carpet. We watched movies in the living room and then went upstairs at eleven, which is the latest my parents would let us stay up. We did our nails or played Truth or Dare until after midnight, learning how to fall down giggling without waking my parents.
When Clara was six months old, she was moved into her own bedroom next to mine. My friends liked to play with her when they came to visit. They tried to braid her hair, but she never had enough hair for any braid to be satisfying. Her room was yellow and orange and blue, largely because I’d painted one wall with yellow and orange and blue fish, in different shapes and sizes, fish such as you’d never come across in a lifetime, even in the Caribbean. I sometimes used to wonder, after we moved to New Hampshire, what the new owners did with that room, if they left the yellow and orange and blue fish swimming through the water, or if they painted the wall white, erasing my artwork the way our family seemed to have been erased—with one large roller.
When I first moved to Shepherd, I was ragged and raw and prone to sudden fits of weeping, difficult to hide in a one-room schoolhouse. To compensate for my lack of emotional control, I pretended to an air of weariness and disdain, as if as a New Yorker I was so far ahead of my peers that I hardly need bother to pay attention in class. I was disabused of this notion in a gradual way, and by May I’d finally caught up in math.
In the scrub on our land were dozens of raspberry bushes that my father and I stumbled across one July day the first summer in New Hampshire. We picked the berries and brought them back to the house and, for a time, ate them with everything (on cereal, on ice cream, with steak). Because there were more raspberries on
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