Read Online Saturday's Child by Robin Morgan - Free Book Online Page A

leave that the two of them told me I couldn’t take him with us. Mommie said we were too busy to care for him, and they both burbled the usual adult inanities that he’d be well cared for and they’d never thought I’d grow so attached to him in such a short time when all they’d meant was for me to enjoy having a pet for a while. He was pulled him out of my arms and passed to the neighbor, as both he and I howled our mutual loss.
    I’ve never forgiven the well-meaning cruelty of that temporary gift, the unspoken lie that it was for keeps. A few years later, when I was working steadily in television, Mommie and Aunt Sally announced I could have apet. I requested a Happy—but was informed that walking a dog was a time-consuming nuisance, and that I wasn’t old enough to have such responsibility (the irony of this was not lost on me). Instead, Aunt Sally came home one day with a small aquarium and three miniature turtles—the kind whose tiny shells some pet stores hideously painted with patterns or faces, a practice now fortunately as illegal as dyeing chicks pastel colors for sale around Easter. I had been reading about the Round Table myths in the Junior Classics series, so I named the turtles Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot. But turtles were unsatisfying; you couldn’t cuddle a turtle, and gazing into its beady eyes only served to remind you it was a cold-blooded creature, a reptile.
    I resented the turtles, who gave little pleasure but required work to demonstrate (again) my responsibility. Their smelly water had to be changed, and their little shells scrubbed lightly with a nail brush to remove accumulated slime. They had to be fed their turtle food plus shreds of lettuce on a regular schedule. They showed no affection in return, of course. “Their God is not my God,” D. H. Lawrence wrote of fish, which fairly describes my attitude toward those turtles, an attitude only intensified on finding, one day, that owing to my having been remiss about feeding them twice in a row, Lancelot had become impatient and eaten Arthur. Because he was so thorough, this sad fact wasn’t revealed until a week or so later, during which time we searched the apartment for a theoretically escaped Arthur, to no avail. It was only when I horribly repeated my carelessness about feeding them that the awful truth emerged—because Guinevere devoured Lancelot, but daintily left part of a tiny claw and some shell shard as a clue to why she seemed so sluggish but content.
    I felt like a murderer, aware for the first time how thin the tissue is that separates the power to help from the power to harm. I did care for Guinevere solicitously until the day of her death, which was of apparently natural causes. I declined the offer of replacement reptiles, and was again denied a dog. So I gave up on pets, at least as a child.
    Only as a grown woman did I discover the glory of cats.
    There is something missing here, in this telling of perks and rewards, however limited.
    It’s not the sense that one is “special”—because that can vanish pretty quickly, plummeting one’s emotions to the nether side of unworthiness. I don’t know if the particular reward I’m groping toward describing is a reward at all, and I don’t know if it’s been experienced by all or even most child actors. Somehow, I’m afraid not, or their lives might’ve turned out a bit saner and more fulfilling. Ultimately, I can speak only for myself. But to do so honestly means admitting the recognition (with hindsight) that there was one beneficent legacy—a more accurate term than reward—bequeathed me by my working childhood.
    It was the idea that work could be something one loved doing .
    I don’t mean by this that I loved performing. Sometimes I enjoyed it, sometimes I detested it, mostly it was just a given. But I did like being good at what I did—anybody does—and I was