Tending to Grace

1

We drive out Route 6 on a silent day at the end of May, my mother, the
boyfriend, and I. We pass villages with daisies at the doorsteps and laundry
hung in soft rows of bleached white. I want to jump out of the car as it
rushes along and wrap myself in a row of sheets hanging so low their feet
tap the grass. I want to hide because my life, if it were a clothesline, would
be the one with a sweater dangling by one sleeve, a blanket dragging in the
mud, and a sock, unpaired and alone, tumbling to the road with the wind at
its heel.
But I don’t say anything as we head east.
My mother is a look-away.

2

My teacher is a look-away.
I am a bookworm, a bibliophile, a passionate lover of books. I know
metaphor and active voice and poetic meter, and I understand that the
difference between the right word and the almost right word, as Samuel
Clemens said, is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
But I don’t talk, so no one knows. All they see are the days I miss school,
thirty-five one year, twenty-seven the next, forty-two the year after that. I
am a silent red flag, waving to them, and they send me to their counselors
and they ask me, “When are you going to talk about it, Cornelia?” I curl
myself into a ball and squish the feelings down to my toes and they don’t
know what to make of me so they send me back to this class where we get
the watered-down Tom Sawyer with pages stripped of soul and sentences as
straight and flat as a train track.
We read that the new boy in Tom Sawyer ran like a deer, while the kids in
the honors class read that he “turned tail and ran like an antelope.”
I know because I read that book, too.

3

Sam finishes reading; Allison begins. Up one row and down another we go
like a set of dominoes, each kid taking a turn at reading aloud and me
waiting for my morning to collapse.
“ ‘It was Monday morning and Tom Sawyer was miserable,’ ” Allison
reads. “ ‘He was always miserable on Monday mornings because it meant
he had to go to school.’ ”
The copy of Tom Sawyer they use for this class sits open on my desk. The
one Mark Twain wrote sits on my lap. I match paragraphs to keep my mind
on something other than my approaching turn:
“Monday morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. Monday morning
always found him so—because it began another week’s slow suffering in
school.”
Allison finishes and Betsy begins. We read aloud in this class because the
teacher doesn’t believe we read at home. And so I wait, my stomach rolling,
a lost ship at sea. We may be reading Tom Sawyer for babies, but Betsy’s
voice, as strong and supple as a dancer, hardly notices. She skips along the
tops of passive verbs and flies over the adjectives and adverbs that stack
and pile up like too many Playskool blocks. When Betsy finishes, the
teacher looks over at me and her eyes widen just a bit.
“Cornelia, will you be reading today?” Her voice pitches too high, too
singsong. Kids turn around. Everyone knows she gives no one else a choice.
I shake my head and look at my feet.