Small Persons With Wings (3 page)

I was a Stoic, like these ancient Greeks I read about who believed emotion opens you up to misfortune. I learned to relax and shut my mind down when Benny grabbed me, easy-peasy, and pretty soon it was over for the day.

It was a relief when our classroom teacher, Mrs. Whipple, got sick of hearing about Fidius and brought in Ms. Appleby, the school counselor, to rid me of an Unhealthy Fixation. Ms. Appleby smiled like a horse, with all of her gums showing, and asked me did I mind missing a couple of gym classes a week. I did not mind. I wanted to keep her interested so I could keep missing gym class.

At first, she asked me about my family every single week, as if there was going to be something amazing and new. There was never much to say about my parents, who were shop teachers by day and artists the rest of the time. They wanted to be full-time artists. They split all the household chores. Sometimes my mom was the boss, sometimes Dad, but mostly Mom when you thought about it.

Ms. Appleby approved of all that.

One day, desperate for something to tell her, I added that my dad didn't drink any alcohol. Ms. Appleby asked why that was, and I said because of Grand-père, who owned the Agawam Inn and Bishop's Miter Pub in lovely, seaside Baker's Village, forty-five minutes northeast of Boston. Dad said Grand-père was a bad example to us all, but especially him.

“We went to visit him,” I told Ms. Appleby. “We pulled up to the curb and he threw old whiskey bottles out of an upstairs window and they smashed all over the sidewalk. Mom said that's it, we're not going back there until the crazy old coot sobers up and apologizes.”

Grand-père stories always scored big for my parents at the Friday night potluck—their friends loved that he was in the French Foreign Legion and came home with a French wife and a bad temper. But Ms. Appleby pinched up her face and said I was being disrespectful to the elderly, which didn't seem fair because (a) she was the one who asked and (b) it actually happened.

After a month or so, Ms. Appleby decided it was time to bring in my parents. I kept insisting that Fidius was real—I mean, I did have that frostbite handprint on my nose and it tingled sometimes in the winter, and where else would it have come from?

Ms. Appleby refused to look at it close enough to see that it looked like a hand.

“Such an imagination,” she said. When I left her office that day I went into the girls' bathroom and shredded a roll of toilet paper into the wastebasket until I calmed down.

My parents made an appointment for a Thursday, three fifteen, after the last bus. They would have to leave the high school fifteen minutes early to get there on time, but Dad said he'd do anything to get a look at Ms. Appleby. I'd told him about the horse smile.

Mom took a change of clothes to school, her usual drapey stuff in cool colors that make her look like a queen even though she's round with curly brown hair like an extra-large cherub. Dad's round and bald and wears the same wire rims as Mom because they got a deal. But he has a honker like Julius Caesar, which could be mistaken for grandeur in the right circumstances. He wore a tie that day, and there was hardly any paint on his pants.

I was sure they had told Ms. Appleby that they knew Fidius too. I was looking forward to the three of us telling Ms. Appleby to widen her horizons and smell the coffee.

“I wanted to talk to all three of you together,” Ms. Appleby said when they arrived. “Can anyone tell me why?” Mom stiffened, because Ms. Appleby sounded as if all three of us were in the second grade instead of just me, and that is not the way you talk to Veronica Sanford Turpin.

Dad put his hand on Mom's knee and said, “Why don't you tell us, Ms. Appleby?”

“Mellie is a smart and imaginative girl,” Ms. Appleby said. “But I do think enough is enough when it comes to the little man with the wings. I get the sense that Mellie really believes in him. This does her no good with her peer group, and may become Unhealthy.”

“What do you want us to do about it?” Mom asked.

“It's clear Mellie respects your opinions. I need you to tell her that this little man exists only in her imagination, that she made him up to substitute for real human friends.”

Mom stayed in her chair, but in spirit she rose up on her webbed feet and flapped her wings like a mother swan. “I do not choose to tell her any such thing. Mellie can make up her own mind about her imaginary friend.”

“Kids grow out of them on their own,” Dad said. “I've been teaching high school for fifteen years, and I have yet to encounter a teenager who still believes in an imaginary friend.”

“Me neither,” Mom said. “I think we should let nature take its course.”

For a second, I was happy they were standing up to Ms. Appleby. But then I realized what they were saying. They were saying Fidius wasn't real. That he
was
my imagination.

I fingered the end of my nose. “I have a frostbite handprint.”

Ms. Appleby blew air out of her mouth. “I keep hearing about this frostbite handprint. What is
that
all about?”

“I'll thank you to maintain a civil tone when talking about my daughter,” Mom said. “Particularly when she's sitting right here.”

“Mom, I have a frostbite handprint. It's real.”

Dad patted my shoulder. “Of course it is, honey.”

“No!” I stood up. “I don't want you to say stuff to make me feel better. You
knew
Fidius. He made squash into candy corn.”

Dad looked miserable. “Honey—”

Something physical happened to me then, as if somebody ran an eraser across whole sentences in my brain and wrote in new ones. My parents and I always pretended we believed in Santa Claus even though we didn't. It flashed on me then that Fidius . . . that Fidius . . .

Wasn't real either.

My innards were gone. Fidius was gone. Part of my life—the good part—gone, gone.

I made him up. He's a china guy with a stupid smile.
I deserved to have my head pushed into a fountain. I was nuts.

I forgot Ms. Appleby was there. All I had were Mom, Dad, and what used to be my friend Fidius. “Daddy, am I nuts?” I never called him Daddy.

Mom made a choking noise. Dad surged up, hugged me hard. “No, honey, no, no, no.”

Mom grabbed my elbow, flapped it. “It's perfectly normal, Mellie.
Perfectly
normal.”

My head was jammed against Dad's chest, facing Ms. Appleby. She smiled like a sympathetic yet self-satisfied member of the equine species. “That's enough for today,” she said. “We'll meet at our regular time Monday, all right, Mellie?”

The next morning on the bus, when Janine asked if my fake fairy had wings yet, I did not explain for the gazillionth time about the china guy being a present from Fidius. I said, “You don't still believe in that fairy, do you?” I grabbed an empty seat and counted telephone poles all the way to school, fighting the feeling—
still
—that I was being a traitor to Fidius.

I had three enemies at that moment: Ms. Appleby, Janine, and Fidius, who still hadn't left my mind. I could see him. I could hear him talk. If I rubbed my nose, the frozen handprint burned. My imagination was fooling my entire, physical body.

Fidius wasn't my friend anymore. Fidius scared me.

As second grade became third, I figured out who the real enemy was, and it wasn't Ms. Appleby and it wasn't Fidius. It was my own brain, with my imagination rampaging around in there like King Kong in that old movie my dad watches.

I knew I had to control the beast. I had to stop day-dreaming about Fidius, stop making up stories to put myself to sleep. I would read fake stories at school because I had to, but at no other time. My loves would be addition and subtraction, order and alphabets, geography. Nature studies. Lists.

I was still Fairy Fat. I was round and clumsy and vocabulary-enhanced, and I had my head in the drinking fountain every gym class until Mr. MacClaren caught on and started keeping an eye on Benny. But someday I would leave Barbee O. Carleton Elementary and Middle School, and I would start over. I would grow up to be an extremely successful ... I don't know, scientist or tycoon or something. Janine and Inez would be cobblers or beggars or washerwomen.

That was something to look forward to.

From that time on, I was a new person. I spent recess organizing the classroom crayons by size and color. I became the best speller in my class. I absorbed grammar and punctuation. After a long day of refusing to enjoy Roald Dahl, I taught myself to multiply and divide. I memorized biological classifications in Latin, down to genus and species.

You can't avoid imagining things entirely. One recess in fourth grade I alphabetized my class's Laura Ingalls Wilder books by title. (This caused a furor a week later when Mina found out she'd read the fifth book first.) One of the book jackets sent me jolting across the prairie in a covered wagon, and I found myself wondering if Fidius could have made my room into a sod cabin.

I developed a defense for these moments. If I caught myself wandering off, I'd mutter “Fairy Fat.” That reminded me how everything imaginary—Fidius, SpongeBag Whatsisname, Laura and Mary in the Big Woods—can suck you into believing in them and ruin your life.

My parents didn't know what to think about my new personality. You can see why. There they were painting pictures and watching
King Kong,
and one day their daughter had alphabetized the spice rack and wouldn't read fairy tales and had a list of Real but Unbelievable Things, from artichokes through sumo wrestlers to the Venus flytrap.

“Sheesh, Mellie,” Dad said, “you're going to make a great scientist. Or maybe an accountant.” He was bewildered.

My parents fought back. They started Family Movie Night on Fridays, with pizza (vegetarian, no extra cheese). I sat through every Walt Disney movie ever made, plus
The Wizard of Oz
and a gazillion others, each more imaginative than the last.

I fought back too, and as a result I can tell you that
The Wizard of Oz
uses the word “witch” sixty-two times, “heart” thirty times, “brain” twenty-five times, and “courage” nineteen times.

They fought harder. Dad gave me a huge book about Edgar Degas, this French painter from the late 1800s who believed people should be plump. The name's pronounced “Day-gah.” There's a ballerina he did, she's having a great time dancing and yet there's this light coming up from the floor that hits her face in a way that makes your stomach jump. Which is a figure of speech—your stomach doesn't do that
physically.

I became very,
very
interested in art, and Dad and Mom joyfully bought me every secondhand art book they could come up with. But then I started a scrapbook of selected post-Renaissance artists in chronological order, with subcategories for religious, mythological, and civic subject matter. Did you know that the
Mona Lisa
was stolen for two whole years? Well, she was. And Pablo Picasso (1881- 1973) created more than 20,000 works of art.

When Dad saw my scrapbook he went silent for several minutes and said, “Sheesh.”

Mom put me in Girl Scouts. I got eighty-four badges and went to Maine for Girl Scout camp two weeks every summer. I made friends at camp, where they celebrated nerds, but they all lived two hours away.

Marshy Talbot, who had thick glasses and the skimpiest hair you ever saw, tried to be friends for a while. But she was as stupid as everyone else and obsessed with Japanese cartoons.

I was better off alone. I was happy. I was fine.

As fourth grade became fifth, and sixth ran into seventh, the other kids in school got so they really hated me. I was the spelling and geography champ and aced Science Fair. The teachers gave up on making me read stories, and let me be some math/science/art history freak. I often recited interesting tidbits from the lives of Degas and Cézanne and van Gogh.

For example: Degas' relatives called themselves “de Gas” because having a “de” in front of your name makes you sound noble in France. I figured the whole class would laugh at that because of, you know, “gas.” This turned out to be one of the times when everyone pretended I wasn't there.

They all wanted to be on my team in Science Brainiac, though. In seventh grade, when we won and were cheering, Benny gave me a one-armed hug, so quick that nobody noticed and afterward I wondered if it had happened. Benny was tall with blue eyes and freckles, and wasn't totally stupid. That night I kept waking up and feeling his arm around me and this electric zing.

The next morning I met him at the classroom door and looked him in the eye and smiled. He said, “What're you so happy about, Fairy Fat?” and muscled past me into the room.

Marshy's mom told her that boys were not to be trusted. I could see what she meant.

Seventh grade was the year Janine and Inez started wearing eye makeup and push-up bras, which could be considered a victory for them. They kissed boys and Janine had hot pink streaks in her straight blond hair. I wore an undershirt rather than a fake bra like Alice Whatsername, who was as flat as me. I kept my hair short and curly and brown, and wore T-shirts and a sweatshirt with a hood. My nose had turned into a Julius Caesar honker like Dad's, which Mom kept telling me I'd appreciate when I grew into my grandeur. But I wasn't growing into anything now, except maybe size fourteen.

Somehow everybody in my class knew I didn't have my period yet, which gave Inez the idea of sticking a tampon in my back pocket as I was getting up to do a math problem at the board.

I heard everybody giggling and it dawned on me that I had something in my pocket. So I reached around and pulled out the tampon and examined it, because at first I didn't know what it was. That brought the house down. I was about to rip open the wrapper when our teacher Mr. Higgins swooped down on me, grabbed the tampon, and threw it away.