Sputterpub's Blog

She read the poem to her next door neighbors. She adored Barbara and she despised Barry; she showed it to them both. She didn’t know whether she did that to add to her pride or her shame; she just couldn’t resist the impulse to read it to them.

Barbara was two years older than Melanie, and a lovely gentle person. Melanie admired her so much she tried to act like her. She tossed her head in Barbara’s winning fashion, but Barbara’s hair was short and curly and Melanie’s was lank and straight; the mannerism just wasn’t as cute on the younger girl. Melanie tried smiling more and cooperating better too, but she couldn’t maintain Barbara’s composure for more than a few minutes. She told herself that Barbara had it easier because she was an only child, but she wasn’t convinced. She suspected Barbara was just better than she was. Barbara listened attentively to the two stanzas, and praised Melanie coolly.

Barry lived on the other side of Melanie’s house. He was her age, and he was gross. A pale-faced towheaded rail of a boy, he was not very smart, not athletic, too quiet, and deadly boring. Melanie had to eat lunch with him sometimes, while their mothers talked in Barry’s kitchen, and she always found eavesdropping on the moms more interesting than attempting to chat with Barry. He was the slowest eater in the world. Lunch took forever. And he put ketchup on everything he ate, including peanut butter sandwiches. Once he tried to get Melanie to lick a smear of blood off the back of his hand, telling her it was ketchup. Melanie wasn’t having any of it. She knew the mark was blood, but she wouldn’t have licked Barry’s hand no matter what it bore. He barely listened to her poem. He smirked when she finished and took another bite of his bologna-and-ketchup lunch.

Melanie stopped the oral recitations then. She didn’t bother to try her poem out on her new friends Pam and Nancy, who had moved into two of the split-level houses that had just been built on what used to be a farm behind Melanie’s block. She never submitted the piece anywhere. She tried to forget about it.

And failed. More than half a century later, those two stanzas are stuck in Melanie’s head. Several years after she wrote it, she learned the word “plagiarize.” She felt busted. She confessed about the old poem then to some of her eighth grade peers. Each of her fellows looked at her like she was crazy. No one had ever heard the second stanza; few seemed to believe she had appropriated it. Melanie held onto the word along with the poem. That made her learn a few facts about plagiarizing.

For one thing, she understood that a plagiarizer knows what she’s doing and remembers it.

For another, the lifted may not be good. It took Melanie decades to notice that the second stanza of her first poem sucked, and that the first stanza alone was an improved version of the piece.

For a third, she concluded that she need have no fear of being plagiarized herself. It’s a form of flattery. And when it comes to Melanie’s poetry, she can always improve on the past. Even if someone steals a sonnet from her today, she can issue a better version next week.

And finally, she figured out how to handle a plagiarizing student. Not that she needed to – she briefly considered a teaching career and rejected the idea – but some of her oldest friends, including Barbara and Barry, made their living as teachers. Barbara did seventh and eighth grades, and Barry took on high school. Each of them ran into copycats just about every year. Barbara’s response was to look the student in the eyes and ask “did you really write this?” and reap a lie. Barry would murmur something like “are you sure you shouldn’t attribute at least some of this to a source?” and obtain mostly blank looks and impatient squirms.

Melanie knew what would work. “Ask the student questions about what he wrote,” she suggested. “Make him defend his argument. Really. Try it. You might find yourself involved in an instructive interaction.”

She was pleased with her conclusions. But she was wrong about her friends. Although her family moved to another state before she was nine, the households stayed in touch. Melanie saw Barbara and Barry every few years. She was beyond surprised at the adults her first neighbors became. Barbara remained lovely, but her grace and sweetness faded. She grew vain and avaricious about compliments and seemed to aspire to little but admiration. She went into teaching because no other career invited her. She was a poor instructor. Barry became an improved version of his kid self. His body broadened in his early 20s and his mind broadened before that. He even expanded his taste in condiments; he always favored acetic sauces but grew up to love mustards and kim chee. He dove into education with a passion and excelled. He took Melanie’s advice about how to deal with plagiary.

Melanie composed her first poem when she was six. She’d been reading poetry with her father as long as she could remember, so it was natural for her first work to be metered and rhyming.

She wasn’t exactly a girly girl then, and she would grow relatively androgynous as she became aware of boys’ rights and genital unfairness. But she was a first-born to a stylish childish mother, so she’d been outfitted from birth in frilly pastel sets so color-coordinated that they were called ensembles. She was enrolled in ballet class at five. Of course she admired ballerinas and princesses (especially princesses like the one in the Crusader Rabbit cartoons, whose conical cap had a scarf unfurling out of the top).

She’ll always remember that first poem. Not because it was any good, but because it was criminal. She stored it in the little niche in her memory where she keeps her regrets.

It was a poem of two stanzas. The first was her own creation but the second was lifted from a mediocre collection of kid verse. She just didn’t have a second stanza in her when she wrote the first, but she was convinced that a one-stanza piece was no poem at all. As far as Melanie was concerned, a book wasn’t a real book unless it had chapters (and a Table of Contents). So a poem wasn’t serious either, if it was too short.

I am a balleriner
As dainty as can be
And when I act out in a play
I go down one two three

That was hers. In ballet class she practiced to perform, so there was little separating dance from the stage, in Melanie’s view. That’s why lines 3 and 4 could be written about any actress as well as about a performing dancer. Then she searched the books in her room (a paltry collection compared to the set in the den, but private), and came up with:

When at night I go to bed
I look up at the sky
And what do I see?
The moon and the stars looking down at me

When she was done with her composition, she read it with uncertain pleasure. She gazed upon the paper with its carefully penciled letters and she felt satisfied, but the good feeling was a little murky around the edges.

“What are you doing in there?” her mother soon called to her. Her father added, “Come out of your room and join the family.”

So Melanie took herself and her paper to the den. “I wrote a poem.”

“You did? That’s great, honey,” her father beamed. “Let me…” as he reached a hand toward her. “No. You read it to us,” and he settled back in his big chair.

Melanie read the 50 words out loud. She couldn’t tell if her mother was listening, but her dad gave his full attention.

“Wow,” he said when she finished. “That’s a very good poem. It should be published in a magazine.”

Melanie didn’t understand the publishing comment, but she lapped up the praise. At first. Then it tarnished a little in her, and she thought she’d tell her father that the second stanza wasn’t her own. But he seemed so happy right then; she just couldn’t bear to watch his grin flatten. She quietly sat on the floor and joined her brother in his attempt at pickup sticks.

It didn’t stop there. Her father showed her first poem to her aunts and uncles and grandparents. Every adult acted like the poem was far better than Melanie believed, and no one gave her any room to come clean.

Soon she would have spent a magic wish to make the poem disappear, if she could. The more she tried to forget it, and its unease, the faster it held in her memory.

If the teacher noticed Melanie’s presence, she didn’t let on. She took attendance but didn’t remark about the one unresponsive student, and then she started the students at crayons. Susie made her usual drawing of a square house with symmetrical windows, centered between lollipop trees. Melanie tried to capture the wall ahead of her, with its individual alphabet letter cards, A through J, along the top of the blackboard (the alphabet continued, but not on that wall). When the teacher circulated to appreciate the art, she murmured at Susie’s and chuckled at Melanie’s.

That was the only teacher attention Melanie acquired. Mostly she hung back during the subsequent story reading, and wondered when the teaching would begin. Melanie had often been sent to bed when she wasn’t tired, and she’d been through a horrific tonsillectomy two months earlier, followed by a long, nauseated, sleepless night in a crib in the pediatric ward, so she had developed the ability to endure the passage of time quietly. She didn’t like to be still and silent, but she could do it.

In general Melanie was unimpressed with Susie’s kindergarten too. It was a slight improvement over her own – one boy actually protested about rest time – and she was glad she had checked it out, but she wasn’t learning, and she was bored. She tried to talk about her disappointment with Susie when they were on the playground, but her friend looked at her with a slightly blank, semi-puzzled expression. “I think it’s fun; I want more stickers,” Susie said with her weird teeth, and Melanie felt more alone than she did at bedtime, stuck in her bed in her room and not tired at all.

When the half-day was over the girls walked out the doors with everyone else and looked for their guardians. Melanie’s mom’s Buick was easy to spot – big and dark green with its stylish chrome holes on the sides in front of the doors. They clambered onto the fuzzy backseat.

“How was the day, girls?” Melanie’s mom asked as she pulled the car away from the school. Susie mumbled something and Melanie said, “Better than yesterday.”

“Oh, really? That’s good to hear.”

“Yeah, well it’s because I went to Susie’s room today.”

“You what?” Melanie’s mom sounded annoyed at first, but then she loosened her fingers on the steering wheel and looked at Melanie in the rear view mirror. “What do you mean?”

“Well I didn’t like my class yesterday, so I went to Susie’s today. And it was better.”

“How was it better?”

“Oh, they just did more interesting things.”

“Like…?”

“Like the teacher called out each kid’s name, and then the kid got to say ‘Here’ or ‘Present.’”

Her mother paid attention to driving for a few seconds and then said, “Did the teacher call your name?”

“No.”

“That’s because you were absent.”

That’s how Melanie learned the meaning of the word. It was the first entry in what became her life lexicon, established in 1955. Over the years other words were added, like “precious” and “subtext” and “whore,” but “absent” remained significant.

For one thing, natural speller Melanie always had trouble with “absence.” She was never secure about the penultimate letter. But the bigger deal was in her. She grew up with other white suburban baby boomers. She was in the San Francisco bay area in 1966, when her generation woke up and blew up. She was more indoctrinated by messages of peace-and-love, of being present and living in the here-and-now, than by any pledges of allegiance or propaganda films. Her friends were massaged and Rolfed and encountered, and some lived for awhile in extreme cults.

Melanie tried and then tried not to scoff. But the truth is, she’s always been more comfortable being absent. Melanie lives best in absentia.

Melanie and Susie were enrolled in a kindergarten-only school. A small public building had been commandeered by a school district struggling with the deluge of post-war babies who had attained the entry age of five and acquired all the necessary inoculations. The Seaman House had two large classrooms on the ground level, what seemed like a labyrinth of small offices on the upper floors that the students were generally prohibited from visiting, and an adequate playground in the back yard.

On the first day of school the girls arrived separately. Melanie’s mom escorted her to the classroom on the right side of the building and Susie’s mother saw that her daughter was settled in the other class. Four hours later both moms arrived in Melanie’s family Buick, to cart them back to their homes. The girls said “Okay” to their mothers’ questions about the first day of school. When the mothers tried to pry more reactions and details from the daughters, they didn’t get much. Susie liked the snacks they ate. Melanie didn’t understand the rest period. Then the girls fidgeted to play in Susie’s yard, and left the mothers to their hot drinks over the metal-edged dinette table.

Susie and Melanie didn’t talk about school much to each other. Susie liked her first day of kindergarten; Melanie saw that she was pleased to be away from her mother and looking forward to the next day too. For her part, Melanie was disappointed. She couldn’t put her finger then on what the issue was, but she’d entered the Seaman House with expectations that hadn’t been met. She had no preschool experience. She’d been led to believe she would learn in school, and she liked to learn, and it hadn’t happened that day. In fact, her teacher reminded her of the lady on Romper Room, using almost baby talk with the students, practically putting her hands on her knees in that bent-forward condescension Melanie despised in nurses, organizing books by color as if the kids couldn’t play a game harder than Candyland, and (worst of all) making everyone lie down on mats and be quiet after juice.

The next day, Susie and her mother picked up Melanie for school. Melanie’s mom would fetch the girls afterward. The mothers first figured they’d alternate shifts, if not daily at least once a week, but as it turned out, Susie’s mother had more time in the morning, because her husband wasn’t around during the week and she didn’t have other children. And Melanie’s mom always had midday errands that required the car. So the families settled almost immediately into a steady commute routine. Susie and her mother would pick up Melanie fifteen minutes before school started, and Melanie’s car, with her mother driving and her brother aboard, was always there when school ended.

On the second day of school, Susie and Melanie tumbled out of the back seat of the Chrysler, waved to Susie’s mother, and skipped through the big front doors together. That was as far as Susie’s mom could see, so she departed then.

Melanie didn’t make the right turn into her classroom. She stayed with Susie and entered the other kindergarten. She took the seat next to Susie’s near the back of the room, and she watched.

Melanie at five and a half had long black hair and big brown eyes. She was of medium height and normal body shape, and her skin showed a light olive cast. She had a two year old brother who entertained her parents with his cuteness, and she had no friends of her age in her neighborhood. All the other girls were at least two years older or younger, and all the boys were wild. In the following year, the farm behind their house would be developed, and Melanie would attend first grade with a slew of girl peers, but from her neighborhood she went to kindergarten alone.

That’s not to say that she had no girl friend. Melanie idolized Barbara next door, who had naturally curly hair and a turned-up nose and the benefit of two more years of life experience. And Barbara was kind to Melanie. But Barbara was nearly eight years old, so it just wasn’t the same.

Melanie wasn’t completely alone for the kindergarten experience. She had a quasi-friend named Susie, who was enrolled in the classroom immediately next door. Susie and Melanie were quasi-friends because their mothers were actual friends. They’d always been expected to play well when their moms got together for coffee and cake, about twice a month. So even though Susie wasn’t a friend whose house you could walk to, she was someone to ride with in the car to and from the new school, and she was a familiar face on the playground.

A familiar face but not an attractive one. Susie had stringy brown hair around a big round head atop a very round body. She was uncoordinated for her age, freckled in a comic way, too large to be cute. She was a nice placid girl; she exasperated Melanie with her slow amiability. And Susie had ugly teeth. They were too small and too widely spaced and they were so yellow they were almost orange. Melanie had to restrain her expressions, facial and verbal, when she first met Susie at age four. Later her mother explained. “A birth defect,” Melanie’s mom murmured on their way home, “from taking Tetraclycine.”

Of course Melanie asked what that meant. “Who took Tetra-what?” Her mother explained that Susie’s mom had gotten sick while pregnant with Susie, and the doctor prescribed a medicine that had the side effect of possibly wrecking your teeth, but in this case the medicine wrecked the baby’s teeth instead of the mom’s. “So Susie was born with this defect in her teeth. That’s why it’s called a birth defect.” Her mom pushed the lever next to the steering wheel that made the signal blink, and then she turned the car into their driveway. “Emily has a birth defect too.”

Melanie knew what her mother was talking about. No one who met Emily wouldn’t know. Emily was one year older than Melanie and lived two blocks away. Their families met through the neighborhood association. And Emily was missing some fingers. She had thumbs, but where there should be four fingers on each hand she had just two. She could bring their tips together kind of like claws. “Thalidomide,” Melanie’s mother pronounced. And Melanie loved the way the word rolled out of the mouth. “Thal-í-do-mide.” Her mother was wrong about Emily, but her mother was wrong about a lot of things.