The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy

2

THE NEW SCHOOL OPENED on schedule, although the building wasn’t finished. On the first day, in the middle of the morning, all of us were herded into the auditorium to hear the principal, Mr. Simon, explain the rules that we would have to follow. It was with nervous anticipation that we shuffled through the hallways to the auditorium, because all of us assumed that once Mr. Simon had finished explaining the rules, he would announce the winner of the name-the-school contest.     Scaffolding was arranged on the sides of the auditorium, and dozens of workmen stood on it, working on a tangle of wires, pipes, and ducts that would, perhaps, be concealed by a ceiling someday. No carpet was on the floor yet, and some of the seats hadn’t been installed, so some of the sixth-graders had to stand in ranks at the back of the hall where the seats should have been. The whine of the workmen’s electric drills and saws and the blows of their hammers echoed in the hall.     Principal Simon stood at a lectern on the stage. When the auditorium was full, he blew into a microphone.     “May I have quiet, please?” he asked, raising his eyes toward the scaffolding and looking around the room. Some of the workmen had heard him and noticed his look. They stopped work, elbowed their co-workers, and began shushing one another, and gradually the noise stopped.     “Thank you,” said Mr. Simon. “We’ll try to get through this as quickly as possible. Then Mr. Simone, our new superintendent of public schools, will talk to you.” Mr. Simon nodded in the direction of Mr. Simone, and a thrill of anticipation ran through all of us, as if we had been wired together. Mr. Simone must be the one who would announce the winner. Mr. Simon shuffled through some papers on the lectern, cleared his throat, and spoke to us with measured simplicity.     “Now, boys and girls, as you can see, the school is not quite finished yet.” Roars of laughter came from the scaffolding, a couple of hoots, and then much shushing. Mr. Simon ignored it and went on. “Because the school is not quite finished, we are going to have to try to stay out of the workmen’s way.” One of the workmen made a remark that no one but his fellows beside him could make out. They roared.     “I have made a list of some of the things that we will have to do to stay out of their way. I hope you will listen very carefully.”     We all listened carefully, even the workmen on the scaffolding.     “Do not walk under ladders,” Mr. Simon began. He went on, citing reasons for not walking under ladders, offering anecdotes that illustrated the misfortune that could befall a person who did walk under ladders, and then went on to another rule. While he spoke, we, and the men on the scaffolding, listened less and less carefully. It was the sort of thing we had heard before. All of us, at least all of the kids, wanted to get to the announcement of the winner of the name-the-school contest. When Principal Simon finally finished, he asked whether there were any questions. Matthew Barber raised his hand, but a much larger boy beside him quickly pulled it down and held Matthew in his seat so that he couldn’t raise it again.     “All right, then,” said Mr. Simon. I took a deep breath and held it. My heart was pounding. All around me, boys and girls took deep breaths of their own and held them. The auditorium was eerily quiet, except for the muffled rumble of our pounding hearts. “In just a minute,” said Mr. Simon, “Mr. Simone is going to—”     I swallowed hard. I wiped my palms on my pants. “This is it,” said Raskol. His jaws were clenched, and he was slowly striking his fists together. A sigh came from somewhere behind me, and Kevin McManus, in front of me, crossed himself and bowed his head.     “—explain your room assignments and your lunch, gym, art, music, and recess schedules to you,” said Mr. Simon. A unanimous groan escaped from us. “Well,” said Mr. Simon, “I know that you’ve been sitting still—or some of you have been standingstill—for a long time. What do you say we have a little seventh-inning stretch? Why don’t we have a game of Simon Says?”

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

     “Did you see this?” I shouted when I arrived at Raskol’s with the paper.

     “Yeah,” said Raskol. “Margot and Martha burst in here with it in the middle of breakfast. My father was just slipping a soft-boiled egg into his mouth with his soup spoon when they flew into the house, wham, bam, no knocking, no hellos, all squeals and excitement. God, his face got so red and swollen I thought his head was going to blow up—barroom! Egg yolk was dripping from the corners of his mouth. He grabbed that broom handle he keeps beside his plate and smacked it on the table, right on the edge of Little Ernie’s oatmeal bowl. There was oatmeal all over the table, all over Ariane’s slip, and all over me, too. My first thought was, Maybe I should call the cops, but then my second thought was, Maybe I should call an ambulance. But it all worked out all right because my father is such a pushover for those two. As soon as he saw them, he said, ‘Hey, how’re my girls?’ and he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, tossed the broom handle into a corner, and squatted down so that the two of them could jump into his arms. He’s out on the dock with them now, thinking up names. They’ve got about sixty entries already written out.”     “Sixty?” I exclaimed. I had imagined that I would enter one name, one top-notch name, one name that was the product of weeks of satisfying effort, the one name that survived after I had rejected hundreds of others as second-rate or worse, one name of such transcendent aptness that it couldn’t lose. It didn’t strike me as appropriate to send in every name that popped into my head. When I saw the stack of papers that Margot and Martha and Mr. Lodkochnikov had beside them I said as much, taking care to direct my criticisms at the Glynns only, suggesting indirectly but as clearly as I could that Mr. Lodkochnikov probably disapproved as strongly as I did, but was just indulging their childish impropriety because he was a kindly sort.     “No, Peter,” said Margot. “You’re wrong. Martha and I talked this over for a long time, and Mr. Lodkochnikov agrees with us, too, don’t you, Uncle Bunny?”     “Uncle Bunny?” I repeated, soundlessly.     “Well,” said Raskol’s father, shrugging, “I got some reservations—”     “But you mostly agree with us, don’t you,” asserted Martha, “that what it comes down to is this—it’s not the name that pleases you or me that’s going to win; it’s the name that pleases the judges, whose decision is final.”     “There I agree with you,” said Mr. Lodkochnikov.     This was a shattering but indisputable truth. “You’re right,” I admitted.     “And the more names you send in,” said Martha, “the better chance you have of sending in one that they’ll all like.”     “You’re right about that too,” I said. I abandoned immediately the approach that I had intended to take and adopted theirs. Over the course of the next five or six weeks, we submitted, among the four of us (five, counting Mr. Lodkochnikov, whose names went in under Margot or Martha’s sponsorship), more than a thousand names for the school. Margot spent afternoons in the library hunting for ideas for names on old maps of Babbington (“Bolotomy Bay School,” “Musgrave Swamp School”); Martha was especially adept at deriving names from the names of animals and birds (“Herring Gull Elementary School,” “One-clawed Crab Elementary School”); Mr. Lodkochnikov contributed a few, but none of us thought they were likely winners (“Unfinished School,” “School of Hard Knocks”); and Raskol proved to have an uncanny knack for coming up with phrases that linked the school with aspects of everyday life in Babbington (“Slow Leak School,” “Foggy Day School”). Compared to theirs, my names were, well, lackluster. They had the virtue of accuracy, but one was much like another, and none, it seemed to me, offered anything that would make the judges sit up and take notice, nothing that would make them say, “That’s it! That’s the name we want!”

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

1

THIS IS THE STORY of two contests in which I competed in the fifth grade. One, probably the more important, was a competition for the love of Veronica McCall. This was a competition that I sponsored, but I was never a serious contender in it myself at all, which is probably as it should have been, since I didn’t really understand what prize was at stake, did not, to tell a truth that I would have been too embarrassed to tell at the time, even want to understand what prize was at stake, because I did understand that it was a variety of love for which I hadn’t yet developed an appetite.     In the manner of a chowder, which is a complex and subtle mixture of elemental foodstuffs, the emotion that we call love is a bewildering and varied concoction of more elemental emotions: lust, friendship, curiosity, guilt, and fear, among others. Tastes in chowders vary from person to person, from nation to nation, from region to region; one’s own taste in chowder changes over the course of one’s lifetime, and it may even shift from day to day. So it is with tastes in love. Some like theirs chock full of voluptuous scarlet tomatoes; others prefer something rarer, more exotic, heady with saffron; and still others like theirs bland and sturdy, with cream and potatoes.     My tastes and Veronica’s were different because I was two years younger than she, and at the time they were an especially important two years. Those two years represented the Gulf of Puberty, not so wide a gulf, but one where the waters can be treacherous, and where the fog is often so thick that one can’t see from one shore to the other. When I finally began to get a fuzzy notion of what Veronica wanted from a boyfriend (however fuzzy her desires might still have been) I began looking for someone who might be able to take the job away from me.     The other contest seemed much simpler on the surface, but I soon found that I had underestimated its demands. Not long after I had entered it, I found myself wishing that I could withdraw from this one too. It was the contest to name the new school.     Because of a rapid increase in Babbington’s population, a new upper-elementary school was being built at what was almost the geographical center of Babbington, and boys and girls from all over town would attend the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades there. The three small existing elementary schools—two old ones in the old town and one fairly new one in Babbington Heights—would be used only by children in the lower grades.     Work on the new school had begun the year before. During the summer, when it looked for a while as if the school might actually be completed before the fall, the announcement of the name-the-school contest appeared in the Babbington Reporter, and it sent a ripple of excitement through the upper-elementary-school population of Babbington.

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

     Well, when Mitgang’s book appeared, it gave the clam culture reason to think of itself as far sexier than the chicken culture. One might expect that the animosity would, as a result, have disappeared, but any good psychohistorian would be quick to point out that things are rarely as simple as that. The anti-chicken attitude in Babbington mighteventually have disappeared if Seafood and Sex hadn’t brought so many outsiders into the town. These newcomers, remember, had been attracted to Babbington by Mitgang’s descriptions of the clamming culture, so they arrived eager to embrace this culture, to penetrate its mysteries, to become part of it. (I’m told that it wasn’t unusual during this time to see half a dozen new Babbingtonians dogging the steps of a native, trying to learn to walk like a clamdigger ashore.) Sadly, among the aspects of clam culture embraced by the newcomers was the anti-chicken-farming prejudice.     Now here comes the strange irony of all this, the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction part. Most of the land available in Babbington for building the houses that the newcomers would live in was in the northern half of town, away from the bay, the part of town to which the chicken farmers had been driven so long ago. This part of town had come to be known as Babbington Heights. As newcomers moved into Babbington, the chicken farms gave way to tracts of new houses, one very much like another, and most of the chicken farmers collected their money from the developers and went off to the Midwest. The people who moved into the tract houses, lured by the promise of seafood and sex, tried to emulate the Old Babbingtonians but found that the real Old Babbingtonians treated them as if they’d been born and bred in the Heights, as if they’d sprung from generations of chicken farmers.     When my parents finally saved enough money to buy a small house, they moved from my grandparents’ house on No Bridge Road, not far from the heart of Old Babbington, to one of the small houses built on a former chicken farm in the Heights.     Perhaps it was inevitable that the people in the Heights, stung by the rejection of the Old Babbingtonians, should band together and reject the people who rejected them. That is what they did. They turned against the old clam-based culture and developed a nostalgic affection for chicken farming, for a past and a way of life that they had never known. Like most converts, they quickly became zealots. Within a year or two, there was hardly a household in the Heights that didn’t have its small flock in a little homemade coop out in the back yard. Most people kept laying hens, but some specialized in roasters or fryers, one or two kept fighting cocks, and several had flocks of homing chickens, which they would allow to walk around the block a few times in the gathering dusk of a summer evening, summoning them home with elaborate whistle signals when night fell. I admired the ability of the whistlers, and my father became one of the best of them, but I never cared for those chickens. I was friendly with the boys and girls in my neighborhood, but my roots were in the other culture—the bay owned my heart and my imagination.

FIFTH-GRADERS are not noted for their tolerance. When the population growth forced the town to build a new central upper elementary school, and boys and girls from all over Babbington were thrown together in that new central upper elementary school, they quickly took sides, as if they were choosing up for a mammoth game of dodgeball. I had grown up with a foot in each of the cultures; I tried to remain aloof from this tribalism, but it didn’t take long for me to see that—at least for the time being—I couldn’t. I could see the way it was going to be. If I was going to have any friends in school, I was going to have to choose one camp or the other. Veronica certainly saw that this was the case, and she began to grow impatient with my reluctance to choose. Finally, on the day when the winner of the name-that-school contest was announced, just a few minutes before the announcement itself, Veronica put her ultimatum to me, in terms nearly identical to those that Albertine was to use thirty years later. She touched her hand to my cheek and said, “Peter, you’ve got to choose: chicken or clams.” I chose clams, and Veronica chose chicken, and away she went.

YOU SEE HOW DIFFICULT it would have been for me to change that outcome without changing Babbington, my past, my feelings for my family, and so on. However, all of the foregoing seemed to me far too complex to include in the story of a childhood romance.     What to do? The solution that you’ll find in the pages that follow was not the only possible one, but working it out gave me great satisfaction. I compressed everything. Since Mitgang and Seafood and Sex were to blame for my losing Veronica, I cast Stretch Mitgang in Frankie Paretti’s role, and I used sex instead of societal forces as the reason for my losing Veronica. Then, since I really hated to see myself lose, whatever the reason, I had myself drop out of the contest instead. And finally, since my loss to Frankie Paretti still stung a bit after all these years, I cast him as an especially unattractive infant. That the satisfaction I gained from doing this to Frankie was ignoble bothered me only a little, and only for a little while.

Peter LeroySmall’s IslandJune 15, 1984

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

     It happened like this:     Before I was born, Babbington was a stable little community, dependent on—and redolent of—the clamming industry, with some small appeal for tourists. No one living in Babbington then would have predicted that within five years a period of rapid growth would begin that would last throughout my childhood. The effects of this growth were broad and deep, both on Babbington and on me.     Most of the reasons for Babbington’s phenomenal growth were not unique to Babbington: the population of the entire United States, indeed of the entire world, was growing rapidly in the postwar years, which these years were, and large numbers of people, especially young fertile couples, were choosing to live in places more or less like Babbington. However, the most important single reason was unique to Babbington, and that reason was Stretch Mitgang.     Mitgang, a sociologist with psychohistorical interests, moved to Babbington just a year or so before I was born. Passing himself off as a psychosocial historiographer, Mitgang undertook a two-year study of the sexual practices of Babbingtonians. His charm and good looks made it easy for him to ingratiate himself with Babbingtonians of all stripes, so he was able to gather reams of data, thousands of anecdotes, tens of thousands of tall tales, and quite a few firsthand experiences. When he had gathered the material he needed, Mitgang disappeared. A couple of years later, he published the results of his research under the title Seafood and Sex: a Study of Life in a Coastal Town.     In his book, Mitgang included the data, history, and logical cement that readers expected, but he also laced the book with anecdotes about Babbington and Babbingtonians that were, for their time, quite frank (and probably exaggerated), and he also included photographs that were, for their time, frank to an extreme (and probably staged). Seafood and Sex has been out of print for years, but if you take the trouble to track down a copy, you will understand why it quickly became a best-seller and why the book itself became a primary reason for Babbington’s rapid growth.     Mitgang waxed Whitmanesque in his enthusiasm for the general good health of the citizens, the “unflagging vigor that they bring to the day’s labor and the night’s delight.” This he attributed to the generally salubrious effects of bracing salt air. He went on to praise the “mesmerizing seductiveness of its women, at once shy and bold, endearingly naive and shockingly inventive, teasing and complaisant.” These qualities he attributed to the aphrodisiac effects of moonlight on the bay. In describing the men, Mitgang returned again and again to their “sturdy thighs, priapic grandeur, and remarkable endurance,” which he attributed to the habit of hard work and to the eating of clams. That did it. As soon as the book was published, outsiders began flocking to Babbington, and the population began an accelerating rise.     The newcomers moved into a town that was already sharply divided culturally. Clamming had always been important to the town, but after the War of 1812, for reasons too complex for me to explain here, chicken farming and processing became an important secondary industry. In the early years of this century, there occurred a series of riots during which clamdiggers attempted to drive chicken farmers out of Babbington. Most historians refer to the period during which these riots occurred as the Chicken Purge; however, the clamdiggers attacked the chicken farmers with, among other weapons, the tongs that they used for harvesting clams from the bay, and because of this unorthodox use of the clam tongs, this unpleasant period is sometimes referred to as—and I apologize for this—the Tong Wars.     Call it what you will, it was an ugly time in Babbington’s history, one that just about everyone would rather forget. But it had such a powerful effect on the culture of Babbington that it can’t be—and, I think, must not be—forgotten. At the time, the clammies claimed that runoff from the chicken farms was fouling the bay, and there was probably some truth to the claim, but it was not the real reason for the animosity that they felt toward the chicken farmers. I think we can find the real reason if we read between the lines of a passage in Our Town and Its People, a social studies text that all fifth-grade Babbingtonians were required to study, a text commissioned by the Daughters of the Tong Wars. Of the chicken farmers that textbook said, in part:

Chicken farming is easy work, suitable for people who cannot do much else. As a group, chicken farmers are a happy-go-lucky lot. Like the birds they raise, they pass most of their lives eating, sleeping, and copulating. They live in blissful ignorance of time and tide.

     I infer from this passage that the clammies were simply envious of the chicken farmers. The chicken-farming culture seemed to offer a life that was easier, happier, and more exciting. Their own lives were hard, sometimes miserable, and often dull. But most of all, the chicken-based culture must have seemed sexy.

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

Preface

To be in any form, what is that?(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither)If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough.Mine is no callous shell,I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

A chicken ain’t nothing but a bird.

E. B. Wallace, “A Chicken Ain’t Nothing But a Bird”(recorded in New York, October 14, 1940, by Cab Calloway and His Orchestra, including Mario Bauza, Dizzy Gillespie, Lamar Wright, Tyree Glenn, Quentin Jackson, Keg Johnson, Hilton Jefferson, Jerry Blake, Andrew Brown, Chu Berry, Walter Thomas, Benny Payne, Danny Barker, Milt Hinton, and Cozy Cole)

THIS STORY WAS CONCEIVED at Corinne’s Fabulous Fruits of the Sea one evening when Albertine and I had dropped by for drinks and stayed for dinner. Al always knows what she’s going to have when we go to Corinne’s, and since she doesn’t eat fish, she always has the same thing: chicken. I study the menu, eliminating things one by one, remain undecided until the last minute, and then nearly always wind up ordering clams. During the important visit that led to my writing this story, we had been sitting at our table for a while, and I had eliminated everything on the menu but two things: chicken and clams.     “Are you having chicken?” I asked Al.     If I remember correctly, she said, “Yes.”     “Maybe I’ll have chicken too.” I said.     She said nothing, I think.     “Or maybe I’ll have clams,” I said.     She said something that I couldn’t quite make out. A waitress, Dianne, one of my favorites, arrived. Al ordered. I hesitated. Albertine said—and I’ll be forever in her debt for this—“You have to choose: chicken or clams.”     An electrifying sensation shot through me, at once frightening and exhilarating. What Albertine had said brought back to me a memory from three decades ago, when I was in the fifth grade. My work on “Take the Long Way Home” began then. Over the intervening months, the story has grown and developed in ways that I couldn’t have predicted, but it is still possible to see that it began with the memory that Al’s statement recalled.     Allow me a little of your time to explain what the memory was, how I changed its essentials, and why I altered them.     When I was in the fifth grade, I competed in two memorable contests. One was a contest to name a new elementary school in Babbington. The other was a contest for the affections of Veronica McCall. I lost both.     As I worked on “Take the Long Way Home,” I changed, among other things, the outcome of one of these contests: the name-the-school contest. In the pages that follow, I win. Why did I change the facts? To tell you the truth, I did it just to please myself. I’ve thought for nearly thirty years that I should have won that contest in the first place. Surely this is one of the motives behind any fiction: the desire to correct the errors of the past. It was easy to change the outcome, so I did.     I would have changed the outcome of the other contest if I could have, but I couldn’t. The reasons for my losing Veronica were so deeply rooted in fact, in history, in the social fabric of Babbington, that to deny them, to try to alter them, would have meant trying to create a new social history, and since that seemed like more than I could do, I decided to stick to the facts.     But what were the facts? These things happened to me in the fifth grade; at the time, I thought that the outcome had a simple cause: I had lost Veronica to a boy named Frankie Paretti. What did I know then about the social forces at work in Babbington? Only as I worked on the story did I come to realize that—in the largest sense—I hadn’t lost Veronica to any one boy. If I hadn’t lost her to Frankie, I would have lost her to someone else, because I really lost Veronica to the sweeping force of social change. As I worked, I kept asking myself, “How did it happen? Why was there such an upheaval in the social structure of Babbington that it produced the tsunami that swept Veronica from me?” Weeks passed before I understood that it was all the fault of Stretch Mitgang.

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

28

LESS THAN A MONTH LATER, Mrs. Graham announced one day that Clarissa was going to be leaving Babbington and moving to Sioux City, Iowa, where her father would be devising new uses for setae, snouts, and trotters at Pickled Pork Products, a large and nationally famous company. While Spike was at the front of the room trying to find Iowa on the map of the United States, I looked at Clarissa. She was stroking her muff again.     On Clarissa’s last day, Mrs. Graham threw a party an hour or so before school ended. Clarissa hugged everyone in the class at least once. She and some of the other girls cried and promised to write to each other.     I dawdled after the bell rang, fussing around, helping Mrs. Graham straighten up, because Clarissa had stayed to help her too, and I wanted to say good-bye to Clarissa alone.     When we were finished cleaning up, we walked out to the parking lot. Clarissa’s mother hadn’t arrived to pick her up yet. Mrs. Graham drove off, and we were alone.     “You’ll be late getting home,” Clarissa said.     “Oh, that’s all right,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”     There was a silence. Then she looked at me and said, very softly, “Good-bye, Peter.”     “Good-bye, Clarissa,” I said.     “We had some good times together,” she said. She hugged her muff and looked off into the distance.     “Yes,” I said.     She smiled and poked me with her elbow. “Remember when you tried to make Mrs. Graham think that you knew the times tables?” she asked.     “You mean you knew that I—” I began.     She chuckled. “And remember that Santa Claus suit you wore when you came to my house for dinner?”     “I wouldn’t call it a Santa Claus suit,” I said. I zipped my jacket up tighter.     “And I’ll never forget that joke about the rabbits.” She went into a fit of giggling, and her eyes began to tear.     She stopped giggling and looked hard into my eyes. “Can you forgive me for what I did?” she asked.     “Oh, Clarissa—” I said.     “You still like me, don’t you?” she asked, rotating at the hips, tipping her head to one side. Her cheeks were red with the cold. A cloud of breath hung in front of her while she spoke, then disappeared while she waited for me to answer. She wasn’t smiling now.     “Yes,” I said.    “Will you miss me?”     I looked past her, over her shoulder. “Yes,” I said.     “Will you write to me?”     “I’ll write to you,” I said. “I promise I will.”     “Please don’t forget me.”     “I’ll never forget you,” I said.     She smiled again. “Why don’t you take my picture?” She pointed to my camera, which I was holding by the strap. “You’ll have something to remember me by.”     “Well—” I began.     “Then you’ll always remember me the way I am now,” she said. “You can put the picture on your bedside table in one of those frames that stands up by itself. You can look at it each night and you won’t forget me. Where do you want me to stand?”     I raised the camera to my eye and found her in the viewfinder. I had her walk backwards until all of her fit within the frame. She stood with her feet together, her legs straight, her hands in the muff. She shivered once and then smiled.     I had my finger on the button, but the familiar uncertainty came over me, and I hesitated.     “Are you finished?” she called.     Through the viewfinder, I saw her frown. She wrinkled her nose, and furrows formed across her forehead. She stamped her foot, and I pressed the button at once.     “Got it!” I called back. I brought the camera down from in front of my face and smiled. She smiled back, and I took a slow deep breath to see if anything hurt inside my chest.     Her mother drove into the parking lot and tooted the horn. Clarissa turned and walked away. I wound the cream-colored plastic knob absentmindedly and watched Clarissa walk the length of the parking lot, get into the car, wave to me, and turn away, toward her mother, who drove off.     The next day, I began using film.

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

26

I GOT AROUND on crutches fairly well, but it wasn’t really any fun. Most of the kids in Mrs. Graham’s class signed my cast. Spike wrote, “You had it coming to you.” Veronica wrote, “Thanks for everything.” Clarissa signed several times. Each time she wrote, “Can you ever forgive me?”     The play was quite a success. Veronica did a creditable job as Cordelia, Spike was an excellent Regan, and Clarissa was outstanding as Goneril.     To tell the truth, I had wanted all along to play Lear myself, but I knew that no one could do a better job than Matthew, and so I gave the part to him. He was superb.     I played the Fool. Judging from the applause, I was good enough, but some people may have been applauding only out of sympathy for my broken foot.

27

VERONICA’S PARENTS threw a cast party in their playroom. They had set up a number of card tables around the room, covered with white paper tablecloths, and at each place was a fluted paper container of candy, a snapper, a paper hat, a paper plate, a paper napkin, and a paper cup with a fold-out handle. For a while, I felt a little sick, partly because I was reminded of all the birthday parties at which I had eaten too much ice cream and had had to throw up on the ride home, and partly because being in the playroom with Veronica beside me, the closet door right behind me, and Mr. and Mrs. McCall bustling around made me apprehensive, but the camaraderie was infectious, and I soon began to relax and enjoy myself. I was sitting at a table with Veronica, Spike, and Clarissa.     Spike was sitting on my right, and now and then she would pause in the wolfing down of her ice cream and cake, chuckle, and give me a friendly knock on the shoulder or punch in the stomach. I’m quite sure that Spike would have broken my foot when she learned that I had given the part of Cordelia to Veronica if Clarissa hadn’t already broken it. As it was, seeing that my foot had been broken by someone seemed to be enough to satisfy her.     Veronica was sitting on my left. At one point she poked me and pointed downward. She had part of her skirt pulled up, and I saw that she was wearing my underpants. She hadn’t returned them to me even after I had given her the part. When I told her the news, she had given me an extravagant hug, and while she was hugging me she whispered in my ear that she would hang on to them for a while just in case. I pulled back from her and told her not to forget that I had hers. “I guess that makes us even,” she said.     Clarissa was sitting opposite me, smiling and telling whoever passed that she wished she had been able to do a better job as Goneril. She had her muff in her lap, and she stroked it like a pet.     “Say,” I said. “I’d like to make a toast.” The girls sat up straight. They raised their paper cups as I had raised mine.     “To Regan, to Goneril, and to Cordelia,” I said, saluting each of them in turn with my cup. “I’m glad it’s over, and I’m glad we’re friends.”     “To Peter,” they answered, and we touched our raised cups. When we lowered them again, I was looking into Clarissa’s big eyes. The reflection in them of the fluorescent light overhead brought on an annoying itch inside the cast on my foot.

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

25

AS SOON AS I had made my decision, everything else looked easy. I read through Mrs. Graham’s notes again and assigned all the other parts. I sat back and took a deep breath. For the first time since I had entered the fourth grade I felt just fine. I needed someone to share this feeling with, and I had someone: Clarissa.     I telephoned her and told her that I had assigned all the parts and that I would like to come over and tell her about them. She sounded excited and pleased, and my heart ached with gratitude toward her for being so good a friend. Though the skies were gray, and a storm really seemed to be about to break, I whistled a happy tune on the way to her house, and the closer I got the happier I felt. I decided to tell her everything. “How lucky I am,” I thought, “to have Clarissa to confide in.”     Clarissa was smiling and blushing when I arrived. We sat at the kitchen table, and I felt relaxed and voluble. I told Clarissa about Spike’s threat, and she seemed quite worried for me. She reached across the table and put her hands on mine. I told her about what had happened in Veronica’s closet, and she blushed, just as I had known she would. I told her about Veronica’s threat, and in her eyes I could see shock and, to myshock, a cold fury.     Then I told her that I had decided to give the part to Veronica.     Clarissa rose from the table slowly, with her hands still resting on it. Her cheeks grew livid.     “What’s wrong, Clarissa?” I asked. “Do you think I should have given the part to Spike?”     She stood and stamped her foot. “You fool!” she screamed.     “Clarissa—”     “You lunatic!” She began stamping her foot repeatedly. She seemed to be losing her mind.     “Please, Clarissa—”     She began inhaling and exhaling rapidly, her breath howling like the wind in a nasty storm. “You treacherous villain!”     “Calm down,” I commanded. I walked toward her with my arms extended, meaning to hold her and pat her on the back.     “You milk-livered coward!” she cried.     “Clarissa!” I expostulated. I was astounded to hear this kind of thing from her. I put my hands on her shoulders.     “You—you—you—” she stammered in her fury, stamping her foot as she spoke.     “But—” I began.     “You!” she shrieked, and when she brought her foot down on mine, her eyes fulgurated.

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

24

I WOKE EARLY on Sunday morning and sat upright in my bed thinking the situation over. My two biggest problems were Spike and Veronica. Until I chose one of them to play the part of Cordelia, I wasn’t going to be able to think about the other roles. Thank goodness I didn’t have to worry about Clarissa, too. Several times during my deliberations I felt a sudden rush of affection for her.     Spike wanted the part, and I was quite sure that she would break my foot if she didn’t get it. Veronica wanted the part, and I was quite sure that she would show up at the kitchen door one morning and hand my underpants to my mother if she didn’t get it. Mrs. Graham’s notes weren’t very helpful, since she had recommended giving the part to Wilbur Carpenter.     I tried to imagine how it might feel to have my foot broken with a brick. I tried to imagine how it might feel to explain to my parents how Veronica had gotten my underpants. I went out to the garage and found a couple of boards that fit under my armpits like crutches. I shoved my foot into one of the empty coffee cans that my father accumulated in case he might need them for mixing paint, and I tried hobbling around a bit. It was really kind of fun. My father called out the kitchen door to say that breakfast was ready. While I sat at the table dunking my toast into my cocoa and playing with the blobs of butter that formed on the surface, I pretended, silently, that I was undergoing my parents’ you-have-some-explaining-to-do-young-man interrogation. Veronica and her parents were there too, and Veronica’s underpants, which I had been made to retrieve from my sock drawer, lay with mine in the center of the table. This really wasn’t any fun at all.     I decided to give the part to Veronica.

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

* You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

* You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

* You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)

* At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” and “Call Me Larry,” the first eight novellas in Little Follies.

* You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.