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

6

FOR A WHOLE WEEK, I had to stay in my room from the time I got home from school until it was time to get ready to go to school the next morning. I also had to apologize to Matthew.     My mother drove me to Mrs. Barber’s shop. We walked inside, and my mother said, “Hello, Mrs. Barber. Peter would like to say something to you.”     Mrs. Barber looked down at me and smiled. She was wearing a white dress with puffy sleeves. Printed on the dress were yellow pansies that looked at me with expressions of stern accusation. But Mrs. Barber didn’t seem to be upset with me at all. She seemed sympathetic.     “I’m sorry I punched Matthew,” I said.     “That’s all right, Peter,” said Mrs. Barber. “I understand.”     “Peter would like to apologize to Matthew too, wouldn’t you, Peter,” my mother said.     “Yes,” I said, to the floor.     “Matthew is in the yard, Peter,” said Mrs. Barber. “Why don’t you go out and talk to him there?”     “Okay,” I said, and I went off in the direction she showed me, through the back room and out a varnished door. I heard my mother and Mrs. Barber talking behind me, and when I paused a moment at the door and looked back into the shop, I saw that my mother was watching me. I opened the door and went out into the yard.     Matthew was sitting in a tire swing, swinging slowly back and forth, letting his feet scrape in the taupe dust under the swing. I had the feeling that he had been waiting for me. I walked up to him at once. I wanted to get this over with.     “My mother says that I have to apologize,” I said.     He just kept swinging.     “So—” I said.     He just kept swinging.     “So, I’m doing what she told me I have to do. This is it. I’m doing it now,” I said.     “What?” he asked.     “You know,” I said. “What my mother told me to do.”     I turned and walked away.

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.

* 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,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six 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 all happened in the fall,” I began, “a little before supper. It was starting to get dark, and a little fox was on his way home from school. He was rowing his boat along—”     “A fox was rowing a boat?” asked Mort. It was a friendly question, not a challenge. He wasn’t suggesting that he thought it impossible for a fox to row a boat; he just wanted to make sure that this fox was rowing a boat.     “Sure,” I said. “Look.” I looked around and found my drawing on the floor of the bus. When, earlier in the day, we had been required to draw a picture of an animal, I had drawn my favorite animal subject of that time—the fox in the rowboat. “Here, see?”     “Oh, yeah,” said Mort. He had slipped his thumb into his mouth and he was half reclining now. Matthew glanced down at him and rolled his eyes.     “So,” I continued, “the little fox was rowing along in his rowboat and he was excited about getting home to see his mother and father. His father was a very nice fox, who was always bringing presents home for his children.”     “Cookies?” asked Mort, pulling his thumb from his mouth just long enough to ask the question.     “No, not cookies,” I said. “Fox children don’t eat cookies. They eat lambs.”     “Oh, yeah,” said Mort.     “So the fox was thinking about the nice roast lambs they’d be having for dinner, and he wasn’t paying attention to where he was going. In came the fog, and before that fox knew it he was lost.”     “Oh, no,” said Mort. He covered his face with his hands. Matthew looked, for a fleeting moment, as if he might giggle.     “Wait,” I said. “Wait. It gets better. So the little fox sat there in the fog calling and calling for his mother, but she didn’t come.”     “No, no, no, no,” said Mort under his breath.     “And the little fox began to cry and cry, and he didn’t know what to do. Since his mother didn’t come, he figured that she probably didn’t even notice that he wasn’t at home. He thought about how she and his father and his pesty little sister were probably sitting around the table now, eating lamb and telling jokes. Calling wasn’t going to do any good. Rowing wasn’t going to do any good. Nothing was going to do any good. He just sat there with his head in his hands, crying and crying.”     “Paws,” said Matthew. I shot him an angry glance, and he pushed his face toward me defiantly.     “Why?” I asked.     “Because that’s what foxes have. Paws, not hands.”    “Oh,” I said. “‘Paws.’ I thought you meant—never mind. Okay, paws.” I shrugged. Matthew was right, after all. “He sat there with his head in his paws, crying and crying, and all of a sudden he started to think about the clams.”     “The lambs,” said Matthew.     “No,” I said, with a good deal of satisfaction. “Not the lambs. The clams. You’re not listening closely enough. He started to think about the clams under the water, because the little fox was cold and lost, and fog kept blowing into his face, and the darned boat was starting to leak, so the fox was having a heck of a time. He thought about the clams, and how they were all home already, in their nice little sandy beds with nothing to worry about.”     Mort’s lower lip began to tremble a bit.     “I know what you’re thinking,” I said quickly. “It’s just like the other kids—they’re all home now, and we’re not. They get to see their mothers and eat cookies and go to the bathroom, and we don’t. Well, just wait and see how this comes out.”     Mort swallowed hard and nodded.     “‘Jeez,’ said the little fox, ‘I bet the clams are happy. I wish my mother had been a clam.’”     “Me too,” said Mort.     “And because the little fox was so angry and sad about all the good times that he missed because his mother wasn’t a clam, he began to let out a cry that was as loud as the siren on a fire engine. At first it wasn’t too loud, but the more he wailed the more angry and sad he got and the louder and screechier his wail got, and what do you think happened?”     “He died?” asked Matthew.     “No,” I said. I took a breath and tried to keep the feeling of compassion alive within me. “His mother and father and sister heard him. They were looking for him all the time, and when they heard him, they rowed right to him and took him home to have dinner, and they all lived happily ever after.”     Mort looked at me for a little while with his mouth hanging open.     “So do you know what the moral of the story is?” I asked. I was about to say, “The moral is: ‘Never give up hope, even when you’re lost,’” but I didn’t get the chance, because Mort said at once, “Yeah, I get it,” took a deep breath, stuck his head out the window, and let out a yell that made the bus driver slam on the brakes. The sound coming out of Mort was really remarkably like the siren on a fire engine. It rose and fell, and he could keep it up for an astounding length of time. He would pause only long enough to take another breath, and then he would launch right back into it, a little louder and a little longer each time.     “Hey, stop it, stop it,” called the bus driver. “Can’t you make him stop?” he asked me.     I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m just a kid,” I said.     Suddenly there was a loud and frantic banging on the door of the bus. The driver and I looked toward it and saw my mother and the widow Barber and another woman, Mort’s mother, banging on the door, hopping up and down to try to see into the bus, and calling our names.     I looked at Mort. An insane joy swelled within us. When our mothers got to us, we were standing on a seat, with our arms around each other, jumping up and down, and laughing hysterically. Matthew was just sitting there. When his mother reached him, he got down on the floor and retrieved his drawings. He handed them to her just as they were, crumpled into a ball, without saying a word. He started down the aisle, and when he squeezed past me, he looked at me with that sneer again, and I could tell that he was going to stick his tongue out at me. Before he had a chance, I punched him in the mouth.

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.

* 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,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six 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.

     The bus came to a halt, and a fat, sweaty man wearing a brown suit and a derby hat lurched down the aisle toward Matthew, Mort, and me. Mort and I gave each other looks of terror. I think it was the first time that either of us had realized that somebody had been driving the bus. We had just been riding along as passengers on a bus beyond our control, a bus that could have been traveling on its own. Now it dawned on us that this big and frightening character with a little mustache right under his nose was in control of the bus, in control of our destinies. I imagine that Mort had the same thought I did at that moment: that our not having gotten home was proof that this guy’s intentions were not good. Matthew simply sat, unmoved, wearing the same impassive look that he had worn most of the time in nursery school.     “Don’t cry, kids,” the driver said. “Stop crying. I’ll get you home. Don’t worry.” I was ready to take heart at this, ready to trust this wheezing stranger as soon as he said the word home. I looked at Matthew to see what he thought about this, and my hopes vanished. He was giving me another of those twisted grins, and I took it to mean that everything the fat man was telling us was a lie, that we were doomed.     The man went back to the front of the bus and sat in his seat. He turned around and called out to us, “Stop crying!” I took this as an order and did my best to stop. I was past crying anyway. I was sniffling and gasping for breath, shaking with the desperate sobbing that comes after the tears are gone, choking, hardly able to breathe, but through my fears the idea came to me that we should try to escape this demon and find our way home.     I dashed across the aisle and sat beside Mort. I beckoned to Matthew, and he stood up and stuck his chin over the back of the seat.     “We—we—we should try to get out of here,” I said. “If we can get the man to stop, then we can run away and find our way home. Let’s tell him that we have to go tinkle.”     Matthew looked at me with undisguised contempt. “‘Go tinkle’?” he asked.     “You know what I mean.” I said.     “Yeah,” he said. “‘Go tinkle,’” he repeated, and he laughed a hollow laugh. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s no use.”     “We could try,” I said.     “I’m telling you, it’s no use,” Matthew said.     “He’s right,” said Mort. Mort had stopped crying. He wiped his eyes, leaving behind feathery streaks of dirt that swept out along his cheeks. They made him look like a tired old man. “It’s too late,” he said. There was no emotion at all in his voice now. He sounded like Matthew. “My mother has probably got another kid by now. Even if I could get off this bus and find my way home, when I got there I’d see some other little boy on her lap eating cookies, and she wouldn’t even remember who I was.”     A thrill ran through me, the electrifying thrill that comes from recognizing a theme in a setting where one doesn’t expect to find it. “This—this—this is like ‘The Fox and the Clam,’” I said. All I really meant was that our situation was as miserable as the fox’s.     Matthew looked at me and opened his mouth. He had that look of disdain again. “Shut up, Matthew,” I said.     Mort looked at me without saying anything. His face still looked drawn and tired, but in his eyes was a wild look of hope.     “Did they get home?” he asked.     “Yeah, Peter,” said Matthew. “Tell us. Did they get home, the fox and the clam?” There was, I thought, a tremor in Matthew’s voice that he hadn’t been able to hide. I started to tell Mort that getting home wasn’t what the story was about, but before I spoke, while I was looking at Matthew, feeling nothing but anger toward him, I remembered the way he had stuck his tongue out at me, and the lard sandwiches that he brought to nursery school, and I saw in his eyes the briefest suggestion of the hope that I had seen in Mort’s, and an unfamiliar feeling ran through me, a feeling that I can now recognize as compassion. If I had been grown-up, I would have said to myself, “Why, he’s not as mired in the slough of despond as he pretends to be. He’s just a scared little boy.”     I moved back across the aisle so that I could see both of them at once. I sat on the edge of the seat, with my legs in the aisle. “Well,” I said to Mort, with a smile, “I’ll tell you the whole story.” With those words, I felt a tiny glow of pleasure inside me, which came from the memory of the day when Mr. Beaker had first read the fable to me and the day when Miss Louisa had concocted her astounding variation on it. If she could do it, why couldn’t I?     Mort wiped his eyes again and ran the back of his hand under his nose. Matthew pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes. His expression seemed to me to say, “All right, Peter. Let’s see what you can do.” I took a deep breath.

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.

* 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,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six 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.

5

I DIDN’T SEE MATTHEW BARBER again until the first day of kindergarten, and then only at the very end of the day, on the school bus.     It had been an exciting day, and each of us on the bus had a handful of drawings to show mom and dad and a headful of strange events to tell about. Each of us was in his or her own sort of daze: puzzled, overwhelmed.     I rode along, sitting beside a window, on one of the seats toward the back of the bus. I was looking out the window, but I wasn’t really noticing anything. I was letting the things I’d seen and heard and done during the day drift through my mind, re-experiencing them and rehearsing the way I would tell about them when I got home. Time passed. From time to time the bus stopped. Each time it did, there was a group of mothers waiting for it. Some children would recognize their mothers and get off at once. Others would remain sitting much as I was, mouths open, eyes blank. Some, I suppose, were rehearsing their stories as I was. Others, I suppose, were just baffled.     A scene often repeated went something like this: a girl sitting staring at nothing suddenly started when a woman who had come onto the bus touched her on the shoulder. She looked up, blinked, and said “Mommy!” Mother and daughter laughed, and the girl began talking as fast as she could, spilling out snippets of the day at random, and pushing papers at her mother, who, beaming, was guiding the child down the aisle toward the door of the bus.     More time passed. The bus emptied. I looked around. There were only two children left, two boys. One was a boy I recognized from the classroom. His name was Mort Grumbacher. He was sitting directly across the aisle from me. The other was Matthew Barber. He was sitting in the seat behind Mort, his head down, staring at the floor.     Mort was looking around wildly, and he had crumpled his papers into a tight ball in his hands.     “They’re all gone,” he said to me.     “Yeah,” I said.     “They all went home,” he said.     “Yeah,” I said.     His eyes were wide, but he wasn’t really looking at me, he was looking far beyond me, at his future.    “We’re going to die on this bus,” he said, “I’m never going to see my mother again.”     “What?” I said. “What?” I looked around the bus again. There really were no other kids left. I looked under the seat, along the floor. There were plenty of drawings left behind, but I didn’t see any little feet dangling down from the seats.     “You’re probably right,” said Matthew. “The rest of them are all at home right now,” he said. “They’re sitting on their mothers’ laps.”     “Uh, yeah,” I said, “probably.”     “But we’re not going to get home,” said Matthew. Mort’s eyes were bulging. His mouth hung open in stupefied horror.     “Sure we are,” I said. “We’re going to get home. It’s just a longer ride for us.”     Matthew gave me his twisted grin, pursed his lips and rolled his eyes, dismissing me as a ridiculous naïf.     “Nah,” he said. “We’re lost.”     “Lost?” I said. “Lost?” I turned back toward the window. We were passing houses that I didn’t recognize. We were lost.     “I knew this was going to happen,” Matthew said. “As soon as we drove up to the school, I had a feeling. I felt sick.”     So did I, I remembered. “So did I,” I said.     “Me too,” said Mort. He swallowed hard. It looked to me as if there was a good chance he would be sick right then.     “I knew that if my mother left me there I’d never see her again,” said Matthew. “I screamed, I cried, I kicked. But she left anyway.” He sighed and stared out the window, wistfully, remembering his mother. As I remember him now, he seems so drooped, so sagging and world-weary that I’m surprised he didn’t pull a half pint of Jack Daniel’s out of his pocket and light up a Lucky.     “Yeah,” I said, but I didn’t admit having done anything similar. Mort just kept looking wildly back and forth at Matthew and me, swallowing hard and nodding his head.     “And now,” Matthew said, “the other kids are showing their mothers the drawings they made—”     Mort looked down at the tight, sweaty ball of drawings in his hand. Matthew gave another of those twisted grins, shook his head slowly, and sighed. He crumpled his own drawings into a ball and tossed the ball over his shoulder. Mort looked at him and moaned. He looked at his ball of papers again and then let it fall to the floor. It was the most hopeless gesture I’d ever seen.     “—and they’re eating cookies too,” Matthew added.     Then he laughed a mad, desperate laugh. My heart nearly broke. My mother had told me that she’d make chocolate chip cookies for me to have when I got home. When I got home! When I got home!     Mort and I burst into tears at the same time. A voice boomed from the front of the bus, “Hey kids! What are you doing here? Did you miss your stop?”

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.

* 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,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six 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.

4

THE FOX-AND-CLAM EPISODE cost the Leightons several pupils. I was one of them. My mother spent much of that afternoon on the telephone. Most of the time, she just listened to the mothers of children who had been upset by the story—children who were lying on their beds, wringing their little hands, staring at the walls—but by the time she had listened to the fourth anxious mother, she had herself become anxious.     Over dinner, she told my father what she had learned. “I think it isn’t the right atmosphere for Peter,” she said when she had finished. “I think we should take him out of the school.”     “But I thought you said that the story didn’t seem to bother him,” said my father. He hadn’t finished eating. He had been listening to my mother throughout her account of the day, taking bites in between nodding and saying “Mm-hmm” and “Hmmm.” Now he put his fork down and ran his hand through his hair.     “Yes,” said my mother, “but if they’re going to be reading that sort of story, I think it’s just not the right sort of atmosphere for a child.” Several of the mothers were using the same phrase that evening. It had originated with Mrs. Hosmer, who, entirely by coincidence, had been reading a magazine article on the importance of the right atmosphere in child-rearing on the very morning of the fox-and-clam incident at the Misses Leighton’s School.     “I think childhood is important to a child,” said my mother. My father sneaked in a quick bite of meatloaf. “There’s time enough later for them to see the misery and unhappiness of life. They should be allowed to spend some time on that mountaintop, in the sun—”     “Yeah, I know,” said my father. “Before they descend into the valley of death.” He frowned.    “The vale of tears,” said my mother.     “Right, right,” said my father. “I don’t have any objection to taking him out of the school. I think those two old gals are kind of funny anyway.”     “Then it’s settled?” asked my mother.     “As far as I’m concerned,” said my father.     My mother went straight to the telephone, and my father had to pour his own coffee. He and I sat at the table, not looking at each other. I stirred the last of my peas into my mashed potatoes. I could hear my mother talking on the telephone to one of the other mothers. She was saying, “We decided that it just wasn’t the right atmosphere—”

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.

* 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,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six 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.

     Miss Louisa closed her book with a bang and looked around at us with a big smile, as she always did when she finished reading. I looked back at her, beaming. I was tremendously proud of her. She had turned in a magnificent performance. She had brought it off so smoothly, apparently effortlessly, without hesitation. I clapped my little hands together and said “Yay! Yay!” as if she’d just set a new record for the high jump.     I was the only one clapping. I looked around at my fellow pupils and I discovered that they, for some reason, were beginning to blubber. Matthew, however, was not. He sat there in Miss Emily’s lap nodding his head, his mouth twisted into that sneering grin.     Miss Louisa’s face fell. Miss Emily looked terrified. She began gathering children to her bosom. “It’s all right,” she repeated as she ran around the circle trying to give a hug to each of them. “It’s only a story.”     “It’s not just a story.” said Matthew. “It’s the truth.” His voice surprised everyone. We all looked at him, and the other children stopped crying. “I heard another story about the fox and the clam,” he said, “and it was just as bad.”     “I know a different story about the fox and the clam, too!” I said, smiling again, thinking that I might get a chance to tell my version.     Matthew looked straight at me. “How come you’re always smiling, Peter?” he asked.     I stopped smiling. I thought about the question, but I couldn’t think of an answer. I looked at Matthew, and then I looked around at the other boys and girls, at Miss Louisa and Miss Emily. They were all looking at me, waiting for an answer. None of them was smiling. I began to feel empty, stupid, and sad.     “I’m not always smiling,” I said, and I wasn’t.     The mothers and fathers began arriving. One by one their children ran to them, weeping, inconsolable. When my mother arrived, I ran to her at once and took her hand and started tugging her toward the car. When we were nearly there, I turned back to look at Matthew. He was staring at me, and after a moment he stuck his tongue out at me. He looked so silly with his red tongue sticking out of his white face that I couldn’t help myself. I laughed.

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.

* 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,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six 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.

     One afternoon, at reading time, we settled onto the lawn, and Miss Louisa opened a book and said, “Today I’m going to read you a story called ‘The Fox and the Clam.’”     “I know that story,” I blurted out, surprised and thrilled. A new feeling arose within me, a warm and pleasant feeling. It was pride. I had already read the story of the fox and the clam, but the other children, to judge from their blank faces, hadn’t; that meant that I was in an elevated position, closer to Miss Emily and Miss Louisa than any of the others.     “I know it, too,” said Matthew. The sound of his voice stunned everyone. It attenuated my warm and pleasant feeling. Miss Emily recovered first; she bounded to Matthew and scooped him up.     “Oh, good, Matthew,” said Miss Emily. She enveloped him in one of her pillowy hugs. “And you, too, Peter, good for you.” She had Matthew squashed in her arms, with his head bent to one side, but nonetheless I could see when he looked at me that he wore the same malevolent smile he had worn when he’d palmed that lard sandwich off on me.     “Now, Matthew and Peter,” said Miss Emily, “since you and I already know the story, we’ll have to be very quiet while Miss Louisa reads, so that we won’t spoil it for the others, won’t we?”     “Yeah,” I said, crushed. Not until she had told me that I was going to have to be quiet did I realize that I had been hoping to parade my familiarity with the story, that I had intended to keep interrupting with “Here comes a good part,” or “Wait’ll you hear what happens to the clam!”     Miss Louisa began.     “Once upon a time, a fox was on her way home to her family. She had spent all day scrubbing floors in the palace of the lion, who was the king of all the beasts.”     I had been wearing a big smile and the condescending look of the cognoscenti, but now my heart began to pound and I broke out in a sweat because the story Miss Louisa was beginning was clearly going to be wildly different from the fox-and-clam story I knew. I felt, at the same time, three kinds of anxiety. The first was the anxiety one feels when one is watching an actor in a difficult role, a musician playing a difficult piece, an athlete attempting a difficult feat: it seemed to me that Miss Louisa was undertaking a stupendous effort of improvisation, and I was afraid for her, afraid that she couldn’t bring off the spontaneous construction of so vastly different a version of the story, afraid that she was going to make a fool of herself. The second was the anxiety one feels when one has pretended, in conversation, to have read a book that one has not and sees in the expression on the face of one’s interlocutor genuine interest, interest that is already forming into a question that one will not be able to answer: it seemed to me that, since I had claimed to know the story, Miss Louisa might at some point ask me what was going to happen next, and I would be the one to make a fool of himself. The third was entirely new to me: it was anxiety born of rivalry. I looked at Matthew. His expression had reverted to his habitual look of disappointment, and from it I couldn’t get any idea of what he was thinking. Since he stayed with the Leightons after the rest of us left, I wondered whether he had perhaps already heard Miss Louisa’s story, whether perhaps he already knew what Miss Louisa was going to say. Since he and I were the only ones who knew anything about the story, we were competitors, but it might well be that he had an advantage, inside information on Miss Louisa’s version of the story of the fox and the clam.     Miss Louisa went on. “Her knees were sore, and her hands were rough and chafed. Her body ached from the hard work she had to do. Her heart ached too, because she knew that she would have to go on doing this work until she died. ‘Oh,’ she wailed, ‘A fox’s life is a sorry life. I wish I could be some other animal.’     “Just then a fairy popped out from under a toadstool. ‘Your wish is granted,’ said the fairy, who had the power to grant wishes. ‘You may be any animal you choose to be.’     “The fox’s heart leaped up, and she skipped along, thinking about what animal she might become. While she skipped along, a small bird flew past her, and the fox said, ‘Oh, I think I might be happy if I were a bird like you. It must be wonderful to fly through the air instead of scrubbing floors.     “‘Does my life look good to you?’ asked the bird. ‘All day long I have been flying back and forth with worms in my mouth to feed my babies, who scream all the time. If that sounds good to you, then why don’t you take my place?’     “The bird’s life didn’t sound very good to the fox, so she went on. After a while, she saw a rabbit hop across the path in front of her, and the fox said, ‘Oh, I think I might be happy if I were a rabbit like you. It must be wonderful to spend all day hopping through the woods, so blithe and nonchalant.’     “‘Does my life look good to you?’ asked the rabbit. ‘Right now I’m running from a farmer who saw me eating cabbage in his cabbage patch. If he catches me, he’s going to impale me on the pitchfork he’s carrying. If that sounds good to you, then why don’t you take my place?’     “The rabbit’s life didn’t sound very good to the fox, so she went on. After a while, she came to a bay, and the fox said, ‘I’ll bet there are clams in this bay.’ And she called out to the clams, ‘Oh, I think I might be happy if I were a clam like you. It must be wonderful to spend all day resting in the sand.’     “‘Oh, yes,’ called a clam. ‘It is wonderful. We don’t have to hunt for food—we just stick our necks out and eat whatever comes along. We never have to bring food to our children, as the birds do—in fact, we never give any thought to our children at all. We never get chased by farmers, as the rabbits do. We don’t have any work to do for the King, as you do, and we don’t ever get sore knees, since we don’t have any knees. However—’     “The clam’s life sounded so very, very good to the fox that she didn’t wait for the clam to finish. She cried, ‘I wish to be a clam,’ and jumped into the bay. By the time she reached the bottom, she had become a clam, and she was happy.     “But just then, along came one of the Royal Clamdiggers, and he dug up the clam who had once been a fox. He took her to the Royal Cook, and that night she ended up in the Royal Stomach.”

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.

* 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,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six 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.

     My mother and Mr. Beaker decided that I had memorized parts of the stories, and that I was making additions and changes to cover up for my not being able to remember other parts. In short, they decided that I couldn’t really read at all.     My mother worried about me. In consultation with the other mothers in our neighborhood, she decided that I had serious intellectual deficiencies that should be corrected before I began kindergarten. She wanted to enroll me in the Misses Leighton’s Nursery School. She enlisted Eliza Foote as an ally, and together they persuaded Mr. Beaker to endorse the idea. The Misses Leighton’s Nursery School was much less practical than what Mr. Beaker would have liked, but it was the only school that that I could possibly attend, since there was no other nursery school in Babbington, and it would at least be a beginning. I would be, at least formally, a student. When my father seemed hesitant, Mr. Beaker offered to pay half the cost, and the matter was settled.

     The school was conducted within the Misses Leighton’s house, a large and comfortable frame house where the two women—Emily and Louisa—had for some twenty years attended their ailing mother. When she had died at last, the daughters, released from their responsibility well into middle age, had spent their small inheritance on a trip to Greece, where they acquired an enormous number of fascinating miniature plaster replicas of classical statuary, and where Emily learned to play the bouzouki, though not well.     When they returned, they opened the little school, which emphasized the visual arts (mostly coloring, finger painting, and modeling in clay), dance (which consisted of having the children put on shifts made of cheesecloth and romp around the lawn behind Louisa while Emily played the bouzouki), and literature (which consisted of our sitting in a circle and listening to one or the other of the Misses Leighton read aloud).     Most of our instruction took place on their porch. The porch had been enclosed with windows and knotty pine. In my memory of the time I spent there, the sun is always shining. Miss Emily, large and soft, is wearing a white cotton dress with a billowy skirt. She is constantly moving, bustling from one pupil to another, giving out squashy hugs, and from time to time she bursts into operatic passages that make Louisa, a wiry, wan woman with fine, dark hair, wince.     Miss Emily paid particular attention to one of the other boys, who was so plump and soft and pale that the rest of us thought of him as a marshmallow. He was a sad little boy who wore a look of disappointment nearly all the time. He didn’t laugh, but neither did he cry. He was so uncommunicative that the rest of us gave up trying to talk to him after a while, though Miss Emily continually urged us to talk to him, to play with him. This was Matthew Barber. All of the rest of us knew that Matthew sometimes stayed at the Leightons’ after we left. His mother would come to get him later, when she closed her shop. I had heard my parents talk about how big-hearted the Leighton sisters were, how fortunate Mrs. Barber was that the Leightons allowed Matthew to attend the school for nothing, how fortunate the poor boy was that he had this opportunity.     Outside the porch, behind the house, was a wide lawn, surrounded by lilacs. Surely these lilacs cannot always have been in bloom while I was at the Leightons’ school, but in my memory they are. Perhaps I am remembering the lilac cologne that Miss Emily wore.     During the morning we would draw, paint, or model in clay. Then we would eat lunch. All of us brought lunches from home. When it was time to eat, we would gather together in groups of friends. Periodically, Miss Louisa took us aside, one at a time, and reminded us that Matthew was not a happy boy, that he had no father, and that we should share our lunches with him because he didn’t have any money. Once, I traded sandwiches with him. The sandwich I gave him was tuna fish, and I was fond of tuna fish sandwiches. The sandwich he gave me was lard, just lard. With the first bite I decided that I’d been duped. I looked at him. He was wolfing down the tuna fish sandwich, but he paused to smile at me. It was not a pure smile. It was more like a sneer.     During the afternoon, we would dance, hurl the discus and javelin, play follow-the-leader, or act in skits. Then at the end of the day, our little group would sit in a ring around Emily or Louisa, who would read to us. On cool days we would sit on the porch, but on warm days we would sit outside on the lawn. After the day’s reading, our parents would arrive, and we would go home.     Most of the time, my mother drove me to the school and picked me up at the end of the day. She was always deferential toward the Misses Leighton, who quite bowled her over. Sometimes, though, my father picked me up, and he was always nervous around the Leighton sisters. He would stand with his hands in his pockets for most of the time. He looked at the ground or the floor, or he looked quickly at the drawings and finger paintings I had made, but he almost never raised his eyes to look directly at Emily or Louisa, and since he spoke, when he spoke, in the direction of the floor, neither of them had any idea what he was saying. When we rode home together in the car, he would sometimes ask me questions about what went on at the school, but he seemed more interested in knowing whether the boys and girls changed into their cheesecloth shifts in the same room at the same time than in what I had made out of my ration of clay that day.

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.

* 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,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six 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.

3

SO DELICIOUS was the pleasure of listening to adults read to me that I resisted learning to read for a long time. Mr. Beaker came to my parents’ house a few times a week to read to me and to try to teach me to read. He would run his finger along the lines of type as he read to demonstrate that it was from them that he was taking his words, and I soon began to understand that he was just repeating what was already in the book, that he wasn’t improvising the stories from the pictures, and I began to think that Mr. Beaker wasn’t as smart—as clever—as I had thought. He would point out words to me and have me repeat them, and if a word appeared several times on a page he would have me point to each occurrence of it. But when he asked me to try to read, I would return to the pictures, to my memory of the story as he had read it, and to whatever popped into my head, and I would improvise. I’d try to concentrate on the type, but my eyes and my mind would wander. I used the written words that I could read only as I used the pictures—as prompts for memory, spurs for imagination.     Finally, one day Mr. Beaker asked me to read the fable of the fox and the clam, which he knew was my favorite. “One sunny day the silly fox hopped into his rowboat and set off to see his friend the farmer,” I began.     “I give up,” said Mr. Beaker, and he did. But by that time my mother had grown fond of the stories in the Big Book, and she read to me from it every night when I went to bed. Inevitably, I began to be able to decipher the blocks of print, but when I read, whenever I came to a spot that I didn’t like or a place where something seemed to be missing or where something seemed to be wrong, I would make an improvement, an addition, or a correction. I did this when I read to myself, and I did it when I read aloud for my mother. She became concerned, and she asked Mr. Beaker to listen to me read once more and decide what should be done. He did. When I read the words on the page, my mother and Mr. Beaker smiled. When I added or changed anything, they frowned.     I loved my mother dearly, and I wanted Mr. Beaker’s approval. I wanted to please them, and I was trying to please them. I had gotten the idea, and it had become an unshakable conviction, that the writing in the book was only part of the story, and the thinnest part of it at that. It seemed to me that it was an outline, that it was just supposed to get you going, that the best parts of any of the stories were waiting in the spaces where your mind was free to wander, to decide what the fox’s children were doing and what his house looked like, to make up the stories that were told about the clam.     “Peter,” asked Mr. Beaker, “why did you say that about the fox’s children fighting over the toy lamb?”     “He says that every time,” said my mother.     “Why do you say that, Peter?” Mr. Beaker asked again.     “Because that’s what the children do,” I said.     “Do you think that’s part of the story?” he asked.     I wasn’t quite sure how to interpret this question. Either Mr. Beaker was insulting me or he had begun to lose his marbles. Hadn’t I just read the story to him with the fighting over the toy lamb in it? Didn’t that make it part of the story? If I put it into the story, it was in the story, wasn’t it?     “Yes,” I said, warily.     Mr. Beaker gave me a pat on the head, and he began talking to my mother in whispers.

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.

* 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,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six 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.

2

“WELL, PETER,” said Mr. Beaker, “what did you think of that?”     “It was funny,” I said. I was studying the picture of the fox in the rowboat. I wondered how Mr. Beaker had gotten so long a story out of that one picture, and especially how he had been able to imagine so clearly the hilarious figure of the fox grabbing for the falling leg of lamb and losing his balance. When my father cleared his throat, I was aware that all three of them were looking at me, waiting for me to say something more. When I looked at them, I saw that they wore long faces. There were tears in the corners of my mother’s eyes, and Mr. Beaker and my father looked gravely concerned. I was smiling.     “The fox fell down,” I said, and pointed to the picture to show them what I meant, because it seemed to me that the whole story was somehow contained in the picture, and that my mother and father must be able to see the fox falling just as Mr. Beaker had. “He was a silly fox,” I said. I looked at them again. I could see that they didn’t agree.     “What about the clam, Peter?” asked Mr. Beaker.     “He was a smart clam,” I said. I began to feel embarrassed. I could tell, from the quiet, patient tone Mr. Beaker used, that I was not answering correctly, that Mr. Beaker thought I didn’t have all my marbles.     “Don’t you think he’s a little young for a story like this?” asked my father.     “Oh, yes,” said my mother. She hugged me from behind and ran her hands over my chest. “He’s much too young, Dudley. Don’t you remember telling me that childhood is like a moment on a mountaintop in the sunshine before we descend into the vale of tears?”     “I don’t remember that,” said my father. “When did he say that?”     “Oh, one time,” said my mother. “I forget when.”     “I suppose you’re right,” said Mr. Beaker. He chucked me under the chin and looked straight at me and frowned. “Smile while you can, Peter. Enjoy that moment on the mountaintop in the sunshine.”     “Why don’t I remember that?” asked my father.     I looked at the picture of the fox again. I still didn’t get it. The fox still seemed like a laughable jerk to me.     “Let’s read it again,” I said.

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.

* 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,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six 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.