Creative Nonfiction

Once the Fun Ends
By Michael Colbert 

We first meet at the gym. The gym has ten treadmills and twenty weight machines. We make eye contact and he waves, so I go say hi. We work at the same school but have never spoken, even though we’re among the four teachers in their 20s. Lynn and I, the two foreign English teachers, have talked about him and the other young teacher. They were new arrivals last April and are closest to our age.
 
On Saturday, when I was leaving the gym with other foreign friends, I saw him signing up. We said hi and when I got home, I looked him up in the old yearbook my supervisor had given me. In it she’d stuck the school paper with an announcement of the new arrivals who came in April. Above the kanji she’d scribbled katakana for me to decipher. Kasai, and next to him Sakuma.
 
So when we meet at the gym, I can say hi and use his name. I stumble through a conversation. We talk about sports—he’s the tennis coach—and friends—I have none because I came to Japan from the States in August, and his all live faraway in Hakodate and Obihiro, the far reaches of Hokkaido from Sorachi, where we live among fields between mountains. I ask if he likes to drink and we part ways with intention to get dinner along with Sakuma.
 
I go back to my apartment that night and write about finally meeting someone my age in town. I tell a Japanese friend in the States that I carried out a conversation in Japanese, and she says to go make friends.
 
***
 
At Christmas, I will return home, so beforehand I send a message to Kasai. Let’s go out for drinks before I go home. The next day at work, he brings me a printed map with a pin of a yakitori restaurant where we will eat. He checked the time with Sakuma, and they will pick me up at 6:45. One of the English teachers I sit next to says something to him in Japanese that I don’t understand. Before he leaves, she looks at me. “He’s the same age as you, so maybe you can become good friends.”
 
That night a shiny white car picks me up at the drugstore near my apartment. Their smiles are big and waves enthusiastic. People say alcohol is a necessary lubricant in Japan, but these teachers seem entirely different from the two I know at school.
 
Before meeting them, I take a shot of whiskey. It warms my stomach and loosens my tongue. When we arrive at the restaurant, I can make simple jokes in Japanese. We talk about movies and food. I say I like katsu curry. I use my love of spicy foods to gain social currency in Japan. I tell them about buffalo sauce, and Sakuma tells me about a restaurant where they serve giant portions of katsu curry, but so big that you’d likely get sick unless you haven’t eaten for days.
 
They ask about the States, and I say that I will visit my sister and brother-in-law in New York and celebrate New Year’s in Boston with college friends. They think New York is cool and I talk about it more than I really know it.
We race to find words on Google Translate when I don’t understand something. They make me try tokoroten, and I laugh when I fumble with my chopsticks even though I’ve lived in Japan for four months.
 
***
 
At home, I tell my family tales from Hokkaido. I make a slideshow to show pictures from visits to Sapporo, Rishiri, and Kyoto. Throughout I add pictures of the friends I’ve made. Proof of the experiences I want to have, and Kasai and Sakuma figure in.
 
To them I also send pictures of the States. My family’s Christmas tree, the tacky light show in town synced to a local radio station, sunsets along the river without snow. I see my home through somebody else’s eyes and I give it to those eyes.
 
I don’t make it to New York during my visit. My flight home was delayed a day. A surprise whiteout shut thousands in the airport. News crews came to record. People got free blankets and made picnics of konbini food on the floor. I found Lynn who was returning to Singapore. “It’s like a picnic with an unknown end date,” she said.
 
Returning one day later changed my days at home from ten to nine, and New York seemed like too far to go. I was envious of myself and the stories I could’ve told.
 
***
 
We exchange nengajo, Japanese New Year’s cards. I ask for their addresses and write cards to say I had fun and that I want to go eat that giant curry and then visit a nearby onsen. I get cards back that say the same.
 
And when I’m back in Japan, we do that. Except it’s a Sunday, and the giant curry restaurant is closed. We go to a Nepalese restaurant instead. This time there’s no beer. I feel the silences and don’t know how to fill them. So I comment on how hard they work. They arrive at eight in the morning and leave at eight at night, well past the 4:30 PM sunsets I take pictures of during my walk home. Both coaches, they go to school for club activities on weekends. Before meeting them that night, I spent the day cleaning my apartment and reading while they worked all day and probably missed lunch.
 
All of us full of curry and naan, at the onsen I teach them the phrase food baby and they tell me a Japanese equivalent. When I mention the Japanese later to other, older friends, nobody seems to think it’s right.
 
The onsen is small. A father brings his young daughter in, and an old man laughs without pause when Kasai, Sakuma, and I enter. I decide it’s because I’m foreign, and we go into the sauna.
 
We take turns entering one of the baths. They both call it “biribiri.” I assume it’s an expression for a massage bath. When I enter, my arms go rigid and sink to the bottom. When I can’t move, I learn that biribiri means shocking, sparks.
​
After bathing, we sit at low tables and drink small bottles of milk. I drink water from my Nalgene, and this fascinates them. They scroll through Amazon and show each other different bottles. The next week during lunch, they come to my desk with blue and red bottles. I give them both stickers from an American coffee shop. I feel like a fourth grade teacher with a good deed chart, giving out gold stars to favorite students. I notice my eyes lighten as other teachers look on.
 
“Cool, young teachers.”
 
“Look at those American water bottles.” I feel cool, and my friendships are public.
 
***
 
Time goes by. Kasai snowboards, so I send him a text. I want to say, “If you ever have a chance and want to go, I’m down,” but it comes out garbled and formal in Japanese. He doesn’t answer, and I worry. These teachers have no free time, so why should I monopolize those few chances they do have?
 
But at school he says he’d like to. Maybe February. January’s busy. You’re all so busy, I say. Don’t worry. At night, I go to the gym alone, no foreign friends, no Kasai. On my walks there and back, I watch for all the white cars, hoping to see people waving inside.
 
More time passes. Sometimes, I say good morning to them before the daily staff meeting, but most I don’t, engrossed in the news. The disgusting things back home provide me with an excuse to ignore them. I’ve known this feeling before.
 
In college in Maine, I went for moody walks off campus past pine-lined streets, forgetting about the friends I wanted and forgetting about the friends I already had. By day I’d study in the student union, burying my eyes in photocopied readings for class. When the people who I hoped to see would pass by, I kept my head down and waited for them to say hi. The people I seek out, whose friendship I yearn for for the easy laughs and laughing ease. I want it, and I think about it, and I push back. I don’t need friends. Why should I care?
 
But I decide I do care. Two weeks later I ask about going out for drinks after work. Something light, something easy. They respond, fast, and we make plans for that Friday. That day after school, Sakuma comes to my desk.
 
“So, is it okay if we eat at your place?”
 
I say yes but then ask if he means eating at my place or picking me up from my place. I wonder if this is a cultural difference, but then I don’t have time to wonder. I rush home from work to clean my room and chop vegetables for soup. I buy a six-pack and stuff the beers into the snow on my balcony. With a tortilla, I make a buffalo pizza as a taste of something American and weird.
 
They arrive late with food. A tray of sushi, drinks, a bag of peanuts. The buffalo pizza is spicy but they like it, and we sit around my kotatsu eating nabe. My apartment is startlingly American. They ogle the pictures on my wall, my floor lamp, and the Christmas lights along my ceiling, holdovers from college I don’t want to outgrow.
 
Conversation is light again. I bring up politics—Trump is why I’m angry in the morning—and family. I learn about their siblings and the families they rarely get to see because of their limited time off.  I fall on the crutch of asking them about work and drinking.
 
In Japanese, I am brutish and unwieldy. Lacking the vocabulary to talk about what I care about, I talk about getting drunk. I am a caricature of someone I have never really been. Sakuma teaches Japanese literature, but I can’t talk about books, and Kasai teaches history, but I can’t talk about politics.
 
It is Setsubun. Sakuma reveals ehomaki, giant rolls of sushi. For good luck, we find north-northwest and eat them facing my wall without speaking. It is the year of the rooster, which means that north-northwest is most fortuitous. I’m slowest, and they video me, spectators commentating on the straggler in the race.
 
We take handfuls of peanuts and toss them towards the door. “Demons out, good luck in.” They get giddy when they ask to go to Lynn’s apartment to toss her some. When she answers, I’m giddy. They really wanted to come, I say with my eyes, although I probably don’t because I’m buzzed. I don’t say that I really wanted to come to show off my friends, but maybe I do because I’m buzzed and Lynn is smart.
 
***
 
After Setsubun, they seem less formal at school. Sakuma drives me home one day as we are leaving at the same time, and Kasai tells me that they both bought new lamps like mine. I think about the friends I sought in college and wonder if all I needed was to throw peanuts with them.
 
But that night, Kasai said he’d be moving schools in April. Back to Hakodate or east to Kitami or Obihiro, cities whose tourist attractions I learn about when searching the distance online.
 
Sakuma will be a homeroom teacher. His students will rally behind him on Sports Day and at the school festival. I think of the sunsets over the nearby buckwheat field that he will never see, staying late for baseball practice, dealing with the PTA, and researching entrance exams for his students’ futures.
 
I knew I’d leave them in the summer, trading yakitori and handicapped discussion for college friends and political protests and a new job. But I think of leaving and being left behind and I wonder why I didn’t feel so bad about leaving them, but being left behind makes me want to stay. With them at school together, from some faceless office in New York or Portland I can still imagine their antics, and I can imagine what I could one day come back to. But with them leaving before, I can only imagine the nothing that will remain while I am still here.
 
***
At night, I go for walks again. It is February and the days sometimes rise above freezing and coat our roads in slush. I walk to the park where I ran in summer, now interred in snow. I walk to the gym, and I walk home. I listen to music I listened to in college on cool Maine nights when I walked down the middle of the street and contemplated streetlights. I walk around town, looking. Looking for the white cars. 

Michael is a writer based in Portland, Maine. He loves horror film (his favorites are Candyman and Get Out), and he’s a coffee addict (his favorites are Costa Rican and Ethiopian). His work has appeared in such publications as Germinal, Gravel, Orion, and the Worcester Journal.

* * * 

I Feel Bad About My Hair
By Tina Mortimer 

As a child, I loved being in the water. Every day of every summer of my childhood in Connecticut was spent either at the beach or in someone’s pool. That changed my freshman year of high school. It was 1990. I was with a group of girls whom I had just started spending time with that school year. There were five of us—Lauren, Amy, Big Nancy, Little Nancy and myself—and we were tight. Each of us was from solid, middle-class families, which meant someone always had a pool, albeit, an above ground pool.  

Although we’d been friends for nearly a year, it was our first summer together, and I had spent the entire spring dreading it. These were popular girls. They were pretty, athletic, slim—all the things I was not.  Lauren had platinum blonde hair that always looked amazing, sea blue eyes and perfect skin. Big Nancy—a moniker we used to differentiate her from Little Nancy because she was several inches taller—had the longest legs I’d ever seen. She was captain of the high-stepping team. Little Nancy, as her name suggested, was perfectly petite. She was also the most bosomy of our group, and a cheerleader. Amy, like me, didn’t participate in any extracurricular activities, but was whip smart and considered a knockout by every boy in school.  She was one of those girls who was treated like “one of the guys,” due to her propensity for tough talking and belching in public. I strongly suspect Amy invented the Resting Bitch Face. 
 
I wasn’t beautiful. I wasn’t athletic. I was far from being one of the guys. At best, I was average. The problem was, I was about 15 pounds overweight and had thighs like tree trunks. I knew I had thighs like tree trunks because Yvonne Diaz told me as much the first time she saw me in a pair of gym shorts in the 8th grade. I doubt she knew then that her words, and the look on her face when she said them, would be forever cemented in my mind. No matter how thin I’d become in adulthood, I would always feel fat. 

I was certain that once my beautiful new friends saw my thick, dimpled legs in a bathing suit they’d turn away in disgust and never be seen with me again. But that didn’t happen. In part because I’d grossly miscalculated how much interest they would have in my legs. These weren’t mean girls. They could be hurtful, sure, but they weren’t malicious. I was part of their tribe. We went to parties together, slept over each other’s houses, copied off each other’s homework. We ate lunch together nearly every day and talked on the phone every night. If they noticed my thighs, they never showed it. What they did notice was something I never expected. 

It was early in the summer. We’d just graduated from lowly freshman to up-and-coming sophomores, and were eager to start working on our tans in anticipation of our higher ranks. This was back before anyone cared about melanoma or sunspots. We slathered on the baby oil with reckless abandon, sometimes using a whole bottle in one afternoon because we thought is would make our skin extra bronzy and subtle, not blotchy and leathery like some of our mothers’ complexions. 

We didn’t last long sunbathing on plastic lawn chairs. Summers in Connecticut could be unbearably humid.  On this day, it must have been close to 90 degrees with air as thick as soup. One by one, we peeled our bodies off the hot vinyl, climbed up the wobbly plastic steps of the pool and jumped in. I was last to get wet. I plugged my nose, squeezed my eyes shut and cannon-balled. 

When I emerged from underwater, I noticed Lauren, whom I’d always considered the kindest of my new best friends, staring at my head. 

“What happened to your hair?” she croaked, rubbing water from her chlorine-reddened eyes. Everyone turned and looked at me. My stomach sank. 

“What do you mean?” I asked, slightly hysterical. Once again, something wasn’t right with me. And once again, someone had noticed. My mind flashed back to Yvonne Diaz and her comment about my thighs. 

I tried to hold it together. My hair, as unruly as it was, had never been a major cause for concern like my weight. Now I could see that I’d missed something. My first thought was that the chemicals in the water had turned my hair a different color. My hand instinctively went to my head. What little hair I had was still there. I gingerly smoothed it back. It wasn’t sticking up. So what was the problem, I wondered. 

“I mean, where did your hair go?” she chuckled, smoothing back her own thick, blonde hair. “It, like, disappeared. It’s so thin.” 

I couldn’t believe it. Was she making fun of me? I wasn’t sure how to respond. My first instinct was to say, Excuse me, in a snotty tone, as if I hadn’t heard her right. But then, I really didn’t want her to repeat what she’d just said. I decided to feign indifference. 

“It’s just how it gets when it’s wet,” I shrugged. 

Lauren floated backwards away from me as if she were already bored with the conversation. The Nancys remained silent. Amy, who lacked a filter, said, “Dude, it looks like you’re going bald!” 

I felt the tears well up in my eyes. Amy must have noticed. “We’re just kidding, girl, don’t be so sensitive,” she said sweetly. 

But I was sensitive. I couldn’t help it. I got out of the pool without saying a word, sat down on my chair, and put on my sunglasses. After a few minutes, Amy, Lauren and the Nancys got bored of splashing around and joined me. They never mentioned my hair again. They didn’t have to. The damage had been done. From that point on, I was obsessed with every measly strand. 

When I got home that night, I realized they were right. Once you washed away the Aqua Net and hair gel and smoothed down the excessive teasing, I wasn’t left with much. I blamed my mother. 

In the 4th grade, I was infatuated with the character Hope Brady who starred on the soap opera, "Days of Our Lives". To my young, still-developing mind she had everything that mattered: a big house, even bigger hair and the town dreamboat, Bo Brady. She also had a nice figure—something my grandfather was quick to point out whenever he caught a glimpse of Hope on the cover of my grandmother’s soap opera digest. I had no idea what a nice figure was, but I reasoned it must be a good thing because my grandfather always had a big smile on his face when he saw one. 

Even at age 10, I knew I would never look like Hope Brady. (I was naïve, not delusional.) Hope was an exotic beauty with dark, wavy hair, olive-colored skin and a c-cup. She was also probably in her mid-twenties at the time.  I was a mousy, flat-chested child.  So I tried for the next best thing: I’d have her hair.  At the time, I didn’t particularly dislike my hair.  I just wanted more of it. All I needed was a perm. 

I expected to have to beg and bargain and plead with my mother. I expected her to say no. She should have said no. I was 10 years old for Christ sakes and I wanted to look like a soap opera star more than twice my age. Yet for some reason I still don’t understand, and still haven’t quite forgiven, she said yes. On one condition: She wouldn’t pay for an expensive salon perm. She would do it herself. So the next day we went to the pharmacy and my mother bought me an Ogilvie home perm kit on sale for five dollars. When we got home, she had me bend over the bathroom sink so she could apply the chemical to my hair. The solution smelled awful, but I didn’t care. I sat perfectly still on the toilet for an hour while it processed, giddy with anticipation. Then my mother rinsed my hair, added more of the solution, and rinsed again until she was satisfied with the level of doneness. 

I emerged from the bathroom two hours later with a sore neck and what could only be described as a Jheri curl. I was mortified. These were not the big, bouncy waves Hope Brady had. These curls were tight and had the consistency of uncooked macaroni. Staring at my reflection in the hall mirror, I pinched a curl between my thumb and index finger and pulled it away from my scalp. It recoiled back with the velocity of a rubber band. I didn’t leave my bedroom the rest of the weekend. And I would have stayed locked in my room the rest of my life had my mother not dragged me, kicking and screaming, to school on Monday morning. 

The rest of the 4th grade did not go well for me. The teasing was relentless, and probably would have continued through 5th grade and beyond until the perm wore off, had it not been for the new student who joined our class that spring. Millie Brown came to our school from the Dominican Republic. Millie was a shy girl with long brown hair, caramel-colored skin and a mustache thicker than my grandfather’s. 

What happened at the pool when I was in high school wasn’t quite as bad as the Jheri curl incident, but it was close. Once again, I felt bad about my hair. And once again, I wanted to lock myself in my room for the rest of my life. 

When I think about it now, I don’t fault my friends for razzing me about my hair. They didn’t mean to hurt me.  But after that day at the pool, something changed. My self-esteem, already tenuous, had taken a major hit. I knew there was no way I was getting anywhere near a body of water with my friends ever again. So I didn’t participate in the hot tub party nights hosted by a classmate whose parents were always out of town. (Which, in hindsight, was probably a good thing). I skipped the spring break trip to Mexico senior year. (Again, probably a good thing.)  I started wearing various head coverings when I went out: baseball caps and bandanas in the summer, knit hats in the fall and winter. Halloween was my favorite time of year. At Halloween, I could have any type of hair I wanted. Even the cheap synthetic wigs, which were all I could afford, seemed better than my real hair. 

Over the years, I’d spent hundreds of dollars on products promising to make my hair thicker, fuller, more voluminous, and hours in front of the mirror trying to cover the thinner spots with magic hair powder or strategically placed hair bands.  (Most of the time I’d become so frustrated, I’d stay home.)  The only time my natural hair ever looked thick, full or voluminous was when I was pregnant with my son.  I could have stayed pregnant with him forever to have that hair. 

Of course, when I wasn’t pregnant, my hair continued on its path to anorexia. Once again, I blamed my mother, but also, genetics. My mother always had thin, baby-fine hair. My father went bald when he was in his early twenties. So I guess I should have seen it coming. Yet, nothing could have prepared me for what I experienced after the birth of my daughter. 

After my daughter was born in 2014, my hair fell out in clumps. I’d run my fingers through my hair and strand upon strand would fall away from my head. This went on for weeks. I thought I was dying. I went to see my OBGYN. She was the same doctor who performed the cesarean section that gave me my daughter, and I trusted her. She drew my blood and ran some tests. I waited for the results with bated breath, certain that the news would be awful. Yet all the tests came back normal. The reason my hair was falling out, she said, was hormones. Apparently, this type of hair loss was common in women who had recently given birth. She explained that during pregnancy, increased levels of estrogen in a woman’s body freezes hair in its growing phase. So hair that would normally fall out stays put. After a woman gives birth and her estrogen levels decline, all the hair that was frozen starts to fall out. My doctor promised that my hair would grow back—eventually. And eventually, it did, but it was never the same. 

I’d like to say that after 40 years I no longer care so much about my appearance, but that would be a lie. The truth is I do still care, very much, but my days of naval-gazing and wasting my precious time and money on hair products are over. No, I didn’t wake up one morning with the sudden realization that only inner beauty matters. There was no grand eureka moment or life-changing epiphany that made me realize my self-worth. I guess I just got tired—tired of trying to look a certain way, tired of trying to live up to some bogus standard of beauty that was created by men and perpetuated by women like myself. Most of all, I was tired of trying to make my hair into something it wasn’t and would never be. So I decided to buy a wig. Well, a sort of wig. 

Wigs have come a long way since I was a thin-skinned, obsequious teenager. Many are made of real human hair. Even the synthetic wigs they make now feel like real hair. The half wig is made for people like me who have hair, but just want more of it. 

If you’ve never seen a half wig, it’s kind of like a toupee that clips on and off and blends in with your real hair. I wear one when I go out to dinner or to a party, which is to say, not often. But it feels good on my head — especially in the winter when my ears get cold. 

When I think about all the time I wasted focused on my hair, and on my appearance in general, I feel shame. I also feel profound sadness. Sadness for the sweet, sensitive girl whose self-esteem was ruined by soap operas and a few hurtful comments before it ever had the chance to develop. Yes, I blame myself for placing so much importance on my physical appearance. I also blame society’s exceedingly warped standards of beauty— standards that are shoved in women’s faces, standards that never seem to evolve or come close to being realistic. 
​
I have more self-confidence now than I ever had, but I still have bad days. On bad days, I forget how to separate myself from my body. Intellectually, I know my self-worth. But when I’m thinking emotionally, I lose all perspective. I don’t want to change who I am or who I was in my teens and twenties, even though I made mistakes and spent too much time worrying about the superficial. I love myself. I just don’t always love my body. I’m trying though. I want to learn—if not for myself, then for my daughter. Because more than anything, I want her to grow up with the self-esteem and self-respect that always seemed to elude me, and with the knowledge that no matter what her body looks like, she is beautiful, she is loved and she is enough. 
​
I want desperately to set a good example, to be the type of woman my daughter can admire and emulate. So I try to move through this world with confidence and grace. Some days, I have to fake it. Most days, I don’t. I’m slowly coming to accept and appreciate what I have: thick thighs, thin hair and all. Today, I wear the half wig only when I’m feeling too lazy to wash my real hair, or when I’m having one of those bad days and just need to pretend I’m someone else for a few hours — someone with great hair, someone who walks with her head (of great hair) held high. Someone who doesn’t give a damn what other people think about her.  
​​
Tina Mortimer is an essayist and short story writer. Her work has been featured in Minnesota Parent and on the websites The Purple Fig, Mutha, Hippocampus and Cleaver. She lives with her husband and two young children in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. 

* * * 

Run Away Home
By Melissa Knox

​​Glasses sliding down my nose, Twiggy haircut falling over the sidepiece held on with a safety pin, knee socks falling to my ankles, I settled again on my favorite spot, the cushioned library windowsill facing the East River. Surrounded by shelves of library-bound books in browns, reds and greens, I could relax. The enforced silence during our fourth-grade’s library period meant I could read without fear of being teased.

Opening the dark green covers of Elinor Lyon’s Run Away Home, I followed the ups and downs of the equally skinny, but fearless Cathie, who never wavers in her resolve to find the place where she belongs. Her Birmingham orphanage is far from the white sands she’s sure she visited, amid the roar of the sea, as a young child. The orphanage director says beaches with white sands don’t exist, but Cathie’s determined to find the one she sat on, though her parents died in an air raid during the Second World War and she doesn’t remember them.

#

I remembered mine all too well, and I was due home in a few hours. I gloated over every minute spent in school, though I barely passed any subject, my chronic inattentiveness resulting in written warnings on report cards. I was on record for phoning eleven people in my class for a math assignment—three weeks overdue—about which I had forgotten. I never passed math, but until the entire class found out I was so far behind, I thought I’d take a stab at doing so. I got teased for carrying around trolls in my uniform pocket--Nobody’s played with them since second grade, Melissa! My feral ways were often chided. Had I heard of Kleenex? Eeeew, wipe your nose.

At “St. Ursula’s Home for Female Orphans,” Cathie, like me, wears an ugly navy-blue uniform. The other girls tease her for losing her temper, but she ignores them. She likes Wordsworth; they read movie magazines. As I sat in my own navy-blue school uniform on that windowsill, wishing I were aboard one of the tugboats heading south on the river, I wanted to believe that like Cathie, I’d find a place I belonged, the place I’d come from so long ago. Even if I didn’t find that place, I wanted not to care when I got teased. I wanted to be just like Cathie.

#

As I turned pages, I schemed: Cathie escapes from a city orphanage, hitch-hiking and tagging along behind families when she boards trains. When everyone insists she has no family, she proves that indeed she does. If she could do that, couldn’t I prove I didn’t have a family when everybody thought I did? Maybe that woman holding me in family photos wasn’t really my mother. If Cathie could meet children who turn out to be distant cousins on the steps of Edinburgh castle, I bet I could run into previously undiscovered relatives while waiting for the crosstown bus at 79th and York.

When I arrived home in the afternoon, my afterschool snack consisted of stale wheat berry bread with organic stone ground peanut butter, which my mother kept refrigerated. The oil separated and rose to the top; the peanut butter could bend stainless steel knives when you tried to get it out. My mother loved a wacky nutritionist whose cookbooks, along with jars of Kretschmer’s wheat germ, adorned kitchen surfaces.

Except when Macie was there. I knew when she was by the aroma of deep-dish peach pie I smelled even before opening the door, and the hiss of the iron when I did. Without Macie, our North Carolina cook, I’d have had to rely almost entirely on school food. Whenever Macie was there, fixing up fried chicken or baking lemon meringue pie for my father, who, longing for food from home, had employed her, she would slip me something good to eat. Macie couldn’t come to our house often enough for me. With her, I felt at home.

#

Cathie doesn’t. Told by the orphanage director, Miss Abbott, that Birmingham “is your home whether you like it or not,” our heroine feels inclined to “start throwing things,” as she does during the book’s opening scene. We glimpse Cathie thinking how different her life would have been if Miss Abbott hadn’t called on her to read a Wordsworth passage that thrust her into a distant memory.

“That immortal sea,” Cathie reads, and reflects: “it was like seeing something out of the corner of your eye.”

I could see out of the corner of my eye that Mom gave me the creeps, but I knew perfectly well that she hadn’t stolen me from some hospital nursery or plucked me off a church doorstep. She had baby pictures of me and my brother—who looked a lot like me—all over the house, as well as pastels of us she’d drawn when we were little and watching T.V. She’d detailed the toxemia she’d endured while giving birth to me.

#

A vision flows in of white sand, Cathie’s wiggling baby toes, and gold-tinted shells in sunshine. Cathie stops reading, but the orphanage director insists that she continue. Like a tide going out, Cathie’s memory recedes. The director’s words (“Oh, be quiet!” says Cathie) banish the dim recollection. 
 
At this point I got reminded several times that Library Period was over, and that I was to return to my classroom. 
 
Cathie closes her eyes, trying to retain the glimpse of her toddler self. When Miss Abbott orders her to continue reading, Cathie throws the book, yelling, “No!”
 
Wouldn’t it be great to throw the book at Mom? Aha, you’re not really my mother! I stretched my feet out on that comfortable cushion, turning pages, glancing at the sun on the river. I lived every moment of Cathie’s escape until the librarian pried me out of my seat.
 
The promise of tea and fruitcake unexpectedly starts Cathie on her way. Sent to visit a motherly old lady, Cathie solves part of her own mystery. Ever since the girl was found toddling through the ruins clutching something with a glint of gold, she has wondered what the object she’d been holding in her baby fist, a locket, might reveal about her identity. She’s curious about the pressed flowers and picture of a woman inside. The mysterious woman whose tiny picture inhabits the locket haunted me. Could she be Cathie’s Mom? The orphanage director dismisses Cathie’s questions, saying the girl probably found the locket on the street.
 
But Cathie’s host, the old lady, observes the flowers in the locket are tied with a bit of fabric. Whipping out her magnifying glass, she identifies the tiny strip of cloth as a Scots tartan—of course tied to some particular clan. The dried blooms are “Grass of Parnassus,” which grows in one of the old lady’s favorite places, the West of Scotland. Parnassus, home of the muses, locus of wine god Dionysius’s wild parties, and surely a pleasant alternative to an orphanage, inspires Cathie’s elderly hostess. Loving the flower as she loves her Caledonian hills, she invites Cathie to come stay the weekend. Cathie gets to wear holiday clothes instead of the uniform that brands her as an orphan and renders her a magnet for the police.
 
Like Cinderella’s fairy godmother, the old lady then vanishes, but not before leaving Cathie the wherewithal for a getaway—payment for table mats Cathie has woven with a Grass of Parnassus design, an entire two pounds—equivalent to seventy-five American dollars in 2016.

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That’s all our girl needs. I didn’t have money, the thought of stealing some never having occurred to me. I didn’t have the guts to stand out on the West Side Highway and stick out my thumb. Yet Cathie packs the durable fruitcake the old lady left for her tea in her suitcase and plunges into her unknown future. Since she’s supposedly away on a visit for two whole days, the orphanage director will not think to look for her, so Cathie buys a cheap ticket to the next town. From there, she hitches a ride with a truck driver to whom—this being a children’s novel published in 1953—it never occurs to molest her.

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An educated Englishwoman like Miss Abbott ought to have heard of Scottish beaches and their characteristic white sands. But she seems never to have left her cloister, except when looking for Cathie. After tracking the wayward orphan to a clan in the Scottish Highlands, Miss Abbott fades from the narrative. Cathie learns that the name she called herself when she was discovered amidst the rubble after the bombing was not “Cathie” but “Catri,” short for “Catriona,” that her original name was Catriona Gunn—a great name for a girl who’s a real pistol.

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Cathie so intrigued readers that she warranted a sequel--Cathie Runs Wild, in which her mother’s sister threatens her independent life. Having discovered that Cathie did not die in the World War Two air raid with her parents after all, her aunt wants to make a lady out of her, sending her to an Edinburgh boarding school that, to the aunt’s unforgivable satisfaction, is far from the windy highlands to which Cathie’s heart belongs. Faced with a powerful adult who has the authority to take away everything, Cathie runs away all over again.
 
When the aunt tricks Cathie into an interview with the Edinburgh boarding school headmistress, telling her niece that the visit is “just to see the place,” but advising the headmistress that Cathie is thrilled to be enrolled, Cathie demurs. The aunt does not get away with telling the headmistress that Cathie is merely shy. In one of my favorite plot twists, the headmistress feels reminded of Cathie’s mother, who had only reluctantly studied at the school. Wanting to avoid the glamorous debutante world of her sister, Cathie’s mother had written a poem—which Cathie discovers in the school library—about the very highland hills that Cathie adores.
 
The aunt persists in asserting that Cathie ought to have “advantages.” The plot snakes along, exposing her as heartless, and Cathy leaves her in the dust. There was no third book—Cathie’s escape was now complete.

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​What I love most about Cathie—that she listens to no-one, sets off on a path she alone has chosen, and walks it to the very end with great success and thrilling closure—has remained a personal ideal. I grew up, I found my way, my own people, managing to build a family I keep far from the one into which I was born. I sometimes wonder if I’d been able to do so without remembering Cathie. 

Melissa Knox teaches American literature and culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. Her essays have appeared in The Wax Paper, Brain, Child, and Gravel; poems have appeared in The Mom Egg Review, NonBinary Review, and other publications. She writes a blog, The Critical Mom. Her memoir, Divorcing Mom: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis, is forthcoming from Cynren Press (Winter, 2019)

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