because he has the kind of mind that keeps arcane details on tap.
He responded: “I hated her so much that I have no memory of her or him. I erased her from my mind.”
I understand perfectly why he feels this way.
Muriel wasn’t an easy person to like. She had a curious habit of talking to adults like they were children, and to children like they were adults. She went around braless to indicate her free-spirited feminism that unyoked her from the backward Establishment—while all the time trying to form her own Establishment that everyone else was required to support.
What none of us realized, when Mom and Dad accepted Muriel and Maurice as equal members of the plan to colonize the cannery, was that this agreement would set us on a collision course that would lead to an epic clash of wills. Not between Muriel and either of my parents. No, it was between Muriel and one of her students.
When Robin came along, the fourth child in the family, he was so cute and had so much personality that everyone adored him. He was precocious in a funny way, with an ironical take on life that was ridiculous in one so young. As a toddler he walked around with his bottle hanging out of his mouth and talked around it, like a 1920s gangster talking around his cigar. At the same time he had an infectious personality with enthusiasms that swept everyone along. Up to that point, the only fly in his ointment was when Christopher came along a year after him and knocked him out of the prestigious baby slot.
Chris, one of the happiest, most harmonious babies in history, adopted all of Robin’s mannerisms including Robin’s inability to pronounce his Ls. Chris’s failing in this area spurred Robin to take him in hand and demonstrate a correct pronunciation.
When Chris said something about Muriel and Maurice’s boat, the Lindy Lou, Robin would immediately deride, “It’s Rindy Rou—not Rindy Rou!”
Needless to say, Chris’s speech didn’t improve.
Muriel zeroed in on this fault immediately. All of her bully pulpit instincts became laser focused on fixing the problem that was Robin’s speech. The rest of us kids, self-starters who could teach ourselves for the most part, held little interest for her.
“You’re not doing it right. Touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth, press your tongue to the back of your top teeth, and make an L sound.” She demonstrated.
I did it myself, surprised to discover a skill I’d taken for granted up until then.
Robin stared at her in the wintry light creeping in through the windows. The little cabin smelled of crayons and finger paint, kerosene from the lamps, cedar firewood, and the seaweed that it rested on when the tide was out and it was no longer floating.
“Do it like this,” Muriel ordered, and demonstrated again.
He made a sound through his teeth.
“No, not through your teeth. Open your mouth and do it. No, that’s not it either. Try it again. Are you watching me? Do you see how I’m doing it? Tara, show him how to do it.”
I looked at Robin’s downcast face and uncomfortably demonstrated.
“There, that’s how you make an L sound. Do you see how easy it is? We’re all doing it. Come on, everyone, show Robin how to make an L sound.”
Muriel, Jamie, Megan, and I made L sounds while Robin stared down at his desk. I’d never imagined how taunting and belittling a prolonged L sound could be, when an entire group of people did it toward the youngest person in the group.
“Now you do it, Robin.”
Robin remained silent.
“Did you hear me, Robin? You’re not deaf, I know you can hear me. Now you’re just being obstructive. Do you want to grow up with a speech impediment? Do you want to be the butt of jokes, to look like a backward person? Do you know how that will affect your life? I know, we all know, don’t we, kids?”
I looked at Robin, and tried to explain to Muriel. “He knows the R sound he’s using instead of an L is wrong, he tries to tell Mitmer how to say it right—”
“His name is Christopher, not Mitmer. And that’s another thing. If you don’t learn your Rs,” she told Robin, “you’ll be responsible for your younger brother’s speech problems throughout his life. Do you want to be responsible for that? Do you want to make him the butt of jokes, mocked and laughed at by people wherever he goes? It will be all your fault. Do you want to live with that?”
Robin scowled and his lower lip crept downward, revealing small kindergarten teeth clenched together.
“He tries at home, my mom works with both of them on it,” I tried again.
Her pale eyes fixed on me. “Obviously that isn’t working, is it, Tara? You’re not helping by making excuses for him, and neither is your mother. Robin, neither you nor I am going to leave here today without you learning how to pronounce at least one L correctly. That isn’t too much to ask, is it kids?”
Robin never again tried to make an L sound in school. In fact, from that point on he refused to cooperate with her in any way. And she refused to admit that she’d lost his cooperation, continuing to harangue and goad him every single day.
It’s probably a minor miracle that Robin learned to speak his Ls without a problem. Her Ahab-like quest to stab at his speech impediment to her last breath made it hard for the rest of us to concentrate on our own work, which she paid little attention to anyway. All her focus was dedicated to getting Robin to give in and submit to her authority.
Robin, five years old doing battle with a college-educated woman in her thirties, never gave in. Instead, he discovered that he could hold his own against even the most self-certain adult. There was no going back after that. His cooperation in anything was almost impossible to win from then on.
In addition to this clash that impacted everything, tensions continued to rise over Muriel’s and Maurice’s expectations that Dad labor for them and keep them supplied in firewood. Due to their inexperience with a wood stove, they treated the wood he cut wastefully. They overheated their small cabin due to their ignorance of the stove’s damper and draft and had to have the front door open to cool the place, burning through the wood Dad provided far faster than he’d calculated. When they ran out they became annoyed that he didn’t fulfill his side of the bargain instantly, leaving them with a cold cabin to live in.
Muriel was someone who needed the admiration of others and felt the bite all the more keenly when it was withdrawn, which was what happened with my parents—with Mom in particular, who had been so impressed by Muriel when they first met.
By the time Maurice was offered a job in a town to the north of us a few months after the move to the cannery, relations were awkward and strained enough for everyone to be okay with them moving back aboard the Lindy Lou and saying their goodbyes. That was the end of their back-to-the-land aspirations. They never again lived so remotely.
We were on our own.
CHAPTER FOUR
“Gee, I thought watches floated.”
—Chris, experimenting with our only timepiece, Dad’s not-waterproof watch, in a pan of water
ONE NIGHT, when the wood box that Dad had built next to the front door was empty… I climbed into it.
I could hear my family inside the house talking, laughing, and arguing. Robin’s and Chris’s voices that couldn’t pronounce Ls piped higher than everyone else’s. Their voices were muffled so I couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying. They were the only human voices for miles.
It was a moonless night, with degrees of black that only the wilderness knows. Up along the wall of the house was the big bay window with a puckered bullet hole in it, not unlike the bullet scar in Dad’s back that he got in Vietnam.
Golden kerosene lamplight spilled out, lighting the railing and gravel beach. The forest stream flowing