Jessi's Wish: Chapters 5-7
Part 1, for Ye Curious.
Chapter 5
“The room was crowded. And noisy. Sixteen kids can be awfully loud. Especially when school has just let out, and they’re hungry and excited and I don’t know what else. I tried to remember how it felt to be eight years old and at the end of a school day.”
First of all, Jessica, YOU ARE A KID. Do you seriously think you’re too old to blow off some steam at the end of the school day? You go to school with sixth-grade boys; why does any of this surprise you? Not like it ends after sixth grade, mind. Trust me; I’ve attended many a college party. And let’s not even touch this “tried to remember” bullshit. Three years? It’s been three times that since I was Jessi’s age, and I still rolled out of bed yesterday morning like a pack of puppies and parked myself under the Christmas tree. Childhood emotions do not dry up that easily.
“‘Don’t worry. They won’t be this zooey all afternoon. They just need to let off some steam before we start. It’s been a long day.’”
So Mr. Katz is cool enough with them trashing the room that he waits another five minutes to put a stop to it, but not so cool that he doesn’t just suck it up and take them outside already?
“‘Jessi will be here to answer questions and to do anything Ms. Simon would have done - except drive our van.’ (The kids giggled.)”
Dammit, Miles, you might as well go whole hog and ruin ALL punctuation for me.
To reiterate: Jessi’s role is “answer[ing] questions”. Because a grown-ass man - a teacher, no less - can’t do that AND keep track of sixteen kids two afternoons a week for ZOMG!awholemonth. And if it’s just too much for him (tiny violin, now’s your time to shine), this school is rich enough to lease a van for a twice-weekly club with sixteen members; they can afford to pay some semi-retired coach to sit in the corner and melt troublemakers with his glare.
This chapter is mostly Mr. Katz reading letters from kids in the hospital, which really isn’t too snarkworthy. As always, though, the Stoneybrooklings are profoundly out of character for elementary-school kids:
“Wendy Jervis raised her hand. ‘Arts and crafts -’ she began.
‘Wendy!’ exclaimed Peter Tiegreen. ‘Can’t you think of something besides art?’”
Because third-graders actually notice or care about one another's favorite subjects. Though that’s actually not as hard to believe as Peter’s language. I work summers at a camp for the academically gifted, and trust me, even the brightest of the bright prefer “shut yer piehole” to “can’t you think of something besides art?”
Or maybe Wendy is the Mallory Pike of the third grade and everything she does, no matter what it is, will come under high-larious scrutiny. My conception of her is chubby and kind of nervous and stuck-up, which I’m realizing as I type is exactly how I was in elementary school. Or maybe it’s because every time I hear “Wendy” I hear Monica Geller going “Wendy is a fat-girl name.”
“‘Who here has ever been in the hospital?’ she asked. (About half the kids raised their hands.)”
I’ve drunk enough now that I’m starting to wonder whether the wine is just the blood of those poor abused parentheses. I’ve got connections, (Ellen Miles), so you’d better get your affairs in order and prepare for lobotomy by red pen courtesy of a crack team of copy editors.
…half these kids have been in the hospital? Maybe they’re not clear what she means by “in” - but if they think she’s asking who’s set foot in a hospital, I’d expect the number to be higher. Siblings are born, grandparents die. This doesn’t make sense either way you read it.
“‘Jessi?’ said Wendy. ‘How do you spell ‘hospital’?’”
Jebus, that’s a lot of quotation marks. I want to make some “quote-ception” joke, but my boyfriend and I had this big thing the other day about not referencing memes from movies we haven't seen, because it leads to obnoxious circlejerking, and I figure now’s as good a time as any to start putting that into practice. (Yes, there’s my tacit admission that I haven’t seen Inception. I’ll be in hiding if anyone wants to bring me a sandwich and some pity.)
Nothing else to say here but that I’m pleased Jessi can spell “hospital”. Last semester a girl in one of my classes (hey, it was actually the same comparative religion seminar I referred to in Part 1) was reading out loud, and the way she stumbled over the word “subtle” you could tell she had never seen it before in her life. I died a little that day. Stoneybrook may be overrun with know-it-all Stepford children, but I’d rather have a little Uncanny Valley than a 20-year-old who pronounces “subtle” with the “b”.
Chapter 6
“The day-care center is big. There’s a room full of high chairs and toys for the babies, and another room for them to sleep in. There’s a nap room for the older children, a playroom for the toddlers, and another for the preschoolers, another for the five- and six-year-olds, another for the seven- and eight-year-olds, and a study room for the oldest kids, and anyone else who needs it. There’s a small gym, an arts-and-crafts room, a kitchen, a nurse’s office, and outdoors, a playground.”
Um. My perspective on this might be a little skewed, because I grew up (as I mentioned before) in rural New England and my hometown contains 1,800 people, but the only day-care center I knew was run by my neighbor out of her sunroom. If you’re shelling out for day-care with four playrooms and a small gym, why for the love of parentheses haven’t you hired a live-in nanny?
I appreciate how hard Ellen Miles tried not to use parentheses in that clusterfuck of a middle sentence, though I wish it didn’t come at the expense of clauses and everything they stand for.
“‘Kristy. Hi. I’m so glad you’re here,’ said Mrs. Hall. ‘We’ve got a full house today, but we’re a little understaffed. Where would you like to work?’”
99% of the time, the word “understaffed” does not directly precede “where would you like to work?” If the business is understaffed, you go where you’re sent and thank parentheses you’ve got work in the first place.
“A teacher was busy with a little girl who was reading aloud, sounding out each word.”
What the fuck kind of day-care center has teachers and nurses on staff? I have a sneaking suspicion this is a front for some kind of cabal, or maybe the Sea Org’s little-known land branch. Either way, Kristy should fit in fine.
“‘Haven’t they ever finger painted before?’ Kristy wanted to know.
‘Yes, but never on a day when they missed their naps.’”
Can I just tell you how much I hate unnecessary dialogue tags? ESPECIALLY ones containing more than one word. This sentence really doesn’t even need one, but if you must, what in parentheses’ name is so wrong with “asked”?
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way: I’m not sure exactly how crack is transferred from three dimensions to two, but it’s empirically possible, because there’s no way this supervisor isn’t smoking the same stuff as Ann and Ellen. Afternoon activities are not divinely mandated. We’ve already passed 12/21/12; the world will not go up in flames if you decide to abandon finger painting in favor of something quieter. The kids’ attention is completely blown and you know it; there is literally no reason to go through with this. I feel like this scene is trying to say something unflattering about male caregivers.
“She read aloud to some five-year-olds. She helped a group of ten-year-old girls make beaded jewelry. She supervised a group of boys who were playing football on the playground.”
Help me decide which of these is most implausible:
- That Kristy willingly went within ten feet of beaded jewelry (though I’d like to see her trick out her softball mitt)
- That Kristy “supervised” a football game without jumping in and making every catch herself because she clearly knows best
- That Kristy HAD THE GODDAMN TIME FOR ALL THAT. She arrived after school; what the hell kind of all-night daycare is this? You guys, I really think this might be a cabal. You know K. Ron’s not gonna like having competition in the childcare cult department…
“Kristy sang a couple of verses of ‘Rock Around the Clock’, ignoring Joy’s wailing.”
When I first read this as a kid, I somehow remembered “Rock Around the Clock” playing over a loudspeaker, not being sung by Kristy. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why there were radio loudspeakers in an infant-care room. (Maybe it doubles as the cult’s indoctrination parlor. YOU NEVER KNOW.)
“‘You must have the magic touch,’ [Marcia] said. ‘Joy never falls asleep that quickly.’”
Is there such a thing? I have little to no maternal instinct and very young kids are pretty foreign to me, so I’m seriously asking this. Is there such a thing as a natural talent for childcare? Or is it necessarily the kind of thing you pick up by trial and error?
Chapter 7
“I had to admit that Danielle did not look wonderful, although she had probably been quite pretty before she got sick.”
Okay, I’m of two minds here. On the one hand, it’s always refreshing to hear people honestly describe the effects of serious illness. None of this “pretending you look exactly the same” bullshit, which is humiliating to both parties and downright insulting to the patient whose struggles you’re completely downplaying. On the other, just once I’d like to see something happen to the gawky kid or the pimply kid or the fat kid, just to see if they’d get the same ZOMG!prettylittlemartyr treatment that Danielle gets in this book. What if Danielle hadn’t been pretty before she got sick? Would that make her less tragic? I hope not, but let’s be realistic here: I doubt a whole lot of third-graders would brim with compassion for a sick kid who wasn’t one of the most popular in the class.
“‘[M]y mom says I still have to do all my homework. She says cancer isn’t an excuse for falling behind.’”
I sincerely hope that isn’t a direct quote, otherwise I’d be calling some CPS up in Mrs. Roberts’s grill. I see her point in that wallowing isn’t going to help anyone and it’s healthiest to attempt to move on with one’s life to the best of one’s ability, but you know? If my tumor-ridden kid felt too sick or too anxious or just plain too tired to finish her math, I’d be the last goddamn person to force it. I had surgery on my leg during my senior year in high school. I was on crutches for a month - in the winter, mind, so slipping in the snow became a daily occurrence. Sometimes I’d come home with my leg swollen from having fallen on it, my entire body tired and achy from the crutches, and I’d just go the fuck to sleep at four o’clock in the afternoon. Do you think my mom woke me up to write some fucking essay on the use of prosody in “Miniver Cheevy”? No she did not, because she understood, like anyone with a trace of reason should, that your health is the foundation of everything else in your life and your GPA doesn’t mean shit when you break your back to get it. I was a senior in high school then, and I graduated on time and got into some decent schools. I’m sure Danielle can stand to miss a few fourth-grade assignments.
Part 3!