Jessi's Wish: Chapters 8-10
Part 1
Part 2
Chapter 8
“‘You guys are so lucky,’ I said to Dawn and Mary Anne. ‘How come you don’t live in the barn?’”
Huh, seems that question gets asked much more often of Kristy, if you catch my drift.
“‘This is the life,’ [Stacey] said with a sigh. ‘I think I was meant to be a country girl.’
‘You mean life without Bloomingdale’s?’
‘Oh. No. What was I thinking? I’m not a country girl at all. My mistake.’”
First of all, I can imagine Stacey totally deadpanning all of this and Claudia not catching on. I feel like I’m shooting myself and this entire community in the foot to say so, but I really do find Stacey’s sense of humor more sophisticated than the rest. She strikes me a good deal wittier than, say, Mary Anne.
Why are city and country life always portrayed as so diametrically opposed, though? I say this as the ultimate ten-acres town-pop.-1800 country girl. There is a goddamn mall about 20 miles out, and I wasn’t walking around in flannel and snow boots every day because I was just ZOMG!sointimidated by the big bad city. Maybe it lacks a Bloomingdale’s, but there’s a pretty decent selection of vintage stores and costume emporia, which Stacey and her “up to the minute” style would probably regard as unbearably regressive. We’ll see whose fashion blog gets more hits in the end, Stace.
“Then Kristy said, ‘Okay, you guys. As you know, this isn’t an official meeting of the Baby-Sitters Club.’
‘Right. No phone, no alarm clock, no visor,’ said Mallory.
‘We’re just here to talk.’ Kristy was smiling. ‘So. What’s new?’”
What is the point of interrupting Stacey and Claudia’s conversation to announce that this ISN’T a meeting and she ISN’T in charge? If they’re “just here to talk” - well, they were already doing that, weren’t they? K. Ron, you will be the kind of mother who outfits her children’s toys with tiny alarm clocks so they know when it’s time to put down the truck and move on to the hula hoop. I’m picturing Curves-style stations in every corner of her living room. Kristy’s bedroom, of course, will be entirely exempt from the soul-punishing order she inflicts on the rest of the house. There she can drop her dirty clothes on the floor to her heart’s content and invite Abby over for a spot of furious hate-fucking to the scent of sweaty panties.
For a writer (none of this “aspiring writer”. I’ll call her a writer, because I always hated it when adults would tack an “aspiring” onto whatever I loved to do just because I was younger than they. Even Mallory deserves that), Mal sure is good at pointing out the yawningly obvious.
“‘Well, I’m in love with Frankie,’ said Mary Anne. ‘What a great little boy. I don’t know why I’m in love with him, since he can’t walk or talk and I never know what’s going on in his mind. But he has this incredible smile. And sometimes he’ll grin right in the middle of one of his toughest exercises. It’s as if he’s saying, ‘This hurts, but I know you’re doing it to help me, so thank you.’’”
Can anyone else totally imagine Mary Anne as one of those overly attached nurses who end up kidnapping the kid and blackmailing the parents? I bet even Ratched started out that way.
Let me pull a Mallory here and mention that no untrained thirteen-year-old has any business helping a severely disabled child through “tough exercises”. MARY ANNE. You are not a doctor or a physical therapist. You do not know what this child is capable of, and poorly administered training could seriously fuck up his already stilted muscles.
“‘[This baby] will be a person.’
‘Danielle is a person,’ I said quietly.”
Holy derailing, Batman. (Does that count as referring to a movie I haven’t seen?)
“‘She’s accepted that she has it. But she wishes people wouldn’t treat her so differently. She’s still Danielle.’
‘You know what she does wish?’ I went on.
‘No,’ said Mary Anne. The others shook their heads.”
This bit is so padded that I’m tempted to take it out behind the barn and frisk it mercilessly for newspaper to run my wood stove. Though I appreciate that Miles didn’t find a way to shoehorn in her favorite browbeaten punctuation mark, it comes at the expense of 1) legitimacy for all dialogue tags everywhere, because you get a little jaded when you see them TWICE FOR ONE PERSON IN ONE PARAGRAPH OF DIALOGUE and 2) Mary Anne’s “sensitivity”. Can’t a bitch recognize a rhetorical question when she hears one? How sensitive can you be if you show no compassion for the already much-abused English language? Do I have to pull out that poem again?
Oh Jebus, they refer to the organization Your Wish Is My Command as “YWIMC”. Verbally. The point of an abbreviation is to write less, guys. It makes literally no sense to say said abbreviation out loud when it has, you know, MORE SYLLABLES than the original.
Jessi spends an entire paragraph explaining why she thinks a kid with cancer deserves a Disney vacation. Jessica. I understand that Ellen Miles was probably behind on her quota and stuffed your words with as much newspaper and sawdust as she could, but honey? Sometimes less is more. Spending a paragraph explaining something so intuitively obvious makes me think you’re aggressively upselling in order to hide something. Maybe Kristy’s paranoia is metastasizing from the page into my brain stem, but I think YWIMC might be the biggest cabal of them all, and their genius is that no one would expect an eleven-year-old (ZOMG!black) girl to be its Santa Claus chief brainwashing executive.
“‘Um, Mrs. Roberts, I just found out the most wonderful thing…’”
Danielle has been sick for a year and her parents haven’t researched this themselves? Not even the hospital has told them one thing about it? Jessi Sue to the rescue!
Chapter 9
Claudia’s art class. Exposition about Karen and Jackie and why Claudia will have her hands full between the two of them. Do Stoneybrook parents even know their children’s names? Sweet Chrimbus, if you KNOW your kid is a walking wrecking ball/a foghorn trapped in the body of a seven-year-old (I hear there’s surgery for that now), maybe show a little sensitivity to the overworked thirteen-year-old managing the class and keep your kid home? Yeah, teachers should be prepared to handle all kinds, but it’s a two-way street here. Not every kid is suited for every kind of activity. There’s nothing worse, at the summer camp I work for, than a kid who clearly isn’t mature enough for the overnight program but has been dumped there by parents who don’t know jack shit about him.
“‘[The clay] flew right past me,’ Karen started to say indignantly.
God forbid it come within a foot of that ill-gotten cruise ship manicure, right? Are you really so precious that clay not on, not in, but NEAR you is cause for complaint? Karen is going to make some boy very unhappy one day, if you catch my drift.
“‘Reid!’ cried Karen. ‘That is not nice. You made Margo feel bad. Now she’s going to cry, aren’t you, Margo?’
‘Yes,’ Margo answered, even though she had looked fine.”
I’ve changed my mind about who exactly the Svengali is here. Damn, K. Ron, you could take lessons from this one.
Karen proceeds to turn her considerable powers of suggestion to making the whole class think her clay jungle is actually alive and moving. Either Karen believes it or she doesn’t, and I can’t figure out which option is more disconcerting: it’s either severe juvenile-onset schizophrenia or the first strains of overt sociopathy. You guys. I’m a religion major, and cults are one of my areas of concentration. According to Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, insisting that your perception of reality overrides everyone else’s is one glaring-ass sign of a cult leader. All I’m saying is that I sincerely hope rumors of a “Brewertown” don’t crop up in the next few years. Motto: “Let’s All Come In.”
Chapter 10
“[Becca] was sitting cross-legged at the end of my bed, dangerously close to the edge. She looked so serious that I didn’t even bother to tell her to watch out.”
You can break every bone in your body falling the two feet from your bed to the floor. Trust me; I’m typing this with my nose.
Hyperbole aside, “she looked so serious” is a shitty reason not to tell someone they’re in danger. I don’t care if you’re about to find an exception to the Pythagorean Theorem; I’m sure as fuck going to tell you if the roof’s thirty seconds from caving in.
“Becca and Charlotte had become friends with Danielle.”
I see someone graduated from the Mallory Pike School of Exposition.
Charlotte and Danielle come over to the Ramseys’ for the day. “Then Mrs. Roberts kissed Danielle, said, ‘Remember your medicine,’ and ‘I’ll be back around four,’ and drove off.” You’re putting sole responsibility for her medicine on a nine-year-old? I’m a big fan of the Free-Range Kids movement and I’m all for childhood autonomy, but I’m pretty damn sure I’d leave something that exacting to Mama Ramsey.
“Besides, they didn’t have time to stand around thinking about themselves.”
That’s a bit rich from someone who spent an entire chapter mooning about how SUFFISTICATED her thirteen-year-old friends are.
“Charlotte showed up, Barbie case in tow. I knew perfectly well what was inside that case: three beat-up Barbie dolls, a jumble of clothing, a spool of thread, a yo-yo missing its string, and a small flashlight. (When asked what the thread, the yo-yo, and the flashlight were for, Charlotte merely shrugged and said, ‘It’s stuff I need.’)”
As a compulsive packrat, I love Charlotte in this paragraph. You never know when a junk drawer will come in handy, and Charlotte takes it to the next level by carrying hers around with her.
I’m a little surprised that they play with Barbies, though. I guess I shouldn’t be, given that they did have them in the ‘50s, but I assumed that all Stoneybrook kids played only with wooden blocks and wholesome cloth dolls and sat inside polishing Mother’s china on rainy days.
The girls segue from dressing and grooming their Barbies to adorning them with war paint and shrieking around the house. That’s exactly the kind of thing I did at their age. My fourth-grade best friend and I used to mutilate our dolls in all manner of ways. Just recently I found one poor specimen under my bed at my parents’ house, her hair still stiff with Vaseline. It’s not something I’d have expected of Becca and Charlotte, though.
“‘What happened to playing Barbie?’ I asked.
The girls looked at each other guiltily. They removed their Barbies from various carrying cases. Each Barbie was wearing her own war paint.
When the girls and the dolls had been cleaned up, I led the girls downstairs.”
Jessica, I was JOKING earlier about baby-sitting being an addiction, but your existence is empirical proof of the sad, sad truth. Your parents are HOME. You are not being paid to take care of your sister and her gigglepuss friends. Your only job, as older sister, is to snot at them about being too loud, NOT police their games and wash their goddamn faces for them. This is another example of what happens when your siblings view you solely as an authority, and an arbitrary one at that: they feel guilty in your presence for playing a perfectly acceptable, if overly raucous, game. It is not your job to worry about the condition of your sister’s dolls and whether or not the paint will wash off. We’re always hearing about your passions; why not go do something else for an afternoon? I hear Mme. Noelle’s holding auditions for Swan Lake next week.
Part 4!