On the book cover, Pickwick sits on the flat end of an upturned log, his striped back toward the viewer, his bright-eyed face in profile. Sunflower seed casings are scattered around his rump and tail. Wishner’s caption: “The nobility of character and elegance of independence: Pickwick looks at the world over his shoulder.”
Her mother sleeps on a futon in the other room. That’s also where she and her mother eat. The open floor space in the kitchen is only eighteen square feet.
Her address is 30-51 33rd Street. The buildings on her block are connected in a right-angle back-and-forth pattern like what you sometimes see on Greek friezes, or like cogs on a wheel, if you were to cut the wheel and straighten it out. The buildings are red brick on the first floor, beige brick on the upper two floors. On some signs and maps the street numbers don’t have dashes (3051) and on other signs and maps they do (30-51). She did research and discovered the dash is the older form. The first two digits indicate the lower of the two avenues flanking the street in question. The historic use of the dash is disappearing. She is fighting this.
There is an endearing photograph of Gutrune on page 47. She is standing on the same upturned log with her hands to her mouth and her cheeks stuffed with sunflower seeds. Wishner’s caption informs us she is twenty-seven days pregnant.
She and her mother have been living in New York City for four years. Her mother wants to find an apartment that’s either bigger or cheaper or both. She dreads this. She has made her nest perfect. Why do people have to move so much?
To get to school, she walks northeast on 33rd Street and turns left at 30th Avenue. At 31st Street she walks under the N and R, an elevated railway fallaciously called a subway. At 30th Street she crosses 30th Avenue via a crosswalk that’s diagonal because 30th Street makes a jog right there.
At P.S. 17Q other children insist on speaking to her. Their motives are unfathomable.
Here is how young chipmunks mature. When they are one day old and weigh five grams, they squeal. When they are five to seven days old and weigh ten grams, their lower teeth, stripes, and hair begin to show. When they are ten days old and weigh fifteen grams, they move about. When they are thirty days old and weigh thirty grams, their eyes open, and they are weaned. When they are forty days old and weigh sixty grams, they emerge from their burrow. When they are sixty days old and weigh eighty grams, they are fully grown. When they are one hundred days old, the females are sexually mature. Repeat cycle.
In the autumn of 1974, Lawrence Wishner installed lights over a woodpile on his back porch. The porch stood thirty feet from the woods. He mounted a camera inside one of his house windows that looked out on the porch. In front of the woodpile he stood two logs on end at precalculated exposure distances from the lights.
She glimpsed a chipmunk for half a second in Astoria Park before it put its tail straight up like the antenna of the transistor radio she’s been taking apart in her room and zipped under a bush.
She and her mother used to live with her grandmother in a house next to the lake north of Ithaca. Then her grandmother got cancer and died. They moved to New York City because her mother wanted to find more acting jobs. She didn’t want to make that move, either.
On the back flap, there’s a photograph of Wishner. He has dark hair falling across his forehead and squarish glasses with dark frames. He has dark lines under his eyes, maybe from rising early every day for six years. He’s sitting at a picnic table and behind him stretches worn and weedy ground that presumably is his backyard. He’s wearing a plaid workshirt. Around his neck he has a black strap attached to a camera with a telephoto lens. A fine caption for this photo would be, “The nobility of character and elegance of independence: Lawrence Wishner looks at the world.”
She emails back and forth with her father. He sends her mathematical puzzles and word games. Her last message to him was a cryptogram of the Epimenides paradox: Iyhcimhoip bri Agibem peho, “Euu Agibemp egi uhegp.”
P.S. 17Q is also called the Henry David Thoreau school. She found a Riverside Edition of Walden in the natural history section of the Strand bookstore and read it in two days. On days after school when it isn’t raining she looks for squirrels in the trees of Athens Square, which is next to P.S. 17Q. She never sees a chipmunk, nor expects to, since Athens Square is small and chipmunks are shy. Athens Square has a sunken plaza and a peristyle of three Doric columns with an entablature. Entablatures traditionally consist of an architrave, a frieze, and a cornice, but the entablature of Athens Square is lacking a frieze. The entablature is broken to make the peristyle look like a ruin. There is a bronze statue of Athena and a bronze statue of Socrates. Socrates is sitting on a smooth piece of granite that slopes downward so he looks like he’s going down a slide. As far as she can tell, no one in the square ever pays attention to any of this.
Wishner is not a wildlife biologist, but a biochemist. He used to teach at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He specializes in the metabolism of Vitamin E and antioxidants. He is an accomplished photographer. One day he saw two chipmunks playing in his woodpile. He spent the next six years observing and photographing them every
