Once a week her mother makes her drink hot lemon juice. “Constipation is a bad habit,” she says. “We’re teaching the bowels a new habit.”
“But I’m not constipated.”
“You can thank your mother.”
• • •
In summer on the Alabama farm she sees her cousins. Her mother has seven siblings. Aunt Jillie is smart. Aunt Iris is stupid. Uncle Torrance is smart. Uncle Milton is stupid. Aunt Eugenie is really stupid.
Frank is one of Aunt Iris’s boys. He’s two years younger than Genny, and he follows her around, marveling at everything she does. His mother is extra religious and she won’t let her boys cuss or tell jokes or do anything. Genny takes Frank aside and teaches him a joke:
What did the brassiere say to the hat?
“You go on ahead, and I’ll give these two a lift.”
• • •
Genny is good at everything in school—math, reading, science, spelling, civics. She skips third grade.
She’s advancing quickly on piano. She practices every day before and after school. She plays in a recital and earns a bust of Schumann. It looks like marble, but it’s made of salt. Her mother starts a music scrapbook, and frames Genny’s achievement certificate to put on the wall.
Genny’s favorite aunt is Jillie, the youngest one, who never married and is always helping her parents and siblings. In Genny’s baby book, it says Genny’s first smile was for Aunt Jillie, who was living with them back then and doing the cooking and cleaning. It says Genny’s first complete sentence was, “Poor Mama tired!”
For Christmas when Genny is nine, Aunt Jillie sends her a dress for Shirley, one of her dolls. She draws a picture of Shirley in her new dress and sends it to Aunt Jillie. Aunt Jillie writes that her cat had four kittens, and Genny writes that she hopes the kittens will still be little when she visits in the summer.
She earns a bust of Handel.
She earns a bust of Bach.
One of her certificates has a mistake on it, so her mother gets right on the phone.
For Christmas when Genny is ten her father builds her a marionette stage. She has Snow White and three dwarves and Hansel and Gretel and a Prince and a Solicitor and a horse in pajamas.
In sixth grade she takes the test to join the School Patrol. They used to call them Patrol Boys, but now girls are allowed, too, and the girls wear the same uniform as the boys, white ducks and a white shirt and a white sailor cap and a white Sam Browne belt and a purple necktie. Genny looks like Butch, the ceramic sailor boy on the parlor mantelpiece. She stands on the corner of Lowell and 34th and crosses the children. The little ones are adorable.
There’s a patrol parade in May and she stands in her uniform in the back yard. Her father holds the camera. Face left, her mother says. No, my left. Put your left foot back so it looks like you’re marching. Bend your elbow like you’re swinging your arm. Stop being silly. Mother worked hard to wash everything and the smallest stain will show.
She wants a puppy.
• • •
Genny is twelve. On top of her piano Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Schubert, Verdi, and Tchaikovsky are all lined up.
It’s Mother’s Day. She gets up early and walks to the florist on Wisconsin Avenue to buy a dozen roses she’s saved for. She puts them in a vase and arranges them better than last year. She makes breakfast and brings it on a tray to her mother, who’s waiting upstairs pretending to be asleep.
“How sweet! Thank you, darling!”
She goes back down and brings up the roses and a card she made.
“How lovely! The card is precious!”
She dresses up and takes her mother to afternoon tea at a café in Friendship Heights. Other girls are there with their mothers, and there’s a little argument about how she’s dressed compared to the other girls, but it’s over quickly and they make up. Daddy takes them both out to dinner and afterward Genny gives her mother a locket, very nicely wrapped. There’s one more tiny argument in the evening about some backtalk Genny gave during dinner, Genny can’t even remember what started it. But the day ends like last year, her mother crying, “Other girls appreciate their mothers, I don’t understand . . .”
Daddy stands there looking useless.
• • •
Genny has written a marionette play and enlisted two other girls from school to help her. It’s called “There Will Always Be an England,” and the girls perform it at their junior high school to benefit Bundles for Britain. For the play, Hansel and Gretel stand in for two English schoolchildren, and Snow White is their plucky, inspiring teacher. The Solicitor is Churchill. The three dwarves are Hitler, Goebbels, and Goering. Genny wrote in a bit about delivering a message so they could use the horse, too. They sell thirty-five tickets and make five dollars. The following weekend they perform the play again, this time for free—which is called doing your part—for some servicemen at the Roads Service Club. The men give them a standing ovation. They receive a thank-you letter from the vice chairman of Bundles for Britain and they get their picture in the paper. The other girls are looking at the camera, whereas Genny—she always does this, why can’t she listen, how old is she now, when will she ever—is looking at Gretel, whom she is holding.
• • •
In the summer of 1942, while visiting the farm in Alabama, Gen gets a chance to ride a neighbor’s horse for five minutes around a dirt track while the neighbor walks along holding the bridle and her life is changed forever.
• • •
Her mother lets her have a Jack Russell terrier, no doubt in hopes it will distract her from horses. Gen loves Stubby fiercely. He has a doghouse in the back yard, but sleeps at night with her. (Arguments about that, which Gen won.) He’s
