Making mudpies and green grass in a backyard near a hot sidewalk is her first vividly recalled memory.
At three, she is left to fall asleep on a couch in a well-lit room where adults are playing cards and laughing and talking. She wakes briefly, knows somehow that she is pleasantly safe, and falls back to sleep.
At 3 1/2, her sister teaches her a prayer. She still thinks it’s odd that you would die in your sleep, and ask about it, just in case, every night.
On the eve of her fourth birthday, she’s hit by an empty swing, and is left with a slight scar above her left eye that makes it even more almond than before.
At age 4, she sees Sabu in the movie The Jungle Book. She thinks he is the most beautiful creature she has ever seen. In her dreams ever after, all the boys who haunt her will be dark.
At 4 1/4, she is enjoying the fact that mother painted the kitchen walls bright enamel red and they are well-sealed. She is patiently putting up “wallpaper” with a bucket of water, a paintbrush, and some sheets of toilet paper. They stick marvelously in bubbled wetness to the bright paint. Her mother is surprisingly amused.
At age 4 1/2, her sister informs her that adults actually do not know what is beyond Planet Earth and a few other round objects. She is suddenly terrified with the anarchy of it all, since the adults were supposed to know what was going on. She feels certain there must be a God, but, Why wouldn’t God tell us?
At 5, she sings her first song while riding her tricycle, in the same pitch as the record. Shortly thereafter, she is given her first toy piano, and inexplicably pecks out the tune to one of her sister’s records with no one’s instruction — the color coded sheets for Mary Had A Little Lamb ignored. Shortly thereafter, a television hour presents a famous flamenco dancer, and the week following is filled with much authentic gesturing and stomping and clacking. She finds these feats of great import, and is puzzled that no one else does.
At 5, she overhears her mother scream that unless her father stays at home more often, he will “find that child with a knife in her back.” She knows she hears an unfamiliar sound of wine in her mother’s voice. But even the idea that she could be such empty currency creates shock. She never truly trusts anyone at home again.
At five 1/4, she is diagnosed “tuberculosis positive” and unpleasant-tasting medications, x-rays, doctor visits, and large machinery frequently interrupt. From that point on, her winters are so buried in snowsuits and scarves that stepping off the front porch is a balancing act.
At 5 1/2 she is swinging back and forth in wide arcs from metal rings suspended by chains from a gymnasium ceiling. A teacher has hoisted her there and lets her down from them in her arms. She has never felt closer to flight.
At nearly six she is shown a tomato worm and smells a large patch of purple and white striped petunias in the yard of a German couple named The Stonehouse’s; they become the closest thing to grandparents she gets on a daily basis.
At six, she is taken to the home of her sister’s friend, and is allowed to play a three-tiered electric organ for the entire visit. Much distressed at leaving the organ, she asks if she can have one. Nothing happens.
At six and a half at a New Years party, she sees a woman descending the stairs covered in multicolored streamers and trailing tinsel. A passion for glitter and extravagance is permanently etched at that precise moment.
At six 3/4, her sister leaves home, and takes any shelter there was with her. Being very excited about a friend’s birthday party the next day, she does not realize her sister is actually moving away. The next day she is decidedly put out.
At seven, the world grows green and wide and glittering.
A house in a small town becomes theirs, where air smells as it never had before and floods full of green grass, with apples and blooming and fruiting cherry tree and milkweed pods. She has her first architectural moments attempting to build igloos out of encrusted snowbanks. She learns to whistle a robin’s call and develops a rapport with squirrels. She also becomes delighted with a brand new sink in the bathroom, because the formica countertop has silver and gold boomerangs in it that sparkle.
At seven 1/4, her teacher makes a miracle. She passes around cream in a jar and every child shakes it as long as possible. Butter emerges from whey, and they eat it on saltine crackers.
At seven 1/2, their President is shot, and although the teacher asks all the children to pray, the principal comes back in two hours to tell them he is dead. No one can quite think of anything more that day.
At eight, another teacher finds her lost in thought yet again, and as she scrambles to pull out a pencil for a spelling test, the teacher spells
S-L-O-W and then uses her name in a sentence, saying she is slow. She has never been embarrassed before. In future spelling tests, she spells school SKOOL to see if the teacher would get her joke — it was in a commercial on TV. The teacher merely marks her paper with red. It becomes apparent to her that teachers are not always miracle workers with saltines and butter, and that they are flawed as well.
At eight 1/4, she sees the great Vladimir Horowitz perform on television. He plays Rachmaninoff. She is in love. She asks for a piano. Again, nothing happens.
At eight and half, she sits on a teeter-totter plank, hovering in mid-air, when the other child suddenly jumps off. Her head whips forward and two of her front teeth are broken on the metal handlebar. She will repair them numerous times throughout her life thereafter. It makes her crooked smile even more crooked, as if her lips had anticipated the change.
Just beyond eight and half she trips a boy who has teased her mercilessly for a month with a word “egghead”, which she does not understand. He falls flat on the asphalt and she is sent to the principal. She states with proud honesty that she is not at all sorry.
At eight 3/4, her sister takes her to J. Toguri Mercantile Company in the big city because she has read the book Miss Happiness and Miss Flower. There she smells wonderful incense, the raw steel of woks, and her sister purchases two Japanese dolls for her that will be the inspiration for the creation of an authentic Japanese dollhouse, furniture, landscaping, clothes, food, utensils, paintings, and clothes made by her small hands. Her mother is at last impressed, and an obsession with Japan is sealed.
At nine, a sidewalk photographer’s polaroid catches her and her sister walking in the city street. Her sister looks at a shop window. She in a Chinese coolie hat is looking way up high at the 1910 architecture. What fine work they put round the tops. And so many birds, too.
At nine, her mother explains what molestation means. Her mind cannot finish it no matter how she tries.
At nine and a half, there are many tornado warnings. Her mother confines them both to the basement’s north corner, while her father remains upstairs in the shower, apparently intent on annoying her or defying death, neither of which message is clear or encouraging.
At nine and 3/4, she reads many more books. She reads Harriet the Spy, and writes every day after. She reads the autobiography of Helen Keller, and longs to help someone rise from darkness with a secret language of fingers. An understanding of the other-gifted ones brings her unusual friends again and again.
At ten she is the tallest child in school but for one basketball player, and Jolly Green Giant products become her bane. In a late afternoon, her teasers are flung far aside into a heap by their collars after being kicked soundly in the shins, and she suddenly realizes she may hurt someone seriously. Her pacificism is avowed from that moment.
At 10 1/4 a Japanese boy is in her class. She will spend three years wishing he would notice her.
At ten 1/2, she witnesses a kiss in the morning between her mother and father. The night before he had again returned late and words were hurled. She has never seen them even touch before. She is much alarmed, realizing a last level has been reached.
At ten 3/4 there is a new Asian girl in school who arrives in a wheelchair, legs paralyzed from a bout of polio. Finding the girl’s home near hers, she speaks Ohaio gozaimasu to her old grandmother one morning. The lady responds, and a discovery that they are Chinese is made. She and the girl become fast friends, China enters her life’s path, and the name ‘Lilly’ will be fondly used in her life in her friend’s honor many times.
At the end of the 10th year, near her birthday, her father has returned from a driving trip to Kansas to visit his mother. She wakes in the morning to find him home, and the green trailer behind the car that has pulled, all the way from cornfields, her first piano. She steps outside, onto gravel, into the open trailer, lifts the tarp, and begins to play.
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