In Which Very Little Is Equitable In The Fifth Form

Lunch Line Realism

by ALICE BOLIN

They are Scholastic paperbacks from the 1980s, approximately 150 pages, their covers featuring an illustration bordered in a bright color, and since I was a child they have appealed to me more than almost any other object. Even now I often buy them in Goodwills and used bookstores, especially if they seem off-brand, a little sad: because some of these books — The Babysitters Club, notably — took off, while others — ever heard of Sleepover Friends? — languish in bookstore-free-box limbo for all eternity.

I was in a thrift store in the strange, tiny town of Ronan, Montana when I came across Barthe DeClements’ 1985 novel Sixth Grade Can Really Kill You, whose title struck me immediately as both bizarre and bizarrely honest. I bought the book for fifty cents and read it dutifully: it’s the story of a sixth grader named Helen who can’t read and acts out in serious ways, like spray painting her school, because of her learning disability. It’s about ineffectual authority figures and what it means to be a “bad kid.” It’s a totally sad and totally good book.

It wasn’t until after I read Sixth Grade Can Really Kill You that I realized that it is by the same author as one of my most obsessed-on books from childhood, Nothing’s Fair In Fifth Grade. It’s difficult to describe the plot of Nothing’s Fair In Fifth Grade: in Google Books’ synopsis, “Overweight Elsie Edwards, new to Brier, Washington, steals lunch money in order to buy candy and Jenny has to decide whether to risk her popularity with her friends in order to help the troubled new girl.” Or taken another way, on the Scholastic website: “A group of fifth-graders must deal with an overweight classmate who steals everyone's lunch money to buy candy for herself.”

Both of these feel so wrong. The first paints Jenny as brave and valiant, risking her popularity, and the second paints Elsie, the overweight classmate, as the villain. Especially for children’s books, DeClements’ books are remarkably morally ambiguous: the kids in Elsie’s class are brutal to her for her weight, but she does steal from them, making some of them feel justified in disliking her. Jenny eventually becomes Elsie’s friend, but it takes her half the book to discover any compassion for Elsie.

A short synopsis also gives the book too much of a coherent, climactic arc. Nothing's Fair In Fifth Grade is humdrum and episodic — we hear about Jenny making dinner with her mom, playing with her cat, and babysitting her younger brother. There are also amusing 1980s mundanities like Elton John records and Mork and Mindy; Jenny’s mom has to get a part-time job and her dad bitches quaintly about having to make his own dinner. The plot is so quiet as to be almost inaudible, but DeClements gets away with it because the book is so emotionally true — it isn’t boring because it feels real.

When I was a kid I ate that shit up. All I desired was a protagonist whose emotions I could project into and experience; plot could get in the way of my lingering in the fantasy. This is related to my childhood love of sequels: Sister Act 2, Beethoven’s 2nd, and, especially, My Girl 2. (I should mention that Sixth Grade Can Really Kill You is not a sequel to Nothing’s Fair in Fifth Grade, but it is something of a spin-off: it features a few of the same characters, but only peripherally.) While first films tediously focused on introducing characters and having stories that made sense, sequels could dispense with character development and focus on hijinks and gratuitous love affairs. Sequels felt low-pressure: first films are tense where sequels are loose, their pacing haphazard, as if they have nothing to prove.

My ideal book offered no novel historical setting, no supernatural elements, and characters who were superbly average — but while Nothing’s Fair in Fifth Grade and Sixth Grade Can Really Kill You are low-pressure, they are also serious. They’re a few steps less bleak than K-mart realism (Target realism? J.C. Penney realism?) for ten-year olds. DeClements was a school psychologist, and this is obvious in her books: they often focus transparently on the underlying issues that make kids misbehave and the problems teachers and parents have when dealing with troubled children. The questions involved are fraught, and Declements doesn’t attempt a unified answer. There’s something axiomatic here: that Declements’ books, like childhood, betray surprising complexity. They’re the kind of books I want to liberate from garage sales and flea markets, wonky, earnest relics that supply weird, honest joys.

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She last wrote in these pages about the bad movie club. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Nothing Is Impossible" - Chad VanGaalen (mp3)

"Weighed Sin" - Chad VanGaalen (mp3)

Enjoy The Perils Of A Literary Childhood At Your Leisure

Elena Schilder and The Babysitter's Club

Lily Goodspeed and The Golden Compass

Helen Schumacher and Little House on the Prairie

Jane Hu and Walk Two Moons

Kara VanderBijl and A Wrinkle In Time

Hafsa Arain and Harry Potter

Lucy Morris and Bruno and Boots

Dayna Evans and The Diary of Anne Frank

In Which We Leave The Grey Room

Response System

by DAYNA EVANS

When I was in third grade and had just moved to America from England, I used to sit by this big brick wall every day at lunch and read. I didn't have any friends because all the kids thought my accent was weird, so I took solace in sitting by that wall and reading for an hour. There were many times that kids would come up to me and taunt me with "Say something, let's hear your voice, say something" and that scarred me and made me really shy. Maybe part of the reason I can't remember a lot about what I read or what I favored in books when I was little is because I associate it with a really awful time in my life when I was constantly picked on by American children.

I got over being shy, but I never dropped the habit of reading books. In a way, I think it was the books that helped me not be shy. Original, I know. I saw in them characters who were smart, interesting, weird, and somewhat manic like me, and I knew that I could take charge of my life like they had. It’s probably not surprising that I also wanted to be an actress for several years. “Hey, change yourself. Just pretend.” My experience with reading as a shy, heavily freckled and portly child was the same as when someone sees those Thor movies or The Hulk and immediately gets P90x delivered to their homes. I would read Matilda or The Secret Garden or A Wrinkle In Time and they were my P90X. I didn’t have to be a shy weird girl with a British accent anymore. There were people in this world for me and I could just pretend to be them. And if I couldn’t, there would be a Miss Honey to help me through.

Weirdly enough, I did sort of have a Miss Honey when I was in third grade. I had this teacher named Miss Rose (all third grade teachers had names taken from an Anthropologie catalog) who really took a liking to me because I knew what the word “vicissitudes” meant. I don’t know how I knew it, but it was pretty symbolic that of all words above my age bracket that I could know, it was one that represented an unfortunate change in circumstance, exactly what I saw as my falling out of favor with children my age once I moved from the UK to America. Anyway, Miss Rose tried to give me free therapy when she should have been teaching me cursive, and I shunned her much as I did my real therapist. All I needed to get me by was a dose of truth from an empowered girl character between the pages of a library book. And lucky for me, I’d found my soulmate.

by sandro castelli

Anne Frank and I had a lot in common. We had both been exiled, felt weird, and were highly perceptive while also being dumb and a little too big for our britches. She understood what I was going through, even as far as not knowing about sexuality, which I didn’t formally discover until my sophomore year in college. Her diary was my greatest inspiration to begin writing, and I can’t erase this thought from my mind fast enough, but basically as a child I thought, “Well, if that girl wrote and got famous off of it, so should I.” Yeah, I know. Now you have to deal with it, too.

In England in third grade, you study the Holocaust because the British don’t make allowances for sensitivity. We also would memorialize May Day every year by dressing up in traditional WWII garb, standing on chairs in a line outside of my primary school, and singing “You Are My Sunshine” to the tilt. The British treat their children like miniature adults with fully formed emotional response systems. When we learned about the Holocaust, I started naming my journals. I tried for “Missy” but thought that sounded too similar to “Kitty,” Anne Frank’s diary, so I changed it to “Kat.” I was a genius.

After moving to America and realizing that not only had no one in my age group heard of Anne Frank, they did not know about the Holocaust (I grew up in a very Irish/Italian neighborhood), I was distraught. But also secretly pleased. Anne Frank represented the “vicissitudes” of my cultural collateral. I not only knew big words, I knew big ideas, and my accent could no longer hold me back.

Well, it turns out it could. I continued to be mocked and disliked, especially because I grew boobs and got my period at ten, making me a verifiable leper. In times of trouble, I turned to Anne (who overcame the largest adversity I could imagine) and Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, who despite her awful brattiness, actually sort of healed people. I used their successes as not only an example of what my successes should be like, but I think I started to believe that I’d also done those things. Like all horribly insecure and self-aware children, I acted smarter, more together, and more aloof than I really was, but it got me through years of turmoil with the underlings of the American school system. Unfortunately, I still haven’t grown out of it.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about Breaking Bad. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

Enjoy The Perils Of A Literary Childhood At Your Leisure

Elena Schilder and The Babysitter's Club

Lily Goodspeed and The Golden Compass

Helen Schumacher and Little House on the Prairie

Jane Hu and Walk Two Moons

Kara VanderBijl and A Wrinkle In Time

Hafsa Arain and Harry Potter

Lucy Morris and Bruno and Boots

Dayna Evans and The Diary of Anne Frank

 

In Which We Read Them In The Hallway

Away From The World

by HAFSA ARAIN

When we were eleven we measured our adulthood through vice. Rumors would spread that a girl once smoked a cigarette, or that a boy got to first base with a girl from another school. When I was eleven, I was kept away from that world. This was partly because of my Pakistani parents, and partly because I was always reading. I was not wholly dissatisfied with middle school society; I had simply realized from a very young age that adventures were limitless on paper.

My school librarian introduced me to many books. She made sure I read Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, and S.E. Hinton. When she told me she had met an author named Rowling in Naperville, she insisted I read her work, Harry Potter. “I just ordered them for the school,” I remember her saying with a barely held excitement. My interest in being the first girl in school to read a new book was quickly squashed when I discovered they were fantasy novels. Witches, broomsticks, and dragons rarely interested me – I preferred a story I could relate to. My librarian was adamant, saying that I would find myself in Harry’s story. She said that everybody could.

As soon as I first starting reading Harry Potter, I couldn’t stop. I read on the school bus, and I read walking to class during passing period. In the middle of the night, I read when everyone else was fast asleep; my grandmother’s snores were audible on the other side of my bedroom. When I started reading at the dinner table, my father put his foot down. He disliked fiction, and he disliked fantasy stories most of all. “There is nothing of value in stories like that,” he used to say in his lectures. When he said those things, I would imagine myself in Harry’s world. I would imagine being away from my parents, my siblings, and my classmates in a boarding school. It was full of people like me, full of people who read books. Not just books – but fiction.

I wanted to be like Hermione more than I have ever wanted to be like anyone. She was the smartest in her class; she was so powerful in her knowledge. She was an outsider to Hogwarts at first, and yet she knew everything about it. In many ways, she was a young immigrant, like me. She left her parents behind, and immersed herself in a new way of life. In Chamber of Secrets, she goes with her family to Diagon Alley. They were foreigners; she had to answer all their questions. I thought of the times that I had to do the same. Like Hermione, I was somewhere between two worlds.

My grandmother left to visit Pakistan in the winter of seventh grade, and I used to lie on her bed to read Prisoner of Azkaban over and over again. I read about Harry discovering his godfather, Harry fighting the dementors. I cried when Harry had to discover that he would return to the Dursleys. I cried when I closed the book and realized I had to return to my world. It was the first time I had cried over a book. The tears that splashed on the paper left tiny wrinkles. Outside my window, I saw a chilly fog over the backyard. (Were there dementors there? I remember thinking.) A few months prior, my grandmother had woken up to hear me sniffling while reading in the middle of the night. “Don’t cry,” she had said in Punjabi, “It will be okay.”

I began to wonder if I was a witch. I wrote in my diary at age 13, “Maybe in American Hogwarts, the letters don’t get sent until someone turns 14. I might still get mine.” I dreamed of having my own chance to prove myself, of having my own moment of greatness. I didn’t realize it at the time, but there were many other children with the same thought. Harry’s life was not only full of adventure, it was just so certain. We wanted just an ounce of Harry’s purpose, just a fleeting feeling that we were doing the right thing. His life was sure, and our lives felt like they would never measure up.

On our beige Packard Bell I found websites dedicated to the Wizarding World. I found interviews with J.K. Rowling, character profiles, and theories on plot. Back then, social media was still in its earliest stages: comments on news articles were rare, and message boards and chat rooms were the norm. I joined the ones labeled “Harry Potter”, and found a digital space full of people like me. We wrote our feelings about the books, explained our admiration for Jo Rowling, lamented the loss of favorite characters, and threw out our predictions. As the series was slowly being released over years, fans would predict its ending in the most imaginative ways. “Dumbledore is really Ron from the future,” one post said. “Harry and Voldemort are really one person,” said another. I wrote my own theories down in my journal: “Harry has a long-lost sibling,” and “Snape and Lily were best friends.”

I had given up on the notion of being a witch in high school. I decided to focus on school and being a good student. Everyone knew about Harry now, but I was convinced the other students did not know these books like I knew them. Still, when I answered questions in class with my hand raised in the air, waving madly, other students would snigger, “Hermione Granger!” To them, it was not a compliment.

I was still sharing a room with my grandmother when Order of the Phoenix was released. After I got my copy of the book, I sat in the hall with a flashlight to read it at night so as not to disturb her. When she woke up for dawn prayers, she stumbled upon me on her way to the bathroom. “Still reading that book?” she asked in Punjabi.

Deathly Hallows was released when I was about to be a college junior. I read it for the first time in my apartment in Chicago, miles away from home and from my grandmother’s bed. When Hermione erased her parent’s memories, I had to shut the book to let the thought of her action sink in. I thought of my own parents, of how many things I had kept from them over the years – all of those vices I had committed in order to grow up. I kept those things from them to protect them. I had to keep them away from America’s turbulent understanding of what it means to be brown, to be foreign, to be an immigrant.

Lately I have chosen to re-read authors like Zadie Smith and James Baldwin instead of Rowling. Though whenever I go back to the Harry Potter books, I find a warm comfort. I enjoy picking them up and starting from a random chapter or page. I do it with extra care now, for even though they are hardcovers, their binding is separating. My copy of Sorcerer’s Stone is held together with painter’s tape, the bright blue of it clashing with the typography on the cream paper.

I needed Harry’s world more than I can even remember. Sometimes, I still need it. But I cannot escape so easily now. I find that my responsibilities are too heavy, and that reality has settled permanently into my fibers.

Hafsa Arain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living outside of Chicago. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Home to Me" - Stefanie Heinzmann (mp3)

"Show Me the Way" - Stefanie Heinzmann (mp3)