Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast (15 page)

 

The air outside was crisp and autumny and smelled of apples. There was a full moon, orange and huge. Harvest moon, Darla thought, which was odd since it had been spring in her bedroom.

Ahead she saw the other girls.
And
the pirates. Or at least she saw their silhouettes. It obviously hadn't been much of a fight. The smallest of the girls—Martha, Nina, and Heidi—were already captured and riding atop their captors' shoulders. The others, with die exception of JoAnne, were being carried off fireman-style. JoAnne still had her knife and she was standing off one of the largest of the men; she got in one good swipe before being disarmed, and lifted up.

Darla was just digesting this when Lizzy was pulled from her.

“Up you go, little darlin',” came a deep voice.

Lizzy screamed. “Wendy! Wendy!”

Darla had no time to answer her before she, too, was gathered up in enormous arms and carted off.

In less time than it takes to tell of it, they were through the woods and over a shingle, dumped into boats, and rowed out to the pirate ship. There they were hauled up by ropes and—except for Betsy, who struggled so hard she landed in the water and had to be fished out, wrung out, and then hauled up again—it was a silent and well-practiced operation.

The girls stood in a huddle on the well-lit deck and awaited their fate. Darla was glad no one said anything. She felt awful. She hadn't meant them to come to this. Peter had been right. Wishes in Neverland were dangerous.

“Here come the captains,” said one of the pirates. It was the first thing anyone had said since the capture.

He must mean captain, singular, thought Darla. But when she heard footsteps nearing them and dared to look up, there were, indeed, two figures coming forward. One was an old man about her grandfather's age, his white hair in two braids, a three-cornered hat on his head. She looked for the infamous hook but he had two regular hands, though the right one was clutching a pen.

The other captain was ... a woman.

“Welcome to Hook's ship,” the woman said. “I'm Mrs. Hook. Also known as Mother Jane. Also known as Pirate til. Also called The Pirate Queen. We've been hoping we could get you away from Peter for a very long time.” She shook hands with each of the girls and gave tizzy a hug.

“I need to get to the doctor, ma'am,” said one of the pirates. “That little girl...” he pointed to JoAnne “...gave me quite a slice.”

JoAnne blanched and shrank back into herself.

But Captain Hook only laughed. It was a hearty laugh, full of good humor. “Good for her. You're getting careless in your old age, Smee,” he said. “Stitches will remind you to stay alert. Peter would have got your throat, and even here on the boat that could take a long while to heal.”

“Now,” said Mrs. Hook, “it's time for a good meal. Pizza, I think. With plenty of veggies on top. Peppers, mushrooms, carrots, onions. But no anchovies. I have never understood why anyone wants a hairy fish on top of pizza.”

"What's pizza?” asked Lizzy.

“Ah ... something you will love, my dear,” answered Mrs. Hook. “Things never do change in Peter's Neverland, but up here on Hook's ship we move with the times.”.

“Who will do the dishes after?” asked Betsy cautiously.

The crew rustled behind them.

“I'm on dishes this week,” said one, a burly, ugly man with a black eyepatch.

“And I,” said another. She was as big as the ugly man, but attractive in a rough sort of way.

“There's a duty roster on the wall by the galley,” explained Mrs. Hook. “That's ship talk for the kitchen. You'll get used to it. We all take turns. A pirate ship is a very democratic place.”

“What's demo-rat-ic?” asked Lizzy.

They all laughed. “You will have a long time to learn,” said Mrs. Hook. “Time moves more swiftly here than in the stuffy confines of a Neverland tree. But not so swiftly as out in the world. Now let's have that pizza, a hot bath, and a bedtime story, and then tomorrow we'll try and answer your questions.”

The girls cheered, JoAnne loudest of them all.

“I am hungry,” Lizzy added, as if that were all the answer Mrs. Hook needed.

“But I'm not,” Darla said. “And I don't want to stay here. Not in Neverland or on Hook's ship. I want to go home.”

Captain Hook came over and put his good hand under her chin. Gently he lifted her face into the light. “Father beat you?” he asked.

“Never,” Darla said.

“Mother desert you?” he asked.

“Fat chance,” said Darla.

“Starving? Miserable? Alone?”

“No. And no. And no.”

Hook turned to his wife and shrugged. She shrugged back, then asked, “Ever think that the world was unfair, child?”

“Who hasn't?” asked Darla, and Mrs. Hook smiled.

“Thinking it and meaning it are two very different things,” Mrs. Hook said at last. “I expect you must have been awfully convincing to have landed at Peter's door. Never mind, have pizza with us, and then you can go. I want to hear the latest from outside, anyway. You never know what we might find useful. Pizza was the last really useful thing we learned from one of the girls we snagged before Peter found her. And that—I can tell you—has been a major success.”

“Can't I go home with Darla?” Lizzy asked.

Mrs. Hook knelt down till she and Lizzy were face-to-face. “I am afraid that would make for an awful lot of awkward questions,” she said.

Lizzy's blue eyes filled up with tears.

“My mom is a lawyer,” Darla put in quickly. "Awkward questions are her specialty.”

 

The pizza was great, with a crust that was thin and delicious. And when Darla awoke to the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall and the sound of the maple branch scritch-scratching against the clapboard siding, the taste of the pizza was still in her mouth. She felt a lump at her feet, raised up, and saw Lizzy fast asleep under the covers at the foot of the bed.

“I sure hope Mom is as good as I think she is,” Darla whispered. Became there was no going back on this one—fair, unfair, or anywhere in between.

In Through the Looking-Glass the Red Queen tells Alice that in her country it takes all the running one can do to stay in the same place. To get somewhere else she says, “you must run at least twice as fast as that.'

So it is with authors. Sometimes we don't even know what ground we have actually covered until we go back and look it over from a very great height. Only then do we notice how we have been going over a personal landscape. Only then can we see all the signposts and placards from our real lives.

Here is what I discovered when I reread these stories in preparation for putting them in this collection:

I began the story as part of a class I was teaching in fantasy. I asked my students to write a variation on the Alice story, and as they worked, I tried the assignment, too. The pig image was as far as I got before our twenty minutes were up.

At the time I didn't know why I had used the pig and the reference to Pig Latin, but later I remembered. I had been a great Pig Latin devotee as a kid; even more I had liked to speak Double Dutch, which is another of those created languages. A junior high school friend and I conversed daily in that tongue, to the annoyance of everyone in both our families. In the fifties a major magazine did an article about me and my use of the invented language, along with a "cute” photograph. I found that article a couple of years ago. So that explains one line in this story.

But all stories are made up of an outside influence and an inside influence—heart and head working together. The outside influences were of course my love for the original books about Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world and my junior high Double Dutch, as well as the fact that someone I knew wanted me to write a story to go into an anthology called Tough Girls. I sent her “Tough Alice,” then pulled it back for this collection and sent her another, which she turned down

But there was more to it than that. The Alice in my telling is very much the child I was: timid and courageous in equal measure, looking for adventure and fearing it, too. My Alice is a child thrust into heroism kicking and screaming.

Just as the original Alice is completely a girl of her time—that is, Carroll's references are from nineteenth-century Britain—so my Alice is a child of today. Phrases like “Haste is a terrible thing to waste,” which is a twist on the education slogan “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” is a modernism that Lewis Carroll, the author of the Alice books, would never have known to use, though he loved to play with words. I am sure the careful reader can find many more.

I wrote this for a volume of vampire stories I was editing, and it has ended up one of my personal favorites. My husband comes from Appalachia, from the small mountain town of Webster Springs in West Virginia. We had our honeymoon there and I am very fond of the countryside and the folksongs. But for all that there is a great beauty in those mountains, there is a shadow side, too. The coal mines have sucked the life's blood from the people; poverty has placed its dark wings over their souls.

I used to sing “All the Pretty Little Horses” to my own children at night. I am sure that the strength of the dead mother in my story—and her deep, abiding love for her own children that finally helps her master the monster she has become—is a combination of my own feelings for my children and those for my dear, departed mother, who passed away nearly thirty years ago, to my lasting sorrow

I am not sure that my agent, Marilyn Marlow, knows that Aunt Marilyn is named after her. They share that same no-nonsense approach to life, though my agent is a much softer person (underneath).

I visualized the garden in our Scottish house, Wayside, as Aunt Marilyn's garden.

Harlyn, like my Alice, is also the child I used to be—imaginative, a bit secretive, a great reader of fantasy literature (though I didn't get to read The Hobbit until I was an adult). But I had a depressingly ordinary family, no major quirks or jerks. Except for a couple of cousins and an unde I could mention...

We named our house in Massachusetts Phoenix Farm when we moved in. Actually I wanted to name it Fe-Fi-Fo-Farm but my husband, who normally has a giant sense of humor, absolutely refused.

Our summer house is in Scotland, in St. Andrews, which is in the Kingdom of Fife. That is what it is actually called—Kingdom—though it is really a state or a county.

I had written a comic book, The Great Selchie, that I set in Anstruther (or Anster, as the locals call it), one of the little fishing villages on the Fife coast near our house. My best friend in Scotland lives there. I did a lot of research into nineteenth-century Scottish folk-life in the Scottish Fisheries Museum, and I only got to use a small bit of it for the comic. Never the kind of author to waste anything, especially research, I decided to write a short story set in the same place and time. Bruce Coville was looking for monster stories and so it went to him. He bought it and called it “a thrilling sea yam.” But anything "thrilling” in the story I credit to the seas around Scodand, which summer or winter are both gorgeous and—on occasion—treacherous as well.

I was born and brought up in New York City and lived most of the first thirteen years of my life in an apartment house on the corner of Central Park West and Ninety-Seventh Street, right next to the First Church of Christian Science. That is the exact setting of Wild Wood Central. My brother and best friend, Diane, and I used to play in the park where Zena and her pals go, though we played baseball, cowboys and Indians, and Knights of the Round Table, not Wilding.

The reference to Max and the Wild Things being "an old story” is, of course, a nod to Maurice Sendak's picture book Where the Wild Things
Are.
It is a story in which a child's wildness is tamed by his imagination, which is a healthy outlet for that kind of thing. However, the actual term Wilding was one that arose in the late 1980s, when gangs of teenagers and young adults ran savagely through Central Park, mugging, raping, and beating up people whose only sin was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'd like to think that we can tame our wildness or at least channel it into more acceptable behaviors, and my story is about that possibility.

The house in this story is actually my Massachusetts house, which has a long, dark, windowless hall upstairs. My middle son used to be so frightened of that hall and the monsters he believed were hiding in the cupboards that he actually invented an entire set of rituals. They included turning around and touching parts of the walls to keep him safe. Nowadays he is a rock-and-roll musician, which involves another group of rituals. I am not sure they keep him very safe at all.

The incident with the cheerleading outfit comes directly out of a confrontation my daughter—who was captain of the cheerleaders when she was in high school—had with her school principal. Her friend Brenda really had been sent home from school because her skirt was too short.

I originally wrote this story just to be scary. I think a lot of childhood fears crept into it. And the fears I have now, when I am occasionally alone in my big house.

The setting is my son Adam's old room, which looks out over the corner of the garden where there used to be a compost heap. The first seven years we lived in this house in Hatfield, Massachusetts, I had a large vegetable garden. My children loved to graze in it, eating fresh peas right out of the pods. Now I have things I'd rather do than spend hours weeding. like writing. And reading. And taking long walks. So I cultivate my gardening friends rather than my own plot of land, and they give me their overruns.