Shell Games

Early on, I realized I was not hard wired for fantasy. Fantasy in the literary sense anyway.

I was in first or second grade. This I know because I had not yet left behind the old fashioned rows of linked wooden desks with attached seats and obsolete holes into which boys from previous generations dipped the long hair of girls sitting in front of them. By third grade, many of the classrooms in P.S. 217 in Brooklyn had been updated with modern laminate desks, free standing shiny rectangles into which you could stuff your notebooks with covers decorated by Peter Max and textbooks protected by optimistic book covers bearing Ivy League insignias, and, more importantly, from which you could easily extract assorted candies you had purchased during lunch at Morty and Eddies across Coney Island Avenue to help get you through the afternoon. By 1967, a jawbreaker was always within easy reach; there was no need to surreptitiously lift the creaky hinged wooden flap and pray the teacher wouldn't notice.

The scrap paper in those days was so thin and soft it almost felt like cloth. I remember those grainy five by seven sheets of yellowed paper that looked as if they had been shaved off an ancient and decaying bit of tree bark. Once a week, a story would be piped in over the public address system, and, when it was over, the teacher would distribute the flimsy pages and ask us to illustrate what I suppose would be our version of a "take away." I remember thinking the stories were a bit silly, but maybe I was just missing the point.

One week, the protagonist in the story was a fellow named Mr. Turtle. If there was a message in the tale I couldn't tell you, but Mr. Turtle, as I recall, had a wife and some kids and spent his days doing the kinds of mundane things that most dads did. If Mr. Turtle had a first name, it was never revealed. It was the same for Mrs. Turtle, which made more sense because she was a minor character.

As always, I did my best to color the best picture in the class. To me, anyway, my figures looked lifelike, and everything appeared to be drawn to scale. My coloring was precise; I never went outside the lines. My rendering of Mr. Turtle was so realistic it could have been mistaken for a photo of a neighborhood dad, maybe even mine. I was proud to print my name on the back.

The teacher collected the drawings and held them up for everyone to see, one by one. The deeper she got into the pile, the more mortified I became. Everybody else had drawn Mr. Turtle as a turtle, not a human. It had never occurred to me that a turtle would do things that a person would do -- eat breakfast at a table, drive a car, speak English. It had not even crossed my mind that someone named Mr. Turtle would actually be a turtle. When the teacher got to my picture, she looked concerned. The boy behind me, the same one who had squeezed my hand on the first day of school so hard it made me cry, snickered. I wanted to crawl into my inkwell.

All these years later, as I try to write a novel, I feel like that little girl who wants to disappear into the inkwell. Fiction, to me, is as far fetched as the most fantastical fantasy, at least when it comes to creating it. Somehow, every character is a hodgepodge composite of me and the people I've come to know along the way. As hard as I try to escape reality, it shadows me with every keystroke. The stories I write are remarkably similar to my own stories, then and now.

I fear I am destined to be a turtle without a shell, exposed, at risk, unable to imagine life as anything but a turtle.