Blow Out the Moon (13 page)

He spoke English perfectly, with a perfect English accent, though he had a SLIGHT lisp (that means he couldn’t quite say his s’s), but some English children did, too — one senior said her r’s like w’s even though she was much older. We called him Mo, but his real name was Mohammed.

While I was sick, and she was sewing by my bed, I asked Matron why Mo was at Sibton Park, and she said, “The boys’ schools won’t take them until they’re seven.”

Mo was six. He had been at Sibton Park since he was four.

On my first day out of bed Mo and I went into the cow pasture together. First, we stood at the fence around the cricket field and watched the men playing. That wasn’t very interesting.

Then we just walked around, talking — it was a perfect summer day with rich, clean English light and a few solid, puffy clouds making shadows on the grass. We had to watch the grass carefully because of the cow pats they’re completely flat and when they dry, they get hard. But I didn’t want to step on a wet one.

“I wish I had a turned-up nose,” I said.

I had practiced what this would look like in the looking glass (it’s bad English to say “mirror”) while I was in bed, and I showed him. I put one finger on the skin between my nostrils and pushed so my nose turned up.

“Like this.”

He looked at me, seriously, obviously thinking about it.

“I think you look really ugly like that,” he said.

I was surprised, but pleased, too. The way he said it sounded like I didn’t look ugly when I didn’t do it. I could tell he really meant it.

There was a cow lying down near us — a big fat one, white with brown splotches. We stood next to her and she didn’t move — she just let us stare at her.

“Have you ever ridden a cow?” Mo said.

“No, have you?”

“Watch.”

He walked even closer to the cow and I followed: Her back wasn’t flat like a horse’s. It had a big bone sticking out in a tall ridge that sloped down to her fat sides. He put his hands on her backbone and stretched one leg up, but when he tried to put it over the cow, she stood up and walked away. We followed her: As soon as she lay down, he tried to get on again, but she always stood up before he could do it.

“Let’s try to ride one of the horses,” I said.

So we climbed the fence into the horse meadow. We were trying to sneak up on a Shetland pony named Frisky when Brioney came running out. She’s a pretty good rider (I watched the riding lessons but couldn’t ride because my riding clothes weren’t ready yet).

Brioney said that Tuppence would be the best horse for us. “Miss Monkman always puts beginners on him.”

I thought Frisky or one of the other Shetland ponies would be better, because they were smaller, but she said no, Tuppence was more “trusty.” Mo didn’t really want to ride a horse (he didn’t take riding lessons), and I really did, so we decided that Brioney would hold Tuppence while Mo helped me get on. It wasn’t hard to catch Tuppence: He didn’t even stop eating grass when Brioney took hold of his halter.

I tried to grab his mane and swing myself up onto his back, the way cowboys do. But I couldn’t.

“Give her a leg up, Mo,” Brioney said. I held the mane tightly in my left hand while Mo held his hands together under my knee and I tried to swing my other leg over, but Tuppence kept stepping aside.

Then I held the mane with both hands and pulled up while Brioney and Mo both pushed and boosted until my stomach was on Tuppence’s back! I was on a horse!

I slithered around until my whole body was sprawled on his back, but before I could sit all the way up, he flung his back into the air. (Horses do this by kicking both their back legs up at the same time so high that their back goes up. This is called bucking.) I hung onto the mane; my body bounced up and down.

“Hang on! Get your leg over him!” Brioney shouted.

I tried — I held the mane tightly with both hands and tried to pull myself up, but before I could Tuppence bucked again — I bounced up into the air and his mane jerked out of my hands and then the ground hit my stomach, hard. (I know that really
I fell,
but it seemed that the ground flew up at me and hit my stomach. I’ve fallen off plenty of horses since then, and that’s always how it feels; it was just more surprising the first time.)

Brioney and Mo bent over me. Mo’s little round face looked even more worried than usual.

“I’m okay,” I said when I could talk. “I just had the wind knocked out of me.”

I sat up: I wasn’t bleeding anyplace. Brioney said, “We’ll help you get back on.”

“Get back on? Are you mad?” said Mo.

“But Miss Monkman says you should always get right back on after you fall off, she always makes us.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

All I could think while they argued (Mo won by just saying “NO” in a very firm voice) was: Finally, I’d ridden a real horse — not for very long, but I
had
ridden. And soon my riding clothes would come and I’d ride every day.

Mo slept in a room by himself. Brioney and I sometimes used to sneak in to talk to him after we’d all been put to bed. Once when we went in, he was crying: We couldn’t see his face, but we could hear him and see his back shaking under the covers.

Brioney and Tuppence: I took this picture, but not on the day in this chapter. It is in the same meadow, though.

We stood in the doorway, waited a bit, and then I whispered, “Mo?”

“Leave me alone!” I didn’t know what to do. “Go away!”

I thought that probably he didn’t want us to see him crying. At Sibton Park (and in the school stories, too), people called crying “blubbing.” No one did it much.

Brioney and I looked at each other again and then, without talking, went back to the Night Nursery and got in bed. I didn’t blame Mo
at all
for crying. He was only six years old! He was the only boy! He had to sleep in a room all by himself; we had each other.

I wondered if other people were ever homesick. Sometimes when we were getting into our pajamas Brioney sat on her bed sobbing and shouting, “Ret! I want Ret!” and one of us would run upstairs and find her. Retina would put Brioney on her lap and cuddle her until she stopped crying. But she never said what she was crying about. Brioney was only seven: I didn’t blame her, either.

But no one else “blubbed” — or if they did, they did it very privately. I never heard anyone use the word “homesick.” It was one of the things you weren’t supposed to talk about or even feel, maybe. No one talked about missing her family, either — in fact, I was the only person in the whole school who ever talked about her family at all.

Chapter Nineteen:

Bubby and Bubbité

That started in French, which we had in a small, sunny room with a big round table.

We sat around that with Mademoiselle: She was tiny, the tiniest grown-up I’d ever known, with huge, round green-gray eyes, freckles, and lots of dark hair on top of her head in a big, but neat, knot. She wore her skirts very long: Whether this was because she was so small she couldn’t find any that fit her properly, or whether she just liked them that way I don’t know.

Maybe it was because she was so tiny, maybe it was because of her age (she was, we knew, only eighteen), but she didn’t seem grown up to me. Matron was only sixteen, and she DID seem grown up but then, she was big, very big.

Everyone always obeyed Matron; hardly anyone obeyed Mademoiselle — once, when people were being very naughty (we were all actually running around the table, laughing), she started to cry.

Then we sat down; I felt sorry. Mademoiselle was so little! Even her voice was little — little and high — and she didn’t speak English very well.

I had French with Mo and the youngest children from IA: They were all-day girls and one of them was only FOUR! It was not very interesting, just lots of memorizing, until one day Mademoiselle (we pronounced it “Mamzelle”) said she thought we were ready to read a storybook. We were very excited; at least, I was.

She brought out six books — one for each of us and one for her. They were all pale green with hard covers, not very thick, and called
Les Lapins
.

“Who knows what is Lapin?” Mademoiselle said. I opened the book: There were pictures of rabbits — a mother, a father, and two children, all wearing human clothes.

“The rabbits!” I said excitedly, and this was right.

She told us all to open our books, and then she read the first page of the story out loud — in French, of course — and we listened and followed along in our books.

The rabbits in the family were Monsieur Lapin, Madame Lapin, and their two children, Pierre and Bubbite (this was pronounced Boo-bee-tay).

Then, she asked who could translate the first sentence into English, and we all looked at the words — and the pictures.

“This is Mr. Lapin,” I said. “And this is Mrs. Lapin.”

Mamzelle said, “Bon, Libby! But what is Lapin?”

“Rabbit,” I said. “Mr. and Mrs. Rabbit.”

(I knew that, but I thought it sounded better in French — less babyish. But I wanted to get to the next page in the story, so I didn’t argue.)

“Bon. Mo, the next sentence, please?”

Mo said, “They have two children, Pierre and Bubbité — Peter and … how shall I translate
Bubbité?
”

Mamzelle seemed to be thinking.

“Bubby!” I said.

Mamzelle looked at me, puzzled.

“My youngest sister’s name is Bubby! Can we translate it into Bubby?”

One of the little girls said Bubby was a funny name, and Mo said, “I like the name Bubby.”

I said, “It’s not her real name. We call her Bubby because when she was a baby she had really chubby cheeks, and we my sister Emmy and my brother Willy and I — used to put our fingers on her mouth —,” I put my fingers at the corners of my mouth, “— and push them together, like this. While we did it we used to say ‘Chub-a-bub-bub!’ So we just started calling her Bubby.”

(This was the kind of conversation Miss Davenport would never have allowed, but with Mamzelle, we could do pretty much whatever we wanted.)

Mamzelle — and everyone else — laughed; Mamzelle said in her excited French way, “Yes, yes, let’s call her Bubby!”

We turned the page: It showed Madame Lapin cooking something, The Lapin family seemed to be very excitable — they were not at all English. Almost all of their conversation ended in exclamation points, no matter what they were talking about:

“But what is this? The saucepan is missing! Pierre! Pierre!
Where is the saucepan?” cries Madame Lapin.
“I do not know, Maman!”
“Monsieur Lapin! Where is the saucepan?”

French was better once we started reading this book; and it was fun to translate Bubbité as Bubby. At home, I never really THOUGHT very much about Willy and Bubby — they were just kind of there, round, chubby things who were always giggling — but at Sibton Park, I did. It was odd to think that now Bubby was three and I hadn’t been there on her birthday, and of a family birthday party without me.

Chapter Twenty:

Sunday

I knew they’d had a party because my mother told me about it in one of her letters. She wrote to me about twice a week, and I wrote to her every Sunday. After church, we all had to go to our form rooms and write letters to our parents; but I sometimes wrote letters at other times, too.

Everything about Sunday was different from all the other days. We had sausages instead of bacon for breakfast: one big fat English sausage each on a piece of fried bread (fried bread sounds awful, but it’s delicious, especially with marmalade). Then we washed and put on our straw hats with the red ribbon, white gloves, and, if it was chilly, the gray wool uniform coats. We were already wearing our Sunday dresses.

We gathered in a big square hall with a stone floor, as usual. But this Sunday, the seniors stood on one side and the juniors stood at the other, so the seniors could pick their partners for church.

We had this new rule because the juniors fidgeted and whispered and giggled so much in church that Marza had decided that we (the juniors) had to be separated from each other.

So, we were each going to have a senior as a partner.