Zebra Forest

M
rs. Roberts had taught sixth-grade English in my school for about eight hundred years. She was famous for cramming educational experiences into every spare minute. So on the last day of school, while the other classes had parties or played out on the field, Mrs. Roberts’s English class was busy sweating the final hours away on a “surprise” end-of-year essay: “Three Wishes I’d Like to Fulfill over Summer Vacation.”

Another thing about Mrs. Roberts. Not only was her end-of-school essay notorious, she never even changed the topic. So though it was supposed to be a surprise assignment for the last day of school, really every sixth grader with a normal IQ knew the question beforehand. And most had written the essay out and memorized it, because the rule in Mrs. Roberts’s class was: when you were done, you could leave.

I had plenty of wishes for the summer after my sixth grade year, none of which I planned to share with Mrs. Roberts. So I wrote a fake essay for that last day, listing my wishes as:

1. See all the movies headlined at the Ace Theatre.
   
2. Learn to swim.
   
3. Visit Beth at summer camp.
   

None of which I wanted to do. But I did have three real wishes.

In fact, I liked Mrs. Roberts’s idea so much that I’d been writing my three wishes down each summer since the year I first heard of her assignment — in the second grade.

Here were my three real wishes:

1. Get tall.
   
2. Have an adventure.
   
3. Meet my father.
   

Of these three wishes, none had ever been fulfilled. And, being realistic, I realized they weren’t going to be. First of all, I was short and, if Gran was any indication, likely to stay that way. Combine that with my short hair and flat chest, and I looked more like an eight-year-old boy than an eleven-year-old girl and usually had to tell people my name, Annie, to make them realize the truth. But Gran says that happens when you’re eleven. And since I’m not pretty, but what people call plain, I didn’t think just growing my hair long would help me. Anyway, the point is, growing tall wasn’t a wish that was likely to come true.

My second wish didn’t hold much more hope of being fulfilled. Adventures were scarce in Sunshine, a small town of what Mrs. Roberts called “some two thousand souls,” as if it were populated by ghosts. Its biggest employer was Enderfield, the state prison several miles from town; its second biggest was the local department store, Ratchett’s, which was two stories high and filled with what my friend Beth liked to call Ancient Style, since everything they showed there was at least ten years out of date.

During sixth grade, the only excitement I’d had was on the few nights I got to sleep over at Beth’s house and watch
The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage
on ABC. We didn’t have a TV at our house, or even a radio. The only reason we even had a telephone was because I paid our bills down at the post office, with cash Gran pulled out of various hiding places in the house. She didn’t believe in dealing more than necessary with banks, which she said kept records on everybody and were nosy. So it was only by going to Beth’s house that I knew those crazy Iranians had kept people hostage for 227 days by our second-to-last day of school, June 17. I’d kept count right along with Mr. Koppel, and Beth liked to marvel at the way those numbers stuck in my head. Privately, though, I thought it had more to do with only getting to watch the show three times. Things like that stay with you when you don’t see them too much. Which is why my second wish wasn’t exactly realistic, either. Since sitting on Beth’s family-room couch and waiting for Ted Koppel to come on was the closest I had come to excitement all year, I had little hope that the summer, with Beth away at camp, would hold much adventure.

As for my third wish, I’m not even sure why I kept making it. But when you’re in second grade, you don’t yet know the meaning of
impossible.
And since I liked that wish best of all, I couldn’t bring myself to change it, even as I grew old enough to know better.

I had no memories of my father, and not even a picture of him, since our house had no pictures. It didn’t have many mirrors, either. Gran said, in one of her talkative spells, that mirrors made her uneasy. She didn’t like looking into rooms she couldn’t get to or at people she couldn’t touch. So we had no photos, not of my father, and certainly not of my mother, who, Gran said, had run off when I was three and Rew just one.

I had one and a half memories of my mother. I say “a half” because whenever I tried to remember what my mother looked like, I saw a brown leather purse instead. That, and the sound of her keys clinking together — that’s what I remembered. And then there was the other memory, or maybe it was one Gran gave me and I made my own. That was of the night she left, when she set us down, along with our suitcases, in Gran’s house. I can’t see her face there, either, but I think she might have had brown hair, like mine. And I don’t remember much of her voice, but I do know the words she used. “They were always his idea, anyway,” she said, and left.

So I didn’t miss my mother much. But my father — since I was, after all, his idea — him, I missed. And though I didn’t know what he looked like, Gran said he was something like Rew, and that made a nice picture in my mind.

Rew looked like he had put his face up to the sky in a rainstorm of freckles. He was covered in them, mostly on his face, but practically every region of his body held a stray freckle or two. I envied him his freckles and his red hair, which made him stand out beside me. Stupid strangers tried to start conversations with us on the bus by asking me, “Where’d your red hair go?” As if I would love to discuss why I was boringly brown and the freckle god had been stingy with me.

So if Rew favored my father, as Gran liked to say, I could only imagine liking his face. And probably everything else about him. Rew had always fascinated me. I did most of the talking, but he did most of the thinking. Genius and freckles must go together, because Rew got both. Even though he was only nine, most of the time he beat me at chess, a game Gran had taught us. He had a way of seeing moves ahead, so he’d trap me and checkmate me before I realized I’d been had. I won only when I could taunt him hard enough to make him mad. Rew stopped thinking when he got mad.

So I imagined my father was Rew grown big. Smart, thoughtful, freckled, red. And he was my third wish.

But that was the unlikeliest wish of all. Because even if I drank a magic elixir and sprouted a few feet, and even if angry revolutionaries suddenly stormed the streets of boring old Sunshine, making true wishes one and two, wish three was impossible. I could never meet my father. My father was dead.

R
ew could think better than I could, but I told the better story, probably because I was a good liar, something Gran had trained me in when I was little. We had moved to Sunshine when I was three and a half, and by the time I was five, when I could have started kindergarten with the other kids, Gran had decided to homeschool us. She didn’t hold with institutions, she said, or being locked up in a big building all day. That was back when she talked more and brooded less, though she brooded often enough even then.

I must have been about six when the truant lady, or so Gran called her behind her back, came to check on us. Actually, she was a social worker named Adele Parks, who had a gentle way of talking that I liked. But I didn’t get to talk to her just then. The first time she came was on one of Gran’s good days, and Gran had summoned up the best of her old self, explaining to the woman, at length, her educational philosophy, which I heard her say included “lots of classics, field trips, and extensive hands-on work.”

After the woman left, Gran, staring out back at the Zebra Forest, said to me, “I’m a liar, I’ll admit. But I pride myself on being a real
good
liar. That’s part of my educational philosophy, too, Annie B. Mark that down. Lesson one: If you’re going to do something, make sure you do it with
excellence.
”

Gran’s name for me, Annie B., was short for what she liked to call me: Annie Beautiful. Since I already told you I’m not one jot beautiful, that was one of Gran’s lies, too. But it was one of her excellent ones. She said it so well, I sometimes believed it.

After that, Adele Parks came by most months to check in. As soon as I had learned to write, mainly by watching Gran do it and studying old
Life
magazines, I had dutifully filled out the homeschool forms she sent Gran. Of course, this only made Adele Parks a more frequent visitor, since a six-year-old filling out forms didn’t inspire much confidence in the homeschooling system Gran had told her about. And so I told her lots of lies, taking my cue from Gran, but eventually she sent me, and then Rew, to the local public school.

I began in second grade, which is how I heard about Mrs. Roberts’s essay one year later than the other kids. But I found I liked school well enough, especially when I sat next to Beth Mayfield.

While I was sitting hunched in my chair that first day, Beth leaned over and told me she liked the way I wrote my name. Beth is a girl who is not afraid to ask questions, and that day, she wanted to know everything about me. I quickly found out I didn’t know much about myself. Not enough to satisfy Beth, anyway.