139: Although work on the play ...
Little Follies, “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” Chapter 15 begins
15
ALTHOUGH work on the play seemed to go along pretty well, I couldn’t shake the conviction that King Lear was going to get me into some kind of trouble. I had the kind of indistinct foreboding that, on a sunny day, warns a clamdigger on Bolotomy Bay that a storm is approaching.
It was a gloriously sunny day, an unseasonably warm day for December, almost a balmy day, when Spike walked home from school with me.
“Hey, Peter! Peter!” she called. “Wait up!” When she reached me, she was a little out of breath. “It’s such a nice day,” she declared, flinging her arms toward the sky. “What do you say I walk you home?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Spike had never had much to say to me before, and I had had hopes that it might be possible for me to get through the entire fourth grade without coming within arm’s reach of her.
“Come on,” she said. “You and I can have a nice talk.” It sounded like a command to me, so I followed her. She walked off, singing “The rain it raineth every day.” When I caught up to her, she raised her arm and I thought she was going to knock me on the ear, but instead she flung her arm across my shoulder and gave me a friendly squeeze.
While we walked along, scraping our shoes on the sidewalk and chatting about this and that, I thought to myself, “Gee, this Spike is pretty nice. It just goes to show that you shouldn’t judge people by reputation or appearance.” I almost thought of sharing this observation with Spike, but when I tried putting it into words, it came out as, “You know, Spike, you’re not the rat that everybody thinks you are,” and so I decided to keep it to myself.
“Hey, Pete,” said Spike, knocking me on the shoulder, “a penny for your thoughts.”
“Huh?” I said.
“What’re you thinking about so hard? I bet you haven’t heard a word I said.”
“Oh, uh, nothing,” I said. “Just, uh, nothing.”
“‘Speak,’” she said, chewing her gum enthusiastically and giving me that big grin again.
“Nothing,” I said.
“‘Nothing?’” she said, widening the grin so that I could see the gum again and giving me a knock on the shoulder.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Hey! That’s great!” she said. “That was perfect. Maybe you ought to play Cordelia!”
“Huh?” I said. Then I realized what she was getting at. “Oh, I get it,” I said. “Act I, Scene I. Yeah. Very good.”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ve been practicing. I think I’d be a pretty good Cordelia myself. What do you say?”
“Cordelia?” was what I said.
“Yeah,” said Spike. She poked me in the stomach with her forefinger. “I’m going to try out for the part—and I sure hope I get it.”
“I don’t know—” I began, without knowing how I was going to finish.
“Hey, listen,” she said suddenly. “I bet you haven’t seen the real King Lear, have you?”
“Uh, no,” I confessed. “Is it different?”
[to be continued on Friday, November 26, 2021]
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
In Topical Guide 139, Mark Dorset considers King Lear and Keeping One’s Mouth Shut, The Wisdom of from this episode.
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At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” and “The Fox and the Clam,” the first five novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.