5
BACK IN MY ROOM AGAIN, I hit on the idea of practicing with marbles instead of peas. I was a little beyond the age of playing with marbles. Among the other kids my age at school, marbles were no longer in favor. A few still played with them, but when I saw that those who did were bespectacled, small, runny-nosed, and disdained, I put my marbles away. I took them out now and then, in private, just to appreciate them as beautiful objects, but simply looking at them was never entirely enough appreciation. They were meant to be played with, not merely admired.
Luckily, I lived on a block with many younger children. They looked up to me, and I encouraged it. They often came to my house and asked my mother if I could play with them. Sometimes, under the protective guise of teaching them, I played marbles with them. I let them win my old marbles, the ones that were chipped and milky, and thereby whittled my collection down to the best of the transparent marbles—the clear, the tinted, the brilliant reds and greens—and the cat’s eyes—best of the best, clear marbles with a twisted leaf of color in the center that from certain angles resembled the pupil in the eye of a cat. These dazzlers I protected with all my skill and effort, and because I always won with these marbles, my students came to think of them as charmed, in the manner—as I later came to learn—of so very many people who, confronted with someone who has achieved something by dint of honest labor vigorously and unstintingly applied, would rather think of it as unfairly won, the product of an unfair advantage, like luck or talent or magic or divine election.
I tried rolling a couple of cat’s eyes and found them so much easier to work with than peas that I wondered why the Glynns hadn’t thought of them. Possibly it was because marbles were not as likely to come so readily to the mind of a girl as they did to the mind of a boy, I thought, chuckling indulgently while I rolled the marbles upward and back and read my social studies assignment at the same time. I did well with the marbles, well enough that I thought I might be able to get away with using marbles exclusively.
I began carrying a pair of marbles in my pocket. These pocket marbles were not for practice, though. I was doing my practicing at home. I carried the marbles so that I could show off. At school, during homeroom or a study hall, I would take the marbles out and begin rolling them with my eyes closed, hoping that someone would notice this unusual behavior and ask me about it. I got quite good at manipulating them, and, with an uncanny prescience that startles me even now, thirty-six years later, began to develop a repertory of manipulations, from touching them, feeling them, fingering them, handling them (all maneuvers that were harder than they sound, since the marbles had a lively reluctance to stay put while they were touched, felt, fingered, or handled), to more active manipulations, such as grazing, brushing, caressing, fondling, pawing, rubbing, stroking, and toying with the marbles, all in addition, of course, to the rollings—up and back, side to side—that one would expect to find in the bag of tricks of a marble manipulator. Often enough, I was asked what the heck I was doing, often enough to get a taste of the satisfying fame conferred for a distinguishing oddity and for the attainment of a skill, and so I had the erroneous feeling that I was doing well. That feeling was dispelled soon enough, one day when the Glynns again plunked themselves down on either side of me in the cafeteria just as I was scraping the raisin gravy off my ham slice.
“Hey,” said Margot, leaning close to me and whispering into my ear, “what’s the idea with the marbles?”
“Oh,” said I, grinning with the pleasure of having an asset discovered, as if I had been writing a poem in secret and had, by accident or design, left some rejected pages of my work out on my worktable, where they might be discovered, leading to their publication, to my passing embarrassment and lasting fame, “the marbles.” I reached into my pocket and pulled the marbles out. “I’ve been practicing. Let me show you.”
“No thanks,” said Martha. She scooped up the marbles with the swift movement of one who in her earlier days must have been an accomplished player of jacks. “Your marbles days are over.”
“Or should be,” said Margot. “Marbles are for kids.”
“Oh, sure,” I said, suddenly embarrassed. “Sure. Of course. For kids. But they’re pretty challenging.”
“Come on, Peter,” said Martha.
“No, really,” I asserted. “They take some skill. And they’re a lot less messy than peas. I can carry them around in my pocket and practice at any time.”
“He’s got a point,” said Martha.
“Please, Martha,” said Margot. “That’s part of the problem, Peter,” she added. “The way you keep taking them out and practicing in front of everyone.”
“Practicing?” I said. “But I thought you wanted me to practice.”
“At home, Peter,” said Margot. “In the privacy of your little room. What you do there is practicing. But what you’re doing with these marbles of yours isn’t practicing. It’s just—”
“—showing off,” said Martha.
“No, it’s not,” I claimed, as guilty parties do.
Martha gave me one of those looks of hers, with those incredulous eyes, that disbelieving grin.
[to be continued]
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