“We’re not ready to have the whole school know that you’re honing your little skills, honey,” said Margot.
“Sorry,” I said with a shrug. “I didn’t realize—”
To my surprise, I felt myself begin to blush, because, although I still had no idea what their intentions might be, what plans they had for using me and my pea-poking skills, Margot and Martha had made it clear that what I was doing was something that shouldn’t be seen, shouldn’t be known, and at that time of life I had so many interests that had to be kept out of sight that a blushing embarrassment and almost reflexive stuffing of my hands into my pockets was my immediate response to the vaguest threat of having any of them discovered. Let someone call to me “Hey, Peter!” and the blush would spread over my face, my hands would fly into my pockets, and I’d look at my shoes.
“Never mind,” said Margot. “Just knock it off. Now let me see how you’re doing.” She picked a raisin from the pool of viscid gravy on the side of my plate. Martha did the same.
“Won’t everybody see?” I asked, concerned now as I hadn’t been before.
“We’ll cover you,” said Martha, moving her milk carton near my hand so that it would hide my raisin work from most of the room. I had to chuckle about this misuse of cover, since I was a devotee of the technical vocabulary of Westerns.
“You don’t mean ‘cover,’” I began. “Covering is shooting at the bad guys—or it could be the good guys—any guys who are shooting at you—or might shoot at you if they got the chance—or not you, exactly, if you’re the one who’s doing the covering—but might shoot at the guy you’re covering—”
“Never mind that,” said Margot, dismissing an entire department of my little store of learning. “Palpate those raisins.”
“‘Palpate’?”
“Touch them. Roll them. Rub them,” said Martha. “Get to work.”
Nervously now, with a childish foretaste of the clammy fear known to anyone who has endured an oral examination or a job interview, I rested a finger on each of the raisins.
“They’re sticky,” I said. “And kind of slippery, too.”
The girls giggled.
“Lightly, now, Peter,” said Margot. “Side to side.”
I could tell that I was in trouble right away. The perfection of the marbles’ shape made their behavior predictable in comparison to the raisins. The marbles also had, of course, the glassy hardness marbles are known for, and the raisins, with their coating of mucilaginous gravy, were slippery, unpredictable little devils, with a resilience that was a little startling, as if there were some life in them still. In working with the marbles, which had a tendency to skitter on smooth surfaces, I had lost the light touch. I was being cautious now, too cautious to display any of the skill that I thought I had acquired. I wasn’t doing much of anything to the raisins, barely moving them.
“What’s this?” asked Martha. “You’re not doing anything.”
“I am,” I said. “It’s just that, well, raisins are kind of hard to work with.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. They’re soft, and yet they kind of push back at you, and they’re not round, not even as round as peas—”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Up and down, now, Peter,” said Margot.
“Up and down,” I said. “Okay.”
“See if you can kind of stroke the raisin instead of making it roll like that.”
“No, I like that rolling,” said Martha.
“Okay, make hers roll,” said Margot, “but just stroke mine.”
I did my best.
“What do you think?” asked Martha.
“Back to the peas,” said Margot. “You’re just going to have to find a way to practice rolling peas, Peter.”
“But—” I began.
“Listen, Peter,” said Martha. “You know how kids in class are always asking, ‘What good is this going to do me?’”
“Yeah,” I said. That was a frequent topic of debate: whether the things we were learning would be at all useful to us in “life,” when we were grown up, or even while we were still kids, doing whatever we did all day.
“Well, I promise you, Peter, that this is going to be useful,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take your word for it.”
“Good,” she said.
“Good,” said Margot. She ate a raisin and giggled.
[to be continued]
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🎧 803: “We’re not ready . . .”