Like a photographic print in a developing bath in a darkroom, my understanding of some of the things Rosetta told me developed slowly as the seasons came around again to early fall. Two impressions stood out from all the others: that Rosetta seemed to have been waiting for me, her proper audience, and that life for a great many people whom I had never met had been far darker, more disappointing, and frightening than it had been for the people who were forever telling me about the night the Nevsky mansion burned.
I should admit, I suppose, in the interest of frankness, that I never did very well at those contests. I couldn’t seem to come up with much of anything that provided the shock of the new, and my expressions of hope never really went beyond the hope that I would win. To my mind, the closest I came was my entry for Troubled Titan Peas: “Troubled Titan Brand Baby Peas are my first choice for stocking a family fallout shelter because they’re ready in a jiffy, they taste much better than lima beans, and they can be fun to play with if you don’t have any other way to pass the time, which could be a problem in a fallout shelter.”
This entry became something of a joke in the Glynn household. Margot and Martha collapsed in giggles as soon as they heard it, and Andy said, almost at once, “That’s just what I’ve been looking for! I’ve never had a good name for it before! I’ve needed a kind of general-purpose phrase for those time-consuming little chores that must be repeated and repeated throughout a person’s life without ever being finished! Like cleaning rollers! Buying cigarettes! Cleaning leaves from the gutters! Changing the damned oil in the damned car! We’re always doing that—stuff—and then one day we discover that we’ve wasted quite a lot of the little time we have in this puppet play on these useless and forgettable pastimes. Thank you, Peter! Thank you!”
From then on, whenever he had to go to the village to get cigarettes or had to clean the leaves from the gutters or had to change the oil in the car, he would say, “I’m going to play with my peas.”
For Rosetta, my entry in the Troubled Titan Peas contest represented something else. “This is quite a document!” she said. “I think it says much more than you know. I think it is a kind of testimony. It bears witness to your honesty, your total unwillingness to compromise what you actually think by giving the contest organizers what they want.” She paused and smiled and said, “I’m proud of you.” After a moment, she added, “Of course, you haven’t got a chance.”
If I never succeeded in giving the contest organizers what they wanted, I did succeed in giving Andy and Rosetta what they wanted. Over the course of the year, as I got to know them, they got to know me, and finally, after a year of visits, a year of lessons from Andy, a year of collaboration with Rosetta, they came to trust me enough to allow me to walk their daughters to the movies.
[to be continued]
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