Six

Winnie Yang

I remember lying in my bed one night when I was six years old, staring at the ceiling in the darkness, covers pulled up to my chin, thinking, “Someday, I’ll wake up and I’ll be twenty years old. And someday I’ll wake up and be forty. What will I look like? What will I be doing? Will I be happy? Will I remember what it was like to be six?”

Memory has always been a concern of mine – mainly, is mine deficient somehow? Everyone else seems able to remember the minutiae of their childhoods, while mine seems mostly fuzzy at best. Sometimes I’ll get little snatches of an image or a feeling, summoned by something I’ve seen or smelled or heard, or sometimes a memory will just float to the surface, unasked for. And other times, I’ll consciously try to conjure up a particular scene or moment, but my efforts are unsuccessful more often than not.

I’m twenty-one. I’m probably a foot and a half taller and twice as heavy as my six-year-old self. I’m in school, reading and writing a lot, trying to figure out my life, wondering (still) what forty will be like. Sometimes I’m happy, sometimes I’m not. I aim for contentment now, mostly.

This is what I remember.

* * *

I’m in first grade. My teacher is Ms. Schultz. She would make the perfect grandmother: a bit chubby, short silvery-blonde hair, smiling blue eyes that crinkle in the corners, and a wardrobe consisting primarily of pink and purple sweatshirts, all cute-fluffy-animal-themed. Her face is so soft-looking I want to reach up and touch it. She likes blue eyeshadow.

I’m good at first grade. The other kids like my drawings. I know not to color the sky as a one-inch blue strip at the top of my paper. I like drawing horses and unicorns and Pegasuses. My stories are the longest and I finish my arithmetic first. I am a teacher’s pet. Except for the time when I used the stapler after Ms. Schultz said not to and I stapled my thumb. I cried and she said, “I told you so,” and I was sad because I thought she didn’t like me anymore. I’m good at first grade, except for P.E. I hate the mile-run. I’m always second-to-last, trying to keep a good distance between me and the fat girl who’s last.

I’m a hit in music class. I’ve played violin for three years and Ms. Cogan asks me to play for the class. She’s kind of weird – she likes to talk to a five-inch bust of Beethoven that sits atop her upright piano. She really likes the song “Lean On Me.”

Ms. Eyerman is really cool. She looks younger than all the other teachers. She has a funny way of talking: her voice is on the low side, and all her sentences always seem to slope downwards – even her questions sound declarative. She says “warter” when she means “water,” and “warsh” when she means “wash.” Art class is my favorite.

* * *

My sister Connie is five. She’s in kindergarten, which lasts only half a day, so after school, she goes to the Wangs’ house, since Mom’s working. They live at West Manor and Penshurst in a blue two-story with white trim. Mrs. Wang makes egg salad every day. Connie says it’s so dry it chokes her.

Connie and I are best friends with Caroline and Stephanie Shieh. Mom says we knew them back when we lived in Houston, but now they live in St. Louis too. Caroline is nine and Stephanie is four. They’re named after the princesses of Monaco. Their house is far away, but once we get there, we spend all day (or even several days at a time) eating Triscuits and Easy-Cheese, watching “City of Gold” on Nickelodeon, and playing “City of Gold” in the basement. We play “She-Ra, Princess of Power” and “My Little Ponies” and “Transformers” too, but the best, by a long shot, is Change-O Car.

Change-O Car requires a lot of furniture and linens: we arrange chairs and end tables in a rectangular formation and stretch sheets and blankets over and around everything, leaving spaces open for windows and a sunroof. We place pillows from the sofa in one corner. This is the helm, where the captain/commander/president/ruthless dictator/general-person-in-charge sits. Everyone else mans stations throughout the vehicle.

Change-O Car has amazing capabilities. It can -- and has -- become an airplane, a submarine, a spaceship, a tank, a canoe. It functions least often as a car. We conquer worlds in Change-O Car. We change history and save the universe. We are invincible. (And if, by chance, some tragedy should befall us, we can always circle the Earth faster than the speed of light, Superman-style, and go back in time to set things to rights.)

* * *

My favorite article of clothing is Squeaky Pants. I have a red pair and a navy blue pair. Squeaky Pants are sweatpants with a fuzzy unidentifiable animal patch sewn just above the right hip pocket. I think it’s a platypus, perhaps. Underneath the patch is a little bladder, maybe an inch or so in diameter. When I poke the animal in the belly, there’s a loud “EEEE-EEEEK.” My friends are covetous. I love these pants.

My mother does my hair every morning before school. We have an assortment of hair “thingies” – as we call them – mostly the figure-eight elastics with the big plastic balls at either end. She makes a French braid or a ponytail, a half-up, half-down or pigtails. No bumps, I insist, forcing strays back against my head with my hand. My hair is long. I have bangs.

* * *

I am afraid of the dark. I see shapes – witches, monsters, ill-intentioned strangers -- moving in the closet; the shadows from my nightlight contort themselves upon my bedroom walls in some sort of danse macabre, and I pull the covers over my head so that not a hair on my body extends beyond the safety of the comforter. I hear Dad rumbling noisily in his sleep down the hall, and I hiss audibly: “Dad, you’re SNORING!” He snorts awake and pads to the bathroom. I hear him scratch his head. When he returns, he promptly falls asleep and begins to snore again.

* * *

I am constantly in transit. My mother drives us everywhere: Monday, orchestra; Tuesday, violin lessons, then swim lessons; Wednesday, ballet; Thursday, choir, then a different orchestra – drawing classes, wheelthrowing, music workshops, Chinese school. Classes at the Art Museum, classes at the Science Center. I am exhausted. I yell: “I don’t know any other six-year-olds that have to do as much as I have to!” She tells me I’ll wish I had done more someday.

I hate ballet. Madame Alexandra is strict. Our black leotards and pink tights always have a funny old sort of smell to them. Kind of like Madame. I do not look good in pink. My bun becomes more disheveled with every demi-plié, every grand arabesque. I envy the older girls their powder blue chiffon wrap skirts, the neatly tied satin ribbons around their tidy buns. But I snicker when Madame chides Gwen – the Pudgy One – for landing “like an elephant,” or Connie, all elbows and knees and bad posture.

I hate swimming. We go to the Whispering Hills Y. The Olympic-sized pool there is covered by what seems to be a roof constructed entirely of stained two-by-fours. The smell of chlorine is almost overpowering but a bit comforting as well. The swim instructors are scary – mean and bullying. I dread their demands for laps, laps, and more laps. Back and forth and back again: I grow tired, heavy. My mouth fills with the salty, metallic-tasting water. I don’t want to drown, I tell them. They are unsympathetic. My swimming progress reports always say the same thing: “Lots of potential, no perseverance.”

I do everything in the car. I eat. I sleep. I read. I whine out of boredom and restlessness. I fight with Connie over who has more of the back seat to sleep on, over who will go first at violin lessons (not me, not her); I fight with her simply because she is my sister and because she is there. I watch the world speed by outside my window in varying greens, reds and oranges, greys and whites. I race raindrops as we coast along the highway.

* * *

I guess I remember more than I thought.

People tell me it’s a terrible tendency I have sometimes of focusing on the past. They say, “You should live in the now.” They insist, “You should enjoy the present.” I feel guilty at first, but I smile to see through the eyes of a six-year-old again. The guilt slides away easily because I know not to let a cloud of memories obscure the present, to freight the moment with past regrets. Instead, I use my memories to elevate my experiences now, to see everything around me with greater clarity. The past gives every moment a little more meaning. To me, it seems critical to know where and whence I came from, how I came to be like this, to think the way I do or act the way I do. Memory offers a claim of permanence, a means of positioning myself in time and in space.

And so I wonder: will I remember what it was like to be twenty-one?

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