In which kids act like kids

Another Goodwill find: Sixth Grade Secrets by Louis Sachar. I loved this book when I was a kid, but I never realized it was by Sachar, who I associate with the Wayside School books. (I bet other people about my age have this association, too, while people a little younger than us know him as the author of Holes, which I've never read.)

Laura Sibbie is just about to graduate from the sixth grade. When she was four, she broke a lamp because she was mad about having to get her hair cut. Her father encouraged her to tell the truth by telling her the story of George Washington and the cherry tree. Laura confesses, and her father tells her since she didn't lie, she doesn't have to cut her hair. Eight years later, Laura still has never cut her hair, or told a lie.

In a previously-alluded to event, several clubs formed in the sixth grade which resulted in hostility and kids being left out; one of those kids' parents complained to the principal, and now there is a strict no-clubs rule in Laura's class. But after Laura buys a trucker cap that says "PIG CITY" on it, she can't resist the urge to start a secret club named for her cap. In order to ensure loyalty, Laura and her two best friends give "insurance"- something very embarrassing that will be exposed to the whole class if a person should happen to spill the beans about Pig City. The first three items- a picture of one of the best friends getting a bath at age 3, a fake news article about the other friend being ticklish, and Laura pens a declaration of love to their teacher, Mr. Doyle.

The next day, the girls start recruiting new members. They choose a girl from their class and initiate her into Pig City. Every day the girls invite a new member to join, but they are overheard one day by Gabriel. Gabriel has a crush on Laura, and writes her a note explaining he knows about Pig City but promises not to tell, and asks to join the club. In typical YA book plot twist, the note in intercepted by a classmate who hates Laura, and she changes the tone of the note to one of extortion- if Laura doesn't kiss Gabriel, he'll tell about Pig City.

Of course, things go horribly wrong. When Laura confronts Gabriel about the tone of the note, he calls her a liar. Big mistake- it's an accusation Laura finds incredibly offensive. They scream at one another, and Gabriel start his own club, Monkey Town. As elementary clubs tend to do, the main point of the clubs becomes trying to torture the rival club members by turning their desks upside down, swiping their homework, and breaking their pencils. Things start to turn more violent when Pig City holds Gabriel down and coats him with mustard. As retaliation, he steals the box of insurance and exposes Pig City's secrets to the whole school. Pig City dissolves and Laura is blamed. When Laura walks home from school that night, two members of Monkey Town hold her down and chop off her waist length hair above the shoulder.

Fortunately, adults get involved at this point. Gabriel also defends Laura's honor by punching the hair-cutters in the mouth. Laura's friends forgive her, Gabriel and Laura make up, and Laura gets a cute haircut.

• Laura plans to be the first female president. She thinks some pretty awesome feminist things about the ways women are valued and how it undermines their real worth- for instance, "...it bothered [Laura] when people told her she was pretty. Nobody ever told George Washington he was pretty!"
• While Laura claims to never lie, she makes a LOT of- well, I was going to call it "equivocations", but then I looked the word up, and that's not exactly the correct term. She applies some circular reasoning to situations, I guess. She admits after the hair cutting incident that she deserved it, since she had in fact been lying all along.
• Can I just say how much I adore books where kids act like they really do? Sure, they are twelve and immature, but the girls talk about whether boys are into girls who are "stacked". Laura tries to distract Gabriel from the feud, and from exposing the insurance, by offering to kiss him (his original demand, she thinks) and thinks to herself "She'd seen enough movies to know men like to kiss pretty women, no matter how rotten they are!" Pretty astute.
• Once the insurance is out, and Laura is implicated in a running tally the teacher's been keeping of misdeeds, Mr. Doyle offers to lessen the punishment since "I can't very well ask someone who loves me" to carry out the punishment (remember, Laura's insurance was her declaration of love). Laura takes back the love letter and throws it away, then says calmly to him "No, I'll do it. I don't love you anymore." I think that's a kick-ass comeback.
• Laura's parents want to file an assault charge after Laura's hair is cut off, but Laura doesn't want to. I think her parents should have insisted, although the culprits do get suspended for the remainder of the school year.
• It's sort of scary how kids act once they form packs. I remember some malicious moments on the playground, though nothing on scale with cutting someone's hair off.
• Which brings me to the cultural identity piece. Are these sort of cliques unique to the American school yard? Surely not- I think it seems like human behavior to form groups and square off. It even happened in Laura Ingalls Wilder books, with her enemy Nellie.

So, I still enjoy this book as an adult. It's well written, and funny, and looks at kiddie politics with a really fair and accurate view. I had heard before, and just confirmed, that Louis Sachar spent time in second and third grade classrooms for college credit. The writer for "My So-called Life", Winnie Holzman, took part in a program that let her be a teacher's aide or sub or something in California high schools so she could write more realistically about teenagers. I hate to admit I'm out of touch with what it's like to be a kid, but I am, and I think you'd have to back and observe to really remember all the drama that happens at school.

By any other name

My husband and I have been married for 7 years. We dated for less than 2 years before that, and we were young (though at the time, I felt perfectly adult and ready to make life decisions). Now that I'm older, I think wow, I did a really good job picking a husband, a better job then I knew I was doing. I couldn't have articulated this then, and didn't even know I was looking for it in a mate, but my husband's hilarious, and his sense of humor gets us through a lot of tense moments. So, I'm happy- I wouldn't change a single second of my life if it meant not ending up exactly where I am- but sometime there are things in our marriage that we didn't consider as thoroughly as we should have.

My husband is first generation Indian. His parents and older brother immigrated here just a couple of years before he was born. His father was adamant that he get to be a normal American kid. He doesn't speak the mother tongue, he had pierced ears and dreadlocks in college, and he dated (and married) American girls. As he's gotten older though, he wants to be more integrated in Indian culture.

This is such a weird concept for me. When asked about my culture, I draw a blank. I'm just your average white girl from the Midwest. I'm not religious, so I don't even have that sort of cultural identifier. I can sort of think of some things that one could call American Culture, but it's just not the same as having dances that are specific to your region of India, or seeing photos of women in outfits and being able to pinpoint what city in India they are from just by the pattern of the fabric.

Recently, we visited some close family friends of my in-laws, who my husband refers to as his "godparents". While my husband and I were visiting them, we also saw some other family friends. I asked what their names were, and hubby's godfather immediately told me "Dr. and Mrs. X, to you." I laughed, thinking he was kidding, and said, no really. He looked at me quite seriously and said "It would not be right for you to call them anything other than Dr. and Mrs. X."

Maybe I just have a temper, but I immediately thought, dammit, I'm 30 years old, it is beyond patronizing to be forced to refer to these people by their last names. Then I though, ahhh, a cultural difference I can point out. Most of my friend's parents, at a certain point (jr high, maybe?) told me to call them by their first names. I think I always called my parent's friends by their first names, and I even have friends who teach elementary school and have their students call them Miss FirstName. All of these seems preferable to me- forcing someone to speak to you in respectful manner does not force someone to respect you.

As I thought more about this name issue, I remembered how in "The Namesake", about Indian newlyweds who immigrate to the US, the parents do not call each other by their names ever. The wife calls the husband something that "translates roughly as 'are you listening to me?'" And for the first time in 7 years of marriage, it dawned on my that this is why my husband never says my name. He'll call for me from a different room, but he just says "Hey, what are you doing?" Or "Hey, can you make me tea?" He has one completely unromantic pet name for me, which he uses sometimes, but never "honey" or "babe". The list of names I call him could go on forever (everything from "bud" to "angel face"). At times I've gotten mad and pointed out he never calls me anything, and he's never articulated that this is a learned behavior. He is not even aware of it, he claims it is not a conscious choice he is making.

I was hoping my YA books would back me up that it's an Americanism for children to call adults by their first names, but in "When We First Met", the older brother's fiance Mimi refers to her future inlaws as Mr. and Mrs. Pennoyer. So, maybe I can't call this a cultural identifier after all.