Secret Heroine

by | Jun 14, 2018 | Book Review, Feminism, How To Be a Girl, Identity, Reading, Representation

In E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, twelve-year-old Claudia Kincaid hatches a plan to run away from her home in Connecticut to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, taking along her money-grubbing younger brother, Jamie.

The children roam the galleries during the day, blending in with crowds. They sleep in the antique beds on display and bathe in the fountain, supplementing their money with the coins they find in it. When an angel sculpture recently acquired by the Met from a Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler begins to attract crowds, Claudia and Jamie become fascinated with the piece. They use their access to the museum to try to prove that it was indeed crafted by Michelangelo. And in their attempt to discover its provenance, they travel to visit Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler herself. (For some reason, I can never think of her as a mere Mrs. Frankweiler—so I’m just going to keep typing out her whole, grand name.)

The story is prefaced by a letter from Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler to her attorney, Saxonberg, and is narrated by Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, complete with trenchant and sometimes cryptic asides.

From the Mixed-up Files was published in 1967. It took the Newberry Award, and Konigsburg became the only writer to have both won and been runner up for the prize in the same year (for her first book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth). She also illustrated From the Mixed-up Files, modeling Claudia and Jamie on her children.

I’d forgotten Claudia’s deep and fundamental dissatisfaction with her life. I’d forgotten about Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s files—the entire meaning behind the title, the heart of the book—probably because I didn’t understand what I was reading.

I read From the Mixed-up Files when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I picked up my copy from the paperback carousel in the library of my suburban Canadian school.

But memory had softened the story into a soulless romp. Over the years, my mind fashioned it into a dreamy urban version of those children’s survival novels that I also liked to read as a kid; instead of weaving reeds and baiting fish hooks, Claudia and Jamie hid in bathrooms and ate at the Automat. I’d forgotten the opening letter from Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler to her attorney. I’d forgotten about Jamie’s cheerful, avaricious practicality, and about how the children wander not just in the Met but over Manhattan. I’d forgotten Claudia’s deep and fundamental dissatisfaction with her life. I’d forgotten about Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s files—the entire meaning behind the title, the heart of the book—probably because I didn’t understand what I was reading.

Claudia is a self-assured and earnest twelve-year-old. She has a sense of mission and tries to make her museum stay educational rather than an anarchic escape. Mrs. Frankweiler notes:

Claudia informed Jamie that they should take advantage of the wonderful opportunity they had to learn and study… her ambitions were as enormous and as multidirectional as the museum itself.

Jamie says he prefers an adventure untainted by grown-up regulations—but he lives in thrall to the rule of dollars and cents. When Claudia suggests trying to find the origins of the angel, brother and sister end up researching. In libraries.

Yes, two school-age children at loose in New York City willingly and deliberately go to the library.*

(*Sorry NYPL, I love you.)

Claudia makes increasingly poignant and quixotic attempts to give their trip a shape and a mission without being quite sure what will change it. She wants the difference she feels in herself borne out. She wants to be a heroine but has a muddled sense of how to go about accomplishing it. At one point, she sees a guide at the United Nations dressed in a sari:

When she was grown she could stay the way she was and move to some place like India where no one dressed as she did, or she could dress like someone else—the Indian guide even and still live in an ordinary place like Greenwich.

(Frankly, I see a lot of grown-up white people who are as misguided as young Claudia.)

She wants to be different. She wants this trip to have significance and change the way people see her—or change how she sees herself.

She wants to be different. She wants this trip to have significance and change the way people see her—or change how she sees herself. She tells Jamie brokenly that she wanted to prove the provenance of the angel because then she would be a heroine—others would see her as heroic, and she wants to herself: “I feel as if I jumped into a lake to rescue a boy, and what I thought was a boy turned out to be a wet, fat log. Some heroine that makes. All wet for nothing.”

But it is in her conversation with Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler that she learns to think of herself as one. Those secret files record her as a heroine.

I re-read this book while watching my daughter’s swim lesson on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—across the park from the Met, across the park from where Claudia and Jamie hid.

Because I now live in New York, the fantastical landscape of my childhood imagination has supposedly become a part of my day-to-day reality. Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Mary Rodgers’ Freaky Friday, and Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, among others, all take place on streets I’ve walked.

Twelve is often the age when girls lose what self-assurance they had. And I wish I’d understood this book better at twelve. I wish I’d carried more away from it.

I think of these books sometimes—I think of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing when I’m in posh doorman buildings with mirrored elevators, like the one Peter and Fudge lived in. But most of the time I don’t remember the fact that I share a setting with favorite childhood books. I don’t feel like a heroine.

I first read From the Mixed-up Files when I was around Claudia’s age. I left for New York when I was ten years older than that. At both those times in my life, I was earnest, like Claudia, but more anxious than she was. Much less confident.

To read—and understand—From the Mixed-up Filesof Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler can be vastly and secretly affirming: Claudia learns as long as she knows she’s a heroine, she is the heroine of her life.

Twelve is often the age when girls lose what self-assurance they had. And I wish I’d understood this book better at twelve. I wish I’d carried more away from it. To read—and understand—From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler can be vastly and secretly affirming: Claudia learns as long as she knows she’s a heroine, she is the heroine of her life. “Now she wouldn’t have to be a heroine when she returned home… except to herself.”

I re-read that last fierce and tender section of From the Mixed-up Files while watching my kid’s swim lesson, and I tried not to cry. I still don’t know what I felt: grief? mourning? a sense of losing something I wasn’t sure I had? My daughter was learning to float and blow bubbles—she was learning to save herself in the water. I hope these skills last her for a long, long time.

top photo: “NYC – Metropolitan Museum – Carroll and Milton Petrie European Sculpture Court,” Wikimedia Commons / Jean-Christophe BENOIST

Subversions

by | Jun 14, 2018 | Feminism, Identity, lesbian, LGBTQIA+, Subversions, writer's life

Subversions

Subversions. I like the way the word tastes on my tongue.

Subversions. As in, ways to act subversively. As in, small erosions of The Way Things Are. In the Online Etymology Dictionary, a “subversion” is a “physical destruction, demolition, ruination; [an] overthrow of a system or law.” The word comes from the Old French for “downfall.” As in, after these subversions, the world will never be the same.

Subversions. As in, after these subversions, the world will never be the same.

I don’t look like a subversive person. Walk into my classroom where I teach English in a large city high school in Colorado, and observe me: I’m tall and big-boned like my German ancestors, I dress in too much brown, I’ve neglected to buy myself new shoes for years, and I need a haircut. I look like just another earnest English teacher trying in vain to cajole teenagers into caring about punctuation and literature.

Except, like most of us, I’m not all I appear to be. Some of my more observant students notice the photograph on my desk of me smiling beside a woman and a little African girl. Is that your sister, Miss? some of them ask. No, I tell them, still practicing bravery, she’s my fiance, and that’s our daughter. And all the assumptions about how I seemed to fit neatly into the acceptable system fly out the tall historic classroom windows.You’re gay, Miss?

Yes.

Like Eve, I often stood on tiptoe and tried to peer outside the Garden into which I’d been born. But I walked straight down an aisle. I behaved.

I didn’t set out to be subversive. For the first twenty-eight years of my life, I worked hard to follow the rules of the system into which I’d been born, though I never felt comfortable. The rules for being good: grow up on a quiet, orderly farm in eastern Iowa, learn to be a good girl, attend a good Lutheran college, marry a nice Lutheran man. I was very good, if that was the rubric. It’s true that I squirmed in the church pew and asked too many questions in confirmation class. It’s true that, like Eve, I often stood on tiptoe and tried to peer outside the Garden into which I’d been born. But I walked straight down an aisle. I behaved.

And then, in a sort of storm at age twenty-eight, I shattered all the expected patterns for my life (or life shattered them for me): I fell in love with my best friend, who was a woman. Another friend asked me on the phone, “Do you think you’ve realized you’re lesbian?” and I gasped. “Lesbian? But I have long hair!” Nothing in my life had prepared me to be subversive. I didn’t want to be. I wanted to have children and nest into a cozy home like my gram’s; I wanted a secure life. Suddenly, all I could hear was wild wind.

Suddenly, I was twenty-eight and divorced. And a lesbian. Same brown sweater, same bad haircut, but I stood hip-deep in the shards of What Had Been Expected.

It’s terrifying to become subversive.

It requires courage.

You’re gay, Miss?

It’s terrifying to become subversive.It requires courage.

Yes. And here is what I won’t tell you, Student, because it’s too much in this small moment in a classroom: I’m gay, and that means that when I still wanted to be a mother, I had to travel halfway across the world to Ethiopia to adopt my child. I’m gay, and that means that when my former partner died five years ago in Alaska, her ashes were mailed to her ex-husband, and the obituary failed to mention me. I’m gay, and that means that every day I teach, I have to decide whether it’s safe to be out. I’m gay, and that means that my fiancé, Meredith, and I don’t hold hands or kiss in public unless we’re certain we’re surrounded by accepting people. I’m gay, and that means Meredith and I only won the right to marry each other legally last June.

I’m gay, which means my life itself is a subversion. The System was not constructed for me, and so every act of mine threatens to overthrow it. Meredith and I walk hand in hand into the elementary school Open House picnic with our African daughter’s hands in ours, and the law of “this is a normal family” shudders. We send out wedding invitations with graphics of two brides holding hands, and the ancient system of marriage trembles. We snuggle into bed at night, our arms around each other, and we rewrite the old rules about who protects and who is protected and who is nurtured and who nurtures. As a writer, I write about women who love women, forcing the old narratives, which never contained our names, to shift aside. Here are all the little subversions. The demolition of an old system.

Evidently, I wasn’t supposed to live a safe life as a straight wife in a small Midwestern town. I was meant to learn about discomfort and grief, fear and discrimination.

Evidently, I wasn’t supposed to live a safe life as a straight wife in a small Midwestern town. I was meant to learn about discomfort and grief, fear and discrimination. I was meant to learn about the surprising joy of being different, of the certain slant of beauty in stories the system never imagined.

I’m still afraid. The systems hate to be shaken, and they do not wish to be destroyed. But the few of us who have glimpsed other narratives, other avenues, other worlds — we are speaking. We have always been speaking, though sometimes we have been required to whisper. Listen. Listen, and maybe you’ll become a little bit subversive, too.