Good With Children

More than a decade ago, I attended a summer camp in our neighboring county. The building, a church, crouched a few neighborhoods behind the highway, the exit marked by a certain series of trees that over the course of the summer grew mustaches and faces and a disapproving look that I think I would still recognize today.

The program was in some sense evangelical—I call it Bible camp. I’ve never been part of a more sordid organization. They screened terrifying films of the crucifixion that made a lasting and hardly spiritual impression on me. Order was questionably governed, the director being absent four days a week, and the children congealing into sophisticated power circles. The socially unfit had a hard time.

Still, it was a lovely, golden summer. There was a small courtyard overgrown with white clovers. The girls picked them from the ground and wreathed them into rings, asking delicately, “Which finger do you want this on?” Say you offered your middle finger, stuck it up like a beacon—the shrieks stayed in your head all day. Some days, we played Bingo, following the burps and rattles of the obese director like hushed parodies of senility.

There were two assistant counselors, J and D, twins whom I have never forgotten. They alone must have sustained the camp financially, because it lasted four years. No where else have I seen two people so universally loved by a group of anarchic kids. We were drawn to them as though to pipers, and lulled to that place people dream their memories could take them. The twins defined for me, in a complex and unfathomable way, what it meant to be good with children.

A day in the summer, the year of the cicadas.

At camp, I had adopted the critical project of properly burying all the dead cicadas in the weedy courtyard. On my own I gathered, with great delicacy, the eight or nine whole cicadas and placed them in a quiet corner, a nook far from where the other kids pestered roly polies.

Three of the cicadas were still alive. Two protested sluggishly against my handling of them. The last, I was shocked to see, was nearly fully alive. It could walk and fly short distances. Then, as if out of breath, it needed to rest.

I brought this last cicada to one of the twins, with the then-powerful conviction that those you love also love the things you love.

She identified it.

“O-oh. You’ve got a cicada.”

I transferred it to her hand. “It’s still alive. This is probably the last cicada you’ll see alive.”

I left her staring at her palm. When I returned to my cicada graveyard, I saw three other children—Stephanie, precocious six-year-old queen, Nate, the “big kid,” and Benjamin, the boy I thought I loved—crouched over the dead and still-living cicadas. They were doing something with sticks that I couldn’t see, and the closer I approached the more tightly they huddled.

When I realized what it was, I grew hysterical. “That is so wrong!” I screamed. “That is so wrong!”

At some point, I couldn’t hear them over my own voice, but I could see them laughing. As my screams grew louder, they laughed harder, but it looked to me like their mouths simply opened wider and wider.

The twins appeared next to me. One picked me up and bore me away, and I saw the other’s back and ponytail as she stood over Steph, Nate, and Ben to see what they were doing.

They were making kebobs.

I sobbed into a shoulder. “Those are the last cicadas you’ll ever see alive!”

As it happened, when the cicadas returned seven years later, they missed my town by four miles.

Good with children—I can do it for short periods of time. When I need to be, I think about J and D, and I try to act the way I remember them acting. When the children get stubborn, I am D, and when they are hysterical, I am J. But mostly I am a mixture of both, and when it works, I am calm and successful. I can do this for a little while, but I can’t do it forever.

How did they do it? I remember another crazy day—the kids were just rowdier than usual. D’s voice was hoarse from being so tired, the boys still wanting her to play dodgeball, and J was sprawled on the courtyard ground, buried by girls who wanted to put more things in her hair. They were tugging on her arms and legs like Lilliputians, and D was bending over laughing because J’s eyes were shut and her mouth hanging open as if she were dead and intending to stay that way. The next summer, after the camp finally closed down, I ran into them at the local Y, still trying to get jobs as camp counselors.

How did this all come to me? I saw them once, not many months ago. I am at the shopping mall, in a store I rarely go to anymore because the quality is terrible. But I am hunting for cheap sandals, and this is how I see them.

They seem not to have aged. They look thinner, but the face is unmistakable—long, with  wide-set eyes and gently sloping noses.

They are dressed strangely. I cannot take my eyes off what they are wearing. I see a short plaid skirt, a blazer that looks unbearably cheap, some wrinkled plastic apparition over a shirt of possibly white mesh. A leg lifts and rubs the back of a calf with a gaudy shoe. They are dressed like 12-year-old girls from 10 years ago. And now their hair is done in the same way—tied up tight at the back of their heads.

One turns to the other and says something, and then lifts her hand to brush her hair behind her ears—one floating, girlish motion that doesn’t end but goes back years and years.

I’d seen them intermittently in the in-between years. When I was 16, I greeted them and we had a short exchange in which neither side knew what to say. Still I could always tell, who was one, who was the other. After all, they were the reason why I became good at telling twins—since J and D, no twins have ever looked identical to me. I take five minutes, and then I can tell one from the other. A male friend of mine says, “There are two kinds of girls that I like. There are the sweet ones, and then there are the other kind—crunchy. Sweet, and crunchy.”

And that’s pretty much the best I can explain it, how it is for me and twins. There is always one who is more like J, one who is more like D.

A mind exercise: the body is a circle of peaks, and in the middle there is a bright lake. Those transient summers, J and D let us wander in this place, and we children streamed across the valley floor—swarming around the water’s edge, tumbling down the banks and howling to the moon, our hundred tongues lapping, summer after summer, the stuff one should not give away. We sapped a vital thing, golden drops rolling on our tongues, during a long summer we would remember piecemeal in a million years. And if we gave them something—if children ever gave them anything—it would be these reserves of memory in our most private minds, tempered and brilliant and warm. They share a summer with the cicadas; the air’s hot vibrato, the cicadas’ fat trundle, the twins, their long hair, cool fingers, clean smell. To me their names are sacred, and rich as the wood of a church pew.

All this to say that we were free from consequence, and they were not. As they leave the counter, I let my eyes follow them out of the store. My hair is short as a boy’s now, so I don’t think I am recognizable. But one of them—J?—is saying something to the other, and together they turn their heads to look at me. Already I am looking at my hands. Already I cannot tell them apart.

—Maria Y. Xia ’11, an English concentrator in  Mather House, is seeing double.