The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page B

too.
    At the front of the school, and to the sides, was a rough playground of sorts, where we played such improvised games as “May I?”—which involved “baby-” and “giant-steps”—and “Pom-Pom-Pullaway” which was more raucous, and rougher, where one might be dragged across an expanse of cinders, even thrown into the cinders. And there was Hide-and-Seek, and Tag, which were my favorite games, at which I excelled, at least with children not too much older than I was.
    Joyce runs like a deer! certain of the older boys, chasing me, as they chased other younger children, to bully and terrorize, would say, admiring.
    Inside, the school smelled of varnish, chalk dust, and woodsmoke and ashes from the potbellied stove. On overcast days, not infrequent in western New York in this region south of Lake Ontario and east of Lake Erie, the windows emitted a vague, hazy light, not much reinforced by ceiling lights. We sat in rows of seats, smallest at the front, largest at the rear, attached at their bases by metal runners, like a toboggan; the wood of which these desks were made seemed beautiful to me, smooth and of the red-burnished hue of horse chestnuts. The floor was bare wooden planks. The blackboard stretched across the front of the room. An American flag hung limply at the far left of the blackboard and above the blackboard, running across the front of the room, so positioned to draw our admiring eyes to it, to be instructed, were cardboard squares of the alphabet showing the beautifully shaped script known as Palmer Method.
    All of my life, though my handwriting has changed superficially, it is the original Palmer Method that prevails. In an era in which handwriting scarcely exists, and most signatures are unintelligible, those of us who came of age under the tutelage of the Palmer Method can be relied upon to write not just beautifully, but legibly.
    Perhaps Palmer Method carried with it an (unwitting, unconscious) moral bias? If beauty and clarity and a wish to communicate are your intention in writing, are you not likely to be good?
    Mrs. Dietz, of course, had mastered the art of such penmanship. She wrote our vocabulary and spelling lists on the blackboard, and we learned to imitate her. We learned to “diagram” sentences with the solemn precision of scientists articulating equations. We learned to read by reading out loud, and we learned to spell by spelling out loud. We memorized, and we recited. Our textbooks were rarely new, but belonged to the school district and were passed on, year after year until they wore out entirely. (How I would love to examine those textbooks, now! I have not the vaguest memory of what we were actually being made to read, and what our arithmetic books were like.) Our school “library” was a shelf or two of books including a Webster’s dictionary, which fascinated me: a book comprised of words! A treasure of secrets this seemed to me, available to anyone who cared to look into it.
    Some of my earliest reading experiences, in fact, were in this dictionary. We had no dictionary at home until, as the winner of a spelling bee sponsored by the Buffalo Evening News , when I was in fifthgrade, I was given a dictionary like the one at school. This, like the prized Alice books, remained with me for decades.
    My early “creative” experiences evolved not from printed books but from coloring books, predating my ability to read. I did not learn to read until I was in first grade and six years old, though by this time, comically precocious as I seem now in retrospect, I’d already produced a number of “books” of a kind in tablet form, by drawing, coloring, and scribbling in what I believed to be a convincing imitation of adults. My earliest fictional characters were not human beings but zestfully if crudely drawn upright chickens and cats engaged in what appeared to be dramatic confrontations; of course, Happy Chicken