home from that disastrous summer with my father to find that my mother had painted my room a clear, rich, bright red while I was gone. She had wanted to surprise me; I had repeatedly asked for a red room in the months before I left. I was overwhelmed with joy; my room was now perfect. I had a mattress on the floor instead of a bed, just the way I liked it—all my furniture was flat and low so I could spread my many ongoing projects around my butter-yellow, fuzzy carpet. My bureau was the one tall thing in the room.
I had a low table to write on while I sat on the floor, cross-legged, hunched over my stapled-together books, grasping my pen awkwardly in my right hand. I had terrible penmanship; I was always impatient and slapdash at everything I did, so the aesthetic quality of my writing itself was completely irrelevant to me, far outside the realm of anything I cared about. I wrote as fast as the words could come out: a series of stories about girls my age and their adventures at school (not the most imaginative plots in the world); illustrated animal stories for my younger sisters with such inventive titles as “Sammy the Snake” and “The Bears on Vacation.”
I drew endless pictures of huge families with sets of six or eight siblings in a descending line from oldest to youngest, with their vaguely Victorian names and ages carefully marked below each one: “Olivia, age 15; Abigail, age 13; Seth, age 11; Malcolm,age 10; Maria, age 8; Genevieve, age 6; Thomas, age 3; James, age 1.” They all had solemn, big-eyed faces, neatly combed or braided hair, and my idea of nineteenth-century country clothes—pinafores, overalls, knickers, aprons.
I had a collection of names in a bowl, slips of paper folded up. Sometimes, when I was too lazy to draw or write, I would lie on the floor picking names out idly, letting them dictate people to me: “Victoria” was a beautiful, snobbish girl with a pouting expression who stamped her little foot; “Olaf” was an honest, industrious midwestern farm boy whose parents were old and poor; “Priscilla” was a cold, cruel, secretly sad rich girl whose mother was dead; “David” was a handsome, intelligent, studious boy with a full head of curly dark hair. I loved phrases like “a full head of curly dark hair.” I rolled it around in my mouth silently, then put the slip of paper aside and picked out another one.
I hated my own name. It was all wrong. I was going to be a novelist, I knew very early on, and novelists were named Jane, Charlotte, and Louisa. When I learned cursive, I practiced signing the autograph I might put in all my books when I grew up: Laurina Kate Johansen. Laurette Johansen. Those substitutes never looked anything but faux Victorian and trampy, and Laura and Laurel weren’t me at all, they were other girls I didn’t know.
Over the course of two or more years, I invented and created an imaginary country called Zenobia; my imaginary friend, Charlie, was the emissary from the queen of Zenobia, and it was from him that I learned about the country. I wrote down the customs, holidays, and religious practices; I drew maps of the towns, set out to write a Zenobian grammar book with conjugated verbs and vocabulary words. I developed an ongoing drama about the royal family’s internecine conflicts and rivalries.
I discovered a rhyming dictionary at the back of my mother’sold
Webster’s
, and wrote poems with it, the longest and most ambitious of which began:
One day, a wagon of hay
Went down a gray
Road made of clay
.
It came to a door
.
Who could ask for more?
People by the score
,
They could ask for more.…
In bed at night, I sat propped against my pillows and leafed through the dictionary, opening pages at random and avidly reading various new words and their definitions until my mother finished telling my little sisters their bedtime story and came to read me mine. Then we picked up where
I had a low table to write on while I sat on the floor, cross-legged, hunched over my stapled-together books, grasping my pen awkwardly in my right hand. I had terrible penmanship; I was always impatient and slapdash at everything I did, so the aesthetic quality of my writing itself was completely irrelevant to me, far outside the realm of anything I cared about. I wrote as fast as the words could come out: a series of stories about girls my age and their adventures at school (not the most imaginative plots in the world); illustrated animal stories for my younger sisters with such inventive titles as “Sammy the Snake” and “The Bears on Vacation.”
I drew endless pictures of huge families with sets of six or eight siblings in a descending line from oldest to youngest, with their vaguely Victorian names and ages carefully marked below each one: “Olivia, age 15; Abigail, age 13; Seth, age 11; Malcolm,age 10; Maria, age 8; Genevieve, age 6; Thomas, age 3; James, age 1.” They all had solemn, big-eyed faces, neatly combed or braided hair, and my idea of nineteenth-century country clothes—pinafores, overalls, knickers, aprons.
I had a collection of names in a bowl, slips of paper folded up. Sometimes, when I was too lazy to draw or write, I would lie on the floor picking names out idly, letting them dictate people to me: “Victoria” was a beautiful, snobbish girl with a pouting expression who stamped her little foot; “Olaf” was an honest, industrious midwestern farm boy whose parents were old and poor; “Priscilla” was a cold, cruel, secretly sad rich girl whose mother was dead; “David” was a handsome, intelligent, studious boy with a full head of curly dark hair. I loved phrases like “a full head of curly dark hair.” I rolled it around in my mouth silently, then put the slip of paper aside and picked out another one.
I hated my own name. It was all wrong. I was going to be a novelist, I knew very early on, and novelists were named Jane, Charlotte, and Louisa. When I learned cursive, I practiced signing the autograph I might put in all my books when I grew up: Laurina Kate Johansen. Laurette Johansen. Those substitutes never looked anything but faux Victorian and trampy, and Laura and Laurel weren’t me at all, they were other girls I didn’t know.
Over the course of two or more years, I invented and created an imaginary country called Zenobia; my imaginary friend, Charlie, was the emissary from the queen of Zenobia, and it was from him that I learned about the country. I wrote down the customs, holidays, and religious practices; I drew maps of the towns, set out to write a Zenobian grammar book with conjugated verbs and vocabulary words. I developed an ongoing drama about the royal family’s internecine conflicts and rivalries.
I discovered a rhyming dictionary at the back of my mother’sold
Webster’s
, and wrote poems with it, the longest and most ambitious of which began:
One day, a wagon of hay
Went down a gray
Road made of clay
.
It came to a door
.
Who could ask for more?
People by the score
,
They could ask for more.…
In bed at night, I sat propped against my pillows and leafed through the dictionary, opening pages at random and avidly reading various new words and their definitions until my mother finished telling my little sisters their bedtime story and came to read me mine. Then we picked up where
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