The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy

11 I BEGAN MY WORK as director the very next day, full of enthusiasm but with no idea at all of what I was supposed to do. Mrs. Graham called me to her desk while the other students were working on some very tricky multiplication problems that she had written on the blackboard. I began to think that being a director was quite nice. Patiently and with a great deal of pleasure, she explained what my...

10 THE TIMES-TABLES BUSINESS left me skittish, afraid each day that something else was going to come up in Mrs. Graham’s class that I wouldn’t know, and that I’d have to put myself through another crash program. Whenever Mrs. Graham began a new lesson with the words “Now, class,” I would reach for my camera and start chewing on my lower lip and praying that she wouldn’t want us to learn anything I...

9 IN ONE MISERABLE WEEK, I did learn to answer questions about the times tables more quickly than Mr. Beaker could snap his fingers. I also learned to snap my fingers, and I learned that the pattern on the wallpaper in my room repeated every eleven inches and that the meals my mother made lost all their restorative power when they were handed through my door on a tray, the puddle of gravy around m...

8 I HAD FIGURED that if anyone could teach me the times tables quickly, it was Mr. Beaker. I was right. Mr. Beaker instituted a crash program in the times tables that very evening. He and Eliza drove up in a gleaming new Starliner, which Mr. Beaker had bought for Eliza’s birthday. Eliza took all of us for a ride, and then we walked around and around the car until there was no longer enough light f...

7 WHEN I GOT HOME I spent an hour sitting at the kitchen table talking to my mother about everything that had happened. My glass of milk and the cruller my mother had given me—a kind of which I was passionately fond, a thin fried cruller made of a yeasty dough twisted into the shape of a large pretzel and glazed, thickly, with sugar paste—lay untouched on the table while I went on and on. I hadn’t...

6 AT THE END OF THE DAY, I made my way out the front door of the school, in a crowd of boys and girls. Mrs. Graham was standing beside the door. “Peter,” she called. “I’d like to speak to you for just a minute.”     She took a step toward me, advancing into the stream of boys and girls. A boy in a wrinkled white shirt and brown corduroys stumbled over her foot. Without taking her eyes off me, Mrs....

     “Hello, Peter,” Clarissa said, so softly that when I responded I spoke in a whisper.     “Hello, Clarissa,” I said. I held my hand out. To be honest, I didn’t just hold my hand out, I reached for her hand. I didn’t intend to shake it; I wanted to hold it. She hesitated for the briefest instant, and then she gave her right hand to me. I held it between both of mine. She kept her left hand on t...

5 THE CLASS gave me a greeting that they had rehearsed, and Mrs. Graham pointed out a seat for me at the back of the room. I made my way to the seat in a euphoric state, for Mrs. Graham had made me feel secure, even confident. I sat down and stretched myself out nearly straight so that I could keep my feet on the floor and my elbows on the desk top. Mrs. Graham had the boys and girls stand, one at...

4 THE SCHOOL was an old one. I had begun attending it in kindergarten, and for a long time I had thought that the people who had gone to the school years ago must have been much bigger at my age than I was or than any of my friends were. Everything in the school seemed taller, wider, higher, or heavier than necessary. My friends and I struggled to climb the stairs, stood on our tiptoes to use the...

3 I CLOSED THE DOOR BEHIND ME, and in a watery haze I walked down the hall, away from the familiar, toward the unknown. I wasn’t crying, but there was a lump in my throat, my eyes were watering, and everything ahead of me was blurry, indistinct. I had closed the door of Room 218 behind me, but in a larger sense I had closed a larger door, and the echoes of its closing reverberated in the hazy corr...

2 ON THE DAY when I left the third grade, my classmates threw a party for me. Everyone had brought cupcakes or cookies, and they had collaborated on a card that said GOOD LUCK, PETER. I was pleased, embarrassed, and moved. When it was time to go, I stood at the door with my hand on the knob. I swallowed hard. I thought that I ought to say something.     At this point I had one of those flashes of...

1 WHEN REPORT CARDS were handed out at the Babbington Grammar School, some of my classmates fell into a whimpering terror, instinctively cowering and covering their vulnerable spots, as skittish and apprehensive as squirrels. Others began whooping and crowing, pounding one another on the back, and totting up their spoils. At the time it didn’t occur to me to pity the first group, but I certainly e...

Preface I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen “King Lear,” never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs . . . . Whatever evolution this or that popula...

Peter Leroy recalls his childhood friend Matthew Barber. Peter and Matthew seem unlikely friends. Matthew finds little to like in life, and his outlook is decidedly blue. Peter finds much to like in life, though nearly everything puzzles him, and he is essentially sanguine about his future, no matter how groundless his optimism might be. Eventually the friends find, as most friends do, that each h...

THE NEXT MORNING, my mother drove me to school. Together we went to Mr. Horne’s office. Mrs. Barber and Matthew were already there. Mr. Horne talked at some length about how proud he was of Matthew and me, but after he said that both of us would be moving up to the fourth grade I was so intoxicated by the news that I missed a lot of what followed. I did, however, recover in time to hear what Mr. H...

13 “SO I SAT THERE, looking at Mr. Grundtvig,” said Matthew, between bites of the tuna fish sandwich I had given him, “and I said to myself, ‘This is it. Everything depends on this.’ There I was. I was actually in the predicament that the man in the rowboat was in. Grundtvig began tapping his pencil on his pad and he looked up at me. As soon as he looked at me, I knew what to do. I gave him the ki...

12 AFTER MATTHEW AND I had put in a couple of weeks in the third grade, Mrs. Barber got it into her head that Matthew should skip a grade. I told my mother that if Matthew was going to skip a grade, then I wanted to skip a grade too. She consulted Mr. Beaker, who endorsed the idea at once.     Matthew and I were put through a series of intelligence tests. For three mornings, we sat in a tiny room...

     The very last Happy and Hapless cartoon that was shown at the Babbington Theater is the one that remains sharpest in my memory.     After a number of mishaps and close calls, Hapless, in his chubby-man incarnation, found himself in a rowboat, rowing across a gray bay. A storm was coming up. Already the bay was choppy, and Hapless was struggling to row into the wind. He was having a terrible t...

11 DURING THE SUMMER that followed second grade, I saw Matthew nearly every Saturday. My mother would drive me to Mrs. Barber’s shop in the morning and leave me there for the day. At noon, Matthew and I would eat lunch upstairs, where he and his mother lived, and after lunch we would walk to the Babbington Theater, which was only a block and a half down Main Street, for the Saturday matinee.     T...

10 THE COPY OF The Amazing Randy the Unbreakable Record that Matthew gave me was badly worn. Matthew must have played it often. I had to strain to hear Randy through the hissing and popping on the first side. The second side was marked with deep gouges that looked to me as if they had been deliberately made, perhaps with the point of a compass. I couldn’t play that side at all.     When I had reco...

I GOT THE CHICKEN POX about halfway through the second grade, and I had to stay in bed wearing flannel pajamas with the ends of the sleeves sewn shut so that I couldn’t scratch my vesicles. One day, Matthew’s mother drove him to my house. My mother came into the room with a package for me, a gift from Matthew. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, but I could see from the shape that...

8 MATTHEW AND I WERE THE BEST READERS in Mrs. Castile’s class, and she let us gallop through all the anthologies that the school had on hand. When reading time came around, Matthew and I would go down to the boiler room, where we had a couple of chairs and desks set up, and read together. At that time, it must have been the fashion to think of reading—or at least of learning to read—as a journey,...

“THE FOX WAS SAD at the beginning,” said Matthew, “because there was no reason for him to be happy. The clam was happy because he was a jerk. The fox was angry with the clam because he couldn’t stand to be around jerks. The fox wasn’t sad at the end because he was dead. And the clam will stay happy as long as he’s a jerk.” He looked hard at me. “But if he ever wises up, he’ll be as miserable as th...

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7 MATTHEW AND I KEPT OUR DISTANCE throughout kindergarten, but we wound up together in Mrs. Castile’s class in the first grade. We were in competition from the first day. Mrs. Castile asked me to distribute copies of Along Sunny Paths , the primer that we would be reading. Matthew looked through his copy and marched right up to Mrs. Castile’s desk with it.     “Mrs. Castile,” he said, “I don’t wan...