This may turn into a sporadically ongoing thing. It may not. I’m capricious like that.
When I was about nine years old, I had two best friends that were sisters. Well, we weren’t all best friends. Anna was seven and Julia was ten so by rights, I should have been closer to Julia. But Julia was a mature ten and I was a more innocent nine, so Anna and I got along famously.
Their mother was Scottish and their father was Brasilian and you wouldn’t know that Anna had anything of her father, or Julia had anything of her mother. The family was split down the center like that, some sort of folded card of genes. Anna and I used to color pebbles with chalk, thinking up elaborate designs and then setting them up on a table outside her house and try to sell them to the perplexed Africans that walked by. On days we did this, sometimes my mother would send along our driver with a few coins and he would lightheartedly make an exaggerated show of buying our merchandise, perhaps in the hope that his vocal appreciation of our pebbles would lure more buyers. But no, we were just spoiled white foreigners trying to sell rocks. Only our childish innocence on the matter prevented it from probably being insulting to passersby.
Julia, possibly a little jealous of my natural inclination to her baby sister, would often disturb our quiet little pretend games or our elaborate make-up houses (which were really sheets draped across small trees and borrowed pots and pans). She was a sweet girl when she wanted to be but too much a bully for my tastes.
I was often intimidated by their father, and I found myself disliking the way he’d come over to visit my parents (they were all great friends) and joke that my mother was a grand dame with fine things. He would call her Doris Day. Now, my mother explains that it was all in jest, but even she admits it was done with a slight pique. His wife was the picture of grace and sweetness, and when she called my teddy bear “Boo Bear” instead of Bow Bear, I thought she didn’t understand his name. But she was so nice, I never corrected her. I know now it was because of her lilting Scottish accent.
There was a time that Anna and Julia were over, and Julia and I got in a spat. She started to storm down the front path, intending to walk the ten minutes back to her house, and I knew if she got out the door I’d be in trouble with both our mothers so I ran after her. We must have tussled briefly, I may have called her a name or something, but what ended up happening was that I fell down on the stone pathway and scraped the side of my left knee to hell. I was bleeding and yelling at her, and she managed to get out the door and home.
My parents scooped me up and bandaged my knee and consoled my raging heart, but I was grounded anyway. I found this spectacularly unfair, as Julia had been the one to throw the mile-high temper tantrum in the first place, but my mother explained to me that I had been host, even if she had been rotten I was meant to take the upper hand.
It was the first time I remember my parents teaching me that life’s lessons aren’t always fair, that you sometimes end up with both the scar and the unfair burden of punishment, because being a grown-up means knowing better even when others don’t. It remains my least frustrating and most memorable grounding, only because I think I understood something that day. I took my punishment gracefully. I still have a nobbly scar on my left knee.