Here’s what driving carpool really means: the floors of your car fill up with food remains, the seams of your seats darken with embedded crumbs, the windows smudge over with the residue of sticky/sweaty foreheads, noses, lips and fingers, the air sours with the lingering odor of left-behind articles of clothing peeled off while wet, half-sucked candy inefficiently rewrapped and hidden in the handy little storage trove on the rear passenger door, right above the door handles, greets you when reach for a grocery bag. There you will also find last Halloween’s Tootsie Rolls, already-chewed gum, used Kleenex, torn Twix wrappers, tiny plastic ducks and whatever else was once held in a grimy or sweaty hand.
Sometimes you find a treasure in the trove – I recently unearthed a tiny origami love message to my son on what once was a 1” yellow sticky note.
Other times, the treasure is the conversational snippets you overhear amid the mess and disorder and the soundtrack of silent texting as you drive around with little people. Especially little people who aren’t yours.
Most of my driving these days is with tweens and teens; I’ve almost forgotten the booster seat/cheerios-in-baggies years. Yesterday I rode with a precocious soon-to-be 9 year old, a darling little girl whose life is about to resemble Eloise’s at the Plaza, having the good fortune of being the daughter of a successful presidential fundraiser. Soon she’ll dash off to live in a centuries-old “cottage” – the kind of cottage with 11 plush bedrooms, 3.6 acres of planned gardens and fountains, and a staff. If a 9-year-old enters this kind of world darling and precocious, heaven help her when she emerges, after her parent’s term is up, as a 12-year-old debutante ready to take the world by storm.
I was on the way to book club, and another member had agreed to drop the daughter of friend at a birthday party near the home of our book club hostess. We did what any car full of girls does – we talked about books. She asked about the book we had read, and we told her a little bit about the precious/precocious 15-year-old heroine of our Bernadette novel, omitting the content deemed a bit too grown up, such as what happens to daughters when their mothers go AWOL.
We asked about what she was reading. “Ophelia and the Marvelous Boy,” she replied. “It’s really good.” She then provided a brief plot synopsis: “It’s about this girl, Ophelia, who’s 12, who meets this boy.”
“What is it that makes the boy marvelous?” I asked. Because this is exactly the kind of thing I want to know. “Well,” she replied, with the impatience of an answer so obvious that fielding the question can barely be tolerated. “He never grows up.”
Ahhhhhh.
After I got home, I looked the book up. Nowhere does it say that it’s about a 12-year-old boy who remains a 12-year-old boy. The forever-boy, apparently, is just a subplot – the reader is to maintain his insignificance because the author never names him. He’s been held prisoner of Her Majesty the Snow Queen in a museum for 300 years. Over all those years, he has miraculously not aged a wit, simply waiting for Ophelia’s help to free him.
His bravery, his actions, his quest are all tied to Ophelia finding and freeing him, but it’s her bravery, her actions, her quest that the reader will know by name; the never-aging-up boy is relegated to his tasks and is known only as The Boy with No Name.
Oh, our fantasies and fairy tales have come a long way since the days where it was the male hero’s quest that required bravery, cunning and skill, after which his reward was the damsel in distress. Or the frozen damsel. Or the cursed damsel. Or the sleeping damsel. Whatever damsel it was, and whoever had had their nefarious way with her before, it was the HERO who was now breaking the spell, kissing her awake, kissing her back to beauty, kissing her alive into a promise of sexual fidelity that was his rightful prize.
Now we get post-feminist fairy tales of girls needing to do everything by themselves, making friendships, sure, but staying young and seeking young boys. A nameless boy who stays 12 forever may seem like a good thing, but not if you ask any of the women-folk I know, whose primary complaint is that their adult male mates have not grown up. That the ideal now for adult masculinity seems to be forever relying on women to take care of them, which I suppose is how women have figured out how to stop being oppressed by men, but making them nameless boy-slaves doesn’t seem to do us any favors. Even Erica Jong wanted her nameless one to be a fully functioning man.
Yes, boys long to stay boys – and who can blame them? The real world of men is not a safe, easy, warm, cozy one. They will have their sensitivities and weaknesses stomped or shamed out of them, only to turn in to the kind of man women ridicule – irresponsible and childlike.
And here’s a story where the heroine has found her perfect mate – an un-aging boy. Good luck to you, Ophelia, as you move into the phases where you want something other than a kid to wander around a museum with – perhaps, one day, someone to live with, purchase property with, make progeny with. If he’s still 12, you’re gonna find him a little less than marvelous. What’s not to like about a boy who’s been held captive for 300 years (and therefore is a virgin, both in body and spirit), who will be forever grateful for your redemption – oh, don’t get me started on men who are looking for their loved ones to redeem them – there’s a little love story that never works – but who is innocent. He probably wasn’t holed up in the museum room with endless access to porn. He wasn’t made to walk the halls of middle school evaluating every girl he saw and then comparing her to what his buddies thought. A boy raised without a father who somehow is gonna be the kind of guy you want for the young, plucky, precocious girls?
Nah. I hope the little reader from the back seat has a terrific time on her adventure. I hope she finds real-live boys who will become real-live men, and that she is being raised by parents who value all there is for grown-up men to offer: courage, bravery, honor, loyalty, strength, endurance, persistence, accountability, responsibility, and the willingness to take action to bring about justice. We’d also like some tenderness, some playfulness, some light-heartedness, some squishy intimacy and sweet nothings murmured near our ears and slowly spelled with the tip of your tongue across the nape of our necks. These are not the skills of a 12 year old boy.