Title Page

Copyright Notice

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

Dedication

Dedicated with love

to my brothers,

Richard and Herb,

in memory of our mother,

Jean Elizabeth Timmons Frost,

1917–2008

My Mind Meanders Like the Creek / April 1917

My Mind Meanders Like the Creek

April 1917

My Crooked Mind / Muriel

My Crooked Mind

Muriel

You’d better straighten out your mind, Young Lady.

That’s what the teacher, Mr. Sander, tells me. As if I could

stretch the corners of my thoughts like you’d pull

a rumpled quilt across a bed in an attempt to make

it look like no one slept there, no one ever

woke up screaming from a nightmare, or lay there

sweating till their fever broke, everybody

scared they’d die—but then they didn’t, they got up

and made the bed. My mind sets off at a gallop

down that twisty road, flashes by “Young Lady,”

hears the accusation in it—as if it’s

a crime just being young, and “lady”

is what anyone can see I’ll never be

no matter how I try, and it’s obvious

that I’m not trying. It’s history class, which,

as far as I can tell, they might as well call

war class, all those battlefields, and Generals,

and Secretaries, capitalized like that—

not secretaries like Aunt Vera, who

works for the city of Chicago, and travels

on her own with money she has saved

even after she has purchased both the hat

with three red feathers and the one of deep blue

wool that’s lined with silk. No, the Secretaries

whose names we have to memorize for Monday’s test

are important people: Secretary of the Treasury,

Secretary of the Interior—in other words,

men. Which is my mistake, to point that out.

Why is it, Mr. Sander, that in real life

secretaries are always women, but here

in school, all the ones we learn about are men?

It’s a perfectly reasonable question, but everybody

turns to stare, first at me, then at the teacher’s blaze of anger:

Miss Jorgensen, are you being smart with me? How

do you answer a question like that? No, I’m

not, or Yes, I am—either way just gets you

in the same place, only deeper. I try for

middle ground. Maybe I am, I say, maybe

I’m not—trying to decide what it might mean

to be smart like Aunt Vera and express my own opinions,

compared to what it means when Mr. Sander says it.

I keep on thinking back and forth along

those crooked lines while he is giving me a