The school bus drove up with its familiar yellow snout. Cecilia and I were wearing narrow, scarlet gowns and had trouble stepping up, for the gowns cupped our ankles in their bottom rings of lace. Josh Kugel and Barry Ramsey cut across the corner lawn and pushed us aside.

“Out of the way, Mary Poppins!”

Barry was the meanest. I felt, though dared not inform him that he was ignorant. We were dressed not as Mary Poppins but Anna Karenina. In the United States of America, in the midst of the fanaticism for Levi jeans and corduroy trousers, Nike and Adidas trainers, Cecilia and I attended class in exorbitant gowns, inspired from I don’t know what century but not the twentieth. To make it worse, my mother made Cecilia and me exactly the same model so we would not be jealous of each other.

My mother was kind enough to make us three versions of the same pattern so we could have a fresh dress to wear every other day, but it looked as though we were wearing the same dress all week. At school, we were baptized the Bobsey Twins. My mother could not understand our complaining. She had attended an all-girls Catholic school in Vilna and they wore uniforms. She’d only had one uniform all year, which she hand-washed with the soap they themselves made with their hardwork and sweat.

After putting up with puerile ammunition, spitballs and rubber bands, despite taking care to sit directly behind Mr. Ginger, the octogenarian bus driver who proved (purposely) deaf, dumb (and unfeeling; because of us, he was hit once in a while, too), Cecilia and I each went our own way. I hated walking past the bigger kids, leaning against the wall.

“It’s Heinz ketchup! Hey! Heinz ketchup?!”

“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious …”

The familiar Mary Poppins tune … I would never make a friend. I guess one generation has to do the melting before the others may brew less conspicuously in the pot.

“Frank Tudor. Kirk Gummer. Okay. Kate Lester?” Mrs. Wella checked off my name. Nowadays, I just signed instead of asking my mother to do so. It used to be that when she saw the statement about the school not being responsible if I was injured during an excursion, she refused to sign. I would be the only child to sit in an empty classroom with a substitute teacher, with pages of arithmetic problems to solve so she could write a love letter to her boyfriend.

We would watch two reels of a film in the morning, have lunch, then visit Coral Springs Zoo. That meant driving over Gables Bridge, which was cause for excitement. On top, we occasionally spotted porpoise and about once a year, it lifted to welcome a yacht into our bay.

Numbers flickered on the screen, ten down to one. A white haired man greeted us, presented a view of the earth seen from the moon, and asked us to follow a drop of water which evaporated to the notes of a harp. Then to a cymbal trying to sound like thunder, rain dropped over a rolling ocean. I wondered how they knew it was the same drop, but after awhile my arm grew tired and I put it back down. When we’d reached Antarctica, I recognized my mother’s Wagner record. The crescendo went better with the pure, white vastness than it did with my mother’s pebble-stone patio.