10-3 Literary Text

• To run a restaurant
• To own a home
• To achieve financial security
• To be well-known
• To be the best in whatever she does
• To be happy in her old age

Does the daughter share this ambition?

My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America.  You could open a restaurant.  You could work for the government and get good retirement.  You could buy a house with almost no money down.  You could become rich.  You could become instantly famous.

“Of course, you can be a prodigy, too,” my mother told me when I was nine.  “You can be best anything.”

In the beginning I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so.  I pictured this prodigy part of me as many different images trying each one on for size. I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by the curtains, waiting to hear the right music that would send me floating on my tiptoes.  I was Cinderella stepping from her pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air.

In all of my imaginings, I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect.  My mother and father would adore me. I would be beyond reproach.  I would never feel the need to sulk for anything.  But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. "If you don't hurry up and get me out of here, I'm disappearing for good," it warned.

''And then you'll always be nothing."

Every night after dinner, my mother and I would sit at the kitchen table.  She would present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children she had read in the magazines she kept in a pile in our bathroom.  My mother got these from people whose houses she cleaned.  And since she cleaned many houses each week, we had a great assortment. She would look through them all, searching for stories about remarkable children.

The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states and even most of the European countries. A teacher was quoted as saying the little boy could also pronounce the names of the foreign cities correctly.

“What's the capital of Finland?" my mother asked me, looking at the magazine story.

All I knew was the capital of California, because Sacramento was the name of the street we lived on in Chinatown. "Nairobi!" I guessed, saying the most foreign word I could think of.  She checked to see if that was possibly one way to pronounce “Helsinki” before showing me the answer.

The tests got harder - multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards, trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los Angeles, New York, and London.

One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three minutes and then report everything I could remember.  “Now Jehoshaphat had riches and honor in abundance and … that’s all I remember Ma,” I said.

And after seeing my mother’s disappointed face once again, something inside of me began to die.  I hated the tests, raised hopes and unfulfilled expectations.  Before going to bed that night I looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink and when I saw only my face staring back - and that it would always be this ordinary face - I began to cry.  Such a sad, ugly girl!  I made high-pitched noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror.

And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me - because I had never seen that face before.  I looked at my reflection, blinking so I could see more clearly.  The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful.  This girl and I were the same.  I had new thoughts, wilful thoughts, or rather thoughts filled with lots of won’ts.  I won’t let her change me, I promised myself.  I won’t be what I’m not.

So now on nights when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm.  I pretended to be bored.  And I was.  I got so bored I started counting the bellows of the foghorns out on the bay while my mother drilled me in other areas.  The sound was comforting and reminded me of the cow jumping over the moon.  And the next day, I played a game with myself, seeing if my mother would give up on me before eight bellows.  After a while, I usually counted only one, maybe two bellows at most.  At last, she was beginning to give up hope.