WHICH EXPLAINS THINGS

Father calls me Mary.  Mother calls me Marie.  Everybody else calls me Mary Marie.  The rest of my name is Anderson.

I’m thirteen years old, and I’m a cross-current and a contradiction.  That is, Sarah says I’m that. (Sarah is my old nurse.) She says she read it once—­that the children of unlikes were always a cross-current and a contradiction.  And my father and mother are unlikes, and I’m the children.  That is, I’m the child.  I’m all there is.  And now I’m going to be a bigger cross-current and contradiction than ever, for I’m going to live half the time with Mother and the other half with Father.  Mother will go to Boston to live, and Father will stay here—­a divorce, you know.

I’m terribly excited over it.  None of the other girls have got a divorce in their families, and I always did like to be different.  Besides, it ought to be awfully interesting, more so than just living along, common, with your father and mother in the same house all the time—­especially if it’s been anything like my house with my father and mother in it!

That’s why I’ve decided to make a book of it—­that is, it really will be a book, only I shall have to call it a diary, on account of Father, you know.  Won’t it be funny when I don’t have to do things on account of Father?  And I won’t, of course, the six months I’m living with Mother in Boston.  But, oh, my!—­the six months I’m living here with him—­whew!  But, then, I can stand it.  I may even like it—­some.  Anyhow, it’ll be different.  And that’s something.

Well, about making this into a book.  As I started to say, he wouldn’t let me.  I know he wouldn’t.  He says novels are a silly waste of time, if not absolutely wicked.  But, a diary—­oh, he loves diaries!  He keeps one himself, and he told me it would be an excellent and instructive discipline for me to do it, too—­set down the weather and what I did every day.

The weather and what I did every day, indeed!  Lovely reading that would make, wouldn’t it?  Like this: 

“The sun shines this morning.  I got up, ate my breakfast, went to school, came home, ate my dinner, played one hour over to Carrie Heywood’s, practiced on the piano one hour, studied another hour.  Talked with Mother upstairs in her room about the sunset and the snow on the trees.  Ate my supper.  Was talked to by Father down in the library about improving myself and taking care not to be light-minded and frivolous. (He meant like Mother, only he didn’t say it right out loud.  You don’t have to say some things right out in plain words, you know.) Then I went to bed.”

* * * * *

Just as if I was going to write my novel like that!  Not much I am.  But I shall call it a diary.  Oh, yes, I shall call it a diary—­till I take it to be printed.  Then I shall give it its true name—­a novel.  And I’m going to tell the printer that I’ve left it for him to make the spelling right, and put in all those tiresome little commas and periods and question marks that everybody seems to make such a fuss about.  If I write the story part, I can’t be expected to be bothered with looking up how words are spelt, every five minutes, nor fussing over putting in a whole lot of foolish little dots and dashes.