GREEN LEMONS Marilyn Martin I grew up watching my brother, a misfit in a family of stellar students, struggle with learning. We were a family of four children. John came third: my only brother. When he started kindergarten, no one thought much of it. He got new shoes and a lunch box. Kindergarten, a children’s garden, what could go wrong there for a five-year old? The worst thing that could happen was that you might cry the first morning. Wiry and adaptable, my brother wasn’t a crier. He spent his playtime devising contraptions from wood, rope and pulleys like those in the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci. My cerebral father wasn’t handy, so when our television broke, it was my brother who figured out how to restore service by rigging up coat hangers. He also had a talent for mimicry. When he copied your expression or gait, it was like looking in the mirror. My mother had to teach him about that fine line between humor and cruelty when, at four, he walked behind a handicapped man in a shoe store aping his spastic movements. At first my brother couldn’t wait to get his hands on the Froebel blocks, the poster paints, to drink milk from those tiny wax cartons. On warm August mornings, he grabbed his new lunch box and practiced walking the halfmile past Lagatelli’s General Store to Chestnut Grove Elementary School. From the playground, he located the window of Mrs. Bolivar’s classroom and peered in expectantly. Mrs. Bolivar had been my kindergarten teacher nine years earlier. I was in her inaugural class. She made home visits back then, and I remember her sitting in an armchair in our living room, balancing a teacup and espousing her idealistic views. She was an artist and wanted to introduce children to beauty. The art projects we did that year were indeed charming. A pink naugahyde rabbit fashioned from a pattern she had designed. The requisite handprint in a circle of clay made memorable by her choice of paint colors. A silhouette—a perfect likeness of my profile—my mother still keeps in a box in our attic. The only problem was we kids did not really create these items. Mrs. Bolivar did. We simply sat still while she drew and cut. I did well with her though. This was 1958 and not much was expected of kindergarteners. Tie your shoes. Count to twenty. Recite the alphabet. Write your name. Five years later, when my sister, Sheila, started school, Mrs. Bolivar had given up on home visits. I remember passing my sister’s classroom and hearing the teacher’s voice, loud and strident, spilling into the hallway, admonishing her charges to sit still. One day, a boy tapped me on my shoulder.
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