When Esmeralda comes, I go sit and entertain her while she does her homework. She is very bright and enthusiastic, and only marginally disheartened when I circle every other word for spelling correction. After I explain some of her vocabulary words to her, and she grinds her way through several pages of long addition, I test her on her spelling:
“Butterfly.”
“B-U-T-F-L-Y.”
“That spells butfly.”
“Butfly!” she says, bursting into hysterics. “Butfly!”
It takes her about a minute to settle down.
“Now, how do you spell butterfly?”
“B-U-T-F… wait… B-U-T-E-R-F-L-Y!”
“Close. You spell butter with two T’s, so you need to spell butterfly with two T’s.”
“Butfly!”
“Uh… Esmeralda?”
“B-U-T-T-E-R-F-L-Y, right?”
“Very good! How about difficult?”
Some ten words later, she asks if we can go into the Pirate Store. We pick up Miguel, who has just finished reading aloud to one of the tutors, and leave the craziness of the tutoring area for the quiet contemplative nature (the mood of the tank on Wednesdays) of the fish-viewing booth. I pull back the curtain, and we sit down in the velvet-lined seats, staring at the crab-like thing and looking for Nemo and Rock Monanoff. Otka, the puffer fish, is back after a month-long vacation at a spa down in Southern California. This explains why she is so tan, and also why she has lost so much weight. And the new pattern on Otka’s scales is purely a trick of the light.
Miguel, who’s in first grade, is just learning to read. He always takes Jurassic Park down from the shelf, but he can’t even make it through the first sentence. With a sigh, he decides to go back to reading My Day (I wonder how many times he’s read that book by now - I always see him choose it when working with other tutors), and basing the text on the pictures. It fascinates me that he thinks that, since the drawing shows a picture of the kid’s mom, the sentence below it must read, “I hug my mom”. He deduces this without looking at the text itself. I have to point out that the words are actually down there, on the paper, and he doesn’t have to make up the story himself. Also, any sentence that starts with an M cannot have the first word be I. When he finishes reading, he takes out Jurassic Park, walks purposefully over to the office area, and makes a copy of the cover to stick in his homework folder along with the spiked cars that I traced for him from the Battlebot book.
While in the Pirate Store, Miguel enjoys digging through the vat of sand to find small treasures. He really wants one of the jeweled rings, but he never finds any in the treasure vat. I have to remember to stick one in for him next time. Instead, he selects (after extensive deliberation) the blue marble over the red one, and bargains for it with a drawing of a cheerfully scowling, flaming-bad-guy-devil robot.
Esmeralda, meanwhile, is opening every single drawer in the shop and pulling all of the messages out of the bottles. She finds this highly amusing, and I bring a chair over for her to reach the higher things. Miguel has placed one ring on every finger, and he is opening and closing his fists experimentally. Esmeralda now wants to try on a peg leg. I tie her foot behind her leg and let her lean on me while we position the suction cup on her knee. I let go of her, and she collapses on the floor, laughing. Anna watches us, bemused, and Miguel returns the rings and goes to the tub of lard. This is a problem, because now Miguel wants to touch the rings again. Anna kindly asks him to wipe his hands and not touch the lard anymore, and Miguel blinks incomprehensively. What is the point of having lard if you can’t stick your hands in it? I helpfully point out the list of uses, but he is still not impressed. Perhaps, he concludes, we should make swords instead.
Anna Waldman-Brown, a former 826 Valencia Intern
