Der Erlkönig

They ask him after lunch and before grammar What do you want to be when you grow up? and Felix isn't sure what they mean. He sees it's a question, and he sees that they are waiting for an answer, but all the things in the middle are limp and useless. Are blank, and oily, and there are no numbers to sink his fingers in.

Well, what do you want for when you're older?

Felix thinks about that.

He would like to ride his bicycle, someday. A sister of his father's had heard about him turning eight that April, and sent him one. Felix had been in love. On sight, instantly: spine-winding world-stealing love. He remembers that it might have been blue. It is hard for him to say for certain, since father had gotten angry, and sent it away, calling it bribery. The next day Felix had asked one of the servants to pull the dictionary from the shelf for him and looked up the definition:

"Corruption," it told him, "esp. of an official of some standing, in the form of money or other valuables."

Well? What do you want to be?

"An official," says Felix, biting his lip.

Okay. What kind?

The dictionary hadn't said.

"I don't know." He bites his lip a little harder.

Well, just be simple with it. What do you want to do? What do you want?

Felix thinks about that.

He wants to be a surgeon like his father. Maybe. He wants to make medicine. A good kind. He wants to heal his mother so she isn't lying in her miles of silky red bed when he leaves for school and still marooned there when he gets back, so she doesn't leave pharaohs' tombs of big glass bottles and circuses of little orange bottles lying on the kitchen counter, so that Felix doesn't knock them over with a noise like an angry zoo when he is making a snack. So that father would stop giving her the little orange bottles. So that he would have no reason to give her them.

So that she could play her music a little more quietly at night, her opera, when Felix should be sleeping, so that she can sit up straight when she tells him things like "The Germans, precious thing-- leave the cooking to the French, and the fighting, the fighting is for the British-- but to the Germans leave the music. N'est-ce pas?" So that she could say other things to him instead.

Felix thinks all these things, but he hasn't said anything, cannot think of anything. They are still waiting for his answer. He wishes he were in math class.

"I would like to fix things." He lowers his chin to look at his books.

That's good. It's good to fix things. You want to be a designer, to fix people's things? Or a vet? To fix their pets?

He lowers his chin and says, quieter, "I would like to fix things."



"Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;
Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt." —


((I worked out the other day to a recording of Marian Anderson's contralto "Der Erlkönig," from like 1936 or something. Lifting weights to opera, particularly when it's sandwiched between Bjork and Man Man and Those Poor Bastards = STRAAAAANGE EXPERIENCE, FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS.

One day, I will decipher my fascination with mangled childhoods!))