The Turquoise Pen

Second Generation 

Noël R. King

I was babysitting this kid one day and discovered that her mom was Alice in Wonderland, all grown up now, her own winsome child in my loving, tender care for the day.

“Well, she’s a little, you know,” Alison told me, making the “she’s crazy” sign with her finger circling her ear.

She leaned closer, close enough that I could smell her grape bubblegum breath. “Honestly? If she weren’t so famous and all, I’d be living in a foster home by now.”

“Really?” I said.

“Probably,” she said, swinging her nine-year-old legs as she sat on the coffee table right in front of me.

“She’s not much of a mom, you know,” she added. “She talks to the eggs, she talks to the cat, she sings all these songs that don’t make any sense. She forgets that I am not herself sometimes, even when it’s clear that I am not.”

“Hmmm. . . . ” I said. I tried to get myself to attend fully to this perfectly reasonable little girl sitting there in front of me, but my longing to know something that I had pondered all these years finally won out:

“Well, do you think all those things really did happen to her just like the books said—before she tried to pretend it was all just a dream at the end?” I waited breathlessly, a little faint, some humming in my ears. How my world might change in just one sentence from this newfound channel to the Truth!

“I don’t know,” she said. “Look, can I have a cheese sandwich this time for lunch? I think I’m gonna throw up if I have to eat her Jabberwocky Crocky one more time.”

“Um, okay,” I said. I watched her legs go back and forth. It was slightly hypnotic; I was starting to feel a little dazed. My moment of impending Truth had been so very short, and I needed a moment here to readjust to life in its far more typically foggy form.

Seeing a pillow embroidered with a red chess king lying behind her on the couch, I finally said, “Hey, you wanna play some chess, just like your mama did? That would be a really fun thing to do, don’t you think?”

“I hate chess,” she said. “I only play cards.”

“Off with their heads!” I cried, and laughed uproariously. (I might have been a little overwrought from my dashed desire to know the Truth.)

She looked at me like I had just sprouted a puppy out of my head.

“It was in the book,” I said. “The queen, you know.”

“Whatever,” she said. “I haven’t read it.”

Later that night by her bed, I didn’t say anything when I turned down her blankets and saw: two dog-eared copies of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, Alison’s name in bright pink on the front, lying wide open beneath all her pillows.

—As circumstances warrant, through her Turquoise Pen column Noël R. King, Scottsville, Virginia, reports on strange and wonderful or worrisome things, including what happened when Alice had Alison.