Beverly Cleary, Ramona Forever

rocking chairs & spice-deployment

“Visitors, some carrying flowers and others looking careworn, walked toward the elevators.”

One of the things that most excited me about having a kid was the thought of all the reading that lay before me. My daughter and I would, together, traverse the entire length of the pool — all the way from the shallowest of shallow ends (Pat the Bunny, Dick and Jane) to the delightful swimmable depths (Treasure Island, Frankenstein). On we’d swim until — in holographic calls initiated from her dorm room — we were flailing happily together through Finnegans Wake. 

My plan was proceeding quite nicely (the crazy-making but virtuosic rhyming of Dr. Seuss; the tear-duct-intensive realism of Matt de la Peña and Oge Mara) until we reached her first chapter books. Now that she was on the cusp of reading herself — or was anyway following stories more linearly and less musically — out went the emotional and linguistic subtleties, and in came the prose by a committee of robots. “Mom, you know I don’t like banana pancakes!” said Georgia, making a grumpy face. This was turning out to be the yuckiest day ever. 

In desperation, and with vague memories of tea-colored paperbacks on the shelves of my childhood bedroom, I picked up Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books. The experience was like coming across a Shaker rocking chair (luminous wood-whorls, seamless joinery) in the aisles of a Target. Here were books written, unmistakably, by an adult human with emotional and literary sensitivity. An adult human who, most importantly, remembered the actual baffling, overwhelming experience of being a child. My daughter’s expression, when she listens to the Ramona books, is different than when she listens to almost anything else — it’s the expression she has when she’s watching a group of older girls on the playground: vital truth is being absorbed.

This sentence comes from late in Ramona Forever, the seventh book, the main action of which involves the birth of Ramona’s little sister. Finally, after much fretful eyeing of her mother’s stomach, the baby has arrived, and Ramona and her sister Beezus have gone off to the hospital to meet it. The sentence appears at first to be a workaday bit of scene-setting (give us some extras for the hospital scene!) but reveals itself, when you stare at it, to be a compact performance of Cleary’s genius, a perfectly sanded edge.       

A parent’s job, or one of them, is to modulate the world’s intensity for your kid. Too intense (There’s this thing called an autopsy) and you risk leaving her trembling in a corner. Too watered-down (Grandma’s taking a long nap, sweetie) and you risk raising a child who crumples at the first hint of adversity. Ideally you’d dole out the intensity at a pace that matches the natural development of her capacity for it — a pinch of red pepper flakes in the mac and cheese. Cleary is a master of spice-deployment, and this sentence captures her with jar in hand.

Hospitals are, of course, locations of both joy and agony. Cleary presents this semi-brutal observation — that the time of death and the time of birth are written with the same erasable markers — forthrightly but without causing needless distress. The faces without flowers aren’t shrieking in pain, or hollowed out with grief — they are careworn. A lovely brass candleholder of a word. (And all the lovelier for its quiet echo of the carrying that comes a few words earlier.)

Also, crucially, Cleary credits Ramona with this insight — or at least with the possibility of it. The books are written in the close third person, which means that the narrative camera is planted somewhere over Ramona’s shoulder — we see what she sees, we have access to her thoughts, but we aren’t limited by her language; the books’ perspective is dyed by her mind but not bound by it. (So the sentence could not read: “Visitors, ruing the day they chose their high deductible plans, walked toward the elevators.”) All of the books’ many casual, delightful observations — about how thoughtful people look while eating fish with bones; about the ways that fights are silently suspended during emergencies — take place at Ramona’s height.    

And only once you’ve put in some serious time with chapter books do you realize how rare a thing it is for an author to see kids for being as tall as they really are. (“Look how tall I am!” is a toddler refrain for a reason). Sadness — actual staring-out-the-window-at-four-PM-on-a-gray-Tuesday sadness — exists right alongside happiness in the Ramona books, and it isn’t tidily resolved or done away with or shown to have been based on a misunderstanding. Living often hurts. Cleary respects kids enough to know that they can handle this fact — and in so doing, she increases the probability that they can in fact handle it.

Lewis Hyde says that one of the purposes of books is to give “courage for living.” The Ramona books do that for me — not least by giving courage to my daughter. When I read them I feel more in contact with the difficulty of growing up — with the difficulty of existing, period — but also more appreciative of the beauty and hilarity and strangeness that is hiding in hospitals, in neighbor’s houses, in the faces of pets. Put more succinctly: I am careworn; I am carrying flowers.