I have been reading a lot of books about faeries and shape shifters lately. I read a lot of books, period.  But, you knew that about me.  Since my daughter Emma became a more eager reader in the last couple of years I have taken up Young Adult fiction.  No, that’s not true.  I have rediscovered that kind of fiction and I am terribly grateful to Emma for that.  Right now, there is a lot of crud filed away under Young Adult, a lot of scary, ugly, angry stuff in those books.  But, there is magic, too.  There’s the real kind, faeries and wizards and talking animals, and there is the more subtle kind, those words written by a grownup, a mother or a father perhaps, that so perfectly capture a voice (theirs, maybe, their own voice remembered) that both Emma and I say “Yes, that is exactly how it feels!”  Exactly how it still feels.

I learned to read (at birth, my mother would say) in the grass, at the beach, along the sandy lanes of East Hampton, New York.  In an unlikely scenario, my family summered there from 1952 until the year Emma was born.  My father, the child (one of nine) of a weary tobacco farmer and my mother, the last daughter of an unhappy, careless boarding house owner, found each other in the theater. They built for us a stage set of such unexpected beauty and sophistication that we swept, thoughtlessly, joyfully through the curtain and into the life they had dared to dream for us.

East Hampton wasn’t a chic, crowded place in my years.  It was a wonderful tumble of artists and farmers and bicycles and salty boys on surfboards.  It was a world of best friends (besties) who met at dawn and dusk to fly kites and play light tag in the gathering dark.  It was Charlie and Liz and Claire.  It was my father coming down to the beach on August 5th, 1962 with a silver thermos of martinis saying “Marylin is gone.”  Oh, fine, I don’t remember that precisely but it has become such an iconic image in our family I might as well.  In the cool, shadowy halls and stacks of the tiny East Hampton Library I learned that as fine a place as this was, there were other finer, wilder places I could go.  And go I did, sometimes while still sitting on the floor of the stacks.  I would stumble out, blinking in the light and heat of the summer sun, startled by the foreignness of the real world.

I remember one day, standing in bare feet (you could still do that then) running my finger across the spines of the books.  It occurred to me that I would have to start reading grown up books soon.  I was about 30.  No I wasn’t, I was probably no more than 12 or 13, Emma’s age.  I was filled with melancholy, weighed down by the realization that I would never, surely never, feel about any book as I did about Charlotte’s Web or A Wrinkle in Time.  There were tears (really) and I walked slowly past the low shelves, the boxes of toys, the displays of picture books and into the main fiction stacks.  I thought that was it, there was no going back.  I had left the childrens’ room for the too big tables and heavy chairs of the adult section.  But, of course, I have gone back, again and again.  I have returned most recently with Emma.  Oh, not to East Hampton, I don’t think I could bear to see it now, but to my book world and hers.  And, if we are no longer barefoot, the floor cool beneath us, we are still transported magically, effortlessly.  We have our documents in order, our passports, our permission slips and we cross the border, together.

I look at Emma sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, when she isn’t looking at me.  Her silver blond hair has deepened to something more like gold, her soft, pliant limbs are now long and lean with muscle.  She is still slight, girl-like though never girly.  But there is a simmering just under her skin.  It is the glow of the young adult, the sharp light that threatens to crack her skin and break my heart.  And it will, as it should.  The confidence she had in me, the way her body gaveas it bent towards me has been replaced by a prickly independence, a distance that makes her as unknowable to me as an actual faery.  And yet, there she is, lying on her stomach, one knee bent, foot waving in the air.  There, the book open before her, hair falling forward, tongue poking through her lips in concentration.  Yes, that is my child, just a glimpse before she parts the curtain, wanders away from me and passes through to the life I dared to dream for her.