Nobody's Family is Going to Change

by Louise Fitzhugh

  Emma sat, silently laughing at Ketchum. Her shoulders were shaking.

  “Are you crying?” asked her mother.

  “What? No,” said Emma, still shaking. “I’m laughing.”

  “What are you laughing at?” asked her mother with somewhat exaggerated politeness.

  “I’m laughing at how silly I am,” said Emma.

  “I think that’s a good, positive attitude,” said her mother. “I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your sense of humor.” She opened the door. “If you want to talk to me again about this, Emma, please know that you can at any time.”

  Emma’s shoulders started shaking again. Her mother didn’t seem to notice, because she went out and shut the door without saying anything further.

  “I’m silly because I’ve been talking to the wrong people,” said Emma aloud to the empty room.

  She saw herself in full-dress uniform addressing her troops. Saunders’ uniform was quite gaudy. Goldin’s was exactly like Saunders’. Ketchum had on a uniform too big for her, its hat covering her eyes completely.

  “Troops!” shouted Emma in her head. “We are the only ones who can change! Change is with us!”

  Ketchum saluted, tripped, and fell over.

  “Rats,” said Emma. “Male images. I’m sick of male images, armies, uniforms, salutes, kowtowing. I’m sick of males altogether.”

  She thought of herself actually calling Saunders and arranging a meeting after school.

  I know I’m right, she thought. I hope they agree with me, because, if they don’t, I’ll have to do it all myself.

  “I looked up the word in the dictionary,” said Emma. She was holding the piece of paper on which she had written the definition. The wind from the river flipped it a little as she talked. Saunders, Goldin, and Ketchum faced her, listening.

  “Here it is,” she said, “and I think it’s a good word to describe what I’m talking about.”

  “Changeling?” said Saunders. “I thought it meant some kid in an Irish fairy tale, stolen away by the leprechauns.”

  “I guess that’s what they mean in this first definition,” said Emma. “What I mean is, somebody who is young and somebody who changes.”

  They’d been sitting on the bench for over an hour. Emma had felt completely inarticulate when she began to talk to them about her idea. She didn’t know what it was about ideas, but they could seem so simple when they came to you as a feeling, then when you tried to put them into words and tell someone else, they seemed impossibly complicated.

  “I mean that nobody’s family is going to change. This means if we don’t want to go on feeling the way we’re feeling, then we have to change.”

  “I get it, sort of,” said Goldin.

  “But, you know, it sounded like the Children’s Army does change things.” Saunders seemed puzzled; not angry, just confused.

  “It doesn’t really change anything. I mean, do you really believe, like take a kid whose father is beating him up, and the committee comes in and everything, and this guy, the father, says he’ll change. Do you really believe he doesn’t swat that kid the minute the committee leaves the house?”

  “No,” said Saunders. “That’s why, in bad cases like that, they get the kid removed. They get him some other place to live.”

  “Exactly,” said Emma.

  Everybody looked at her. “Clear as mud,” said Saunders. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying fathers don’t change and mothers don’t change. It’s up to us to change.” Emma had said it as well as she could. She couldn’t think of any other way to say it.

  Ketchum was nodding slowly. “Mine won’t change,” she said.

  “I never thought about it,” said Saunders.

  There she goes again, thought Emma. If she didn’t think of it, it annoys her. She’s only enchanted by her own mind.

  “My father certainly won’t change,” said Goldin.

  “Read the definition,” said Saunders, playing for time.

  “Okay, but it really doesn’t apply. I don’t know why I brought it. I mean, I just like the word because I think it describes somebody young changing.” Saunders had gotten everybody interested in the definition now, so there was nothing for Emma to do but read it.

  “Changeling, noun,” read Emma. “Definition 1 is a child surreptitiously or unintentionally substituted for another. Definition 2a is archaic, and is a disloyal person.” Emma looked around.

  “What’s definition 2b?” asked Saunders.

  “Oh, nothing. It means nothing,” said Emma.

  Saunders grabbed the piece of paper. “Definition 2b is an imbecile,” she read aloud. She laughed, a great big laugh.

  Goldin covered her face and Ketchum squealed off into a series of high giggles that finally had everybody turned in her direction.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Emma. “I told you guys this didn’t mean anything.” She felt despondent. Why was she trying this, anyway? These goons would never understand what she was talking about. They were still laughing. “Listen, to hell with it. I mean, I’m going to do it, but you guys can do what you want.”

  They stopped laughing. “I think this all sounds good,” said Goldin. Saunders turned to her in surprise. “I think about my father and I know he’s never going to change.” She looked straight into Emma’s eyes. “I don’t understand how I’m supposed to, that’s all.”

  “I meant that we—I thought that if we—” Emma stopped. Damn it, it was embarrassing. “I thought we could try and help each other.”

  There was silence. Emma wanted to grab back every word and run out of the park. She never wanted to see these girls again. Obviously, she had made a fool of herself.

  Saunders nodded. “Like a consciousness-raising group?”

  Emma nodded. Was it possible they understood? Goldin and Ketchum were nodding too. “I see it,” said Goldin. “But I don’t see how to change.”

  “I don’t either,” said Ketchum in a woeful voice. Emma figured she was seeing herself face to face with her uncle of an afternoon.

  “Well, for instance, your uncle,” said Emma. Ketchum jumped. “Say he comes to the door.”

  Ketchum seemed about to jump out of her skin at the thought.

  “What does he say he’s come there for?” asked Emma.

  “He says he’ll just wait for my mother to come home from work,” said Ketchum in a quavering voice.

  “Okay, so you leave,” said Emma.

  “Where would I go?” asked Ketchum.

  “That’s not the point. He’s not going to follow you, is he? I mean, he’s said he’s come there to wait, so he won’t come with you, because that would make a liar out of him. So it doesn’t matter where you go. Come to my house if you want to.” Emma felt exhilarated. The whole thing was much easier to explain when you had examples.

  Ketchum smiled broadly. Her braces glinted in the sun.

  “What about my father?” asked Goldin.

  “Your father,” said Saunders, “is a lost cause. He thinks those boys are great and he’s never going to think you’re anything, because you’re a girl.”

  “Well,” said Goldin, “I can’t change that.”

  “No, but you can stop wanting him to change,” said Saunders.

  Emma felt like the top of her head would fly off. Saunders got it, the whole thing. “That’s what I mean,” said Emma loudly. “That’s just what I’m talking about. We have to stop waiting around for them to love us!”

  “Hey,” said Saunders. “You know, you’re right. That’s just what I do. I keep waiting for my mother to say, ‘I think it’s wonderful that you want to be a scientist.’ I keep waiting for her to think it’s as wonderful as I think it is.”

  “That ain’t never going to happen,” said Emma, thinking of her own father. Never, ever, would he look at her and say he thought it was a swell idea, her being a lawyer, never, if she waited a million years.

  “I think we’ve got something here,” said Saunders.<
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  What do you mean we, thought Emma.

  “I think we ought to meet once a week,” continued Saunders, “or more—every day if we have to—and talk about what we feel and see if we can figure out solutions, see if we can help each other. I even like the name. Let’s call ourselves the Changelings!”

  Can you beat that, thought Emma. In one more minute she’ll give herself the credit for thinking of the whole thing.

  “What I was originally thinking of when I first thought of this,” said Emma slowly, letting her words sink in, “was that we would also enlarge the group, and start other groups, so that, finally, when people get to be ten or eleven, or even earlier, it would be a natural thing for people to belong to a group like this.”

  “Great,” said Saunders, as though Emma had finally contributed something.

  “Why don’t we get sweat shirts,” said Goldin excitedly.

  “No!” said Emma. “This should be secret.”

  “Like the Army?” asked Goldin. “Hey, are we going to belong to the Children’s Army?”

  “I don’t know how I feel about that,” Emma said importantly. “I spoke to Harrison Carter.”

  “You did?” asked Goldin, obviously impressed. Saunders looked put out by the news.

  “I’m not sure what I think of the operation,” said Emma. “They accomplish a lot, I know that.”

  “It’s not the same thing as this,” said Saunders. “One thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other.” “Yeah,” said Goldin. “They’re two different things.”

  “I think,” said Emma, “that the first meeting of the Changelings should come to order.”

  “Who made you president?” asked Saunders swiftly.

  “She thought of it,” said Goldin.

  That Goldin is a good kid, thought Emma, as she continued: “I think the first thing on the agenda is for each person to discuss how she plans to be different at dinner tonight.”

  “Motion passed,” said Ketchum wildly.

  They began to talk. They talked all afternoon.

  That night, at dinner, Emma waited until dessert was served to make her announcement.

  She waited patiently, watching Willie try to tell what had happened that day at rehearsal. She watched her mother being nervous. She watched her father retreating more and more into silence, eating faster and faster. She watched her mother watching her father.

  When Martha placed a piece of chocolate cake in front of her, Emma pushed it away and said, “I’m going to be a lawyer when I grow up.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake! Can’t we have a peaceful dinner around here?” said her father loudly. He jerked his cake closer to him and shoved his fork down into it.

  “Stop saying things just to upset your father!” said Mrs. Sheridan.

  “Women lawyers are idiots! They’re the laughingstock of any group of lawyers. I think any woman who tries to be a lawyer is a damned fool!” Mr. Sheridan glared at Emma.

  “That,” said Emma, “is your problem, not mine.” To herself she added, And frankly, Daddy, I don’t give a damn.

  She shook with silent laughter. Wait till I tell them tomorrow how these two looked when I said that.

  Just wait.