Free Growing Girls by Jeanne Marie Laskas Page A

they obeyed.
    I felt as if I was watching some sort of mating dance, with Sasha in charge. All action, no language. And yet she was so willing and so able to communicate an invitation for friendship—a friendship on her terms.
    In time the girls were at the bottom of the sliding board, encouraging Sasha, who was at the top of it. “Come on! You can do it! We’ll catch you!”
    Sasha sat up there and pondered. Then she waved her hand in a wiping motion. “Iss!” she shouted.
    “You want us to wipe off the slide?” the short one asked her.
    Sasha nodded in the affirmative.
    “There’s
sand on
the slide!” the tall one said. “We have to get it
off
!”
    So they did, while the little peanut in the pink turtle bikini sat on high and watched and waited. A queen. A ruler. A girl for whom language was a royal waste of time.
    Eventually, the girls approached me. They told me they were cousins, Julia and Jennifer. “Will you be here tomorrow?” asked Julia. “Because we would like to play with her after Bingo.”
    I told them we would be and they jumped with happiness. “High five?” Jennifer said to Sasha, holding up her hand for a slap. Sasha had no clue what this meant and so the girls taught her.
    After that, we spent every afternoon in Aruba with Jennifer and Julia, both of them waiting on Sasha and occasionally waiting on Anna but just to be polite. The thing that got me was the realization that Sasha would spend her life being populardemanding it, getting it. I figured Anna would or wouldn’t be, but probably wouldn’t care.
    It was easy to see that Sasha’s claim on the world predated her mastery of spoken words. I wondered how much of that was true of all of us. Before we learn to say hello, have we learned how to be, how to manage who we are? I always thought language was the key to knowing, to understanding, and maybe that’s true except when it comes to knowing the self. We all cry and we all laugh before we speak. We are emotion first, thought second. And I suppose word whenever we get around to it.
    That summer Sasha said her first sentence. “Beez a beez a beez a beez?” This means, “May I please be excused?” We all knew it the minute she said it, thanks to her posture and beckoning with her eyes, but mostly because Anna confirmed it. Further complicating Sasha’s attempt to talk was the fact that Anna understood much of what she said. When you have an interpreter, you aren’t as motivated to learn the local lingo.
    There was still a lot of summer left so I decided to have the girls help me cut a path through the woods. Together we would snip, snip, snip through the sticker bushes and make it to the top of the hill.
    “Be careful of those jaggers,” Anna said to Sasha.
    “Jaggers” was a word she must have picked up in preschool. It’s a Western Pennsylvania word. I was born in Eastern Pennsylvania, where we said “sticker bushes.”
    “Anna,” I said. “We don’t say ‘jaggers’; we say ‘sticker bushes.’”
    “‘Sticker bushes’?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Sasha,” she said. “Be careful of the sticker bushes because they can hurt your fingies.” She paused. “Mom, do we say ‘fingies’?”
    “Sure.”
    This was how we talked. This was who we were. We never said “butt.” We said “bummy.” We always said please and thank you and before we left the table we all said, “Beez a beez a beez a beez?” ever since Sasha invented it.
    Every family has a language and this was ours. You bring jaggers or sticker bushes from your youth, and then there were all those invented words like “fingies” and “eggy-egg” and “niptydoops” that mysteriously fly in, if only for a little while, like colorful birds.
    “Momma,” Anna said. “Does Daddy say ‘sticker bushes’?”
    “Yes, he does,” I said. (Or he would now.)
    We were about three feet into the impossible thicket. I could see a small clearing on the other side of a partition of thorns, a break. A destination. We