When it’s cold I take comfort in how Louise Fitzhugh drew people wrapped up like onions. She did it at least twice in publication -- once in Harriet the Spy, where Harriet is dancing (as an onion) and once in Suzuki Beane, where Suzuki comes home to find find Hugh and Marcia asleep on the mattress. Sleeping or dancing, the people are curled the same -- ankles crossed and arms twisted around the body, not fetal but about to roll. “I want you to feel,” says Miss Berry, Harriet’s drama teacher, “that one morning you woke up as one of these vegetables, one of these dear vegetables, nestling in the earth, warm in the heat and power and magic of growth… waiting for that glorious moment when you will be…” (“Eaten,” Harriet whispers to her friend Sport) “…once and for all, your essential and beautiful self, full-grown, radiant,” continues Miss Berry. Fitzhugh leaves Miss Berry in a pose, one arm stretched skyward and half her hair falling into her face. “I am warm here,” I tell myself when I wake up and the cold’s skritched little stars on the inside of the windows. I imagine Miss Berry in the corner, then I stumble out in longjohns to make coffee.
by
Mairead Case