Pamela Erens - Matasha

Matashas brave and original heroine reminds me of Harriet the Spy and Blubber, her perspective captivating and inimitable. Its a joy to watch Matasha grow up, making meaning of everything. This novel has tremendous sweep and scope, with all the joys, sorrows, and revelations of a real girlhood.RACHEL DEWOSKIN, author of Big Girl Small, Blind, and Someday We Will Fly

The narrator of Matasha may be small for her age, but she is years ahead of her peers in how she faces a growing series of challenges. Matasha has to deal with the casual cruelty of her classmates, her growing alienation from her longtime best friend, her increasing awareness of her mothers dissatisfaction, and her own health issues, handling them all with a thoughtfulness that feels realistic (especially when interrupted by the occasional spectacular temper tantrum). Readers of all ages will enjoy seeing 1970s Chicago from her vantage point.MICHELLE FALKOFF, author of Playlist for the Dead and How to Pack for the End of the World

Tender, funny, and endlessly surprising, Matasha perfectly captures the confusion of being an eleven-year-old girl and trying to solve all of lifes mysteries, big and small. This wonderful bookand the wonderful girl at its centerwill stay with me for a very long time.ROBIN WASSERMAN, author of Girls on Fire, The Book of Blood and Shadow, and Hacking Harvard

MATASHA

Pamela Erens

Copyright 2021 by Pamela Erens.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For information, contact:
Ig Publishing

Box 2547

New York, NY 10163

ISBN: 978-163246-201-5 (ebook)

Matasha Wax was eleven and in the sixth grade at the Margaret E. Marvin Elementary School in Chicago, but she was no bigger than many of the third graders at the school. Shed been the shortest in her class ever since kindergarten, and for a long time it was not something she thought much about, but in the past year some of her classmates had shot way up and she found, standing beside them, that she came up only to their armpits orin the case of some of the girlstheir breasts. The doctor she saw every May for a checkup said that if she did not reach four feet five inches by her half birthday in early November, they would talk about treatment. Matasha didnt know what treatment consisted of, and the word frightened her. Would it involve needles? Matasha was terrified of needles. Whenever she had to have a regular shotthe tetanus booster, for instanceshe ran from the doctor screaming and sobbing until her mother and the doctor had to trap her in a corner and hold her there, writhing, to meet her doom.

Matasha didnt know why she was so afraid of needles.

Generally, if she didnt understand something, Matasha would search it out in a book in the library, or she would ask her parents. Her parents almost always gave a useful reply. But in this case Matasha was too afraid to ask what treatment might be; she didnt want to know the answer. Matasha thought of herself as someone who wanted to know everything about everything, so this was a humiliating development.

Matashas class was at library now. Library was one of the best periods of the week, in a week filled with periods Matasha enjoyed. She enjoyed math, science, English, French, and history. She did not enjoy art. She could never get her shapes and colors to look like anything, whether the class was painting or doing pastels or cutting up construction paper for collage. She did not see the point in art class. She did not understand why Miss Fillmore, the art teacher, did not teach them useful and beautiful skills such as real drawing. Matashas best friend, Jean, could draw marvelously, but Jean was never able to teach Matasha how to do what she did. Matasha would have given a great deal to be able to draw a flower that looked like a real flower and not a circle with flat teardrop shapes around it. She would have liked to draw real faces, and a house that looked like an actual house instead of a square topped by a triangle plus a rectangle with fake smoke coming out of it. (That was certainly not what Matashas home looked like. She lived in an apartment, though it did have two floors.) What a talent that would be!

If Miss Fillmore would teach them such thingsincluding how to make objects that were far away look far away and not close upart would be interesting and worthwhile instead of boring and leaving Matasha always with a sense of failure.

Of course, Matasha knew that art was not always drawings and paintings of real-looking people and houses and landscapes. Her mother often took her to the Art Institute or to galleries where they looked at large canvases that were almost entirely black, except for an odd meandering thread of red, like a trickle of blood, in one corner; or pictures of people who seemed to have melted faces; or brightly painted constructions held together by wire; or even art you walked through wearing paper slippers. Matasha knew who Picasso was, and Van Gogh, and Matisse. She enjoyed going to the museum with her mother, who was good at explaining art: what to look for and why it mattered. (Once upon a time her mother had led tours at the museum; now she helped other people buy art for their homes and offices.)

None of this excused Miss Fillmore from teaching Matasha how to draw properly in art class, or justified her wasting Matashas time with dopey collage. Once, in fourth grade, Matasha had asked Miss Fillmore when she was going to teach them how to draw things that looked real. An annoyed look had come over Miss Fillmores face, and shed said that the purpose of art instruction was not to impart narrow skills such as the reproduction of nature but to open children up to broader sensitivities such as symmetry, shape, color, and form.

The way adults talked exasperated Matasha. Sometimes, because she was earnest and bookish and could follow directions and sit still in her seat, they treated her like she was a little adult herself. They used all of their evasive and wordy grown-up language on her the way they used it on other adults, rather than giving her the straight answer she was looking for. When they didnt do that, they treated her like a baby, the way most grownups treated most children. It was almost always one thing or the other.

Except for her mother. Her mother, Matasha thought, treated her as the person she wasan eleven-year-old who was not an idiotand was always honest with her. Sometimes a little too honest. Sometimes she wished her mother would tell her fewer things, and less clearly. Matasha was aware that people thought her mother was a little eccentric. Shed known this from the minute people had started asking her about her name, which was basically as soon as she knew it herself and could talk. Matasha? they asked. Not Natasha?

Matasha, Matasha would say firmly, her toddler feet planted. For that was her name.

The grown-up would swivel to her mother with a questioning look. And Matashas mother would explain that War and Peace