Not So Little Mysteries

Today Lily's babysitter, whose name is Alishia, left her cell phone here by mistake. I discovered this when suddenly loud pop music began playing, seemingly from the middle of the dining room, as I was making Lily dinner. After a few seconds, I realized what it was. I have never been able to figure out this programming feature and my own phone merely rings, but all of the twelve-year-olds I know can basically make their phones do their taxes by pressing mysterious codes; apparently Alishia has this skill as well. Or at least she can make it play music. And I know that seventh graders don't really pay taxes. But if they did, they could make their cell phones do the legwork, I swear it.

Anyway. Over the course of the evening Alishia's phone rang three, four, five more times, and at some point it occurred to me that maybe Alishia was trying to locate her missing phone, was calling it herself to see if someone picked up. I opened it up to see if she had been making the calls to her own number, which she hadn't been. But I saw something else, something I'd forgotten about.

You know how you can enter your name in your cell phone, so when you open it up, up pops your name? Or at least you can do this if you are in seventh grade; I had a seventh grader do mine. I was expecting to see the name "Alishia Philip" on Alishia's phone, but instead it said, "Nancy Philip." Suddenly I remembered something Alishia had once told me, almost in passing, although I wondered now if she had expected more of a reaction.

Alishia grew up on St. Lucia, one of eleven children. I know some about her childhood and adolescence, what she has told me, but she is somewhat impenetrable and doles out information sporadically. Sometimes I can tell she is torn; she knows I am interested and actually likes telling me stories but also knows it is an unusual feature of the typical childcare provider/parent dynamic and is wary, justifiably so, I suppose, not because of me but because of the way the world works. There is more to be said about this, much more, in fact, but it is not the subject at hand today.

The subject at hand is the way people reveal themselves inadvertently and--I've written this before--how much I love being surprised by the weirdness, the particularities of the revelations. Apparently, in a childhood that was not full of libraries and books, at some point Alishia managed to get her hands on a Nancy Drew book. She loved it, read it again and again, became a little obsessed with Nancy. There may have been more than one book over time; I can't remember. I wish I'd paid better attention when she was telling the story.

She so loved Nancy Drew that she changed her own name to Nancy, in her head at first, and then got some other people--siblings, cousins, schoolmates--to jump on board. For much of her childhood, a number of people who had known her since birth called her Nancy; what I love is that, although I have never heard anyone call her this, her sisters, any of her friends, it is still clearly how, sometimes anyway, she thinks about herself. Every time she opens her phone, it is the name that she sees. I love this. It makes me aware of how unknowable, how mysterious, how infinite Alishia, any person, actually is.

In that one detail, the name Nancy on the tiny screen of her phone, Alishia's entire being, her life history, her story, expanded again a thousandfold for me. And suddenly, after an off-kilter, out-of-sorts, anxiety-ridden kind of day, the world was again a place where there was much to be discovered.