I can just ramble on and on. I wonder does everybody have thoughts like these or am I crazy. I can just say that easy and all, or sometimes I can worry about it. Not exactly working up a sweat, but more like lying in bed at night ready to sleep and getting a chill at the thought and sitting right straight up in bed for a few minutes.
My name is Ariel and I don’t know if I like it or not. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t and I don’t know which feeling generally has the upper hand.
The first thing about my name is that it is unusual. When you are a little kid that is awful because all little kids want is to be like everybody else. Anything different is bad and embarrassing. Especially your name because that is something everybody else knows about you.
Ariel.
I used to be teased about my name. Kids would all make the same stupid jokes about car aerials or TV aerials. Or they would call me Antenna. Hysterically funny. Thinking about it now I wonder why I even bothered to hate it, but I did. You tease a little kid about anything and it’s going to hurt, even if the teasing doesn’t make any sense.
I started to like my name about the same time I started becoming the unbeautiful stranger. I guess everything started happening in the early part of the year. We moved here and I left my old school and started in my new school and Caleb was born and I got my period and Roberta started not liking me anymore and I started turning into a private person.
I don’t think I became a different person, exactly. I changed by becoming more completely the person I really was all along. As if I was always a stranger but never knew it before.
Ariel the strange stranger.
What I like about the name Ariel is partly what I used to hate about it, namely that it is different. It is just fitting that I should have an unusual and uncommon name. Plus it makes me think of flying, soaring high in the sky above the ordinary people, gliding effortlessly like a hawk in the autumn sky, just floating on air currents and having a great old time.
There is a book of poems called Ariel by a crazy woman who killed herself as soon as she was done writing them. I found the book in the public library over the summer. My heart jumped when I saw it. I had never heard of it and there was my name on the cover of a book. It was the oddest sensation seeing it like that, as if the book had been put there just for me to notice it.
I was almost afraid to touch it, but I’d no more not pick it up than Roberta would pass up a book that calls itself My Secret Thoughts. I sat at one of the long reading tables with it and my first reaction was to be disappointed because it was poetry. I like poems but I guess I thought the book would be about me and tell me who I was or some such silly thing, and then it was poems.
Before I ever tried to read them I read on the book cover about Sylvia Plath, who wrote them, and how she kept writing her poetry and thinking about suicide until finally she stuck her head in the gas oven.
And I got so mad! I don’t know if I was ever so mad before or since. Because I thought they named me Ariel after that book of poems, named me after somebody putting her head in an oven and turning on the gas, and I thought, God, what a hateful thing to do to a baby!
That book was published after I was adopted. I checked the dates. They just went and named me Ariel. Maybe Crazy Sylvia named her book after me.
Oh, who cares? She was crazy and her poems are crazy, or at least I can’t make head or tail out of them. Anyway I don’t want to make head or tail out of them. They make me feel all cramped, all that hate and blood and anger, all that screaming without any noise.
I wonder who picked the name. David or Roberta?
I guess they like unusual names. Their names are ordinary ones but they picked Ariel and Caleb for their children. Caleb Oliver Jardell. I wonder if Caleb would have liked his name, or if they would have teased him about it.
My middle name is Emily. For David’s mother. I hate it.
I liked Caleb’s name. The sound of it, and the way it looks on the page when you write it. It looks like Cable with the letters switched around, and once you see that you keep switching letters and trying for other words, but all you get is gibberish.
Elbac.
Laceb.
Blace.
Oh, please don’t let me think about Caleb. I feel terrible when I think about him.
I don’t care for the name Roberta. I don’t like women’s names that you get by tacking an ending onto a man’s name. Pauline, Georgette. There’s a girl in my geography class called Davida and I really feel sorry for her. It’s as if her parents are telling the whole world right out that they wanted a boy so much they couldn’t be bothered thinking of a girl’s name.
I wonder what my real name is.
That sentence looks so weird I decided to leave plenty of space around it. But I know what it means and it makes sense to me.
I have thought about this a lot. How when my mother was pregnant with me she decided to put me up for adoption. Maybe she had no choice. I don’t know anything about that.
But she carried me for nine months, unless I was premature (which I probably was, just to be different), and during that time she must have done some thinking. In the hospital, waiting to give birth to me, she must have had thoughts. Even knowing she was putting me up for adoption, even knowing that she would never set eyes on me, she would have been wondering if I would be a boy or a girl.
And she would have picked out names. She might not have wanted to, knowing it would just hurt her, knowing it would make it that much harder to give me up, but I honestly don’t see how she could have helped herself. Oh, I myself will sometimes think up names for kids, and I am only twelve years old and not pregnant, nor likely to be, thank you all the same! But I will now and then imagine myself married and with children, which I can imagine easily enough, and I’ll think, well, I would call the boy Ethelbert and the girl Davida, or whatever names I am crazy about that particular day.
Now she must have done this. So she had a name in mind for me. So in a sense that is my real name and Ariel is just what they call me.
They call me Ariel, the Adopted.
I don’t have a nickname. Back when she used to like me Roberta would sometimes call me Honey or Darling but they were never specific names for me, just all-purpose pet names that she used. And David used to call me Little Pooch. I don’t know where he got the name from. Now that I think about it, I don’t guess it’s awfully flattering. But I used to like the idea that he had a special name for me.
Now he generally calls me Ariel, like everybody else.
There was a girl, Linda Goodenow, who was sort of my best friend two years ago, but not quite. I didn’t have anyone I liked better but I never felt close enough to Linda to call her a best friend. Anyway, the point is that she used to call me Airy. She didn’t ask if I wanted to be called that. She just one day called me Airy and went on with it.
I hated it. Thinking back, I don’t know why I didn’t ask her not to call me Airy. How was she to know I hated it if I never said anything? But I never did and she went right on calling me Airy, probably because it made her feel more like best friends to be the only person to call me by that name. Some best friend to be the only person in the world calling me by a name I hated!