Godzilla vs. Sweden

When I was in third grade, Mrs. Horowitz’s divided the class into five groups of five and assigned each cluster a country. I wanted Sweden because I loved the big yellow cross on the their blue flag. It made Sweden look so strong and official. I also loved Swedish meatballs and every really hot girl in my dad’s Playboy listed her nationality as Swedish or Scandinavian. I got Japan. And I was also picked as the leader of our group, a position I felt I could not uphold. At eight, I was already feeling the pressure of stress and constraint. I didn’t have time to be a leader. I needed all of my energy to hide from my domineering mother, to read Charlie Brown books, and just like him, good grief, I needed time to sulk.

We spent the next month in Social Studies, working on our countries. I stared longingly over at the blue/yellow group led by Kim who was adorable and always wearing a new outfit. She had rich people’s skin, seductively tan from extended trips to St. Maarten. She was in total control, practically wearing a crown and touching every pencil and hand with her golden scepter. I didn’t know what I was doing and I was spending very little time learning. Japan was a scary place. There were mysterious shipwrecks and millions of people running from Godzilla. Japan was home to Mothra and his luminous fairies—Asian twins the size of clothespins. Their flag was a big red eye that was supposed to be the sun. I wasn’t sure. Either way, my team busied itself with tasks I assigned on a whim. Mark would look up chopsticks and rice. Kathy would research origami. Brian would read up on the fish market. Laura would tackle the concept of family. And I would write a haiku, which I did:

Creepy, crunchy legs

Little bugs that eat their prey 

Crawl, eat, slurp all day

I wrote the poem on pastel rainbow stationary, in CURSIVE, inside the stomach of an outlined, black felt-tip spider. I made the eyes from glue drops and a pile of green glitter. And I gave my spider a red nose. I don’t know why but it seemed to heighten the work’s authority.

The teacher told us we had to build a diorama or a sculpture of one of the country’s important monuments. I convinced my group, after scrapping their wishes for a pagoda, to erect a Tokyo skyscraper, the likes that beckoned Godzilla’s big smashing foot. Laura was the only one who liked the idea. She bobbed her head, yes, yes, beating her bangs against her brow. We started collecting everyone’s milk cartons. I even enlisted Randy, the stoner guy supervising our lunches, to help collect the wet throwaways. Randy said, Cool, and brushed the hair from his eyes and pushed down on his thick moustache in agreement.

He kept our stash near the trash, in the back of the cafeteria, and by the end of the week we had more than enough. We could be picky, throwing out the chocolate milk cartons and discarding any smashed bottoms. The plan was to glue together nine boxes, side-by-side, and then to stack and glue, layer upon layer, until we’d amassed a tower. It worked. We painted the building white and drew small black windows on every floor. There were ten in all.

Mark and Brian cut tree heads from pulpy paper and pasted the green bunches to slender-trunked toothpicks. We pierced the hedges into our flat cardboard base, around the building and lining our one main street. Things were really starting to take shape. I looked over at the other groups. France. Germany. Italy. Kim’s had made a log cabin, sweet enough to smell the maple syrup. They even had small trolls and miniature dolls in Swedish clothes. I decided right then, I was bringing Godzilla. He wasn’t really Godzilla but a Frankenstein lizard with enough parts to make him a bad twin.

Mrs. Horowitz walked past our table and frowned. She stopped and asked, What are you building? 

We’re done, I said. It’s a tall building in Tokyo.

She kept looking. I wanted to grab her gold hoop earrings and yank down hard and crawl into her cavernous head and yell with full echoes. It’s a Japanese-nese-nese sky-sky-sky scraper-aper-aper. But I couldn’t find where to latch onto the jewelry; the hoops were buried inside the mousy curls circling her face. She shook her head and walked away.

It was the night of the big open house. My sister’s fourth grade class had each been given a state to study. Kasha requested Alaska. My mom dropped us off at the door. Kasha was wearing a fur-trimmed coat and a brown shirt she thought made her look like an Eskimo. She wanted to bring our gray cat to use as a prop. As we left the house, she and my mom had been yelling and I heard the words, but Micey looks just like a baby seal. I had Godzilla jammed in my backpack.

We arrived at the school. There were so many people and all of these parents dressed in dark suits and made up like they were going to church or temple or wherever they congregated. My mom stuck out, a total babe all boobs, and wore a tight pink shirt and bell-bottoms, with a scarf draped around her shoulders—very European. She had a really thick accent that people thought was cute and made them laugh. I wished it were Swedish, but it wasn’t. It was a crazy mix of Polish/Russian/German all confused together in a bowl of saliva soup. Whatever. She was still hot. But, I had asked her to bake fortune cookies the night before, all things Asian, and she had refused. She looked at me like I was a crazy little dog nipping at her heels, begging, please, mom, please, it’ll be so cool, just bake them. She looked down at me, over her mountainous breasts and said, I know nutting about yoor coo-keys. I can’t bake for-choonz.

I didn’t care about anyone else’s country anymore. I stood in front of the tower with my group. We all wore cotton bandanas around our foreheads with the sharpie red symbol of the sun. Mom looked confused like she didn’t know what to do. She stood off in the corner. Mrs. Horowitz walked right past my group over to you-know-who’s gold and blue table. I pulled Godzilla from my bag. What are you doing? Laura asked. I set the green dinosaur in front of the Tokyo tower and it looked totally dumb and fake, so I set him on top of the building. That still didn’t look right. So I did what any good project leader would do. I fixed the problem. I crushed half of one corner down, and then I felt hands pounding next to my hands and felt my team smashing the milk cartons, really wrecking the tower into a lopsided barn. We cheered and placed Godzilla on the crooked top, victorious.

Mrs. Horowitz walked over and yanked me by the arm and started chewing on my ear. I looked around for my mom, but she’d already gone off to my sister’s station. I was in trouble but I didn’t understand why. I was trying to make downtown Nippon look happy-terrific-real.

The Japanese group was dismantled. Each of the kids left, only after being stopped and questioned by Mrs. Horowitz. They all looked pretty sad and then I felt bad like I’d ruined their night. I had to stay because Kasha was still representing Alaska. She had made a poster with blue markers and cotton balls and had built an igloo out of sugar cubes. It looked pretty cool. She sat in her chair, slumped, with her parka hood covering most of her face. She was eating a piece of black licorice, dangling it from her mouth. She looked up at me and smiled.

It’s supposed to be a walrus tongue.

Gross.

When I grow up I’m moving to Alaska, so far away, mom will never find me.

Think you’ll marry an Eskimo?

Only if I’m really lucky.

You can have Eskimo babies with fur boots.

If mom does show up, she said, she’ll be old and wrinkled and I can float her away on an iceberg.

They do that?

Uhuh. The Inuits do, but only to people with gray hair and crinkled skin. It’s why I asked for this state.