Wendy, Darling
By Adrienne Garrison
@adrie.garrison
“Can I push the button? Can I push the button?” Theo is tripping over his flip flops, trying to get to the elevator ahead of his older sister.
“You pushed it last time! It’s my turn,” she says, dragging the pool bag along behind her.
I follow after, forever brokering a deal. “Penny, you can call the elevator, and Theo can choose the floor.”
“He always gets to do the inside button!”
“Do not.”
“Do too!” She turns to me with her finger outstretched toward the wall. “Up or down?”
“It’s on the third floor.” Once inside, I cinch the hotel robe a bit more tightly as the elevator rises and watch as they sprint away the moment the doors part. They do not know where they are going, but a child rarely cares for such things as directions, next steps, logistics. Those are the thoughts that occupy the whorls and loops of my grown-up mind.
“Did you bring our goggles?” Their hands are clasped around the door handle as they bounce up and down on the balls of their feet. On the other side of the glass, a narrow pool glows under a night sky.
“Of course I did,” I say. They pause to pull the masks over their head and glance at each other, bursting into giggles before pushing out into the sea spray air. Beyond the walls of the hotel, the Pacific laps gently at Monterey Bay. Just a few hours before, they pressed their palms against tanks containing multitudes of microscopic jellyfish cast through the dark water like stars in the sky, but now they jump into the pool and grow gills, transformed in the chlorine and blue. To me, moments like these represent childhood itself. Unfettered, exhilarating joy. I love this moment.
I made this moment.
***
Wendy: What were you doing there at the window?
Peter: I came to listen to your stories, of course.
Wendy: My stories? But they’re all about you.
Peter Pan: That’s why I like ‘em.
***
Have you ever paused to ask yourself whether there even is a Peter Pan without Wendy? Does Neverland exist at all if there is no Wendy to conjure it into being with her words and the shape of her hands as they flutter in the candlelight? The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up could hardly get away with an eternal childhood if not for a perfectly choreographed dance of care knit tightly around him.
Well, dear reader, I have paused. I have asked myself whether it is better to fly off into the night like a boy with no cares, or to sit on the side of the bed and spin tales with the sound of my voice. Wendy Darling, with one foot in the neverland of her own imagination and another in the world of womanhood, has become the true hero of the story for me. She has shown me that the glory, magic, and adventure of childhood is a fairytale that mothers weave for children between packing swim goggles, gathering dirty socks from the floor, and pouring spaghetti sauce into hot ground beef.
***
I stack fresh towels on the deck chair and wrap two around myself as I sit with my legs dangling into the greenlit foam of the hot tub. My words become small puffs of cloud in the night as I instruct them on the ways of underwater telephone.
“This is how you play: One of you, Penny, thinks of something to say. Just a few words, a secret message. And on the count of three, you take a deep breath and plunge beneath the water. Penny will shout the phrase, and when you come back up, Theo will try to guess what you said.”
They inhale together and splash below, sending up bubbles and the sound of muffled yelling.
Theo shakes water from his hair and makes a guess. “You said: I tried to warn ya?”
“No!!” she shrieks between fits of giggles “Try again.”
Her hair floats like tendrils of silk in the water.
Again, they rise. “I give up. What is it?”
She grins wide and shouts into the night: “I love California!!!”
***
Wendy: I'm so glad you came back tonight. I might never have seen you again.
Peter Pan: Why?
Wendy: Because I have to grow up tomorrow.
Peter Pan: Grow up?
Wendy: Tonight’s my last night in the nursery.
Peter Pan: But that means ... no more stories.
Wendy: (SNIFFLING) Mmhmm
Peter Pan: No! I won’t have it! Come on.
Wendy: But where are we going?
Peter Pan: To Never Land.
Wendy: Never Land!
Peter Pan: You’ll never grow up there.
***
My children’s eyes are lost behind the fog in their swim masks, but their smiles beam back at me. “What now? Do you know any more games?”
“Well,” I say, “It does seem like a rather good night for an underwater tea party. It goes like this … ”
I recall my own attempts at this game, the floor of the swimming pool knocking against my behind as I tried to stay under and sit cross-legged and hold my pinky aloft all at one time. As exhilarating as that moment was in my own childhood, I know that the moment I am living now is far better. Their gangly limbs flailing about beneath the water, the spray of their laughter as they surface fills me to the brim with happiness.
It feels as though I could fly.
***
Wendy: Neverland. Oh, Peter, it would be so wonderful. But wait! What would mother say?
Peter Pan: Mother? What’s a mother?
Wendy: Why, Peter, a mother’s someone … who loves and cares for you and tells you stories—
Peter Pan: Good! You can be our mother. Come on.
***
The moon slides ever higher in the sky as I pull them out of the water and wrap them head to toe, insisting on bedtime. They clutch the towels around their waists, sprinting back along the hallway before coming to a halt at a line of windows. We have paused on the walkway that stretches across Cannery Row, watching the cars pass below us. Penny points southward, at the aquarium. “Do you think the sardines are still swimming in circles over there?”
“Shhhh,” I say, “Don’t let them hear you. They think they are traveling a long, long way.”
“Out there is the ocean,” says Theo, “And the otters are still holding their baby otters, floating in the dark.”
I lean down and pick him up for what is surely one of the last times, his lanky five-year-old frame stretching over me so that his toes brush against my knees. I nod in the opposite direction, saying, “And out past the mountains and deserts and prairie is your bed, all soft and cozy, waiting for you to come home tomorrow.”
***
Michael: Oh, Wendy, we don’t want to go home.
Wendy: But you must. You need a mother. We all do.
Michael: Aren’t you our mother, Wendy?
Wendy: Why, Michael, of course, not! Surely you haven’t forgotten our real mother.
Lost Boys: Tell us! Tell us. Please, Wendy!
Wendy: Well, a mother, a real mother is the most wonderful person in the world. She's the angel voice ... that bids you good night, kisses your cheek, whispers "sleep tight."
***
In the thin glow of the streetlight, I gather wet suits from the floor of the hotel room and hang them in the shower, mentally calculating what remains of the snack reserve while my husband checks us in for our afternoon flight. Our toddler is winning a wrestling match against his older brother, and every few minutes Dan returns to the bed to rebuild the wall of pillows between them, each time with less and less patience. A current runs unspoken between us. We are ready to go home, ready to return to bedtime routines and blackout curtains and all the other mundanely brilliant solutions to the day-in-day-out work of parenting.
In the morning, we will sip weak coffee from paper cups while the children leap from one queen bed to another, high on the countless number of PBS shows it will take us to repack the bags and track down lost socks and iPad chargers.
“Is it worth it?” I whisper, suppressing a yawn as I track down the cap for the toothpaste.
He looks up from the screen and leans against the doorway, now tethered to the wall by a phone cord. “What? Having kids?”
“No!!!” I say, laughing. It’s far too late in the game to ask that sort of question and besides, we both know that it is worth every minute of effort, every hour of lost sleep, every waylaid adventure. I clip three little toothbrushes back into their travel case and hang up the hand towel. “I mean vacation. Is it worth it to do all the regular things, all the exhausting little tasks just … somewhere else?”
Dan puts down his phone and reaches for the belt of the robe still tied tight around me, pulling me closer. “I think it is,” he says. “You’re different here. You’re Vacation Mom.”
“Yet another hat to wear,” I say, but I know he is right. I am different here, even though nothing ever goes quite according to plan. Like Wendy, that darling girl and her longing for mermaids, the adventure is never what I imagined in my head. But it is still wonderful—better sometimes.
Adrienne Garrison lives in Bloomington, Indiana with her husband and their two little ones. Her essays have appeared in Coffee + Crumbs and New Millennium Writings, and her short story “No Longer Mine” was recently featured in LETTERS Journal. Adrienne believes magic takes the form of heart-to-heart conversations, petit-fours, and walks in the woods. You can find more of her writing on her website and Substack.
Sections of this essay are excerpts from the 1953 Disney Animated film, “Peter Pan,” which is an adaptation of JM Barrie’s script by the same name, written in 1904.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.