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cook about it. “She’s an odd duck,” the nanny said. She didn’t sound as if she found it a particularly appealing trait.
    Unfortunately there were other indications of Gwen’s oddness. For a while she had become obsessed with words. “Why do we say it’s a plate?” she demanded. “Why don’t we call it spinach? Or a mud pie?”
    “Because it’s a plate, that’s its name,” her nanny had replied.
    “But what if the name is wrong? In other countries they call it something else.”
    “Well, we’re right here in the good old U.S. of A. So you don’t need to worry your head about what foreigners might say.”
    “But what if they’re right and we’re wrong? Or what if everyone is wrong? What if words don’t mean anything? What if nothing means anything?”
    “Odd duck,” said the nanny to the cook. “Just odd.”
    *                           *                           *         
    Gwen gave up on Nanny Sarah. But questions kept cropping up in her mind. And no matter how hard she tried to keep them to herself, she needed to talk about them. So the next time she had one of her odd-duck ideas she decided to take it to the place where children were supposed to get answers—or so she had been told. She took it to her school.
    Gwen planned her presentation carefully; she didn’t want her teacher, Miss Spencer, thinking she was odd. This meant she had to wait until an empty Land O’Lakes butter box was thrown into the kitchen trash. She retrieved her treasure on a Saturday and hid it until Monday when she brought it to school. Monday morning was show-and-tell time, and when it was Gwen’s turn to speak she held the box out so the entire class could see it.
    “There’s a picture of a girl on this box,” she began. Something about the seriousness with which she said it—or maybe it was just the fact that she’d brought an old butter box to show-and-tell—must have seemed funny to the other children, because they started to titter. Normally this would have been enough to send Gwen back to her seat, but need drove her on. “The girl is holding a box of butter that has a picture on it of a girl holding a box of butter,” she went on bravely.
    “Yes, you’re absolutely right, Gwen. How interesting. Thank you for sharing that,” said Miss Spencer. “Now does anyone else have something to—”
    “But when does it stop?” Gwen broke in. “Does it just go on and on forever?”
    “Does what go on?” asked Miss Spencer who was as bewildered as Nanny Sarah had been.
    “The box!” Gwen said. The other kids were laughing out loud now. “The box and the girl, does it just go on forever with boxes and girls holding them? What does forever mean? And is there a bigger box that I can’t see with a bigger girl holding it . . .” and then to her horror Gwen felt the treacherous tears stinging at her eyes, and, dropping the Land O’Lakes box, she ran out of the classroom.
    “Neurotic,” Gwen overheard Miss Spencer say to the school nurse after she had taken Gwen to the nurse’s office to lie down for a little while. “The child is obviously having some serious problems.”
    “Are you going to ask for a conference with the parents?” asked the nurse.
    “Would you want to be the one to tell Cassandra Wright her daughter is disturbed? I’m not touching that with a ten-foot pole.”
    And there it was. In addition to nurture and nature, there was another element forming the character of Gwen Wright when she was young. She was a Wright of Wright Glassworks, living in the vicinity of Wrightstown. If there was ever a definition of life in a fishbowl, that was it. Actors and politicians, who had, after all, asked for the scrutiny, did not live more public lives than Gwen and her mother did in their small world. Perhaps ordinary little Susie Jones could afford to be an odd duck; Gwen Wright could not. She was not supposed to have strange thoughts.