written in one hour only!
Lessons Of Life
by Jessica
What would you do if everyday you came home sobbing? Uncontrollable tears spilling down your face. Your sisters teasing you constantly, “Turn off the faucet, somebody! She cries at the drop of a hat”; everyday you see what goes wrong in life. You put on a brave face outside your home, but every jeer someone throws, you cry a little more inside. In the story, “In the Blink of an Eye” by Norma Fox Mazer, Norma Fox is a female teen struggling to see the good in the world and others. She is warring with her mind and her heart all day, everyday. Norma wants to keep the tears from coming but she “…doesn’t ask for tears. They just come,” and sometimes in life we don’t ask for the good or bad, they surprise us, just like Norma’s tears.
At the beginning of the story, Norma picks up a cigarette from the gutter taking a long drag. She glances around the neighborhood; if anyone spotted her smoking her mother would kill her! She speeds home bumping into Herbie Sternfeld. His parents are the landlords and her “mother says [she] has to be polite to the Seinfeld’s,”; for Norma it’s easy being nice to Herbie’s parents but it’s difficult to be nice to Herbie. Herbie is weird, he does experiments in the shed, he walks funny, and his hair is stiff and black. When Herbie calls Norma a dirty liar she blows a breath of hot, stinky gutter smoke into his face. He reels back and pushes her, cracking her head into a tree. He walks off leaving Norma and her secret, silent cries, alone.
That night Norma lays down in bed hearing Herbie yell at his parents next door, Norma wishes she had parents like the Sterfeld's. Every time she passes by them they “nod their white little heads and say, ‘Nice girl! Nice girl!’” and Norma’s heart swells with joy at their love and compassion. The next day Norma plays her favorite game called “Spies”. She runs down to her shed and presses your eye against the slats only to see Herbie across the room mixing things in jars and beakers. It excites Norma to be so sneaky and, “Once or twice, Herbie looks toward the flimsy wall separating us, and seems to look at almost the exact spot where I’ve got my eye.” She runs back up the stairs promising herself she won’t do it again, but she doesn’t want to stop, so she goes on playing Spies.
One day as Norma peeks her eye into the slat she realizes Herbie is not across the room, “He is right there standing by the wall staring back at me,” a hypodermic needle in his right hand. He raises the needle and pushes the plunger sending a stream of hot acid into her eye. She staggers backwards running up the stairs. Soon the doctors arrive saying, ”that if it was a fraction closer, she might have lost sight in that eye.” Norma realizes she hasn’t cried the whole time that this ordeal has been happening. She wonders if she doesn’t cry in front of strangers but soon comes to understand that she had passed over the invisible line between childhood and becoming more mature.
Norma proved to be a dynamic character; she changed in a significant way over the course of a story. She started out as a crybaby with a rough exterior but ended up as a mature teen who would never lose the sense of gratitude that she had sight in her left eye. When we reach that point where we are stuck between being a child and an adult, it can be a rough transition. You make mistakes, take the wrong road, but that is what life is about. This story taught me that it is okay to change who you are. Norma will always remember her sensitive past, and try to carry the lessons she learned with her into the future.
