The Whole Truth

In kindergarten, we were taught to read using the Letter People. The Letter People were 26 balloons, each of which represented a different letter of the alphabet. Each consonant was a man and each vowel a woman and each Letter Person had traits that corresponded to his or her letter (for example, Mr. M had a munching mouth and Mr. B had beautiful buttons). The balloons were hung around the ceiling and stared down at us forbiddingly all day and sometimes it was hard to shake the feeling that one of them would come to life and brutalize us were we ever to get out of line. (I still have nightmares about Mr. T, lifeless eyes rolling around in his head, slowly chomping his gigantic teeth closer and closer until I wake up.)

I don’t know if this is the most effective way to teach kids how to read. More often than not, the Letter People only raised more questions than they answered. This was especially true when it was announced that, as part of a lesson to teach us that Q is always followed by a U, Mr. Q and Miss U were to be married. Would Miss U take Mr. Q’s name? If so, would words like and blue and queen become blqe and qqeen? Or perhaps she would hyphenate her name and become Mrs. U-Q, which would present all sorts of problems in itself.

It turns out that Miss U was one of those feminist types and did not take Mr. Q’s name, but that was not the end of the questions that arose from this odd situation. We understood why Q was marrying U – after all, he never goes anywhere unless she drags him along. But why would Miss U settle down with a born loser like Mr. Q? There were so many options out there for her – it seemed to me that Mr. R always had an eye for her. Was she getting that desperate and frightened of ending up alone that she settled down with the first letter who threw himself at her?

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Miss U could do better than a pitiful outcast known only for being Quiet. I’m sure Miss U herself knew it; she never looked so scared and hesitant as she did walking down the aisle to her oblivious husband at her wedding, which we celebrated with the entire kindergarten.

But it was quickly evident that little had changed. Miss U continued to gallivant about the English language caring little if at all for who she was seen with. I felt awful for Mr. Q. I imagined that, desperately in love with Miss U, the only way he could get her to agree to marriage was to term it an “open relationship.” While Miss U had the time of her life, Mr. Q was of course too timid to do anything but sit at home, hoping that she would eventually fall in love with him and only him. It never happened, of course, and Miss U continued making a fool of her poor faithful husband.

Mr. Q probably took a stand and convinced himself that he was going to go out and have a good time of his own. But he’s really nothing more than a social defect. Nobody wants to be put in the uncomfortable position of being seen with Q, the most awkward letter in the alphabet. At least X is fun and unpredictable; Mr. Q really has nothing to recommend him. So he just started sticking himself places where he didn’t belong like at the end of Iraq and waited for someone else to come along while I, R and A stood to themselves and tried to figure out why Q had followed them there and why he wouldn’t leave when they’d rather be hanging out with Mr. N. And when that didn’t work out for him he started proposing unwieldy alternate spellings like one of the hundreds of ways you could write Moammar Gadhafi’s name. Miss U probably felt bad for him and tried to cajole her friends into going out with him, but that all ended after Miss A was mortified to find herself stuck next to him at the beginning of Al Qaeda.

A few years later, my elementary school cancelled the Letter People program amid complaints that it was sexist for only having five women versus 21 men. But I think there’s probably more to the story than everyone let on. Mr. Q most likely just got tired of it all and leapt off his perch atop the classroom, ending his life. Everyone must have wondered how the quiet guy they’d all known had been able to do this. The only trace he left behind was a note that simply read: “Forget about me.” At least that’s the way I imagine it.