COME ON, PATSY

Elementary irony is the keynote of this very brief rhyming monologue in the seemingly upbeat, brisk and friendly words of a little girl inviting another, named Patsy, to play. Sounding at first like a simpy Dick-and-Jane contrivance—"Hi, Patsy. Do you want to play?/ Want to go to the park?/ I know a new way"—the words are soon revealed as those of a headlong, insensitive bully who drags poor weeping Patsy through all kinds of hazards with only impatient reprimands ("I told you to hurry. . . . You should have jumped higher. . . . Why didn't you say you don't like to go high") as Patsy falls and scrapes her knee, has her clothes bitten by a bulldog, gets sick from the merry-go-round, and so on. Zemach makes the speaker's obliviousness amusingly obvious and Patsy's distress comically pathetic, though she never goes beyond the requirements of the single-minded, far from catchy text. This is incidental Zemach and incidental Snyder—but it's a sufficiently novel diversion, with the added educational value of a guided reading between the lines.