by Karen Foxlee
Yours sincerely,
Mrs. Cynthia Spink
* * *
February 3, 1975
Burrell’s Publishing Company Ltd
7001 West Washington Street
Indianapolis, Indiana 46241
OUR GIFT TO YOU IS THE GIFT OF KNOWLEDGE
Dear Mrs. Spink,
Congratulations! We wish to inform you that you are one of the lucky winners of the Burrell’s Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia set. Our gift to you is THE GIFT OF KNOWLEDGE. Each issue is delivered direct to your front door and with this letter we are happy to include your first three issues. You’ll have the A volumes built in no time! If at any time you choose to speed up the building of your set please contact our sales team, there are a range of payment plans available.
Yours sincerely,
Martha Brent
General Sales Manager
A:
African Civets and the Abominable Snowman
4’ 5”
FEBRUARY 1975
My mother lied with gay abandon. She lied from the first sentence, Welcome to the Spink family. No one ever visited us except Mrs. Gaspar and Karl and Karla. If someone knocked at the door, our mother would be suspicious. She would peer through the peephole angrily. She would mutter to herself, “Who could that be?”
She lied about taking Davey to the doctor. She hadn’t taken him once, but only mentioned it, instead, every day.
“I’m taking you to the doctor,” she threatened, as though that would stop him growing.
“What will he do?” Davey asked.
“He’ll give you a needle to stop you growing,” said Mother.
“But I don’t like needles,” wailed Davey.
On the subject of our beauty, it was true, Davey was a handsome boy. He had blue eyes and long lashes and a dreamy gaze. But already he was leaning to the right. He’d grown as tall as a fifth grader and he was only five, but he was beginning to bend, just slightly, like a weed wilting in the sun.
I wasn’t pretty, there is no denying it. There were pretty girls at school. They had pretty hair and pretty faces and pretty dresses. They skipped easily, squealed easily, smiled easily. They had names like Tara or Tabitha or Mary-Lynne. None of them had names like Lenny.
In that letter, my mother lied about Peter Lenard Spink.
Peter Lenard Spink. Peter Lenard Spink. Peter Lenard Spink.
I whispered it in bed at night to remember him.
Peter Lenard Spink had nicotine stains on the first two fingers of his right hand. His skin was hard as a hide there, cracked and bright yellow. He was good at string tricks.
“Come over here, little Lenny,” he sometimes said and I knew he was taking the string from his pocket. It was an old frayed string. I knelt before him to watch.
I wanted to.
I didn’t want to.
I wanted to.
I didn’t.
He made a butterfly, quick, looping that string around his fingers and then he snapped it away. A cup and a saucer, a star, cat’s whiskers.
“Meow,” he said.
“Do you remember his string tricks?” I asked Davey in the darkness of our bedroom.
“Of course I do,” he said.
“No, you don’t,” I said to ruffle him.
Witch’s hat. Broomstick. Church steeple. Spider’s web.
“Put your hand in, little Lenny,” Peter Lenard Spink said.
I never wanted to. I wanted him to slow down so I could see how he did it.
“I can’t slow down, the magic stops working,” he said. “Put your hand in.”
It was always the last trick. The end of the show. I put my little hand in through the spider’s web and he went to catch me, but in one flick the web was gone, leaving just one gaping ring.
“Peter Lenard Spink,” I whispered, as though it might stop him from vanishing.
“Stop it,” said Davey. “Mama, Lenny’s scaring me.”
“Go to sleep,” she shouted from the living room.
“Peter Lenard Spink,” I whispered in a scary voice.
In that letter my mother lied about me.
“Mama, she won’t stop it,” shouted Davey.
“Don’t make me come in there,” called Mother from the living room. “Whatever you are doing to scare him, stop it, Lenny. You’ll wake Mr. Petersburg.”
Mr. Petersburg was our neighbor in number sixteen. We hardly believed he was even real. No noises came from his apartment. None at all. I’d only ever seen him twice in all my years and on those occasions he was tall and pale and wore a suit. Quiet and whispery, he had glided up the stairs like a ghost. That’s what I told Davey, who had never seen him.
I liked to remind him.
“Mr. Petersburg the ghost,” I whispered.
“I’ll tell,” he said.
“Let’s watch the buses,” I said to stop him tattling.
His bed was near the wall but mine was near the window. At night the traffic slowed down but never really stopped. It hummed away below us, punctuated by the garbage trucks and the street sweepers and the truck that delivered fruit to Mr. King’s “King of Fruit” Fruit Store. All night the pigeons cooed on the ledge outside. Davey had named those pigeons Frank, Roger, and Martin. I told him for sure one would be a girl but he didn’t agree.
Davey crept into my bed, beside me. We knelt and looked out past Frank and Roger and Martin at the Greyhound bus station across the street. We must have watched a thousand goodbyes from our bedroom window, Davey and I, maybe more. Small farewells and big farewells. Paltry farewells and grand farewells. Some people just couldn’t leave a place without everyone they ever knew coming to see them off: aunts and uncles and grandmas with canes and every cousin and friend, girls in good dresses and boys in ironed pants. All the thronging and hugging and kissing and waving that went on. The faces made from the bus windows. The frantic gesturing. Other people just got on. They had nothing but the ticket in their hand. They climbed the steps and didn’t look back to wave at anyone.
And we saw countless arrivals too, crumpled weary travellers ejected out onto the night streets. We watched them and wondered about where they were going and where they had been. Some had people come to fetch them, others no one. I searched the faces for him, each and every bus, even if I pretended not to.
“Do you even remember him?”
“Of course I do,” said Davey. Up close to me he smelled soapy and clean and his eyes shone.
“No you don’t,” I said.
There were many interesting things that began with A. Aardvarks and aardwolves, albatrosses and African civets. African civets appealed to Davey in a way we couldn’t understand.
“I love those cats,” he said, between us in Mother’s bed.
“It’s not a cat, Davey,” I said.
“It looks like a cat,” said Davey.
“It’s an African civet. It makes musk and they want to catch it and make perfume from it.”
“Don’t talk about that,” said Mother. Her hair was out and her face scrubbed clean. “Please.”
She didn’t like sad things or hard things or mean things.
“They keep them in cages,” she said. “Little wild things kept in cages.”
“I’d keep one in a cage,” said Davey. “For a pet.”
“Hush, Davey,” said Mother. “Let’s read albatrosses instead.”
Davey was sad to see the African civets go.
“Look at these birdies,” said Mother. “‘Albatross’,” she read. “‘A sea bird of the order Procellariiformes and the family Diomedeidae, closely related to storm petrels and diving petrels’.”
She spoke these words carefully and with her shining clean face she looked like a girl. Something in the way she spoke about albatrosses quietened Davey. I closed my eyes and listened. I saw storms and birds diving.
“‘Some albatrosses have wingspans eleven feet across and once the birds fledge some never see the land again for several years.’”
“Where do they fly to?” I asked.
“Oh, here and there, I expect,” she said. “All over the world.”
“‘Albatrosses pair for life’,” she said and then stopped reading.
She was quiet but her thoughts filled up the room the way they often did.
Peter Lenard Spink did a trick with a coin as well. He twirled a dime between his fingers, then he disappeared it up his sleeve. He brought it back again behind my ear.
“You’re too serious, like your mother,” he once whispered to me.
Maybe if I’d laughed more he might have stayed. Or maybe it was that my hair was too thin. He mentioned it once. He said, “You’ve got that bad Spink hair, Lenny.” He smelled like cigarettes and toothpaste and hair cream.
He smelled like belt buckles and bus stops and newspaper ink. His cough was wet. He spat, spat, spat into our bathroom sink. I was glad he was gone and I wanted him back.
“Davey is asleep,” Mother said at last and closed up albatrosses. “And it’s way past your bedtime.”
My brother would not stop growing. Our mother measured us against the kitchen door frame. Me on one side, my brother opposite. She squished down Davey’s hair with her hand and drew the line in marker pen.
“Davey,” she demanded. “Slow down.”
“But I can’t help it,” he said.
Mrs. Gaspar wheezed into our apartment and sat on our sofa. Her beehive looked untended. It listed. She brought her own tea in a little silver canister and handed it to Mother.
“Stand up please, David,” said Mrs. Gaspar.
We were on the floor looking at the abominable snowman. The abominable snowman was our favourite entry so far in the Burrell’s Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia. Two new issues arrived each Friday in the mail and Davey and I rushed down the stairs, bumping each other to get there first, but we returned again and again to the grainy black-and-white image of the abominable snowman.
Davey stood up.
“Yes, it is true, then,” said Mrs. Gaspar. She slumped back into the sofa. “I had a dream last night.”
Mother returned with Mrs. Gaspar’s tea.
We loved Mrs. Gaspar’s dreams. They were colourful and wild and full of warnings. In her dreams birds spoke and the sea washed into the city streets and Mother got married in a blue wedding dress. Once Mrs. Gaspar even dreamed she went to the moon on Apollo 11. “I flew the spaceship,” she said, and it made us giggle so much, the thought of her sitting in there with Neil and Buzz, in her pom-pom slippers and her shaggy tangerine bathrobe, that even Mother started to laugh as well.
“What did you dream?” asked Davey.
“I dreamed you got taller and taller,” said Mrs. Gaspar.
“Mrs. Gaspar,” pleaded Mother.
“Cyn-thi-a,” pleaded Mrs. Gaspar back.
“You grew and grew until—bang—your head hit up on the ceiling,” she whispered.
“Please,” said Mother. “You’ll scare him.”
We loved Mrs. Gaspar’s dreams but sometimes she went too far.
“I’m not scared,” said Davey. He looked down at his feet.
“Anyway, I’m taking him to see the doctor next week,” said Mother.
“Good,” said Mrs. Gaspar and she took a long sip of her special tea.
I wanted to ask what happened next in the dream, after Davey’s head hit the ceiling. I wanted details. Mrs. Gaspar’s dreams were always lush with details. Clocks that called out her name and secret rooms and white horses thundering through the streets. Dream magical stews made with dream mushrooms she found on dream Second Street. But I knew I’d have to ask her later, when Mother wasn’t there.
“You can sit down, David,” said Mrs. Gaspar, now that she’d caused enough trouble. “What are you two dumplings looking at?”
“The abominable snowman,” said Davey.
“Pah,” said Mrs. Gaspar, and she waved her hand as though we bored her. “I saw him once when I was walking home from school in Hungary.”
A:
Ants and Amphibians
4’ 6”
APRIL 1975
Hungary was nowhere near Mount Everest. We knew this because a complimentary atlas arrived with issue ten. It had buoyed our interest momentarily. There were only so many times we could look at African civets and the abominable snowman. We still bumped and bustled our way down the stairs each Friday, but we’d become bogged down in abscesses and abstract art and the two John Adamses. Acne, amoeba, adding machines, and adenoids. All credit to the ancient civilization of the Aegean, but we did not believe it deserved a two-page spread. We were getting bored and the first volume cover had only just arrived. It was olive green, its skin rippled. We fastened the first fifteen issues into the volume cover, A to Ampersand, with a satisfying click, but we didn’t much care.
“I knew it,” said our mother. She was irritated by our boredom.
As though she had bought the encyclopedia herself.
“I knew it!”
As though she hadn’t lied to win it. As though she hadn’t said our father was dead.
“I knew it,” she said and she took A to Ampersand and put it in her bedroom as a punishment.
But then issue sixteen arrived with three pages of glossy colour plates on amphibians. Frogs and axolotls and salamanders. The mountain yellow-legged frog. The blue poison dart frog. The golden frog. Northern leopard frogs. Horned frogs. American bullfrogs. Our favourite, the African goliath.
Included in each description was the sound that the frog made, so we spoke frog language at the dinner table. Davey spoke African goliath. I spoke blue-eyed bush frog.
“Enough,” said Mother. “Enough is enough. Honestly, I’ve had a long day.”
But as soon as she was gone into the kitchen to start the dishes, I did the song of the fire-bellied toad.
“I’m not kidding!” she yelled from the kitchen.
Our mother had a strange high-pitched yell, like someone playing on a tin pipe.
“Don’t push me,” she piped. “Last warning, Lenore Spink.”
Which was exactly what Miss Schweitzer said to me at school, only she dropped the Lenore. “Last warning, Spink,” she said when I was daydreaming about the abominable snowman and if he belonged to a family. If he was a father. If he had two children and a wife.
“Spink,” said Miss Schweitzer. “I can’t imagine what it’s like inside that brain of yours. I bet it’s a jumbled-up mess like a junk sale.”
She was right. It was filled up with the Arctic and Africa and several colour plates on ants. I thought about the ants a lot. Army ants and Argentine ants, bulldog ants and crazy ants, pharaoh ants and honeypot ants. My head was filled up with ants that could kill you if they stung you and ants that could launch themselves out of trees and glide to the ground without wings. I smiled at Miss Schweitzer and wished I could tell her how bad it really was.
But you couldn’t tell Miss Schweitzer things like that. She wouldn’t like to hear about the abominable snowman even though she was frostily beautiful. I disliked Miss Schweitzer, yet I touched my handkerchief in my pocket, to check that it was pristine, because I still wanted to impress her. It was a strange and powerful conundrum.
“Don’t you leave that iron on and burn the whole place down,” said Mother when I ironed my handkerchiefs.
Sometimes I imagined it. I’d be at school and I’d smell smoke. I’d hear the sound of fire engines and I’d know. Everything would be gone. All our clothes. My glow in the dark sandals. My Bambi LP. Davey’s cowboy shirts. Davey’s big brown shoes. The photograph of Nanny Flora. That would sizzle and burn. The Burrell’s Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia. A to Ampersand. The issue with the amphibians. All the colour plates of ants.
“That Schweitzer has too much time on her hands if handkerchiefs are all she worries about,” I said to CJ in the playground.
“What’s the point of a handkerchi
ef if you can’t blow your nose on it?” replied CJ.
“Don’t you agree?” I asked Matthew Milford who was nearby. I pushed my perfectly ironed handkerchief deeper into my pocket. He looked at me as though it might be a trick question. I crumbled up my cookie and fed it to the ants in the playground and smiled at him to show I was friendly. He crumbled up some of his sandwich. We took turns seeing what the ants could handle.
“I thought you liked amphibians,” said CJ.
“I do,” I said. “But I like ants too.”
I could tell she was anxious that Matthew Milford might become my new best friend. I asked her to be the Ant Olympics crumb-lifting judge and it settled her.
“Did Davey go to the doctor yet?” she asked. She was dreadfully biased. She had ruled three times in favor of my ant crumb-lifting team.
“No, we go on Saturday morning,” I said.
“Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-hat’s …” started Matthew Milford.
“Nothing is wrong with him,” I said.
It was a long walk to Dr. Leopold’s office. Second Street, all moon-rock-coloured, stretched forever and I wondered sometimes if it ever even ended.
We went past Mr. King’s “King of Fruit” Fruit Store.
“Hello, Cindy,” shouted Mr. King.
Mr. King was short and he wore his hair like Elvis, but he had a bristly moustache as well. He had sparkly black eyes and they danced all over Mother. “Where are you all going on such a beautiful Saturday?”
Mr. King had the trace of an accent and black stubble on his chin like Fred Flintstone.
“We have an appointment for Davey at the doctor’s,” said Mother.
