by Alice Ozma
“No,” my father said, “if she’s quick on her feet she’s safe from Bertha. And look how lively she is! She can take care of herself, I’m sure.”
His voice was filled with wonder as he looked from Bertha to the newcomer, and I knew he was about to begin his almost nightly lecture on their beauty. I always wanted to hear it, so I prompted him.
“Dad, why do you like spiders so much?”
He sighed a contented sigh and stared dreamily at the complex web.
“Well, Lovie, it’s like we always say. I like that they’re active. They don’t just sit on a plant and sunbathe. They go out and find something to do, like make this web, and then they catch things, and then they put them in storage. I like the way they walk, the way they lift their legs like they’re walking through puddles gracefully. And I like that they’re underrated. Everyone thinks they’re harmful but they’re really quite beneficial.”
“What if you woke up and there was a spider on you?”
“At least you know there aren’t any other bugs on you!”
“What if it was a big one?”
“The bigger the better!”
“The bigger the better,” I repeated, noticing movement in Bertha’s web. I jumped to my feet, thinking she’d caught something, but when I saw that the web was empty, I realized: “That noise in the distance must be thunder!”
“Geezlepeezle!” my father exclaimed. “I almost forgot, there’s a huge storm predicted tonight. Good thing we finished our reading in time to see it!”
Of course, he hadn’t forgotten. That’s why we’d come straight to the porch after we finished a chapter of It’s Like This, Cat. Partly to check on Bertha, of course, but also to observe another beloved sight: the coming of a summer storm.
We turned off the porch light (I apologized to Bertha in case it would hurt her business) to get the full effect of the lightning and ate pineapple juice pops while we waited, getting more excited as the time between the lightning and thunder got smaller. In school we’d learned that for every “Mississippi” you could say between seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder, the storm was a certain number of miles away. I forgot how many miles it was exactly, but right now the storm was six Mississippis away, which seemed impressive. I told my father this with excitement. He smiled.
“Do you remember being scared of storms?” he asked.
“No,” I said dismissively, “I was never afraid of storms. You must be thinking of Spider.”
Appropriately enough, this was also our nickname for my sister, because of her long, thin legs. Partly because she was seven-and-a-half years my elder and partly because she was on the tall side, her legs always seemed to me twice the size of my entire body. There were few things I loved as thoroughly as spiders, but my older, cooler sister was one of them. The comparison was the highest compliment to both of course.
“No no, it was you,” he said emphatically. “When you were two years old, maybe even as late as three, you were terrified of thunderstorms. Your mother started that in you. The thunder would get to rumbling off in the distance, and she would call you inside immediately, and make it all out as the most horrible thing to ever happen on Hazel Boulevard.”
I still didn’t believe him.
“If I was scared of them then, why aren’t I scared of them now?” I asked suspiciously.
“You think I was going to let you be afraid of something as beautiful as a thunderstorm? Like fun! As soon as I realized what your mother was up to, I brought you out on the porch, right in the heart of the storm, and every time we would see a lightning bolt I would yell, ‘That’s a good one!’ ”
“What did I do?”
“What do you do now? After a few minutes, you started yelling, ‘That’s a good one!’ and hopping up and down like a frog, ‘That’s a good one! That’s a good one!’ You would hop and hop and hop, cheering with all the life in you and shaking your little fists, even when the lightning was right overhead! Sometimes I thought the house was going to crack open. But as long as we were under the roof of the porch and close to the house, I figured we were reasonably safe. As safe as anywhere, I’d imagine.”
The storm was getting closer and the windows were starting to shake beautifully, humming with the excitement and anticipation.
“So the only reason I like storms is because you convinced me to?”
“You liked storms because they were fun! The sky lights up. You can see the whole street. Also they’re loud. And maybe a little dangerous.”
He was also describing the current scene, as the sky broke open with a crack and a torrential downpour began. My first instinct was to check to see if Bertha was safe, but she was a smart girl and had already headed for her rain spot, hidden behind the gutter. You had to know where to look, because only one brown leg was sticking out, almost flirtatiously, against the white paint. The newcomer had moved to the window, and I couldn’t tell if she was looking in or looking out. With all those eyes, it was probably both.
“I was never afraid of spiders, was I?” I had to ask, even though I knew that an affirmative answer would be the ultimate shame.
“I don’t recall that you were,” he laughed. “But I took preventative measures.”
I remembered Charlotte’s Web, and how it had been one of the first books we ever read together. Charlotte was my favorite character in the book, before Wilbur or even Templeton. She used her webs to spell out words just as I was learning to spell them myself, and I knew how proud of herself she must be. All words look beautiful in your own handwriting, so they would have looked even prettier on a web. Maybe Bertha was writing words, too, but since there was no pig in need of saving she needn’t bother to write them in English. They were in spider language, with tight capital letters that people couldn’t read. Charlotte would have known what they said—she was great with languages. English, spider language, pig or rat or goose language, she could do it all and still have time to make something beautiful. But that didn’t make me respect Bertha any less, because she was real, and she was ours.
“I would have liked spiders on my own,” I insisted.
I just would have, because of their colors and their eyes and their gift-wrapping technique and their dazzling webs. And their legs, like my sister’s.
“You didn’t even name Bertha,” I pointed out. “That was me.”
“Yes, you probably always liked spiders,” he agreed.
I still felt a little cheated, since he was trying to take all the credit. But he had gotten me thinking, and I was feeling something else, too.
Really, secretly, I was a little proud. Proud to love storms and spiders, things most of my friends hated. Proud to be fearlessly out on the porch watching the wind whip the trees and waiting for lightning to strike. Even if he had coaxed me out of a fear years ago, was that so bad? Anything was better than hiding in my bed, pulling the covers up over my head and waiting for the storm to pass like I’d seen girls do at sleepovers. And now, my excitement was all my own, bubbling over in me without his help.
When lightning finally struck in plain sight, lighting our faces like a flash photograph, we both rose to our feet at the same time. But the line was mine to say, and I relished it.
“THAT’S A GOOD ONE!” I yelled, jumping up and down, shaking my fists in triumph.
CHAPTER NINE
Day 758
Everybody cried, because death is hard. Death is sad. But death is part of life. When someone you know dies, it’s your job to keep on living.
—Deborah Wiles, Each Little Bird That Sings
I never really thought of my grandfather as my father’s father. I couldn’t picture him as a young person, meeting my grandmother and picking out a ring. I knew that he was something in the war, but I don’t think anyone knew for sure exactly what he did. At some point his children were born, and he raised them, and then he became Poppop. I didn’t know much about Charles Brozina, but as Poppop, he was at least familiar.
Poppop kept a garden b
ehind the house, where he raised the usual Jersey things, like squash and strawberries and tomatoes bigger than both my fists together. He’d go out to work in the garden for hours every day, sweating though his striped gray overalls that might have been blue once. It was only a few months before he died when I realized that he was a retired road worker with a hobbyist’s garden and not the full-time farmer I’d always assumed he was. He never mentioned his old line of work to me, but he always sent me home with a crinkly plastic bag of produce, so for years I wanted to be a farmer. He smelled of soil and Ivory soap, which struck me as the perfect combination.
I don’t remember much from his funeral other than that the smell was gone, the way my mother’s smell went away the day she moved out. The room with my grandfather’s casket smelled like flowers and perfume and wood polish, but there was no hint of dirt or soap. There were little cardboard prayer cards, one of which I folded into tiny squares until my sister told me I might want it someday. The rest of the day has faded with time. What I remember from that week happened the night before.
Before the viewing, my father and his siblings were called to the funeral parlor to make sure their father looked just as they wanted him to for the next morning. When my dad got home from the event and came up for our reading, he looked a little shaken. Since the event had seemed mostly a formality (he had seen the body before), I was a bit taken aback to see him affected by it. We hadn’t talked about the passing of his father, so when I asked him what was wrong, I was expecting the kind of conversation I knew from sitcoms. Poppop was gone. He wasn’t coming back, but he was in a better place. I would feel better in time, but never forget him. I certainly had not expected my father to talk about his feelings, especially with me. A little over a decade of life experience seemed hardly enough to qualify me for the position of compassionate listener. But as I sat beside him on his bed, nodding my head and asking questions at the right moments, that was what I tried to be. He began without much prompting, which made me even more certain that he was sharing his burden rather than trying to explain death.
“We were all standing around the casket,” he explained in a calm but surprisingly soft voice, “and the room was crowded, since there was Grandmom and the four of us. Everyone else managed to get spots right up close, looking at him, but there was no room for me. I tried to squeeze in but when I didn’t fit I had to go down and stand by his feet.”
I nodded and used a phrase I had recently learned at school:
“And how did that make you feel?”
“Well, at first I was pretty annoyed. I wanted to see him as much as the rest of them, and even as tall as I am it’s not like I could see over my brothers. So I was stuck at the feet and I wasn’t too happy about it. What kind of feedback could I give the funeral director about the feet? That the shoes needed some shining?”
“Did they?”
He ignored this question, and I made a mental note that my questions only worked if they got him talking about the things he already wanted to talk about. I tried to be the best possible listener, not even biting my nails. Well, biting them a little, but only to help me concentrate.
“I stood there sort of brooding, waiting for my chance to move up to the head of the casket, but then I actually started looking at his feet. When I looked at them, they made me think.”
“What did they make you think of?”
It was obvious that he was going to tell me anyway, but I wanted him to know that I was really listening, and that I wasn’t scared to hear his real thoughts on death, even if parents usually hid them.
“They made me think of the times when I was a kid.” The strain in his voice told me this was the part that had him shaken. “And he would pay me a nickel to rub them. When he got home from work and his feet were sore, he would pay me a nickel to rub his feet, and I’d use the nickel to buy baseball cards. There were four of us, you know, but I don’t know if he asked anyone else to rub his feet. That was our thing, as far as I can remember.”
He let out a sigh after saying it, like it hurt a little more to get it out than it did to keep it in. I warned myself never to make him repeat it, no matter how old I got. It felt like a secret.
“Didn’t you have other things? Things that you shared, like The Streak?”
“Nothing like The Streak. We both liked baseball, but my brother liked baseball.”
He thought for a moment, and again I knew that this was the right question. I looked at myself in the mirror across from his bed, checking to see if I suddenly looked a little taller or more adult. I thought I did. Maybe a little. My father looked as big as ever, but his size was all huddled up in a lump, curled up on itself like he was bracing for a storm.
“Well, boxing was our thing. We would watch the fights together on Fairton Road when I still lived there, and when I moved he would come here to watch them. Sometimes I took him to see them in person. We saw some pretty good fights.”
“So it’s not like all you ever did, just the two of you, was rub his feet.”
“There was more than that, but not much more than that. It’s hard with four. How do you ever spend time with one? What are the other three doing? When you finally do spend time alone together, it’s not until you’re both adults. And then I can’t say it’s quite the same. Not the same as getting to know them when they’re still trying to figure things out about the world.”
“But you’re still trying to figure things out about the world even now, aren’t you?”
“That’s very true. Are you?”
“Yes, there’s lots I want to figure out. I’m sure Spider has lots to figure out, too,” I said, pointing to a photo of my sister on his nightstand.
“Two is a lot easier than four.”
“But you still had time to get to know Poppop, I mean your dad. Right? Plenty of time.”
He shook his head in a way that could have been a dismissive yes, of course or an honest not at all. He had the book on his lap, ready to start our reading, but he just stared at the floor. Or maybe at his own feet. I wanted to keep asking the right questions. He had always spoken with me honestly, but it was never quite so candid. He was talking to me like an adult, breaking all the rules I had come to understand about explaining death to children. He wasn’t explaining death. He was explaining Charles Brozina, his father, and along the way, he was explaining James Brozina, my father, even more clearly.
“He worked hard every day of his life. Started working full-time when he was barely a teenager, after his father died.”
I’d heard this before, but for the first time I actually tried to imagine my grandfather as a child, not much older than I was now, working to support a family. It made me exhausted just thinking about it. I felt even worse imagining his life without his father. What would have happened to my dad if Poppop had died while his children were still young? And how could my grandfather bond with his children after giving up his own childhood to work like an adult? Paying your son for a quick foot rub must have seemed silly, almost satirical, to a man who did manual labor for meager pay starting at age fourteen. But when I pictured his face, weathered and worn, it seemed happy. The skin seemed a bit gray and tough in my memory, but the mouth was set in a small smile. I had seen him alive just days ago, so I was sure this was right.
“He might have worked hard,” I conceded, “but he died a happy man.”
“Do you think so?”
When his voice came out, it sounded strangely like mine whenever I asked this question. Hopeful and looking for a reason to be optimistic, but in need of a little coaching. I wasn’t quite sure how to play this role, since I was always on the other end of the conversation. But I tried to imagine what my father might say to himself. I kept my voice steady and confident.
“Yes, of course. He had four great children, who all have steady jobs and families now. He had grandchildren who loved him. He had Grammom”—here my father looked concerned, so I immediately smoothed over with—“who will miss him but had lots of g
reat years with him. And he had a beautiful garden full of delicious foods, and a great pair of overalls, and a very memorable smell. He was a great man, and he lived a great life, and I think he died happy.”
And then, to show I’d really been listening,
“Maybe we can look at some of those baseball cards you got with your foot rubbing nickels after Read Hot?”
The words reminded him we had a task at hand, and he pulled the bookmark out.
“You could write a person a pretty good eulogy, Lovie.”
His voice and smile told me that he was feeling better, but I hoped his comment meant that he hadn’t regretted being honest with me. Losing someone is sad. It was sad for both of us, even though he was an adult and my father. Had he told me this, I might not have believed him. But when he had spoken plainly and openly, I caught a glimpse of a rare, vulnerable side of my father that I would not truly see again for years. Maybe I was still too young to completely understand death, but I was old enough to realize that what had just happened was special, and that in my own way I had actually helped my father through the grieving process.
When he began reading, I snuggled even closer into his arm. I cried softly, my tears trickling down onto his shirt and his pillow, because I missed my grandfather. And I knew that was okay.
CHAPTER TEN
Day 829
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Case of Identity,” The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The nurse knew my tricks. It wasn’t that I didn’t like school, or even that I particularly liked going home. There’s nothing interesting on television between nine in the morning and two in the afternoon. But I liked going to the nurse, and I liked being sent home. It was a chance to practice my acting skills and maybe miss some multiplication drills at the same time. And the nurse was friendly, chatty, and warm. Even when she didn’t send me home, she kept me in the office for a while. I think she enjoyed our visits almost as much as I did, and for the same reason: it was a break from the daily routine.
