by Alice Ozma
My teachers quickly caught on and started limiting my nurse passes, but there were ways of getting around this. Substitute teachers, for example, were particularly sympathetic to a gravelly cough or clammy hands (I just so happened to have the latter naturally, and often used it to my advantage). The aides on the playground would send anyone in who asked, reasoning that you had to be feeling pretty lousy to willingly give up your kickball or dodgeball privileges. I hated, and will probably always hate, any of the games involving kicking, catching, or, in my case, hiding from bright red playground balls. I was bad at all of these “sports” and found them boring, but more importantly, I got hit pretty often. The aides didn’t pick up on this, though. A quick point to my stomach, some light panting, and maybe a comment about how sad I’d be to miss my turn (“Oh man! I was really looking forward to kicking this dangerous-looking ball in the general direction of the opposing team!”) and I’d be on my way back in the building, nurse’s pass in hand.
I’d come in, and she’d smile and pull out a chair. Most of the time she would ask me what was wrong, but sometimes she’d try to guess from my facial expression or my posture.
“Sore throat, huh?” she’d say, reaching for a cough drop.
“Uh-huh,” I’d whisper, quickly moving my hand from my stomach to my neck. “Really bad.”
For the first ten minutes or so, I always had to go lie on the cot. There were three cots in the nurse’s office, but I always chose the same one—my home away from home as my father might say—in the back left corner. It was in its own tiny, enclosed room, made of those shiny manila bricks popular in freshman dorms, hospitals, and other generally unhappy places. On the far end was a bathroom, which I avoided at all costs since some genuinely sick kid had almost certainly thrown up in there in the past few hours. The trick was to act queasy, not get queasy. After closing the bathroom door to avoid accidentally seeing a spot of half-digested chicken patty the janitors had forgotten to clean up, I climbed up on the cot and closed my eyes. It was impossible to sleep, partly because of the scratchy white paper rolled out over the cot and partly because of my age. At ten years old, I was still dangerously close to the days of forced naps. My rebellious nature would barely let me take a long blink while the sun was out, let alone a voluntary snooze. But the point here wasn’t sleeping, anyway—sometimes staying up was more convincing.
“Couldn’t sleep a wink, huh?” the nurse would say, standing over my cot twenty or so minutes after she sent me to lie down.
“Uh-uh,” I’d say, shaking my head wearily.
“That throat of yours must be pretty bad, huh?”
“Uh-huh,” I’d say, wincing as the words came out.
“Let’s go call someone,” she’d say, helping me to my feet.
“Oh no,” I’d whisper hoarsely, “I was hoping to get back outside in time to kick the ball. I love kicking the ball, and having it thrown at me. But if you really think we should call home…”
Protesting, of course, always sealed the deal. I think because she believed that a woman’s place was with her children, the nurse always called my mother first, even though she’d already moved out. I went to her apartment sometimes, but about halfway through the year, between her own illnesses and mine, my mother was usually out of sick days. The nurse’s phone was always loud enough for me to hear the conversation on the other end of the line, and when I heard that tone in my mother’s voice—regretful but sort of annoyed—I knew what was coming next.
“No problem at all,” the nurse would say cheerfully. “I’ll call her father then.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy spending time with my father—of course I did, almost always. But once he’d gone to work, crisply dressed in a well-ironed dress shirt and pants and a colorful tie, he was a different man. At home he would indulgently tolerate my meaningless ramblings for hours at a time. We’d eat ice cream, and watch ’50s horror movies, and, of course, read. But at work, only one of these mattered: reading was the focus of every moment, and anything else was a distraction.
My father spent thirty-eight years as an elementary school librarian, and I can say almost without bias that he was clearly the best around. His students loved him because he was good at what he did—from reading, to discipline, to creating a general mood of mutual respect, my father was an expert at getting children to love their time in the library. He was an absolute pleasure to watch almost any given day. On certain days, though, it bordered on cruel and unusual punishment.
On the rare occasion that my father was called to pick me up and actually agreed to come, I had to be genuinely sick—unlike the nurse, he automatically assumed I was faking unless there was a high fever involved. We’d make a quick stop at home to get my sleeping bag, pillow, and cough drops and then head straight back to his library. I tried to explain to him that when you are sick, really sick, the last place you want to be is in an elementary school surrounded by loud, potentially germy kids. In fact, that was precisely the environment I was trying to avoid by calling him to get me. But my father, who was born with only 25 percent of his hearing, could be particularly good at ignoring my protests when he wanted to. As long as I was physically able to walk up the stairs of his building, it was off to the library with me.
When we first arrived, it took him a few moments to notify the staff that he was back in the building and library classes could resume as usual. During this time I would spread out my sleeping bag behind his desk, a spot I thought hid me from view to some extent and led to less staring from his classes. You could still see me through the bottom of the desk, though, and I was perfectly clear from the side when you first entered the room. It really wasn’t much of a hiding place. As soon as children came into the library, they immediately started asking who was behind the desk, wondering if I was in time-out or perhaps dead. My father ignored these questions completely, not wanting his students to be distracted any further, and whisked them to their seats.
Depending on what time of day I arrived, I would hear the same books anywhere from three to eight times. Each collection was a series of seven or so picture books, all classics in my father’s eyes and almost all familiar to me from readings at home. He had the books completely memorized from hours of rehearsal, so he held the pictures facing the children the entire time. From cover to cover, he would recite, in a clear but theatrical voice, stories from the Berenstain Bears to folktales, and his favorites like the Clifford books or the Dumb Bunnies, never once stumbling or stopping, always keeping a set tempo and turning the pages at the appropriate moment.
Since I never came in during the first few weeks of the school year, I didn’t know for sure if his students were, at one time, surprised by this technique. It certainly didn’t surprise me—after seeing his rehearsals so many times, it took me years to convince myself that those who did not read to children this way weren’t flat-out lazy. It seemed natural to know what was coming next, to turn the page with absolute certainty, to lift your eyebrows in surprise at an event you certainly knew was coming. As someone who was already writing and performing in plays with friends, this may have been where I first found my inspiration. My father claims that he could never enjoy acting, yet he did it every day for years, calmly changing his voice to portray a small child like Dr. Seuss’s Cindy Lou Who, or dramatically slamming the book shut at the end of a creepy tale like The Monster and the Tailor. It required skill, and lots of it.
But on those days, crouched behind the desk in my sleeping bag with a pounding headache or a churning stomach, I found his performances anything but impressive. With each gasp from the children at a surprising twist (which I couldn’t even see, since the pictures were pointed at them and away from me) I groaned and covered my ears, retreating deeper into my sleeping bag, looking for somewhere, anywhere to hide from the noise and the lights. However bad I thought it was the first time, it got exponentially worse with the recitation of each book. Even worse was if the book rhymed, making it easy to memorize. In those instanc
es, I’d find myself whispering along by the end of the day, unable to tune out my father’s resounding voice, unable to sleep through the enthusiastic clapping that followed each and every book. During those moments, I would have given anything to be back on the cot in the nurse’s office, in the dark brick room, perhaps actually napping for once.
During the car ride home, I’d make my case once again.
“The thing is I just feel worse when you take me to the library. It’s loud and hot and there are people everywhere. It’s not the kind of place you should take a sick child.”
“For someone who is supposed to have a fever of 101, you’re awfully clearheaded in making your arguments.”
“Does that mean you actually understand what I’m trying to say?”
“Martha said, ‘No discussion!’ ” he would repeat, reciting a classic (well, classic to us) line from the George and Martha picture book series by James Marshall. When Martha, or my father, said no discussion, it was final. I’d sulk all the way home, trying to pick the library floor dust out of my hair. Reading was his passion, so all-consuming that he could not be convinced to stop even to stay home with a sick child. He never took sick days himself, and he clearly could not see the point in sitting around on the couch doing nothing while I slept in my bed upstairs. If he was well enough to read, he would read, regardless of any distractions like my incessant cough from the back of the library.
This may be, in part, why The Streak worked. Nothing stopped my father from doing what he had planned to do, especially when the thing he had planned to do was reading. Reading was sacred, traditional, perennial. I could hardly remember when the reading began (we’d read for years before officially starting The Streak) and I certainly couldn’t imagine where it would end. Neither could he.
On those days when I curled up in my sleeping bag, counting the minutes and crawling deeper at any dangerous-sounding cough or sneeze from a fellow infection carrier, we still read. Of course we still read. Those five or more hours of nonstop, unavoidable reading in the library did not count. My father had not been reading directly to me, and it was in his eyes an unacceptable substitute. So after my bath, right before bed, I’d go get the Raggedy Ann doll he’d gotten me when I was four years old. She seemed big, almost as big as me, and she felt heavy when I was tired, but the bright red thread that outlined her smiling mouth made me feel better. I’d slip under the covers next to him, box of tissues in hand. I’d sneeze, and cough, and sometimes coil up tightly in an attempt to keep my dinner down, but we would read. We would read, just the two of us, like we always did.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Day 873
To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
It’s got a great coat of paint, and it rides like a dream,” my father began, trying to defend his purchase against the suspicious glance I shot him over my breakfast. This one did look like it was in great shape, but when my father brought home his sixth yard-sale bike of the summer, I knew we needed to talk.
“Listen,” I began, “do you even know how to ride that thing?”
“Of course I know how to ride it,” he said, wheeling it quickly past me and toward the basement door.
“And do you plan to ride it? Because if it’s going to just sit in storage under the house like the others, you really should have saved your money.”
He tilted his head to the side as if he couldn’t quite hear me, mostly because he knew I was right. He was raised in poverty and generally took every purchase quite seriously. If there is one thing you can make my father feel guilty about, it’s spending money.
“How much was it?”
“Twenty-five stinking bucks! A steal!”
“It’s not a steal if you’re never going to use it. Once you put it down there, is it coming back up? Will this ‘steal’ ever see the light of day again?”
“I was thinking maybe you could use it?” he suggested hopefully.
“You know that I have no idea how to ride a bike.”
“We could try after you finish your slop.”
There again was his favorite word for food. I usually paid no notice to the term, but since the new frozen breakfast bowls we were trying weren’t particularly appealing, I quickly lost my appetite.
“I’m done, but I’m not interested in learning. You’re going to lose your patience, and I’m going to fall and crack my head open.”
He stepped out on the porch for a moment, and then came back in carrying a bright pink helmet.
“I got this too,” he admitted sheepishly.
I had absolutely no desire to ride a bike. I had gone twelve years without using one and I was doing just fine. My sister had learned to ride pretty well, but she still hadn’t been allowed to leave the driveway. I’m not sure what my father was afraid would happen to her on our sleepy street, but all she was allowed to do was pedal to the mailbox, turn around, and pedal back. If he was outside, washing the car or pulling weeds, she was permitted to go the edge of the property next door and pedal back, as long as she didn’t linger on the street. Needless to say, she lost her interest in riding at a young age, and I never quite developed mine. But I knew why this meant so much to my father, so I let him hold the back of my seat as I pedaled in wobbly circles.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t bring it up, though.
“You know,” I said, “no matter how many bikes you buy as an adult, they will still be your adult bikes. It’s not like you can go back in time and give one to your ten-year-old self. And giving one to me doesn’t count either, especially if I don’t want it.”
The comment seem to spur him on rather than deter him.
“Do you even know the story of my quest for a bike?”
“Well, kind of,” I said, knitting my eyebrows as though I was in deep thought. Of course I remembered, but I liked hearing anything about my father’s childhood.
As great as he was at reading, I thought he was even better at telling stories from his own life. But maybe I just cared about the main character in his a little more. We’d just started the Harry Potter series, which we looked into because it was the hottest thing on the market at the moment and kept reading because I insisted. I completely understood why Harry wanted to know everything about his father and mother. I had an advantage over him, sure, because my parents were still alive and therefore not quite as mysterious. But it was still interesting to imagine what these big people were like as little people, whether they’d been horribly murdered by Voldemort or they were still alive and well, buying large quantities of used bicycles. And though my father was never a great wizard, his stories were just as interesting to me. Harry made me appreciate those stories even more, and I was in the mood for one.
“You had this bike that you were crazy about, that your parents got you when you were really little, right? A red one?”
I pretended to really believe this, although I had just thought it up on the spot. My father shook his head as though he felt sorry for me.
“Lovie,” he said, “your memories are more cracked than mine are.”
“I guess I don’t remember,” I said, knowing that he was falling for it.
He cleared his throat, pushed hard on my seat, and increased my speed a little.
“I wanted a bicycle,” he began. “And I think your uncle Charles had one that Poppop found on the side of the road, but he got it because he was the oldest.”
“Like primogeniture,” I added, helpfully.
“Yes, because he was the oldest son. Did you learn that in Mr. C’s class? It was like that but it was a bicycle and not land, and it had never belonged to my father. So actually it wasn’t much like that, but that’s still a good term to know.”
My father, a history major because the library certification called for only one class when he was in college, was pleased.
“But Poppop didn’t find two, you know, and there was no question of asking for one. Of course
I wouldn’t ask for one.”
He pushed air out through his lips, probably wondering if he needed to remind me why he couldn’t have asked for one. But he had told me the stories of his family’s extreme poverty—vegetable soup for dinner every single night, no hot water in the house, two stained shirts to last him the first year of high school—often enough to consider the point made. He didn’t ask for anything because he wouldn’t get it. He continued, “So whenever the neighborhood boys went somewhere, I would run alongside their bikes.”
I wondered if he looked how he did just then, trotting beside me as I pedaled too slowly to earn his full run, watching closely to see if I was leaning to one side.
“Everyone had a bike but me. Which I guess probably was good for my health, what with all the running. But it did make me stand out.”
“Well, standing out isn’t so bad,” I reminded him, knowing that he prized individuality even more than I did.
“No, I stood out in a bad way. And I knew it. So when the Cub Scouts said they would have a citywide contest, and the top prize was a bicycle, you can imagine how excited I was. I was determined, absolutely determined, to sell the most chocolates. They were two for a penny, big chocolates with coconut cream filling, and whoever sold the most got the bike. I wanted that bike.”
“Did you think you had a shot?”
“I didn’t think. If I had a plan, it was just to work and work and work. I didn’t give a second thought to what the other guys were doing, because my mind was made up to win the prize.”
He leaned away from me for a moment, mistakenly thinking that I was balancing my own weight. I leaned toward him and he caught me and straightened me out without even needing to take a break from the story.
