by Alice Ozma
“It was late in the fall and it was nice and cold, and windy, every night after school. The kind of weather where your nose runs all the time, you know? Well mine would, in that cold. I wheedled Grammom to let me use Charles’s bike, though generally I wasn’t allowed to touch the thing, even if he wasn’t using it, because it wasn’t mine.”
Here he looked longingly at the bike I was on, seeming to forget that it, like the five in the crawl space, was his.
“So I went every day after school, with those chocolates in the bicycle basket, riding to every house in a two-mile radius, hawking these lousy two-for-a-cent candies. Back then people were at home, because there wasn’t anywhere to go. I would go out each and every night, trying to get rid of these god-awful chocolates—”
“Were they that bad?”
“No, actually they were tasty. I couldn’t afford to eat my own product very much, but I remember that they tasted good, so I must have tried them at some point. The whole experience was unpleasant, though, so it makes the chocolates seem a lot worse.”
“Did people buy any?”
“Not much, but I kept at it. Anyhow,” he continued, “the time for the sale ran out and I went to the council meeting like I was meeting my destiny. There were boys there from all over the city, and the room was filled, and I mean filled, with Cub Scouts.”
“How many?”
“At least a hundred.”
I always made a point of asking this but the number never changed, so I knew he wasn’t exaggerating.
“They quieted us all down and the scoutmaster said, ‘How many of you have sold five dollars’ worth?’ There were quite a few. So he asked who had sold ten, and some hands went down. Which is understandable, because that was two thousand chocolates! Then he said fifteen dollars, and that was a major blow. But when he asked who had sold twenty or more, it came down to just me and one other kid.”
I wanted to pull over for this part, since it was the climax and I was having enough trouble staying upright, but I didn’t know how to brake and didn’t want to interrupt him to ask.
“So the scoutmaster looked at me, and then the other kid, and he asked me first: how much had I sold? I told him the truth, and with pride—twenty-three dollars and sixteen cents. Then he turned to the other boy and asked how much he had sold, and the boy said twenty-five-something.”
Usually at this point my father described how his heart sunk, watching the bike wheeled out and watching the other boy roll it away. But today he just looked at me, on the new bike. I hoped he wasn’t picturing me as the boy taking the prize he had worked so hard to get.
“There was no second prize?”
“Not even a ruler. The other boy got the bike and I got nothing.”
Here I had to confess my knowledge of the story.
“But he didn’t really earn it, though, did he?”
“I can’t say I know for sure. Years later, though, I found out that boy was the scoutmaster’s son, and that he had a reputation as sort of a lazy bum. And then when you think about it, doesn’t it seem a little convenient that the scoutmaster asked me how much I sold first? Don’t you think his son was just going to say whatever was higher? At the time, I thought the guy had actually outworked me. But in hindsight, I think that’s nearly impossible. Everyone would take his dad’s word for it either way. I don’t think that bike was ever really available as a prize. They always knew who would get it. I don’t know, but that’s just my gut feeling.”
It would have been unlike my father, usually a bit cynical, to give someone who might have been corrupted the benefit of the doubt. But whenever I heard the story and pictured the boy and his scoutmaster father, I didn’t trust them, either. I pedaled faster, shaking them off.
“Then I started dreaming that I had a bike. I could see the bike clearly in my dreams. It was a sea-green color, with white sidewall tires, and a light on the front that you could switch on and off, and tassels at the ends of the handlebars. I would have these dreams quite often, every week and multiple times a week. In my dreams, I could see the bike, a Schwinn, out the window.”
“And then what happened?” I asked, already smiling from ear to ear.
“And then that year for Christmas, my parents got me a bike! There it was on Christmas morning, right under the tree. It was exactly the way I had thought it would be in my dreams. Exactly.”
My eyes watered every time.
“So you had described the dream to Grammom?”
“No! Not that I recall. Unless I was talking in my sleep.”
“It was like a Christmas miracle.”
He smiled and shrugged, and as he moved his arm I finally lost my balance and fell sideways onto the pavement.
“You clumsy she-ape!” he laughed, as he pulled me back up. My knees were already badly scratched, and the story was over.
“I still don’t think I want to learn to ride,” I confessed.
“That’s okay, you’d probably break your neck anyway.”
“But this is really a great set of wheels,” I conceded. “And I don’t think it was a waste of money.”
After listening to his story again, I felt awful for scolding him earlier.
“Thank you for your permission to spend my money,” he said, bowing low as though I were a queen.
“I think you should promise, though,” I said, taking off my helmet, “that if I ever have a kid and he wants a bike, you have to give one of them to him. Your best one.”
His eyes lit up.
“Oh, I’m sure that can be arranged.”
“And maybe you should buy a few more, so he’s got some selection.”
“Yes, Lovie,” he said, as we put the bike in storage next to its five brothers and sisters, “I think you’re right again.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Day 1,074
Poetry needn’t fix real life, Lou. It just need be. The fixing is up to us.
—David Baldacci, Wish You Well
I just don’t understand what you’re actually afraid of,” my father said, as he looked in through my doorway for maybe the fifth time that night, “And I can’t do anything for you if I don’t understand.”
I pointed at the bottom bunk without saying anything, tacitly insisting that he check it again.
“What am I looking for? What are you actually afraid will be there? His ghost? His spirit?”
“Don’t make me say it,” I whispered. “If I say it it’s more likely to come true.”
“Well, then it doesn’t do a heck of a lot of good to call me in here. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’ll tell you what’s down here: a messy pile of blankets. Are you afraid of making your bed? Is that what this is all about? Because that’s what I’d guess, judging by the state of things.”
There are few things worse than being teased when you are scared, and there was only so much I could take. At twelve years old, this shouldn’t have been a problem. But it was, and had been for long enough for him to know. Finally, I blurted out before he could make the situation any worse: “I am afraid that JFK’s dead body is on the bottom bunk! You know that! You check for it every night! Just tell me if it’s there!”
“Lovie,” he said, “would I be talking to you so calmly if the body of an ex-president was lying on your bottom bunk? You don’t think I’d be downstairs, calling the neighbors to come take a look?”
“No,” I said, “you wouldn’t, because it’s unbelievable. That’s what makes it so scary. You would be like the boy who cried wolf. No one would ever believe that his dead body was in our house.”
“I think it would be an issue of national security if it was. We’d probably have to answer a lot of questions. And I get all mixed up when I have to answer questions, because my hearing’s so bad. So for my sake, Lovie, do you think you could keep his body away for just a few more nights?”
“If I could keep him away, it wouldn’t be for your sake,” I whispered through the sheets.
It takes a certain type o
f child to develop a crippling, life-changing fear of the corpse of John F. Kennedy. I’m not sure what my parents did to raise that child, so I can’t tell you how to duplicate the results. I do remember how it started, though, and it’s not particularly terrifying.
I never had a bedtime (“If you wake up tomorrow and you’re tired, you’ll know you overdid it” was my father’s motto), so it took me years to figure out the best sleep schedule for me. One particular night, maybe when I was around eight, I fell asleep quite early and had a nightmare. In the dream, I was on the playground at my elementary school, tossing a big red ball with my friends. Then my friends disappeared, and I started to walk back toward the school. I noticed that someone was following me and turned around to realize it was our former president John F. Kennedy. I told him not to follow me into the school because he was an adult, and also dead, and this was a school for children who were very much alive. But he still walked behind me, wordlessly, looking sad and sort of lonely. I felt bad that I couldn’t let him in, and also scared that he wasn’t listening to me. I don’t like to be followed.
I awoke from the dream, which must have been short because everyone else in my house was still up and going about their business. I went downstairs to visit my dad and recount the dream, but he was distracted. He was working on some sort of paperwork and really needed to concentrate. To calm me down without occupying his time, he went to the shelf where we kept the videos and selected a documentary about JFK that made him seem like a sweet and caring man. He thought this would help me to understand that JFK wouldn’t hurt me even if he could. He forgot, however, about the end of the film: a fifteen-minute montage all about Kennedy’s assassination and funeral. It was dark, and even creepier because the footage was in black-and-white. Death on such a national scale was a very big thing to such a small girl. I ran back upstairs and dove into my bed. Thus, a JFK-phobic was born.
To be completely fair, it was not the person himself whom I was afraid of, initially. I was afraid of his dead body, and I had somehow become convinced that it would appear one night on my bottom bunk, all laid out and ready for a funeral. I don’t know where I got this idea, and I’m happy to report that today it makes me laugh. Then, though, it was a very grave and serious matter.
Every night, I would go through a huge ordeal to avoid the body. At first I tried going to bed while it was still light out, but because it was winter that only gave me an hour or so from the time I got home from school. And if I went to bed early, it meant waking up early, while it was still dark out. So the darkness was unavoidable. Instead, I tried turning on all the lights in my room and sleeping with them on. My parents didn’t even yell at me, but finally the overhead light in my room burned out and I wasn’t tall enough to replace it. My father was, but I think he made a conscientious decision not to do so. As I got older, contrary to my parents’ expectations, the fear actually got stronger. By middle school, avoiding JFK’s dead body, which was obviously lying in state on my bottom bunk, was the focus of my evening.
I brought one of my cats in and left him on the bottom bunk, not as a sacrifice but as a guard. The cats were very brave. Then I hopped up to the top bunk in one big step, putting my feet only on the middle rung of the ladder. Of course, if JFK’s dead body was going to try to pull me down by my feet, he would have a prime opportunity while I was going up the ladder. I wanted him to know that I was on to his tricks. Once I reached the top bunk, I looked down every few minutes and called for backup (someone to make sure he wasn’t tucked out of sight) every half hour until everyone but me fell asleep.
The fear soon shifted from JFK’s dead body to JFK in general and included even photos of or quotes about him. So it was with great terror that I learned my father was planning a family trip for my sister and me shortly after my mother moved out, and one of the stops was the JFK Memorial Library. My father tried to convince me that I liked libraries more than I feared JFK. I had to point out to him that he did not know his own daughter, and that we’d visited before—it wasn’t just a library.
No, it was worse: it was a museum filled with things Kennedy had used, or worn, or touched. There were things that belonged to Jackie Kennedy, too, my father reminded me, as he tried to pry my fingernails from the museum’s gate. Fashionable, pretty things like outfits and hats. I had no interest in fashion. My interest was in self-preservation. I made it as far as a bust of Kennedy, shiny and golden to create a false sense of security, before retreating to the gift shop in tears. People stared. I wondered what they thought was going on. I found a bench in the book section and tried to steady my breathing.
After three tense hours, I finally heard my sister and father laughing about something as they approached. I curled up on the corner of my bench and hugged my knees to my chest, an act that I had always pictured made me look bigger, like a cat puffing out his tail and making his hair stand on end. Kath took it upon herself to mother me when no other females were around, and I could see as her eyes softened that we were going to have one of those moments. Feeling genuinely bad for me, she took a seat close behind me on the bench, patting my back and telling me it was okay. It was time to go anyway, she reminded me and the worst was over. I liked her technique. And because we are who we are, my father tried our usual fix: reading. He picked a book up off of a shelf near me. I had been eyeing the book curiously because it didn’t seem to fit in with the others. There was no black-and-white portrait of the Kennedy family on the cover—instead, from the cover illustration, the book seemed to be about a goat.
“Billy Whiskers,” my father said, as he flipped open to a page at random, “They mentioned during the exhibit that this was JFK’s favorite book as a child. Looks like it’s not half bad, and it’s on clearance. Should we get it and give it a try?”
I shook my head and looked away, but found myself looking back at the goat on the cover anyway. In such a fearsome environment, he didn’t seem so bad. He had been my ally during my wait, the one thing in the store that, as far as I could tell before my father spoiled him, had nothing to do with John F. Kennedy. Now I felt bad for leaving him behind to fend for himself in this horror house of smiling photographs.
“Okay,” I said, more to the book than to my father, “I guess we can give it a try. On vacation. But I know what you’re doing, and it’s probably not going to work.”
What he was doing, specifically, was trying to use The Streak as a solution to a problem. It was something he did often, even if he wasn’t doing it intentionally. There were just trends: after my mother moved out, we read stories about young girls without mothers. When there were bullies at school, we read about kids who outsmarted their nemeses rather than resorting to fistfights. And now, probably because there weren’t any books about JFK-phobic middle schoolers, he was getting creative.
We took the book back to the hotel and moved Lois Lowry’s The Giver into my father’s suitcase. The story of a young boy being held responsible for the entire history of his people was intriguing, and the futuristic world they lived in was unbelievably believable. We were starting to see the flaws in the supposedly utopian world, and we’d left off on a cliff-hanger that made me beg my father to stay up just a little longer. That made it even harder to put the book down and pick up Billy Whiskers, so it’s possible I went into the experience with more than a little bit of a bias. But we were spending only two nights away from home, and my father and I had agreed that if I liked the new book enough I would keep reading it on my own, and we’d go back to The Giver together as soon as we got back.
I don’t remember much about Billy Whiskers. It must have been pretty decent because I did keep reading it once I got home. But the problem was that there was no safe place to enjoy it. My favorite spot to snuggle up with a book was in bed. I’d even set up a makeshift shelf that held a small lamp and a bookmark, so I could read until I got sleepy without having to jump down from the top bunk to turn off the lights. I couldn’t bring Billy Whiskers up there, though. If JFK knew I was reading hi
s favorite book, he’d want to come see for himself. If I left the book anywhere in my room, for that matter, he’d stop by to read it while I was asleep. Worse yet, he might stop by to read it while I was wide awake.
I tried keeping the book in the basement but decided that was a bad idea, too. That was just asking for it; it would be like keeping cheese on your doorstep and then wondering why so many mice were always coming to visit. Ultimately, I had no choice but to secretly put it in the lost-and-found box at school.
There are some things that reading, or The Streak, couldn’t fix. Billy Whiskers was not, to my father’s surprise, the answer to my fears. Even after I got rid of it, I thought JFK might be able to smell the ink on my hands. I washed myself in the bath that night with the zeal of Lady Macbeth herself. I ran into my room at full speed, trying my best to go straight past the bottom bunk without even looking at it, blurring my eyes to avoid even a peripheral glance. I hopped up and looked over, somewhat safe from my perch. Nothing. I read for an hour or two, forcing myself to get sleepy until my eyebrows felt like they were sliding down into my nose. Sometime after midnight, my father yelled for me to either turn off my light, which was shining directly into his room, or close my door. Of course, I couldn’t close the door: that would mean getting out of bed. If I did, I’d have to start the routine all over again. So I peeked over the side of my bed one more time before switching off the little lamp, pulling the covers up over my head, and folding my feet under me so they wouldn’t dangle over the sides.
I couldn’t appreciate it then, but it takes creativity to lie shivering and shaking in your bed, wondering if your cats will know how to defend you, not against ghosts or the boogeyman, but against the immobile body of one of the most famous and beloved ex-presidents of the United States. Thanks to The Streak and my father, imagination was not something I lacked.
