The Reading Promise

by Alice Ozma

  “Finally they have a use” was all he said.

  For several nights in a row, we could hear the cats running back and forth, back and forth, through my sister’s room. For some reason, the cave crickets never went past her door (or at least, not that we saw) so the cats had a safari-like opportunity: they would hunt for a few hours and then come into my room to take a nap. I never actually saw one of the crickets, but I could hear them at night. And, just a little bit louder, I could hear Brian or Rabbi calling to the other during tag-team missions or slinking quietly across the floorboards for a surprise attack. Since they both loved hunting, I would have to guess this was one of the happiest times in their lives. It made me want to cart in game for them on a regular basis, but I would have felt sorry for anything even slightly cuter than a cave cricket. Which is just about everything.

  One night, the sound of a cat’s running was really interrupting our reading. We could hear someone darting around in the room next door, having a wonderful time but making an awful lot of noise. My father tried to adjust his volume accordingly, but then the noise ended abruptly. I was listening for a moment, trying to figure out what had happened, when Rabbi suddenly appeared in my father’s doorway. He was purring loudly and grooming himself. He had made the kill.

  When he jumped on the bed, he did not butt his head against my father. He did not drop hints that he wanted to be petted: he simply expected it to happen. I felt like a warrior’s wife, greeting my husband with love as he returned from a fierce battle. I tried to avoid looking at his mouth, though, for fear of encountering dangling bug legs. The reading ended a few minutes later and my father noticed Rabbi’s exuberant behavior.

  “What’s the deal with him?” he asked.

  “Rabbi has vanquished the cave crickets,” I said proudly. “Or at least a cave cricket.”

  “I guess if all I did was sleep all day, I’d find hunting pretty interesting too.”

  “Aren’t you impressed, though?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “He was defending us!”

  “I doubt he thought of it that way.”

  “Well, at least now you can’t call him a freeloader.”

  “I most certainly can.”

  I huffed off to bed, hoping Rabbi would follow. But during his proud moment, to my surprise, he chose to be with my father. As always, this annoyed me. I had to listen to my father repeat, over and over again, “You’re miserable, Rabbi. You are really miserable.”

  I wanted to get up and defend him, to tell my father that he had killed a rather nasty bug, or two or three or four, to protect our home and defend my honor. But then I listened again, and there was one noise a little louder than my father’s incessant teasing. Even from across the hall, I could hear Rabbi purring delightedly.

  I tried to imagine what Rabbi thought my father was saying and decided it was Thank you for slaying the cave crickets. You are valiant, and deserving of my love.

  And maybe in the language they alone shared, that was the correct translation after all.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Day 1,948

  “It’s just,” she said to her grandmother, “I have the feeling that I know who I am, only I’m not any more.”

  —Cynthia Voigt, Dicey’s Song

  My father always said that he needed time to rehearse our reading before I came up. With some of the more challenging books, especially ones with confusing dialects, I’m sure this was really the case. But he also wasn’t afraid of taking the opportunity to censor the book if he thought something was inappropriate. He never wrote on the pages, that I saw, but I thought I could tell when he had substituted a word or avoided a phrase. Generally, his edits lasted less than a sentence. Dicey’s Song, however, presented a whole new test of his improvisational skills.

  I was a freshman trying to figure out fickle friends, flirty boys, and high school in general. I felt that I was supposed to do one big, dramatic gesture, that would define me and help me find my place in high school, but I couldn’t figure out what. Perfecting a Norwegian accent to get the lead in the school play wasn’t it. Neither was dying my hair red, blond, and back to my natural brunette in a two-year period. For a time, I thought clever T-shirts were my thing, until I realized that “Chicks Have Major Attitude” over a picture of a chicken in an army hat wasn’t particularly clever, nor were any of the other shirts I owned. I went through a rather unfortunate velour pants period, but there’s no need to discuss that here. Let us just agree that I was uncool, in that profoundly uncool way that only newly minted teenagers can truly perfect. Thankfully, I had no idea.

  Maybe in response to my junior high endeavors, my dad and I were on a kick of reading books about young teenage girls. We went through dozens with similar plots, focusing on the trials and tribulations of those painfully self-aware years from the perspective of chipper, optimistic female narrators. I think I was supposed to learn something from them, but I never quite figured out what the message was. Even when they proclaimed absolute embarrassment, the heroines were much better at dealing with most situations. They wrote about them in their journals that night and laughed about them with their mothers a few chapters later. They sounded a lot taller than I was.

  I don’t remember how we found Dicey’s Song. I know it was at a library, but I don’t know what made us pick it up. My dad gave it a quick skim and decided it was for us. I didn’t know enough about the plot to make an argument against it or else I probably would have, just for the fun of it. Almost everything we read was my father’s selection anyway—putting up the occasional protest at least reminded him that I was one half of The Streak.

  “This cover makes no sense,” I might say.

  “It won an award,” he would respond.

  “The cover won an award?”

  “No, the book did.”

  “Are you sure? It sounds like you need to get your facts straight before you decide to occupy the next month or so of our lives with this book.”

  “It sounds like you need a swift kick in the pants for that smart mouth.”

  “Yes,” I would agree emphatically. “As we were both saying, I think this is a perfect book for The Streak.”

  Such scholarly discussions were common during the selection process, but we started Dicey’s Song without much comment. It wasn’t until we’d made a significant dent in the book that any controversy came of it.

  My father went up to bed to practice the reading, as usual, while I waited at the dining room table, watching a marathon of my favorite TV show, The Monkees, on Nick at Nite. Once the theme song started for the third episode, I realized something was up. His usual rehearsal time was around fifteen minutes, twenty at most. When he finally called for me, I was already suspicious.

  The chapter was progressing normally enough. Dicey, a girl about my age, was riding on a bus with her grandmother, and they were discussing various things going on in Dicey’s life. But a few minutes in I started to guess which section had kept me waiting so long. My father started turning pages quickly, lingering for only a moment or two before flipping onward. Sometimes he barely seemed to be glancing at the text. I would have guessed he was reciting from memory, but the sentences sounded too strange. Although the dialogue just a few pages ago had been rich and complex, the conversation between Dicey and her grandmother had taken a strange turn that went something like this:

  “Dicey, do you know about all the stuff?”

  “Yes, Gram.”

  “All the stuff?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you’re ready for growing up, and whatnot?”

  “Yes, I already know about that so we don’t need to talk about it.”

  “No, we shouldn’t talk about it.”

  “No.”

  “Okay then.”

  “Good. I’m glad we talked about it.”

  I looked over to see if the text was as sparse on the page as I would have imagined. No—the pages were filled and the lines of the conversation l
ooked long. I couldn’t help but wonder what I could possibly be missing. I waited for my father to finish the chapter before beginning my investigation. I didn’t expect any information from him, but I tried anyway.

  “That was a strange chapter, huh?”

  “Yes, the dialogue was a bit confusing.”

  “I don’t even think I understand what they were talking about.”

  “Who?”

  He wasn’t especially good at playing dumb.

  “Dicey and her grandmother. The only people in the chapter. I don’t think I understood what they were talking about on the bus.”

  “Pretty vague.”

  “Did you understand it?”

  “No, I think they were just killing time.”

  I had trouble keeping a straight face.

  “I bet that’s exactly it.”

  The next day, while my dad was sorting some papers in the basement, I snuck up to his bedroom and plopped down on the floor next to his bed. He kept many of his personal books in the same pile, but our current Streak book was always on top, bookmarked and ready to go. I left the bookmark in, so that there was no chance of accidentally replacing it in a different spot and incriminating myself. I didn’t like keeping secrets, but as long as we were both being secretive, I was determined to be little better at it.

  I opened to the chapter from the night before and began reading backward. There was the now-infamous conversation between Dicey and her grandmother, but it was not quite how he had represented it. It was about puberty, which hadn’t been at all clear in the edited version. Gram uncomfortably brought up menstruation and boys to Dicey; and Dicey, also uncomfortable but not quite as much, agreed to come to her with any questions. It was quirky, and realistic, and not at all graphic. Actually, it was a rather classy way for a parent to approach these subjects. I could envision someone, someone other than my father, giving this book to a daughter to help get those conversations started in real life. When I found another skipped passage, about Gram taking Dicey to purchase her first bra, I had to put down the book because I couldn’t see the pages through my tears.

  I was laughing uncontrollably, squirming around on my father’s rough bedroom carpet until I had rug burn up and down my arms (my velour pants, of course, protected my legs). The tears were streaming down my face so quickly that I almost wanted to look in a mirror and make sure none of my freckles had washed off. My stomach hurt in that wonderful, out-of-breath way that is somehow exactly like doing crunches, but opposite.

  My father had gone to an extreme effort to cut out the exact conversations that we should have been having. He could have taken the easy way out, giving me the information through Gram instead of broaching it himself. I’m sure this is what most single fathers would have done. Instead, though, he went to painstaking, exhausting efforts to mask the nature of the conversation and, indirectly, the plot of the entire novel. For some reason, it struck me as the silliest thing he had ever done. I imagined what our conversation on the bus might have been if we were living out Alice’s Song, and I realized it might be strikingly similar to my dad’s improvisation the night before. It would just require a role reversal.

  “Dad,” I would say, “do you want to talk about the stuff?”

  “No, I think you know about the stuff.”

  “All the stuff?”

  “Yes,” he would say. “You know about all the stuff.”

  “Okay, so we shouldn’t talk about it?”

  “No, we definitely shouldn’t talk about it.”

  I kept replaying this scene in my head. Realistically, we would never even have a conversation of that depth. I think he was telling himself that I wasn’t quite ready to talk, and that Dicey’s Song raised questions I didn’t even have yet. But really, he wasn’t ready to talk, and he never would be. We never had a big discussion on the topic. Once, he told me that he hoped I wasn’t “jiving” and that I shouldn’t give into societal pressures. I thought we were having a meaningful conversation about relationships, or maybe drugs, until I figured out that he was telling me not to spend any money on him for Father’s Day. I have never heard jiving used in that context again.

  I sat on the floor, skimming other books from The Streak and looking for my father’s omissions. I felt sort of sorry for him, realizing how uncomfortable he was. More noticeably, though, I felt my throat getting tighter. Through the laughter, I had to remind myself to breathe.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Day 2,015

  Do what you can to make it good. And remember, as we used to say, that life is like a pudding: it takes both the salt and the sugar to make a really good one.

  —Joan W. Blos, A Gathering of Days

  There’s a big gray spider setting up shop in my room! Come see!”

  I heard a low grumbling noise from my father’s room, followed by some raspy coughing.

  “Hurry up! She’s going to crawl back into the windowsill! She has a little nook in there.”

  Again the strange noise, like someone playing a clarinet without using any of the keys.

  “What are you doing? You’re missing it!” I yelled, poking my head into his bedroom.

  He looked greenish and pale. His face was covered in sweat. I could see through his white shirt.

  “Oh my goodness, what happened to you?” I ran up to the bed and tried to put my hand on my father’s forehead, but he batted it away and wrinkled his eyebrows together to show his frustration.

  “Hhhhhh,” he said, moving his lips as though he was saying more than that. I laughed. Then I realized he actually was saying more than that. I came closer and leaned over him, ear first.

  “I think I might be coming down with something,” my father whispered. His voice was thin and choppy, like someone had been running it over a cheese grater. His breath was abnormally warm.

  “I’ll take it a step further for you—you are sick,” I corrected him, imitating his voice to bring attention to just how awful he sounded.

  “I’m not sick,” he wheezed. “I never get sick. I’ve never been sick a day in my life. But I’m a little under the weather. I’m just running in a lower gear right now.” He coughed a few more times.

  “Things running in this gear usually don’t work. Things running in this gear are broken.”

  “I guess I should go see the doctor pretty soon,” he said. He rubbed sweat off with his hand.

  “How soon is pretty soon? Today? In an hour? Should I call and see what she has open?”

  “Geezle peezle, Lovie, I’ve got enough vigor left in me to make a phone call.”

  “Yes, but they’ll hang up once they decide that they’ve got a prank caller doing a Donald Duck impression. Are you sure you don’t want me to call for you? I’ve got nothing better to do.”

  “Rrrrhhhhhhsh,” he said, bracing himself to get out of bed.

  “What was that? Yes?”

  “I’ll do it,” he whispered. “They’re doctors. They’re used to situations like this.”

  As it turned out, he was right. They were used to situations like this: they’d seen their share of sore throats and stubborn old men. When my father came home he swore they’d told him to take a few cold pills and get on with his regular schedule, but I imagined rest had also come up, though he failed to mention it. It seemed that his only real problem was his throat, which was raw and red. I could see it when he talked, maybe because I had to get so close to hear what he was actually saying.

  “That looks like it’s killing you. Did they tell you to gargle with salt water? That’s the worst.”

  “It actually doesn’t feel as bad as it sounds. I feel pretty much normal at this point, I just haven’t gotten my voice back. These words aren’t even coming from my throat right now.”

  He showed me how he was puffing air up in his cheeks and mouthing the words as he released it, creating a sound that vaguely resembled talking but was more closely related to whistling.

  “That’s all you’re doing? No wonder I can’t unde
rstand a word you’re saying. Just talk from your throat if you say it really doesn’t hurt. Did the doctor tell you to rest it or something?”

  “No, it just doesn’t work. Nothing comes out. There’s no sound. Like someone turned it off.”

  “Weird! That is actually kind of creepy. You are like some sort of voiceless alien. Cool.”

  “Well,” he whistle-whispered, “it’s got me a little worried, to tell you the truth.”

  “Oh, that is cute of you! I didn’t think you were ever concerned about your health. I’m glad you are. But don’t worry at all. The doctor just saw you; she would have told you if something was up.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s not that. I feel fine and this should pass in a couple of days. I’m worried about”—he leaned closer and mouthed both syllables painstakingly—“The Streak.”

  I listened without understanding for a minute or two, just nodding and smiling at my father’s sick ramblings. But then what he’d said sunk in, and suddenly I was worried, too. Why hadn’t this occurred to me from the moment I heard his voice, or lack thereof, earlier that morning? It only made sense, of course, that he was worried: his whole job during The Streak was using his voice. There wasn’t too much else to it. His voice had never been a problem before; my father, as he claimed, never actually gets sick. He wasn’t even sick-sick now, since he was already feeling and looking better. The only issue was his throat, and for such a small tube, that was a surprisingly big problem. I started to feel a little sick myself as I wondered what would become of our tradition.

  We had to take control of the situation. We both spent the day pondering solutions. I asked, if he read me a picture book with big words, could he mouth the sentences while I also read them to myself? No, he decided, that was cheating. Really, that was me reading to myself while he chaperoned. He thought of reading something we both knew by heart and that maybe rhymed, like a Poe poem, where I’d know what he was saying even if I couldn’t really hear it. But if my idea didn’t work, his didn’t, either: it wasn’t really reading if we both had it memorized. It was synchronized recitation, and it was unacceptable. Whenever my father got a new idea he’d jot it down on a notepad and leave it by my chair at the dining room table, but by the end of the day none of our ideas seemed any more logical than the first few. All of them, we decided, weren’t quite up to the standards we had set for The Streak. Now my concern was starting to feel like panic.