The Reading Promise

by Alice Ozma

  I took my cats out on the porch for some supervised playtime. This was their favorite part of any day, and a good part of mine because it gave me a chance to think. As I sat on the porch steps, drawing with a pebble I’d found that had a chalklike consistency, I found myself doodling “The Streak” over and over again. Sometimes it was in cursive, with big, loopy letters, sometimes in all capital letters, declarative and assuring, but mostly in my tiny, neat print. After all these years—I was now fifteen—I tried to picture what it might feel like if The Streak had to end tonight. I knew it wouldn’t—if The Streak ever ended suddenly, it would be because one of us couldn’t make it home. If we were both in the same place at the same time, as we were right now and would be later in the evening, The Streak would go on. We would figure something out. But there was a part of me that wondered about things, like falling out of the window of a car or accidentally ingesting enough toothpaste to warrant calling the poison control number on the back of the tube. And that part couldn’t help picturing what it might feel like to end The Streak tonight. We’d pick up the book, and my father would attempt to read, but the sounds just wouldn’t come out. He’d get a few words out, but then his whisper would become totally inaudible, and we’d have to stop. After all, he wasn’t really reading to me if I couldn’t understand him. We’d sit in silence and know, just know, that it was the last night and there was nothing we could do about it. It would be sad, maybe the saddest thing that had ever happened to me. Certainly the saddest thing that had ever happened to my father, I thought. More than anything, to him, it would mean defeat. I knew he wouldn’t let it happen.

  I took the pebble I’d been doodling with and underlined the words: THE STREAK. I wrote them bigger, with confidence. We’d figure something out. We had to.

  Our decision was ultimately to do whatever we deemed closest to our regular routine, and we decided that was reading as usual, but at a close range. A very close range.

  “Ghhhhjhhh,” my father said, as he sat down on the couch. We’d relocated from his bed to the couch so I could sit up next to him and get a better spot, right next to his mouth, leaning in as close as I could.

  “I would tell you that you have to speak up, but I guess that wouldn’t be very funny, huh?”

  “Come closer,” I watched his lips say. His throat sounded even weaker than it had earlier.

  I leaned onto him just as he started a coughing fit, causing me to jump back immediately. He continued coughing for quite some time, long enough to give me a chance to run upstairs and get hand sanitizer. I put it on his hands, and then my hands, and then my face. It made my cheeks cold and dry, but I felt a bit safer all the same. When I took my position back, it was with cautious deliberation.

  “Can you understand me?” I finally realized he was saying. My ear was so close to his lips that I could hear the spit forming in his mouth between words. My father, who still hates physical closeness at any time, had probably not let anyone this near him since I was a toddler, or maybe since he and my mother were still happily married. I realized, feeling sorry for the both of them, that I didn’t know which of those events came first. Not wanting to offend him, I tried to keep any part of my body from touching him.

  “When we last left off,” he began, once I had stopped squirming around.

  He always gave me a reminder of the chapter from the previous night before delving into a new one. Although Maniac Magee, the story of an athletic orphan searching for a home, wasn’t particularly hard to follow, tonight I was really grateful for the help. Otherwise, the only thing I could really focus on was the strangeness of the situation. I imagined what the caption might read if someone snapped a photo of us right then and put it in the newspaper, like the photos of the kids playing by fire hydrants they sometimes stuck next to the weather forecast on a really hot day. It might be something like:

  James Brozina, age 55, reads to his daughter, 15. Due to some recent medical issues, Brozina was unavailable for a quote. No one can explain why his face looks so greenish, or why his daughter is sitting so close to him. A reader from Vineland points out that they are not actually touching in any way. Further investigation into this matter forthcoming.

  I brought my attention back to the moment long enough, though, to realize that my father was actually doing a superb job. The deep bass he had created for Earl, the zoo groundskeeper, was brought up an octave, and the girlish singsong of bibliophile Amanda Beale was brought down, but the words were rolling off his tongue in a beautiful, hypnotic way. He said them with certainty, closing his mouth firmly after each sentence, taking a breath and starting anew. It was obvious that he had to put in a great deal of effort to reach this quality. His face was sweating, and this time it wasn’t from the fever. He strained, occasionally trying to switch back to his throat but quickly realizing that there was no sound left in the pipe. So the whisper became more comfortable, and he used facial expressions to supplement it. He wasn’t so hard to understand at all. He made it look easy, like always. There was no question that he had rehearsed the chapter many, many times since realizing he was sick.

  For the next three days, his voice was shot. He practiced each of those nights for an hour, maybe more, the few short pages he had to read to keep The Streak alive by our high standards. When his voice came back in full by the end of that week, I couldn’t completely convince myself that it was any better than his recent work. Undoubtedly, he was happy to be back to his old self, reading at what he perceived to be his highest level of quality.

  But I remember that summer a little differently than he might. It was hot, very hot, from June to September. The fireflies came out earlier than ever and sometimes stayed late into the evening. Someone down the street from us got an outdoor fireplace, and the whole street smelled like wood chips and smoke for months. And there was something else. A sense of joy, a sense of pride, that we’d overcome another obstacle. Nothing at all could stand in our way at this point. We were meeting the challenges The Streak threw at us with ease. We were fearless and invincible. And his hollow whisper sounding out a children’s book was more beautiful than the most robust rendition of Shakespeare.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Day 2,340

  “It’s really dreadful,” she muttered to herself, “the way all the creatures argue. It’s enough to drive one crazy!”

  —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  It was one of those hot, humid days when you stuck to anything you touched as though you were made of maple syrup. Right now I was stuck to the car seat, heading to Pennsylvania with my dad and sister to visit a museum and a couple of public gardens. My father was absolutely opposed to turning on the air conditioner at home until July, so the opportunity to ride around with the windows down should have excited me as much as it would have excited any floppy-eared dog. But thirty or so miles into the trip, with the sunlight pouring in relentlessly through my side of the car, I was feeling less than enthusiastic about the experience. My body felt swollen from the heat, a sausage tightly packed and about to burst from its casing. I reached to pat my sister, who was home for a bit before starting her first adult, full-time job. She still rode in the backseat with me, and I wanted to thank her for the visit with a pat on the knee. It seemed like too much effort, though, so I just wiggled my fingers at her while humming in her general direction. She was reading a book about antiques and pleading with my father to turn down or turn off Elvis, so she misconstrued my friendly gesture as an attempt to tickle her and slapped my hand. We were off to a great start.

  The one great comfort to me in my sweaty state was Hank’s Place. Appearing like a mirage in the distance, Hank’s sang to me sweetly from beside the highway, offering hearty split pea soup and egg-and-cheese sandwiches all day. It was the quintessential greasy spoon, with the slogan “Where hungry people eat and friendly people meet!” as though there were no alternatives for either. Hank’s made any trip, even a hot and sticky one, worthwhile. If my family was traveling throu
gh the area, it was a guaranteed stop. I had even skipped breakfast in preparation for my feast.

  Our car rolled on past the parking lot, and I jumped up immediately, straining the seat belt and pointing like a hunting dog.

  “I want to get to the Brandywine Museum before the crowds start,” my dad said.

  “But I haven’t eaten yet!”

  “And whose bright idea was that?”

  “I had a bowl of oatmeal, but I could eat. As long as we double back in an hour or two, we might all have bigger appetites,” Kath offered.

  She was attempting to be a nonpartisan, logical peacemaker. There is nothing more annoying in a heated argument than a nonpartisan, logical peacemaker. I swatted at her. My father kept driving.

  “Thanks a lot,” I hissed, as I slumped down in my protesting rag doll position.

  “No problem,” she said sincerely, and returned to her book.

  When we arrived at the museum, I was determined to leave and get back to the food as quickly as I could.

  “There’s a new exhibit on ducks this week,” the woman at the desk mentioned cheerfully, as she handed us our admission buttons, “and tours are available every twenty minutes.” She was speaking softly, and no else seemed to have heard her.

  “No, thank you,” I responded in a sympathetic whisper, turning my back to my family and barely moving my lips. “My sister is horribly afraid of ducks.”

  The woman looked at Kath, put her hand over her heart, and nodded.

  Finally we were ready to go, bracing ourselves for the weight of the heat as we pushed open the glass doors. We’d managed to keep our circuit to less than half an hour in total, and I was feeling generous. I suggested a stroll through the gardens before brunch.

  “Brunch?”my father said. “I thought we were just getting pastries at one of the gardens.”

  “Oooh,” Kath agreed, “I could go for some chocolate cake.”

  “No no no, we made plans to go to Hank’s.”

  The sun was making me dizzy, and the thought of eating something heavy and sweet set my stomach swaying. More importantly, though, I had a blood sugar problem and could not eat something sweet as a meal. I verbalized my concern.

  “Little Orphan Egg,” my sister said, using her nickname for me and giggling.

  “Your life is a Shakespearean tragedy,” my father added, getting in on the act.

  The heat was really getting to me, but their teasing was worse. In a childish moment of confusion and resentment, I darted off into a corner of the garden and crouched behind a statue of a pig. It was made of bronze and burned my arm.

  “What happens to a dream deferred?” I wrote frantically in a notebook I had pulled out of my bag, quoting Langston Hughes and trying to be philosophical at sixteen years old. I couldn’t think what he would say about not being able to go to your favorite restaurant, so I drew a picture of my foot. In an angry sort of way.

  I could see them peeking at me and trying not to smile.

  “It’s not funny!” I finally called out.

  “You can’t get a fried egg, so you are hiding behind a statue of a pig and writing in your journal,” my sister pointed out.

  “I am not writing in my journal! I am reflecting in my reflecting notebook!”

  They couldn’t keep straight faces anymore.

  “Could you reflect at the next stop, maybe over a cookie?” my father asked, laughing.

  I huffed out and didn’t say a word. When we stopped at the garden’s cafeteria, I used my own money to get a sandwich and refused to even look at the desserts.

  About an hour later I was feeling social again and talking to my sister, though I hadn’t quite forgiven her treason yet.

  “Why did you bring a textbook?” I asked her, pointing at the heavy reference book on antiques that she had pulled out again as we headed to our final stop.

  “I am taking a class on early American furniture,” she explained, “and I want to be prepared to fully enjoy the house tour we are taking at the Winterthur Estate.”

  “Like fun we are taking that tour!” my father interrupted. “It was about time for my nap two hours ago! We’re going to go for a loop on the turnip truck and beat it back home in jig time.”

  The garden tram was the “turnip truck,” a term he insisted on using in front of the museum curators and tour guides. Luckily, they were always too confused to be offended.

  Kath looked as though someone had just informed her she’d been injected with a slow, lethal poison. Her face got white, her eyes got big, and she reached for my hand.

  “We… aren’t… going on the tour? That’s the whole reason I came home for the weekend!”

  “I thought you came home because you loved me,” I said.

  “No,” she explained.

  I considered for a moment before weighing in.

  “We’ve done that tour a million times. If we’re going to do anything extra, it should be a stop at Hank’s. And that’s not even extra, since it should have happened earlier anyway.”

  “What would you do,” my father began, “if someone said that you could eat out for free at any chain restaurant for the rest of your life, but you had to sleep in a coffin every night instead of a bed?”

  His infamous scenario questions were a sure indicator that he was listening to neither of us. Kath looked at me for support, but I was reminded of my dark moments just hours ago, pining for soup in the shadow of a pig statue. She had not come to my rescue. I shook my head and stared out the window. My sister curled herself up against the car door and began to sulk. She looked at us with moody eyes and pursed lips. She reminded me of Rabbi, when you stopped petting him without warning. And because she had not fought in my defense earlier, I did not feel a bit sorry for her.

  Twenty minutes later, I was feeling very sorry for her.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get to see the boring chairs,” I said in a soothing tone.

  She looked at me suspiciously from her corner, like a snake who was trying to decide if she should strike or just go to sleep until I went away.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get to stuff yourself like a turkey at Dad’s expense,” she finally relented.

  To make ourselves feel better, we played Tales of Fang. It was a game we invented when we inherited my grandmother’s cat, who had once been called Miss Kitty but was appropriately renamed Granny Fang because of her old age and penchant for biting. She absolutely oozed hatred like no other creature before or since. To play the game, you need only think of a scenario and explain how Granny Fang might wreck it. Usually, her method involved her trademark fang.

  “Okay, let’s say your boyfriend was about to propose.”

  “Too easy,” my sister said. “Granny Fang would bite my finger off so that I had nowhere to put the ring.”

  “What about your wedding day?”

  “Even more obvious—she’d stick her fang in just enough places to get blood all over my dress.”

  “You make it sound like bullfighting.”

  “Yes, only more violent.”

  We started laughing until my father yelled from the front seat,

  “Cut that out! What did you say about me?”

  We looked at each other.

  “Nothing. We were talking about Granny Fang.”

  “Who called me an old bull?”

  “One,” my sister said, “that is not even a real insult. And two, no one said that.”

  My father kept his eyes on the road but his face was getting red.

  “I don’t like you girls whispering back there.”

  “We are talking at a normal volume!”

  “Remember that you are mostly deaf, Dad.”

  He reached for the glove compartment.

  “If you’re not going to include everyone, you’re not going to talk in my car,” he said, pulling out an Elvis CD. He pushed Play and turned up the volume, and we drove the rest of the way home without speaking another word.

  When we got home, my father re
ad to me from a book that ended up being one of my favorites from The Streak—Surviving the Applewhites, by Stephanie S. Tolan. I initially liked it because the characters were putting on a production of The Sound of Music, and at the time, musicals were a big part of my life. It was the first book we’d ever read that was about theater, and I felt a special connection. But tonight the connection ran deeper, as I considered the Applewhite family for what they were: eight very different people who seemed to, for the most part, get along quite well living under one roof. They squeezed themselves, and even a visitor, into their house and still enjoyed life completely. A family of eight! I couldn’t imagine it. Whenever Kath came home, we became three, and we couldn’t even handle that. The house felt tight and cramped, and we couldn’t quite figure out how to fit all of us in. I wished we could, but we were no Applewhites.

  Today was just another example, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, because it always happened something like this: I would get mad but back down when Kath got cranky, and she would just be coming around when my dad lost his temper. We didn’t want to admit it, but we had adjusted to life apart. Just being together meant that someone would feel attacked, or ganged up on, no matter what we were doing. We could last for Christmas, or maybe a long weekend. But most of the time, we couldn’t figure out our group dynamic because even if we got it right once, my sister would be on her way again and we’d have to make a fresh start at the next visit. We all felt guilty, but there seemed to be nothing we could do to fix it. Apologies didn’t make much of a difference when everyone was miserable. And there weren’t even enough of us to put on a production of The Sound of Music the way the Applewhites did.