ALSO BY E. L. KONIGSBURG
Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
About the B’nai Bagels
(George)
Altogether, One at a Time
A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver
The Dragon in the Ghetto Caper
The Second Mrs. Gioconda
Father’s Arcane Daughter
Throwing Shadows
Journey to an 800 Number
Up From Jericho Tel
Samuel Todd’s Book of Great Colors
Samuel Todd’s Book of Great Inventions
Amy Elizabeth Explores Bloomingdale’s
T-Backs, T-Shirts, COAT, and Suit
TalkTalk
Thanks to Dr. Robert Stoll
for educating me about the life and times of Florida sea turtles.
—E L K
Atheneum Books for Young Readers
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 1996 by E. L. Konigsburg
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Book design by Becky Terhune and Anne Scatto
The text of this book is set in Weiss.
Printed in the United States of America
19 18 17 16 15 14
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Konigsburg, E. L.
The view from Saturday / E. L. Konigsburg.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Jean Karl book.”
Summary: Four students, with their own individual stories, develop a special bond and attract the attention
of their teacher, a paraplegic, who chooses them to represent their sixth-grade class in the
Academic Bowl competition.
ISBN 0-689-80993-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-6898-0993-4
eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-3201-2
[1. Teacher-student relationships—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Schools—Fiction.
4. Contests—Fiction. 5. Physically handicapped—Fiction.] I.Title.
PZ7.K8352Vi 1996
[Fie]—dc20 95-52624
This is for David for beating the odds.
1
Mrs. Eva Marie Olinski always gave good answers. Whenever she was asked how she had selected her team for the Academic Bowl, she chose one of several good answers. Most often she said that the four members of her team had skills that balanced one another. That was reasonable. Sometimes she said that she knew her team would practice. That was accurate. To the district superintendent of schools, she gave a bad answer, but she did that only once, only to him, and if that answer was not good, her reason for giving it was.
The fact was that Mrs. Olinski did not know how she had chosen her team, and the further fact was that she didn’t know that she didn’t know until she did know. Of course, that is true of most things: you do not know up to and including the very last second before you do. And for Mrs. Olinski that was not until Bowl Day was over and so was the work of her four sixth graders.
They called themselves The Souls. They told Mrs. Olinski that they were The Souls long before they were a team, but she told them that they were a team as soon as they became The Souls. Then after a while, teacher and team agreed that they were arguing chicken-or-egg. Whichever way it began—chicken-or-egg, team-or-The Souls—it definitely ended with an egg. Definitely, an egg.
People still remark about how extraordinary it was to have four sixth graders make it to the finals. There had been a few seventh graders scattered among the other teams, but all the rest of the middle school regional champs were eighth graders. Epiphany had never before won even the local championship, and there they were, up on stage, ready to compete for the state trophy. All four members of Maxwell, the other team in the final round, were in the eighth grade. Both of the Maxwell boys’ voices had deepened, and the girls displayed lacy bra straps inside their T-shirt necklines. The fact that the necklines were out-sized and that the two pairs of straps matched—they were apricot-colored—made Mrs. Olinski believe that they were not making a fashion statement as much as they were saying something. To her four sixth graders puberty was something they could spell and define but had yet to experience.
Unlike football bowls, there had been no season tallies for the academic teams. There had been no best-of-five. Each contest had been an elimination round. There were winners, and there were losers. From the start, the rule was-. Lose one game, and you are out.
So it was on Bowl Day.
At the start of the day, there had been eight regional champs. Now there were two—Epiphany and Maxwell.
It was afternoon by the time they got to the last round, and Mrs. Olinski sat shivering in a windowless room in a building big enough and official enough to have its own zip code. This was Albany, the capital of the state of New York. This was the last Saturday in May, and some robot—human or electronic—had checked the calendar instead of the weather report and had turned on the air-conditioning. Like everyone else in the audience, Mrs. Olinski wore a short-sleeved T-shirt with her team’s logo across the front. Maxwell’s were navy; Epiphany’s were red and were as loud as things were permitted to get in that large, cold room. The audience had been asked not to whistle, cheer, stomp, hold up signs, wave banners, or even applaud. They were reminded that this Bowl was for brains, not brawn, and decorum—something between chapel and classroom—was the order of the day.
Epiphany sat on one side of a long table; Maxwell, the other. At a lectern between them stood the commissioner of education of the state of New York. He smiled benevolently over the audience as he reached inside his inner breast pocket and withdrew a pair of reading glasses. With a flick of his wrist he opened them and put them on.
Mrs. Olinski hugged her upper arms and wondered if maybe it was nerves and not the quartering wind blowing from the ceiling vents that was causing her shivers. She watched with bated (and visible) breath as the commissioner placed his hand into a large clear glass bowl. His college class ring knocked bottom. (Had the room been two degrees colder, the glass would have shattered.) He withdrew a piece of paper, unfolded it, and read, “What is the meaning of the word calligraphy and from what language does it derive?”
A buzzer sounded.
Mrs. Olinski knew whose it was. She was sure of it. She leaned back and relaxed. She was not nervous. Excited, yes. Nervous, no.
The television lights glanced off Noah Gershom’s glasses. He had been the first chosen.
NOAH WRITES A B & B LETTER
My mother insisted that I write a B & B letter to my grandparents. I told her that I could not write a B & B letter, and she asked me why, and I told her that I did not know what a B & B letter was. She explained—not too patiently—that a B & B letter is a bread and butter letter you write to people to thank them for having you as their houseguest. I told her that I was taught never to use the word you are defining in its definition and that she ought to think of a substitute word for letter if she is defining it. Mother then made a remark about how Western Civilization was in a decline because people of my generation knew how to nitpick but not how to write a B & B letter.
I told her that, with all due respect, I did not think I owed Grandma and Grandpa a B & B. And then I stated my case. Fact: I was not just a houseguest, I was family; and fact: I had not been their houseguest by choice because fact: She had sent me to them because she had won a cruise for selling more houses in Epiphany than anyone else in the world and if she had shared her cruise with Joey
and me instead of with her husband, my father, I would not have been sent to Florida in the first place and fact: She, not me, owed them thanks; and further fact: I had been such a wonderful help while I was there that Grandma and Grandpa would probably want to write me a B & B.
My brother Joey had been sent to my other set of grandparents, who live in a normal suburb in Connecticut. “Is Joey writing a B & B to Grandma and Grandpa Eberle?”
“Even as we speak,” Mother replied.
“Well, maybe he has something to be thankful for,” I said.
Mother drew in her breath as if she were about to say something else about what children of my generation were doing to Western Civilization, but instead, she said, “Write,” and closed my bedroom door behind her. I opened the door and called out to her, “Can I use the computer?”
She said, “I know you can use the computer, Noah, but you may not.” I was about to make a remark about who was nitpicking now, but Mother gave me such a negative look that I knew any thoughts I had had better be about bread and butter and not nitpicking.
I gazed at my closed bedroom door and then out the window. Door. Window. Door. Window. There was no escape.
I took a box of notepaper out of my desk drawer. The notes were bigger than postage stamps, but not by much. I took out a ballpoint pen and started pressing it against a piece of scrap paper, making dents in the paper but not making a mark. Ballpoint pens sometimes take a while to get started. When I was down in Florida, Tillie Nachman had said, “The ballpoint pen has been the biggest single factor in the decline of Western Civilization. It makes the written word cheap, fast, and totally without character.” My mother and Tillie should get together. Between them, they have come up with the two major reasons why Western Civilization is about to collapse.
Not because I was trying to save Western Civilization but because I wanted to actually get my B & B letter written, I put the ballpoint pen back into the drawer and took out my calligraphy pen, the one that uses wet ink. I didn’t fill it. I would fill it when I was ready to write. I also took out a sharpened pencil and a pad of Post-it notes to jot down any ideas that might come to mind.
I wrote red wagon. The red wagon had definitely been a gift—even though, under the circumstances, I didn’t bring it back to Epiphany with me. I thought a while longer and wrote tuxedo T-shirt. It, too, had been a gift, but I didn’t have that either. I wrote calligraphy pen and bottle of ink. A wet ink pen and a bottle of ink had been given to me, but the ones I took out of my desk drawer were ones I had bought myself. The calligraphy pen made me remember about the Post-it notes I had bought to correct the problem that had developed with the ink. Even though I had bought the Post-it notes myself, I added Post-it notes to my list. I peeled off the Post-it note containing my list and stuck it on the wall in front of my desk, and then, as my mother had commanded, I thought again.
Century Village where my Gershom grandparents live is not like any place I had ever been to. It is in Florida, but it is not exactly Disney World or Sea World or other regular destinations. It is like a theme park for old people. Almost everyone who lives there is retired from useful life. Grandma Sadie and Grandpa Nate fit in nicely.
It all started when Margaret Draper and Izzy Diamondstein decided to get married, and the citizens of Century Village called a meeting in the clubhouse to organize the wedding.
In their former lives, Grandma Sadie and Grandpa Nate had owned a small bakery right here in Epiphany, New York, so Grandma volunteered to do the wedding cake, and Grandpa Nate, whose chief hobby had always been violin playing, promised to arrange for the music.
My grandfather Gershom began practicing immediately and often. Grandma Sadie said, “Nathan, how can you stand playing the same piece over and over again?” And Grandpa Nate answered, “Why don’t you ask me how I can stand making love to the same woman over and over again?” And even though she is the age she is, my grandmother blushed and said, Sha! a shanda far die kinder, a remark I had heard many times before Grandma and Grandpa moved to Century Village. Translated it means, “Hush up, it’s a shame for the children,” but what it really meant was that Grandpa was embarrassing Grandma.
Mr. Cantor, a retired postman from Pennsylvania, who was devoted to growing orchids, said that he would have enough blossoms for the corsages. And Mrs. Kerchmer said that she would lend her African violets for the centerpieces.
Tillie Nachman volunteered to do the invitations, and Rabbi Friedman, who was a rabbi in his former life, said he would perform the ceremony even though Margaret Draper was not Jewish and Izzy Diamondstein was. This was a late second marriage, and there wouldn’t be any concern about what religion they should choose for their children since all their children were already grown up and chosen. Grandpa Nate later explained to me that unlike the average citizen of Century Village, rabbis don’t have former lives. They are what they were; once a rabbi, always a rabbi.
Many citizens of Century Village were widows who had once been great family cooks, so they formed a committee to plan the wedding dinner. Everyone agreed to share the cost, and they made up a menu and a master shopping list.
After that first meeting, Grandpa Nate and I took Tillie Nachman, a former New York City person who had never learned to drive, to the stationery store so that she could buy the invitations. While she shopped for the invitations, Grandpa and I went to Wal-Mart to pick up Grandma’s prescription, and that is when we saw the red wagon special. Grandpa bought it for me, and it’s a good thing he did. It came in handy until Allen came along.
I checked my list. Post-it notes. I had bought them when we ran out of invitations. Of course, we didn’t run out of invitations until Tillie’s cat got its paws into the ink.
Tillie was filling in the who-what-when-and-where on the invitations when I noticed that she had the prettiest handwriting I had ever seen. “Calligraphy,” she said. “It means beautiful writing,” and she asked me if I would like to learn how to write like her. I said yes. She said she would give me lessons if I would help her address the envelopes. So Grandpa drove us to an art supply store where she bought me a calligraphy pen and a bottle of ink. It was while Tillie was trying out various pen points (called nibs) that she made the remark about the ballpoint pen being the biggest single factor in the decline of Western Civilization.
After choosing a nib Tillie said, “I hope in the future, Noah, that you will use a ballpoint pen only when you have to press hard to make multiple carbons.”
I couldn’t promise that. There were times in school when a person had to do things fast, cheap, and without character.
Tillie said, “There are pens that come with ink in a cartridge, Noah, but I will have nothing to do with them.” So when we were back at her condo, Tillie taught me how to fill a pen, or, as she said, “How to properly fill a pen.”
One: Turn the filling plunger counterclockwise as far as it will go. Two: Dip the nib completely into the ink. Three: Turn the filling plunger clockwise until it stops. Four: Hold the nib above the ink bottle and turn the plunger counterclockwise again until three drops of ink fall back into the bottle. Five: Turn the plunger clockwise to stop the drops. Six: Wipe the excess ink completely from pen and nib.
When I told Tillie that six steps seemed a lot to have to do before you begin, she said, “You must think of those six steps not as preparation for the beginning but as the beginning itself.”
I practiced my calligraphy. I practiced all twenty-six letters of the alphabet, including X, which was not part of any of the who-what-when-and-wheres or any of the addresses but is a very good letter to practice because fact: It is not easy.
When Tillie decided that I was good enough to help with the invitations, I sat on the floor of her living room and used her coffee table as my desk. She sat at the kitchen table. Fact: Many of the domiciles in Century Village do not have family rooms with desks.
There was a lot of writing to do because at the bottom of each and every one of those invitations, we wrote: Your pre
sence but no presents. Tillie said that practically all the invitations that went out from Century Village said that. “Besides,” she said, “I think that making the wedding is enough of a present.”
I was doing a wonderful job until Thomas Stearns, called T.S., Tillie’s cat, pounced into my lap, and I jumped up and spilled the ink, and the cat walked through the spilled ink and onto a couple of the invitations I was addressing. A few—five altogether—now had cat’s paws.
Tillie was pretty upset because she had not bought extras because she said, “I don’t make mistakes.” In her former life Tillie had been a bookkeeper. I heard her say, “I can add up a column of figures with the best of them.” I didn’t know if she meant the best of the computers or the best of the bookkeepers, and I didn’t ask because I was afraid I already knew.
I told Tillie not to worry. I told her that I would think of something. And I did. That’s when I bought the Post-it notes. I put a Post-it into each of the invitations that had a cat’s paw mark. On the Post-it I wrote (in faultless calligraphy): Bring this specially marked invitation to the wedding and receive a surprise gift. When Tillie asked me what the surprise would be, I told her not to worry, that I would think of something. And I did. But fact: It wasn’t easy.
On the day the groceries were to be purchased, the citizens of Century Village formed their version of the Home Shopping Network. They met in the clubhouse again. Everyone sat in rows, holding coupons they’d clipped since printing began. They asked me to be master of ceremonies.
I sat at a table in front of the clubhouse room and called out items from the master grocery list. It was a lot like a game of Go Fish. I said, “I need one Crisco, four margarines, pareve, and let’s have all your paper towels.” Everyone searched through their fistfuls of coupons and gave me the ones that were needed. Tillie circled the items we had coupons for.
Then we checked the newspaper for supermarket specials and made out lists for each of the stores, depending on which one had the best buy in a particular item. I wrote the Gershom list in calligraphy. It didn’t slow things down too much, and the citizens of Century Village are accustomed to waiting.
The View From Saturday Page 1