by Dar Williams
He spoke again. “I’m shivering, and — and — this is terrible!”
He was shivering. I could see him. But he still couldn’t see me.
Joyce spoke so gently, it seemed normal that she wasn’t actually in the boat with us. She was simply a presence. She asked, “Are you afraid? Think a little deeper, David, what does this rain remind you of?”
Dad was almost yelling, because the rain and the waves were getting louder. I started shivering, too.
“I feel exposed!” he cried. He was trying to answer the question, which made me feel proud of him, to my surprise. He was talking about how he felt. “I — I am cold and alone, and no one can help me. What’s going to happen to Amalee in this cold, driving rain if I can’t even help myself?” My breath caught on the sound of my name.
Joyce didn’t rush to make him feel better. Instead, she went a little farther into what he was saying. “So you feel like if you don’t get better, you’ll run out of money, you’ll lose your house, and your daughter won’t have anywhere to go?”
“Yes — that is exactly what will happen,” Dad said loudly. I wanted to touch his hand and say I could take care of myself, but I knew this was not the time. I kept my arms wrapped around my chest in the freezing rain, watching the cold water drip from his hair onto his neck.
“David, you’re forgetting something,” Joyce almost cooed.
“What?” he yelled.
“You’re forgetting something very important.”
“My bank savings?” he asked.
“No, David. Well, yes, you have some money squirreled away and, sure, that could help. But, David,… think about what else you have. Think about … your friends.”
“They’ll get sick of helping me! I can’t put this on their shoulders!” he insisted.
“David,” Joyce said firmly, as if she wanted to raise her voice. “You have listened to John talking about his big plans until three in the morning almost every weekend since college. That’s twenty years. You have bought an endless number of Carolyn’s paintings, even when she did that horrible series about her knees. You listened to her describe every one of them, too. You helped Phyllis get a job after her divorce.” He did? “And me. Well, I don’t want to go into what you’ve put up with. But you know.”
“It didn’t feel like I was helping you. You’re my friends.”
“Well, how do you think we feel?” Joyce asked, trying to keep the soothing tones in her otherwise exasperated voice.
The wind gradually died down in the silence that followed. The rain became a cool, April mist, and then it stopped completely.
“Has the rain stopped?” Joyce asked.
“Actually it has,” Dad said in a humble voice. Clearly, Joyce had stood up to the voice of his fear, which we all knew was no small feat.
“All right, then. If we’re on an entire ocean, there are bound to be other things that come up. David, do you see anything?” I caught myself looking around at the calm ocean. I couldn’t see the shore, which was a little frightening. Joyce was right. This boat wasn’t coming in to shore yet.
Dad wasn’t ready to come home.
“LOOK!” Dad cried. I jerked my head.
“What is it?” Joyce asked.
It was rising just above the surface, whatever it was, and coming at us faster than we could outrun it. I thought I might throw up, I was so scared. Dad’s expression didn’t make me feel any safer. He looked terrified.
“It could be a shark!” he cried.
“A shark,” Joyce repeated firmly, but calmly. Obviously she couldn’t see it.
It was coming so fast the boat was starting to rock.
“Yes! A shark, which is dangerous, and cruel, and doesn’t care about me, and — and —” Dad was looking hard at the smooth, black shape that we could now see under the water as well as above the surface. He was trying to describe his fear so that Joyce could tell him how to make it better. I felt angry at Joyce and myself, forcing Dad to talk about his fear so that it wouldn’t kill him. Everything seemed very real at this moment, and this thing was maybe thirty seconds away.
“David, what does this remind you of?” Joyce asked quickly. “What has been coming at you too fast, hunting you down?”
“My sickness!” Dad yelled. “Yes! That’s what it is! That’s how it feels! Like a shark swimming after me. Why me? What did I do to make this sickness come after me? It’s so unfair! It’s so — wait a minute, that’s not a shark,” he suddenly said. He leaned out of the boat to see. “It’s something else. I know this from one of the books Phyllis gave me. It’s not a shark, it’s not as dangerous. What is it?”
I craned my neck to see if I could tell what it was, still alarmed at its speed. All I could see was that it was huge. Now that I looked, I could see it did not have a sharp fin like a shark’s. But it wasn’t a dolphin, it was …
“A WHALE!” Dad cried. The whale came close to the boat, then alongside of us, quickly swimming to get ahead of us. When it was many feet away, it sprang out of the water, flipped around to its other side, and splashed back into the ocean. “A whale! A whale! Just like in the books!” Dad was saying in his almost–eight-year-old voice. “It wasn’t a shark, it was a beautiful whale!” I was speechless to see the ballerina grace of the spinning whale.
“David …” Joyce spoke softly.
“I know what it is!” Dad interrupted her. “You don’t have to ask. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s not all bad! A shark might want to eat you for lunch, but a whale does not. My sickness is not out to get me. It’s just my life, and life is full of beauty where you least expect it. It’s not trying to hunt me down!” he said, starting to laugh. “Life is like a whale, because …” He was really trying to think this through. “Because, well, it’s huge, it’s bigger than I am, it seems a little too big to handle, and it’s so beautiful, and full of … important things that are difficult to understand. How’s that?” he asked.
Now Joyce was laughing. “I’d say you’ve done a lot of work, out there on the ocean! Do you think you’re ready to come home now?”
Was it my imagination or was the boat starting to speed up? Suddenly we were moving almost as fast as a motorboat toward something that was definitely not a tropical beach. This was the answer to Joyce’s question. We were not homeward bound yet. There was something giant and white towering out of the ocean. I thought it might be a castle made of snow and reaching all the way up to the clouds, and I tried to guess what this could be. Maybe it was a pile of term papers that he had to grade, so huge they became the building blocks of an igloo castle. Maybe he’d been thinking he’d have to work twice as hard next year to make up for the time he’d lost. The boat came closer. This was something I’d only seen in pictures, never knowing how immense the real thing would be. It was an iceberg. An iceberg? Dad would have to start talking fast, or perhaps we would crash into it. But the boat slowed down and bobbed its way up to the side of this ice mountain whose top I could not even see.
“We’ve come to an iceberg,” Dad said in a tired voice.
“Aha. I’m not surprised,” Joyce said reassuringly. “Don’t be discouraged, I’m sure we’re close to the end of our journey, David. Let’s just figure this out.”
“I have no idea what this is,” Dad said, shaking his head. “I’m afraid if I touch it, I’ll freeze up, too. I’ll turn to ice, and then into air.”
I shivered when he said this, but not because I was cold.
“Touch it!” Out of nowhere, Joyce was insisting, “I have a strong feeling about this. Touch it now!”
The boat wobbled. She surprised me and Dad so much, we both jumped.
“Okay,” Dad said cautiously, reaching out.
Silently, because he still hadn’t seen me, I snuck to the edge of my seat and extended my arm, too.
The ice was not cold, but it sent some kind of feeling up my arm as quickly as fire or ice. What was it? I took a deep breath and realized that my mind was filling with memories coming o
ne after another, faster than I thought my mind could think.
It was my first-grade teacher in an orange sweater out on the playground, telling us to look at the orange leaves of the fall trees. It was John telling all of us that we were going to “love love love” the black-and-white movie he found on channel thirteen, and all of us, my dad’s friends and me, too full of Thanksgiving dinner to protest. It was Dad standing with me in the snow on a clear winter’s night, pointing up at the sky and telling me the names of the constellations.
I looked over at Dad, his eyes closed as he touched the iceberg. When he spoke, his voice was absolutely clear. “I was afraid that if I didn’t make it, if I actually died, my life would feel unfinished. But I can always look at it as a complete book, can’t I? I mean, I can see all of you in it, and I am so grateful! And I will always be lucky for everything that has already happened. I’ve had so much fun, and I have loved my job, and you are the best friends I could ever want, and there’s something on top of that, even more than that.”
“What’s that, David?” Joyce asked, but I could tell she was smiling as if she knew. What was it?
“Amalee,” he said. “She is the most wonderful thing in my life. Her kindness to me, and her tomboy gracefulness that she doesn’t even know she has, and her sense of humor.” He opened his eyes. We were back in the room. “Amalee!” he said. “You’re here!”
“I was here the whole time,” I said. “I was here the whole time, Dad.” I meant more than just our time in the boat today, and he knew it.
Dad said, “I’m sorry you had to go through all this, Honey.”
“I was okay, Dad. I’m sorry you had to go through this. I wish you’d let me help you more. You could have told me you were frightened.”
“I was obviously afraid of telling myself!” he said, laughing.
Joyce looked confused, and a little relieved. “Uh, three, two, one, now you’re awake.”
But he was already awake and we were all sitting on his bed together, no iceberg, no boat, and no more ocean.
I rested my head against Dad’s chest, and he put his arm around me.
We sat quietly for a few minutes, and then we heard a car pull up outside. Soon Carolyn appeared in the doorway, and we all admired her painting.
Joyce marveled at the variety of plants Carolyn had painted, and I marveled at Joyce in a way I never had before.
Joyce said, “No wonder John’s so excited about your work on the —” She stopped short.
“On what?” asked Dad.
“I’m, uh, helping John plant some stuff,” Carolyn explained nervously. What was so hush-hush about that?
Joyce nodded her head, so whatever the secret was, she was in on it. She and Carolyn left the room and said they’d heat up some dinner for us.
I sat with Dad.
“Why couldn’t you talk about being sick?” I asked.
“Why couldn’t you tell me about school?” he asked.
“Hey, not fair,” I said. “I was under strict orders from Dr. Nurstrom not to upset you.”
“Well, I was under strict orders from the Patron Saint of Parents not to tell my eleven-year-old daughter that I was so afraid of what was happening.” So we both had a decent excuse.
“Do you want to tell me what happened at school?” he asked. “I know something happened.”
“I don’t want to, but I think I should.” And so I started.
I started with Lenore asking me to stay over, then I told him about not having my notebooks, and finally I told him — slowly, exactly — what happened when I pushed Lenore and she fell down the stairs. I told him about how everybody hated me, and how Lenore was going to sue me and get me thrown out of school for a week, and that I thought I deserved it all until Phyllis stuck up for me. I ended by saying I still felt confused, and I still felt bad, but things were getting better.
“It turned into something like an English class,” I said.
“What do you mean?” asked my dad.
“Well, I got to be the villain, and I survived. Ms. Severance says we need to understand the people we call the bad guys, and now I really do. So I feel lucky. And I also got to see that even when we do bad things, we can still be forgiven.”
“So how does this terrible lesson make you lucky?” my dad said, trying to make sense of this. “Oh, man. Honey, I feel like I really let you down.”
“You let me down? I let you down! I’m the one who almost lost our house.”
“No, that wouldn’t have happened,” Dad groaned. “I could have told you that. I could have helped you. I would have told you, well, first of all, you’re not a villain or a bad guy. You’re a great girl. I think you’re the best. All my friends think you are the coolest kid.”
“I haven’t always been nice to your friends. I think sometimes I treated them like morons.”
“Oh, big deal,” he said. “Every once in a while you did what kids do. You said what was on your mind. They didn’t care. I mean, they might have been hurt, but that’s because they wanted you to like them. Adults pretend not to, but they really want kids to like them. When kids don’t like you, you get afraid that you’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a kid.”
“Huh, I never thought of that.”
“But my friends have always loved you. Right from the start. Every time I told them things you’d said or done, they were as proud as if they were your parents.”
I thought of John putting my good tests on the refrigerator.
“Your friends are very interesting people,” I said.
We both laughed a little. That was an understatement.
I wasn’t sure if I had taken them seriously before. I remembered thinking they were selfish, boring, weepy, whiny.
They were heroes! That’s how I saw them now.
They were more than heroes. Each of them had a special skill that we needed to help my father.
“Your friends were superheroes,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head. “And I was the opposite.”
“You were sick!” I protested. “Dad, you are still sick!”
“But I wonder how I could have come through for them if they were sick. Could I teach them philosophy?”
“No. You listen to them. If they were sick, you would sit and listen to them so much, your ears would get as big as satellite dishes.”
“Oh, I see,” he said.
“And your ears would transmit their messages across the planet, and thousands of people would send letters with helpful advice.”
“Is that so?” Dad was laughing. “I don’t think we should stop at this planet, then.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “Messages would be transmitted throughout the galaxy. And one very friendly extraterrestrial would show up, and he would say, ‘JOYCE. WILL. YOU. BE. MY. GIRLFRIEND?’”
My dad laughed harder than he had in months. “I think Joyce is already taken, Honey,” he said, wiping away his tears.
“Really?” I said. Well, good for Joyce.
“Or so I suspect,” he added. I watched him look away mysteriously, and then he changed the subject. “Hey, what are they making us to eat in the kitchen?”
I got up and said I’d help them make some pesto and orecchiette. “Orecchiette just means pasta shaped like ears,” I explained.
I stopped in the doorway and said, “Of course, you know you’re already my hero.”
My dad had already picked up his favorite gorilla book. He turned a little red.
“No, I didn’t know that,” he said, opening the pages.
“Oh, yeah. Your friends think I’m the coolest kid, but my friends think you’re the coolest dad.”
“You have friends?” he blurted out.
It was okay. He was allowed to wonder. I thought about it for a minute.
“I have one,” I said.
I walked to school the next morning. Joyce had a boyfriend? Was it who I thought it was? I decided I’d ask her about it when I saw her agai
n.
English class was great. Ms. Severance looked excited about the new words we were going to learn. She said, “These are words that you see all the time, but you might not know what they mean.”
Ambivalent: having mixed feelings, feeling more than one way about something
Vigilant: watchful, often looking out for danger, making sure things go right
Pompous: having an exaggerated sense of self-importance, shown with boasting and grand gestures of seriousness
“How many of you have seen these words and wondered what they meant?” she asked.
We all raised our hands.
“Well, look them up!” Ms. Severance teased. “No, let’s take the shortcut together. It’s better to look at them here, because then we can talk about the sense of a word, or the connotation.” She wrote “connotation” and underlined it. “Sentence?” she asked.
I raised my hand, and she called on me. “I was ambivalent about the advice from the expert, because I wanted to be vigilant about doing the right thing, but I knew he was so pompous, he might not be trustworthy.”
I was speaking a secret language to Ms. Severance.
“Very good,” she said cautiously. “Especially on the word ‘pompous.’” She shot me a quick, knowing smile, then continued. “It’s hard to trust pompous people, because they act like experts, but their own sense of self-importance can get in the way of their intelligence.”
Poor Mr. Shapiro. If he only knew that I was having a conversation about him with Ms. Severance!
After class, I heard someone behind me in the hall.
“Hey, Amalee! Wait up!” It was Sarah. “We’re doing three shows of Bye Bye Birdie. It’s Thursday and Friday nights and Saturday afternoon. You want to come?”
“Sure!” I said. “How about Saturday afternoon?”
“Good,” she answered. “We have the most tickets for that show.” She pulled two tickets out of a big envelope and gave them to me.