Josie Bloom and the Emergency of Life
Page 2
That didn’t seem to help; Grandpa opened his mouth and, after a second, closed it again.
Inside, the bookcase was even better. The hallway was lit up by four wall sconces that looked like real candles—the bulbs were even flickering on purpose, not because they were about to burn out. A couple of cats wandered out and Mrs. B-B blinked, maybe because the walls were the color of Fleischmann’s margarine. She sighed a big long sigh, maybe because of the paint fumes. She planted her fists on her hips just like at school when she would call on Bubba Davis and he’d burp the whole answer and it wasn’t even correct.
“I suppose it will do,” Mrs. B-B finally said. Her voice went all weary and droopy, but her face told a different story.
Which is why my mind went here:
* * *
One time when I was a little girl, Mrs. Bean next door? Her front yard exploded. One minute the grass was prickled all over with green spikes, and the next minute—kapow! Yellow daffodils everywhere. If there was one thing my mom liked, it was daffodils. So I went and got my little green-handled scissors and I lopped off every single daffodil to give to Mom. Mrs. Bean ran out of her house screaming Stop, You Little Vandal!, and Mom ran out of our house screaming What on Earth Is the Matter!, and when Mom saw me and the flowers and the big vein throbbing in Mrs. Bean’s neck, well, she gave me a look. A wicked long look.
The very same look Mrs. Blyth-Barrow leveled at Grandpa.
And that’s why I thought Mrs. Blyth-Barrow was about to kiss Grandpa’s cheek. I thought she might whisper in his ear these words that my mom whispered in mine: “How is it that a little girl like you can take care of me? How is it possible that everything I need is here in your small hands?”
That memory is full of importance, like a TV After-School Special in my brain. Yellow flowers, yellow hair, yellow dress. Mom’s breath was warm on my ear, and her kiss was soft as snowflakes on my cheek. A shiver started slowly around my feet and picked up speed along my backbone to my head, and my body felt like it was growing bigger. I’m telling you, that shiver felt like goodness. That shiver told me I was good. Suddenly I knew the magical formula for being good: all I had to do was take care of Mom!
However, that day back in Mrs. Blyth-Barrow’s apartment over the Five and Ten, Mrs. B-B did not whisper, and she did not kiss Grandpa’s cheek. “Honestly, Mr. Bloom,” she said instead, and pretty loud. “Your business card might as well say We Do Jobs Oddly!”
* * *
“Psssst. Josie!” Winky was hissing at me and I noticed my name hanging loudly in the air as if someone had just hollered it three or four times.
“Here!” I shouted.
By the way, Mom made me help Mrs. Bean around the yard for three months!
The Book of Knowledge
Every librarian will tell you that if you want answers, read. Hungry to know how to make macaroni and cheese? Read the box. Need to know how fast lightning travels? Read Ripley’s Believe It or Not! (220,000 miles per hour, FYI.) Want to know about mortgages, bank fees, and home finances? Me neither, but I didn’t have any choice.
After homeroom we had library. There are posters all over the library walls, with sayings on them and pictures of famous people. Without education, you’re not going anywhere in this world.—Malcolm X. Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.—Margaret Mead. Mr. Mee had not tacked up anything dumb like Don’t forget to floss.
“Good morning, good morning.” Mr. Mee hailed us that day (and every day) with his arms up in the air like a gospel singer going Hallelujah. He has heavy black-framed eyeglasses and a mustache, and he nearly always wears a white button-up shirt and a skinny black necktie and a zip-up sweater straight out of Mr. Rogers’s closet. Mr. Mee was born in Bermuda and came to Maine for boarding school, way back when. He is something like fifty years old at this point, so people consider him a true Maineiac.
Becky Schenck moved out of Mr. Mee’s range just so she could mouth at me, “You smell.” Then she flipped her perfect blond hair and pinched her perfect little nose.
“Anything I can help you fine young people with today?” Mr. Mee asked us. He still has a little something of an accent, from Bermuda. I think you would call it a musical lilt because some of his syllables go up or down where you might think they wouldn’t, the way sometimes words change a little to fit the music in a song. “Heinous homework?” said Mr. Mee. “Arduous assignment? Intriguing investigation?”
“No, thank you,” I said, totally ignoring Becky, who was pretending to gag, by tilting my head and reading the spines on the closest shelf: NEW ARRIVALS. “Nothing particular.” I didn’t want him to know about the mortgage problem because everyone knows it isn’t polite to talk about family money problems in public. “Just something to read. Maybe a magazine.”
“Excellent, excellent,” said Mr. Mee. “You have come to the right place, but see here!” Mr. Mee raised a finger. Then he turned around and got a big giant book, which he plopped on the desk. It was so heavy that it went thud and so old that it gave off a puff of dust. Winky sneezed.
“God bless,” said Mr. Mee, and “Shh!” said Becky Schenck.
“This is the venerable Children’s Encyclopedia of Knowledge,” Mr. Mee said. He knocked his knuckles on the red cover. Gold writing made me figure it was expensive. I could probably sell it for a hundred and three dollars and eighty-seven cents.
“It’s a book full of fantastic facts and fancy findings!” Mr. Mee said. He was staring at us over his eyeglasses. “And so imagine my surprise,” he went on.
The clock above the door clicked. “Yes?” I said. Click. “Your surprise…?”
Mr. Mee bent an eyebrow. “In this volume,” he said, “I have found a number of falsehoods.”
“Falsehoods,” repeated Winky. He blinked a bunch. “In an encyclopedia?”
“Things once believed to be true,” said Mr. Mee, “but—what with the passage of time, technological advances, etceteras—discovered to be false.”
“Lies!” I said.
Mr. Mee shook his head. “Not lies, Josephine.” He tapped a fingertip on the cover of the book. “There are things in this book that once were as good as true, but have since been proved to be, shall we say, not actual.”
“Like the Tooth Fairy,” said Winky.
Mr. Mee whipped his head so fast I felt a breeze. “Not at all,” said Mr. Mee. “Our belief in things unproved is different. To my knowledge, nobody has proved that the Tooth Fairy does not exist.”
“Never visited me,” Winky said.
“What do you do with all your baby teeth?” I said.
“I keep ’em in a Band-Aids tin. Sometimes I rattle them around.”
Mr. Mee cocked his head, maybe to listen in his mind’s ear to the rattling of Winky’s teeth. Then he opened the book and turned some pages. “Listen,” he said after a little while. “The earth was once part of the sun that fell off,” he read. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Think of the poor fellow, the scientist, who’d believed the falsehood all along.” Mr. Mee shook his head and his eyes went all misty like someone with a lot of regrets, on TV. “Everything he thought he knew about the ground beneath his feet. Not so.”
I thought about that. Poor ye olde scientist. That must’ve been a wicked rough day.
“Did you know,” said Bubba Davis, looking at us one by one, “that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built by aliens?”
Becky Schenck heaved a stack of books onto the desk and flipped her long, straight, blond hair over her shoulder. “Yoo-hoo, checking out books here,” she whispered at the top of her lungs, as if Mr. Mee was her personal servant. Wicked rude.
Mr. Mee closed the Children’s Encyclopedia of Knowledge and smiled at Becky. “Certainly, certainly.” He stamped her books. “Excellent choices.”
“What about you, Josephine?” said Mr. Mee. Becky moved on, throwing me a dirty look for her own mysterious Becky-reasons. “I always enjoy knowing your selections.”
I usually would check out magazines, or my one favorite book, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! or something a lot like it. So Mr. Mee did not bat an eye when he stamped The VERY Best of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! on the counter.
Then I plopped another book on the counter, which I’d found on the New Arrivals shelf. On the cover was a kid surrounded by bricks of gold. The kid looked wicked satisfied. His hands were on his belly as if he’d just eaten one of the gold bricks. That kid probably never had to worry about paying the mortgage.
Without saying one word, Mr. Mee stamped Child Millionaire: A Young Person’s Guide to the Stock Market. He closed the cover and pushed my books across the counter. Then he said, “You might consider reading more fiction. A good novel can prepare us for what might come our way in life. Fiction provides a safe place to contemplate our choices and weigh our decisions. And many times, you’ll find a happy ending.”
“Well, I like things that are stranger than fiction,” I said. I scooped up my books. “Also, I thought school librarians weren’t supposed to judge,” I added.
Mr. Mee ignored that. “Give Dickens a try sometime,” he said.
Mrs. Blyth-Barrow’s Agenda
What the dickens,” said Mrs. Blyth-Barrow.
We were sitting in Mrs. B-B’s classroom after school the next day in a little ring of student chairs. She has very yellow hair that looks like you could knock on it, sort of a Darth Vader–type look if he wasn’t on the Dark Side.
“To what are you referring, Mrs. Bith-Blith—Mrs., uh, Berth-Bith…” Grandpa always sat up wicked straight and talked fancy, very proper, when he was in these meetings with my teacher, as if she was his teacher too.
Mrs. B-B waved a hand, probably to make him stop hacking away at her name. “Let me begin by saying that ennui is not a proper state for a child,” Mrs. B-B said.
“Sir, yes sir!” Grandpa agreed. He stood and saluted, for emphasis.
Mrs. B-B looked flattered.
Grandpa sat.
I raised my pointer finger. “On-wee—”
“Don’t interrupt, Josie,” Mrs. B-B interrupted. “I recall my youth in Entwistle, where I was a girl with a bright future, all the world ahead of me, and every reason to enjoy all the confidence in the world.”
What was she talking about? Hadn’t she called this meeting to talk about my grades again? I looked at Grandpa for help, but by his dreamy face I could tell he’d been carried away to Mrs. Blyth-Barrow’s youth in Entwistle, wherever that was.
“But—”
“Why don’t you apply yourself, Josephine?” she said, switching gears. That was more like it! She leaned in. “You don’t seem to care about your grades, Josie”—she held up a hand—no buts!—as if!—“but it may surprise you to know that I don’t care about your grades either.”
That was a surprise. I looked at Grandpa. He looked at me. We were like a couple of bunny rabbits caught out in the open.
“What I do care about is that you try,” she said, “and that you learn. Something. Anything.”
Without moving my head, I sliiiiiiid my eyes upward from Mrs. B-B’s hard yellow hair to the clock, but the hands hadn’t moved. Then I rolled my eyeballs sideways to look out the windows. It was a nice day. Hamburg is especially nice during that week or so in spring when the mud season is nearly over and the black fly season hasn’t come on yet. I realized that the only way to get from in here in this stuffy classroom to out there in the nice day was to agree with whatever my teacher said.
“Tryyyy,” I said, nodding. “I’ll try that.”
Mrs. B-B sat back in her chair and smiled.
I do try, I thought. Just not that often or much. Winky’s more of a try-er.
Grandpa sat back in his chair, like Mrs. B-B, and smacked his hands on his thighs. “We seem to be having a fine conversation here. I would add, as a wise man once said, it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
Grandpa’s motto had about as much to do with my homework or grades as Mrs. B-B’s youth in Entwistle, as far as I could tell. It was one long blurt.
“I couldn’t disagree more, Mr. Bloom,” said Mrs. B-B. Her hair bobbed side to side.
This was interesting. Grandpa’s motto challenged? I looked from one to the other. The clock hands moved a little.
Suddenly Mrs. B-B leaned forward. Her hair swung like the Liberty Bell. “Do you even possess a hairbrush?”
Hey! Well, I couldn’t get a brush through my hair even if I had one.
“No offense,” she went on. “I’m sure you’re doing a fine job caring for Josephine…”
What?
“Cheese and rice!” Grandpa said.
I sat wicked still, so as to seem like I hadn’t noticed Grandpa’s blurting. Did Mrs. B-B notice it? I wasn’t exactly sure why I didn’t want her to notice, except that the blurting seemed… new and unusual. I didn’t want to see Grandpa’s business card go from Odd Jobs to just… Odd!
I didn’t need to worry, because Mrs. Blyth-Barrow had what she liked to call during morning meeting her agenda. And her agenda was me. “But isn’t she a bit, err, rough around the edges, hmm? A bit unkempt? A bit, shall we sayyy… unnn-hygienic?”
Come on, now, she made up that word.
She folded her hands in her lap. “A feminine influence is in order. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Bloom?”
What what what? Mrs. B-B’s meeting was taking more turns than an episode of The Sands of Time! It’s a show about a sprawling family of cattle ranchers, the Sands, who live in a quaint town in Texas called Time. Time has got everything a drama needs in the way of shops and businesses and interesting inhabitants, plus good-looking visitors are always moving in. You can hardly believe what goes on there, but I guess that’s the point.
Anyway, it’s true that my Toughskins had grass stains, but what you do with blue jeans is, you give them a good shake before you put them on again. And I’d taken a bath just two days before. Two days? Maybe four days. I couldn’t remember exactly. I sniffed in the direction of my right armpit. No problems. I also checked my breath by blowing on my hand and smelling. Smelled fine. Like breath.
“Well, well, that’s all very well,” Grandpa said. He frowned at me. What did I do?
“No advice columnist for any newspaper in the world would tell you otherwise, and I would know,” said Mrs. B-B. “For seven long and intensely dull months I was ‘Dear Beth,’ for the Punxsutawney Daily Shadow, yes, that Punxsutawney. The editor-in-chief believed no one would write to a Dear Balithia. I can tell you that in Punxsutawney, anyway, people are all the same. Their problems boil down to one thing: communication!”
“Talk is cheap,” said Grandpa.
“Silence is costly,” said Mrs. B-B.
Grandpa had the last word. “Waffles!”
Mrs. B-B blinked like an owl on Animal Kingdom. But then she kind of twinkled, like a mom in a peanut butter ad. “Oh my, Mr. Bloom. The wit! The leaps of brain power!” She turned to me. “Am I right?” She actually seemed to want to know. Probably she was trying to decide if Grandpa was showing leaps of brain power, or a shortage of brain power. I’d seen her look at me the same way in math class.
So I said, “Right!” with all the confidence of a youth in Entwistle.
She landed on the side of leap. “One can hardly keep up!” she said.
I had no trouble keeping up with that one. It followed that this talk of things being cheap and costly made Grandpa remember the waffles at Moody’s Diner, which had gone up in price and down in quality since Mrs. Beverly Moody retired and her granddaughter Debbie Moody-Cote took over. I, myself, had been ordering the pancakes instead.
Mrs. B-B stood up, so we did too. Then she said, “This child needs to bathe.” Wicked abrupt!
“I do bathe!” I said.
“Regularly.”
“All right already!”
“In the bathtub.”
“Where else?”
“With soap.”
“Mis-ter Bloom!” said Mrs. B-B. He stopped mid-sidle. “There are items a girl needs that a grandfather might not think of having in the house. Feminine items.”
“Got it!” he said. His face was glowing about as bright as his blaze-orange hunting cap.
“There is no need for embarrassment. Mennnstroooaaation is perfuhhllyy waaaahh garble bidddlle prrrr gggaahhh.”
I’d stopped hearing anything after the word “menstruation,” the absolute worst word of all time, especially from your teacher with your grandfather standing right there! “Mrs. B-B! I mean—I’m not—I don’t need those things, Mrs. Blyth-Barrow!” my voice sounded as blaze-orange as Grandpa’s face. Where was a giant, person-size Brenda’s Book Cozy when you needed one to wrap yourself in?
“But you will need them,” she said, her voice all quiet and creepy, “and you will need other things too. Someone to talk to.” As if I’d talk to my teacher about… about anything! “I am here for you, Josephine. And I am here for you, Mr. Bloom. And I am paying attention. If all aspects of this child’s care are not attended to, I will notice. And I will take steps.”
Steps? What steps? Did she know about the mortgage and the water and the lights? And even though she was using a soft voice, why did it sound like Grandpa and I were both being sent to the principal’s office?
The Not-Secret Fort
On Saturday, someone came and planted a FOR SALE sign on the next-door neighbors’ front yard.
“Why would the Beans want to leave Hamburg?” I asked Grandpa. Had Mr. and Mrs. Bean not paid their mortgage? Would we have to sell our house too? Five days had gone by since I’d found that mortgage statement, and so far all I’d done about it was sneak around the house looking for some more of Grandpa’s fishy money.
Grandpa glanced up from what he was doing, which was arranging a bunch of peanuts-in-the- shell on the mudroom steps.