Dicey's Song

by Cynthia Voigt

  “I wonder if I could do it,” he wondered. “I’ve got pretty good balance. Don’t you think I do?”

  “I think,” Dicey said, picturing the fifteen-foot metal swing sets, “that if you ever talk like that again I’ll have a heart attack.” She could see how it would look, Sammy’s sturdy body and his head of yellow hair, with his arms out to keep his balance. And falling onto the packed dirt. “Seriously.”

  “OK, Dicey,” he said, with a smile in his voice. “We had a math test this afternoon,” he added.

  Dicey took in the information. “They didn’t do it on purpose, did they? To get out of the test?”

  “I think so,” Sammy answered. “They’re pretty tricky.”

  “Did you ask them?”

  “Yep. After school. Ernie — he’s the one who has all the ideas — didn’t say yes. But he didn’t say no either. He’s bigger than the rest of us. Miss Tieds never even caught on,” Sammy said.

  “How was the test?”

  “Easy,” Sammy reported.

  Just before supper, Dicey asked James when he was going to begin working with Maybeth. James pulled his eyes up from a book he was reading, as if he couldn’t remember what she was talking about.

  “James,” Dicey said.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “Cripes, Dicey, give me a chance. I’ve got the paper route and school and all. There’s no hurry.”

  The phone rang during dinner — in the middle of a big conversation about chickens. Sammy was trying to persuade Gram that they would be smart to get some chickens. “I’d feed them and everything. I’d collect the eggs,” he promised. “They could stay in one of those empty stalls. The chickens, not the eggs.”

  Gram teased Sammy. “You’d give them names,” she told him, “and then when it came time to eat one you’d say, ‘We can’t eat Hercules!’”

  Sammy laughed. “I wouldn’t name a chicken Hercules,” he said. “I’d name it — Miss Tieds. I wouldn’t mind eating that chicken.”

  “I couldn’t ever eat any creature named Miss anything. Or Mister. You can’t give chickens titles, boy. It’s like — naming one Queen Elizabeth, or President Johnson.”

  “Johnson’s not President any more, Gram,” James informed her. She fixed him with a beady glance, and her mouth twitched. Before he could say anything, the phone rang and he ran to answer it. When he returned, he was running. “It’s Toby, and he wants me to spend the night on Friday, and can I?”

  Gram asked him if he wanted to, and he said yes. She asked him where Toby lived, and he lived downtown. She asked him about what time, and he told her after school on Friday and Toby’s mother would bring him home Saturday afternoon. All the time, he was almost jumping with excitement. Gram asked him about his paper route. “Sammy’ll do it, won’t you, Sammy?”

  “Sure,” Sammy said.

  “Sammy’s too little,” Dicey protested.

  Both James and Sammy protested that. Dicey looked at Gram for advice.

  Gram apparently agreed with the boys, and she gave James permission. He ran back down the hall to tell Toby, and then ran back to the table, full of plans for what he’d take and what they might do. Dicey looked at him and couldn’t tell what to think. She was glad he had a friend, but she had the feeling that he wasn’t going to do much to help Maybeth, feeling the way he did.

  Her foreboding was correct. Dicey knew she was impatient for Maybeth. She tried not to nag at James. But she couldn’t help asking him, about every time she saw him, whether he had figured out how to teach Maybeth. “What’s the big hurry?” he asked her.

  “The year’s a quarter through,” Dicey said. Their report cards were due out next week. They would get them handed out in a special homeroom at the end of the day next Tuesday.

  “So what else is new?” James asked. His question was impatient, but his eyes shone with an excitement inside him, as if nothing could really disturb him, not even Dicey’s nagging.

  “But even if you can find a way to teach her, she’ll go slowly. You know that, James. There’s no time to waste.”

  “I’m not wasting time. I’m thinking,” he told her.

  “Yeah, but what are you thinking about?” Dicey snapped. and walked away before he could answer. She knew what he was thinking about that made him so happy, and she was glad for him. But.

  This holding on that Gram had talked about was more complicated than she’d thought. She had to hold on to James, for what he wanted, and hold on to Maybeth for what she needed. That was fine, except for when the wants and needs were at cross purposes. At least Sammy seemed more cheerful and was talking more and more about the kids in his class, as if he had time to notice them now.

  When Dicey returned from work on Thursday, her whole family except for James was in the kitchen. A thick silence lay all over the room. Gram sat quietly at the end of the big wooden table, her hands busy with yellow wool. She was rolling it up into balls, and Sammy was helping her by holding the wool. Maybeth had her head down and her shoulders were shaking. Dicey dumped her books and asked, “What’s the matter?”

  Maybeth kept her head down. Gram looked at Dicey and said, “She won’t say.” Sammy answered at the same time, “I dunno, she started crying when we got off the bus.”

  Dicey went to kneel before Maybeth. “Maybeth? What’s the matter? Whatever it is, it’s all right.”

  Maybeth raised her face. Her hair hung down wet at the side of her face. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks were wet, her mouth quivered. She threw herself into Dicey’s arms and kept on crying.

  Dicey patted her shoulder and rumpled the hair at the top of her round little head. “I promise, it’s OK, whatever. I promise, Maybeth,” she said. “You believe me, don’t you? You know you can believe me.”

  Maybeth’s head nodded. She took a big, shuddering breath and got up. She went to stand beside Gram, where she could look at all of them. She twisted her hands in front of her.

  “They all —” she said in a voice so low and little Dicey almost couldn’t hear. “I didn’t want — to have to tell twice,” she wailed. Her voice got stronger, but her words came out choked and uneven. She was crying so hard, she gulped in air and gulped out words that shuddered with her breath. “When I read, they all, every one, they laughed at me. And Mrs. Jackson couldn’t make them stop. And I forgot everything. And she said they were unkind. And I couldn’t make any words come out. And it was horrible, I don’t know what to do — I don’t ever want to go back there.”

  In the middle of this, James came bursting into the doorway. His cheeks were red from the long ride in the cool air, his eyes shone. As he listened, his face got quiet, thoughtful.

  “They were all — all laughing — whenever I made a mistake — and I kept making mistakes. I couldn’t help it.”

  James met Dicey’s eyes. Dicey expected him to stick out his lower lip and look away. But he didn’t. He nodded at her, just once. She could see him thinking. She could see him beginning to understand how it was for Maybeth, and how she had to feel. She could see him being angry at himself for thinking it wasn’t important. She could see him wondering what to say, to Maybeth.

  “Because I can’t,” Maybeth wailed. “I can’t — read, and I — can’t learn.”

  “Who says?” James’s cool voice cut across her tears.

  “Everyone,” Maybeth told him. She stood there, her shoulders heaving. You could see her stomach going in and out. She looked so fragile Dicey was frightened and wanted to run out of the room. Gram and Sammy were sitting with frozen, unhappy faces. Only James looked unconcerned, but that was an act, Dicey knew.

  “Who’s smarter?” James demanded of Maybeth. “Everyone? Or me?”

  “I don’t know,” Maybeth mumbled. At least her sobs were dying down. James had her attention.

  “Well, I know. It’s me. And do you know what I say?” James asked her.

  Dicey wanted to hiss at James, Get to the point. But part of holding on was letting him do things his own way.
Maybe, after all, he was right, because Maybeth looked up at him and shook her head, no. Tears had stopped oozing out of her eyes, too.

  “I say — you can learn. I say, I can teach you. And you know what else?”

  Maybeth shook her head again.

  “I’m going to. Whether you want me to or not, so you better say yes.”

  A little smile lifted the corners of Maybeth’s mouth, like a wave licking at the shore.

  “Have you ever known me to be wrong?” James asked. He sounded so confident, Dicey almost believed him.

  “Yes!” Sammy shrieked, unable to bear the tension any more. “Lots and lots!”

  At that, James grinned and shrugged. He kept his eyes on Maybeth, and she smiled back at him.

  “Dicey thinks I can,” he said.

  “Do you?” Maybeth asked. “Really?”

  Dicey nodded.

  “All right,” Maybeth said, in a little voice.

  “That’s settled then,” Gram announced. She began winding the wool again.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” James told Maybeth. “On Saturday morning, because I’ll be in town, or maybe tomorrow night — if I ask I bet Toby’ll want to. We’ll go to the library and I’ll take out all their books on reading. Did you know there are dozens of different ways to teach it?”

  Maybeth shook her head, no.

  “I asked Mr. Thomas. The reason there are so many ways is because there are so many different kinds of brains, to learn. I think we’ll have our first lesson on Monday, Monday after school.”

  “I have piano lesson Monday,” Maybeth protested, softly. But her hands had stopped twisting.

  “OK, Sunday afternoon. And Monday afternoon after piano,” James agreed. He looked around at all of them and added: “Sammy will have to take over my paper route. He can do it, Dicey. Better than me, because he’s more careful.”

  “That’s true,” Sammy told her. He turned his face back to look at Gram. “It is.”

  “Sounds all right to me. How’s it sound to you, girl?” Gram asked.

  “Fine,” Dicey said. She hoped James would be able to do what he had said he could. She could tell, watching him, that he was having the same doubts, and the same hopes.

  Holding on was time-consuming, Dicey discovered. Well, she said to herself — pedaling out behind Sammy on Friday afternoon, watching him carefully throw the carefully folded papers onto doorsteps, noticing how he talked to barking dogs and rode alertly, using his ears as well as his eyes to watch traffic — you knew that. It was, after all, only what she had been doing as long as she could remember. It was, also, what she wanted to do.

  James returned late Saturday, with reports of what a good time he had had and how they wanted him to come back — and they said soon. After supper, he settled down to read through a huge pile of books he had taken out of the library. They had lit a fire again, as they did most evenings now. Gram had gone up to the attic and brought down piles of warm socks, half-a-dozen pairs of workboots and a pair of red rubber boots for Maybeth. There were also a couple of rough, heavy sweaters for the boys. Dicey decided she would be glad to wear one of the old boys’ sweaters on cold mornings, so Gram was knitting Maybeth’s yellow sweater first.

  When Gram entered the living room with the armload of clothes, James lifted his head from the book and exchanged a glance with Dicey. She knew he was thinking about what else was up there, in the attic.

  After the little kids had been put to bed, James insisted that Dicey confer with him. What he really meant was that she should listen to him, but that was OK with Dicey. He talked and talked, about the different ways of teaching and the theories behind them. He used words she’d never heard before: dyslexia, dysgraphia, remediation, word recognition, effective learning, affective learning. Dicey didn’t bother to ask him what everything meant. She just listened and nodded her head whenever he seemed to want her to. Finally he told her, “There’s a lot I can’t understand yet. People have such different theories about education, and they’ve studied them.”

  Dicey nodded.

  “And I haven’t had very much experience myself. I never paid too much attention to what other people were doing in class. You know?”

  Dicey nodded again. Now she really was listening, however, because she wondered what James was leading up to. It wasn’t like him to talk about what he didn’t understand. He preferred to talk about what he knew.

  “But here’s what I think. Gram? Are you listening? If you think I’m wrong, I want you to tell me. Because I just don’t know enough. But I think — for years and years they taught using the phonic method. Remember Dicey? Where you learn what the letters and phonemes and blends say, and you sound out words.”

  Dicey didn’t remember, but that didn’t matter.

  “My guess is, that if they’ve used it for years — and it’s the way we learned, and Massachusetts has one of the oldest public school systems in the country, and it’s a good one too — that’s the one I want to use with Maybeth. What do you think? Because if it wasn’t good it wouldn’t have lasted so long.”

  Gram answered. “It’s sound reasoning. But you haven’t read all those books, have you?”

  “No, how could I? Some I just looked over to see what the chapters were about.”

  “But if it’s the way Maybeth was taught in Provincetown,” Dicey said — then she stopped, noticing that she didn’t even think to say back home. James waited, so she went on. “Maybe it doesn’t work for Maybeth.”

  James’ face was serious, and it was almost as if he was looking inside of his own head for the words he was going to speak, even though his eyes rested on Dicey. “Yeah, but listen. There’s what they call the emotional overlay, when someone has reading problems. Like — I dunno, maybe like layers of paint and you have to scrape it off before you can get to the real problem. Like a kid who always gets in trouble in class, so he’s always being punished and never gets his work done. That way he avoids looking stupid. Because he’d rather be bad than stupid. And Maybeth is better here — we all know that, don’t you, Gram? She’s not nearly so scared of things. Of people. It’s not so complicated for her here. Without Momma to worry about, and what people say. My theory is, all that stuff interfered with her before and it won’t interfere now. What do you think?”

  “You could be right,” Gram said.

  “What are you going to do next?” Dicey asked James.

  “Tomorrow, I’ll study this book on the phonics method and then we’ll start.”

  “Is that enough time?” Gram asked.

  “Sure. And if I’m wrong, I know what method to try next. It’s interesting, you know?” James told them, his eyes bright. “I had no idea it was so interesting. It’s made me curious about what Maybeth thinks. I mean, I don’t think she’s got a reading disorder, it’s just slowness. But I wonder. . . . “ His voice drifted off. Dicey looked at Gram and grinned. Gram smiled back and reversed her needles to begin another row.

  Dicey hung around quietly in the background during Maybeth’s first lesson with James. She had her own books open in front of her, and she was sort of doing her assignments, but mostly she listened to James and Maybeth working. The two heads bent together over a pad of paper on which James wrote letters. Then he asked Maybeth what the letters said. Maybeth understood this, and Dicey thought she did pretty well at it. James’ brown hair looked darker next to Maybeth’s yellow curls; and her hair seemed to shine brighter next to his dark head. Dicey listened hard, not to hear precisely what they were saying, but to hear what the two speakers were like. If she was going to hold on, then she wanted to have a clear idea of who she was holding on to. So she could get a good grip.

  Besides, she admitted to herself, if she could learn how James did it, then she could help him out if he needed it. If it worked for Maybeth.

  CHAPTER 6

  DESPITE DICEY’S firm intentions to concentrate on her family — and on Gram too, and she didn’t know how Gram would feel if she knew Dicey was t
hinking that — during the third week in November, the outside world seemed determined to get her attention.

  First it was the weather, which turned chilly, then cold. The sky hung gray and flat, day after day. This muted all the colors, except for the bare branches of the trees, which turned deep black against that sky. When the wind was from the west, off the Bay, it carried a dampness in it that penetrated through Dicey’s clothing and wound around her bones. She couldn’t work on the boat in that weather, not without the danger of chillblains.

  “What are chillblains?” Dicey had asked Gram. Gram had smiled. “You know, I don’t know. All my life I’ve heard about them and tried not to get them — because they sound so awful. Chill-blains,” she repeated, listening to the sound of it. “As if the little veins in your nose freeze individually. We’ll ask James,” Gram concluded, looking back to her knitting. She was halfway up the back of Maybeth’s yellow sweater. She had already finished the front.

  And then, Dicey got her report card. This school made a real ceremony of report cards. At the end of the school day everybody went to his homeroom. When your name was called out, you went up to the front of the room. The homeroom teacher studied your grades and then he would talk to you about your schoolwork. These conversations were kept to a low tone. Everybody in the front row pretended they couldn’t hear and weren’t listening.

  There were forty kids in the homeroom, so it took a while for Dicey’s name to come up. “Dicey Tillerman,” he called. Dicey went to stand next to the big desk. She tried to see the card, but he held it so she couldn’t. He had his attendance book spread out in front of him, and he was making checks by each student’s name after the report card was given out.

  He asked his questions without looking at her. She stared at his ear to answer.