by Jean Little
“The English language is full of words with double meanings like that,” her old teacher answered, immediately taking the bait as Anna had known she would. When Mrs. Schumacher had been Miss Williams, her class had learned several sure ways of distracting her. One was a discussion of the peculiarities to be found in English.
Dr. Schumacher, sitting down again, smiled. As their glances met, Anna realized that he too had discovered this way of changing the subject.
“Have you any good names to suggest for this baby?” he asked. “We don’t promise to use what you suggest, but we are beginning to collect and consider names.”
“When I have my children,” Anna said dreamily, “I’m going to name the boys Sebastian, Timothy, and Matthew and the girls Melissa, Jocelyn, and Charlotte.”
“You’re planning on six, three of each?” Dr. Schumacher looked amused.
“Just because you have the names ready doesn’t mean you have to use them,” Anna defended herself, returning to her pie. “I change my mind all the time. I read a book today about a girl called Elnora. I never met anyone called that.”
“A Girl of the Limberlost!” Mrs. Schumacher said, looking pleased with herself. “I loved that book.”
The time of tension passed. From then until Dr. Schumacher drove her home, Anna enjoyed every minute.
He came in with her for a few moments. “I guess you want to tell them yourself,” Anna said, reaching out to open the door.
“No. You go ahead,” he said.
“I’ll start knitting a shawl tomorrow,” Mama cried when Anna had broken the news. Anna stayed and listened to the congratulations.
“Now you’ll really find out what trouble is,” Papa teased his friend, “especially if it’s a girl.”
Anna protested with the rest and then, the first moment she could get away, escaped to sit on her bed and get back to Elnora Comstock’s story. It was after eleven when she finished it, and she realized she had not done any homework at all.
Chapter 10
The solidarity of the gang began to give in the middle of the second week of school when Suzy, to nobody’s surprise, did become a cheerleader. Practice now claimed her promptly at four so she could no longer walk home with the others. She was so pleased about it though that they could not help but rejoice with her and even take pride in having her as their friend. Suzy was not noted for either her tact or her insight but when she was happy she was radiant.
A couple of days later Paula had an announcement to make too.
“I’ve decided to join the Dramatic Society.”
They plied her with questions and learned she had a secret longing to try being an actress and, the night before, she had made up her mind to stop being secretive about it and find out if she really had any ability. “They put on three plays a year,” she said, “so if I’m good at all, I should get a part in one of them.”
“So you’ll be busy at four too,” Maggie said. “My great news is that, starting tomorrow, I’m going to be bringing my lunch and eating at school.”
“How come?” Paula asked. “I thought your mother agreed with mine that the walk did us good.”
“She does, but she’s not going to be home at noon for a while because she’s got a job looking after an old lady with a broken leg who won’t go to the hospital because she’s sure they’d kill her off there somehow. Mum’s a trained nurse, you know, but she just specials patients. I hate having to be the only one taking my lunch.”
“You won’t be,” Anna said, delighted at this turn of affairs. “Mama can’t come home at noon because the store is busy then, so I eat that kind of lunch anyway. We make everybody’s the night before. I would have taken it to school long ago, the way the twins and Gretchen are doing, but I hadn’t anyone to eat with.”
As she spoke, she thought, I’m glad it’s Maggie I’ll be with.
It was Paula who said slowly, “The gang won’t be meeting so much then. Of course, every so often, we may all meet in the detention room.”
They laughed at that, but nobody liked the thought of being apart so much even though they had only been a foursome for a couple of weeks. Then a milk wagon came around the corner and their downhearted mood was gone as they waited for Paula to feed the horse.
“Hi-yo, Silver!” Paula said, seeing the horse was mostly white.
She dug into her pocket and came up with four sugar cubes. Paula always carried them for the next time she would meet a horse. Her longing for a horse of her own was like Anna’s hope for a puppy. They both still made up daydreams in which somehow it all came true and there they were with their faithful animals. It was nice there were lots of horse-drawn delivery wagons and the pet store right on the way to and from school.
The horse clopped off. Anna remembered that she had brought a poem she had discovered the night before. She told them about it as she looked for the place in her book.
“It’s by Emily Dickinson too,” she said.
There was no need to say more. Miss Sutcliff had told them she thought maybe Emily Dickinson was her favourite poet. Miss Sutcliff was everybody’s favourite teacher, everybody’s but Suzy’s who got fluttery whenever Mr. McNair asked her to go to the board.
“It’s the way he calls me ‘Suzy,’” she said, with a long sigh.
Anna was just thankful that so far Mr. McNair had not asked her to do a math problem at the board. As she never raised her hand to give an answer either, she had only heard him call her “Anna” a couple of times when he had asked about Rudi. It was a nice change. Most of the teachers called the boys simply by their surnames and the girls Miss Hughes or Miss Solden. It was flattering in a way, but distant.
“Here’s the poem,” she said, standing still to get a better hold on her other books so she could lift the poem up to read it.
“Anna, we’re going to be late if we don’t keep moving,” Paula said.
They all knew what that meant. Mr. Lloyd never accepted an excuse, no matter how valid. You were sent to the principal’s office for a late slip and given a detention when you had three of them. They had been given one only two days before, when Suzy’s mother offered to drive them and then dawdled about it just long enough to make them arrive one minute after the bell.
“I can read and walk at the same time,” Anna said. “You’ll like this. It’s funny. It makes me feel as if I actually knew her. Listen.”
Holding the book so close that it nearly touched her nose, she began to read aloud.
I’m nobody. Who are you?
Are you nobody too?
Then there’s a pair of us. Don’t tell.
They’d banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody;
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
Paula laughed. Anna turned her head to share in her appreciation of the fun in the rhyme. As she did, she tripped over the curb and would have gone flying if Maggie had not had quick enough reflexes to grab her.
“Anna Solden, watch where you’re going!” she scolded.
“Thanks. I will from now on, truly. But don’t you like that poem? I wonder if she wrote it to somebody real. I’d love to have somebody write a poem like that to me,” said Anna.
“I’ll do one to you. It’s easy,” Paula said. “Give me two seconds to get feeling poetic.”
Forgetting the danger of being late, she stood stock-still, put her right hand over her heart, and regarded Anna solemnly.
I’m somebody. That I know.
Heaven knows who you are though.
I think I know you but right in the middle,
You come out wrong and turn into a riddle.
A frog in a bog has better eyes
Than you, you say. Then, to my surprise,
You see just fine. Still, since you’re my friend,
That makes you somebody too.
The End.
Anna stared at her in awe. The other two laughed.
“She can rhyme them off as easy as a wink,” Suzy bragged as though she had invented Paula. “You should hear the awful one she made up about me last year. It was a scream. How does it go, Paula? I just hated it.”
“You loved it, you mean,” Maggie said. “It’s a wonder you didn’t have it tattooed on your forehead.”
“Jealousy will get you nowhere,” Suzy countered without turning a hair.
Paula, now walking along and looking much as usual, grinned at Anna.
“I learned to do it from my father,” she said. “He does it all the time. We don’t make up our own poems, just parodies of other people’s. I’m no good at writing the kind of poem you think up all by yourself. I did Suzy’s to ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’”
Immediately Suzy began chanting:
Boys to the left of her,
Boys to the right of her.
“Quit it,” Paula ordered. “I did really like what you read, Anna. I know what you mean about feeling like you know her. She sounds as though she was shy.”
“I think she was,” Anna said absently. Right now she wanted to learn why Paula had said in her bit of rhyme: “You … turn into a riddle.”
Maybe Paula had said it on purpose to get her to ask.
“What did you mean … about me being a riddle?” she asked, looking at the squares of sidewalk she was walking over instead of at Paula. She took care not to step on a crack while she waited to hear.
Paula’s hesitation only lasted a moment, however, for she was a forthright person and Anna had guessed rightly that she did want to discuss this very puzzle.
“It’s not just me. We all feel muddled. We talked about it that day you went to the doctor’s and didn’t wait for us. We know you don’t see well. You told us so yourself and, anyway, it’s pretty obvious. Yet, every so often, you seem to see perfectly.”
“Half the time, I forget about you not being able to see,” Maggie confided. “You just seem like anybody. And then, I realize you hardly ever can see what’s on the board even when you’re up front, while I can see that from the very back of the room.”
Anna had taken her limited vision for granted for so long now that their bewilderment caught her off guard. While she tried to think of what to say, Paula plunged on.
“Yesterday when you came to meet us, I could tell you knew where I was even though I was standing right beside a bunch of people waiting for the bus — and I was way farther away from you than any blackboard.”
“You had on your red plaid skirt,” Anna said, “and your yellow sweater. I wouldn’t have known you except that I recognized the colour of your clothes. I didn’t see your face or anything. Sometimes I’ve thought I recognized people and I’ve waved, and then when I got close I found out I’d made a mistake. Now I just smile until I know I’m right.”
She was figuring out the answer as she went along. As she came to a halt, she realized that she knew something new about herself. She had sensed it but had never before defined it in words.
They were close to the school now. She suddenly had a lot more to say. She tried to put it all into a few quick sentences but it was too complicated.
“I’m like you, Maggie. I don’t think about not seeing till I’m up against something I can’t see. At home, where I know where everything is, I run and never think of falling. But as soon as I’m in a strange place, I have to watch out for steps and stuff.”
“You look around just like the rest of us,” Paula commented. “You don’t seem to be missing anything.”
“To me, what I see seems normal,” Anna answered. She smiled, perceiving it as funny rather than sad. “I don’t see what I’m missing, so I don’t think I’m missing anything. Mostly, I just feel ordinary. Until I need help,” she finished, a bit abashed at so much talk about herself.
“I just don’t understand what you DO see,” Maggie said in frustration.
“I don’t either, exactly,” said Anna. “I asked Dr. Schumacher that and he made it a bit easier for me to understand. He said that I can see at twenty feet what you see at about one hundred. If we are both standing looking at a door, for instance, I see the door and you see the door — but you also maybe see the doorknob and the keyhole and the grain of the wood. I just know there’s a door there. I see as far as you do, more or less, because we can both see to the horizon, but everything’s dimmer and less distinct for me.”
Suzy had been silent throughout this whole discussion. Now she put a hand out and clutched Anna by the elbow, jolting her so that she almost missed her step.
“I think it’s awful asking you things like that,” she said. “It’s bad enough to … to be different and not to see … but it isn’t kind to talk about it. I don’t see how you can be so unfeeling as to … to discuss it as though it were any other fact,” she said to Maggie and Paula. “It’s cruel!”
Anna, for the first time since Paula had made up the rhyme which had started off the whole conversation, felt embarrassed. Not only embarrassed but furious. Suzy made her poor eyesight sound like a shameful secret, something to be hidden away and only talked about in whispers when the afflicted person was out of earshot. She jerked her arm free and tried to think of something to say which would finish Suzy’s gushing over her.
“Oh, shut up,” Maggie said, “and get that drippy look off your face, Suzy Hughes. Anna doesn’t have two heads or … or …”
“Her foot in her mouth,” Paula said. “Which is where yours is. How can we help her if we don’t know when she needs help? Who would know better than Anna herself.”
“The trouble is,” Anna said, as they hurried up the steps and down the hall to their lockers, “that sometimes I don’t know when I need help because I don’t see what I’m not seeing so I don’t know I’m not seeing it.”
Suzy refused to laugh but the other two made up for it.
“We’ll just have to keep on playing it by ear,” Maggie said. “But you’ll understand that if we make mistakes, it’s only because you have us thoroughly confused.”
They reached their desks in the nick of time. Anna, catching her breath, thought of Mrs. Schumacher. Hadn’t she said something about Anna not really knowing herself what she could do and what she couldn’t, when and how to ask for help, and when to manage on her own? She should have known that her old teacher would be right.
I wonder if I’ll ever really know though, she thought. If I were really blind, it would be simple compared to this.
She looked across the aisle at Maggie. Maggie was getting out the map of the Great Lakes they had had to draw. Anna had an enlarged copy which Maggie had made for her especially. She started to turn to her own book when the sun came from behind a cloud and turned Maggie’s wheat-brown hair into a bright halo.
Anna knew right then that while it might be simpler to be blind, even the poorest vision was a gift to be treasured.
“Miss Solden, have you or have you not completed your homework assignment,” Mr. Lloyd’s voice sliced through to her.
The sun went behind another cloud.
“Yes, sir,” Anna said and got out Maggie’s map.
Mr. Lloyd walked to her desk and looked down at it. Could he tell somehow that she had not done it herself? She couldn’t have done it from the small map in the book, but she planned to make a copy of this larger one tonight so she could learn it. He had told them it was to be one of their test questions tomorrow. She waited, breath held.
Mr. Lloyd seemed about to speak. Then without a word he turned and walked down the aisle behind her, making acid comments on more than half the maps he was shown, giving detentions to the three boys he caught without the work prepared.
Anna looked across at Maggie again. Maggie smiled. Anna returned the smile, hoping somehow it spoke her thanks.
But that night she took time to make her own map. Something in Mr. Lloyd’s silence made doing it herself important. She also made a large outline map she could use for the test, if she just had courage enough to ask.
>
The next morning, when Mr. Lloyd handed out the pale purple dittoed outline maps on which they were to fill in all the place names, Anna waited till he reached her desk. Then, having rehearsed the one sentence over and over so she could get it out, she said with a dry mouth, “May I use this bigger map, sir, please? I can’t see to put the places in on a smaller one. And I need it drawn in black ink.”
Again there was an instant of silence while Anna waited. Mr. Lloyd picked up the larger sheet and turned it over. Did he think she had things written in on the back?
“Certainly, Miss Solden,” he said.
He returned to the front of the room and stood glaring out over the now-busy class. Anna’s hands shook as she filled her fountain pen from her ink bottle. She got out her blotter. She knew the work well enough that she didn’t have to use a pencil so she could erase.
Then, as her hand and her heartbeat steadied, she looked up at the teacher.
You’re a riddle too, she thought. Why didn’t you snap?
She couldn’t answer and let it go. Carefully, she printed St. Lawrence River and went on confidently to name the lakes.
Chapter 11
The last Wednesday in September was the twins’ birthday. As a rule, birthdays were not made much of in the Solden family, but the twins’ had always been an exception. It was only right that, since there were two of them, twice as much fuss should be made. Over the years, it had become a day set aside for a family celebration, an occasion when not just the twins but everybody had some special treat. Since it was Fritz’s and Frieda’s birthday, their suggestions were given first consideration, and this time what they wanted to do was first have supper at the Honeydew Restaurant and second go downtown to Loews to see The Wizard of Oz. It was the last night it would be on.
“It took some coaxing to get Papa to trust the locking up to Mr. Mills,” Anna told Maggie at noon on the great day. “He knows the place almost as well as Papa.” Mr. Mills did watch repairs at his own house, but he helped out at the store whenever Mama had to miss a day.
“What about his watches?” Maggie asked.