At that moment there was a rip in the clouds and an island of star-sparkled sky appeared, its light so brilliant it seemed to reach down beyond the horizon and encircle the earth, a ring of pure and endless light.
I wasn’t sure that Adam’s words were very comforting. But his arm about me was. He made me feel very real, not replete with me at all, only real, and hopeful…. And I knew that if Adam kissed me it was going to be different from Zachary, with all his experience, or Leo, with all his naivete.
Adam did not kiss me.
Yet I felt as close to him as though he had.
This is a far cry from Leo, whom she can grieve with but not kiss, or Zach, whom she can kiss but not grieve with. But here again, we find that the dolphins have the answer for her. After the baby of the dolphins at the lab dies, she asks the wild dolphins (wouldn’t you?) to explain the nature of death to her:
I thought of Ynid and her grief at her dead baby, and I asked Basil, Is Ynid’s baby all right? (Is Commander Rodney all right? Is my grandfather all right? Am I? Is it all right?)
Basil pulled himself out of the water and a series of sounds came from him, singing sounds.
And what it reminded me of was Grandfather standing by Commander Rodney’s open grave and saying those terrible words and then crying out, full of joy, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!
Like Vicky’s minister grandfather, the dolphins—as they inform Vicky, telepathically—believe that life and death are intertwined. (Unlike the freeze-dried, death-seeking Zachary.) But when Vicky, on the cusp of womanhood, tries to assert her new psychic powers to get closer to Adam as well, she’s slapped back:
Without consciously realizing what I was doing, I turned my mind toward Adam. Do a cartwheel in the water, like Basil.
I held my breath.
Adam dove down. Up came his legs. Flip. Head and arms were out of the water. Just like Basil.
Adam, do you really think of me as nothing more than a child? I realize I’m naive and backward for my age in lots of ways, but I don’t feel about you the way a child feels. I’ve never felt about anybody else the way I feel about you, touched in every part of me…Is it only my feelings? Doesn’t it touch you at all?
He broke in, saying sharply, “Vicky, what are you doing?”
I could feel heat suffusing my face. “N—nothing.”
Now he was shouting at me. “Don’t do that!”
“Why? Why not?”
“Because—because—” He clamped his mouth shut. But he was telling without speaking. Because it’s too intimate.
But I did it with the dolphins. Why was it all right with the dolphins?
And the answer came lapping gently into my mind like the water lapping about my body. Because this is how the dolphins are, all the time. They’re able to live with this kind of intimacy and not be destroyed by it.
I have always loved the part of this book where Leo tells Vicky how his parents made love after his own grandfather’s death as an “affirmation of life” (it’s not creepy, I swear), and it seems to sum up the entire thesis of this book—that sex and death are both part of joy, which is, as Vicky’s grandfather puts it, “the infallible sense of God in the universe.” Meg Murry may well get to be consumed by tilting planets and fandolae and the future of the universe, but Vicky is, in her own quiet way, touching on questions just as crucial, however young and awkward she is. Like Meg, Vicky is a conduit for discussing the big questions, but her experiences are also a standin for the overwhelming feelings of adolescence, especially for girls. As Adam puts it, “I simply did not expect that John Austin’s kid sister would be thunder and lightning and electricity.” Ah, to be John Austin’s kid sister, and get some dolphins and psychic powers to go with all those hormones.
BOOK REPORT
Tiger Eyes
By Judy Blume 1981
Managed Care
It is the morning of the funeral and I am tearing my room apart, trying to find the right kind of shoes to wear. But all I come up with are my Adidas, which have holes in the toes, and a pair of my flip-flops.
Long ago, in a writing workshop far, far away, I seem to remember a certain teacher informing his charges that one should make sure to tell the entire story in the first sentence. I can’t imagine he was speaking of this book in particular, but Tiger Eyes is a shining example of packing a major punch in under 30 words. From a shelf filled with Blume’s awkward, not-yet-grown preteens, I always loved this book’s heroine, Davey Wexler, the most. With her boyfriend, smart tongue, and moody, independent streak, she was like the older sister to the Margaret Simon in me, pulling on her frayed jeans and scrambling off to a canyon to meet a mysterious stranger while I fumbled with the belt on my sanitary napkin.
As the novel begins, Davey Wexler has just turned 15, and her father has just been killed—shot when two junkies hold up the 7-Eleven he owns, which was filled with the beautiful drawings that were the last remnants of the artistic career he never pursued. Davey, her mother, and her younger brother, Jason, are wholly shattered by his death—Davey most of all. After spending weeks in bed, not eating or washing her hair, she returns to the world of the living when school starts—then succumbs to a series of panic attacks that knock her out (literally) on a daily basis.
Into the breach step her Aunt Bitsy, her father’s sister, and her Uncle Walter, who live in Los Alamos, where Walter works in the W (weapons) division at the famed lab that developed the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (I thank this book for all Trivial Pursuit tournament “Fat Man and Little Boy” wins.) After the doctor recommends a change of scene for Davey, the family relocates to Los Alamos for an unspecified period, which lengthens into a year-long visit after the store at home is vandalized.
Aunt Bitsy, who gives tours at the Bradbury Science Museum where the remnants of the bomb reside, is the kind of woman who wears a uniform to work because, as she says, “it makes her feel official.” Walter is the kind of man who hands his niece a bomb-shelter card her first month in the house. The Kronicks, who allow Davey to ride their (clearly “Kronick” labeled) bikes only as long as she wears a helmet, have strict views on anything Davey wants to do: Climbing in canyons (“You could wind up a vegetable!”), riding in hot-air balloons (“It’s beautiful to watch, but only a fool would actually participate”), driving (“Why rush?”), skiing (“You don’t want to wind up a vegetable, do you?”), and the aforementioned bomb shelter (“Russians…have an outstanding civil defense program. If they’re attacked, chances are, they’ll survive. I wish I could say the same for us”).
But Davey, who has been spending her nights in bed clutching a bread knife for protection and her days smacking her head against the ground each time she faints, has an odd reaction to the sudden onslaught of stability and security: She starts to become her old, adventurous self again. On some level, Davey realizes that her life has weathered its own enormous bomb without a shelter, and she’s still here.
After begging off yet another family sightseeing tour (“But we had rest and relaxation scheduled for next week!” Bitsy cries) she goes off on a bike ride, climbs down into a canyon, and meets the very embodiment of mystery and danger—a guy who calls himself Wolf, a tanned, inscrutable fellow hiker who hears her shouting “Daddy” to the empty canyon and thinks she’s shouting for help.
Davey, still on the alert for maniacs, is not happy to be caught out in such a vulnerable position:
“So…I’m alone,” I say, sounding bitchier by the minute. “Is there a law against that?” I am standing in front of the rock now. All I have to do is bend over, pick it up, and wham….
“No, but there should be,” he says.
“Oh yeah…why?” I am having trouble following our conversation but I know it is best to keep him talking. The longer he talks the less likely that he’ll attack. I read that somewhere.
“Who’s going to help you if you need it?” he asks me.
And with that, Davey remembers something important—which is that, while
being alone with a stranger can make you vulnerable, so can just being alone. This realization is hastened along by her extreme thirst, which has reached epic proportions since her climb down into the canyon at midday with zero provisions:
“You’re thirsty.”
“A little,” I tell him, licking my lips.
“You came into the canyon without a water bottle…. Here….” he passes his to me. I am so relieved I feel like crying. I mean to take a quick swig, but once it’s to my lips I can’t stop. I drink and drink until he takes it from me.
“Easy,” he says, “or you’ll get sick.”
I begin to relax. He’s not out to get me after all.
“What’s your name?” I ask him.
“You can call me Wolf.”
“Is that a first name or a last name?”
“Either,” he says.
“Oh.” I can’t think of anything else to say.
He stands, puts the water bottle back into his knapsack, stretches and says, “Okay, let’s go.”
“Go?” I should have let down my guard. “Where?”
“Back up,” he says. “It’s one o’clock. I’ve got an appointment at two.”
“So, go,” I tell him.
“You’re going with me.”
“Really!” I say.
“Yeah…really.”
“Guess again,” I say.
“I’m not about to leave you down here by yourself. I’m not in the mood to be called by Search and Rescue later. I have other things to do.”
“Search and Rescue?”
“Right.”
I think about the fourteen-year-old boy who was killed by a falling rock and about the woman who broke her leg and went into shock and I wonder if Wolf was called in then. But I don’t ask him. Instead I say, “I’m tougher than I look.”
“Sure you are. Let’s go. I’m in a hurry.”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“You see anybody you can trust more?”
Life in Los Alamos is very different from Davey’s life in Atlantic City, a brilliant mix of color and class on the edge of the ocean, where no one needs Search and Rescue any more than they need proper boots to climb down into the canyon. By contrast, Los Alamos is flat and arid, rigidly divided along class lines that mimic those at the lab—meaning the kids whose parents are highest up are the grinds at school, any Hispanic kids are the offspring of the maintenance workers in the lab, and there are barely any black kids at all. (In Atlantic City, Davey’s best friend, Lenaya, was black, and a budding scientist.) Davey, whose life with Walter puts her in the grind group but not of it, wishes that there was a group for people like her, called “The LeftOvers.”
Even as Davey starts to come back to life, the novel is bracketed by scenes from what happened the night her father died, each snapshot from the past appearing as Davey takes another stop forward, making it that much more excruciating:
I walked behind the counter to where Dad was sitting at his easel and looked over his shoulder. “Very nice…” I said. “Especially the eyes. I wish I could draw like you.”
“You can do other things.”
“Oh yeah…like what?”
My father pretended to think that over. “You’re very good at stacking the bread,” he said.
“Thanks a lot!”
We both laughed. I hung my arms over his shoulders, from behind, and rested my face against his hair, which was soft and curly and smelled of salt water.
“So, where are you off to?” Dad asked.
“Oh, Hugh and I are going out.”
“What time will you be back?”
“I’m not sure.”
“An educated guess.”
“Ten…eleven…something like that.”
“Stay off the beach. It’s not safe at night.”
“I’ve already had that lecture.”
“I just don’t want you to get carried away and forget.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
…Outside the sun was setting.
It’s not only physical safety that her father is talking about—it’s the fact that she was conceived under Atlantic City’s Million Dollar Pier, and her father doesn’t want Davey to derail her own life like his. (“A waste of a life,” Walter bitterly sneers one night about her father, ridiculing how his lack of planning put Davey and her family in its present circumstances.) But would planning ahead have done anything to help her father stay alive?
This is the question Davey asks after things have come to a boiling point with her and Walter and Bitsy. While Jason has taken on Bitsy and Walter’s love of planning ahead, even going so far as to sport an apron while he and Bitsy make endless sheets of cookies, her mother has descended into a cocoon of pain medications, blotting out the entire world:
I face Mom and say, “Mom, please. I really want to take Drivers Ed. It’s very important to me. All you have to do is sign the little green card.”
Mom looks at me and we make eye contact for the first time in months. Then, just as she is about to speak, Walter says, “Statistics show that accidents, especially automobile accidents, are the leading cause of death among young people.”
“Why go looking for trouble?” Bitsy says. She pours the batter into the cake pan and Jason pulls the oven door open for her.
“Mom…say something, will you?”
“Walter and Bitsy know what’s best,” Mom says.
“Since when…since when I’d like to know?…I’m sick of hearing how dangerous everything is…Dangerous…dangerous…. dangerous…. Stay out of the canyon, Davey…you could be hit by a falling rock. Don’t forget your bicycle helmet, Davey…you could get hit by a car. No, you can’t learn to ski, Davey…. you might wind up a vegetable!” I am really yelling now.
“Davey, honey…” Mom begins and she reaches for me. But I pull away from her.
“Some people have lived up here so long they’ve forgotten what the real world is like,” I shout, “and the idea of it scares the…”
“You can just stop it, right now,” Walter says, before I have finished. He says it slowly, making every word count.
“You’re a good one to talk,” I tell him. “You’re the one who’s making the bombs. You’re the one who’s figuring out how to blow up the whole world. But you won’t let me take Drivers Ed. A person can get killed crossing the street. A person can get killed minding his own store. Did you ever think of that?” I kick the wall and stomp out of the room. I am crying hard and my throat is sore.
Davey may realize that living as irresponsibly as her parents did isn’t the best idea, but she also is learning that if your whole life is built around trying to stave off death, taking up arms against unseen forces can make your life arid, a place where responsibility blots out possibility. (“I don’t want to go through my life afraid, but I don’t want to wind up like my father, either,” Davey writes to Wolf. “…I think about that a lot, especially in this town, where so many people seem afraid. Does building bombs make them feel afraid…?”)
Tiger Eyes must be the only teen novel in which the heroine stars in a production of Oklahoma! and the entirety is summed up in a paragraph. But Blume has bigger fish to fry, namely describing, in amazingly adult detail, how Davey comes from being too scared to sleep with anything but a bread knife to a girl who can face her father’s death—not because of anything that has happened to her, but because of something that is in her. After her mother refuses the proposal of a man at the Lab and decides to take the family home, Davey realizes this is true of her mother, too:
“It’s time for us to leave,” Mom says. “It’s time for us to start making a life on our own. We’re going home. We’re going home to Atlantic City.”
“No!” Bitsy says…. “What about the children…. They’re secure here. You can’t keep moving them around.”
“I’m not going to,” Mom says. “I’m taking them home.”
“But Atlantic City…it’s not safe…you, of all people, shou
ld realize that, Gwen.”
“I can’t let safety and security become the focus of my life,” Mom says.
I can’t believe how sure of herself my mother sounds. I want to stand up and cheer for her.
Everyone knows that if you worry about how how you’ll die, you’ll never enjoy being alive. But Davey learns something even more subtle: that although people think preparing for death is being responsible, it’s also ducking a greater responsibility: one’s responsibility to live.
Davey learns that herself the day she meets Wolf, and the day she starts to let her father go:
“Stop!” I tell myself. Stop thinking about that night. Concentrate on how good it feels to be alive. No matter what. Just to see the color of the sky, to smell the pine trees, to meet a stranger in the canyon.
I go to my room, tear a piece of paper from the yellow pad on my dresser and write one word. Alive. Then I tear off another piece and write Wolf.
Maybe the answer to the question lies in the shoes Davey finally settles on after teetering on her mother’s borrowed heels at the funeral and then slipping down into the canyon where she meets Wolf in her Adidas. She knows she’ll never be the kind of person who is so afraid of what can happen to them they’ll never go into the canyon at all, but she’s also not ready to be like her parents were—stumbling and slipping down, and then caught out without water or shelter when tragedy strikes. She’s become the kind of person who keeps around the pair of hiking boots and canteen Wolf tells her to buy after escorting her out of the canyon when they first meet. These are sturdy, long-lasting, and strong, letting Davey take on any situation—alone or not.
BOOK REPORT
The Long Secret
By Louise Fitzhugh 1965
A Note on the Type
The notes were appearing everywhere.
Traditionally, in women’s fiction, from Little Women to The Women’s Room, the spotlight has been squarely on what goes down between the, you know, women. (It’s in the titles and everything.) But as The Group begat Golden Girls begat Gossip Girl, we’ve lost the most important font of all drama—friends. No, not friends who like the same boy as you do, thereby creating explosive competition. Not friends who turn on you and isolate you among your peers. Not friends who stand behind you come what may all the way; not friends who become anorexic/alcoholic/cutaholic; not friends who offer witty quips when you get pregs and attend your teen-mom birth. In The Long Secret, you put away all the drama and simply turn to the side to see your best friends—who are difficult simply because you are you and they are they.
Shelf Discovery Page 7