Shelf Discovery

by Lizzie Skurnick

  Okay, so Nancy’s kind of intense. But by the time we’ve gathered the basic situation through Duncan’s convenient use of dialogue-as-backstory (“But Dad?” Brendon said. “What about him? How can he work here? His job is to travel all over the place writing articles and taking pictures…”), we’ve moved on to Nancy handily locating her father in Paris to check in on his emotional situation:

  She closed her eyes tightly and reached out—out—across the miles, the hundreds and thousands of miles—to the place where their father was…. It was a business lunch and he was getting briefed on the next assignment. There was a notebook by his plate and a pencil, but the page of the book was empty, for he had not been taking notes. His mind was away from the conversation….

  No Twitter required! But Mr. Barrett’s staying away from the family, ironically, gives the kids more of a chance to settle in and spread out. Now Kirby, a passionate dancer, is finally in a place where she can study it seriously. Brendon, who’s been rambling solo with two sisters, can finally make a friend and get into normal-boy activities, like building a boat out of an old door and orange crates and chewing gum (more on that later). And Elizabeth—astonishingly, to her children—reveals all sorts of new items for the children to digest, like that she can actually drive, and hold a job—even date someone, like Tom Duncan, a guidance counselor at their new school, who’s her old boyfriend and still totally in love with her.

  In fact, the change is only severe on Nancy, who must deal with the new problem that her ESP—which she does not even know is called ESP, EVEN THOUGH SHE HAS ESP—does not fly as easily in the world of the public high school. As this is a pre-Blubber era narrative, when teacher abuse still trumped peer abuse, Nancy’s harsh debut into the world of the unbelieving takes place when she mistakenly starts putting the answers to a geography quiz down before the teacher has even asked the questions:

  “No, Nancy, you did not imagine these questions,” Miss Green said. “They are exactly the questions that I asked the previous classes. I would be very interested in learning how you knew what they would be.”

  There was a long silence. All around them, heads were raised and turned in their direction. Thirty pens were held, suspended, over thirty sheets of paper as thirty students waited to hear Nancy’s explanation.

  “I—I don’t know,” Nancy said slowly. “I just sort of—knew. I do that sometimes.”

  How very convenient. (That’s what the teacher says, too.) However, this is the part where it becomes even more extraordinarily convenient to have a guidance counselor who has been in love with your mother for 20 years:

  “Wait,” he said. “Now, let’s wait a minute, Miss Green. I would like to hear a bit more about this ability of Nancy’s. There is such a thing as extrasensory perception, you know, although we don’t run into it too often.”

  “Extrasensory perception?” Miss Green’s mouth fell open. She stared at the counselor as though she thought he had gone crazy. “Oh, come now, Mr. Duncan, surely you can’t be serious!”

  “Indeed I am,” Mr. Duncan said firmly. “ESP does exist. I am quite positive of it. I have known these girls’ family for years, and I have often wondered if their grandmother didn’t possess the gift….”

  I cannot tell you how much I love the part in any Duncan novel where the wise old sage, upon hearing some supernatural activity has been occurring, instead of being, like, “That sounds batshit,” nods oldly/wisely/sagely and says, “Yes, there are many studies from first-rate universities showing that there are [witches/ghosts/people who can astrally project themselves into other bodies],” etc.

  With Tom Duncan’s revelation, Nancy has a name for what has always been—and starts to realize that she, like Kirby, may also have something that distinguishes her as an individual:

  “Well, what is it exactly?” Kirby asked. “Is there more than one kind?”

  “There sure is.” Nancy referred to the book. “There’s one kind called telepathy. That means being aware of what the other person is thinking. Then there’s clairvoyance; that means knowing when something’s happened. There are two other kinds two—precognition means knowing about the future, and being able to tell when something is going to happen. Retrocognition is knowing about the past….”

  “…It’s your gift, isn’t it? This ESP thing? Like my gift is dancing?”

  Have I mentioned my second-favorite part of the Duncan oeuvre is when the heroine goes to the library and retrieves a book about whatever supernatural event is occurring, then handily recites its particulars for another character?

  It’s no mistake that, one page later, Nancy goes to the mirror and notices she’s not quite as flat anymore: “She might never look like Kirby, but she was finally, at long last, beginning to look like something other than a boy.” Taking responsibility for her ESP is also about her growing up, and being able to listen in on what one’s father is doing thousands of miles away in Paris should also leave room for noticing what’s going on, literally, under her nose.

  Because A Gift of Magic isn’t only about a girl with ESP. It’s also a novel about members of a family who, plopped like spores in a new environment, have to learn how to grow without destroying the entire culture. Kirby, given the freedom to study all the dance she desires, has to learn to not become completely anorexic and starve herself in order to look like a dancer, then fall down and break her leg and almost lose the gift because of nerve damage, but then triumphantly be okay. Elizabeth has to learn that it’s all right to let go of the past and marry Tom Duncan and be her own person, even if her daughter Nancy isn’t thrilled about it. Brendon, whose gift is music, has to learn that even if he’s going to squander that gift, it’s still not a good idea to make a boat out of a door and old crates and set sail into the Gulf, and that if he does, he’d better shout loudly at his psychic sister’s mind so she and Tom Duncan can save him before he drowns. And it’s Nancy, most of all, who has to learn that her powers aren’t evil, and they’re not all encompassing—they’re a part of her, like Kirby’s gift for dance, or Brendon’s for music. (And, for that matter, Lois Duncan’s gift for storytelling, which comes up at the end of the novel in a way that’s too fun to be spoilered.)

  But if the novel is truly about learning to grow within and without one’s family, why the ESP at all? I’ve always wondered if perhaps these novels bloomed in the 1970s and 80s because it was a time before a fractured family became a given, and that, if it’s the case, for the daughters growing up in that new hierarchy, they struck a particularly hopeful note. Because Nancy’s family has undergone a turbulent dissolution, true, but it doesn’t crush her. In fact, it gives her the ability to learn more about herself and what she can achieve than she would have had her mother stuck out an unhappy marriage. Duncan may have fun with ESP, sure. (She also has a bit of fun at the end, when we learn who Nancy’s storyteller daughter turns out to be.) But at the end of the day, A Gift of Magic isn’t only a novel about special powers. It’s also just about power.

  BOOK REPORT

  The Girl with the Silver Eyes

  By Willo Davis Roberts 1980

  Life on the Pharm

  Katie sat on the small balcony of apartment 2-A, looking out over the sidewalk.

  As a champion squirreler of old books, I am rarely in the position of having my memory happily jogged by the cover photo. But not so with The Girl with the Silver Eyes, which fell out of my possession in the early 1980s, after which all I could call up was a dim memory of an apartment complex with brown balconies overlooking a pool. (There ’tis!) But what reams of crucial essentials had been forgotten! Those calico Clark Kent glasses! That white-ringed tee! That man’s groceries tending skyward on their own! How it is fun to make things move, just by thinking about them!

  Willo Davis Roberts also wrote, among the other 987 books she published, Don’t Hurt Laurie!—which has a scene of young Laurie, wearing rollers, being beaten with a hairbrush and knocked out against a bathroom sink by her mother. The Girl with
the Silver Eyes is not nearly that dark, although it does have Grimmsian intimations about the sorry fate of children at the hands of adults. Luckily, in this case, Roberts has given our heroine, the polyester-orange snappily knife-creased Katie Welker, a weapon against them—not only the aforementioned silver eyes, but their handy corollary: telekinesis, and the ability to know what animals are thinking.

  When we first meet Katie, her grandmother Welker has just died, and she’s been returned to the custody of her mother, Monica—living in splendor in the apartments you see pictured. Her time with her grandmother as a young girl, however, was by no means sanguine, as Katie’s ability to float Social Security checks in from the mailbox to the dining-room table without moving rattled the old lady beyond reason:

  It had taken her awhile to learn how to be careful about what she moved. She knew the name for the moving, now; she’d read it in a book [more on that later!]. Telekenesis.

  As time went on, this peculiar ability of Katie’s made more and more problems between them. When Katie learned how to turn off the light from the wall switch after she’d gotten into bed and turn the pages of her book [moooooore on that later!] without touching them…and smooth her hair without using the hairbrush, she made Grandma Welker nervous….

  …The same was true of the kids at school. She was good at games, but there was always someone who didn’t like the way she played them. She didn’t like balls coming at her…. That was before she learned how to make the ball veer off to the side. She knew that could spoil a game, but somehow, like other things she did, she couldn’t help doing it.

  Katie’s odd eyes, her controversial page-turning methods, and her champion poker face (“She knew it bothered the adults around her, the way she could keep her small face perfectly expressionless, yet it seemed the safest thing to do, most of the time”) go over equally unevenly at the new apartment complex, where she alienates Mr. P, the snarly resident bachelor whom she torments with errant rocks, drives away two loathsome babysitters, and weirds out Monica’s boyfriend:

  “What kind of kid is this one of yours, Monica? I never saw one like her before.”

  He didn’t lower his voice. He was one of those people who talk about kids as if they weren’t there or couldn’t hear. Of course, it was probably true that he’d never seen anyone like Katie. She hadn’t met anyone like herself either. She wished, quite sincerely, that she would.

  Katie’s alienation is somewhat mitigated by two new friends: Jackson Jones, the paper-delivery boy whom Mr. P routinely stiffs, and Mrs. M, the batty old neighbor who loans Katie The Scarlet Pimpernel while Katie mind-melds with her cat, Lobo. (Brief aside: Do they still only refer to adults by the first letter of their last name nowadays? All through the 1980s, I never knew any adult’s actual last name!) Still, Katie knows she is different and it pains her—and when she overhears Monica’s boyfriend Nathan put forth, in a tell-don’t-show exchange too tedious to relate, the theory that Monica’s exposure to a drug called Ty-Pan-Oromine while working in a pharmaceutical factory might have spawned Katie’s unusual condition and that there may be others like her, she goes hunting for answers:

  And if Nathan was right—Katie forgot to eat, engrossed in the idea—that she was the way she was because of the stuff Monica had worked with, what about the babies those other women had had? All about the same time as Katie herself had been born? Was Ty-Pan-Oromine responsible for her silver eyes and this ability to move things by thinking about moving them? And if it was, were those other kids like herself? Somewhere out there in the world, were there more “different” kids, who would be her own kind?

  It’s unsurprising that TGWTSE is a stealth favorite of readers everywhere, since it is the implicit cri de coeur of those yelled at in English classes for reading one book under the desk because they finished the assigned reading two months ago. Forget talking to cats or moving rocks across the sidewalk to smack irritating neighbors—in TGWTSE, Katie’s reading, full stop, is a deeply suspicious activity:

  “It’s like you were drugged or something, you don’t even know what’s going around you,” Grandma Welker used to say in annoyance about Katie’s reading.

  Drugged. As in, ON DRUGS, people! And that’s not the worst of it:

  Grandma didn’t value books that much; she’d even burned one, once, when she’d caught Katie reading it after she was supposed to have been asleep. Katie had had difficulty forgiving her for that. She’d had to fish the remains out of her fireplace late at night and carefully lay out the brown pages with the charred edges to find out how it ended.

  Does that make your stomach hurt? That actually makes my stomach hurt. But, as in Summer of My German Soldier, you can tell Katie’s friends from her enemies by who likes words—Jackson Jones, Mrs. M—and who doesn’t. That’s why the letter Katie decides to send out to the probable offspring of one of her mother’s old coworkers to feel out if they’re co-kenetics is so stupendous:

  Katie chewed on the end of her pen for a minute, wondering if she should specify anything, and decided not to.

  “I like to read, and I like animals,” she wrote then. “And I’d sure like to hear from you.”

  Likes to read, likes animals—are you a mutant, too? But Katie’s quest to find out if she’s the only one of her kind—a quest in which she is ultimately successful—will be familiar to those who might also primarily use telekinesis to turn pages and push up their glasses without lifting a finger, too. Normal children might use telekinesis to float a ball, you know, INTO the soccer goal. But Katie is un-bubbly, unprepossessing, happy to hang with a septuagenarian and paper boy, and completely unfamiliar with the rites of the slumber party. Left to her own devices, she’ll read The Scarlet Pimpernel with one eye and diligently dissect the adults around her with the other. She is, to put it briefly, a big nerd. Yes, just like you! Floating forks is fine, but this is sweet justice for those of us who suffered having a book yanked out of our hands at the dinner table every night. In my next telekinetic life, I will float those back, too.

  BOOK REPORT

  Stranger with My Face

  By Lois Duncan 1981

  Stop Projecting

  My name is Laurie Stratton. I am seventeen years old, and I live at the Cliff House on the northern tip of Brighton Island.

  Would it have been so hard to let me astrally project, God? I know the telepathy was not a possibility, as by second grade, my peers and I were already running numerous controlled studies using the means of scrap paper and different corners of the room, and to succeed would have granted me far too much power amongst them. I know you gave me precognition that one time about winning that contest in 8th grade and it was so spooky I could never have handled any more spook. I am way too OCD to move things with my mind, and I know, as I am not the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, I cannot be a witch. However.

  I don’t see what the PROBLEM would have been with allowing me to freaking LEAVE MY BODY FROM TIME TO TIME AND TRAVEL THE WORLD, BOUND ONLY BY AN INVISIBLE CORD LINKED TO MY TRUE SPIRIT WHILE MY BODY WAS TEMPORARILY A HUSK, A SHELL, TO ALL APPEARANCES DEAD!

  In any case, Laurie Stratton, unbeknownst-to-self-child-of-the-Navajo-with-twin-sister, is far more blessed than I. In Stranger with My Face, Duncan has ditched her typical Southwest setting for the rocky shoals of coastal New England, where our heroine lives with her mother and father, a painter and writer, respectively, and two sweet younger siblings, Neal and Megan. Also in the mix is Laurie’s so-psyched-to-no-longer-be-gawky prize of a ripped boyfriend, Gordon; a brooding, darkly handsome acquaintance, Jeff, whose face was half-burned off by an exploded can of lighter fluid; and, of course, an expert outsider WITH insider extrasensory knowledge, Laurie’s schoolmate Helen Tuttle, who has recently moved from the Southwest and becomes Laurie’s new friend.

  Interestingly, the first few scenes of the novel, as befits the events to come, are rife with splits in which one element is not only the opposite of the other, but also the veritable photo negative. First is
Laurie’s passage from gawky to glamorous—a constant Duncan trope at the beginnings of her novels. Laurie’s improved looks not only alter her appearance but her entire social currency:

  In every girl’s life, I guess, there must be one special summer that is a turning point, a time of stretching and reaching and blossoming out and leaving childhood behind. This was the summer that had happened to me. The year before, I had been awkward and gawky, all pointed knees and sharp elbows and bony rib cage, hiding my shyness behind a book while girls like Natalie Coleson and Darlene Briggs wriggled around in their bikinis and got boys to buy them Cokes and rub them with baby oil.

  This summer it had all been different. The first day I walked out onto the beach, clutching my book and my beach towel, I heard a wolf whistle.

  Another split is found in Jeff Rankin, a former crush of Laurie’s who has been moody and withheld since the summer when a can of lighter fluid exploded in his face:

  The left side of his face was fine. If you saw him at a certain angle, you’d have thought he was the best-looking guy you’d ever seen. If you saw him from the right, you had to stop and swallow hard.

  It occurs to me that even the fact that Laurie is recounting, not experiencing, the events in question, leads to a sort of narrative split, the dreadful present aftermath merging with a golden past. (Does not “There was a time when I, too, loved Cliff House” have more than a whiff of “Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again”?)

  However, the biggest initial split is with Laurie and her own family—from whom she is inherently estranged, just as Jeff is to his old face, by looks: