The Reading Promise

by Alice Ozma

  “Oh my dear,” she said, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize this was torn. What a pity, hmm.”

  She held it up to show me, but it looked no different to me than any of the other layers.

  “I don’t see what you’re talking about,” I said honestly, putting on my glasses to check.

  “What a dear,” the woman said with a smile. “You’re too kind. Well I certainly can’t sell you a damaged dress at that price, now can I? Hmm, how ’bout we take off… Does fifteen dollars sound fair?”

  All I could do was nod and uncurl my hand to give her the sweaty wad of cash. During the ride home, I hugged the dress to me tightly and smiled until my dimples hurt.

  “I’m almost ready!” I yelled back, as my father called for me for the fourth or fifth time in ten minutes. “But if you want to be surprised, then you can’t come charging in here!”

  “You’re starting to make me nervous!” he yelled. “That boy’s expecting you any minute!”

  That boy was our neighbor Ryan, a friend I’d had since I was thirteen years old.

  “I’m just putting on the finishing touches,” I said, adding a necklace that had belonged to my grandmother. I smoothed my hair a few times in the mirror and walked into my father’s room.

  “Surprise!” I said, as he saw the dress, and my updo, and even the catlike fake nails for the first time.

  He looked at me for a long time, and I was afraid he was going to say that I had wasted his money. I was afraid he still didn’t “get” prom. I stood up straight so he could see the dress’s hand-done embroidery, falling gracefully into the soft pink layers of fluff.

  “Well,” he said, lowering his eyes and hushing his voice, “you are certainly something else.”

  When you’ve spent months preparing for an event, vague answers aren’t quite good enough.

  “Do you like it?” I asked, fanning the many skirts into a wide curtsy.

  “Lovie,” he said, “you have never looked so beautiful.”

  It was a word I’d never heard him use to describe a person. A painting, a house, a lake, maybe. But even though he was always quick to give a compliment, this word must have been put on reserve. He was waiting for some big day to use it. My face was warm as I beamed up at him.

  “Now hurry up,” he said. “You’ve been making me a nervous wreck!”

  He patted my usual spot on his bed, and I crawled under the covers beside him.

  “Watch out!” he yelled as he noticed my updo was about to collide with the headboard. He slid a pillow under my head and eased me down onto it, careful not to let a single hair fall out of place.

  Because prom would go until midnight and a friend was having a campfire afterward, we had to do our reading beforehand. My preparations had taken a lot of time, and this was the only time in the day that we were both free. And so, at eighteen years old, in my full prom attire, I nestled up next to my father to hear a chapter from The Old Curiosity Shop just before my date arrived.

  “When we last left off…,” my father began, as he summarized the previous chapter.

  I thought I heard him say, When we last left off: You were nine years old. You chewed your hair when you were nervous. You hated boys and dresses. I was terrified to be a single father.

  He didn’t actually say that, though. He just summarized the last chapter, as he always did, and moved on to the next. In that way, our 3,170th night of reading wasn’t really that different from our first.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Day 3,218

  If this road goes in, it must come out… and as the Emerald City is at the other end of the road, we must go wherever it leads us.

  —L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

  We knew the day was coming. There was no way around it. We’d talked it over and decided that The Streak had to end when I went to college. If not then, when? Would I call him every night, between exams and club meetings, and hope that I was catching him while he was free but before he went to sleep? We’d run up legendary phone bills and every night would be a gamble—would we get in touch? What if he left the phone off of the hook? What if the power went off during a storm? More than anything, though, it wasn’t how we wanted The Streak to be. It would make it a chore instead of a joy. The Streak was about spending time together and taking the stress out of a hectic day—not adding more to it. We were supposed to sit together and appreciate just being in the same room, working our way through a piece of literature. It wouldn’t be the same after I left for college. No, it had to end. Once I got my orientation packet, we knew the date: The Streak would end on September 2, 2006. I was hoping for a bright sunny day, maybe even a rainbow off in the distance.

  The day came. Tropical Storm Ernesto hit the East Coast with a roar of whipping winds and endless rain. My mother, father, and I piled into the van, and I drove. I had all the usual jitters; I wondered what my roommate would be like, and if my room would be big enough. I wondered if the pink and patchwork comforter set I’d picked out for my bed would look childish. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with college-level math classes. But something bigger was also on my mind.

  I was thankfully distracted when we arrived in the worst of the rain and found, to our dismay, that the dorm was at the top of a large flight of stairs. We lugged up my television, and my computer, and my heavy mattress pad. Everything was soaked, including us. I greeted my suite-mates for the first time with hair stuck to my face and my jeans dripping on the tiled floor. Little puddles formed wherever I stood for an extended period of time. When the last of my things came in, it was time.

  We looked for a spot. I’d wanted to read outside, and I had pictured it in detail. We’d find a sunny spot a couple hundred yards from my dorm, some place where the grass was tall and green from a lack of foot traffic. I had even seen the perfect place as we were unloading the van, but the rain was getting heavier, and everything outside was becoming one muddy puddle. I suggested we read in my dorm room, where I could lie on the tiny bed while my father sat at my desk, but he dismissed the idea. That space, he said, was too full of boxes. It felt cluttered and tight, and even with the door closed you could hear people coming and going, dragging beds across floors and shouting out the window to their new friends. It wasn’t the way to end things, not at all. I agreed, but the problem was, there was no way to end things. Nothing would ever feel quite right. I would rather have searched and searched forever than finally sat down in a spot and said, This is it. Here is where we will end it.

  So we searched. We walked through my building looking for nooks and crannies, but everything was exposed—there was no privacy anywhere. Then we discovered the tunnels. My dorm was apparently connected to other dorms in the quad by a series of long and winding underground hallways. They led to a small lounge, which, I was amazed to find, already had people in it. Someone had even found a use for the laundry room already, and one machine was clattering loudly. Nothing down here would be of use to us. We were headed back for ground level when my father stopped me on the stairs.

  “This will do,” he said, sitting down and pulling the book out of his jacket.

  “What will? This hallway? Where are you suggesting we read?”

  “Right here. On these steps. You can’t hear anyone from here.”

  “But we’re on steps! What if someone wants to come down to the basement? It’s cold and damp down here. And there’s barely any light!” I rattled off my protests as quickly as I could think of them. The only light came from an Exit sign with two large white bulbs beside it. It gave the place a sad, abandoned feel. The hallway echoed a little when we talked. This couldn’t be it.

  “I’m tired of looking around,” he said. “And we’re never going to be happy with anywhere.”

  “I would have been happy with a little grassy hill in the sunshine. Should we wait and see if the rain stops? We could get something to eat and give it a couple of hours.”

  “It’s a tropical storm, Lovie. I don’t think
it’s just going to clear up like that. It’ll rain for days.”

  “I’m not ready,” I said, sitting down beside him even as I said it.

  “I know. It’s just something we’ve got to do. We’ll never be ready.”

  I sighed. From beneath my hooded jacket, I pulled out a small, worn face. The Raggedy Ann doll my father had gotten me when I was four years old had been a faithful follower of the reading streak. Now, at fourteen years old, her skin was grayish and one of her eyebrows had unraveled. There was a black dot on her face from a marker drawing I made in my bed one night. Her dress, which we’d replaced several times, was faded in the spot where I’d always put my head while my father read to me. She smiled up at me through the loose red yarn surrounding her face and I tried to smile back at her.

  “Should we do this?” I said to her, but my father was the one to respond.

  “Not really any way around it, is there?” he said.

  He put his hand on the cover of the book as though swearing in on the Bible. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was our compromise, since we couldn’t agree on which Oz book we’d been reading when we started The Streak. This wasn’t it, but it was symbolic to us: the first Oz book. The one that had started it all. In this book, Dorothy wouldn’t even meet my namesake Ozma yet. She had no idea what was in store for her. But we knew. We knew how it ended, but we read like we didn’t.

  We read like we always did. My father and I, together, sharing words that weren’t our own but were still a part of our secret language. His voice was calm, deeper than usual, round and soothing. I listened with my arms around my knees. Raggedy Ann was propped up between us, and she was listening, too. He read with a slow confidence that made the first chapter last longer than it probably did the first, second, and third times we’d read this book. He must have been rehearsing for quite some time, or maybe he was just remembering from years gone by, because he barely seemed to be looking at the page. I tried to soak it all up and not think about the future. It wouldn’t be this way in ten minutes. In ten minutes, I would be a college student and he would be on his way home without me for the first time. But then, right then, at that very moment, I was Lovie and he was Dad and we were doing what we always did, what we always had done for as long as I could remember. I saw that we were approaching the end, that the first chapter, which he’d marked off with a paper clip, was getting smaller and smaller. When we got to the page with the paper clip, my eyes started to water. I heard a change in my father’s voice, he got even slower but it was inevitable. Three thousand two hundred and eighteen nights and days left us here. I knew what came next.

  We turned the page.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I’m not running away.

  —Jerry Spinelli, Maniac Magee

  I entered college as, appropriately enough for the daughter of The Streak, an English major. Although The Streak was over and I no longer lived at home, my father and I still found ways to spend time together. When I came home for a weekend, our days were piled high with activities in the Philadelphia area, visiting our old stomping grounds. Had I known the challenges we were about to face in the name of reading, I might have appreciated those days more. They were peaceful. My father was happy. But the conversation we had one particular summer day seems, in an eerie way, like foreshadowing. It was as though my father knew all along what was ahead of him—a fight for the thing he loved almost as much as he loved his own children.

  “You know how the water from the bathroom sink always tastes better than the water from the kitchen sink?”

  I was surprised that my sister remembered this because now that I was in college, she hadn’t lived at the house in four or five years.

  “I don’t think it really does,” I said, though I knew what she was talking about.

  “Yes, exactly, that’s my point. That’s what this mountain was to him. It was the water from the bathroom sink, which you always think tastes better because we don’t keep cups in the bathroom. You have to stick your head under the spigot. It’s about the challenge. Which is a very selfish reason to risk your life, if you ask me.”

  “I agree, I think. I don’t get the part about the spigot. But I agree with that last bit.”

  My father, sister (who was, to my excitement, home for the weekend), and I had gone to the Franklin Institute to see an IMAX film and we were now discussing the movie on our way back to the car. My new boyfriend Dan was tagging along, looking as out of place as he was feeling with my still-unfamiliar-to-him family. The movie was about a man who climbed a mountain in Switzerland to prove a point. At least, that was how I saw it. But my father kept saying, “It’s something he had to do.”

  “How is this something he had to do at all?” I argued. “His dad died climbing that same mountain. Half of the movie was about how hard it was for this man to live without a father. And now, his daughter is the same age he was when he lost his dad, and he’s still going up? He’s choosing to abandon her.”

  “Selfish,” my sister repeated.

  We nodded our heads in unison.

  I sometimes point when I am making an argument, and this time I found myself accidentally pointing at Dan as I spoke. He smirked at my finger and steered it away from his face. I gave him a pat on the back to ensure him I meant no harm. But after I put my hand back in my pocket, I pulled it right out again, this time intentionally pointing at Dan. He had to weigh in.

  “Yeah,” Dan said in a low voice, not quite comfortable joining a family argument. “I think your dad is right. It’s just something he had to do, man.”

  Dan used the word man when he was trying to turn his sentence into a punch line. But I wasn’t going to be distracted.

  “Lovie,” my father said, “sometimes things challenge you, and you know you will never be able to move on with your life until you meet the challenge. You need to prove it to yourself.”

  My father is far more competitive than most. Once, I tried to convince him to start playing Scrabble with me. I set up the board, taught him the directions, and walked him step-by-step through a few scenarios. For the first ten or fifteen minutes of our inaugural game, he did nothing but tell me how much fun he was having, and what a great educational tool the game was, and how much he hoped we could incorporate a few games into our weekly routines. Fifty minutes later, when I’d beaten him by only forty or fifty points, he made me put the game away and told me to never even suggest playing again. He is just as competitive with himself, pushing himself to walk just a little bit faster or lose just a little bit more weight or haggle a price down by just a dollar or two more at a yard sale. This certainly skewed his view a bit.

  “I don’t think most people look at life as one big contest, Dad. And even if they did, why would you enter a contest where the grand prize is getting to the top of a cold mountain and second place might involve plunging thousands of feet to your death?”

  “And there his wife and daughter were,” my sister added, “staying in a cabin at the foot of the mountain, watching their lunatic husband and dad climb a mountain for no good reason.”

  “I think I gave a perfectly good reason.”

  “Dad,” I said, trying to end the argument without backing down from my point, “let me ask you this: would you have done what he did if Kath and I were little kids waiting for you at the bottom of the mountain, holding our breath and crossing our fingers?”

  My sister and I stared, waiting tensely for his response, but knowing what to expect.

  “Of course I would,” he said calmly and without pause.

  This was not what we’d expected. Dan coughed into his sleeve and fell behind to, ostensibly, stop at a water fountain. He took long, slow sips and punctuated each with a deep breath to allow my sister and me time in semiprivate to grill our father.

  “What are you thinking?”

  My sister stepped away from my father as she said this and gave him a disgusted look, as though he had just revealed he had been bathing in human blood instead of water
for the past few weeks.

  “Those are some pretty skewed priorities,” I said, also backing away. Coming from a man whom I have always considered the most dedicated father on Earth, these statements were shocking.

  “Sometimes,” my dad said, “there are things a person has to do before they can do anything else. This man couldn’t be a good parent until he conquered his fears. How could he tell his daughter not to be afraid of ghosts or the dark or the decaying corpse of a former president”—here he looked at me and smiled—“if he was lying in bed at night, shaking like a leaf thinking about the thing that scares him? There are things you have to do. Some things come even before your family, because if you don’t deal with them, you can’t take care of your family.”

  Dan was nodding with his eyebrows raised.

  “That makes a lot of sense, actually,” he said.

  I shot him a look that I thought made it perfectly clear his commentary was unwelcome if he wasn’t going to agree with me, but he must have misinterpreted because he continued.

  “I can’t imagine what that thing would be, for me. But if I had a kid, and something was really distracting me, how could I be a good dad? I guess I couldn’t.”

  “More than distracting,” my dad elaborated. “This was taking over his life. It’s no different than having a drug problem or a gambling addiction. If it’s all you can think about, you need to beat it so you can move on and be a better parent.”