Читать книгу Miss Boo Is Sixteen - Margaret Lee Runbeck - Страница 4

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We were driving up from the desert and we had been lulled by the cozy intimacy of the car into dropping down the walls of discretion that often protect children from seeing adults exactly as they are. We had forgotten Boo and were all talking unguardedly to each other as if she were not present.

Then beside me I heard a despairing sigh.

“What’s the matter, darling?”

“Grownups!” she said eloquently.

“Grownups? What about them?”

She shrugged. “Grownups are so screwy,” she said somewhat wearily.

“Oh? We are?” In the vacant air before me something very welcome was happening. I was seeing a magazine page with the words amusingly lettered, and under it, as by-line, our two names. As one does in the presence of material, I prodded gently.

“What are we screwy about, precious?”

“Millions of things,” she said. “You’re people who could do anything you want to do, and yet you hardly ever sit all day in a bathtub full of bubbles, eating ice cream cones and reading comic books.”

“No, I guess we don’t,” I admitted.

“And you fool around with people you just can’t bear.”

“What else can we do, if they’re under foot?”

“You could do what we do,” she said impatiently. “When we can’t stand anybody, they probably feel the same way about us. So we come to an understanding.”

“How do you manage that?”

“We say, ‘Listen, you. Scram. You play on that side and I’ll play on this, and that way we won’t have any pain.’ ”

“Does it work?”

“Mais natch,” she said bilingually. “There are always plenty of people we do like. But grownups ...”

“I know what grownups do,” I said. “We try to make-believe we’re just crazy about everybody.”

“And that makes you very cross, sometimes, with the people at home.”

I thought that over and decided it was true. “How else are we screwy?”

“Oh, you buy clothes like everybody else’s ... then when everybody has ’em, you toss yours out. Too common. And you wash dishes. When everybody knows the best meals get eaten standing beside the refrigerator. Then all you have to do is brush the crumbs off the chest. You read books because everybody else is reading ’em, and if you missed last year’s best book, you wouldn’t dream of wasting your time reading it this year.”

“We’re too busy for that,” I said defensively.

“And that business about being too busy,” she said scornfully. “You have more time than we do because you don’t have to do Latin and Algebra ... and what do you do with your time? Waste it boring yourselves.”

“I think you have something,” I said. “Maybe you and I could do a magazine article called ‘Grownups Are Screwy’ ... might even reform a few of ’em.”

“I doubt it,” she said, “but you always say people like to read about themselves.”

“I’ll tell you what. You talk to some of your friends, and see what ways they think we’re crazy, and then we’ll see what we can do.”

“I’d be getting my money ready for college,” she said with enthusiasm. “And besides, I’d sort of like to see my name in print.”

But, like a lot of what seems to be good material, this was never impaled tidily on typewriter paper. About a week later she came home from school looking glum.

“I’ve got bad news for us,” she said.

“Oh? The Latin quiz?”

“Nope. The magazine article. I asked my friends what they thought. They say grownups aren’t screwy at all. I just spend my time with screwy grownups.”