Читать книгу Miss Boo Is Sixteen - Margaret Lee Runbeck - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Growing was certainly in the air! Yet it took me all day to realize exactly what it meant.

Everywhere we looked we could see that things were on the grow. That morning the gardener had had to lop off long exploring arms from the bougainvillea, because all of a sudden we couldn’t see out of our bedroom windows. We had picked roses that were too tall for any of the modest vases we have in the house (our vases having been brought with us from New England, where hopes are plausible and conservative ... and not preposterous as is the floral fact in California).

Boo got out a favorite gingham frock from the recesses of her closet, which somehow had been forgotten in her preoccupation with shorts and swim suits. She put it on exuberantly with the delight of finding something lost.

“My wonderful pink plaid!” she cried. “Imagine it spending the whole summer in the dark. Not even a moth to enjoy it.”

But when she tried to button it, something was wrong. The buttons and the buttonholes weren’t within speaking distance of each other!

“What on earth can have happened to it?” she cried indignantly. “You don’t suppose it could have shrunk on account of not being worn, do you?”

“I’ve heard of that causing shrinkage. In certain types of clothes,” I said, hardly daring to tell her the sober truth.

“I know what’s happened,” she said elatedly, “I’ve grown! I’ve definitely grown!”

“You definitely have,” I admitted, because blithesome as is that news to her, it still has a wistful meaning to me. I know she’ll go on growing; I want her to, of course. And yet....

By this time she was walking around, delightedly surveying the outgrownness of the frock.

“Isn’t it wonderful!” she cried. “I’ve grown at least an octave!”

I thought she meant only that stretched distance between thumb and little finger which occurs when she sits for twenty-nine minutes a day drumming out piano scales.

“Yes,” I said, sounding depressingly like a parent, “you’re getting to be a big girl now.”

She went out and sat in the shade of the acacia tree a long time. She came back into the house and considered whether or not she’d do some cooking; she got out her roller skates and looked at them. She finally put them on, and just sat with her elbows on her knees. Then she took them off and came inside, and said in that particular plaintive voice I haven’t heard for years, “I don’t know what to do.”

“What about?” I asked absently.

“About anything. There isn’t anything to do.”

“Nonsense,” I said, “there are hundreds of things to do.”

“Not today,” she said tragically. “There’s nothing at all.”

I looked at her, and I saw that the usual bubble and squeak had gone out of her. She looked limp and loose-endy, like a doll when nobody is home to breathe life into it.

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You can come with me. I’m going into Hollywood to do some errands.”

Unenthusiastically she got into the car and slumped supinely beside me, looking out from under her golden bangs indifferently. There was simply nothing on the street. But I didn’t insist upon opening the subject, because I have had days myself when there was nothing on my street.

At last she said, “I’ll tell you what’s the matter with me. Wanta know?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Well, I’m halfway between.”

“Between?”

“I’m getting too big for the things I used to like to do, and I haven’t found out yet how people spend their time doing that other stuff.”

My heart opened to her in a flood of understanding.

“That’s nothing to be alarmed about,” I said. “I hope you’re going to be the kind of person who never finishes growing. You’re going to keep on ... long after school is finished, and college ... long after you’re sixty and seventy. ... There will be dozens of times like this, when you’re halfway between what was big enough for you yesterday and what will be yours tomorrow.”

“I s’pose so,” she said listlessly, staring straight ahead of her. But it was only nominal agreement, because she couldn’t see where she was going; and where she had come from was suddenly too tight for her to return to, like the pink gingham dress.

We had reached the bookstore now, and I got out. But she just shook her head when I invited her to come in with me. So then I knew how sunk she was. But I knew, too, that the remedy was at hand. I asked for my own books quickly, for now that was not the business of the day.

“But what I want mostly,” I said to my friend the book-man, “is an armful of books for Boo.”

“Does she ever find time to read?” he asked incredulously, remembering how only a couple of years ago she had hopscotched up and down his aisles, and worn him out with questions.

“She’s about to,” I said. “She just discovered time, and it’s got her scared.”

“We’ll fix that up,” he said, and the two of us hurried back to the rear of the long shop, where there are stacks and stacks of classified reading matter. He ran up his ladder and began handing me down books; I hardly had time to take them from his downstretched hand, because I was snatching up selections of my own. Then I realized that he was picking out books for himself-when-young as I was seizing books for myself. He had picked Treasure Island and Ivanhoe, and was trying to find some other title which he was muttering over and over to himself. I had found Pride and Prejudice, The Life of the Bee, The Wind in the Willows, and Flammarion’s Astronomy, and was looking for Mistress Masham’s Repose, which I couldn’t find.

He came down the ladder, and I sat on the lowest step, and we talked and talked. He told me about how his father let him read anything as a boy, and about their barn with hay and a big high loading door ... the finest reading room a boy could know, he says. And I told him about the way my father used to read aloud to us, and how many times we had read Maeterlinck’s Life of the Bee, over and over.

“She ought to have something about the oceans,” he said emphatically. “Or maybe we should save that for next year?”

After a while we both woke up suddenly and realized that we had been a long time back there in what the sign said was the Juvenile Department. We came up toward the front of the shop self-consciously, with our arms full of books.

“You don’t want these wrapped do you?” he asked, and I shook my head, for we have a silent agreement that it is insulting to books to carry them out of a shop wrapped and tied with string, as if they were some kind of captive merchandise.

Then both of us happened to let our eyes fall on the adult books around us. Dyspeptic books they were, with frowning letters making up the titles; worried fat responsible-looking books, with bloated economy and disgruntled diplomacy and atomic doom in their titles. Within an arm’s reach were ten of them that spoke explosively of the crowded emptiness of today and the terror of tomorrow.

He saw me realizing this, and he said, “You know sometimes I have to retreat back into that Juvenile Department, or I’d go nuts.”

When she went to sleep that night, the books were on a chair beside her bed. A few beatific sentences had been read out of each one, just to make sure each book was her own. I knew from her politeness that some were too young....

“Wanta know something?” she said. “This has been simply a super day.”

“Why do you suppose that was?”

“Well, first of all, I found out I had grown an octave.”

There again was the word she had used this morning. I had accepted it then as her way of indicating a number of inches. But now I saw that she meant something more than inches. I didn’t try to ask her. She had given me the word ... she had given me the day, and I must interpret it for myself, as she had interpreted it for herself. I turned out her lamp and went downstairs, thinking about it.

We do seem to live through this life of ours in octaves. There is a rounded octave of desires and fears and accomplishments always present at whatever stage we are. When one scale is finished another will grow from it, recognizable yet lifted into a higher register.

Our days are melodies made from these notes in endless patterns. We emerge from one octave to the next so gently that we hardly realize the transition.

Thinking about all this, I remembered that table of new adult books with the menacing titles. In the same instant I had a vision of that little face I love, which this morning had looked out with listlessness and discontent at a world outgrown. The adult books with the grim titles and the face had something in common. Her malady had been that she couldn’t find anything to do. And this present world whose voice speaks in the dyspeptic books, this weary, jittery, fagged-out world of the moment ... it, too, hasn’t yet found what it wants ardently to do. They were two unhappy children together, protesting against the growing!

“I’ll tell you what’s the matter with me,” Boo had said. “... I’m halfway between.”

In the destiny of the race, this world we know is only a half-grown child. At this moment, it cannot find its way back to yesterday, and it is afraid to venture into tomorrow.

Perhaps they both need a kind of mothering. Perhaps this spoiled little world needs to ask its Mother what it had better do. Then she could show it what wonders lie ahead, waiting until it is ready to accept them. There are beautiful freedoms ahead, as unguessed as the armful of books that started Boo’s ticking again. Surely we’ll find them one by one, as we lay aside the tired inanities.