Lenny's Book of Everything Read online

  Mrs. Gaspar prayed for us. For our mother to be kept safe travelling to the Golden Living Retirement Home on the number twenty-eight bus, for the return of our wayward father, for my hair, for her wheeze, for her long-ago parents, for Karl and Karla, who meanwhile sat at our feet watching with shining black eyes. And she prayed for Davey to stop growing.

  We ate breakfast in her little kitchen that was a shrine to Apollo 11. There were newspaper articles cut out and stuck all over her fridge, coloured National Geographic pages taped around the kitchen door with a triptych of the astronauts Buzz, Neil, and Michael up top. Davey was sad every time I was ready to go to school, as though it had never happened before, this business of me donning my jacket and clipping my schoolbag shut. He said, “Len-neeeeeee,” long and slow. He grabbed me and pushed his big blond head into my stomach and cried all over my clean shirt.

  He stayed with Mrs. Gaspar and they would watch Days of Our Lives together. “Like sands through the hourglass,” Davey said, “so are the days of our lives.” “Good boy,” said Mrs. Gaspar. She would make him pray three times a day, on his knees, and he would do it, very good-naturedly. But he’d have tantrums too. He didn’t like Mrs. Gaspar’s soup. He didn’t like the tea she made him drink to slow down his growing. It was exactly the same bitter yellow tea she gave me for my thin hair. “Drink it,” I whispered after school, “just drink it.” She wheezed when she was agitated. She said we were ungrateful. Where would we be without her? Would we stay with Mr. Petersburg in number sixteen? Would he make us breakfast? Would he make us hearty soup? “Just drink it,” I said, “it’s got nothing in it.” My hair was still thin. But he wouldn’t. He closed his eyes and opened his mouth and I waited for his bellow.

  Davey bellowed like a wounded bull. Davey’s bellows shook the walls.

  Mrs. Gaspar raised her hands to the ceiling and said a silent prayer. Karl and Karla hid under the sofa.

  “I’m too old,” said Mrs. Gaspar to Mother. “I love my dumpling, but this crying. It makes it hard for me to breathe. There must be a kindergarten.”

  All the way to school I tried not to think of him. Second Street, Grayford, Ohio was long and straight and its buildings were almost entirely the colour of moon rock: light grey, dark grey, and occasionally a strange light green. I knew this because Neil Armstrong had brought some rocks home to Earth and they’d shown coloured pictures of them on the television. I told Mother once that I thought Second Street looked like it was made out of moon rock.

  She said, “I like that about you, Lenny, you always see the good in the bad.”

  Moon rock smelled like spent gunpowder.

  Second Street smelled like diesel exhaust and pigeon poo. It smelled like the popcorn at the entrance to the movie theatre and the rotten fruit at Mr. King’s “King of Fruit” Fruit Store and the cool gasping sliding-door breath of the bank, which had the aroma of suits and dollar bills and perfumed ladies.

  I walked past the Greyhound bus station. I walked past the grocer’s and Mr. King’s “King of Fruit” Fruit Store. I walked past the movie theatre and the bank. I went past the Three Brothers Trapani, tailors, and Miss Finny, the seamstress. I went past Mr. Kelmendi, the shoemaker. Each day he said, “Aren’t you too small to walk to school alone, young lady?” and each day I frowned at him and said, “No,” which made him laugh so hard that the pigeons exploded into the air.

  I went past the park where the trees shivered their grey fingers at the winter sky. I breathed out my foggy breath, puffed it in front of me like a dragon. All the way I could feel the ghost of Davey’s big hands upon me and smell his tears.

  My third-grade teacher was Miss Schweitzer and her name sounded like the swish of a rag across a dirty table. She was tall and frostily blonde and her bell-bottoms were ironed with a crease. She made us sit tall, she pulled our ponytails into line, and she inspected the handkerchiefs in our pockets each day. My mother said, “That Miss Schweitzer has too much time on her hands if handkerchiefs are all she worries about.”

  But I worried about handkerchiefs incessantly. I worried about their cleanness and pressed-ness. I tended to the floral handkerchief collection, which my nanny Flora thankfully had sent me for a birthday present, like my life depended upon it. Matthew Milford had been shamed for having a handkerchief several days old and dried hard in places with snot. Miss Schweitzer discovered it during handkerchief inspection. She asked him what it was.

  “It’s a handkerchief,” said Matthew Milford, although it took a lot longer than that on account of his stutter. He was on the It’s for a good minute and then, between the a and handkerchief, he jerked for an eternity. We all waited patiently. Matthew Milford had a big mole on his cheek. Hairs grew out of it. I liked to count them when he wasn’t looking. There were always five.

  “No, Milford,” said Miss Schweitzer, “it’s not a handkerchief.” Matthew looked confused. He stared at the handkerchief, which Miss Schweitzer held up as an example of what was not to come to school. Matthew Milford had a stutter and a mole and a terrible haircut so he didn’t need any more bad things to happen to him.

  Apart from Matthew Milford there was a girl called Frankie Pepelliani who could tap dance and everyone coveted her tap shoes. There was a girl named Tara Albright who looked exactly like a doll. She was so shiny and her eyes so glassy and her hair so neatly tied back in tails that it made you want to poke her just to see if she was real. These were just a few. There was also a girl called CJ Bartholomew and CJ Bartholomew was my best friend.

  CJ Bartholomew didn’t sound like the name of a girl in third grade. It sounded like the name of someone who wrote books about dentistry. CJ stood for Cassandra Jane which conjured up images of girls in long dresses in green gardens, but Cassandra Jane wasn’t like that. CJ was a small wild slip of a thing. She had a blast of fair hair that wouldn’t stay in the bunches her mother tied. Sometimes she had just one bunch left by the end of the day, like the handle on a teacup.

  CJ Bartholomew got dirtier than other kids. Her eyes watered in the sunlight. She wiped at them with her palms so that two dirt trails formed on her cheeks like cheetah tear lines. She had a permanently snotty nose. She was Miss Schweitzer’s worst nightmare.

  “Bartholomew, go and wash your face!”

  I liked her from the first. CJ ate her triangular sandwiches upside down, crust first, point last. She pushed her wobbly teeth in and out with her tongue. She screwed up her nose at things, squinted her eyes. CJ had five sisters and she recited their names to me until I could remember them: Bonnie-Anne, Nancy Jane, Lorelai Marie, Susan Louise, Josephine Claire.

  “I only have one brother,” I said. “He won’t stop growing. Mrs. Gaspar said we should take him to the doctor. No schools will have him. But my mother said he’s just big and that happens sometimes. There are Swedish people in our family.”

  “Like with Jack and the beanstalk, he just kept growing,” said CJ.

  “The beanstalk kept growing,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said CJ, who was very wise, “but it’s the same thing.”

  Davey had been to one nursery school for ten minutes. It was called the Sacred Heart Mary Street Nursery School, which was a very long name for no good reason. I had a bad feeling about the place before we even went there. I could tell Mother did too. She spent forever slicking down Davey’s hair with hair cream like it was his biggest problem. She used so much cream he said his head felt heavy with it. He didn’t like his scratchy new pants either. His new brown shoes were too squeaky. I could tell he was just plain scared. We walked along Second—all of us, a cloud of dark feelings. It got so bad I stopped still on the corner of Charlotte and Second because I knew it was wrong. We couldn’t take Davey to some place and just leave him there.

  My fear sucked all the sound out of the day. All the cars and buses and trucks stopped making noise. The pigeons burst into the air without volume. The winter sun winked from behind a cloud. It sent a semaphore message. It said, DON’T GO.

  Davey
frowned at the winking sun too.

  “What on earth are you two doing?” said Mother to us, stopped still, staring at the sky. “We’ll be late.”

  Inside the Sacred Heart Mary Street Nursery School it was hushed, like the inside of a church. Sister Agnetha met us at the door. Sister Agnetha smiled and looked for our five-year-old. She looked behind us like he might be there. She looked over the top of Davey’s head. My mother showed her Davey. His hair held down with a gallon of Brylcreem. His scratchy pants and his new brown shoes shining. Sister Agnetha’s smile vanished.

  “He’s too big,” she said.

  She was the first one to ever come right out and say it.

  It wasn’t He’s VERY big. It was He’s TOO big. He didn’t fit. And the worst thing was we’d never tried to fit him anywhere else. It was our first attempt. It jolted two tears right out of my mother’s eyes.

  “He’s just big for his age,” whispered Mother.

  “How can he play with children when he is twice their size?” asked Sister Agnetha. Twice their size was a stretch. He was approximately fifteen inches taller than the average five-year-old. Sister Agnetha tried to salvage her smile. Davey, who always smiled, didn’t smile in return. He knew meanness when he saw it. He grabbed a fistful of Mother’s skirt.

  “It’s just I wasn’t informed of his size,” said Sister Agnetha. “It isn’t right. It might be dangerous.”

  Now my brother was strong. If my mother needed heavy furniture lifted he could do it, but he would never hurt anyone. The other children had stopped doing what they were doing at the word dangerous. Building with blocks and painting on easels and reading on beanbags. They were staring at Davey.

  “I filled in all the forms,” said my mother. “He is five. He was with me. They saw him. They would have said if there was a problem.”

  Davey’s hands went around Mother’s waist. My ears went numb with a feeling that something bad was about to happen. I tried to hear. Sister Agnetha was saying something. She looked like she was trying to cover up her meanness. It was a patchwork affair and parts of it showed through. There was some kind of deal being struck. Her lips were moving but there was no sound. Then Davey had his tantrum.

  His mouth opened up into a dreadful lopsided oval. The sound turned back on. It was a roar. His roar. Sister Agnetha leaned backwards, shocked. The glass, high up in the windows, rattled.

  “No!” he bellowed.

  “Don’t be silly, Davey,” said Mother into the brief silence that followed. Children’s paintbrushes wilted in their hands. A pile of blocks fell to the floor.

  She tried to prise him from her waist. He gripped harder. She peeled his fingers backward and he reapplied them with more force. Sister Agnetha backed away. Her hand reached out for the red telephone on the wall. I watched it all unfold, as though I wasn’t really there, just the ghost of Lenny Spink.

  My mother succeeded in removing Davey from her. She jumped back from him.

  “Quickly,” she said to me and he looked at her with such desolation. She sobbed back at him with such despair.

  Davey took off running. He ran in a great galumphing arc around the classroom. He overturned two book stands, hurling them to the ground, he reached out one arm and tore a painting from an easel. He picked up a beanbag and tossed it up to the ceiling. He splattered paint and crashed right through the teacher’s chair. His Brylcreemed hair came unstuck and rose in two gelled horns upon his head, his face grew red, hot tears streamed down his cheeks, and glittering snot poured from his nose. Children screamed and cowered.

  Davey completed his lap of infamy. He rushed back into my mother’s skirt. He wept and bellowed into her lap at the terrible thing that he had done and the thing that had been done to him.

  “Please leave,” said Sister Agnetha, the red phone in her hand. “Straight away. Take your mon …” She didn’t finish the word. “And leave.”

  I think she wanted to say monster. I was almost certain she wanted to say monster.

  “He’s not a monster,” I cried, and my words were loud as cymbals, and it was much, much worse for my saying them.

  But we left. We sat on the steps outside until Mother could walk. Her legs were shaking so. She held Davey to her and she held him like she would never let him go.

  “How’s Davey doing at school?” asked Nanny Flora.

  It was raining. Icy rain falling past the window and all the pigeons shivering. The whole city was grey and my sadness flower had opened up inside my chest.

  “He’s not going,” I said.

  “Not going?” said Nanny Flora.

  “They wouldn’t let him because he was too big,” I whispered. I didn’t want Mother to hear. It still ruffled her. It made her spiky. It made her slam down our meatloaf. It made her say, “Too big?”

  “Well, he’s certainly that,” said Nanny Flora on the phone.

  Mother had sent her a studio photograph. In the photograph I was seated on a small cane chair with my feet daintily crossed and my white socks pulled up high. My yellow dress had turned my complexion the colour of canned franks. Beside me Davey looked as though he had stepped off a Viking ship. He was blond and huge, his feet planted apart in a sturdy stance and the buttons on his new red cowboy shirt straining over his tummy. He was grinning and I was frowning.

  Nanny Flora lived far away and neither Davey nor I had ever met her in person. She spoke on the phone, once a month on a Sunday, twelve Sundays a year. She was an official regular event. There was a picture of her on the china cabinet, a tiny woman with a golden bowl of tight curls on her head and very white teeth. She wore a blue coat and she looked very clean, like someone from an antiseptic advertisement. On the phone she spoke down from somewhere high above, a cloud perhaps, perfectly white and sanitized.

  “But there are big people in the family, you know?” she said. “Swedish people. In fact he looks a lot like Uncle Gus and he was from that side.”

  I imagined them, a family of Swedish giants, with hands the size of dinner plates and jagged gap-toothed smiles.

  “How’d you like those handkerchiefs?” asked Nanny Flora from her sanitized cloud.

  “I loved them, thank you,” I said.

  “Did you like the flowery blue one?” Nanny Flora asked. “Or did you have another favourite?”

  I really hadn’t paid much attention to the patterns, just adored their stiffness and cleanliness and resolved to never blow my nose into them.

  “I liked the blue flowery one,” I said.

  “What about the yellow one?” asked Nanny Flora. “I thought it was very pretty, did you?”

  It was like being interviewed by the secret handkerchief police. I wondered if she was trying to trick me. Maybe there wasn’t a yellow one. It seemed like the kind of thing her voice might do.

  “The blue one is the best,” I said.

  There was a small silence.

  “So too big, you say?” she said finally, then “Well, tell me, how are you doing?”

  It was a difficult question to answer. She didn’t know me. She didn’t know the holes in my stockings. She didn’t know my ratty toothbrush. She didn’t know the three warts in a triangle on my left knee that I called my holy trinity.

  She didn’t know how I pretended I was a dragon the whole way to school.

  “Good,” I said, heart beating fast.

  She didn’t know how sometimes rain made me want to cry, like there was something deep inside of me—the sadness flower that opened up when rainy days came, and blossomed inside me until I couldn’t breathe.

  “Tell me something new,” she said.

  It was a little threatening. I bored her.

  “We entered a competition,” I said, remembering. Oh, the relief was sweet. I leaned against the wall, phone pressed to my ear, breathed.

  “Really, now?” Nanny Flora said.

  “For an encyclopedia set. A whole set. Completely free. If we win it.”

  “Well, now,” said Nanny Flora from her cloud.
“That would really be something now, wouldn’t it?”

  “It sure would,” I said.

  “Put your mama on,” said Nanny Flora, so I did.

  Mother turned her back to us, cradled the phone against her neck. Ever since the Sacred Heart affair, her magic had been leaking out. She was made entirely of worries now. Her legs were thin, her arms too. She was worried thin. She worried about Davey’s constipation. She worried about whether I needed glasses. “How can I afford glasses?” she asked me, even though I didn’t need them and no one had even looked at my eyes. She worried about the box of oranges she brought home from Mr. King’s “King of Fruit” Fruit Store, and if she should have accepted them.

  “I know,” I heard her say to Nanny Flora.

  “I know, but …”

  “Yes, I’ll take him to the doctor …”

  “Mama,” we heard her say. “I don’t want to hear about Uncle Gus from Sweden right now.”

  ADVERTISEMENT:

  Join the Burrell’s family. Our business is giving THE GIFT OF KNOWLEDGE. For a chance to win the Burrell’s Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia set please write us a letter and include the phrase THE GIFT OF KNOWLEDGE. The Burrell’s Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia is delivered weekly right to your door! But hurry! The competition closes January 15 (see terms and conditions in the notices section of this paper).

  * * *

  January 5, 1975

  Apartment 15, 762 Second Street

  Grayford, Ohio 44002

  Dear Burrell’s family,

  Welcome to the Spink family. My name is Cindy and I have two children, Lenore and David. Their father died nearly a year ago. I raise them myself by working shifts as a nursing aide at the Golden Living Retirement Home. We get by, we have enough food and a roof over our heads. My children are the Love of My Life. They are both beautiful although Davey is very big for his age. I’ve taken him to the doctor and they are going to figure out why. Lenore is so good to her brother and so very smart in third grade. She reads very well. We’re hoping for the encyclopedia set so that we can always have THE GIFT OF KNOWLEDGE in our humble abode.