Another Good Thing
I wasn’t very stalwart the next morning. The day started with one of those happy dreams I have just before it’s time to get up, only this one was very real.
In the dream, it was a sunny fall afternoon in Pleasantville. Kenny and Peg and Pat and Emmy and I were in our front yard, hulahooping under the trees. The air was thin and the light was pale. It was hot and I could feel the sun on my face and dead leaves scratching my socks; the leaves above me blazed yellow and orange and red; I could see bright blue sky and sunlight shining through them all, especially the yellow ones.
When I first woke up I thought I was at home in America, and I was happy — until I remembered.
I was in London.
I was in London, in the basement room with the black bars on the windows. In London, where when it wasn’t raining it was gray — gray all day and dark by the time I got out of school. London. I felt heavy and gray, like the buildings and the sidewalks and the sky and the air.
I had the dream every morning. It was always exactly the same, and I always woke up happy from it, until I remembered where I really was.
I was in London. One morning I looked up at the heavy gray sky (what you could see of it through all the black bars) and almost started to cry. I never cry. I didn’t even cry when I slit my knee open playing baseball and had to have thirteen stitches! I had to do something.
There was a high bookshelf in the hallway outside our room. I looked up at the books and then carried a chair in from the dining room and stood on it to choose. The paint was peeling, and the heat pipes near the ceiling were dusty and so were the books. There were books for children and grownups; I took down some of each and started reading.
The one I read first was about five sisters whose mother really wanted them to get married, and it was called Pride and Prejudice. One of the sisters (named Lizzy — her real name was Elizabeth, like mine) was lively and charming; she was her father’s favorite. She had very arched eyebrows and the question marks in the book were arched, too, and the author said Lizzy talked “archly” — it all fit together, and I liked that. The mother was very childish and silly (she was so ridiculous that she made me laugh, and I liked that, too) and the father made jokes about everything, and because Lizzy was smarter than all her sisters he thought she was great; all the men liked her.
This is from the first book I read.
This is what I always did on sight-seeing trips when we got to the sight my parents wanted to see.
I loved that book. I brought it everywhere with me. I brought it to school and read it there, and on the Underground, and at home I read without stopping from the time I got home from school until dinner, and then from dinner until I went to sleep.
On weekends, when my parents took us on sight-seeing trips, I’d stay in the car, reading it. If my father made me get out of the car, I’d sit down next to it and go on reading.
If they made me get out of the car, this is what I did.
As soon as I finished one book, I started another. After a while I read mostly books about girls going to boarding school: There were lots of those books in the apartment, and I loved them.
The girls in those books slept in a room with other girls their own age and ate together and had lessons together. Usually in them a new girl came, and the other girls made fun of her and teased her and didn’t like her at first — and then she did something heroic and everyone liked her a lot.
Or sometimes the girls had adventures together: The adventure usually started at night with someone putting on her dressing gown and getting a torch (that’s what they call a flashlight). I was surprised that they always had torches with batteries and bulbs that worked; each time they’d get the torch I’d wonder if this time the battery or bulb would be dead, but it never was.
And there was always a scene of a midnight feast: In the middle of the night, they would get up, put on their dressing gowns, light their torches, and spread food on a blanket.
So that was another good thing, reading. I read like that until one Saturday Jill took us to a toy store.