One
I never liked football. Never.
Never, never, never, never, never.
This is not hard to
understand. My father was from England,
where football means soccer and where
American football is hardly ever played.
And so I grew up in a house where there was no interest in it.
I never saw football on television,
either, because we never had a TV set—not my entire life. As I’ve told you, my father had a favorite
saying: “Television kills your mind.” And
so he never owned one—and I never cared.
Not at all.
Because, you see, what Father did own was a huge library, a library
jammed with books of all kinds: novels, history, science, you-name-it. Although we had a room called the “library,”
our books spilled out of that room and overflowed into every other room in our
house. Books were on every table, on
every shelf; stacks of them were by our beds.
Many of them, though, were carried
away by the tornado that severely damaged our house in the summer after my sixth
grade year, but Father quickly began buying books again (the insurance money
was very helpful), and before long, our house—our repaired house—was once again overflowing with books.[i]
Father was a reporter for the
newspaper in town, so we had newspapers in our house, but because he was never
interested in sports—of any kind—that was the one section of the newspaper that
neither of us ever read. Ever.
Of course, I knew about
football. During recess at school,
especially in the fall, lots of kids would play it—mostly boys, but some of the
girls, too. I never paid too much
attention to it, but I saw the activity every day and just tried to stay out of
the way. I can’t say that I thought much
about it at all—except to wonder why so many boys would want to play a game
that caused so many of them, after recess, to have ripped clothing and bruises—and
sometimes even blood.
I have to confess that there was
another reason I grew to dislike football.
Blue Boyle. As he grew and grew
and grew and grew during fifth and sixth grades, he became more and more
interested in football. And why
not? It gave him a chance to knock down
and hurt other kids—things he could not do in any other way and still stay out
of trouble.
In fact, Boyle was rewarded for being violent. The other boys were afraid of him, many of
the girls started to like him—yes, I mean like
him—and coaches from the high school used to show up at recess to watch him.
As you remember, Boyle disappeared
in sixth grade—then reappeared most horribly later in two different places: on
Middle Island on the Ohio River, on Green Island in Lake Erie.[ii]
By that time, he was huge, as
oversized and sturdy as a statue—and more a creature
than a person. Now that seventh grade had begun, I was grateful he wasn’t
around anymore. School can cause plenty of stress on its own; no need to add fear or even terror to the mix.
“Vickie! Vickie! Are you home?” Harriet’s
voice was shouting as she banged the door knocker louder and louder.
It was a week before school
started. I had not seen my neighbor and friend Harriet Eastbrook for about a
month. She and her mother helped us a lot after that tornado on July 4, and, in
fact, it even looked as if her mother and my father were going to … you know? But
for much of August Harriet and her mother had been gone to Myrtle Beach, South
Carolina, where her mother played golf every day and where Harriet had other
friends whom she saw every summer.[iii]
“Door’s open!” I yelled back. I was
in the parlor, reading, as usual.
“I have the best news!” cried
Harriet when she entered the room. “The best news ever!”
“School’s been called off this year
due to lack of interest?” I suggested.
“Don’t we wish!” she said. “But
actually, it’s even better than that!”
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense
any longer, Harriet.”
“Got anything to eat?”
“Yes. And you know where, too,” I
sighed.
I closed my book and followed her
to the kitchen, where she was soon searching the cupboards and refrigerator for
food. She quickly found the graham crackers and some milk and sat down at our
kitchen table with an entire stack of crackers. In seconds her mouth was
entirely full. I continued to marvel at Harriet’s ability to eat anything and
everything but not add an ounce of weight.
“So what’s your news?” I asked
again. I had begun to believe it wasn’t going to be as exciting as Harriet had
thought.
“Bbmdheknethd,” she said.
“Pardon? Why don’t you swallow that
glob of graham crackers before you try to talk!”
She picked up her glass of milk and
took a long drink. Looked at me closely.
“Blue Boyle is back,” she said.
[i]
You can read a full description of this destructive tornado in the first
installment of The Papers of Victoria
Frankenstein.
[ii]
These events Vickie deals with in the first installment of her Papers.
[iii]
Harriet Eastbrook was Vickie’s best—and only—friend at this period in her
life. As Vickie reveals in I discover Who I Am, Harriet’s father
abandoned his family, and Vickie suggests that her father and Vickie’s mother
were beginning a romantic relationship.
Vickie’s mother, remember, had died shortly after Vickie’s birth.
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