Dicey's Song (14 page)

“The year's a quarter through,” Dicey said. Their report cards were due out next week. They would get them handed out in a special homeroom at the end of the day next Tuesday.

“So what else is new?” James asked. His question was impatient, but his eyes shone with an excitement inside him, as if nothing could really disturb him, not even Dicey's nagging.

“But even if you can find a way to teach her, she'll go slowly. You know that, James. There's no time to waste.”

“I'm not wasting time. I'm thinking,” he told her.

“Yeah, but what are you thinking about?” Dicey snapped. and walked away before he could answer. She knew what he was thinking about that made him so happy, and she was glad for him. But.

This holding on that Gram had talked about was more complicated than she'd thought. She had to hold on to James, for what he wanted, and hold on to Maybeth for what she needed. That was fine, except for when the wants and needs were at cross purposes. At least Sammy seemed more cheerful and was talking more and more about the kids in his class, as if he had time to notice them now.

When Dicey returned from work on Thursday, her whole family except for James was in the kitchen. A thick silence lay all over the room. Gram sat quietly at the end of the big wooden table, her hands busy with yellow wool. She was rolling it up into balls, and Sammy was helping her by holding the wool. Maybeth had her head down and her shoulders were shaking. Dicey dumped her books and asked, “What's the matter?”

Maybeth kept her head down. Gram looked at Dicey and said, “She won't say.” Sammy answered at the same time, “I dunno, she started crying when we got off the bus.”

Dicey went to kneel before Maybeth. “Maybeth? What's the matter? Whatever it is, it's all right.”

Maybeth raised her face. Her hair hung down wet at the side of her face. Her eyes were red and swollen, her cheeks were wet, her mouth quivered. She threw herself into Dicey's arms and kept on crying.

Dicey patted her shoulder and rumpled the hair at the top of her round little head. “I promise, it's OK, whatever. I promise, Maybeth,” she said. “You believe me, don't you? You know you can believe me.”

Maybeth's head nodded. She took a big, shuddering breath and got up. She went to stand beside Gram, where she could look at all of them. She twisted her hands in front of her.

“They all —” she said in a voice so low and little Dicey almost couldn't hear. “I didn't want — to have to tell twice,” she wailed. Her voice got stronger, but her words came out choked and uneven. She was crying so hard, she gulped in air and gulped out words that shuddered with her breath. “When I read, they all, every one, they laughed at me. And Mrs. Jackson couldn't make them stop. And I forgot everything. And she said they were unkind. And I couldn't make any words come out. And it was horrible, I don't know what to do — I don't ever want to go back there.”

In the middle of this, James came bursting into the doorway. His cheeks were red from the long ride in the cool air, his eyes shone. As he listened, his face got quiet, thoughtful.

“They were all — all laughing — whenever I made a mistake — and I kept making mistakes. I couldn't help it.”

James met Dicey's eyes. Dicey expected him to stick out his lower lip and look away. But he didn't. He nodded at her, just once. She could see him thinking. She could see him beginning to understand how it was for Maybeth, and how she had to feel. She could see him being angry at himself for thinking it wasn't important. She could see him wondering what to say, to Maybeth.

“Because I can't,” Maybeth wailed. “I can't — read, and I — can't learn.”

“Who says?” James's cool voice cut across her tears.

“Everyone,” Maybeth told him. She stood there, her shoulders heaving. You could see her stomach going in and out. She looked so fragile Dicey was frightened and wanted to run out of the room. Gram and Sammy were sitting with frozen, unhappy faces. Only James looked unconcerned, but that was an act, Dicey knew.

“Who's smarter?” James demanded of Maybeth. “Everyone? Or me?”

“I don't know,” Maybeth mumbled. At least her sobs were dying down. James had her attention.

“Well, I know. It's me. And do you know what
I
say?” James asked her.

Dicey wanted to hiss at James,
Get to the point.
But part of holding on was letting him do things his own way. Maybe, after all, he was right, because Maybeth looked up at him and shook her head, no. Tears had stopped oozing out of her eyes, too.

“I say — you
can
learn. I say, I can teach you. And you know what else?”

Maybeth shook her head again.

“I'm going to. Whether you want me to or not, so you better say yes.”

A little smile lifted the corners of Maybeth's mouth, like a wave licking at the shore.

“Have you ever known me to be wrong?” James asked. He sounded so confident, Dicey almost believed him.

“Yes!” Sammy shrieked, unable to bear the tension any more. “Lots and lots!”

At that, James grinned and shrugged. He kept his eyes on Maybeth, and she smiled back at him.

“Dicey thinks I can,” he said.

“Do you?” Maybeth asked. “Really?”

Dicey nodded.

“All right,” Maybeth said, in a little voice.

“That's settled then,” Gram announced. She began winding the wool again.

“Here's what we'll do,” James told Maybeth. “On Saturday morning, because I'll be in town, or maybe tomorrow night — if I ask I bet Toby'll want to. We'll go to the library and I'll take out all their books on reading. Did you know there are dozens of different ways to teach it?”

Maybeth shook her head, no.

“I asked Mr. Thomas. The reason there are so many ways is because there are so many different kinds of brains, to learn. I think we'll have our first lesson on Monday, Monday after school.”

“I have piano lesson Monday,” Maybeth protested, softly. But her hands had stopped twisting.

“OK, Sunday afternoon. And Monday afternoon after piano,” James agreed. He looked around at all of them and added: “Sammy will have to take over my paper route. He
can
do it, Dicey. Better than me, because he's more careful.”

“That's true,” Sammy told her. He turned his face back to look at Gram. “It is.”

“Sounds all right to me. How's it sound to you, girl?” Gram asked.

“Fine,” Dicey said. She hoped James would be able to do what he had said he could. She could tell, watching him, that he was having the same doubts, and the same hopes.

Holding on was time-consuming, Dicey discovered.
Well,
she said to herself — pedaling out behind Sammy on Friday afternoon, watching him carefully throw the carefully folded papers onto doorsteps, noticing how he talked to barking dogs and rode alertly, using his ears as well as his eyes to watch traffic —
you knew that.
It was, after all, only what she had been doing as long as she could remember. It was, also, what she wanted to do.

James returned late Saturday, with reports of what a good time he had had and how they wanted him to come back — and they said soon. After supper, he settled down to read through a huge pile of books he had taken out of the library. They had lit a fire again, as they did most evenings now. Gram had gone up to the attic and brought down piles of warm socks, half-a-dozen pairs of workboots and a pair of red rubber boots for Maybeth. There were also a couple of rough, heavy sweaters for the boys. Dicey decided she would be glad to wear one of the old boys' sweaters on cold mornings, so Gram was knitting Maybeth's yellow sweater first.

When Gram entered the living room with the armload of clothes, James lifted his head from the book and exchanged a glance with Dicey. She knew he was thinking about what else was up there, in the attic.

After the little kids had been put to bed, James insisted that Dicey confer with him. What he really meant was that she should listen to him, but that was OK with Dicey. He talked and talked, about the different ways of teaching and the theories behind them. He used words she'd never heard before: dyslexia, dysgraphia, remediation, word recognition, effective learning, affective learning. Dicey didn't bother to ask him what everything meant. She just listened and nodded her head whenever he seemed to want her to. Finally he told her, “There's a lot I can't understand yet. People have such different theories about education, and they've studied them.”

Dicey nodded.

“And I haven't had very much experience myself. I never paid too much attention to what other people were doing in class. You know?”

Dicey nodded again. Now she really was listening, however, because she wondered what James was leading up to. It wasn't like him to talk about what he didn't understand. He preferred to talk about what he knew.

“But here's what I think. Gram? Are you listening? If you think I'm wrong, I want you to tell me. Because I just
don't
know enough. But I think — for years and years they taught using the phonic method. Remember Dicey? Where you learn what the letters and phonemes and blends say, and you sound out words.”

Dicey didn't remember, but that didn't matter.

“My guess is, that if they've used it for years — and it's the way we learned, and Massachusetts has one of the oldest public school systems in the country, and it's a good one too — that's the one I want to use with Maybeth. What do you think? Because if it wasn't good it wouldn't have lasted so long.”

Gram answered. “It's sound reasoning. But you haven't read all those books, have you?”

“No, how could I? Some I just looked over to see what the chapters were about.”

“But if it's the way Maybeth was taught in Provincetown,” Dicey said — then she stopped, noticing that she didn't even think to say
back home.
James waited, so she went on. “Maybe it doesn't work for Maybeth.”

James' face was serious, and it was almost as if he was looking inside of his own head for the words he was going to speak, even though his eyes rested on Dicey. “Yeah, but listen. There's what they call the emotional overlay, when someone has reading problems. Like — I dunno, maybe like layers of paint and you have to scrape it off before you can get to the real problem. Like a kid who always gets in trouble in class, so he's always being punished and never gets his work done. That way he avoids looking stupid. Because he'd rather be bad than stupid. And Maybeth is better here — we all know that, don't you, Gram? She's not nearly so scared of things. Of people. It's not so complicated for her here. Without Momma to worry about, and what people say. My theory is, all that stuff interfered with her before and it won't interfere now. What do you think?”

“You could be right,” Gram said.

“What are you going to do next?” Dicey asked James.

“Tomorrow, I'll study this book on the phonics method and then we'll start.”

“Is that enough time?” Gram asked.

“Sure. And if I'm wrong, I know what method to try next. It's interesting, you know?” James told them, his eyes bright. “I had no idea it was so interesting. It's made me curious about what Maybeth thinks. I mean, I don't think she's got a reading disorder, it's just slowness. But I wonder. . . . “ His voice drifted off. Dicey looked at Gram and grinned. Gram smiled back and reversed her needles to begin another row.

Dicey hung around quietly in the background during Maybeth's first lesson with James. She had her own books open in front of her, and she was sort of doing her assignments, but mostly she listened to James and Maybeth working. The two heads bent together over a pad of paper on which James wrote letters. Then he asked Maybeth what the letters said. Maybeth understood this, and Dicey thought she did pretty well at it. James' brown hair looked darker next to Maybeth's yellow curls; and her hair seemed to shine brighter next to his dark head. Dicey listened hard, not to hear precisely what they were saying, but to hear what the two speakers were like. If she was going to hold on, then she wanted to have a clear idea of who she was holding on to. So she could get a good grip.

Besides, she admitted to herself, if she could learn how James did it, then she could help him out if he needed it. If it worked for Maybeth.

D
ESPITE DICEY'S firm intentions to concentrate on her family — and on Gram too, and she didn't know how Gram would feel if she knew Dicey was thinking
that
— during the third week in November, the outside world seemed determined to get her attention.

First it was the weather, which turned chilly, then cold. The sky hung gray and flat, day after day. This muted all the colors, except for the bare branches of the trees, which turned deep black against that sky. When the wind was from the west, off the Bay, it carried a dampness in it that penetrated through Dicey's clothing and wound around her bones. She couldn't work on the boat in that weather, not without the danger of chillblains.

“What
are
chillblains?” Dicey had asked Gram. Gram had smiled. “You know, I don't know. All my life I've heard about them and tried not to get them — because they sound so awful. Chill-blains,” she repeated, listening to the sound of it. “As if the little veins in your nose freeze individually. We'll ask James,” Gram concluded, looking back to her knitting. She was halfway up the back of Maybeth's yellow sweater. She had already finished the front.

And then, Dicey got her report card. This school made a real ceremony of report cards. At the end of the school day everybody went to his homeroom. When your name was called out, you went up to the front of the room. The homeroom teacher studied your grades and then he would talk to you about your schoolwork. These conversations were kept to a low tone. Everybody in the front row pretended they couldn't hear and weren't listening.

There were forty kids in the homeroom, so it took a while for Dicey's name to come up. “Dicey Tillerman,” he called. Dicey went to stand next to the big desk. She tried to see the card, but he held it so she couldn't. He had his attendance book spread out in front of him, and he was making checks by each student's name after the report card was given out.

He asked his questions without looking at her. She stared at his ear to answer.

“This is your first year here?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you go to school before?”

“In Massachusetts.”

“Hunh. How do you like home ec?”

Dicey shrugged. He waited, so she put the shrugs into words. “I dunno.”

“You've got a good attendance record,” he said, concluding their conversation. He uncapped his pen and marked down two zeros on the upper corner, where there were places for absences and tardinesses. Then he checked off her name in his attendance book. Finally, he gave Dicey her report card.

Dicey didn't even look at it until she had sat down. She scanned down the grades. Home Ec: F.

That letter, F, jumped out at her eyes.
What?
Dicey wasn't any brain like James, but she did all right in school. Anger warmed her blood. What right did Miss Eversleigh have flunking her. She had gone to all the classes, she had done everything she was told. She had done everything badly, she knew that; she had done everything with a minimum of effort and attention. But she
had
done it, and she hadn't ever made any trouble in class, unless you counted the time they all laughed, and that wasn't her fault.

Dicey bit at her lower lip. She went back up the list of grades and saw a C+ by English.

Now wait a minute, she thought. She'd been getting B's and A's in English. This one had to be a mistake. Mr. Chappelle must have copied somebody else's grade down, instead of hers. She wondered how she should get it corrected. She decided, the best thing was to wait until the essays were handed back at the beginning of next week, then she would ask Mr. Chappelle. She could ask him right away, she supposed, but the class had been pestering him so much about how long it took to get the essays back that Dicey was starting to feel sorry for him. She was as impatient as everyone else, but it didn't do any good nagging and complaining at him. He'd promised to get them back on Monday, and he'd apologized for taking so long and he'd made excuses. Dicey felt — well, she'd believe it when she actually had her paper in her hand again. She wasn't at all sure he'd keep his promise, but she hoped he would. And then she'd ask him about the grade. She bet he would be surprised that he'd given her a C+. She was about the smartest kid in the class, certainly one of the smartest.

But was that F in home ec going to get her in trouble? When the bell rang, Dicey hurried out to see if Jeff was there. “Hey, Jeff,” she greeted him.

“Hey, Dicey. Think we'll ever see the sun again? How long's it been, eight days? Did you ever hear a song called ‘Dark as the Dungeon'?”

Dicey shook her head impatiently. “What happens if you flunk your minor?” she demanded.

“Did you do that?” he asked. His face was only curious, with maybe a litttle surprise, she decided. His eyes weren't smiling at all.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Don't worry. Nobody cares about minors much anyway. And until you're in high school, it doesn't matter about credits for graduation. Pass English, and they pretty much have to pass you. You passing English?”

Dicey didn't even answer that. She just gave him a look that said,
Of course I'm passing it, what a stupid question.
Then he did smile at her. He asked her if she wanted to hear the song, “Dark as the Dungeon,” and she said, no, thank you, she couldn't, she had to get going.

She waited until after supper to show Gram her report card. Gram had to sign it. There was a place on the back, a row of dotted lines, and underneath the words “parent or guardian.”

Gram put her knitting aside and looked at the front of the card. Then she turned it over and signed it with the pen Dicey had ready for her. Then she turned it over and looked at the front again. Momma never even looked at the front, Dicey remembered. Momma, those last couple of years. She would take the report cards, one at a time, and sign her name carefully, four times. She had to be careful, because the boards on their old table were coming unglued and might make ridges in your writing, and it might look like you didn't even know how to write your name. Momma's long hair fell forward when she bent her head down. Momma said her hair started out the color of Sammy's and Maybeth's, but got darker as she got older. Momma's hair rippled down her back, like sunlight, like music. Like the music Maybeth was playing then, on the piano.

“Well?” Gran said.

“It doesn't matter about home ec,” Dicey assured her. “That's just a minor. It's OK to flunk it.”

“Is it,” Gram wondered. “Why are you failing?”

Dicey thought about that. “I don't like the class.”

“I know, you wanted mechanical drawing, I remember.”

“And — I'm not trying, but I go to every class and do everything she says. Sort of.” Then she told Gram about her apron, about how she got around the rules. She even told Gram about how the rest of the class had laughed, because once she was started that was part of the story. Dicey found she didn't mind telling Gram; and when Gram laughed too, she joined in.

“You aren't making trouble in class?”

“Nope, I keep quiet.”

“You're sure it's not going to — I don't know, they talk about school records.”

“I asked someone,” Dicey said.

Gram looked at her for a long minute, then accepted it. “The rest — except for English — are very good. All A's.”

Dicey looked down. She hadn't even noticed those, not really. “The English is a mistake,” she said to Gram.

“Are you sure?” Dicey was sure. “You're not just fooling yourself?” Dicey shook her head.

“I'm going to ask him about it on Monday. You'll see.”

“I believe you,” Gram said. And she did, Dicey could tell. Dicey liked that. That Gram really believed her, because she knew her, made Dicey's heart swell up warm. Dicey felt like putting her arms around Gram and hugging her, hard. But she didn't, of course. Gram wasn't the kind of person who wanted to be hugged.

So Dicey just smiled, and said, “Thanks.” She drifted over to the piano. She sat down beside Maybeth on the bench. For a while, she watched Maybeth's fingers pushing down the keys, the white keys and the black ones. She noticed for the first time what pretty, delicate hands Maybeth had and the way her fingernails shone rosily. Then Dicey looked at the page of music. It was something called a minuet, by someone called Bach.

(How would you pronounce that? Dicey wondered idly, listening, remembering the phonemes James talked about with Maybeth.
Bahk? Batch? Bash?
She'd ask James, if he knew.)

There weren't that many notes on the page of music, it didn't look too hard; but the music that Maybeth made from it sounded too perfect for the score to be as simple as it seemed. The notes flowed out from under her fingers. The rhythm was steady, but the melody danced round it as if doing whatever it wanted, whenever it felt like it. It sounded like a dance, and when Maybeth finished, before she could turn to something else, Dicey asked her, “What does it mean?”

“Mean? I don't know.”

“Then how do you decide what to play loud, or fast, or smoothed together?”

Maybeth looked at her with round eyes. “It's just the way it sounds, when it sounds right.”

“Play it again?”

Maybeth did. Dicey listened, and she still couldn't understand how Maybeth knew what it was supposed to sound like, all together. “I really like hearing you play,” she told Maybeth. Maybeth smiled, and her eyes shone at Dicey. She didn't say anything.

Then, while Dicey was washing down the floor at work on Wednesday, and Millie was leaning over the counter telling her about chickens, what the best breeds were, what were each breed's advantages and disadvantages, Jeff came in.

Dicey saw him before he saw her. He had gone over to the sugars and was looking at the boxes and bags. He carried his guitar slung over his back, like a minstrel out of Robin Hood. He wore a down vest and his cheeks shone pink. Millie went to help him, and he looked up. Then he saw Dicey. “Hey, Dicey,” he said, surprised.

“Hey, Jeff.” She was careful
not
to sound surprised. She pushed the mop down into the bucket of warm water and sloshed some onto the floor. She swirled the water around with the mop before getting down to real scrubbing.

He came to stand in front of her. She ignored him.

“You work here?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Every day?”

“Pretty near.” She still hadn't looked at him.

“I didn't know that,” he said. That was nothing Dicey needed to answer. “I've only been in here a couple of times in the last year,” he said. “To pick up odds and ends.”

He waited. Dicey mopped. He moved his booted feet away from where she wanted to clean. Dicey mopped.

“Dicey?” She didn't look up. “See you.” She nodded.

She heard him pay for the box of sugar, heard the door close, heard Millie go back to her position behind the meat counter. She could feel Millie staring at her. Finally, her employer spoke: “He your fellow?”

Dicey snorted. “Just someone I met at school.”

“He's kinda cute,” Millie said. “Does he play that guitar?”

No, Dicey thought of saying, he just carries it around. But instead, because it was Millie, she answered politely, “Yes.”

“He looks so young,” Millie said, absently. “And so do you, but I'm used to you, I guess. I remember” — her voice drifted on behind Dicey's head — “when we were young. Ab and Herbie. John Tillerman. I can't remember me that young though — isn't that a funny thing?”

“You remember Gram? What was she like?” Dicey had stopped working and was looking at Millie's face. Millie was staring somewhere into the front of the store.

“I guess we called her pert,” she said, with a smile moving her thick features. “She had quite a tongue, did Ab, and she'd as soon bite your head off as smile at you. She kept things hopping, wherever she was. Some people didn't, but I liked her. I guess she used to make us laugh sometimes, the things she'd say, the things she'd do. Then after she married John, it wasn't the same. Well” — she shook her face to bring her attention back — “I guess it never is. I guess she was kept busy on the farm, and her children, and things the way John wanted them. But I can remember. . . .”

Dicey stayed still, not to interrupt, not to distract Millie.

“Once — oh years ago — I saw Ab downtown with her three children, the little girl about as pretty as your sister. They were having a race, down the sidewalk, all four of them running as fast as they could. Oh — they were having a good time.”

Millie stopped talking, and didn't recommence, although Dicey waited a good while. Dicey tried to figure out a question to ask to get her reminiscing again. Then Millie started talking again, as if she had been thinking her own thoughts in the silence.

“I never saw her much all those years. John mostly did the shopping. I guess she kept pretty busy. And then, she got queer. They always have shopped in here, the Tillermans,” Millie said proudly.