The Reading Lessons (27 page)

When Nina bumped the lid with the ladder, she knew she’d stumbled on something significant. She flipped it open, fully expecting to unearth the rotting body of the twin sister she never knew she had, or a suitcase full of stolen money. The books were a disappointment. 

Nina couldn’t imagine what could possibly be interesting about a collection of books hidden in a room that was crammed floor to ceiling with books. Still, something told her that this was an important discovery, and instead of hiding in the best place in the whole wide world, she locked the door to the Reading Room and hauled the books out on the floor. Sure enough, inside the first volume, Nina came face to
penis
with the most confusing picture she’d ever laid eyes on.

“Hmm,” said Nina. She turned the page sideways. She turned it upside down. She snapped the book shut and returned it to the pile. Were there spicy pictures in all the books?

One of the volumes she picked up was called
Lady Chatterly’s Lover
,
and it had words instead of pictures. Nina fanned the pages, picked one at random, and began to read.

 . . . as he felt the frenzy of her achieving her own orgasmic satisfaction from his hard, erect passivity, he had a curious sense of pride and satisfaction. 'Ah, how good!' she whispered tremulously. 

No sooner had she gotten to the juiciest part, when Rich Rich jiggled the knob. “No fair locking the door!” he griped, and he proceeded to hammer his fist until the hinges were set to bend.

“Nina’s not in here,” Nina called, impersonating her mother perfectly. 

“Open the dim-damn door, Nina. I found you.”

Still impersonating Mother, Nina said, “Richard Luciano Ignazio Timpone! Did I hear you say ‘dim-damn’?” 

There was silence then, which seemed encouraging, but then Nina had to go and push her luck. “Go and sit on your bed until I bring the hairbrush.” The hairbrush being the equivalent of a belt.

“Oh farts,” Rich Rich said. “I know it’s you, Nina, and I’m gonna go tell the Stinkberry that you locked the door.” He clomped away like Paul Revere, shouting his tattletale news. 

Whew,
Nina thought,
alone at last.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out that
Lady Chatterly’s Lover
was nothing like the other books on The Reading Room shelves. Nina was a collector of words, so she was practically a professional when it came to understanding anything that was rare, fancy, or the least bit indecent. It was her habit to pick out two or three new words each week and use them as she saw fit. She printed them in straight columns in her
Fibber McGee and Molly
notebook, keeping careful track of dates, any unusual reactions that might accompany the usage, and the consequences, if relevant.
Piss ant
, for example, was spoken on Oct 1, 1932 so the entry looked like this
: 

PISS ANT. 10/01/32. 

Lifebuoy instead of macaroni for dinner
. 

Just looking at the words in
Lady Chatterly’s Lover
made Nina taste soap. It might be a challenge to find an appropriate situation to make use of the phrase
erect passivity,
but Nina wasn’t one to back away from a challenge. She liked
frenzy
,
too, and was immediately in a frenzy to use the word
frenzy.

The next book,
Of Mice and Men,
showed promise as well
.
For one thing, it used the words
son of a bitch
plain as day, and that had to mean something good. 

Luckily, Nina was just about the craftiest girl she knew. She straightened up the pillows on the seat and buried
Lady Chatterly
in the art box that had been left lying in the middle of the floor since the completion of her postage stamp-size rendition of the Lord’s Supper several weeks before. She then un-locked the door and stepped behind the curtains. 

By the time Rich Rich came back with Miss Dinkleberry, Nina had succeeded in making him look like the little liar he so often was. Rich Rich marched up to the curtains and whipped them back. “You locked the door,” he grunted.

“Did not,” Nina said.

“Did too!” he shouted.

“That’s enough,” Miss Dinkleberry said, for she avoided confrontation at all cost, often times to the advantage of her young charges. “How about a nice game of Neck & Neck?” she suggested. “I think we’re Hiding-Seeked out.” 

###

Due to its delicate content, Nina was forced to read
Lady Chatterly’s Lover
by flashlight after everyone else was asleep. Huddled within the daisy-printed cave of her blankets, she pondered the same question night after night: Who put the dirty books in the window seat?

The most obvious guess would be Father, since he was a man, yet Nina couldn’t quite believe it of him. Although her father did have a fondness for saying
son of a bitch
, it was almost impossible for Nina to imagine that he’d ever heard of things like
orgasmic satisfaction
. Nina had known him all her life and felt as if she could safely say that he would not be interested in anything so exciting as that. If he’d heard of it, he probably coughed and buried his head in the funnies like he did whenever Rich Rich cussed. Anyway, Nina had never seen Father read anything but the funnies. 

No, Father was a gun man, not a book man. Nina had been hunting with him since she was five, and she knew what made him tick. Father was only patient when crouching in buck vine with his finger on a trigger. He liked the speed of a bullet. He liked to eat what he shot, too, but he ate it rare—rare didn’t taste better, but he could never hold out for well done. Nina couldn’t see her Father having the attention span for
Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Nope
, Nina decided. Just because Father liked saying son of a bitch didn’t mean he gave a tinker’s damn about orgasmic satisfaction.

Nina’s favorite answer to the question was Miss Dinkleberry. It would be the most fun if it turned out that their old maid governess was hiding dirty books in secret places around the house. If the books were Miss Dinkleberry’s, Nina would have to tell Rich Rich and Guido about it immediately. No one could appreciate the irony of such a development more than her two cousins. It had been her experience though that people who hid things were generally jittery, and she was one hundred percent certain that the Stinkberry had looked just as wooden as ever when Rich Rich found her hiding in the curtains by the window seat. Disappointing as it was, Nina scratched the governess off the suspect list. 

That pretty much left Mother.

Yes. The books belonged to Mother, Nina would have staked her life on it. Mother had surely heard of sexual things, otherwise she wouldn’t dress the way she did. Or laugh the way she did. Or smile at Neville Pillwater the way she did whenever he came around with new drapery material for her to poke through. Yes, Mother would read these sorts of books and like them, Nina felt certain of it. 

The thought of uncovering one of her Mother’s secrets made her heart jump track. Surely such naughty information could prove useful? Luckily, Nina was clever and knew to keep the books to herself until the time came when Mother’s secret might benefit her in some way

There were some close calls in the years to follow. Ever since Aunt Fancy’s Sicilian husband went in the red and jumped off the Bucatunna Creek
bridge, she’d been dropping her boys off for weeks at a time, unable to deal with their rambunctious presence during her endless period of mourning. As a result, Nina had been all but permanently saddled with the Timpone cousins for every waking hour of the day. And every sleeping hour, too.

Guido Bertrando Innocenzio Timpone, who was four years younger and a perpetual baby, once knocked Lady Chatterly out of bed when he crawled in during an electrical storm. 

Guido had been born with a fear of storms, and Nina cursed herself for not thinking ahead when she heard the first clap of thunder. Guido switched on the light, picked up the book and said, “Whatcha reading under the covers, Neen?”

Nina dearly liked having something on her mother, but she didn’t want Guido having something on her. She folded the book against the pearl buttons of her nightgown as the first fat rain drops began to tap at the panes. “I’ll confide the truth if you don’t tell,” she whispered. 

Guido lifted her arm and put it over his quaking shoulder, his eyes growing double in size in the flash of lightning that followed. He could be chicken-hearted, but he was a sucker for secrets and kept them surprisingly well, unlike Rich Rich, who was a mere four months younger than Nina and generally rotten to the bone. Once, at Christmas dinner, Rich Rich announced that Nina had written a love letter to one Eugene Starks of her third grade music class, then he proceeded to delight the entire table with snippets of heartfelt verse that had been meant for ‘Dearest sanguine-haired Eugene’ alone. The whole horrid transgression occurred not so much because Rich Rich had been born with loose lips, but because he knew the effect it would have on Nina, who turned so purple with rage, she flicked maple syrup pie at his big head in front of God and everyone. The pie-flicking resulted in Mother sentencing Nina to her room during the wine toast—which, as Rich Rich knew perfectly well, was their only shot at wine-toasting for the entire year. 

Guido was not Rich Rich, however, and vowed to seal his lips up like a tomb, even as he pulled the bed sheet over their heads. 

“Well,” Nina began, clicking on her flashlight inside the dark sheet-den. “I didn’t get my reading done at school on Friday, and if Father gets wind of it, I’ll have to read double this weekend for sure.”

Guido had been born with the face of Gabriel, but in that precise moment, his Gabrielic face screamed disappointment. Nina smiled and propped the book up on her knees. “Want me to read you some of it?”

“No!” Guido crowed. “I’ve had enough of school this week.

Nina was nothing if not understanding. “I’ll just put it up for now.”

Another time, The Stinkberry yelled at Nina for messing up the cushions on the window seat. “You know your Mother insists that you keep away from the books in this room,” the old bat said, even though it wasn’t a bit fair. Rich Rich had left his disintegrator pistol in the middle of the floor, and there was a big glob of grape jelly on the ship clock that everyone had been ignoring for three days. The room was hardly the museum The Stinkberry made it out to be. Still, Nina reminded herself to be more cautious in the future. After she straightened the cushions, Miss Dinkleberry poked her beak-sharp nose around the window seat so suspiciously, Nina almost wet her pants.

The only thing better than reading the dirty window seat books was concocting scenarios in which Nina caught her mother reaching into her
stash
. This had, in fact, become Nina’s favorite daydream. She had been born with her father’s love of the hunt. She’d made her first bellow’s call out of a piece of shoe rubber when she was only a kid of seven. Father bragged that Nina could
shoot skeet to beat the band.
In order to jump shoot Mother, she fancied the idea of a hidden jerk string that set off bells and whistles and exposed the woman to deepest embarrassment when everyone in the household ran to see what all the fuss was about. Other times, she imagined leaving drops of Guido’s model glue on the back cover of a book so that, when Mother picked it up, it stuck like a little airplane wing to the palm of her hand. Oh, wouldn’t it be funny to watch Mother trying to drive Neville Pillwater into a state of erect passivity with a nasty book stuck on her hand? 

For a while, Nina toyed with the idea of telling Rich Rich about her plans. Sneaky as he was, Rich Rich had the necessary skills to come up with something truly inspiring to snare the woman. Getting back at people was just about his favorite pass-time, and he would have appreciated the opportunity to pay his aunt back for what he commonly referred to as the
Kix Cereal Incident
. The
Kix Cereal Incident
came to pass when Mother saw to it that her face all but blotted out his own the day the newspaper came out to photograph him for winning the
Kix Cereal Contest
. Under the big bold headline—
Local Boy Wins Kix Cereal Contest to Name Silver’s Son—there
appeared a picture of a beautiful middle-aged woman in a fluffy fox scarf next to one half of a boy’s head. 

“I will never forgive her for the
Kix Cereal Incident
,” Rich Rich vowed.

But, alas, the dirty books were Nina’s secret, and she liked it better that way. Rich Rich would have to find his own form of revenge.

###

On the surface, Nina’s mother looked harmless enough, fingering her hair in such a delicate way, people might think butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. She was head of the
Christian Women’s League
and the
Afternoon Bridge Girls
, and co-chairperson with Mr. Keaten Powers of the
Madison County Optimist’s Club
. 

Behind their backs, she said of her fellow optimists, “If not for having Keaton to look at every week, I couldn’t abide all that optimism.”

Mother had her charities, there was no forgetting that. She managed to work them into at least every other conversation and with such finesse, people never failed to gasp and say, “What a tireless soldier you are for the needy, dear.” To which she would inevitably respond by quoting that corny old quote that hung in Grandpa’s house, “Never forget where you come from, I always say.”

Of course, Mother came from one of Beattie’s Bluff’s finest old mansions. Nina knew because she had slept in Mother’s mansion when Mother and Father went to Niagara Falls to rekindle the old fires. No matter how nobly Mother managed to say it, Nina couldn’t understand what was humbling about remembering the mansion you came from. 

The charities were but a minor grievance in the scheme of things. Rich Rich particularly detested Mother’s nightgowns, which he said were enough to make him want to form his own charity;
The Charity for Boys Who Cannot think of Anything But Their Aunt in a Slinky Nightgown
. Guido was too sweet to find flaw with anyone. He liked to point out that Mother’s nightgowns made terrific
Ming-the-Merciless
capes.