Okay for Now: Chapters 7–10

In the beginning of January I did this with the wagons, but pretty soon Mr. Spicer figured that I'd do a whole lot better with this old toboggan he had.

I could smell his coffee, and even though it didn’t smell as good as Mrs. Windermere’s—which she percolated before I came—it still smelled pretty good.

In Mr. Ferris’s physical science class we were distilling aspirins, very large aspirins, which by the time the last bell rang Mr. Ferris said he needed.

The two winds were pushing them in different directions, but the petrels were using them to meet in the center of the picture. That’s what the picture was about: meeting, even though you might be headed in different directions.
All movement relies on that kind of tension, you know.

“Birds,” said Mr. Powell, “tend not to have expressions on their faces.”

And there were those fat puffins, looking like chumps, bumbling around like they had no idea how to get on in the world, looking dumb and stupid, and so beautiful that I wanted to...nothing.

Librettos of the Great Operas. Snore. Life of Verdi. Snore snore.

My husband liked to collect quirky books. That one has a page of Copland’s music written in his own hand.

It took two hours to get Christopher out on bail.

In world history, I told Mr. McElroy, “Who really cares about the creation stories of the aboriginal tribes of eastern Australia?”

And in Mr. Ferris’s class, I wasn’t so all-fired excited that the command ship and the lunar module of Apollo 9 had separated and flown a hundred miles apart and then come back together, just like they would for the real moon shot, which was now really going to happen, said Mr. Ferris.

“That plate was a gift from the Education Committee when Principal Peattie assumed the responsibilities of being the principal of this school,” he said.

“I would never have ordered pistachio. It’s...green.”
“That’s what Mr. Spicer packed.”
“Skinny Delivery Boy, Mr. Spicer is not infallible.”

Sorry, but I couldn’t put up with a contraption like that rattling around here all day.

Frankly, we don’t want our customers feeling sorry about something when they walk in.

“Don’t hurt him,” Mrs. Daugherty said, and Mr. Daugherty said I was big enough to take it and he laughed and that was the cue I guess for Ben and Polly because I was down on the floor before Mr. and Mrs. Daugherty were out the door, and they were tickling me until I agreed to play Bloody, Bloody Murderer and they all went screaming to hide.

It’s the same thing that Mr. and Mrs. Daugherty told me when they got to Dr. Bottom’s house and saw Joel asleep on the couch, covered with two afghans and being watched over by Dr. Bottom and Otis and me.

By that first Saturday, everything had jumped from brown to green, and if you stood in front of the Marysville Free Public Library and looked at the maples up and down the street, you could watch their gold leaves unfurl like little flags, waving for all they were worth—which, after a long winter, was a lot.

There was froth at the tops of the bottles, and Lil could hardly keep from giggling when she took her first sip.

“And this,” said Mrs. Windermere, “is Mr. Gregory, who is supposed to be producing my play at the end of the month but who is not making much headway.”

It’s like those horror movies where the person about to be mauled to death could have saved herself if she’d taken only one more step but she stops to be polite or something.

She complained loudly enough that the manager came over and Lucas explained that he had cashed the one she had asked him to cash and he was already fixing the problem and Mrs. Roethke said she wasn’t going to be lied about by the likes of him and she had heard what soldiers did in Vietnam and he was probably so drug-addled that he couldn’t take proper directions...

Mrs. Windermere happened to make her theater appearance right then. Blue dress flouncing, a couple of hundred strands of pearls draped around her, an ivory cane that she didn’t really need.

Lil grimaced, but not because of Joe Pepitone. “I think we’d better...”

“They're perfect over the mantel.”

But I let out the Bertha Mason shriek, and by the time the first echoes finished bouncing back from the mezzanine, I wasn’t the only one in the Rose Theater who was shrieking.

I spent some of it reading Our Town and some of it working on the Transcontinental Railroad in the United States report, which was almost finished even though a certain someone hadn’t written a single word and now she would probably say that she was so sick that she couldn’t write a thing.

By the time we got to the “Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present” part, it was almost eleven o’clock, and Mrs. Windermere still had to drive my mother and me back home, which meant it would be almost one o’clock before I even got close to sleep.

But you might say that we were both more than a little happy, mostly because Mr. Gregory had called Jane Eyre a smash, and told us it was going to have a long run, and so Mrs. Windermere was flying high. I was too, but mostly because Mr. Gregory had promised that if I stayed on as understudy, he would find another actor—actress—to play Helen Burns until Lil came back.

He backed up to the next step, leaned back, hefted up, sweated.

In Advanced Algebra, Mrs. Verne told us that she was going to end the year with an Introduction to Geometry, and when we pointed out that Geometry wasn’t taught until tenth grade, she congratulated us on our powers of observation and told us all to be sure to bring protractors the next day.

He couldn’t stop smiling, not even when he was describing the thermodynamics of the fuel for the Saturn rocket that would carry the command capsule and the LEM.

“And those seagulls?”
“I thought they would add realism.”

“It’s all right,” said Christopher. “I’m not going to do it. He’d probably get them all in, just for spite. Isn’t that right, Coach?”

“Isn’t the orchid delicate in this light?” said my mother.

“You’re very welcome. So get out of your funk before I throw my bedpan at your head.”

I was a little late because Mrs. Mason had loaded me down with three hostas and five tall ferns “for your mother’s perennial garden.”

If we kept up our studies, we would all find next year’s algebra Regents exams to be well within our abilities, and we would fare quite well against all the other algebra students in the great State of New York.

Lil with a kerchief on when I came in, which she pressed down, dragging her tubes up with her arms, pressing down the kerchief so that I couldn’t see that she had no hair.

And then big clouds of smoke right behind the fire, and then slowly, like it is barely moving at all, this huge tower of a rocket starts to go up, and you can’t believe it’s really going up, but it is. And then it starts to tilt a little bit, and then it heads up with the fire beneath it, and up, and suddenly it’s hurtling through the blue, flying faster than Audubon could ever imagine.