Read Online Shadow Baby by Alison McGhee - Free Book Online Page A

can’t write a book report. I can’t stand what a book report does, boils a book down to a few sentences about plot. What about the words that make each book unique, an island untoitself, words like
cursory
and
ingenuous
and
immerse
? What about the
heart and soul
?
    Plot? Who cares?
    My plots are always interesting. They’re just not real. After the last report I wrote, my teacher sent me a personal note: “Clara, you have an intuitive understanding of how to include just enough information about a book to make your report exciting, while not giving away the ending. I am intrigued now and I may just have to go read this book myself.”
    That’s the danger. She wants to know the nonexistent ending to a nonexistent book. I know how she feels. After I finish making up a book report, I myself want to read the book. I myself feel as if the book is out there, searching for me, with an ending I don’t know, a future waiting to be written.
    The old man knew of my love of books. He used to gather them for me on scavenging nights. Another place to get books is garage sales, of which there are many in a Sterns summer, but the old man didn’t do that. He didn’t go places where there might be crowds of people. He was a loner, the old man. He preferred solitude to conviviality.
    Conviviality
. Six syllables. A word that would be hard to say were English not your mother tongue.
    Some of the books the old man gathered for me were not to my taste. I said nothing, though. He chose them mostly for their pictures and photos. I could tell. They had personal meaning for him, the books that he chose. I always thanked the old man when he saved a book for me. Here’s the kind of book that appealed to him:
Metalworking Made Easy
, by William J. Becker. 1942. The old man had
Metalworking Made Easy
open to the page that showed a picture of how to make a tin paper roller.
    “This would be useful for you,” the old man said. “You could put your roll of adding-machine paper in it and it would keep it taut.”
    That was thoughtful of him, to think of me and my adding-machine paper. Next time I came to visit, he had a paper roller waiting for me. He had made it out of some sheet metal that he cut with his tin snips and soldered together with his solder iron. It looked just like the one in the book.
    I f you know how to read, you know how forever. You can’t unread. You can’t ever look at a word and not know what that word is, precisely and permanently. You just can’t do it. They should tell you that when you’re a kid, that once you get into phonics you’re into them for life.
    “There’s no backing out, kiddo,” they should say.
    Brainwashing. That’s what it actually is.
    The old man though, he was a different matter. The old man was seventy-seven years old. When I met him, he was exactly seven times as old as me. How I love numbers that are multiples of eleven. They are far more interesting than multiples of ten, which are what the structure of the world revolves around when you think about it.
    Here’s a secret about the old man: he did not know how to read.
    A few months after I met the old man I had a dream. I was on Ellis Island. The old man was standing on the edge of a pier. He was wearing a coat with a round collar like in the olden days. He was a boy. He was seventeen years old. His nose was moving, lines and stars and rectangles. The shape of the American flag.
    The old man had told me that he used to use the tip of his nose to write in the air as a child. He called it air-writing. In my dream, there was a certain look in the old-man-as-a-young-man’s eyes. I woke up and I knew he couldn’t read.
    I proved it.
    “I’m writing you a message in the air with my nose,” I said.
    This was one day after he told me about the air-writing.
    “You see if you can figure it out,” I said.
    I wrote it in small letters:
bye
. That was the whole message, three small letters. It was time for me to go. Tamar didn’t like to drive