9
“PETER!” my father called from the foot of the stairs. “What are you doing up there?”
His voice startled me, and I reacted like a guilty party. I pushed aside the paper I was writing on, covered it with my science book, grabbed some other pages of the Tars Manual, and spread them in front of me.
Then I recovered. I reminded myself that I had, at least technically, been doing something of which my father approved. I had been working on the Tars Manual. “I’m working on the manual,” I said. There was, however, a tremor in my voice. I hoped my father wouldn’t notice it.
“Are you really, Peter?” he asked. He must have noticed the tremor.
“Yeah,” I said. “I am.” I decided to take the big step, to see whether my father would accept the reasoning that I had accepted, whether he would legitimize what I was doing. “I’m working on a whole new section. It’s called ‘Tales for Tars.’”
“‘Tales for Tars’?” asked my father. I heard a note of suspicion in his voice.
“That’s right,” I said. I let a long sigh escape me and rubbed my temples as if I had a headache. “This is going to be a section of stories that Tars can read at night, when they’re off watch and hanging around on the afterdeck or lying in their bunks. It’s a lot of work, though, and it’s giving me a headache.” I was using a tone and style that I’d learned from my mother. She used it on the telephone, when she was describing one of the tasks she particularly disliked—cleaning the oven, defrosting the refrigerator, bringing the fall clothes out of the storage closets under the eaves in the attic—and even though she was talking on the telephone, she would include the gesture of rubbing her temples, bringing her right hand to her forehead, masking her eyes, so that she could rub her right temple with her thumb and her left with her middle finger.
“Well, Peter,” said my father (and from the note of sympathy that I could hear beneath the sternness on the surface I knew that I’d been successful, that he’d accepted my writing “Tales for Tars” as a legitimate part of my working on the manual), “sometimes you have to just grin and bear it. I remember when I was on the baseball team, in high school—”
My father went on to describe for me the pain he’d felt when he’d had to run laps and his annoyance, even anger, when the coach demanded, as he always did, one more lap. I listened with a guilty pleasure, because the tales I was writing for the Tars were, of course, about Larry Peters, and the headache I felt was of a different order from the one I got when I had to reorder the Tars Traits, or rewrite the procedure for the Tars meetings.
In Topical Guide 223, Mark Dorset considers Deception; Writing: Difficulty of, Headaches Caused by; and Persistence from this episode.
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