Mr. Beaker brought the package from behind his back and put it on the table in front of me. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with cord. Slowly, he began to unwrap it. My mother tied the belt on her robe and came over to watch.
Before Mr. Beaker had folded the paper back enough for my mother and me to see what was inside it, my father peeked around the corner and said, “Oh, it’s you, Dudley, I thought I heard your voice.” He came into the kitchen in his shorts, with shaving cream on his face and a razor in his hand.
“Berrrrt,” said my mother, dragging the name out into a complaint, “you’re not dressed.”
“Oh,” said my father, looking at his shorts. Then he frowned and shrugged and said, “Oh, so what? I’m sure Dudley isn’t shocked by a guy in his shorts. Look at you—you’re not dressed either.”
My mother blushed again and pulled her bathrobe tighter around her. “I’ll go throw something on,” she said. “Don’t open the package without me.”
My father looked at the half-unwrapped package. “What’ve we got here?” he asked. He walked toward the table, raising an eyebrow and pointing at the package with his razor.
“Some—thing—for—me,” I said, in much the way that Mr. Beaker had. I finished with a little flourish of my spoon that sent a piece of limp graham cracker flying over the package onto the table.
“Peter!” said Mr. Beaker and my father precisely in unison. They snapped their heads toward each other, and my father knit his brows. Mr. Beaker cleared his throat and turned away. He got a napkin and wiped up the bit of graham cracker.
“Don’t play with your food,” said my father. Mr. Beaker opened his mouth, and I thought that he might say something. My father must have thought that he was going to say something too, since he turned abruptly toward him, but Mr. Beaker just smiled at my father and said nothing.
“Okay,” called my mother. “Here I come.” She ran into the kitchen, wearing the red robe that my father had given her for Christmas. She had put on bright red lipstick too.
“Go ahead, Peter,” said Mr. Beaker. “You finish opening it.” He tugged at the paper a little to show me what he wanted me to do.
I looked at my bowl and at the package. I looked at my father. Very carefully, I picked up the bowl and held it out to him. He took it. The lather on his face had dried and cracked like peeling paint.
I pulled the wrapping paper off the book and lifted the cover. The book was placed on the table with the binding away from me, so that I opened it as I would have opened a box, lifting the cover up and away as if I were lifting its lid.
When I opened the book, it released into the kitchen a rich, earthy, damp odor that I have ever since associated with reading, an odor that I’ve come to expect to smell when I’m about to begin reading a book, an odor that produces an anticipatory thrill and an appetite for graham crackers and milk. Of course, the odor is missing from new books, which smell only of paper and ink, and even from most used books, those that have been treated with care, but from time to time I find a used book with that evocative odor, and when I come across one of these, I buy it at once, regardless of its subject or author. As a result, I have a number of books—The Piezoelectric Properties of Woodcomes to mind—that I’ve bought for their odor alone.
I looked at the endpapers, where swirls of brown, purple, blue, and gold swam—swam, it occurs to me now, like the colors made by gasoline and oil on the surface of the estuarial stretch of the Bolotomy. The swirling colors and the odor of the book made a heady, intoxicating mix, and for a moment I thought I was going to be sick, but I knew that I was getting a gift, and I knew that I should be grateful for a gift, so I looked up at Mr. Beaker and smiled.
“Here, Peter,” he said. “Open it this way.” He turned the book and flipped the first few pages. The paper was thick and deckle-edged. Mr. Beaker stopped at a place with a color plate. The left-hand page was handsome and intriguing but indecipherable. It had on it only blocks of print, squared off along the sides, indented in paragraphs, with irregular lines of type that looked like rows of dark houses silhouetted against a light sky, and intriguing rivers of white that ran along surprising courses, cutting across the lines at angles and changing direction unexpectedly. The right-hand page had a smoother, whiter piece of paper glued to it, and on this paper was a picture, a color picture of a fox in a rowboat, the first picture I had ever seen of a fox in a rowboat.
My father looked over my shoulder at the book. He rubbed his chin, and flecks of dried soap fluttered onto the picture. I swept them off with my hand. My father walked over to the stove and poured himself a cup of coffee.
Mr. Beaker drew a chair up beside me and sat down. “Now, Peter,” he said. “I’m going to read to you.”
My mother stood behind me with her hands on my shoulders, leaning over me so that she could see the page. My father sat at the far end of the table with his coffee.
“This ought to be as good a place to start as any,” Mr. Beaker said. I looked at the open book, and Mr. Beaker began the story.
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” and “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” the first six novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.
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