The World’s Strongest Librarian

  I grabbed the first book I saw, ran outside, and read it in the front yard. Mr. Gopher.* My mom had gotten this book for me a week earlier and we’d read it several times already.

  As I read I had a wonderful idea. Mr. Gopher lived in a hole. He came out occasionally to eat marigolds, his favorite breakfast. I’d already eaten breakfast, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t have some more. While my mom busied herself in the house, I ate a bunch of marigolds from her garden. She gardened for many of the same reasons that she practiced devout Mormonism: Her parents did it, it gave her a sense of purpose, and it allowed her a source of reliable beauty, no matter how ugly the rest of the world might get.

  Now, if you were to design something that a person shouldn’t swallow, you couldn’t do any better than the marigold’s pointy, curved seeds. This indelicate second breakfast lodged painfully in my throat. My eyes started to water. I ran inside, hands around my neck, and tried to convey that I was dying. I could breathe, but I couldn’t swallow.

  Like her mother, Mom was good at folksy remedies. She got me to eat some bread to push the seeds down. “This always works,” she said. The bread mixed with the seeds and formed a doughy, prickly, unmovable lattice below my uvula.

  “All right, we’re going to the doctor,” she said, shooing me outside. During the drive to the clinic, she kept telling me to breathe. This is my first memory of true panic. My mom couldn’t fix this. The question had been asked for which she had no answer.

  Soon I was sitting on a table sheathed in flimsy paper. The doctor asked me to tilt my head back. I sat rigid, hands bunched into fists. He asked again. When I didn’t respond, he put his hand on my forehead and tipped my head back. A pair of long clamps came into view. I sat still. I opened my mouth. I tried not to gag when the cold metal hit the back of my throat.

  The doctor grabbed the tips of the seeds and withdrew them from my throat, one by one. “What happened?” he asked my mom as he worked.

  “A story went to his head,” Mom said. She told him about Mr. Gopher. He nodded at her swelling stomach and said, “Are you ready for another one?”

  “He likes books,” she said. “They give him ideas, though.”

  “That’s the point, right?” said the doctor.

  I wasn’t yet in kindergarten when The Cat in the Hat gave way to, with some help from my parents, more advanced fare like the Encyclopedia Brown books.

  “Where do we keep our magnifying glass?” I asked my dad.

  “We don’t have one. Why?”

  I didn’t tell him that I was trying to solve a mystery I’d invented: “Who stomped on this anthill?” I’d stomped it an hour before that. Days earlier I’d stumbled and fallen into an enormous anthill in the hills behind our house. I raced down to our backyard, sprinting and falling, covered in ants, screaming and slapping at myself, interrupting the lunch my mom and some friends were having on the back lawn. She stripped me down and they all helped slap the ants off me. My dad reminded me of this humiliating experience, which he’d gotten quite a laugh out of. “Are you sure it wasn’t you? Seems like you’ve got the motive.”

  “No, Dad.”

  “He’s going to drive his teachers crazy in the fall,” Dad told my mom.

  “No, he won’t,” she said. “There are worse problems for a teacher than a kid who loves to read. They’ll love him.”

  “I love him too. But just because they’ll love him doesn’t mean he won’t drive them crazy. Can’t we just get him some books about airplanes or something?”

  “He can read what he wants. He’s nervous enough about school without you fussing. It’s going to be however it’s going to be.”

  After reading Harriet the Spy, I started keeping spy notebooks. The Great Brain convinced me that I’d make my fortune as a genius, while Where the Wild Things Are confused me—when I threw a tantrum I got sent to bed and that was that; I was never transported to a faraway land of giant beasts who made me king. And yet, for all my book lust, I didn’t know what true mania was until we brought home Charlotte’s Web and the After Fern era began.

  Charlotte’s Web looked like other books. It had a cover, a title, and pages. I sat on the couch and started leafing. My mom asked if I wanted her to read it to me. “I’ll try it first by myself,” I said. In the early pages, a farm girl named Fern saves a piglet named Wilbur from being killed and decides to raise him herself. I stopped on page 11 and stared at the picture. The book drifted toward me as the walls of our house dissolved. My face got hot. And then the sound of my mom’s laughter snapped me back into reality.

  I looked up. Mom stood in the doorway with mirthful tears in her eyes. “Can you show me which picture you were kissing?” she asked when she could talk again.

  It was the picture of Fern pushing Wilbur in a stroller that first caught my eye. And then there was a picture of her sitting on a milking stool, watching Wilbur in his sty with a love in her eyes that lit my head on fire. She was so beautiful that I forgot where I was and wound up kissing a dusty page in a library book. But so what? I wasn’t embarrassed. I wanted to be that pig. I would even have worn the bonnet. Later, I practiced making faces at myself in the mirror, looking up at myself under my long eyelashes, just like Wilbur.

  “I’m in love with Fern,” I told my mom the next day. She laughed harder than I thought was possible. That is, until my dad came home and she told him. Her laughing was nothing compared to his. He still thought fiction—other than Tony Hillerman’s detective tales set on the Navajo reservation—was a waste of time, but he was giddy at this sign that I’d be interested in girls.

  On the first day of kindergarten, I put my copy of Charlotte’s Web in my new plastic crayon box. After the first hour of school, I wasn’t nervous anymore. When I opened my lunch that day, there was a note on top of my sandwich: I’m glad you’re my son. That was the first of the many messages Mom would write.

  I’m proud of you.

  And just as often—Your dad and I love you so much.

  At the end of the first week of school, my mom wasn’t there to pick me up on time. It was an early-dismissal day and she’d forgotten. It took only thirty minutes for my teacher to get her on the phone and down to the school. I hadn’t given her much thought in the interim. I was in the middle of my first book club meeting. To teach us the alphabet, our teacher used inflatable cartoon characters that each held a letter. When my mom rushed in full of apologies for the teacher and for her oblivious son, I was seated at a table with some letter people. They each had a book, which I’d selected from the shelves that ringed the class. I’d asked each of them to read a page, and then tell me what it said, so that I could absorb more books in less time. I don’t think there was anything special about my reading ability—if I read better at that age than other kids it was because I didn’t spend much time doing anything else. I didn’t understand that that wasn’t the norm for boys my age. After that day my teacher, who’d helped me arrange the book party, started letting me take books from the class onto the playground for recess if I wanted them. I usually did.

  After the initial uneasiness of something as new as spending half the day in a classroom, I loved school. How could I not? My parents had a knack for making everything into a game. Learning was a reward. And when I came home from school, instead of asking, “How was school today?” they’d ask, “What did you ask today?”

  My memories of those teachers are about how kind they were. I certainly didn’t cause them as many headaches as the kids who couldn’t sit still or pay attention, or who didn’t like books, numbers, or anything not involving recess. And I was perhaps pathologically respectful of my elders. Despite my dad’s rough edges, my mom molded me into a perfect little gentleman, and she taught me that nobody was as worthy of respect as a teacher.

  So it was with great reluctance that I disagreed, ever so politely, with Ms. Poindexter, my first-grade teacher, as she cast the Thanksgiving program. But I had to. I wanted to score a big role, and not just any role. I wan
ted to be a pig, and not just any pig.

  “What is it, Josh?”

  “I’ll be a pig. My name is Wilbur. I’m from Charlotte’s Web.”

  Ms. Poindexter sighed. The Thanksgiving play didn’t call for a pig named Wilbur. She sized me up, which wasn’t hard; I was already the tallest kid in class. “No, you’re a tree,” she said.

  “I don’t want to be a tree,” I said.

  “You’re tall and we have enough animals, Josh.”

  “Okay. I’ll be a tree that oinks.”

  “Please go sit down, Josh.”

  After a month of rehearsals in which I tried my best to look arboreal, it was time. We shuffled onto the stage in the gymnasium at Farmington Elementary and divided into Indians, pilgrims, some animals, and one tree. As the show progressed, it became apparent that the tree was alive and was possibly fighting a stiff breeze.

  My parents squinted at me in the dark auditorium. “Why’s he doing that?” whispered my dad.

  Under the bright lights, my nose, eyes, lips, and tongue contorted as if they’d seceded from my face and were involved in a game of one-upmanship.

  “I don’t know,” said my mom.

  Not only did my tics last the entire performance, they got worse the longer I was onstage.

  “Josh, honey, are you okay?” my mom asked after the show.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  My parents didn’t tell me what had happened. I didn’t know anything was wrong.

  After the play, Mom and Dad started a surveillance operation at home. Mom observed me while I watched TV, while I played with my friends, while I read, and while I wrestled with my dad. After a week of mental note-taking, she asked me why I was doing it.

  “Doing what?”

  She explained what they’d seen the night of the play and told me that I was still “doing it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mom curled her upper lip and touched her nose with it. She blinked her eyes rapidly, at the same time, then in intervals of forceful winking with either eye. She jerked her head back and forth as if trying to toss away some hair that had fallen over her eyes. She stretched her neck to its limit like a turtle, then bobbed her head backward and forward like a chicken. “Like that. Do you think you could stop?”

  “Do I really look like that?”

  She made a deal with me. “If you quit doing that for five minutes I’ll buy you a new book,” she said.

  “Mom, I’m sorry,” I said, after lasting only one minute before the tics returned. Lips and nose and tongue and eyes. Up and down. Up and down. Over and over and back again. Now that Mom had pointed it out, I was more aware of “doing it.” Not always, but often. I didn’t like it that she wanted me to stop. If it were a good thing, she wouldn’t care.

  “It feels weird if I don’t do it. Am I really doing it all the time?”

  Mom became convinced that what I was doing wasn’t a deliberate behavior. She felt so bad about this that she took me to the library that night after dinner.

  I brought home some books about sharks. I’d probably read as many books about shark attacks that year as I did fictional stories about gallant horses and child sleuths.

  Dad sat by me while I opened the first book. Certain sharks, I discovered, can’t breathe if they stop swimming. They have to move or they can’t breathe.

  “That’s like me!” I said.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I can’t stop moving either.”

  Dad thought about it and then said, “Well, you like sharks, right?”

  I did.

  “Sharks are the toughest things ever!” he said. “What do you want, to be a little dolphin? Would you rather be a kitten? No way! Sharks get whatever they want. A shark can punch the whole world in the face and then just swim away. That’s going to be you.”

  A couple of weeks later, Dad came home from work agitated. “Josh has Tourette Syndrome,” he told my mom during dinner. My little sister Megan babbled away in her high chair. She was two, chubby, and her head was as round and seamless as a bowling ball. A messy bowling ball.

  “What?”

  “I was talking to a guy at work and he said his boy’s doing some of the same things Josh is doing.”

  “And?”

  “And his boy has Tourette Syndrome.”

  “And?” said my mom.

  “What do you mean, ‘and’?”

  “What’s Tourette Syndrome?” I asked, twirling a bunch of spaghetti on my fork and flying it over my plate.

  My mom said, “What are you talking about? Isn’t that that thing where people just yell and swear all the time? Josh doesn’t have that.” She looked at me. “You have to eat your salad, Josh.”

  “Swearing is bad,” I said.

  My dad pushed food around his plate in a circle. “Well, I was talking to the guy, and it sounds a lot like…you know.” The ticking clock was the only noise until my mom drummed her fingernails on the table and then tapped the pitcher of water with her fork. Ding.

  Megan giggled.

  “Well…,” Mom said. “Maybe we could investigate it a little more. But don’t make your mind up yet.” She poured herself a glass of water and held it for a while, not drinking.

  My dad nodded and turned to me. “What do you think about all this, buddy?” he asked.

  I stood up on my chair. “I don’t care. I’m a shark.”

  My mom watched me through the glass of water, then put it down. She walked over, picked me up, and sat me back down in my seat. “Even sharks don’t get to stand on the chair at dinner.”

  “Leave him alone,” said my dad. “He’s a Great White.”

  I felt like I’d grown a foot taller. My dad always knew just what to say.

  My parents tucked me into bed together and Mom read to me. Dad returned to say prayers. After we prayed, Mom squeezed my hand and said, “You’ll be fine.”

  I heard them talking in their bed. The rhythms changed and the volume rose and fell.

  The next day Mom and I went to the library again. While I looked for books about talking animals, she found a book about Tourette’s. When we got home, I went into my room with Charlotte’s Web and she sat on the couch with her neurology book.

  She learned that, in the broadest sense, Tourette Syndrome affects people in three ways. It either makes them move involuntarily, vocalize involuntarily, or both. These movements or sounds are called “tics.” Motor and vocal tics both have a continuum that can swing pretty freaking far. Mom was both unnerved and incredulous. The book made it sound like Tourette Syndrome was a life sentence of perversion. Study after study talked about poor little boys who kept getting suspended from school because they couldn’t quit displaying their weenies in public. The author discussed famous people who may or may not have had Tourette’s; Mozart, for example. Oh, and there was speculation that some of the poor women who were burned at the Salem witch trials might not have been possessed by the devil, but may have had Tourette’s.

  But most of the book focused on the disorder itself. Even less was known about it then, but the symptoms mentioned were so different from what my mom saw me doing that she couldn’t convince herself that it was Tourette’s.

  I didn’t know about the book. She told me all of this later. This is something I give my parents a lot of credit for: After their initial rounds of questioning, they didn’t bring up the subject anymore. I wasn’t asked to talk about the tics, or asked to fight them. Once they decided I wasn’t in danger, they kept their worries to themselves and let me get back to being a relatively carefree kid. They didn’t see the point of having Tourette’s, if that’s what it was, on my mind, even if I was having frequent tics.

  They didn’t take me to a doctor. My father had a deep suspicion of them. “Doctors are idiots,” he said after I’d been diagnosed with asthma; the prescribed inhaler did nothing for my symptoms. Mom took me to a specialist when I asked why I wasn’t getting better. “A specialist is like a sup
er-doctor,” she said. “A super-idiot,” said Dad. When the super-doctor misdiagnosed me with an allergy to dairy products, my dad crowed.

  I learned that doctors could be wrong. Doctors have the opportunity and the credibility to really screw up someone’s life. Doctors’ calm detachment and reassurances could help my parents, but they might not help my symptoms. My parents didn’t feel the need to put them on the case yet.

  “Hold still,” said Ms. Poindexter, pressing the now-red cloth to my forehead. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you all, but you need to slow down out on that playground.”

  “I tripped,” I said. It made me sick to lie.

  I could’ve told Ms. Poindexter what had happened, but I thought it would sound stupid. My long arms and endless energy made me a menace during games of tag. I had the longest reach, the longest legs, and I could run forever. I’d been running down another victim when I started shaking my head from side to side, like the hair-shaking tic my mom had shown me, but with the ferocity of a T. rex who had just caught its prey. This violent motion altered my trajectory and I plowed face-first into a brick wall.

  I’d been a happy little airplane, soaring above the clouds. Now there was a kamikaze pilot in the cockpit of my skull, scowling at the horizon, trying to find a battleship to crash into.

  I started crying when my mom asked me what had happened.

  “I lied to Ms. Poindexter.”

  Faced with my strange tics, Mom did what she always did—she went merrily along her way, seeing beauty in all things. She’s part caterpillar, weaving a lovely cocoon of euphemisms around herself, giving purpose to life and seeing the best in things.

  Not my dad. He probably wouldn’t admit it, but I suspect that he wondered how the circus would treat me in the freak show. I picture him watching me pick at my carrots at dinner and thinking, Eat up, boy. It beats those fish heads they’ll be serving you out of buckets.

  But for now, safe in my mother’s cocoon, the circus would have to do without me.

  * I can’t find any record of this book, but my mom swears that’s what it was called. She then wondered if maybe it was called Mr. Mole, but I can’t find any record of a fictional mole eating marigolds either.