OurStory

Thursday, September 21, 2006

The Night the Book Ate My Life
by Birdie Jaworski

A joyful memoir of how To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee changed my life. As I sit in my car on this cool Kansas evening, my favorite book at my side, it seems to be the only thing I can do.

"You have exactly two weeks to read this book and return a book report."

My ninth grade teacher pushed oversized glasses up her nose as she spoke. Her black hair was piled in a loose bun on the top of her head. The bun swayed back and forth, and I could see grey roots at her temples. I opened the frayed cover. To Kill a Mockingbird. I read it in three days.

I never finished an entire chapter book before. I didn't know books told stories, thought they just rained parables full of words hard as hail I would never understand. I drew charcoal portraits of the characters, wrote an original play about Scout's adventures in my hometown, laboriously typed it all on my Gramma's Underwood typewriter. The morning it was due I found a million saliva-coated pieces strewn across the kitchen floor. The family dog gave me an apologetic glance.

I told my teacher, could barely get the words past the lump in the throat. She didn't believe me. She gave me an "F." As she spoke, I watched her morph into old dying Mrs. Dubose, my chewed pages the soft waxy petals and torn leaves of a ruined camellia bush. I squinted at her through my tears, my hands on hips just like little Scout. That's when I figured adults were cynical and tired, that they didn't stop to hear the expression of your eyes. And so I did the only thing Scout would do. I stole that dog-eared hardcover school edition and called it my own.

Four years later, I became some kind of Boo Radley - Mayella hybrid, pregnant, the victim of a violent rape, a girl on the run. I stood in line at the employment assistance office day after day, filled out form after form, met with pasty faced placement officers and nothing, just nothing happened. I walked the parking lots looking for spare pennies, hopefully enough to buy a loaf of cheap bread. Women with spare money passed me, didn't see my hollow cheeks, didn't notice the only dirty maternity shirt I owned. Invisible. Poor. Scared. Hidden. I lay in bed each night, that musty book against my growing belly and prayed to my fading God to give me the steady wisdom of someone like Atticus.

What I want to do now is slice my body in half so that you can peer inside, look at my guts and heart and mind and frontal lobes and see what this book meant to me. It was everything, because it carried me through that pregnancy, sat beside me as I signed my newborn daughter over to the state, held my hand during all my bad choices and man problems and kid emergencies and work traumas. I've lived a hundred thousand lives in the thirty years since I stole that book, wear Calpurnia's apron as I cook dinner, watch my own young boys steal Jem's defiance, Scout's tree-climbing joy, Dill's imagination.

Tonight I sit in a parking lot stealing wifi from a chain hotel. My dad waits in a Wichita hospital bed for heart bypass surgery tomorrow morning. The Book hides in my purse, every page splattered with pizza, with tears, with rock scrabble memory. I know just what scene I'll read as they wheel Dad to meet the surgeon. I'll open to the day Scout finally meets the darkness, the evening she sits in white light silence next to Boo Radley. My dad will meet his fears as they drive the sleep needle into his arm. As for me, I meet my fears every damn day. But thanks to Harper Lee, I'm never alone.