Page 11 of Twice
“Keep reading,” he said.
The Composition Book
I’ll move the story along now, Boss, because there is much to share and I don’t want to lose the point, which is to tell you of the one great love in my life, and what I’d like you to do for her after I’m gone.
For the rest of my childhood, my father and I remained in that same Colonial home with our Plymouth Road Runner in the driveway. We rarely went anywhere. My parents used to go shopping, eat at restaurants, play gin rummy with the neighbors. But my mother’s death had left my dad rudderless. He worked. He came home. Now and then, when the weather was warm, he’d toss a baseball with me, but he always seemed distracted, his thoughts elsewhere.
We never spoke about Africa. But there was a photo of my mom on the table next to the couch, and I often caught my father studying it, as if he couldn’t turn away, the way someone stares at a bad medical report. We’d stopped going to church. We no longer prayed before meals. I think Dad felt if this was how God treated those who went around the world to spread His Good News, he’d just as soon sit things out.
Looking back, I felt badly for him. It must have been hard, living alone with me, because in those days a single man with a child was pretty rare. He wasn’t exactly welcome around other married couples, but he was too old to be hanging out with the local single men, most of whom were just a few years out of high school. He largely let medo what I wanted and tolerated my banging on the basement piano. He even bought me a cheap Radio Shack microphone for singing.
But he did make one thing abundantly clear: rules. No leaving the kitchen before the dishes were washed. No exiting the bathroom unless the dirty towels were in the hamper. No television during the day. No loud music at night.
In the silent vacuum of my mother’s absence, rules were what my father used to reset his balance.
I had my own resets.
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My mother had been right. Iwasable to do anything twice. It took me a while to master the technique, like a baby Superman learning to fly. But once I got the hang of it, I began taking second chances at anything that went wrong the first go-around. What kid wouldn’t? A bad grade on a spelling test? I went back and aced it. A strikeout in a baseball game? I relived the at bat, this time knowing what pitches to expect. If I mouthed off and got punished, I repeated the encounter and kept my mouth shut the second time. Consequently, I rarely paid a price for bad behavior. And unlike most kids, I was never bruised or bloodied for more than a few seconds. As long as I could jump back in time, I could unbreak every broken bone and untwist every twisted ankle. Physical danger became a challenge. When other boys my age thought risk-taking meant looking upfartin the dictionary, I was skating into holes on the ice or jumping off the roof over our garage.
Best of all, this power enabled me to undo the embarrassments of my often-distracted personality. Once, in fourth grade, I was staring out the window, daydreaming, when the teacher asked me to “name any one of the classification of organisms.”
I froze.
“Organisms?” I said.
“Yes, Alfie. Name one.”
All I could think of was the “organ” part.
“The kind you play in church?”
The room erupted in laughter. Tommy Helms, who was nearly twice my size and a brute on the football field, blurted out, “He’s an idiot. He doesn’t even have a mother.” The teacher turned to scold him, but before she finished her sentence, I had transported myself back to the breakfast table that morning, where, over a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, I opened my science book and began memorizing.
Later that day, while I was staring out the window—deliberately this time—the teacher asked me the same question, and I turned to her slowly.
“Organisms?”
“Yes, Alfie. Name one.”
I saw Tommy Helms sneering. I waited for maximum effect. Then I stood up.
“Domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.”
My teacher blinked. “Yes. Wow. That’s all of them. Excellent, Alfie.”
I gave Tommy a look, then sat back down. It was all I could do to keep from laughing.
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You may have noticed I no longer had to sleep to make my second chances happen. Nor did I have to call myself “stupid.” Through trial and error, I learned I only had to say or think the wordtwiceand tap any part of my body. That took me back to somewhere earlier that day. If I wanted to go back further, I could, but I had to focus on the event I wanted to revisit.
This required meticulous record-keeping. I began to chart my daily activities in composition notebooks. When I got up. Where I rode my bike. Who I ate lunch with at school.
“Why are you always writing in those notebooks?” my dad asked.
“I like to keep track of things.”
