Tolstoy and the Purple Chair Read Online Free Page B

Mary Ann, or might find someone else (ha—not on a deserted island), never occurred to us. We were prepubescent, innocent, and happy.
    And then one day we weren’t. Carol moved to a street far enough away that we could no longer just drop in on each other. Our play had to be planned and involved parents and cars and schedules. When summer vacation began, I was left in the old neighborhood with old—but not best—friends while Carol moved on to new friends. And, very quickly, she found a new best friend. Carol was no longer interested in me or the Professor.
    The only way I got through the loneliness of that summer was by reading Harriet the Spy . Harriet became my new best friend. I could not play Gilligan’s Island alone, but I could spy on my own. In fact, that was one of Harriet’s rules of spying! Suddenly, being alone was not so bad. I began to carry around a notebook and scribble my thoughts down in it. I didn’t do much actual spying. My sisters caught on quickly to what I was up to with my notebook, my dime-store binoculars, and the copy of Harriet the Spy that I always had with me. They told my mother, and she gave me a quiet lecture on respecting the privacy of our neighbors. No big deal. I was more interested in writing my own thoughts in my notebook than in spying on boring suburban neighbors. Reading and rereading Harriet the Spy brought me somewhere new, to a place where a girl my age lived, a girl who loved to read and scribble and eat peculiar foods just like me. Harriet took me with her to her world, a place where Ole Golly talked to us kids as if we were smart and big, telling us all about writers like Henry James and Dostoyevsky and making them sound wonderful. It was a place of solitary freedom and tomato sandwiches. When Harriet found herself in deep trouble with her friends, I didn’t want her to work things out with them. I wanted her to be alone, like I was.
    In mid-July of that summer my mother and I left for Belgium. My grandmother was in the final stages of cancer, and my mother was going to care for her. I was brought along because at age ten I was too young to be left unsupervised at home, and maybe because my mother had noticed my sadness over losing Carol. She wanted to keep an eye on me. My father and older sisters would join us in August, when we would head east to visit relatives in Poland. I was happy to be flying away to Belgium, unaware of just how ill my grandmother was. I sat on the plane feeling very safe, with my mother beside me, and my copy of Harriet the Spy , my notebook, and my stuffed Piglet—beloved Piggy—anchored in between our seats.
    I remember sitting on the bed where my grandmother lay, very ill but still smiling, still eager to spoil me. “When I’m better, we’ll go shopping, yes?” she asked in her lovely voice, her English accented and slightly warbling. But she didn’t get better. I don’t remember anyone telling me that she had died. I just remember my aunt taking me to buy clothes for the funeral, a plain blue skirt, white jersey, black shoes.
    Just before the funeral I developed a brain-splitting headache, so bad that I vomited again and again. My grandfather, a doctor, gave me a sedative that made me feel better, and I went to the funeral. I sat beside my mother, waiting alone on the bench while she went up to the casket. My mother cried, the only time I saw her cry that summer, but I don’t remember crying—I was half numb with the headache medication.
    In the days that followed, my mother took me all over Antwerp. We walked everywhere. It was wonderful being with her, going to the zoo, down to the port by the river, and to Rubens’s house, filled with his paintings. I liked the blue-and-white tiles encircling the kitchen fireplace in Rubens’s house, each tile presenting a different tiny scene from life. Afternoons we would sit at a café and share sugared waffles, my mother