The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [63]
Because our Dick and Jane books at Greenwood were ten or fifteen years old, they depicted a world that was already gone. The cars were old-fashioned; the buses, too. The shops the family frequented were of a type that no longer existed—pet shops with puppies in the window, toy stores with wooden toys, grocers where items were fetched for you by a cheerful man in a white apron. I found everything about this enchanting. There was no dirt or pain in their world. They could even go into Grandfather’s henhouse to collect eggs and not gag from the stink or become frantically attached to a blob of chicken shit. It was a wonderful world, a perfect world, friendly, hygienic, safe, better than real. There was just one very odd thing about the Dick and Jane books. Whenever any of the characters spoke, they didn’t sound like humans.
“Here we are at the farm,” says Father in a typical passage as he bounds from the car (dressed, not incidentally, in a brown suit), then adds a touch robotically: “Hello, Grandmother. Here we are at the farm.”
“Hello,” responds Grandmother. “See who is here. It is my family. Look, look! Here is my family.”
“Oh, look! Here we are at the farm,” adds Dick, equally amazed to find himself in a rural setting inhabited by loved ones. He, too, seems to have a kind of mental stuck needle. “Here we are at the farm,” he goes on. “Here is Grandfather, too! Here we are at the farm.”
It was like this on every page. Every character talked exactly like people whose brains had been taken away. This troubled me for a long while. One of the great influences of my life in this period was the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which I found so convincingly scary that I took it as more or less real, and for about three years I watched my parents extremely closely for telltale signs that they had been taken over by alien life forms themselves, before eventually realizing that it would be impossible to tell if they had been; that indeed the first clue that they were turning into pod people would be their becoming more normal—and I wondered for a long time if the Dick and Jane family (or actually, for I wasn’t completely stupid, the creators of the Dick and Jane family) had been snatched and were now trying to soften us up for a podding of our own. It made sense to me.
I loved the Dick and Jane books so much that I took them home and kept them. (There were stacks of spares in the cloakroom.) I still have them and still look at them from time to time. And I am still looking for a family that would all try to touch their toes together.
Once I had the Dick and Jane books at home and could read them at my leisure, over a bowl of ice cream or while keeping half an eye on the television, I didn’t see much need to go to school. So I didn’t much go. By second grade I was pretty routinely declining my mother’s daily entreaties to rise. It exasperated her to the point of two heavy sighs and some speechless clucking—as close to furious as she ever got—but I realized quite early on that if I just went completely limp and unresponsive and assumed a posture of sacklike uncooperativeness, stirring only very slightly from time to time to mumble that I was really seriously unwell and needed rest, she would eventually give up, and go away saying, “Your dad would be furious if he was here now.”
But the thing was he wasn’t there. He was in Iowa City or Columbus or San Francisco or Sarasota. He was always somewhere. As a consequence he only learned of these matters twice a year when he was given my report card to review and sign. These always became occasions in which my mother was in as much trouble as I was.
“How can he have 26¼ absences in one semester?” he would say in pained dismay. “And how, come to that, do you get a quarter of an absence?