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“You like the smell of garbage?” asked Abel.
“I do,” said Angeline.
She watched him walk into the bathroom and almost immediately she heard the shower running. “I bet he can take off his clothes faster than anyone in the world!” she thought.
He worked for the sanitation department. He drove a garbage truck.
In an odd way, he was afraid of Angeline. He remembered the time they went into a music store where she sat down and played the piano without ever having had a lesson. Everybody in the store stopped and listened to her. It was so pretty it scared him. He hadn’t taken her back there since.
More likely, he wasn’t as afraid of her as he was afraid of himself. He was afraid he was going to somehow blow it for her. “How’s an idiot like me supposed to raise a genius?” he often wondered. Probably if they didn’t call her that name, a genius, he wouldn’t have been half as scared.
He put on his pajamas and robe. It wasn’t even six o’clock but he was already dressed for bed. He never went out at night. He hadn’t gone out for over five years, not since Nina died. He stepped into the living room. “Now you can hug me,” he said.
Angeline hugged and kissed her father. “I liked the way you smelled before better,” she told him.
She followed him into the kitchen and watched him cook dinner. “Tomorrow, will you take me on the garbage truck with you?” she asked.
He sighed. “No,” he said firmly. “You know you don’t belong on a garbage truck. Besides, you have school tomorrow.”
“I hate school,” said Angeline.
“Why does she always want to ride on that filthy truck?” Abel wondered. He hated the garbage truck. The only reason he still worked at that stinking job was for Angeline, so that he could make enough money to send her to college someday. Someday buy her a piano. Buy her nice clothes because someday she was going to be a famous scientist, or a concert pianist, or President of the United States. “Someday, Angeline…” he thought.
“Well then, how about on a holiday when school’s closed?” she asked. “Then can I ride in the garbage truck?”
“Someday, Angeline,” he said.
Two
A Goat with Two Heads
Angeline was put in the sixth grade. They put her there because, well, they had to put her somewhere and they didn’t know where else to put her. They put her in Mrs. Hardlick’s class and that was probably the worst place to be put. She sat at the back of the room.
She started to put her thumb in her mouth but caught herself. She was smart
enough for the sixth grade. She was the smartest person in the class, but she still did dumb things like suck her thumb. She knew Mrs. Hardlick hated it when she sucked her thumb. Sixth-graders are not supposed to suck their thumbs. She also cried too much for the sixth grade.
“Who was Christopher Columbus?” Mrs. Hardlick asked the class.
Angeline was the only one who raised her hand.
Mrs. Hardlick looked annoyed. “Somebody else this time,” she said and glared at Angeline. “It’s always the same people.”
Angeline lowered her hand. It wasn’t her fault she was the only one. She didn’t think Mrs. Hardlick should have been mad at her for raising her hand. It was everybody else’s fault for not raising theirs. But in her mind she could hear Mrs. Hardlick saying sarcastically, “It’s always everybody else’s fault, never your own.” As she thought this, her thumb slipped into her mouth.
Mrs. Hardlick told the class about Columbus. She said that Columbus discovered America.
Angeline knew that was wrong. How could Columbus have discovered America when there were already lots of people here when he arrived? She knew that America was actually first discovered by the first snail to crawl out of water and onto land. It was something she knew before she was born.
However, she tried to give both Mrs. Hardlick and Mr. Columbus the benefit of the doubt. “Maybe,” she thought, “from his own point of view Columbus discovered America.” But that didn’t seem true either because even after Columbus got here, he still didn’t know he was in America. He thought he was in India, which was why he called Americans “Indians.”
Mrs. Hardlick said that Columbus proved the world was round.
Angeline knew that was also wrong. If he really had made it to India, then he would have proved it was round because India was east and he sailed west. But he bumped into America first and he could have sailed to America even if the world was flat.
Besides, everybody knows the world is round before they are born. That’s why nobody is even slightly surprised when they first learn it in school.
These were the thoughts occupying Angeline’s mind when Mrs. Hardlick suddenly called her name. “Angeline!” she commanded. “Take your thumb out of your mouth right now!”
