The Summer of the Swans

Table of Contents

 

Sara put down the shoes and went back into the hall.

“Charlie!” She looked into his room again. “Oh, Charlie!” She went out onto the front porch and looked at Charlie’s tent. It had blown down during the night and she could see that he wasn’t there.

Slowly she walked back through the hall, looking into every room, and then into the kitchen.

“I can’t find him, Aunt Willie.”

“What do you mean, you can’t find him?” Aunt Willie, prepared to chide the two children for being late to breakfast, now set the pan of oatmeal down heavily on the table.

“He’s not in his room, he’s not in the yard, he’s not anywhere.”

“If this is some kind of a joke—” Aunt Willie began. She brushed past Sara and went into the living room. “Charlie! Where are you, Charlie?” Her voice had begun to rise with the sudden alarm she often felt in connection with Charlie. “Where could he have gone?” Aunt Willie walked into the hall and stood looking in Charlie’s room. She stared at the empty bed. She did not move for a moment as she tried to think of some logical explanation for his absence. “If anything’s happened to that boy ...”

PUFFIN MODERN CLASSICS

PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group,
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

 

First published in the United States of America by the Viking Press, 1970

Published by Puffin Books, 1981 Reissued 1996

 

This Puffin Modern Classics edition published by Puffin Books,
a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2004

 

Copyright © Betsy Byars, 1970

All rights reserved

 

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PREVIOUS PUFFIN EDITION AS FOLLOWS: Byars, Betsy Cromer. The summer of the swans.

Summary: A teenage girl gains new insight into herself and her family when her mentally
handicapped brother gets lost.
[1. Mentally handicapped—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.]

I. Coconis, Constantinos. II. Title.

eISBN : 978-1-101-00689-4

 

 

 

S
ara Godfrey was lying on the bed tying a kerchief on the dog, Boysie. “Hold your chin up, Boysie, will you?” she said as she braced herself on one elbow. The dog was old, slept all the time, and he was lying on his side with his eyes closed while she lifted his head and tied the scarf.

Her sister Wanda was sitting at the dressing table combing her hair. Wanda said, “Why don’t you leave Boysie alone?”

“There’s nothing else to do,” Sara answered without looking up. “You want to see a show?”

“Not particularly.”

“It’s called ‘The Many Faces of Boysie.’ ”

“Now I know I don’t want to see it.”

Sara held up the dog with the kerchief neatly tied beneath his chin and said, “The first face of Boysie, proudly presented for your entertainment and amusement, is the Russian Peasant Woman. Taaaaaa-daaaaaa! ”

“Leave the dog alone.”

“He likes to be in shows, don’t you, Boysie?” She untied the scarf, refolded it and set it carefully on top of the dog’s head. “And now for the second face of Boysie, we travel halfway around the world to the mysterious East, where we see Boysie the Inscrutable Hindu. Taaaaaaa-daaaaaa!”

With a sigh Wanda turned and looked at the dog. “That’s pathetic. In people’s age that dog is eighty-four years old.” She shook a can of hair spray and sprayed her hair. “And besides, that’s my good scarf.”

“Oh, all right.” Sara fell back heavily against the pillow. “I can’t do anything around here.”

“Well, if it’s going to make you that miserable, I’ll watch the show.”

“I don’t want to do it any more. It’s no fun now. This place smells like a perfume factory.” She put the scarf over her face and stared up through the thin blue material. Beside her, Boysie lay back down and curled himself into a ball. They lay without moving for a moment and then Sara sat up on the bed and looked down at her long, lanky legs. She said, “I have the biggest feet in my school.”

“Honestly, Sara, I hope you are not going to start listing all the millions of things wrong with you because I just don’t want to hear it again.”

“Well, it’s the truth about my feet. One time in Phys Ed the boys started throwing the girls’ sneakers around and Bull Durham got my sneakers and put them on and they fit perfectly! How do you think it feels to wear the same size shoe as Bull Durham?”

“People don’t notice things like that.”

“Huh!”

“No, they don’t. I have perfectly terrible hands—look at my fingers—only I don’t go around all the time saying, ‘Everybody, look at my stubby fingers, I have stubby fingers, everybody,’ to
make
people notice. You should just ignore things that are wrong with you. The truth is everyone else is so worried about what’s wrong with
them
that—”

“It is very difficult to ignore the fact that you have huge feet when Bull Durham is dancing all over the gym in your shoes. They were not stretched the tiniest little bit when he took them off either.”

“You wear the same size shoe as Jackie Kennedy Onassis if that makes you feel any better.”

“How do you know?”

“Because one time when she was going into an Indian temple she had to leave her shoes outside and some reporter looked in them to see what size they were.” She leaned close to the mirror and looked at her teeth.

“Her feet
look
littler.”

“That’s because she doesn’t wear orange sneakers.”

“I like my orange sneakers.” Sara sat on the edge of the bed, slipped her feet into the shoes, and held them up. “What’s wrong with them?”

“Nothing, except that when you want to hide something, you don’t go painting it orange. I’ve got to go. Frank’s coming.”

She went out the door and Sara could hear her crossing into the kitchen. Sara lay back on the bed, her head next to Boysie. She looked at the sleeping dog, then covered her face with her hands and began to cry noisily.

“Oh, Boysie, Boysie, I’m crying,” she wailed. Years ago, when Boysie was a young dog, he could not bear to hear anyone cry. Sara had only to pretend she was crying and Boysie would come running. He would whine and dig at her with his paws and lick her hands until she stopped. Now he lay with his eyes closed.

“Boysie, I’m crying,” she said again. “I’m really crying this time. Boysie doesn’t love me.”

The dog shifted uneasily without opening his eyes.

“Boysie, Boysie, I’m crying, I’m so sad, Boysie,” she wailed, then stopped and sat up abruptly. “You don’t care about anybody, do you, Boysie? A person could cry herself to death these days and you wouldn’t care.”

She got up and left the room. In the hall she heard the tapping noise of Boysie’s feet behind her and she said without looking at him, “I don’t want you now, Boysie. Go on back in the bedroom. Go on.” She went a few steps farther and, when he continued to follow her, turned and looked at him. “In case you are confused, Boysie, a dog is supposed to comfort people and run up and nuzzle them and make them feel better. All you want to do is lie on soft things and hide bones in the house because you are too lazy to go outside. Just go on back in the bedroom.”

She started into the kitchen, still followed by Boysie, who could not bear to be left alone, then heard her aunt and Wanda arguing, changed her mind, and went out onto the porch.

Behind her, Boysie scratched at the door and she let him out. “Now quit following me.”

Her brother Charlie was sitting on the top step and Sara sat down beside him. She held out her feet, looked at them, and said, “I like my orange sneakers, don’t you, Charlie?”

He did not answer. He had been eating a lollipop and the stick had come off and now he was trying to put it back into the red candy. He had been trying for so long that the stick was bent.

“Here,” she said, “I’ll do it for you.” She put the stick in and handed it to him. “Now be careful with it.”

She sat without speaking for a moment, then she looked down at her feet and said, “I hate these orange sneakers. I just
hate
them.” She leaned back against the porch railing so she wouldn’t have to see them and said, “Charlie, I’ll tell you something. This has been the worst summer of my life.”

She did not know exactly why this was true. She was doing the same things she had done last summer—walk to the Dairy Queen with her friend Mary, baby-sit for Mrs. Hodges, watch television—and yet everything was different. It was as if her life was a huge kaleidoscope, and the kaleidoscope had been turned and now everything was changed. The same stones, shaken, no longer made the same design.

But it was not only one different design, one change; it was a hundred. She could never be really sure of anything this summer. One moment she was happy, and the next, for no reason, she was miserable. An hour ago she had loved her sneakers; now she detested them.

“Charlie, I’ll tell you what this awful summer’s been like. You remember when that finky Jim Wilson got you on the seesaw, remember that? And he kept bouncing you up and down and then he’d keep you up in the air for a real long time and then he’d drop you down real sudden, and you couldn’t get off and you thought you never would?

Up and down, up and down, for the rest of your life? Well, that’s what this summer’s been like for me.”

He held out the candy and the stick to her.

“Not again!” She took it from him. “This piece of candy is so gross that I don’t even want to touch it, if you want to know the truth.” She put the stick back in and handed it to him. “Now if it comes off again—and I mean this, Charlie Godfrey—I’m throwing the candy away.”