A Chill Rain in January Read Free

holiday story. Finally in exasperation Zoe asked her mother to help her.
    They sat down together after dinner. Zoe had some paper and a pencil. Her mother said, “Tell me something you did in your holidays that you really enjoyed a lot.”
    Zoe thought about that. She’d enjoyed sneaking into the basement of the Nelsons’ house, next door, and poking around in an old trunk she’d found there. After a minute she shrugged her shoulders.
    â€œWhat about when we went on the train to Banff?” said her mother.
    â€œI liked it in the pool,” said Zoe, remembering. “Because the water was hot but the air was cool.”
    â€œYou could write about that, then.”
    â€œThat isn’t much to say,” said Zoe doubtfully.
    â€œI don’t think Miss Warren wants you to say a whole lot. Maybe enough to fill up a page. You could write about the train ride and then about the hot springs.”
    â€œWhat would I say about the train ride?”
    â€œWhat do you remember about it?”
    Zoe imagined herself putting her thoughts through a sieve. “I remember looking out the window at night,” she said. “Sometimes I couldn’t see any lights anywhere. I thought all the bulbs in the world had got burned out at the same time.” She glanced at her mother, and saw that she was smiling.
    â€œThere, you see?” said Zoe’s mother. “You have lots of things to write about.”
    Zoe wrote those things and Miss Warren said what she had written was very good.
    Zoe thought hard about this for a long time.
    She decided that it was okay if she showed other people little tiny bits of what she thought and felt about things. But that it was really important to pick the right bits.
    She started writing down things for herself. First just on loose pieces of paper, trying things out.
    For example: Was it all right to say the thing she thought about Benjamin? she wondered on the paper.
    Then she said them, to her mother.
    Her mother became very upset and scolded her in a piercing voice and rushed from the room.
    Zoe then said the same things to her father. For a minute his face looked as if it was caving in. Then he leaned forward until his arms were resting on his knees and he was staring at the rug.
    â€œIt’s perfectly normal,” he said, “to get angry with your brother. He gets angry with you sometimes, too.”
    He said a lot of other stuff, too, but Zoe wasn’t listening anymore. There were many things that people didn’t like to hear. When you said them they might pretend you didn’t mean them, or they might try to persuade you not to mean them anymore, or they might just get mad. Either it was very boring or, if you got them mad, you could get yelled at, or slapped.
    Eventually Zoe used her allowance to buy herself a scribbler, a notebook, where she could say things other people wouldn’t want to hear. And gradually, with the help of the scribbler, she got things sorted out.
    When she was little and had seen something she wanted very badly she had always just taken it, even when it belonged to somebody else. But this led to uproar and punishment. So she made a rule about it: “Don’t steal anything unless you can be sure nobody’s going to find out who did it.”
    When people asked her questions, she was in the habit of saying whatever came into her head. A lot of times these were made-up things. This got her into trouble, too. So she wrote in the exercise book: “Don’t say anything about anything unless you have to, and then try to say just a little bit, and make at least some of it true.”
    When something made her angry she struck out at it, whether it was a person or a thing, because this used up the anger. She disliked being angry. It was a hot, tight feeling which was very uncomfortable. But hitting, it seemed, was even worse than stealing; especially when she broke things. So one of her rules said: