It was the fall of my sophomore year of high school and my first boyfriend had just confessed that he was still seeing his summertime girlfriend. We lived in a resort community, where wealthy Chicagoans owned lavish second homes. His summertime girlfriend, a member of one of those families, only visited on the weekends.
I wasn’t actually furious, but I was certainly hurt by the revelation. I suppose I should have been grateful for the confession. I otherwise would have continued to be ignorant. Maybe that would have been okay. Not sure. I told my boyfriend that he would have to choose. He did. And he didn’t choose me.
The one period we had in common was a so-called Study Hall. That was a joke of a misnomer since no one, absolutely no one, studied. During the day, the large exam room was used to corral up to 100 students per class period. It was a complete free-for-all in there and I really can’t imagine how the monitor on duty was able to stand it. But he did. He would grade papers, and glance up from time-to-time to make sure no one was fighting or making out. My boyfriend and I, and one other friend, laughed our heads off every day telling each other stories and reminiscing about grade school. Sometimes I would get to laughing so hard, I couldn’t speak.
But after my boyfriend made his choice, I wasn’t interested in going to Study Hall any longer. Since we had the option of asking the monitor for a pass to the Library, I chose to go there instead.
Going to the Library took some getting used to as I wasn’t accustomed to spending any time during the school day studying. But as it turned out, I found it to be the best decision ever because I could get most of my homework done, which left me more free time in the evenings. I loved that.
Free time in the evenings meant I could indulge in reading for leisure, but I wasn’t very practiced at that either. My parents weren’t fiction readers. They read magazines and newspapers, but rarely anything else. I found a copy of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, which I snuck-read because I found it hidden in the back of a cabinet and figured Mom would get angry if she knew. Then I found a copy of Gone With the Wind on the downstairs bookshelf. It was awfully thick and intimidating, but I had the time, so plunged into it. Despite what we now know are a multitude of problems with the novel, I was instantly hooked on historical, with a splash of romance, fiction.
After Gone With the Wind, and in need of a new novel to read, I began snooping through the stacks in the school Library. I found my friend, Carolyn, tucked away at a lonely carrel near the end of the fiction stack. She was reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago for crying out loud! I’d only heard of the author and the book because it had just been published in English and there was a lot of news in the paper and on television about it. That thing was really thick. Way thicker than Gone With the Wind, and no romance at all to be found in the tome. Nevertheless, right then and there, I decided I wanted to read a really thick book, so turned my attention back to the stacks.
Only a few moments later my eyes zeroed in on a very thick volume: Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War. At nearly 900 pages, it definitely qualified as thick, so I checked it out and began reading it that night. Talk about getting swept up into a story. But, it was nearing the end of the school year, and final exams, papers, and everything else that hadn’t gotten crammed in yet kept me too busy to spend much time reading it. On top of all that, my family was moving more than 1,000 miles away for Dad’s new job. But, I just had to finish that book. It was too good to abandon.
Unfortunately, I had to return the hardback book to the Library before leaving school on the last day, even though I was only halfway through it. I had to help pack, we were having a garage sale, there were friends to have last moments with, and I didn’t have time to find another copy of the book. I couldn’t stop thinking about the story, however, so resolved that I’d figure something out after I got to our new house.
It rained just about every day that first week in our new house. A tropical depression that never reached hurricane status was churning its way across the state of Florida. I bought myself a new ten-speed bicycle the day after we moved in. During a short break in the weather while Mom and Dad were unpacking and setting up the kitchen, I rode the bike up to a nearby bookstore. To my delight, they carried the paperback version of The Winds of War. I purchased it and rode home to try and find the place where I had left off in the story.
I had just barely gotten back on track with the novel’s storyline before I was, again, interrupted with chores, appointments with new doctors and dentists, and registration requirements for my new school. I kept thinking that I’d just have to wait until the week was over and hope that things calmed down.
On Saturday morning, my mother announced that she had volunteered me to help the minister and his family that lived across the street with their garage sale. Was everything conspiring to keep me from The Winds of War? Mom explained that a couple of other girls, who I would soon be going to school with, would also be helping, and that it was a good opportunity to make some new friends. I was a little bit intimidated, and maybe a bit angry, at my mom for forcing this awkward encounter upon me. I decided to take The Winds of War with me as a possible refuge. Though it would be rude to sit in a lawn chair and read rather than talk, I might need it to take cover. And maybe they’d just think I was smart. My Solzhenitsyn-reading friend, Carolyn, always had her nose stuck in a book, and that’s what people said about her...She’s really smart. And wasn’t a move to a new home and school the exact right time to kind of reinvent one’s self?
One of the girls that showed up to help with the garage sale, I would later find out, was destined to be a contender for Valedictorian. She later confided to me that when she walked up to the minister’s garage that day and saw me sitting there reading such a thick book, she thought, Oh no, the new girl is really smart so I’m going to have to work harder than ever to keep my academic standing.
She needn’t have worried. The Winds of War is merely a very long novel set during WWII—lots of sex and intrigue—with barely what a friend used to call a 15-cent word in sight. Though reading the book helped me be pretty smart while taking a future history test, and it did give me a great reputation, it did not put me in contention for Valedictorian. That distinction went to the girl I met while looking like I was really smart.
Copyright DJ Anderson, 2020
