Never again will I have such a perfect setup for summer reading as my grade-school and early-teen years in Phoenix. Most days would start with mowing a lawn or two before the temperature reached a full sizzle. The day’s enterprise done, I would retire to my room, where, as in the whole house, the shades were drawn to keep out the noontime glare. My room benefited from being on the same end of the house with the evaporative “swamp cooler,” which blew icy, damp air. There in the dim chill, defying the blistering heat outside, I would settle into a big orange Naugahyde beanbag chair (the comfort of which has never been equaled) and read the day away.
Perhaps my happiest memories are of the books that were age-appropriate. I was 13 when I consumed the Lord of the Rings trilogy, an ideal age for gobbling up Tolkien and all his goblins. When my kids were young I bought a copy of Rifles for Watie in the hope they would, around 9 years old, enjoy it as much as I had. (They read Harry Potter instead.)
Sometimes, though, I got ahead of myself. In second grade, having seen some World War II movie on TV, I was curious to learn what the whole shebang was about. I found a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and I set about reading it. I don’t think I got through a dozen pages.
And occasionally my choices were decidedly (and traumatizingly) age-inappropriate, as when, at 10, I found my mother’s copy of Jaws.
The book was suitably terrifying from the get-go. It starts with a skinny-dipper whose leg is bitten off so quickly and efficiently that she doesn’t quite know what’s happened. By the time she figures out she only has one leg left, the shark has “swallowed the woman’s limb without chewing” and come back for more. “This time the fish attacked from below,” Peter Benchley writes. “The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly . . .” And so it goes for a couple of hundred pages of grand watery guignol.
Phoenix being in the middle of a desert, why did I have to worry? There was no nearby shore at which to be fearful of what lurked beneath the waves. But the book did scare me enough that when over at the houses of friends who had pools, I would find myself perusing the deep end to make sure it was 100 percent shark-free.
The great white wasn’t the only thing in Jaws alarming to my 10-year-old self. In the movie version (which my parents wouldn’t dream of letting me see even a couple of years later), police chief Brody’s spouse is an admirably honest woman, all sturdy wifely support and maternal concern. In the book, by contrast, she’s a bored housewife eager for a little extramarital excitement. She finds some with Hooper (the character played sexlessly in the movie by Richard Dreyfuss). This entails naughty bits. These involve the couple fantasizing about getting busy while driving; they imagine the resulting accident that would leave both dead, thrown from the car, their private parts exposed “for the world to see.” Yikes!
I rather suspect it was this section, not the detailed descriptions of swimmers as shark smorgasbord, that had my mother worked up when she popped in to see what I wanted for lunch. Realizing what I was reading, she gasped, hesitated a moment, snatched the book from my hands, and wordlessly left.
Her reaction to Jaws notwithstanding, my mother was less censorious than my father. Long before I was a teen, sitting in the backseat on long family road trips, I would read until carsick, alternating between Encyclopedia Brown mysteries and pulpy Mack Bolan paperbacks. It was on one such trip I remember being in some store’s checkout line; the lady behind us began chiding Mom about the novel with the lurid cover I was about to buy. I don’t remember exactly what my unfailingly courteous and soft-spoken mother said, but it was strictly mind-your-own-beeswax stuff. Years later, by contrast, when my prep school’s summer reading list for rising freshmen included Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux, my father had words with the headmaster. When it came to naughty bits, Peter Benchley had nothing on John Updike.
This summer I’m setting out to re-read books that I read at the wrong age. For example, I’ve been of the opinion that John O’Hara is the true chronicler of the jazz age, not F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I’ve never properly compared their work, having read Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8 as an adult and The Great Gatsby in junior high—what did I know then about the book’s themes of love and loss? So I think I’ll give Gatsby another go. I hope to finally find time for William Shirer. I might even read Jaws all the way to the end.
Now, if only I had an orange Naugahyde beanbag chair.
