Body Language Read Online Free PDF Page B

Christmas when my adventure began. I was nine and alone, bundled up and packed onto a northbound bus, laden with gifts for my as-yet-unmet extended family, including several pounds of margarine for Aunt Peggy, who had a heart condition. Mom had stuck some cheap self-adhesive bows on the waxy cartons, explaining, “They make so much butter in Wisconsin, margarine is actually illegal up there. You can be a real hero by smuggling these in for her.”
    The bus ride took most of the day, as I traveled a few hundred miles from my Illinois home into Wisconsin, headed for a town called Dumont. Though the weather at home was cold, it hadn’t snowed yet, so I was anxious to set foot in the faraway land where I assumed all Christmases were white. As the long afternoon shadows grew darker around our bus, the driver announced that we had arrived, and I was disappointed to see that the ground was still green. I had presumed that Dumont was nestled somewhere in the great north woods, a mere clearing in the pines, but it turned out to be a substantial little city, larger than my own hometown. And though there were plenty of trees, they did not, even collectively, constitute a woods—certainly not the primeval forest that had rooted in my mind.
    At the bus stop, I was the only child to get off the Greyhound, so my uncle easily spotted me in the crowd. “Mark,” he said, rushing forward and squatting to hug me, “I’m your uncle Edwin, your mother’s brother. Welcome to Dumont.”
    In the car, he told me how anxious my aunt Peggy was to meet me. She was at home helping the housekeeper with dinner. (Mom had told me that her name was Hazel—right! The real Hazel wouldn’t need help fixing supper.) “The kids,” Suzanne and Joey Quatrain, were dying to show me around (I’ll bet). And the older son, Mark (same first name as mine), wouldn’t be home from college till tomorrow. Uncle Edwin did most of the talking, as if he could fill me in on a lifetime of missing details during the short ride from the bus station. He mentioned his printing business, “the new plant,” and I remembered Mom’s frequent comment that our family must have printer’s ink in its blood.
    The car was a real beauty, imported, which was something of an oddity back then. I found the strange controls on the wood-inlaid dashboard far more engrossing than my uncle’s chatter. “Here we are,” he said at last, turning onto Prairie Street. And then I saw it.
    Big and brick, square and stately, it looked more like a bank than a house, conspicuous among its fancy-gabled neighbors. Its clean, strong lines rose from the earth and shot three stories high, topping the giant elms that edged the street. The pitch of the roof was so shallow that it appeared flat, overhanging the walls with broad, shading eaves. Though the house was more than twice my age, its many windows gave it a modern airiness that belied its structural heft. The most prominent of these windows was a half-circle of glass on the third floor, like a mammoth eye peering out from under the eaves.
    My uncle laughed at my awed reaction to the house, mentioning a famous architect who ran a school in Wisconsin. One of the students had designed this house, and everybody got all gushy once when the head architect paid a visit and said he “liked” it. (Big deal!)
    We entered through the heavy front door, and I was met by the entire household, who fluttered around me with such excitement, you’d think they never had company. Aunt Peggy was nice, but a little stiff; I was expecting someone more like Mom. She thanked me for the margarine, saying, “That’s very thoughtful, dear,” then handed it to Hazel, who held the stuff as though it might explode. Hazel wasn’t anything like the maid on TV. She was not plump, she did not have red hair, she wore thick glasses, and she had a husband, Hank Healy, who was the handyman around the house (too bad he didn’t have any snow to shovel).
    As for “the kids,”