Intermediate Listening Series 4 Lesson 9- Tuesday of the Other June Short Story in English
In this lesson, you listen to Tuesday of the Other June Short Story in English. Bullying exists all over the world, and can surface in almost any situation where people gather (school, the playground, work, sport etc.) This story from Norma Fox Mazer addresses the difficult question of whether the best approach for the victim is passive acceptance, assertiveness (standing up for oneself), or fighting back. Here, a mother’s advice is to turn the other cheek, smile at the world, and the world’ll surely smile back, while her daughter dreams of kicking, punching, and biting her (the bully) like a dog. Themes: mother-daughter relationships, bullying, fear, the courage to say “Enough!”
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Tuesday of the Other June – Norma Fox Mazer
“Be good, be good, be good, be good, my Junie,” my mother sang as she combed my hair; a song, a story, a croon, a plea. “It’s just you and me, two women alone in the world, June darling of my heart; we have enough troubles getting by, we surely don’t need a single one more, so you keep your sweet self out of fighting and all that bad stuff. People can be little-hearted, but turn the other cheek, smile at the world, and the world’ll surely smile back.”
We stood in front of the mirror as she combed my hair, combed and brushed and smoothed. Her head came just above mine; she said when I grew another inch, she’d stand on a stool to brush my hair. “I’m not giving up this pleasure!” And she laughed her long honey laugh.
My mother was April, my grandmother had been May, I was June. “And someday,” said my mother, “you’ll have a daughter of your own. What will you name her?”
“January!” I’d yell when I was little. “February! No, November!” My mother laughed her honey laugh. She had little emerald eyes that warmed me like the sun.
Every day when I went to school, she went to work. “Sometimes I stop what I’m doing,” she said, “lay down my tools, and stop everything, because all I can think about is you. Wondering what you’re doing and if you need me. Now, Junie, if anyone ever bothers you—”
“—I walk away, run away, come on home as fast as my feet will take me,” I recited.
“Yes. You come to me. You just bring me your trouble, because I’m here on this earth to love you and take care of you.”
I was safe with her. Still, sometimes I woke up at night and heard footsteps slowly creeping up the stairs. It wasn’t my mother, she was asleep in the bed across the room, so it was robbers, thieves, and murderers, creeping slowly… slowly… slowly toward my bed.
I stuffed my hand into my mouth. If I screamed and woke her, she’d be tired at work tomorrow. The robbers and thieves filled the warm darkness and slipped across the floor more quietly than cats. Rigid under the covers, I stared at the shifting dark and bit my knuckles and never knew when I fell asleep again.
In the morning we sang in the kitchen. “Bill Grogan’s goat! Was feelin’ fine! Ate three red shirts, right off the line!” I made sandwiches for our lunches, she made pancakes for breakfast, but all she ate was one pancake and a cup of coffee. “Gotta fly, can’t be late.”
I wanted to be rich and take care of her. She worked too hard; her pretty hair had gray in it that she joked about. “Someday,” I said, “I’ll buy you a real house, and you’ll never work in a pot factory again.”
“Such delicious plans,” she said. She checked the windows to see if they were locked. “Do you have your key?”
I lifted it from the chain around my neck.
“And you’ll come right home from school and—”
“—I won’t light fires or let strangers into the house, and I won’t tell anyone on the phone that I’m here alone,” I finished for her.
“I know, I’m just your old worrywart mother.” She kissed me twice, once on each cheek. “But you are my June, my only June, the only June.”
* * * * *
She was wrong; there was another June. I met her when we stood next to each other at the edge of the pool the first day of swimming class in the Community Center.
“What’s your name?” She had a deep growly voice.
“June. What’s yours?”
She stared at me. “June.”
“We have the same name.”
“No we don’t. June is my name, and I don’t give you permission to use it. Your name is Fish Eyes.” She pinched me hard. “Got it, Fish Eyes?”
The next Tuesday, the Other June again stood next to me at the edge of the pool. “What’s your name?”
“June.”
“Wrong. Your—name—is—Fish—Eyes.”
“June.”
“Fish Eyes, you are really stupid.” She shoved me into the pool.
The swimming teacher looked up, frowning, from her chart. “No one in the water yet.”
Later, in the locker room, I dressed quickly and wrapped my wet suit in the towel. The Other June pulled on her jeans. “You guys see that bathing suit Fish Eyes was wearing? Her mother found it in a trash can.”
“She did not!”
The Other June grabbed my fingers and twisted. “Where’d she find your bathing suit?”
“She bought it, let me go.”
“Poor little stupid Fish Eyes is crying. Oh, boo hoo hoo, poor little Fish Eyes.”
After that, everyone called me Fish Eyes. And every Tuesday, wherever I was, there was also the Other June—at the edge of the pool, in the pool, in the locker room. In the water, she swam alongside me, blowing and huffing, knocking into me. In the locker room, she stepped on my feet, pinched my arms, hid my blouse, and knotted my braids together. She had large square teeth; she was shorter than I was, but heavier, with bigger bones and square hands. If I met her outside on the street, carrying her bathing suit and towel, she’d walk toward me, smiling a square, friendly smile. “Oh well, if it isn’t Fish Eyes.” Then she’d punch me, blam! her whole solid weight hitting me.
I didn’t know what to do about her. She was training me like a dog. After a few weeks of this, she only had to look at me, only had to growl, “I’m going to get you, Fish Eyes,” for my heart to slink like a whipped dog down into my stomach. My arms were covered with bruises. When my mother noticed, I made up a story about tripping on the sidewalk.
My weeks were no longer Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and so on. Tuesday was Awfulday. Wednesday was Badday. (The Tuesday bad feelings were still there.) Thursday was Betterday, and Friday was Safeday. Saturday was Goodday, but Sunday was Toosoonday, and Monday—Monday was nothing but the day before Awfulday.
I tried to slow down time. Especially on the weekends, I stayed close by my mother, doing everything with her, shopping, cooking, cleaning, going to the laundromat. “Aw, sweetie, go play with your friends.”
“No, I’d rather be with you.” I wouldn’t look at the clock or listen to the radio (they were always telling you the date and the time). I did special magic things to keep the day from going away, rapping my knuckles six times on the bathroom door six times a day and never, ever touching the chipped place on my bureau. But always I woke up to the day before Tuesday, and always, no matter how many times I circled the worn spot in the living-room rug or counted twenty-five cracks in the ceiling, Monday disappeared and once again it was Tuesday.
The Other June got bored with calling me Fish Eyes. Buffalo Brain came next, but as soon as everyone knew that, she renamed me Turkey Nose.
Now at night it wasn’t robbers creeping up the stairs, but the Other June, coming to torment me. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of kicking her, punching, biting, pinching. In the morning I remembered my dreams and felt brave and strong. And then I remembered all the things my mother had taught me and told me.
Be good, be good, be good; it’s just us two women alone in the world… Oh, but if it weren’t, if my father wasn’t long gone, if we’d had someone else to fall back on, if my mother’s mother and daddy weren’t dead all these years, if my father’s daddy wanted to know us instead of being glad to forget us—oh, then I would have punched the Other June with a frisky heart, I would have grabbed her arm at poolside and bitten her like the dog she had made of me.
One night, when my mother came home from work, she said, “Junie, listen to this. We’re moving!”
Alaska, I thought. Florida. Arizona. Someplace far away and wonderful, someplace without the Other June.
“Wait till you hear this deal. We are going to be caretakers, trouble-shooters for an eight-family apartment building. Fifty-six Blue Hill Street. Not janitors; we don’t do any of the heavy work. April and June, Trouble-shooters, Incorporated. If a tenant has a complaint or a problem, she comes to us and we either take care of it or call the janitor for service. And for that little bit of work, we get to live rent free!” She swept me around in a dance. “Okay? You like it? I do!”
So. Not anywhere else, really. All the same, maybe too far to go to swimming class? “Can we move right away? Today?”
“Gimme a break, sweetie. We’ve got to pack, do a thousand things. I’ve got to line up someone with a truck to help us. Six weeks, Saturday the fifteenth.” She circled it on the calendar. It was the Saturday after the last day of swimming class.
* * * * *
Soon, we had boxes lying everywhere, filled with clothes and towels and glasses wrapped in newspaper. Bit by bit, we cleared the rooms, leaving only what we needed right now. The dining-room table staggered on a bunched-up rug, our bureaus inched toward the front door like patient cows. On the calendar in the kitchen, my mother marked off the days until we moved, but the only days I thought about were Tuesdays—Awfuldays. Nothing else was real except the too fast passing of time, moving toward each Tuesday… away from Tuesday… toward Tuesday…
And it seemed to me that this would go on forever, that Tuesdays would come forever and I would be forever trapped by the side of the pool, the Other June whispering Buffalo Brain Fish Eyes Turkey Nose into my ear, while she ground her elbow into my side and smiled her square smile at the swimming teacher.
And then it ended. It was the last day of swimming class. The last Tuesday. We had all passed our tests, and, as if in celebration, the Other June only pinched me twice. “And now,” our swimming teacher said, “all of you are ready for the Advanced Class, which starts in just one month. I have a sign-up slip here. Please put your name down before you leave.” Everyone but me crowded around. I went to the locker room and pulled on my clothes as fast as possible. The Other June burst through the door just as I was leaving. “Goodbye,” I yelled, “good riddance to bad trash!” Before she could pinch me again, I ran past her and then ran all the way home, singing, “Goodbye… goodbye… goodbye, good riddance to bad trash!”
* * * * *
Later, my mother carefully untied the blue ribbon around my swimming class diploma. “Look at this! Well, isn’t this wonderful! You are on your way, you might turn into an Olympic swimmer, you never know what life will bring.”
“I don’t want to take more lessons.”
“Oh, sweetie, it’s great to be a good swimmer.” But then, looking into my face, she said, “No, no, no, don’t worry, you don’t have to.”
The next morning, I woke up hungry for the first time in weeks. No more swimming class. No more Baddays and Awfuldays. No more Tuesdays of the Other June. In the kitchen, I made hot cocoa to go with my mother’s corn muffins. “It’s Wednesday, Mom,” I said, stirring the cocoa. “My favorite day.”
“Since when?”
“Since this morning.” I turned on the radio so I could hear the announcer tell the time, the temperature, and the day.
Thursday for breakfast I made cinnamon toast, Friday my mother made pancakes, and on Saturday, before we moved, we ate the last slices of bread and cleaned out the peanut butter jar.
“Some breakfast,” Tilly said. “Hello, you must be June.” She shook my hand. She was a friend of my mother’s from work; she wore big hoop earrings, sandals, and a skirt as dazzling as a rainbow. She came in a truck with John to help us move our things.
John shouted cheerfully at me, “So you’re moving.” An enormous man with a face covered with little brown bumps. Was he afraid his voice wouldn’t travel the distance from his mouth to my ear? “You looking at my moles?” he shouted, and he heaved our big green flowered chair down the stairs. “Don’t worry, they don’t bite. Ha, ha, ha!”
Behind him came my mother and Tilly balancing a bureau between them, and behind them I carried a lamp and the round, flowered Mexican tray that was my mother’s favorite. She had found it at a garage sale and said it was as close to foreign travel as we would ever get.
The night before, we had loaded our car, stuffing in bags and boxes until there was barely room for the two of us. But it was only when we were in the car, when we drove past Abdo’s Grocery, where they always gave us credit, when I turned for a last look at our street—it was only then that I understood we were truly going to live somewhere else, in another apartment, in another place mysteriously called Blue Hill Street.
Tilly’s truck followed our car.
“Oh, I’m so excited,” my mother said. She laughed. “You’d think we were going across the country.”
Our old car wheezed up a long, steep hill. Blue Hill Street. I looked from one side to the other, trying to see everything.
My mother drove over the crest of the hill. “And now—ta da!—our new home.”
“Which house? Which one?” I looked out the window and what I saw was the Other June. She was sprawled on the stoop of a pink house, lounging back on her elbows, legs outspread, her jaws working on a wad of gum. I slid down into the seat, but it was too late. I was sure she had seen me.
My mother turned into a driveway next to a big white building with a tiny porch. She leaned on the steering wheel. “See that window there, that’s our living-room window… and that one over there, that’s your bedroom…”
We went into the house, down a dim, cool hall. In our new apartment, the wooden floors clicked under our shoes, and my mother showed me everything. Her voice echoed in the empty rooms. I followed her around in a daze. Had I imagined seeing the Other June?
Maybe I’d seen another girl who looked like her. A double. That could happen.
“Ho yo, where do you want this chair?” John appeared in the doorway. We brought in boxes and bags and beds and stopped only to eat pizza and drink orange juice from the carton.
“June’s so quiet, do you think she’ll adjust all right?” I heard Tilly say to my mother.
“Oh, definitely. She’ll make a wonderful adjustment. She’s just getting used to things.”
But I thought that if the Other June lived on the same street as I did, I would never get used to things.
* * * * *
That night I slept in my own bed, with my own pillow and blanket, but with floors that creaked in strange voices and walls with cracks I didn’t recognize. I didn’t feel either happy or unhappy. It was as if I were waiting for something.
Monday, when the principal of Blue Hill Street School left me in Mr. Morrisey’s classroom, I knew what I’d been waiting for. In that room full of strange kids, there was one person I knew. She smiled her square smile, raised her hand, and said, “She can sit next to me, Mr. Morrisey.”
“Very nice of you, June M. OK, June T., take your seat. I’ll try not to get you two Junes mixed up.”
I sat down next to her. She pinched my arm. “Good riddance to bad trash,” she mocked.
I was back in the Tuesday swimming class, only now it was worse, because every day would be Awfulday. The pinching had already started. Soon, I knew, on the playground and in the halls, kids would pass me, grinning. “Hiya, Fish Eyes.”
The Other June followed me around during recess that day, droning in my ear, “You are my slave, you must do everything I say, I am your master, say it, say, ‘Yes, master, you are my master.’”
I pressed my lips together, clapped my hands over my ears, but without hope. Wasn’t it only a matter of time before I said the hateful words?
“How was school?” my mother said that night.
“OK.”
She put a pile of towels in a bureau drawer. “Try not to be sad about missing your old friends, sweetie; there’ll be new ones.”
The next morning, the Other June was waiting for me when I left the house. “Did your mother get you that blouse in the garbage dump?” She butted me, shoving me against a tree. “Don’t you speak anymore, Fish Eyes?” Grabbing my chin in her hands, she pried open my mouth. “Oh, ha ha, I thought you lost your tongue.”
We went on to school. I sank down into my seat, my head on my arms. “June T., are you all right?” Mr. Morrisey asked. I nodded. My head was almost too heavy to lift.
The Other June went to the pencil sharpener. Round and round she whirled the handle. Walking back, looking at me, she held the three sharp pencils like three little knives.
Someone knocked on the door. Mr. Morrisey went out into the hall. Paper planes burst into the air, flying from desk to desk. Someone turned on a transistor radio. And the Other June, coming closer, smiled and licked her lips like a cat sleepily preparing to gulp down a mouse.
I remembered my dream of kicking her, punching, biting her like a dog.
Then my mother spoke quickly in my ear: Turn the other cheek, my Junie; smile at the world, and the world’ll surely smile back.
But I had turned the other cheek and it was slapped. I had smiled and the world hadn’t smiled back. I couldn’t run home as fast as my feet would take me. I had to stay in school—and in school there was the Other June. Every morning, there would be the Other June, and every afternoon, and every day, all day, there would be the Other June.
She frisked down the aisle, stabbing the pencils in the air toward me. A boy stood up on his desk and bowed. “My fans,” he said, “I greet you.” My arm twitched and throbbed, as if the Other June’s pencils had already poked through the skin. She came closer, smiling her Tuesday smile.
“No,” I whispered, “no.” The word took wings and flew me to my feet, in front of the Other June. “Noooooo.” It flew out of my mouth into her surprised face.
The boy on the desk turned toward us. “You said something, my devoted fans?”
“No,” I said to the Other June. “Oh, no! No. No. No. No more.” I pushed away the hand that held the pencils.
The Other June’s eyes opened, popped wide like the eyes of somebody in a cartoon. It made me laugh. The boy on the desk laughed, and then the other kids were laughing, too.
“No,” I said again, because it felt so good to say it. “No, no, no, no.” I leaned toward the Other June, put my finger against her chest. Her cheeks turned red, she squawked something—it sounded like “Eeeraaghyou!”—and she stepped back. She stepped away from me.
The door banged, the airplanes disappeared, and Mr. Morrisey walked to his desk. “OK. OK. Let’s get back to work. Kevin Clark, how about it?” Kevin jumped off the desk, and Mr. Morrisey picked up a piece of chalk. “all right, class—” He stopped and looked at me and the Other June. “You two Junes, what’s going on there?”
I tried it again. My finger against her chest. Then the words. “No—more.” And she stepped back another step. I sat down at my desk.
“June M.,” Mr. Morrisey said.
She turned around, staring at him with that big-eyed cartoon look. After a moment she sat down at her desk with a loud slapping sound.
Even Mr. Morrisey laughed.
And sitting at my desk, twirling my braids, I knew this was the last Tuesday of the Other June.
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