Tig
Tig
My room had a rocking chair. I liked seats that moved. They were way less boring than seats that didn’t.
The bed stood high off the floor. It had a fancy wooden headboard. It thought it was really something special. It didn’t know it did the same job as a mattress on the floor. If it did, it wouldn’t look so smug.
The social worker had asked if there was anything I wanted to take from the old house. I took a dog breed poster and my favorite cushion. The dog breed poster we’d found in a recycling bin and the sequined cushion my mother had bought to say sorry.
“I can wash that if you like,” said Uncle Scott.
The sympathy on his face leaked out his pores and dripped on the floor. I put on my imaginary boots and splashed in his pity puddle. He got drenched. I stayed dry. My yellow raincoat matched my boots.
After being rescued by police from an abandoned house where she survived alone for four months, 11-year-old Tig (short for Tigger, a reference to the jumpy A. A. Milne character whose movements she copied as a toddler) comes to live with her Uncle Scott and his partner Manny in their idyllic home. Tig is traumatized, in ways she can’t even begin to unpack, having been abused physically and mentally by her mother’s boyfriend, Eddie, and abandoned by her alcoholic mother. Scott and Manny are loving and accepting of Tig, but often Tig’s response is to lash out. She takes comfort in her imaginary older brother Peter, who first appeared to her at age six after Eddie choked her—a memory that Tig represses until near the end of the story. Things begin to turn around when Uncle Scott and Manny agree that Tig can adopt a dog.
Smith, the author of The Agony of Bun O’Keefe (www.cmreviews.ca/cm/vol23/no34/theagonyofbunokeefe.html), writes here for a younger audience but with only slightly less painful details. Her writing is succinct and often heartbreaking to read, yet beautifully phrased, filled with believable and memorable characters and reminiscent of Kate DiCamillo’s finest work. The contrast between Uncle Scott (dependable, loving, yet unsure about how to best help his niece) and his younger sister (Tig’s mother) is diametric; likewise, the ways in which Manny’s strengths (cooking, especially grilled cheese, making doll houses, and understanding the importance of a dog to Tig’s healing process) complement Scott’s and enable the pair to eventually break through the walls Tig has erected around herself.
Tig is not an easy read (keep tissues nearby), but Smith lessens some of the distress with clever word play. Tig is always looking up big words in the dictionary which she then uses in comical example sentences; and the adopted dog, Guten Morgen, himself previously mistreated, often acts out in ways that parallel Tig’s misbehaviors.
All in all, Tig is important and unforgettable.
Kay Weisman is a former youth services librarian at West Vancouver Memorial Library and the author of If You Want to Visit a Sea Garden (www.cmreviews.ca/node/1693).