Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks

Cynthia “Say So” Sower puts on a comedy show in front of her classmates during the last five minutes of class time. Her teacher Mrs. Stevens allows her to do so because she knows “this was the only way to keep Cynthia from disrupting and derailing the entire lesson” (137). Mrs. Stevens even secretly enjoys Cynthia’s jokes as they “reminded her of old comedians on the black-and-white TV shows her grandmother used to watch when she was a child” (139).

Cynthia’s mother works during the day and attends school in the evening. Although “she was Cynthia’s hero,” Cynthia considers her grandfather “her superhero” (141). Cynthia is named after her grandfather whose name is Cinder. He owns a liquor store and would “hold court right there in the middle of the store” on a wooden crate he would flip over as a makeshift stage (141). Cynthia has inherited her grandfather’s sense of humor and talent for making jokes. Cynthia describes her grandfather as being both “a hardheaded, hardhanded, hard-talking man” while also being “soft enough to hold baby Cynthia and stare at her and laugh and laugh like she was the greatest joke ever told” (142). He nicknames baby Cynthia “Say So” for her noisy babbling.

Her grandfather dates “a gray-haired, lipsticked, cigarette-smoking mail woman named Miss Fran” who laughs at her grandfather’s jokes and “would stick stamps on Cynthia’s chubby cheeks and forehead” and threaten to mail her off to the imaginary Ookabooka Land (142). Miss Fran dies when Cynthia is seven. Cynthia is sad, “but her sadness was nothing compared to Cinder’s” (143). Soon after Miss Fran’s death, Cinder sells the liquor store, which is soon torn down and replaced with a playground. A small stage is erected in the playground with a plaque that honors Cinder’s wooden crate makeshift stage; the stage is called Cinder’s Block. Remembering her grandfather’s great sense of humor, Cynthia hopes “that maybe he’d step up on it someday. Crack a joke or two” (143). Unfortunately, Cinder begins to forget things like “how to turn on the radio. How to work the microwave” (143). Cynthia helps her grandfather in these moments of forgetfulness.

As Cinder’s forgetfulness grows more concerning, Cynthia and her mother move into Cinder’s two-bedroom apartment and share one bedroom. Cynthia often sleeps on the couch and dreams of making her mother laugh. Due to her mother’s busy schedule and overwhelming number of responsibilities, Cynthia instead gets by on making her classmates laugh for five minutes at the end of each math class.

In present day, Cynthia hands out hand-drawn flyers to a comedy show at Cinder’s Block in the playground outside of her apartment building. Cynthia takes a shortcut home to prepare for her show at 3:33 pm that afternoon. Part of this shortcut home takes Cynthia through a cemetery where she briefly stops to pick up cigarette butts for her grandfather’s collection. Cynthia finds one cigarette butt with “lipstick kissed [on] the end of it” sitting on top of Miss Fran’s grave (148). Cynthia takes it for her grandfather and rushes off to her show at Cinder’s Block.

She arrives at 3:31 PM and finds only one little girl in the playground. As she waits, Cynthia thinks of new jokes based off a pigeon she observes in the playground. At 3:33 PM, no one arrives to attend Cynthia’s show. Cynthia reveals that people rarely come to her shows. Cynthia accounts their absence to other responsibilities or to the weird start time of her shows that might make them think “the whole 3:33 thing was just a part of her act. Part of the joke” (149). Cynthia unveils the reason for the oddly specific start time. It is for her mother whom she hopes may one day decide to skip her evening class, “take a day off […] give herself a break” and watch Cynthia perform (149). Before leaving the playground, Cynthia writes down her new jokes and places the joke inside an envelope that she places a stamp on. Before leaving to go up to her apartment, Cynthia gives the young girl in the playground a stamp on the back of her hand, just as Miss Fran did to her when she was little.

Cynthia takes the envelope, goes up to her apartment, and calls for her grandfather to receive the “mail” she has written. She finds Cinder “scribbling in his notepad,” and “paper balls littered the floor” (151). She notices that some of the papers feature her handwriting and come from the similar envelopes to the one she has created today. Cinder tells Cynthia that he is writing her some new jokes to take to school and asks her how her performance went in math class. Cynthia presents her grandfather with the cigarette butt she discovered at Miss Fran’s grave. He adds it to a bottle that holds his collection. She also hands him the “mail” she has written. She knows that her grandfather will read the “mail” later, “read it, then forget he’d read it, and believe he wrote it” (152). Cynthia will tell this joke at school and “come home and tell him his jokes were working. His jokes were still cracking people up” (152).

Before leaving his room, Cynthia makes a reference to Ookabooka Land and they share a tender moment before they both “split open and laughter poured out of them” (153).