They took many outings, she and Mr. Woodson, and he did try, very patiently, to explain what he called traffic to her. There were corners where everything had to stop, where some people and carriages were allowed to proceed while others waited, but she just couldn’t get the hang of it; she always wanted to cross when it wasn’t her turn.
There were parties for her, where other children were all dressed up in party clothes, as was she; Mrs. Johnson had helped her understand, or at least try to, which clothes were supposed to be worn when. And every piece of clothing was only worn once at the Johnsons’ before it was whisked away to be laundered! By someone else, not Anette! Mrs. Johnson did sit her down and explain that the boarding school wouldn’t quite be the same; she would have a uniform and would wear it for a week before it was laundered, but again she wouldn’t have to do it herself, which seemed fantastic.
At those parties, Anette was simply too shy to play any of the games the other children knew, games they seemed to have been born knowing how to play. What she’d heard someone call “playtime” was not anything she had been acquainted with, except for recess at school. While she wasn’t ashamed of how hard she’d once worked—one of the most amazing things was that her body no longer got stiff and achy when she sat too long, her back no longer throbbed, she didn’t get headaches anymore—she was sometimes filled with a sadness that she had missed out on what seemed an important part of childhood. At least childhood for girls and boys who had grown up in Omaha.
The other children’s screaming—city children were definitely more excitable than prairie children—did make her ears ache, though; she hadn’t been prepared for how loud the city was compared to the prairie. All the voices in the streets and the wheels of the carriages and wagons and cable cars, outdoor clocks with bells that chimed, and not all at the same time, harnesses on storefront doors that jingled when the doors opened and closed, jangly music coming out of buildings Mr. Woodson wouldn’t take her to, people shouting, selling things on every corner—
Even Mother Pedersen at her most furious couldn’t have made her voice heard over all that noise.
One day they went to what Mr. Woodson called a circus—P. T. Barnum’s circus, he said proudly, he’d seen it back in New York at something called the Hippodrome. It was all under a big tent, and there was a parade full of the oddest people she’d ever seen—giants and tiny people and what Mr. Woodson pointed out as clowns, people with funny faces who piled out of carriages and jumped around and hit one another with pig bladders and sacks of flour. And then there were the fantastic animals; he pointed them out to her, too. Elephants and tigers and lions, the most beautiful horses she’d ever seen ridden bareback by elegant ladies on their tiptoes. Anette couldn’t take her eyes off those graceful figures, she thought she might cry, she’d never seen such prettiness in her life. She was given peanuts and popcorn and something called spun sugar, and she ate it all and then got sick later, but Mr. Woodson didn’t mind. “That’s how you see your first circus,” he said, tickled. “I got sick the first time I went to one, too.”
He took her to where he worked, once. An enormous building surrounded by even taller ones. It had a big sign at the entrance that read Home of the Omaha Daily Bee. He was very proud when he took her inside and introduced her to so many men and ladies; one man in particular Mr. Woodson called “the boss,” and he was very happy to meet her and shook her hand solemnly and said, “Thank you, little lady, for all the subscription renewals.”
She had no idea what that meant.
Her favorite part was when Mr. Woodson showed her the printing press, a monster of a machine, taller than any man—well, maybe not as tall as the giant she’d seen in the circus—with a huge roll of paper that continuously flowed over the gears and what Mr. Woodson called “the slug,” which seemed to be made of raised metal letters. The paper never stopped rolling over it, and then it was folded and cut into pages and it just kept going and going and going. The sound of it was like what she imagined a dragon sounded like. But she wasn’t afraid of it; she could have looked at that never-ending roll of paper being stamped and folded and cut, over and over, forever. When Mr. Woodson saw how much she liked it, he chortled. “Another Nellie Bly, by God!”