This World We Live In

by Susan Beth Pfeffer

  Mom and Syl came back, and we put the trophy in the bag first, and then the contract around it, and stuffed in Syl's hair.

  "There should be a shovel in the garage," Mom said. "Miranda, get it, and you girls can bury everything by the window. I'll stay inside where it's warm."

  "Join us--" Syl said, and she stopped in such a funny way, Mom and I both understood the problem immediately.

  "Call me Laura," Mom said. "And thank you, but I'd just as soon watch from here."

  I went to the garage and got the shovel, and then Syl came out with the bag. We picked a spot where it would be

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  easy for Mom to see us, and we took turns shoveling. All the snow is melted now and the ground is soft, so it didn't take much effort. Besides, I folded the bag over, so it wasn't very big.I thought about how hard it had been for me to pray by the mound of bodies, and I realized if I couldn't pray there, I didn't want to pray to a goddess. "You say something," I said to Syl. "I'll pray silently."

  "All right," Syl said. "Oh, Diana, goddess of the moon. Take our offerings and return peace and wholeness to our planet."

  I thought about the earth then, really thought about it, the tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanoes, all the horrors I haven't witnessed but have changed my life, the lives of everyone I know, all the people I'll never know. I thought about life without the sun, the moon, stars, without flowers and warm days in May. I thought about a year ago and all the good things I'd taken for granted and all the unbearable things that had replaced those simple blessings. And even though I hated the thought of crying in front of Syl, tears streamed down my face.

  "That's good," she said, gently wiping my cheeks. "Your tears are the best offering of all."

  May 19

  It was an awful day.It started raining last night and it never stopped. It was cold and windy, and the combination made me realize we haven't had electricity in a week or more. All those lovely electric heaters are useless.

  We had no idea when Matt and Jon would get back, but we knew they'd have a hard trip because of the rain. Mom

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  checked on the cellar to see if it was flooded, and she cursed so loudly, Syl and I could hear her from the sunroom.Horton's hardly eaten since Jon left, but in spite of that he managed to throw up a hairball. Even though we've been cooking the shad on the barbecue outside, the sunroom stinks of fish. Two aspirin did nothing for my headache.

  Matt and Jon got in around 4:00. Last week they brought back two huge bags of fish and a sister-in-law. This time all they had was a half bag.

  "We stayed as long as we could," Jon said. "There was hardly any fish. Everyone was gone."

  "Put on some dry clothes," Mom said. "We'll be fine with what you caught."

  But we all knew we wouldn't be. We'll go through the fish in no time, and then it'll be five people with food for four. I can tell myself over and over that I'm used to being hungry, that it isn't so bad, but it is bad and I hate it. I just hate being cold and lonely and dirty more.

  The first thing Matt did was go to Syl and hug her so hard I thought she'd choke. "I kept thinking what if you're not here," he said. "What if you left while I was gone?"

  "Why would I do that?" Syl asked, which wasn't exactly the same as "I love you and need you and will never ever leave you."

  Matt pulled away from her and then he noticed. "What did you do to your hair?" he said. "Mom, did you make Syl cut her hair off? Was it so she should look like shit, the same as the rest of us?"

  "No, Matt," I said. "Mom tried to talk her out of it." It didn't seem like the right time to explain about offerings to the moon goddess Diana.

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  "I was tired of it," Syl said. "It was a nuisance to keep clean. Besides, this way I look like I belong.""You don't belong," Matt said. "Don't you understand? I love you because you're different from everything I've been stuck with this past year."

  "I'm sick of you, too!" Jon shouted. "I don't want to be in this stupid family, either!"

  "Matt, you go upstairs," Mom said. "You and Syl both. Take your fight to your room. And change into dry clothes while you're up there."

  "Mom, you can't keep telling me what we should do," Matt said.

  "Yes, I can," Mom said. "As long as you live under my roof. Now go!"

  Syl took Matt's hand and led him out.

  "Miranda, take the bag offish and put it in the garage," Mom said. "Now."

  "Can I put my coat on first?" I asked.

  "No back talk!" Mom said. "Get out."

  I grabbed the pathetic half-full bag of smelly, disgusting, uncleaned fish and went out into the cold, dreary, rainy day. When I got to the garage (which in all honesty took about ten seconds), I realized I didn't have the key to the padlock. I was stuck outside in the cold, dreary rain until Mom came to her senses.

  I didn't know how long it would take Matt to fall in love with shorthaired Syl, but my guess was once he noticed her cheekbones, he'd adjust. Which meant the two of them would resume their honeymoon and it'd be a while before we saw them again. Which was fine with me.

  But what I really couldn't be sure of was how long Mom would need to talk with Jon. And even though my

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  head hurt, and I hate shad, and I was cold and wet and hungry and scared, I knew Jon was cold and wet and hungry and scared and really angry at Matt, who must have made his life miserable for the past few days.So I stood against the garage wall with the bag of shad by my side. It began raining really hard then. There was no way to keep dry, and I began to shiver.

  "It'd serve them right if I died of pneumonia," I said to myself, because when you're stuck outside in the rain with half a bag of dead fish, you say stupid things like that out loud.

  I thought about pulling the shad out of the bag and counting them, multiplying by two, for the two remaining bags, then dividing the total by five, so I could guess how short a time it would be before all we'd have were a few cans of vegetables to keep us alive.

  I thought about the mound of bodies.

  I thought about what a really rotten moon goddess Diana had turned out to be.

  I wasn't outside for more than ten minutes, but it was long enough that I was shaking pretty badly by the time Jon came to get me. He was carrying my coat and an umbrella.

  "Mom says she's sorry," he said.

  I knew she was. I knew Matt was, too. I knew we were all sorry. That's what we're best at. Being sorry.

  May 70

  Last night Jon took the plywood off the dining room window and moved his mattress in. He now has the room to himself, although of course we can look in from the sunroom.Mom asked me this morning if I wanted to take the plywood off the kitchen window as well. She said she'd keep

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  sleeping in the sunroom and could check on the woodstove during the night.I considered it, but right now what I really want is to be back in my bedroom. Being there the other day, looking at my skating trophies, made me long for my bed, my chest of drawers, my windows.

  The dining room has two doors: one from the living room and one from the kitchen. But we're never in the living room, since that's where we put all the dining room furniture. And there's no reason to go from the kitchen to the dining room, except for Jon to get in there.

  But you have to cross the kitchen to get to the downstairs bathroom and the sunroom, and even the cellar stairs. And it's the kitchen. We keep our food there and plates and silverware.

  The dining room may only have fake privacy. But the kitchen has no privacy whatsoever.

  So I'm going to keep sharing the sunroom with Mom, at least for the time being. We moved our mattresses away from the back door, and then we moved the clothesline into the kitchen so the sunroom feels less like a dorm and more like a family room.

  It's rained on and off since Matt and Jon got home. It's not like I expect to see sunlight, but I'd like it if things dried out.

  May 21

  Just what we needed. A cold spell. The rain turned in
to snow last night, and there are a couple of fresh inches on the ground."Sometimes it snows in the spring," Mom said. "It'll melt soon enough."

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  Matt and Syl took advantage of the snow day by spending it in Matt's room. Occasionally there were shrieks.Jon reorganized his baseball cards. Good thing we hadn't sacrificed Mickey Mantle.

  I looked out onto the backyard and pictured the mound of bodies covered once again with snow.

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  ***

  Chapter 7 May 22

  Matt and Syl came back from town, and Matt was in a much better mood. It couldn't have been easy biking through the snow, but he didn't care."The mayor was in, and he performed the ceremony," Matt said, waving a marriage certificate. "Syl and I are now married in the eyes of the great state of Pennsylvania."

  "You should have come with us," Syl said. "All of you."

  "Maybe next time," Mom said.

  "And look," Matt said. "Five bags of food!"

  I did look. I looked even harder as Mom and I put the food away. There were a few cans more than last week, but I think what Mr. Danworth did was give us our standard amount and put it in five bags instead of four.

  Mom decided, since the fish has been cleaned and salted and is already stinking up the garage, that we should only have it a couple of days a week and then just two shad for the five of us. I'm glad, even though I know she's doing it because she's scared of what's going to happen when we run out and when we no longer get any cans from town.

  What will become of us then? Where will we go? Will Matt and Syl leave by themselves and I'll never see him again?

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  I know I should be happy for him, but with everything I'm scared of, I think I'm scared most of losing Matt forever.

  May 23

  "Did Horton eat last week?" Jon asked me. "When I was away?""A little," I said.

  "He isn't eating very much," Jon said.

  "Cats eat less in the spring," I said. "Horton always loses his winter weight."

  "Yeah, but he's really getting thin," Jon said.

  I know he's right, but there's nothing we can do about it. When Horton feels like eating, he'll eat.

  May 24

  We spent the day drying the cellar out, pail by pail. The electricity came back on for the first time in weeks, and Matt got the sump pump running.Mom acted like this was Christmas and New Year's. I'm surprised she didn't burst out singing.

  May 25

  Matt and Jon are back chopping firewood. As far as I'm concerned, that means the official end of the school year. Nothing good happened to Romeo or Juliet.

  May 26

  The third day in a row with electricity. All three days the electricity's been on for hours, and last night it came back on for a few hours as well.We don't get any TV reception, and the news on the radio remains bad, but Mom announced that we should

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  spring clean. So that's how she and Syl and I spent the day. The menfolk chopped wood. Us women vacuumed and scrubbed.Matt came home exhausted, but when he saw how clean things were, his mood brightened. "Syl, you're fantastic," he said.

  Syl worked every bit as hard as Mom and me but no harder.

  Sometimes I'd like to kill him.

  May 27

  I can't remember the last time I was in a good mood. It feels like all I do is crab and mope and feel sorry for myself.Since the house is as close to spotless as it's ever going to get and Romeo and Juliet are totally dead, I told Mom I was going house hunting. I think she was glad to get me out of here, so she didn't put up a battle.

  "I'll go, too," Syl said, which wasn't my idea at all. "Laura, do you want to come with us?"

  Thank goodness Mom said no. "See if you can find any more books for me," she said instead.

  I didn't want to go house hunting with Syl. I wanted to spend time by myself. I was looking for a tactful way of explaining that to Syl, but before I could, she said, "Let's split up. We can meet here at noon."

  "How will you find your way back?" I asked. Matt would kill me if I let Syl out of my sight and she wandered off, never to be seen again.

  "I never get lost," Syl said. "I'll be back here. Don't worry."

  I thought about how lost I'd gotten and I've lived here practically my whole life. But Syl's an old married woman

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  and I'm just the kid sister-in-law. And I really did want some alone time. "Fine," I said. "I'll see you, then."We biked together until Schiller Road, and she turned to the left. I kept biking down Howell Bridge Road until the right onto Penn Avenue. Lots of nice houses there. A very literate neighborhood.

  I really do love breaking and entering, and I got positively cheery seeing how the wealthier people in Howell used to live. Not that I found that much we could use, since everybody else must have realized Penn Ave. would have good pickings.

  But there were books for Mom, and one space heater, and best of all, two pairs of blue jeans, price tags still attached, in a size I never could have fit in before. I tried on one pair, and it was a little loose (I guess shad doesn't have that many calories) but definitely wearable. Syl weighs even less than I do, but I figured the second pair could stay up with a belt, and I was sure she'd appreciate having something new to wear.

  I also took a can of ocean breeze room freshener. Now that the temperature's up to 50, Mom's been opening the windows to air the house out, but everything smells like fish anyway. That and a travel-sized bottle of aspirin were my best finds.

  I balanced the handlebars with one trash bag on one side and one on the other and began biking to the rendezvous spot. My mood was much better than it has been in ages. I pictured how pleased Syl would be with my gift of blue jeans, and how Matt would appreciate my generosity, and how Mom would love the books I'd found, and how Jon ... Well, how Jon would turn out to be a secret ocean breeze air freshener freak. Okay, I couldn't think of why

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  anything I brought home would make Jon happy, except maybe the aspirin, for when his muscles ache from chopping wood.Jon's never been easy to shop for.

  Even with nobody to hear me for miles, I didn't burst into song, but I did whistle as I biked. I liked the splashy way the bike rode through puddles on the road. And I had this great realization: I don't have to be happy all the time. With everything that's happened, no one should expect to be happy. But moments of happiness can sneak up on you, like pairs of unworn blue jeans, and you need to cherish them because they're so rare and so unpredictable.

  I even understood why Matt married Syl ten minutes after meeting her. Finding her was rare and unpredictable.

  Of course it hadn't hurt that she had long hair at the time.

  I was whistling "I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair," a song I learned in third grade and haven't heard since, when I rode my bike straight into a pothole and went flying off.

  I landed face down in a puddle, and for an instant I was in a state of total panic. I remembered Mom in the cellar, and I swear I thought I was going to drown.

  What shocked me to my senses was how much I hurt. When you're in that kind of pain, you almost wish you were going to drown in a half inch of water.

  I rolled out of the puddle and moved my fingers, my hands, my arms, my legs, until I was satisfied I hadn't broken any bones. The palms of my hands were scraped and it felt like my knees were, too. My chin and jaw hurt horribly, but I wasn't spitting any teeth out. I was going to be a total-body black-and-blue mark, but no one dies of bruises.

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  I crawled back to the bike. It was lying on its side, but the two trash bags were unbroken, and both tires looked okay.That was when I realized how lucky I'd been the day I got lost. What if I'd had a flat tire? I'd been miles away from home, with no idea where I was, and I would have had to walk back.

  Sometimes I think all I've done for the past month is cry, but that didn't stop me. I sat by my bike, telling myself over and over again how lucky I was, and I sobbed.

  I didn't have to use my swe
atshirt to blow my nose this time, though. I'd found a tissue packet at one of the houses, so when I was up to it, I dug through a trash bag and located it.

  That's progress.

  I was just finishing the tissue packet when Syl rode over. We were south of our meeting spot, but she must have looked around for me, and since I was on Howell Bridge Road when I fell, I couldn't have been too hard to locate.

  "You're a mess," she said, helping me up.

  "I rode into a pothole," I said.

  Syl nodded and straightened up my bike. "Which will be easier?" she asked. "Riding or walking?"

  Either way, it was going to be a mile uphill. "How about letting me die here?" I asked.

  "Laura would never forgive me," Syl said. "Do you need a few more minutes?"

  What I needed was a completely different life. "I'll try walking," I said. "I'm feeling too wobbly for the bike."

  "All right," Syl said. She grabbed the handlebars of her bike with her right hand and the handlebars of mine with her left, and began pulling them behind her, while I hobbled by her side.

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  "You'll be all right," she said after a few of the most agonizing yards I've ever walked. "You couldn't make it this far if anything was broken."Just because I knew it was true didn't make me any happier to hear it.

  "I remember once, months ago," Syl said. "Right after the air got bad. The band I was with--"

  "You were with a band?" I asked.

  "Not that kind of band," Syl said. "When you're on the road, you find bands of people to travel with. By foot, by bike, even by truck."

  "There are trucks?" I said. I couldn't remember the last time I saw a truck.

  "Of course there are," Syl said. "How do you think food gets to Howell? And they're always bringing supplies to the safe towns. They're not supposed to give people lifts, but sometimes they do."

  "Were you with a band of people when you met Matt?" I asked.

  "Just one other person," Syl said. "We'd split off because he wanted to try fishing in the Delaware. Anyway, this happened last summer. We were in South Carolina, I think. There were a half dozen of us, and we saw a man lying on the side of the road. You could tell right away his leg was broken, and he was screaming in pain."