“I don’t suppose you have any unadulterated vegetables?”
“Unadulterated?” Mrs. Finney said.
“It means unspoiled, without any butter or stuff added—”
“I know what it means, Phoebe,” Mrs. Finney said.
“I can eat unadulterated vegetables. Or if you have any red bean salad handy—or stuffed cabbage leaves? Broccoli and lentil casserole? Macaroni and cheese? Vegetarian spaghetti?”
One by one, everyone at the table turned to stare at Phoebe. Mrs. Finney got up from the table and went into the kitchen. We heard her opening and closing cupboards. She returned to the doorway. “Muesli?” she asked Phoebe. “Can you eat muesli?”
Phoebe said, “Oh yes, I eat muesli. For breakfast.”
Mrs. Finney disappeared again and returned with a bowl of dried-up muesli and a bottle of milk.
“For dinner?” Phoebe asked. She gazed down at the bowl. “I usually eat it with yogurt on it—not milk,” she said.
Mrs. Finney turned to Mr. Finney. “Dear, did you buy yogurt this week?”
“Blast it! How could I forget the yogurt?”
Phoebe ate her dried-up muesli without milk. All through dinner, I kept thinking of Bybanks, and what it was like when we went to my grandparents’ house for dinner. There were always tons of people—relatives and neighbors—and lots of confusion. It was a friendly sort of confusion, and it was like that at the Finneys’. Tommy spilled two glasses of milk, Dennis punched Dougie, and Dougie punched him back. Maggie socked Mary Lou, and Mary Lou flipped a bean at her. Maybe this is what my mother had wanted, I thought. A house full of children and confusion.
On the way home, I said, “Didn’t everyone seem unusually quiet after dinner?”
Phoebe said, “It was probably because of all that cholesterol sitting heavily on their stomachs.”
I asked Phoebe if she wanted to spend the weekend at my house. I’m not sure why I did this. It was an impulse. I had not yet invited anyone to my house. She said, “I guess. That is, if my mother is still—” She coughed. “Let’s go ask my dad.”
In the kitchen, her father was washing the dishes. He was wearing a frilly apron over his white shirt and tie. “You’re supposed to rinse the soap off,” Phoebe said. “And is that cold water you’re using? You’re supposed to use really, really hot water. To kill the germs.”
He didn’t look at Phoebe. I thought maybe he was embarrassed to be caught doing the dishes.
“You’ve probably washed that plate enough,” Phoebe said. He had been rubbing it around and around with the dishcloth. He stopped and stared down at the plate. I could practically see the birds of sadness pecking at his head, but Phoebe was busy swatting at her own birds.
“Did you call all of Mom’s friends?” Phoebe asked.
“Phoebe,” he said. “I’m looking into it. I’m a little tired. Do you mind if we don’t discuss this now?”
“But don’t you think we should call the police?”
“Phoebe—”
“Sal wants to know if I can spend the weekend at her house.”
“Of course,” he said.
“But what if Mom comes back while I’m at Sal’s? Will you call me? Will you let me know?”
“Of course.”
“Or what if she telephones? Maybe I should stay home. I think I should be here if she calls.”
“If she telephones, I’ll have her call you at Sal’s,” he said.
“But if we don’t have any news by tomorrow,” Phoebe said, “we should definitely call the police. We’ve waited too long already. What if she’s tied up somewhere and waiting for us to rescue her?”
At home that night, I was working on my mythology report when Phoebe called. She was whispering. When she went downstairs to say good night to her father, he was sitting in his favorite chair staring at the television, but the television wasn’t on. If she did not know her father better, she would have thought he had been crying. “But my father never cries,” she said.
26
SACRIFICES
The weekend was unbelievably long. Phoebe arrived with her suitcase on Saturday morning. I said, “Golly, Phoebe, are you planning to spend a month here?” When I took her up to my room, she asked if she was going to be sharing the room with me. “Why no, Phoebe,” I said. “We built a whole new extension just for you.”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic,” she said.
“I was only teasing, Phoebe.”
“But there’s only one bed.”
“Good powers of observation, Phoebe.”
“I thought you might sleep downstairs on the couch. People usually try to make their guests comfortable.” She looked around my room. “We’re going to be a little crowded in here, aren’t we?”
I did not answer. I did not bash her over the head. I knew why she was acting this way. She sat down on my bed and bounced on it a couple times. “I guess I’ll have to get used to your lumpy mattress, Sal. Mine is very firm. A firm mattress is much better for your back. That’s why I have such good posture. The reason you slouch is probably because of this mattress.”
“Slouch?” I said.
“Well, you do slouch, Sal. Look in the mirror sometime.” She mashed on my mattress. “Don’t you know anything about having guests? You’re supposed to give your guests the best that you have. You’re supposed to make some sacrifices, Sal. That’s what my mother always says. She says, ‘In life, you have to make some sacrifices.’”
“I suppose your mother made a great sacrifice when she took off,” I said. I couldn’t help it. She was really getting on my nerves.
“My mother didn’t ‘take off.’ Someone kidnapped her. She is undergoing tremendous sacrifice at this very moment in time.” She started unpacking. “Where shall I put my things?” When I opened up the closet, she said, “What a mess! Do you have some extra hangers? Am I supposed to leave my clothes jammed up in the suitcase all weekend? A guest is supposed to have the best. It is only courtesy, Sal. My mother says—”
“I know, I know—sacrifice.”
Ten minutes later, Phoebe mentioned that she was getting a headache. “It might even be a migraine. My aunt’s foot doctor used to get migraines, only they turned out not to be migraines at all. Do you know what they were?”
“What?” I said.
“A brain tumor.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yes,” Phoebe said. “In her brain.”
“Well, of course it would be in her brain, Phoebe. I figured that out when you said it was a brain tumor.”
“I don’t think that’s a particularly sympathetic way to speak to someone with a migraine or potential brain tumor.”
In my book was a picture of a tree. I drew a round head with curly hair, put a rope around the neck, and attached it to that tree.
It went on and on like that. I hated her that day. I didn’t care how upset she was about her mother, I really hated her, and I wanted her to leave. I wondered if this was how my father felt when I threw all those temper tantrums. Maybe he hated me for a while.
After dinner, we walked over to Mary Lou’s. Mr. and Mrs. Finney were rolling around on the front lawn in a pile of leaves with Tommy and Dougie, and Ben was sitting on the porch. I sat down beside him while Phoebe went looking for Mary Lou.
Ben said, “Phoebe’s driving you crazy, isn’t she?” I liked the way he looked right in your eyes when he talked to you.
“Extensively,” I said.
“I bet Phoebe is lonely.”
I don’t know what came over me, but I almost reached up and touched his face. My heart was thumping so loudly that I thought he would be able to hear it. I went into the house. From the back window, I watched Mrs. Finney climb a ladder placed against the garage. On the roof, she took off her jacket and spread it out. A few minutes later, Mr. Finney came around the back of the house and climbed up the ladder. He took off his jacket and spread it out next to her. He lay down on the roof and put his arm around her. He
kissed her.
On the roof, in the wide open air, they lay there kissing each other. It made me feel peculiar. They reminded me of my parents, before the stillborn baby, before the operation.
Ben came into the kitchen. As he reached into the cupboard for a glass, he stopped and looked at me. Again I had that odd sensation that I wanted to touch his face, right there on his cheek, in that soft spot. I was afraid my hand might just lift up and drift over to him if I was not careful. It was most peculiar.
“Guess where Mary Lou is?” Phoebe said when she came in. “She’s with Alex. On a date.”
I had never been on a date. Neither, I assumed, had Phoebe.
That night at my house, I pulled the sleeping bag out of the closet and spread it on the floor. Phoebe looked at it as if it were a spider. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll sleep in it.” I crawled in and pretended to fall asleep immediately. I heard Phoebe get into bed.
A little later, my father came into the room. “Phoebe?” he said. “Is something the matter?”
“No,” she said.
“I thought I heard someone crying. Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
I felt bad for Phoebe. I knew I should get up and try to be nice, but I remembered when I had felt like that, and I knew that sometimes you just wanted to be alone with the birds of sadness. Sometimes you had to cry by yourself.
That night I dreamed that I was sitting on the grass peering through a pair of binoculars. Far off in the distance, my mother was climbing up a ladder. She kept climbing and climbing. It was a thumpingly tall ladder. She couldn’t see me, and she never came down. She just kept on going.
27
PANDORA’S BOX
The next day, as I was helping Phoebe lug her suitcase home, I said, “Phoebe, I know you’ve been upset lately—”
“I have not been upset lately,” she said.
“Sometimes, Phoebe, I like you a lot—”
“Why, thank you.”
“—but sometimes, Phoebe, I feel like dumping your cholesterol-free body out the window.”
She did not have a chance to respond, because we were at her house, and she was more interested in besieging her father with questions. “Any news? Did Mom come back? Did she call?”
“Sort of,” he said. “She phoned Mrs. Cadaver—”
“Mrs. Cadaver? Whatever for? Why would she—”
“Phoebe, calm down. I don’t know why she phoned Mrs. Cadaver. I haven’t been able to speak to Mrs. Cadaver myself yet. She isn’t home. She left a note here.” He showed it to Phoebe: Norma called to say she is okay. Beneath Mrs. Cadaver’s signature was a P.S. saying that Mrs. Cadaver would be away until Monday.
“I don’t believe that Mom called Mrs. Cadaver. Mrs. Cadaver is making it up. Mrs. Cadaver probably killed her and chopped her up. I’m calling the police.”
They had a huge argument, but at last Phoebe fizzled out. Her father said he had been calling everyone he could think of, to see if her mother had indicated where she might be going. He would continue calling tomorrow, he promised, and he would speak with Mrs. Cadaver. If he did not receive a letter—or a direct phone call—from her mother by Wednesday, he would call the police.
Phoebe came out on the porch with me as I was leaving. She said, “I’ve made a decision. I’m going to call the police. I might even go to the police station. I don’t have to wait until Wednesday. I can go whenever I want.”
That night she phoned me. She was whispering again. “It seems so quiet here. I don’t know what is the matter with me. I was lying on my bed and I can’t sleep. My bed’s too hard.”
On Monday, Phoebe gave her oral report on Pandora. She began in a quivering voice. “For some reason, Ben already talked about my topic, Pandora, when he did his report on Prometheus. However, Ben made a few little mistakes about Pandora.”
Everyone turned around to stare at Ben. “I did not,” he said.
“Yes, you did.” Phoebe’s lip trembled. “Pandora was not sent to man as a punishment, but as a reward—”
“Was not,” Ben said.
“Was too,” Phoebe said. “Zeus decided to give man a present, since man seemed lonely down there on Earth, with only the animals to keep him company. So Zeus made a sweet and beautiful woman, and then Zeus invited all the gods to dinner. It was a very civilized dinner, with matching plates.”
Mary Lou and Ben exchanged an eyebrow message.
“Zeus asked the gods to give the woman presents—to make her feel like a welcome guest.” Phoebe glanced at me. “They gave her wonderful things: a fancy shawl, a silver dress, beauty—”
Ben interrupted. “I thought you said she was already beautiful.”
“They gave her more beauty. Are you satisfied?” Her lip was no longer trembling, but she was blushing. “The gods also gave her the ability to sing, the power of persuasion, a gold crown, flowers, and many truly wonderful things such as that. Because of all these gifts, Zeus named her Pandora, which means ‘the gift of all.’”
Phoebe was getting into it. “There were two other gifts that I have not mentioned yet. One of them was curiosity. That is why all women are curious, by the way, because it was a gift given to the very first woman.”
Ben said, “I wish she had been given the gift of silence.”
“Last, there was a beautiful box, covered in gold and jewels, and this is very important—she was forbidden to open the box.”
Ben said, “Then why did they give it to her?”
He was beginning to irritate Phoebe, you could tell. She said, “That’s what I’m telling you. It was a present.”
“But why did they give her a present that she couldn’t open?”
“I-do-not-know. It’s just in the story. As I was saying, Pandora was not supposed to open the box, but because she had been given so much curiosity, she really, really, really wanted to know what was inside, so one day she opened the box.”
“I knew it,” Ben said. “I knew she was going to open the box the minute that you said she was not supposed to open it.”
“Inside the box were all the evils in the world, such as hatred, envy, plagues, sickness, and cholesterol. There were brain tumors and sadness, lunatics and kidnapping and murders”—she glanced at Mr. Birkway before rushing on—“and all that kind of thing. Pandora tried to close the lid when she saw all the horrible things that were coming out of it, but she could not get it closed, and that is why there are all these evils in the world. There was only one good thing in the box.”
“What was it?” Ben asked.
“As I was about to explain, the only good thing in the box was Hope, and that is why, even though there are many evils in the world, there is still a little hope.” She held up a picture of Pandora opening up the box and a whole shebang of gremlins floating out. Pandora looked frightened.
That night I kept thinking about Pandora’s box. I wondered why someone would put a good thing such as Hope in a box with sickness and kidnapping and murder. It was fortunate that it was there, though. If not, people would have the birds of sadness nesting in their hair all the time, because of nuclear war and the greenhouse effect and bombs and stabbings and lunatics.
There must have been another box with all the good things in it, like sunshine and love and trees and all that. Who had the good fortune to open that one, and was there one bad thing down there in the bottom of the good box? Maybe it was Worry. Even when everything seems fine and good, I worry that something will go wrong and change everything.
My mother, my father, and I all seemed fine and happy at our house until the baby died. Could you actually say that the baby died, since it had never breathed? Did its birth and death occur at the same moment? Could you die before you were born?
Phoebe’s family had not seemed fine, even before the arrival of the lunatic and the messages, and the disappearance of Mrs. Winterbottom. I knew that Phoebe was convinced that her mother
was kidnapped because it was impossible for Phoebe to imagine that her mother could leave for any other reason. I wanted to call Phoebe and say that maybe her mother had gone looking for something, maybe her mother was unhappy, maybe there was nothing Phoebe could do about it.
When I told this part to Gram and Gramps, Gramps said, “You mean it had nothing to do with Peeby?” They looked at each other. They didn’t say anything, but there was something in that look that suggested I had just said something important. For the first time, it occurred to me that maybe my mother’s leaving had nothing whatsoever to do with me. It was separate and apart. We couldn’t own our mothers.
On that night after Phoebe had given her Pandora report, I thought about the Hope in Pandora’s box. Maybe when everything seemed sad and miserable, Phoebe and I could both hope that something might start to go right.
28
THE BLACK HILLS
When we saw the first sign for the Black Hills, the whispers changed and once again commanded, rush, hurry, rush. We had spent too long in South Dakota. There were only two days left and a long way to go.
“Maybe we should skip the Black Hills,” I said.
“What?” Gramps said. “Skip the Black Hills? Skip Mount Rushmore? We can’t do that.”
“But today’s the eighteenth. It’s the fifth day.”
“Do we have a deadline someone didn’t tell me about?” Gramps asked. “Heck, we’ve got all the time in the—” Gram gave him a look. “I’ve just gotta see these Black Hills,” Gramps said. “We’ll be quick about it, chickabiddy.”
The whispers walloped me: rush, rush, rush. I knew we wouldn’t make it to Idaho in time. I thought about sneaking off while Gram and Gramps were looking at the Black Hills. Maybe I could hitch a ride with someone who drove fast, but the thought of someone speeding, careening around curves—especially the snaking curves down into Lewiston, Idaho, which I had heard so much about—when I thought about that, it made me dizzy and sick.
“Heck,” Gramps said, “I oughta turn this wheel over to you, chickabiddy. All this driving is making me crazy as a loon.”
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