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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF NORMA FOX MAZER
“Mazer is one of the best of the practitioners writing for young people today.” —The New York Times
“It’s not hard to see why Norma Fox Mazer has found a place among the most popular writers for young adults these days.” —The Washington Post Book World
A, My Name Is Ami
“A satisfying novel about the ups and downs of 12-year-old Ami’s relationship with her best friend Mia … The writing is light but consistently sensitive and realistic, as the joys and disasters of the characters flow towards a moving and memorable ending.” —School Library Journal
“The atmosphere and the girls are right on target.… An accurate slice of teenage life.” —Publishers Weekly
B, My Name Is Bunny
“[Bunny] is a likeable, true-to-life character who hates her name and wants to be a professional clown. Her friendship with Emily is the source and depth of this simple story of two teenagers learning about life … [a] story of growth and acceptance with accurate and touching emotions.” —School Library Journal
C, My Name Is Cal
“Deftly sketched … Mazer’s skill in telling the reader more about Cal than he knows about himself, while narrating Cal’s unique, taciturn voice, is especially memorable.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Readers will recognize themselves.” —Booklist
Dear Bill, Remember Me?
A New York Times Notable Book and a Kirkus Choice
“Highly accomplished short stories, variously funny and moving, about ordinary, contemporary girls and their relationships with mothers or boyfriends.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Eight short stories, powerful and poignant, about young women at critical points in their lives.” —The New York Times
“Stories that are varied in mood and style and alike in their excellence.” —The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
Summer Girls, Love Boys
“Featuring female protagonists, the stories mix the bitter and the sweet of life while encompassing a variety of narrative techniques, settings, themes, and tones.… Mazer writes honestly and provocatively of human emotion and circumstances while she demonstrates her versatility as a writer.” —Booklist
Good Night, Maman
“Mazer writers with a simplicity that personalizes the history.… Direct … honest.” —Booklist, starred review
Downtown
Norma Fox Mazer
For Karen and Jeff—love and hope
“Kids with obsessed parents always pay a terrible price …”
Sidney Lumet, 1983
One
For a long time I’ve had these bad times that I call the White Terror. It usually happens to me in the morning after a long night of dreams. Murderous dreams; dreams of bodies lying headless and cold that I stumble over on some ordinary errand, on my way to school, or going into the bathroom, or down to the kitchen. In the dream I’m sometimes me as I am now, sometimes younger, but always moving along on some ordinary errand. And then I stumble over something hard yet mushy and I look down and there’s a body, a headless rotting corpse. A paralyzing terror grips me. I can’t move, can’t run, can’t go past the body or away from it. And as I stand there, my heart threatening to rip out of my chest, I feel myself dissolving, shrinking away into emptiness. And I scream, No! That’s the point at which I wake up.
I’m always in a sweat, my heart whacking away, and as I thrash aside my covers, the emptiness is still there. And I wonder who I am, who is this person, this boy, this body? Am I real? Sometimes when it happens, I think I’m dying, but by now I know to just lie in bed until it subsides.
I was dead serious when I named it the White Terror, but I had to laugh when I found that same phrase, the White Terror, in a book I was reading about the Russian Revolution. After that, I tried calling my White Terror the American White Terror, but that sounded like a racist superhero. The American White Terror strikes again! Indeed, it does. And again and again, and never when I’m expecting it or telling myself to prepare for it. In between the times it happens, I try, only half successfully, to forget about it.
For a while I did magic things to keep it away, like always taking the same number of steps from our house to the corner. Or walking around the dining room table seven times when I came home from school. Or touching each corner of my bed as soon as I came into the room. Nothing helped. All I had to do—no, all I could do—was wait for it to come, wait for it to go. Well, why not? Half my life had been spent waiting. Waiting for word from my parents, waiting for their letters or the rare phone call. Waiting for this terror, this thing, to pass—was that so different?
I noticed that almost every time it happened, there was one small cool part of my brain that remained uninvolved. I dubbed it my Man Brain and began to think of it as the better part of me. I’d be sitting up in bed, gasping like a fish on land, with wave after wave of this emptiness and fear rolling over me, and my heart actually thumping so loud I could hear it, and all the time there was also that rational voice in my head, my Man Brain, telling me, Your heart’s beating … you’re alive … you do exist … you are alive …
The whole thing never actually lasts very long, maybe four or five minutes at the most. When it’s over, that doesn’t seem like much, but while it’s happening, those four or five minutes are as long as eternity. Sometimes it ends abruptly, like a snap of the finger. Now you see it, now you don’t. More often it goes like a fog slowly seeping away.
One morning I especially remember. I was sprawled in bed, in a stinking sweat, limp, shaking, the covers twisted around my legs, when, from across the hall, I heard my uncle clear his throat. Eh, eh, ehhh. I could see that sound, see it traveling through the wall of his bedroom into my room, see it bouncing off the bookcase, touching the desk, then slowly … slowly … sinking to the floor. It was agony, real agony, to watch that sound moving and wait for it to reach me.
Then it did. Eh, eh, ehhh. Just that, and the terror was gone. I was released. I lay there for a moment, letting it all go, then I was up and out of bed, whooping with relief. Instead of fifty push-ups, I did seventy-five, and I yelled across the hall to my uncle, “Gene, I want fried eggs this morning. French toast! Sausage! I’m a starving man!”
Released from the White Terror, I was—myself again. Someone real, who lived with his uncle, who had a name. No, two names: Pete Greenwood. Pax Martin Gandhi Connors.
But what did any of that matter? I was here and glad of the day, and for now, at least, the White Terror was gone.
Two
My uncle Gene’s an optometrist by profession, an actor and gourmet cook by choice. One year the Winston Theatre Guild threw a fancy hundred-dollar-a-plate benefit dinner to raise money. Gene was the master chef with dozens of minor chefs scurrying around obsequiously, cutting and chopping and adding stuff to sauces, all under his direction. “Best role I’ve ever had,” he said, afterward. “I felt like the White Queen. Off with their heads! Even if it was only parsley, the power kind of got to me.”
In our upstairs bathroom, which is kind of neat and old-fashioned with little black and white octagonal tiles on the floor and a bathtub with claw feet, there’s a big wicker basket next to the toilet, the kind of basket most people use for plants. Ours is filled with Gourmet magazines and playscripts.
My own bathroom reading runs more to history books, the fatter the better. I’m not very discriminating. I read anything that’s history, any period, any country, just as long as it’s about the past. I’ve read about the Russian Revolution, the sixti
es in the United States, medicine in the Middle Ages, and the bloody jostling for power of the English royal families. “You’re a little too haphazard in your reading,” Totie Golden, my history teacher, says. She’s right. One of these days I’ll settle down and start at the beginning (if I can figure out where that is—it all depends on your point of view), get serious and systematic. Meanwhile, I raid the library shelves. The way I see it, even with some of the real horrendous things that happened to people, like the rack torture and legs being amputated without anesthesia, the past had to be better than where we are now, with all the pollution and chemical junk and the Big Bang hanging over our heads. I think I could be happy going back to live anywhere, anytime, in the past.
Sometimes I try to get my uncle to read something besides recipes, plays, and eyeglass magazines. “Don’t have the time, Pete,” he says. Maybe, and maybe he’s just stubborn, just doesn’t want to do anything I suggest. He always comes across sort of mild and sweet, but I notice that things in the house go pretty much the way he wants them to.
Another thing he never does is eat the food I make. “Gene, want to taste something fantastic?” I stirred the Sloppy Joe I was cooking. It smelled authentic—teria a la mode.
My uncle looked into the pot. “No thanks.”
“Not so fast.” I went after him with the spoon. “Come on. Taste!”
“Pete, that spoon is dripping all over.”
“Taste it and it won’t drip.” He eyed me. I eyed him back. I’d been in a rotten mood for days. Was it unreasonable to think that Laura and Hal, also known as my parents, could have figured out a way to mail me a letter so it would reach me by my birthday? Or weren’t they going to write me a birthday letter this year? Maybe they’d forgotten the big date, or figured at sixteen I should forget about things like birthday letters and presents.
“A little bite of my food won’t kill you, Gene.”
“Martha and I are going to try out that new Japanese restaurant.” He looked at his watch. “She’ll be here in half an hour.”
“Listen, I eat your slop—excuse me, your creations—all the time, so how about a little reciprocity?”
“Is it my imagination, or have you become difficult since you hit sixteen?”
“You’re jumping the gun. Four more days. Right now I’m still just a difficult fifteen-year-old. And you said the same thing last year on my birthday.”
“Come on, Pete, I’m sure I didn’t.”
“You’d better watch it, Uncle Gene. Repetition is one of the seven danger signs of creeping old age. How old are you anyway, Gene?”
“What difference does that make?”
I knew he’d say that. Gene is sensitive about his age and his looks. Martha says all actors are like that. I’d just been baiting him, being obnoxious, but all of a sudden I went into one of my maniac rages. I threw down the spoon. “Why can’t you just answer the goddamn question?”
As usual when I acted like a psycho, Gene got very calm. Didn’t say a word. Just picked up the spoon, wiped the floor, and went upstairs, removing himself from the vicinity of the mad dog. I foamed at the mouth for a few more minutes, throwing things around. Then I sat down at the kitchen table with the pot of Sloppy Joe.
What a pig I was, taking out my lousy feelings on Gene. He was good, he was fair, he didn’t make unjust demands on me. (Thank you, Uncle Gene.) I had money in my pocket, clothes on my back. (Thank you, Uncle Gene.) He didn’t treat me like a kid or a ward or a dependent. (Thank you, Uncle Gene.)
He came back downstairs, dressed for his date with Martha: ruffled white shirt, gold cufflinks, and his old, gold Bulova watch. He took the water bottle from the refrigerator and poured a glass of water. “Sorry,” I mumbled, and dumped the Sloppy Joe into the garbage as a peace offering.
Gene looked at me over the rim of the glass. “Am I wrong, or was that quite a little blowup over nothing?” He sipped his water and spoke slowly. “We’ve been living together nearly eight years, Pete. Seems like we should have things worked out enough by now, so if something’s on your mind—”
“I just got mad.”
“You often just get mad.”
“I don’t mean to. It just happens.”
“Do you think you could try not to let it happen?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I actually don’t think there’s anything I can do about it. I don’t plan to go crazy, it just hits me. Things get to me, and va-voom!
Gene sat down across from me and sighed. He has a whole repertoire of magnificent sighs. I guess they come in handy on the stage. Sometimes all he does is sigh, and that gets across his point. This was a sigh that told me a story was coming.
“Eight years ago, Pete, I had a very strange phone call. A total stranger called me and said, ‘I have something to tell you. Please trust me. Your sister and her husband are in trouble, something very bad has happened, unexpected, and they have to drop out of sight for a while. Can you take their little boy until things calm down?’ I wasn’t asked to think it over and I didn’t need to. I reacted instinctively, I guess anyone would in the situation … Pete, are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“Your eyes are closed.”
“They are?” I sat up. “I heard every word you said, Gene. Go on.” Even though I’d heard all this in one form or another before, I never minded hearing it again. “So you got this phone call and then—”
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘yes, I’ll take the boy.’ I hung up. And then I got a reaction. My God, what is this? What have I done? I haven’t seen Laura in years, she’s not even my full sister! I thought I was mad. What did I know about little boys? As for you, we’d never even met. I’d had pictures of you from Laura now and then, and that was it.”
“So why didn’t you call back and say, ‘Sorry, folks, deal’s off’?”
“Lots of reasons. She is my sister. Just because we had different fathers—no, the half sister thought was absolutely mindless panic.” He tipped back in his chair. “Besides, I didn’t have the option of calling my mysterious caller back. I said yes, he hung up, and it wasn’t till hours later that I realized I didn’t have a name, I didn’t have a number, I didn’t have a clue! What sort of trouble were Laura and Hal in? Well, actually, it didn’t take too much to figure out it had to be something political.”
“Did that bother you?” I asked. Gene is probably the most unpolitical person in the world. If he didn’t have to go to an office every day to make bucks, he’d be content to spend his life thinking about nothing but plays and food.
“Maybe it worried me a little. I knew the two of them had been marching and shouting and demonstrating against the bomb and the military for years. Maybe I’d been half-expecting Laura to get into trouble. Once she did, do you remember that?”
“When? What kind of trouble?”
“Oh, she was in some sort of demonstration—the military was deploying one of those missiles, and she climbed a fence and got herself arrested with a bunch of other women. I sent your father bail money for her. She spent two nights in jail and then, luckily, the charges were dismissed. I didn’t keep up with their activities. Once in a while, I’d read something in the paper or Laura would write me a letter and say, ‘Well, we just threw blood on the Pentagon,’ something like that. You know they were always doing things—draping the flag of that organization of theirs on the Statue of Liberty or lying down in front of cars going to air bases—I don’t know, I never thought it meant that much, but it was their whole life. Anyway, what I remember thinking after that phone call was that this time they must have done something pretty serious. Such as? I didn’t know—destroyed government property, bashed up some military vehicle—I just didn’t know. My imagination didn’t take me any farther than that. All the things they’d ever done over the years, they’d been pretty legal, protected by the First Amendment, or whatever. Still, I couldn’t understand—why go into hiding? For a lot of these people, publicity is really what they want.”
“
Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said. “You make it sound so cynical, as if everything they do is for publicity. That’s dead wrong! They have ideals, they have principles, they don’t do these things for any selfish gain.”
“Cool down,” my uncle said. “You misunderstand me. What I meant is that they need media attention so they can make their statements. Did you notice the article in the newspaper yesterday about the seven Quakers who broke into a draft board office to protest our military policy? They hung around for two hours waiting for someone to come along and arrest them. That was the sort of thing Laura and Hal would have done.” He thumped down his chair. “Then that day, or maybe it was the next morning, I don’t remember which, I read in the newspaper about the explosion in Femmer Lab. And I started putting two and two together. Did you know right away? You were such a little kid, but—”
“Not that little, Gene. Laura and Hal never treated me like a baby. I knew they were going to do something important, but they were coming back. That was the plan. Then I heard on the radio … what happened … and those people—” I broke off. I didn’t want to talk about the Femmer Lab thing.
“Go on with your story, Gene,” I said. “So you got this phone call. And then you got cold feet. What next? I arrive with Uncle Marti, right?”
“I wonder what his real name was. Did you know?”
“I just knew him as Uncle Marti. Does it matter?”
“I suppose not. It’s just—sometimes I think back to that phone conversation and I have to laugh. Would I take care of you for ‘a little while,’ he said. That, to me, at that moment meant a week, at the outside a month. What did I know about taking care of a child? I didn’t have much time to prepare, I’ll tell you that. Twenty-four hours later, there you were, delivered to me in the middle of the night. A nephew package, complete with roped suitcase and two grocery bags of toys, special delivery from my little sister, Laura. I might have lost my head if I’d known that ‘little while’ was going to turn into eight years.”
Downtown Page 1