The Enemy

by Sara Holbrook

  If she just looked in the basement, she’d know.

  It’s one thing to get a younger brother or sister. That’s normal. That happens to kids all the time. I have a friend, Mary Virginia O’Donnell, who’s in my sixth-grade class, and that’s happened to her every single year since kindergarten. There are eight kids in her family and Mary Virginia’s the oldest. I don’t remember ever seeing Mrs. O’Donnell when she wasn’t expecting.

  But waking up one day and finding out, poof, you just became a little sister to a teenage weirdo overnight is not normal. And the fact that he’s a senior in high school who owns a motorbike and a leather jacket is even more zonko. At first Mom said she wanted to draw the line at the motorbike when he moved in, but Dad said to let him have it. “Boy is sleeping on a borrowed bed in a borrowed house with a borrowed family. Let him have something that’s his.”

  In the beginning I felt sorry for Frank because of the way things happened with his pop dying and all. It was really sad. The four of us went to his pop’s funeral, and after the service, we became a family of five because he came home with us. Frank already has a brother, but he couldn’t come to the funeral since he’s in prison for borrowing a car without permission. Dad says they call that stealing in his book, but Frank says Dad doesn’t understand. Anyway, Frank was all alone, standing outside of the funeral home with a suitcase, and then he was part of our family.

  That was the first time I ever heard someone’s death described as not by natural causes. Turns out, not by natural causes is not something you’re supposed to ask questions about at a funeral. But how was I to know that? I’d never been to a funeral before. Even though Mom made me go sit in the car, I still felt sorry for Frank. At first.

  But then after a couple of months he started teasing me and bossing me around like a real brother. Not the kind of brother that gives you advice on what’s cool, or as Frank would say, what’s hep. He turned into the always-in-my-business, thinks-he-knows-everything, bossy kind of brother. That’s when I started hating him. Really hating him.

  I arrange each place setting on the table, making sure the knife blades point away from the plates. Mom goes crazy over dippy details like that. Knives pointed the wrong way, forks on the wrong side of the plates, glasses on the left side—that stuff makes her nuts. There is enough mess in this world, she says, that she doesn’t need to sit down to it at dinner. As I finish rounding the table, putting down the silverware just right, my little sister, Carol Anne, comes bouncing down the stairs.

  “I hope you weren’t touching any of my stuff,” I say. We share a room, Carol Anne and me. Frank sleeps on a bed in the basement. It’s not a real bedroom, but Dad says it’s the warmest place in the house, which is true since it’s next to the furnace. The furnace is the same color as the coal that Dad shovels into it, and it’ll burn the skin right off your hand if you touch it. Frank tried to tape a picture of a girl in a bathing suit to the side of it when he first moved in, and the tape melted and the picture turned brown and curled up like a dead water bug, which Mom said was for the best anyway. All I know is that furnace belches fire like a dragon when someone opens the grate.

  When I was little, Dad convinced me that the furnace was a monster and that he was its trainer. He keeps the furnace monster happy by feeding it coal, but he said if I ever touched it or came near it when he wasn’t around, the fire-breathing monster would eat me alive. I believed him, too. Just like Carol Anne believes him when he tells her that he was in the cavalry and his vaccination scar is where he was shot in the arm with a flaming arrow by Sitting Bull in the war.

  My dad was in the big war, World War II. He was in some war in Korea, too, but that was just a little war. I don’t know what that was about, really. But the big war was about beating the Nazis and the Japs, who as far as I can tell, decided to gang up on us at the same time. Anyway, all those wars are over. Now we have something called a Cold War. I’m not sure what that one’s about either, but it has to do with the H-bomb.

  “Marjorie, wake your dad up. Time to eat,” Mom calls from the kitchen.

  I may not be the oldest kid in the house anymore, but at least I’m not the youngest. I immediately tell Carol Anne, “Go wake up Dad.”

  “No!” she screams. Her eyes get all wild and wide and she knocks over a chair diving under the dining room table as quick as a chipmunk darting into a hole. “No. No. No. You can’t make me,” she calls from under the table.

  “Oh, grow up,” I say. “Stop being such a baby.”

  “No, no, no, no, no,” she whines. I don’t even have to look. I know she’s rocking back and forth.

  Before I can pull her out and point her toward the living room, a stretching shadow appears in the doorway.

  “What’s going on in here?” Dad says.

  “Daddy!” Carol Anne squeals and scrambles out from under the table and springs into Dad’s open arms. Dad tosses her over his shoulder and bends down to pick up the overturned chair, with Carol Anne laughing and beating on his back.

  “You two get jobs yet?” he jokes.

  Do we have jobs, and have we found husbands yet? Those are two of Dad’s most worn-out things to say. He isn’t serious, of course, since I’m twelve and Carol Anne is six, and he doesn’t even want Mom to have a job. Every once in a while Mom checks out the Help Wanted, Female section of the newspaper. There’s never anything listed except jobs for receptionists and bookkeepers, and Dad says he doesn’t want his wife being someone else’s flunky. I’m pretty sure he’s serious about that part.

  “I saw you and your friend out there holding down the fort, Marjorie. Keeping the enemy at bay?” he laughs, setting Carol Anne on scrambling feet. She takes off like a wind-up toy into the kitchen.

  “We had to take Mrs. Fisher back home,” I say.

  He shakes his head. “Sad case, that one.”

  “And some guy I never saw before was watching us. He was wearing a black cap.”

  “Black cap, eh? Ya hear that, Lila?” he calls out to Mom. “Spies in our midst.”

  Spies? I feel my eyes growing and then I remember not to be a patsy. You can’t believe what my dad says half the time. But sometimes I do and then he says, “Don’t be a patsy, kid,” which basically means, Don’t be a dumbbell; he’s just making stuff up again.

  Dad was in the cavalry in the war. That’s a true thing. He just rode a tank instead of a horse.

  Daddy doesn’t talk too much about the war except to make jokes. One of his favorite jokes is about this time when his feet got frozen and he lay in a hospital bed for two weeks while the doctors decided if they were going to cut his feet off. He says the nurses were taking turns trying on his boots because the army sent them into combat in saddle shoes and cotton dresses, and they had to dress themselves in jackets and boots wherever they could find them. They mostly just took boots and stuff from GIs who didn’t need them anymore. Mainly dead GIs.

  Daddy says that one day he just stood up and walked out of that hospital and said, “Sorry to disappoint ya, gals.” That whole story is true. I think.

  I hear Frank’s feet stomping up the wooden basement steps.

  Frank.

  What do you make of a guy who greases his hair and leaves his collar up, trying to be cool even at Sunday dinner? I give him a look that says exactly how cool I think he is—exactly not one bit.

  “I think the Red Wings are going to go all the way this year. You should’ve come up for at least part of the game,” Dad says to Frank.

  “Big exam tomorrow.” Frank plops in his chair and picks up his fork. “Bunch of nothin’ if you ask me. I can’t see how memorizing the chemical elements is going to help me when I join up in June.” Mom waves her napkin in his direction, motioning him to put his napkin in his lap.

  “Got to graduate,” Dad says. “It’s a new day. Got to get the piece of paper if you want to get anywhere in the military today. Besides, your pop wanted you to graduate, boy. You know that.”

  Mom clears her throat
and straightens the napkin on her lap. “Frank, have you ever thought about college?”

  Everyone’s hands and mouths stop moving as we look at her.

  My mother’s a college graduate.

  It’s true.

  It happened during the war because her daddy didn’t want her hands turning dirty in a factory helping the war effort, so he sent her off to a safe place with ivy all over it. She never lies about going to college, but she doesn’t bring it up either. Probably because, like Dad says, it doesn’t help her do the dishes any better than the next woman. It’s almost a family secret, like a birthmark or my grandpap’s horse-thieving uncle who had his name cut out of the family Bible. Something we don’t talk about.

  “It’s not out of the question, Frank.” She straightens her knife, making it perfectly parallel with her spoon. “You are a bright boy.”

  “Leave it, Lila. College ain’t the be-all and end-all,” Dad says, reaching for the salt and restarting his dinner. My dad practically never says ain’t. I know he just said it to get under Mom’s skin. By the red flush of her face, I can see it worked.

  Sometimes when he’s under her skin it makes her laugh, like the time he stole her bra off the clothesline and wore it like earmuffs. But she doesn’t laugh this time.

  “Chemistry’s not my thing, that’s all.” Frank’s all hunched over, scooping up food. Mom sits up a little straighter in her chair. She watches Frank, and I know she wants him to sit straighter, too. I sit up as straight as I can to try and take her mind off of him as he continues to go at his food like a gorilla.

  “Who cares that according to some book, the letter C stands for carbon and OX stands for oxygen. Like it’s too much trouble to just say ‘carbon’ or something,” he mumbles into his plate.

  “O stands for oxygen,” I whisper under my breath.

  “What’s that, punk?” Frank shoots back.

  “Peas, anyone?” Mom asks.

  CHAPTER 3

  Monday is Monday. Alarm. Bowl of cereal. I check the temperature on the thermometer hanging outside of the window. Twelve degrees. I pull on a pair of flannel-lined corduroys under my skirt for the walk to school so my kneecaps won’t freeze off. It doesn’t seem fair to me that boys are allowed to wear pants to school while girls are given the privilege of chapped legs. I mean, who wrote that rule? If I don’t wear pants under my skirt, my legs freeze up and feel like they’re going to crack right off, so I’ll be walking on bloody stumps. I tuck my pants into my boots and don’t care how it looks.

  “I’m going to borrow this, okay?” I call to Mom as I grab her green scarf.

  Mom’s bent over the newspaper and her crossword puzzle, chewing on the end of her pencil. “What’s the matter with that beautiful red scarf that Grandma Mona knitted you for Christmas?” she asks, but I can tell she really doesn’t care.

  “Still wet,” I lie, wrapping her scarf around my head twice. Bernadette will be waiting for me on the corner, and while she’s probably over being mad at me, there’s no use waving a red scarf in her face. That’s like inviting her to call me commie for the rest of the week or forever. Bernadette is the most popular girl in both classes of the sixth grade and also my best friend. Partly we are friends because she lives next door, but also because I know how to be friends with her.

  “C’mon,” Bernadette says when she sees me, and then she’s silent. We are halfway to school before she huffs, “I can’t believe you wear those baby pants under your skirt.” She’s wearing a plaid skirt and knee socks. For sure her skirt is scraping her raw, and her frozen knees must be on fire. I know this because I’ve tried it. Bare knees in this kind of weather cause real pain.

  “You have to grow out of wearing those pants before junior high next year, Marjorie, or I’m not walking to school with you anymore.”

  I don’t say anything. Not a word. We’ve walked to school together every day since kindergarten. Usually Bernadette does most of the talking and I do most of the listening. I know how to wait out her anger, and if I just let her grumble along and don’t say anything, she’ll be out of steam by recess. Then we can be back to being best friends, just like normal.

  After we take our seats in class, Mrs. Kirk announces that tomorrow a new girl will be joining our class, and she’s not from here. She’s from another country, Canada. Mrs. Kirk stares at her grade book for a while like she’s studying a map. Then she says the new girl will be sharing my desk.

  Bernadette speaks right up. “I can share with Marjorie,” Bernadette offers, sounding sweet as a Hershey bar. Mrs. Kirk shakes her head. “You two chatterboxes?” She laughs. Then she tells us to pull out our grammar books and rulers.

  Bernadette slaps her book on her desk to send a telegram to the world that she’s not happy. I can see that her mouth is pinched tight.

  I turn my eyes to my book and smile. Good, I’m thinking. Now she can be mad at Mrs. Kirk, and she won’t have time to be mad at me anymore.

  A new girl.

  From Canada.

  I feel a little excitement inside. I wonder what she will look like and if she will smell like garlic or wear big petticoats. The new girl will make us a class of thirty-eight kids with thirty-two desks. Five rows of six desks and one desk sitting in the back corner and one right by Kirk’s desk. Those are the desks where Owen Markey and Danny DiMario sit until they learn to control their actions.

  Our school has only two sixth-grade classes and five first-grade classes. Kirk says we need another sixth-grade classroom, but there’s no chance because there are even more kindergarteners coming in next year.

  I saw a picture in National Geographic of a snake with a bulge in it because it had swallowed a whole rabbit. Homer Elementary School is like that snake, and Carol Anne and her class are the bulge, part of a boom of babies who were born right after World War II. All the GIs who didn’t get killed came home, got married, and had kids. Bing, bang, boom. And those who were already married, like my mom and dad, had more kids. Homer Elementary is so crowded, it has one staircase for going up and one for going down, with an indoor safety patrol to make sure no one tries to go the wrong way and winds up being stomped to death.

  National Geographic is my school away from school. I like the articles about snakes curled around tree branches in Brazil and crocodiles floating in the Nile and little gorilla babies, which are about the cutest things you’ve ever seen. I study the pictures of howler monkeys and cockatoos and pretend they are on the branches outside my window. But what I really like, what I dream the most about, is someday visiting the places where all the animals live, places where everything’s not the same as it is here.

  When the clock finally tick-ticks its way to 3:15, we stand in the cloakroom and bundle up for the walk home.

  “Look,” says Bernadette, with excited eyes. She holds out a nickel. “How about I call my mom and tell her we’re going to stop at the library on the way home? You have any money?”

  I show her the nickel Mom gave me this morning.

  “Good. I’ll make the phone call, you buy the doughnuts,” Bernadette says, pulling her ponytail out through a hole in the back of her hat.

  “You want to come over?” Mary Virginia asks Bernadette, but she shakes her head and says, “I’m busy.”

  She could have invited Mary Virginia along, but she doesn’t, which just goes to show that even though I make Bernadette mad sometimes, I’m still her best friend. I button up my coat as quick as I can and follow her to the pay phone by the staircase.

  Since my nickel is in charge of buying the doughnuts, I can keep the change. Cream-filled doughnuts at Schwartz’s Bakery are three cents, but a nickel will buy a couple of two-cent fried cakes. I’ll have a penny left over. That means if Mom gives me a nickel tomorrow, I’ll have six cents, and I can buy cream doughnuts for Carol Anne and me after school.

  Most people hate Mondays, but they’re my favorite. Monday is the day Carol Anne has Camp Fire Girls and I don’t have to walk her home, even though it seems w
eird that there is a day I don’t have to take care of her.

  It’s mostly weird how Carol Anne is starting to have her own life now that she’s in school. Before then Baby Carol Anne never seemed real to me—the kid in the high chair, the sleeping kid who’s the reason everyone has to whisper, the lump who’s allowed to sit on Mom’s lap in the front seat or on the sofa.

  Mom said the other day that Carol Anne needed new shoes and Carol Anne just nodded and said, “I’m losing my littleness.” Losing her littleness is something that can’t happen too fast as far as I’m concerned, which is why Monday’s the best day of the week.

  So Bernadette’s nickel clangs its way through the pay phone in the school lobby and my nickel drops down onto the glass counter at Schwartz’s.

  “How are you two darlink’s doing today,” Mrs. Schwartz asks as she gives us our fried cakes on paper napkins.

  Bernadette answers for both of us. “Just fine. Thank you very much for asking. And how’s your husband?”

  How’s your husband? I look at Bernadette like she’s just turned into a Martian. Where does she come up with these things? But what I really can’t believe is how grown-ups talk back to her and take her seriously.

  “Ah, my sveet. Mr. Schwartz ist vell. Gone home to bed, you know. He poured deez doughnuts at two o’clock dis mornink.”

  “Two o’clock? Gee. That’s so early.” Bernadette opens her eyes as wide as two crullers.

  “Ev’ry day. Ev’ry day.” Mrs. Schwartz smiles and hands us two free doughnut holes on another napkin.

  The cold air takes our breath away as we step back outside.

  “I can’t believe you,” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How’s your husband?”

  “You’re just too shy. You should speak up once in a while and maybe you’d get free doughnuts,” Bernadette says. “Darlink,” she imitates Mrs. Schwartz’s accent perfectly. “You can’t go through your life like a ghost.”