The Enemy

by Sara Holbrook

  Almost 4:15.

  CHAPTER 7

  I stop in the hallway by the telephone bench, chewing on my graham cracker. I really want some peanut butter for my crackers and a glass of milk, but I’m not going back in the kitchen while Big Stupid is still in there.

  I never really thought about Dad working on top secret defense stuff and it’s hard to believe a couple of old library books might make him lose his job. I wonder if he carries secrets around in the car or in his lunch box. I stop munching on crackers.

  What if that man in the black cap wasn’t watching Bernadette and me at all? Could he have been looking to break into our house for top secrets? Was he a commie whose job it was to send pouches of information straight to the Kremlin? Was he trying to make us into puppets for Stalin?

  I shake my head. That’s silly. More likely, if anyone was casing the house, it was someone looking to rob us blind, not a Russian spy prowling for defense secrets to steal. Somehow this thought does not make me feel better.

  I’m thinking I’ll call Bernadette and see how she’s feeling. Tell her about the new girl. Artie told me that she’s down with a bad ear infection. Bernadette comes down with ear infections like the rest of the world goes to the grocery store. By that I mean on a pretty regular basis.

  I pick up the black telephone receiver to dial her number, but I hear talking on the phone.

  “Did somebody just pick up?” It’s Mrs. Burke from down the block. I’d know her voice anywhere. It’s smooth like syrup. You might think she’s really sweet, unless she catches you putting one foot on her grass. Then it’s war. She comes racing after you with a broom. This has happened to me and Artie and Bernadette maybe a hundred times. Bernadette and I used to think she was a witch because of the broom she likes to wave around and the fact that she keeps her curtains closed all the time. But it turns out she’s just a secretary for Father Coughlin, the priest at Mary Virginia’s church, the Shrine of the Little Flower. Dad calls it Shrine of the Silver Dollar. Dad says the priest she works for used to be on the radio and was on the side of the Nazis before the war. That makes her out to be a Nazi sympathizer in Dad’s book, and he said we’re allowed to walk all over her lawn anytime we feel like it. Mom says to steer clear.

  We like to play next door to Mrs. Burke because Mrs. Papadopoulos sometimes surprises us with trays of yummy cookies with powdered sugar on top.

  The first time Mrs. P. brought out cookies, it was a surprise. Now we’re used to it, which is why their yard is our favorite place to play. Mr. and Mrs. Papadopoulos don’t have any kids, but unlike Mrs. Burke, you can tell that they wish they did. For Halloween last year, they set up a long table with treats, and every ghost, vampire, Snow White, and Davy Crockett in the neighborhood dropped by for warm Vernors ginger ale, cinnamon sticks, and doughnuts.

  “Hello?” Mrs. Burke says.

  “Sorry,” I say and hang up.

  Bernadette’s family has a private line, and even though Dad says that’s an as-dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks way to waste two dollars a month, I wish we had one too.

  Party phones might be okay in some places, but not if you wind up paired with people like Eugenia Burke. Mostly, I just wish Witch Burke wouldn’t spend all her non-broom-swinging hours on the party line.

  I sit on the telephone bench, breaking off small bits of cracker and trying to catch all the crumbs in my skirt. No books. No TV. No telephone. No going over to Bernadette’s, since she’s sick. I swing my feet back and forth, bored, bored, bored, until I notice the mail sitting at the bottom of the stairs.

  A brown envelope.

  I jump straight up, scattering cracker crumbs all over the floor. A brown envelope!

  It’s addressed to Miss Marjorie Campbell from the consulate of Brazil. And it’s a thick one. I grab the envelope and fly up the stairs and slam the door to my room. From under my bed, I slide out the huge Hudson’s Department Store box that’s almost big enough to hold Carol Anne.

  But now it holds the world. British Kenya. French Indochina. Spain. Sweden. Australia. Morocco. Brochures and maps sent to me absolutely free because I clipped a small advertisement from the back pages of National Geographic, taped it to a two-cent postcard with my return address, and sent it in.

  I tear open the envelope from Brazil. This time it’s not just a map. The package holds brochures, hotel information, three postcards, a message from Pan Am Airlines, and a map that opens as colorful and big as a beach towel. I trace the outline of the coast with my finger. The cover of the first brochure is a swirl of a dancer’s red dress, with her face crowded into the upper left-hand corner. Visit Brazil! It says in tall white letters.

  I do. Sitting on my bedroom floor I feel it throb with the stamping of the dancer’s feet. I hear the clicking of castanets and the whip of her skirt. I forget about Frank and the returned library books. About Mrs. Burke and the new girl crammed into my desk at school. About Mom’s sad eyes. Those are all just fuzzy chapters in a bad dream.

  Brazil looks forward to welcoming me! There I will enjoy endless sunny days, no more ice crystals on the windows or frozen kneecaps. Instead, I can experience glorious sun-filled days and magnificent moonlit nights, exploring more than four thousand miles of spectacular coastline where ocean breezes graze golden cliffs and sandy white beaches.

  Rio de Janeiro either is a festival or has one. At first I can’t tell, but it has its own brochure, and I can read it to find out. I set it inside the box between the Eiffel Tower and the Pyramids for further study. Another brochure about cruising the Amazon claims I will see majestic mountain peaks, caverns filled with sparkling crystals, and an untamed world of wildlife and waterfalls. There are pictures I can crawl into. I feel the water spray on my face. Brazilians, I read, are a hospitable, culturally diverse people who enjoy rich cuisine and lively music. They value their families first, then education, and they lead rich spiritual lives. No mention of loyalty oaths or tight-jawed librarians with folded arms. No scary men in black caps just staring for no reason. Everyone in the pictures is smiling, looking as if they are having the best time ever.

  From the manila envelope, a world of blue and green possibilities bursts into my world of dirty snow banks and crowded classrooms, and I fill my lungs with warm, moist air and soar like a parrot above the canopy of rain forest to rest on the highest treetop. I hear my name being called from below.

  “Marjorie? Marjorie!”

  I am sitting in a tree being tickled by green leaves when I realize, yikes, Mom really is calling me from below. From downstairs.

  “Coming,” I shout, as I jam the brochures into the coat box and slide it back under my bed. Her program must be over. Time to set the table.

  “Coming!”

  CHAPTER 8

  As Inga and I settle in, I notice that she doesn’t have any supplies. Not only are we sharing a desk, we will be sharing a science book, a reading book, a grammar book, a ruler—my ruler. I want to ask how we’ll both be able to diagram sentences with only one ruler. I look at Mrs. Kirk for help, but she’s busy telling Owen Markey and Danny DiMario that it’s not okay to play bombs away with ice balls.

  I dig through my pencil box and pass Inga a pencil I don’t mind sharing. It’s missing an eraser. She takes the pencil with a nod, but just like yesterday, she doesn’t say a word. I point to the math problem on the board. That’s Kirk’s favorite way to start the day. She writes some word problem involving miles or apples or apples going miles, and we solve it while she takes attendance. Inga gives me that scared rabbit look again, and I stand up and retrieve a sheet of paper for her from the box on the corner of Mrs. Kirk’s desk.

  I can’t believe I was even a little excited to meet this girl. She says nothing, and she knows nothing.

  Inga folds her hands on the paper and sits like she’s praying in church.

  I’m not sure what “welcoming our new friend” means exactly, but I’m pretty sure it does not mean I’m supposed to give her the answers to word problems. So I just do my
work, and I’m done in about one minute.

  Billy O’Brien leans over and asks, “You got the answer?” I sneak my paper over to the corner of my desk so he can see. If Billy O’Brien wanted my entire pencil box, notebook, coat, scarf, and boots, I would probably push them all his way, too. I know that’s stupid, but that’s the thing about Billy. He makes me feel stupid, even though I’m faster at word problems. He plays basketball. He’s captain of the outside safety patrol and crosses kids at the corner of Coolidge and Catalpa, the busiest corner in the neighborhood. He delivers the Free Press to my house every morning. Dad reads it at the dining room table before I come downstairs in the morning. When I see it spread out there, I know that paper was touched by Billy, and it’s like I just missed him stopping by.

  Over Christmas break I set the alarm for 5:30 a.m. one morning so I could catch the paper when Billy threw it on the porch. I had a picture in my mind of how I would open the door and take the paper and smile, and he would really see me for the first time. We wouldn’t have time to talk, but our eyes would connect, and after that, everything would be different.

  I loved that dream. It glowed like a crackling campfire and made me warm inside.

  But when Billy came by to fling the paper on the porch, we didn’t connect at all. Instead, I hid behind the curtain.

  Billy makes me do stupid things like that.

  After I give the answer to Billy, I see him give it to Owen. Meanwhile, Inga is still just sitting there. We’ve been sitting hip to hip for a whole day plus thirty minutes and she hasn’t said a single word. It’s starting to get on my nerves.

  I give her a little elbow, not hard. A nudge. I point again to the board. She looks at me and one tear pops out the corner of her eye. She wipes it away quickly. She looks at me like a squirrel does right before it dashes away.

  And then I know. I don’t know how, but I know. And I say, “English?”

  And she lowers her head. Two more tears drop onto her paper.

  I look at Mrs. Kirk, who’s standing with her attendance book, asking if anyone knows why Bernadette isn’t in school for the second day in a row.

  “Earache,” about eight kids shout in unison.

  “Well, that girl needs a shot of penicillin so she can come back to class if she wants to pass this grading period.” Kirk slaps her book on her desk.

  “Who has the answer to this morning’s problem?” She looks around at the raised hands and smiles.

  “Billy. We know you have the answer. Enlighten us, young man.”

  And he does.

  After the word problems we do round-robin reading, but luckily before it’s my turn, it’s time for recess. As soon as we hit the gym for indoor recess, I snatch Inga by the sleeve and pull her into a corner.

  I don’t have to say the words. She knows what I am asking before I can ask it. “Yah,” she says, “I am speaking English. Just not so good to read.”

  Her accent isn’t quite like Mrs. Svenson’s. It’s more like my swimming teacher’s, Mrs. Edelstein’s.

  “I thought you were from Canada,” I say. “I’ve been to Windsor, Ontario, and I know they speak English there.”

  The panicked, scared squirrel look returns and she turns away, but I grab her and turn her back. “Does Kirk know?”

  Privately, Bernadette and I call our teacher Kirk the Jerk because she’s kind of dense about things. But even the densest teacher in the world would know if a new girl couldn’t read English. Wouldn’t she?

  “You help me? I read?” Inga blurts out the question in a half whisper, eyes darting around to see if anyone’s listening.

  “Oh, for cripes’ sake.”

  “What is cripe?”

  “Oh, never mind,” I say. The fact is, cripes is my mother’s favorite swear. What she uses for a swear word, anyway. There are worse words, but that’s just what comes to me when Inga asks me to teach her to read English. How am I supposed to do that? But how can I tell her no? It’s obvious she’s desperate.

  “Yes, mind,” she says. Urgent. Like learning the word cripes has a deadline and she’s missed it.

  “Don’t you worry about learning that word,” I say. How do you explain a bad word to someone who hasn’t even learned the good words yet?

  “What is chew?” she asks.

  “Chew?” I repeat.

  “Yah,” she says. “Don’t chew worry. What is chew?”

  I bust out laughing. Inga looks at me, and for the first time, she halfway smiles.

  “Chew is funny word?” she says. “You teach me chew?”

  “I’ll teach you chew,” I say, still laughing.

  “When?”

  This girl is something else. “I don’t know, how about tomorrow?”

  She nods. “Tomorrow and the next tomorrow.”

  “The next tomorrow?” I ask. “You mean the day after tomorrow?”

  “Yes!” She nods, all excited. “The tomorrow after tomorrow and the tomorrow after that, even.”

  This girl makes me laugh. Not laugh at her in a mean way. She’s like a walking National Geographic magazine, strange and fascinating, and I can’t wait to turn the next page.

  The bell rings. Time to go back to class. I head for the door, and it’s Inga’s turn to catch me by the sleeve.

  “You teach me cripes, too,” she says. She doesn’t wait for an answer as we both join the flock of kids flowing into the hallway.

  CHAPTER 9

  “You tree. Dare. Stay dare. Later for you.”

  Mrs. Edelstein flaps her arm at the side of the pool, indicating we should take a seat on the edge. Three of us sit down at the spot where she pointed, feet dangling into the deep end. Me, Ben Zielinski, and Tony DeMarchi. We are hugging our arms and shivering. The non-swimmers.

  Learning to swim at the YMCA is the worst way of all to learn. I don’t care if the Y is closer than the lake. In a lake you can wade in a little at a time. You can hang on to an inner tube and float, pretending you can swim. The sun warms your back. You can fake it and still have a good time.

  I used to love that kind of swimming at the lake. It didn’t matter to me that I couldn’t really swim, and Mom didn’t seem to know the difference. But then Andrea Soboleski’s cousin caught polio at Cass Lake, and now he’s in an iron lung, and I’m stuck with swimming lessons at the YMCA, where the frost grows on the windows so thick you can’t see the sun, and the chlorine makes my eyes burn. I tug at the strap on my bathing cap and wait. My kneecaps quiver. I watch Mrs. Edelstein coach the other kids through swimming widths across the deep end. She’s wearing a whistle around her neck and a gold bracelet on the same arm as her tattoo.

  I remember the first time I saw a woman with a five-digit number tattooed on her arm like Mrs. Edelstein. It was Mrs. Schwartz from the bakery. We were in the locker room here at the Y, after a family swim night last fall. That was the night Mom caught on that I couldn’t really swim and signed me up for lessons.

  I’d never seen Mrs. Schwartz’s bare arms before, and I asked her why she had a price tag on her arm. Mom threw a towel over my head.

  “Oh, Mrs. Schwartz, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I apologize for her. She doesn’t … I’m so sorry.”

  “No harm,” said Mrs. Schwartz.

  I pulled the towel down, and Mom put it right back.

  “I’m just so, so sorry.”

  I was having trouble breathing. I pulled the wet towel off again. I didn’t understand. Why did she have numbers on her arm? Why was Mom apologizing? Why wasn’t I ever allowed to ask any questions? Mom wedged herself between Mrs. Schwartz and me, hiding me like I was embarrassing her.

  Mrs. Schwartz patted Mom on the arm. “Enough, already. No worry.”

  Then she bent down to where I was peeping out from behind Mom’s elbow and looked me in the eye. “One day, my darlink.” She touched my face. “One day.”

  Lucky I never said anything like that to Mrs. Edelstein. She doesn’t have time for questions or to look kids in the eyes. She’s the t
ype who steps on your fingers if you won’t let go of the side of the pool.

  After I said that price tag thing to Mrs. Schwartz in the locker room, Mom made Daddy explain to me about the Nazi concentration camps. I sat on a footstool in the living room, and Dad sat on the very edge of his chair and told me how his tank knocked down the wall of one camp and they found all these Jewish people in there. They were like skeletons just wandering around. He said the GIs knew the Nazis had put people into prison camps. “But we weren’t prepared for that,” he said, almost whispering. He wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at a place far away.

  “Were you scared?” I asked. He shook his head.

  “You fed the people, right?”

  Dad didn’t answer me right away. He bit his lip. For a few seconds, he closed his eyes. Just when I thought he might be done talking, he went on. I could tell he was pulling the words from deep inside. He told me that the soldiers starting passing out their K rations, but it made the starving people sick. Some of the people even died because they’d been hungry for so long, their stomachs couldn’t handle food.

  “They died?” I asked. This was the worst thing I’d ever heard. It made my heart hurt and my eyes burn. “You tried to help them, and they died?”

  “We didn’t know.” Dad lowered his eyes.

  Then he told me how the nurses who traveled by bus arrived and told the GIs to switch and start the people in the camp out on chewing gum and soup that was hardly more than hot water.

  I wanted to know what kind of bus? And why did the Nazis lock up all the Jewish people? Where did the people sleep in the concentration camp? How did they find their way home again? But Daddy just looked at me and shook his head. “Later, kid, when you’re older. That’s it.” He slapped both knees, stood up, and went outside to wash the car.