Joy School

by Elizabeth Berg

  “Yes,” I say, “I’ll tell you later.” We head out to the kitchen. We’ll get some dessert and then come back and talk about Ginger. We have so much to do before she leaves. We haven’t even started on her troubles yet. I don’t believe I’ve moved up to where I can give her advice, but I will listen as long as she wants because of all she told me about Jimmy.

  The day after Cherylanne leaves, we are eating dinner when my father says, “Just who is this Taylor person?”

  I swallow my mouthful of food, grown suddenly larger.

  “Taylor Sinn?”

  “Yeah. Her.”

  “Well, she’s … you know, that new girl at school.” Who said what, I’m thinking. Ginger? Cherylanne?

  “You’ve been spending a lot of time with her.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “What do you do with her?”

  Who said what?

  “I don’t know. Mostly just shopping and stuff like that.”

  “Why doesn’t she ever come here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’d like to meet her.”

  “All right.”

  “She’s the one you went to the drive-in with, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, I want to meet her.”

  “Okay.”

  Silence. And then he says, “Ginger and I are going to be going out to dinner tomorrow night. You all right with that?”

  “Yes.”

  I think what it is, is he’s trying to be fair.

  Lying in bed that night, I think of when I asked my mother about how she met my father. She blushed, telling me. It was at an ice-cream parlor. They were each sitting in booths, across from each other, each of them with other people, dates. Julian was her date’s name, Susan was his. And the next day, she and my father each came back at the same time, alone. “How’d you know he’d be there?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she answered, smiling. “But you’ll know, too, when it’s your time.”

  Oh, where is she? A stubborn part of me had thought this might be over sometime. But she is staying gone and staying gone and staying gone. She is not in the grave, though. No, she isn’t. I have her out of the grave. And right now I put her in a yellow flowered dress, a pale yellow apron over it. It has ruffles and the ruffles are eyelet. I don’t know if there is such a thing, really. But now there is, and I am sitting at the kitchen table watching her shape the piecrust edges into their stand-up design. She is concentrating so hard her tongue sticks out a little. This really used to happen. Once I laughed and she said, What are you laughing about? and I told her her tongue was sticking out and she said, “It was not!” Well, there are things you can’t see about yourself. I loved that she stuck her tongue out that way. It was cute, like when a kitten is done washing and his hair sticks up on top of his head. I never said anything about her doing that again. I wish I could have. I wish I could have gone through my long list of all the things I loved about her before she died. Right in front of her. I don’t believe my memory would have failed me one bit, even if I was crying the whole time, saying those things. Saying all those things that made her her.

  After English, I tell Taylor my father wants to meet her.

  She stands looking at me, saying nothing.

  “Can you?” I say, finally.

  “Can I what?”

  “Can you meet him?”

  “What for?”

  “He’s just curious. He knows I like you.”

  She nods, stares after a boy who just passed in the hall. He’s a senior. I believe she’s thinking, Hmmm, do I want to bother?

  “What’s he like?” she asks.

  I turn, see the boy disappearing around the corner. “I don’t know. He’s a senior.” Someday I’ll be a senior with my ring that lets me butt up in the lunch line.

  “No, your father.”

  “Well, he’s.… you know, I told you.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  Well. He looks like my father.

  “He’s tall. Big.”

  “Fat?”

  “No. Just big. He has blue eyes. Black hair. But it’s in a crew cut.”

  She shrugs. “I’ll come over for dinner. I want you to help me do my sonnet anyway.”

  Mrs. Brady has given us all that assignment, to write a sonnet, which is kind of like a poem wearing high heels. It’s because we’ve been reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. Everybody groaned but me. I felt a blip of secret happiness. It will be a challenge, but I am grateful to try it. Shakespeare! I always wanted to say his name in casual conversation. Someday I will have a house with a fireplace and I will have all the things he wrote in a big leather book nearby, gold print on a red cover. You have to puzzle him out, Shakespeare, but it’s worth it. Just sit down by the fire in your velvet robe and take your time. Let the clock be ticking a little bit loud, the pendulum flashing on the upstroke from the angle of the sun. Say the words out loud to yourself, taste them like they are food. Which they are. Have tea nearby in a silver pot, the spout as graceful as a swan’s neck. Your cup should be china, so thin light can push through it. This to me beats lying on the floor chewing bubble gum and reading Archie and Veronica, which is what most kids my age like. Although Shakespeare is dead, I hope he knows what an honor it is to be him.

  I want nice paper to write my sonnet on, too. I wish it could be thick and cream colored, which I read about in a story and it made me want to write on that too. The words “heart” and “glass” have come to me. It’s enough to start with. It excites me, like the way you feel walking up on a butterfly. Stay, you’re thinking. You reach out, moving so slow when you’re dying to just crash forward.

  I don’t think Taylor really needs any help. She makes As in everything without even trying, even in chemistry, which usually you have to be a sophomore to take. I’ve never known her to study. “It’s all obvious,” she said, when I asked her how she could do that. “It’s easy.” We were in her room, each of us lying on a twin bed.

  “Maybe you need a harder school,” I said.

  She smiled. “I tried that.”

  “How come you left that school, anyway?”

  “How come you ask so many questions?”

  I stayed still for a minute, thinking, then raised up on one arm. “Did you get kicked out?”

  She got up, walked over to her dresser, started combing her hair. “I hated that school. It was a bunch of girls.” She turned around. “You ever hear of Howlin’ Wolf?”

  “No.”

  “He’s a blues singer.”

  “He is?”

  She held up a record album featuring a huge black man, sweating. “This is him, right here.” She stared at it, then handed me the album. “He’s my father.”

  “Right.”

  “Really!”

  I looked up at her. Her eyes were wide open and staring straight at me, full of the wound of not being believed. Well, I have never met her father. Her parents are separated, and he never comes around. Probably because her mother is so strange. She’s always in a hurry; she’s always saying, “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, I’m eons late.” Plus she lived in Greenwich Village which is that place in New York City. She used to be a great beauty, you can tell, but it is all being erased. She’s an artist, she has a studio out in the garage and does gigantic paintings that you don’t know what are. She forgets important things, like to make dinner. She’s really different from any other mother I’ve ever seen. But still. “That is not your father,” I told Taylor.

  She laughed.

  She can be like that, sort of weird. But then she will do something that shows off a talent of hers and you can’t help it, you want so bad to be her friend. Once she read a whole play to me, acted out all the parts and she was so good. I couldn’t believe it was really Taylor. It was a Tennessee Williams play, Summer and Smoke. Taylor was not really there. She was replaced by each character she read. She is like a sparkler you cannot stop watching and want to touch so badly. Her sis
ter is only beautiful. She doesn’t have this sharp genius of Taylor. I think that’s what it is, she is a genius. And you have to cut a genius some slack sometimes. That’s how they are. I ended up just combing Taylor’s hair that day, lifting a section now and then to feel the silky weight in my hands. Sometimes I would get down next to her face and put her hair on me to see how I would look as a fabulous blond. Sometimes she let me do that.

  It is such an odd thing to have a Christmas with only two people. It might be worse than being alone. My father and I opened our few presents, then sat for awhile by the tree, each of us thinking that’s what the other one wanted to do, I guess. My father gave me twenty dollars to buy him something and I just got him a wallet and a duck call. He never will use that duck call. It was one of those things, I was feeling desperate and the guy selling the duck calls honked it and I thought, Isn’t that cute! Maybe my father will think that’s funny! I and I bought it. But he just said all serious, Well, thank you, Katie and then he laid it carefully back in the box. I got knee socks, pajamas, a book of poems by Americans and a stuffed animal, a cat wearing a dress. She’s cute, but really I am too old, she’ll have to live in my closet. The best gift was Intimate perfume and dusting powder. So I guess Ginger helped a bit with shopping. I kept wishing someone else was there so I could have another face to look at, a triangle of possibility instead of just a deadly straight line.

  After a bit we went out for Chinese food, and my father left a big Christmas tip and the waiter nodded and nodded and said “Happy Christmas, Happy Christmas” about three hundred times. We went for a little walk afterward and my father’s hands were deep in his pockets and his head was hanging low. I didn’t even try. I just walked beside him and kept looking at the stars, trying to think which one was the Star of Bethlehem, which I think is one of the prettiest phrases I’ve ever heard, Star of Bethlehem. I thought, what if I were a Wise Man, what would the message be now? Maybe just God saying, Well, they are wrong about me. I did once make a terrible mistake. If you think I’ll ever send my Son again, forget it.

  Now it is ten o’clock and we are both pretending to sleep. But I can feel his awakeness and probably he can feel mine. I have my radio turned on real low and someone is singing “I’ll be home for Christmas” like their heart is breaking wide open. Outside, snow falls, so perfect.

  It is with a terrible weariness in my heart that I knock on the door. Mrs. O’Connell opens it. “Well!” she says. “L’étrangère! How are you, dear?”

  “Hello, Mrs. O’Connell, it’s nice to see you.” I feel like Eddie Haskell on Leave It to Beaver.

  “Come right in, Cynthia’s up in her room. She’s been there quite awhile, waiting.”

  I wipe my feet on the outside rug, step in.

  “I wonder …” Mrs. O’Connell says, looking at my shoes with a pained expression. I slip them off, watch her line them up like they are leading the parade. Then I head upstairs, feel her eyes on my back the whole way up.

  I sneak a look into Nona’s room when I pass by; she’s asleep, snoring with her mouth open. I have missed her, that part I always enjoy. Cynthia is on the phone. She holds up a finger to me, then says, “Okay, I have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”

  She hangs up, smiles at me. “Hi!” She doesn’t say anything about who was on the phone. Our relationship is at the point where we don’t owe things. I have not worn the necklace for over a week. She didn’t ask me what was wrong.

  I sit in her chair, think how long will I have to be here.

  “You wish you hadn’t come, huh?”

  Well, I didn’t mean to show her.

  “No!”

  She smiles sadly.

  “I wanted to come.”

  She shrugs. “I know it’s Taylor, now. But I thought we could still be friends, too.”

  “We are.”

  “Not so much.”

  I am getting a little impatient. “Well, I’m here, Cynthia.”

  She looks me full in the face like a mother. “No you’re not.”

  “Do you want to do something?”

  “Okay,” she says. “What?”

  Well, she is the hostess.

  “Take a walk?” I say.

  “Okay.”

  We head downstairs and Mrs. O’Connell makes a beeline out of the kitchen. “Well! Where are you girls off to?” She always acts like she is being so friendly, but there are things hidden in her voice, like fingers in a fist.

  “We’re going out for a walk,” Cynthia says.

  “It’s awfully cold.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, you certainly can go, but it seems to me you’d be more comfortable here. I have a batch of cookies almost ready. Double chocolate chip.”

  “It’s actually pretty nice out,” I say. “The sun is warm.”

  “Isn’t that funny, how that works?” Mrs. O’Connell says, smiling. “That it can feel so warm when it’s not?”

  “I’m going out, Mom,” Cynthia says.

  “‘Bye, now,” I say, in a way I know Taylor would love.

  “Well, all right then, I’ll see you in about fifteen minutes, how’s that?” she says, as we walk down the steps. “I’ll just go get your plates ready. Now. Cocoa or cold milk?”

  Neither of us says a word. I am proud of Cynthia. This is the time of growing up for all of us. I can see it in my body, too. Last night I lay in the bathtub looking at my legs. These new ones are longer. The knees are more square and horsey. They are not my old legs. Those old ones are gone.

  I am spending all Saturday with Taylor, and the night, too. That is how good an impression she made on my father. The most unbelievable thing is she made him laugh. Twice! Taylor is like a slinky chameleon, deciding what a person needs and then changing into it. She acted like being in the army was like being president. She asked him a million questions. Ginger was there, and I could feel her eyes on me, Katie? I didn’t look up. I let Taylor do all the work, and I just ate. To tell the truth, I really enjoyed it. It was relaxing. I thought, When did I ever before feel this way at my dinner table? The answer was, never.

  This afternoon, we are going out shopping with Gwen. I told Taylor no stealing and she said fine, she’d pay for things, it didn’t matter either way. We are a few blocks from the house when Taylor says, “Let me drive.”

  “You want to?” Gwen asks.

  “You can drive?” I say.

  Taylor turns around to look at me in the backseat. “Can’t you?”

  “I’ve never tried.”

  “It’s easy.”

  “You want to try?” Gwen’s laughing eyes in the rear view. They’re doing Fun With Katie.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  That ought to stop them.

  But Gwen pulls over, gets out of the car, comes around to sit in the back. “Go ahead,” she tells me.

  I sit there, saying nothing.

  “Go!”

  “Come on,” Taylor says. “I’ll teach you.”

  I get out of the backseat, come around front, slide behind the steering wheel. I put my hands on it. Oh, the feeling. I am right now in that TV commercial, “See the USA in your Chevrolet.” I lean back against the seat, look into the rearview, then the side view mirrors. Everything looks weird and backward and scary.

  “I don’t want to,” I say, and start to get out.

  “Just put it in drive,” Taylor says. “Put your foot on the brake first.”

  I look down at the pedals, point. “This one?”

  “Maybe she shouldn’t do this,” Gwen says.

  “Relax, I’ll watch her.” In their relationship, Taylor acts like she’s the older one.

  “Put your foot on the brake first, and then put it in drive.”

  I look around. We’re on a deserted suburban street. No one is out. I put my foot on the brake. The car grows fifty times bigger.

  “Now put it in drive,” Taylor says. “Move that red line to the D.”

  I pull the stick down, feel a little clunk, ju
mp. Well, now, there. I have broken the car. I look over at Taylor, sick. How will I pay?

  “What? You’re doing fine!” Taylor says.

  Oh. I breathe out, get re-excited.

  “Now just press down gently on the accelerator,” Taylor says. “That other pedal.”

  “Okay.” I push down and suddenly we are going across someone’s front lawn and everyone is screaming.

  “Stop!” Taylor yells. “Put your foot on the brake!” I do, and Taylor goes flying onto the floor. I look at her, scared she is bad hurt, but she is only laughing, holding her head. Gwen is laughing, too. And then so am I. “Put it in park,” Taylor says, “P.”

  I do, like an expert if I do say so myself.

  “And get out.” She is still laughing. She opens her car door and starts for my side. I get out, too, head for the backseat.

  “No, just stay up there with Taylor,” Gwen says. “The two of you belong together.”

  Well. I think I am flattered.

  Taylor drives slowly off the lawn, bumps down the curb. There are bad tire tracks all over the place.

  “They’ll go away,” Taylor says, seeing me look back at them. “By tonight, they’ll be gone.” I don’t know if that’s true. But she knows more about cars than I do. And anyway, there’s nothing I can do about it now.

  Taylor drives all the way to the store. She does everything right. Once, a police car pulls up behind us. “Cop,” Gwen says. “Watch it.” Taylor looks into the rearview mirror, smiles. I look slowly behind me. The cop is smiling back. And then we lose him without even trying.

  Dear Katie,

  Happy New Year! Well, I knew a trip could restore my spirits to a high note and once your spirits are right everything can change for the better. To make a long story short, who’s sorry now? I am back in school and with someone altogether different, Ed Lombrowsky, which I never noticed him before, but boy I should have. And I have been nominated for yearbook queen. As you know I am only a junior and that honor usually falls to a senior. I feel like I have awakened from a bad dream. Thank you for being such a good hostess to me in my time of need. The only thing that was not good was meeting you know who, as if you didn’t know. I am not jealous to say this, Katie, but I don’t think she is a good friend for you. Don’t ask me how I know. I can just tell.