Girlhearts

by Norma Fox Mazer

  I smoothed light green eye shadow on Patty’s eyelid. “Hold still, Patty.” My voice caught. “Cynthia said we were a ‘tragedy.’” I lilted my voice, trying to catch Cynthia’s operatic tones. “‘Un-believable. You would not think such a thing could happen again. Ten years ago, a mere ten years, her father was in a freak accident.’ She’s gossiping about my life! What is it to her, just a story, like a play where she aced the lead, got the great part!”

  Asa was staring at me with a dumbfounded expression, and I thought, If I keep on like this, they will all despise me. Yet, I couldn’t seem to stop.

  “She gets to be sooo sad and sooo sympathetic. She took in the orphan child; isn’t she just sooo good?”

  Patty and Grant exchanged looks, and my heart took a huge lunge. I told myself to simmer down. I knew that what I was saying was unfair. I remembered Patty’s telling me once that I was an “even” person, meaning I didn’t let things get to me, meaning I didn’t rant and rave. Maybe I’d been that person before Mom died, but no more. I was jagged now; I had sharp edges. I was righteous, too, ready to shout through the fire in my heart at anyone who crossed my path. Do you know how lucky you are, or are you too stupid to know?

  I didn’t like me much anymore, and I didn’t see why anyone else should, either. James … well, he was just a little miracle. But he didn’t really know me, and who knew how long that would last.

  “She cried,” I said. “Cynthia cried on the phone. You know how I hate that? I don’t want to hear her crying over me or Mom.”

  “She was your mom’s best friend,” Grant said. “She’s got a right, Sarabeth.”

  “You can say that, Grant, but I’ve heard enough crying to last me the rest of my life. Enough ‘Poor Sarabeth,’ ‘Oh, Sarabeth.’ I know what everyone’s going to say before they even think it. Am I okay, and how am I, really? And their soppy voices and how any moment I’ll feel better. And I don’t want to hear how proud everyone is of me for taking things so well. Oh, yes, I take things so well. You can see how great I’m doing!”

  I twirled Patty around in the chair. “I’m done!” I dropped onto the bed and covered my eyes with my hand. “Sorry,” I said. “I blew it. Sorry, you shouldn’t have to listen to me doing that.… If my mom came back tonight, do you think she’d even recognize me?”

  “Are you kidding, girl?” Jen said. “Your own mother?”

  “I’ve changed, Jen. I’m not a nice person anymore. You can all see that. Sometimes I don’t even recognize myself. It’s like I’m a house that a stranger has moved into and taken over. I’m not the person Mom wanted me to be. I’m mean; I’m rude and smug—”

  “Stop that,” Patty said. “Stop putting yourself down.”

  “If you could see into my heart, you’d know I’m just telling the truth.”

  “Sarabeth,” Grant said. She sat next to me and stroked my hair. “You’re the same person you always were.”

  I hid my face in my hands. Why did they have to be kind to me? I didn’t want it; it made me too ashamed. I couldn’t even tell them the truth, that sometimes I loved them the way I always had, but sometimes I hated them, hated how much they had and how little I had.

  “Sarabeth,” Grant said again.

  “I’m sorry. It’s being without Mom that makes me crazy.”

  “I’d be crazy, too, without my mom,” Jen said.

  “It’s like doing really hard work,” I said. “You feel tired all the time. Sometimes, just breathing is hard. Being without Mom has changed everything. It’s confusing, and maybe that’s the hardest part of it all. Or, I don’t know, the really hard part could be just thinking about her.”

  “Running the mom movies?” Asa said.

  “Yes.” I half laughed. “Sometimes they’re really cool and I like it; I like remembering stuff about her. She could be so funny.” I started crying.

  Grant started crying, too, and then so did Patty. It was contagious. Jen was next. Asa held out for about five seconds, and then she joined in, and we were all crying and holding on to one another. They were crying for me, but for themselves, too. I knew it. They all had things to cry over, even if, most of the time, they never talked about it.

  It was midnight, and we didn’t even realize it. We had planned to toast one another with grape coolers, but instead we cried our way into the New Year.

  TWENTY

  “Do what?” I said to Billy.

  “Has she got hearing problems?” Billy looked across the table at Cynthia with a little smile. Smile said, Can’t she take a joke? He had a bunch of jokes like that. “Has she got speech problems?” “Does she ever say anything?” “Is she of any use around here?”

  “You want me to do what, Billy?” I said again.

  “Transfer,” he said. “To Hugo Everts, which is the school nearest to where you live now. Which is here.” With each word, the toothpick he was chewing on bounced on his lip. “Cyn’s been running you all the way across the city every morning for weeks, and then picking you up every afternoon. That is way too much. And as it’s a new year and a new term, I thought it would be appropriate to have a nice fresh start.”

  “It isn’t every day,” I said. “I try to keep it down. I don’t like Cynthia driving me all the time, either. That last week, before vacation? I took the bus three mornings—”

  “I don’t care if you were getting up four mornings out of five, which you weren’t,” Billy said. “I don’t want Cynthia to have that responsibility. I don’t want her doing that anymore, period. Okay? She’s not going to do that, plus the baby and everything else.”

  I took an orange from the bowl in the middle of the table and squeezed it between my hands. “Billy, okay, I understand, but I don’t want to transfer schools. I can’t! I mean, I like my school. I like my teachers. I—”

  “You’ll like these teachers, too. Why not? You’ll have a new experience. It’ll be good for you, I guarantee you that.”

  “But all my friends are over there—”

  “Are they going to stop being your friends because you’re at another school? If they do, they’re not the kind of people you want for friends. Am I right? Come on, answer me, am I right?”

  I dug my thumbnail into the skin of the orange. “I guess so.”

  “You guess right. Hugo Everts is four blocks away. You can roll out of bed and be there in five minutes. I’ll tell you something else. Now is the time, before the term really gets under way. Hugo Everts is a good school—no problem there, we checked it out.” He looked over at Cynthia. “Tell her, Cyn.”

  “He’s right. It is a good school; we checked it out,” Cynthia said.

  Our eyes met. She was steady in her glance, letting me know that she agreed with Billy. That she wanted me to do this. Wanted me to change schools. Didn’t want to drive me back and forth across the city anymore. And I couldn’t blame her for that. I don’t know if even Mom would have been as good about doing that as Cynthia had been for so many weeks.

  “Think about this,” Billy said. “You can sleep another hour every morning, maybe two. I always wanted to sleep more when I was your age.”

  “Can’t you see him, Sarabeth, snoozing away?” Cynthia tapped my arm, giving me a smile that asked for one in return. “His poor mom—trying to get him up must have been like moving a derrick.”

  “Like trying to wake the dead,” Billy said. He didn’t wince the way some people did now when they said “dead” or “death” in front of me. “Anyway! Getting back to the point, Miss Silver, sooner or later, you’re going to have to bite the bullet and transfer. You know that. You know we’re not in that school district. They’re letting you finish out the year. Dispensation. But the time is coming when—” He drew his hand across his throat.

  I peeled the orange, thinking, Grant … Patty … Asa … Jennifer.… Thinking about not seeing them every day. Thinking about how I depended on seeing them. They were my friends, and more than friends. Billy used to be my friend, too, someone I could joke with, trust,
depend on, someone who would even defend me from Cynthia and Mom when they were mad at me. But those were the old days. Everything was different now. Billy was different, and so was I.

  “What the devil are you doing?” he said.

  I looked up. “Doing? Nothing.”

  “You’re eating the peel, for God’s sake.”

  “No, I’m not. The white stuff inside the peel. It’s good for you. Vitamins.” I liked how chewy and stringy it was between my teeth. I didn’t say it. It would be just another strange thing about me.

  “If you’re going to eat an orange, eat it like an ordinary human being,” he said. “Don’t go chewing on the peel. It looks pretty bad, you sitting there with that orange peel stuck in your mouth.”

  “Salute him, Sarabeth,” Cynthia said. “Salute Sergeant Billy. He’ll feel much better, won’t you, Sergeant?”

  “Well, what the hell,” Billy said, putting his hands behind his head. “Just trying to do my best by our boarder.”

  Cynthia rapped his cheek with her knuckles. “Told you, she’s not a boarder. Sarabeth’s part of the family now, okay?”

  Billy tipped back on his chair, balancing on the back legs. Behind him was the drying rack, loaded with Darren’s little outfits. Shirts, undershirts, diapers, running pants. “So what do you say, member of the family?”

  “I don’t want to transfer, Billy. Please …”

  I was begging, and I hated it. Hated the stinging tears behind my eyes. I forced a smile. My lips lifted. I sat up straight. No tears. No crying in front of other people. That had always been one of Mom’s rules, and now it was my rule, and I wasn’t going to break it.

  “Well, my friend,” Billy said, removing the toothpick from his mouth, “if you don’t transfer, how are you going to get to school every morning? I’m telling you right now, Cynthia isn’t driving you anymore. That’s kaput. Finished. So it’s either the bus or you got a nice thirteen-fifteen-mile distance there to cover. You going to walk? Fifteen miles, that’s about four hours. So tell me, how are you going to get to school?”

  “The bus,” I said.

  “Every day?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have to get up at five o’clock to make it, am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ll do that? You’ll do it every morning?”

  “Yes.”

  Billy shrugged and let the chair back down. “If you can do it, no argument from me. But no missing school. No excuses. No oversleeping. No ‘I’m not feeling good enough today to get up.’”

  I nodded.

  “Sarabeth,” Cynthia said, “are you sure? It’s going to be hard. It would be a lot easier on you to transfer—”

  “No,” I said.

  “Some mornings, you’re going to be tired, and you’re going to want to sleep. What then?”

  “I’ll get up. I’ll get up every morning.” I swallowed a segment of orange. It was soft and sour. “Thank you,” I said to Billy. “Thank you for not—”

  “Hon,” Cynthia said, “you don’t have to thank him.”

  Oh, but I did. That was another of Mom’s rules: You’re polite; you’re always polite and careful with people who have power over your life.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I was never late to school now that I took a city bus; in fact, I always arrived way before first bell with time to kill. Sometimes I trotted around the track; sometimes I sat in the bleachers and read. The mornings James showed up were the best. Maybe I looked sort of excited on those days, or maybe Jen was intuitive; whichever, she picked up on our friendship, and she was so curious. She kept me asking me questions; she really wanted to know just how close James and I were. We kept having variations on the same conversation.

  Jen: “I like James.”

  Sarabeth: “Me, too.”

  Jen: “He’s a good friend?”

  Sarabeth: “Mmm.”

  Jen: “How good?”

  Sarabeth: “Good.”

  Jen: “Really good?”

  Sarabeth: “Mmm.”

  Jen: “Really, really good?”

  Sarabeth: “Mmm-hmm.”

  Partly I held back to tease her; partly I just wasn’t ready to talk about James yet. Maybe I was afraid that if I said too much, I’d spoil things between us. Or maybe I was afraid that he was a fluke, a quirk, an accident, and that at any moment he would disappear as so many other things had in my life.

  When I got on the bus one Friday afternoon to go to Travisino’s, the first person I saw was James, sitting with his clarinet case. “Where are you going?” I said, taking the seat next to him. “I’m on this bus a lot. I’ve never seen you on it before.”

  “My music teacher changed our schedule from Saturdays to Fridays. He’s in the Fischer Building downtown. Where are you going?”

  “Is the Fischer Building that one on Canal Boulevard?” I asked. I didn’t want to say Travisino’s name and then have to explain about him. James knew some things about me, maybe even a lot, but not everything. “Is it that big brick building with all the windows?”

  “Right. It used to be a shirt factory. Now it’s all music and dance studios.”

  “Cool,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s great. It’s inspiring to hear all these people banging away on their instruments and blowing their lungs out.”

  “You make it sound like work.”

  “I take it you never played an instrument, Sarabeth, or you’d know it is work.”

  “My mom couldn’t afford lessons, or an instrument,” I said.

  He stared at me. “Huh!”

  “Huh, what? Huh, we were poor?”

  “Hey!” He put up his hands. “Don’t be sensitive.”

  We had sort of talked about our differences—the thing of me and Mom being trailer people and he and his family being way up there. And the thing of his being black and my being white. Which had made me ask something I really wondered about. “Does your family know about me? Would they hate me being your friend?”

  “What about your family and me?”

  “What family? If you could have known my mother, you wouldn’t even ask that question.”

  “If you were me, you’d know that I have to ask that question.”

  “If I were you—jeeze, oh man,” I said, like Leo. Which made James laugh and say that was the corniest, most retro expression he’d heard in a long time.

  We talked all the way downtown. I told him how I thought the army had ruined Billy’s character. Then he got onto how he hated organized sports, and he really ranted on. I stood up to pull the cord for my stop. “James,” I said, bending toward him, “you know what I think—you like to talk the way some people like to eat—nonstop.”

  “You saying I’m piggy?” He smiled up at me, and I thought of the first day we’d met—the bleachers, the snow, and how I’d called out, almost in a panic, when he was going to leave, and how he came back, and how that was the beginning. And remembering that, for the first time in a long time I felt lucky.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Leo should be here any moment,” I said to Patty as we walked out of school. “He’s picking me up, and I’m hoping he’s bringing Tobias, like the last time he came for me.”

  “You mean the Leo is coming here, aka Leo the Good?”

  Ever since I’d told Patty that Leo had nearly cried in the storage trailer, she had looked on him as half a saint. It really annoyed me. “Right,” I said. “He’s driving me over to Roadview.”

  “How come Leo? Don’t tell me you asked Cynthia and she turned you down.” Patty’s pale cheeks flushed. “That’s going to make me really mad.”

  “I didn’t even ask her, Patty. I just went straight to Leo.”

  Since the argument, or whatever it had been, over my transferring schools, I’d been careful not to ask Cynthia for any favors. I lived there, and we got along, but it was different now from when I first came. It was as if a loaded paintbrush had swept across all of us and left us each stiffened and se
parate.

  “Why are you going over to Roadview?” she said. “I thought you were through with everything there.”

  “I just want to see where Mom and I lived one more time. I guess it doesn’t make any sense, but—”

  “I can see that,” Patty said. “I just hope you won’t run into that Dolly woman.”

  Leo’s truck, with the chimney sweep logo on the side, pulled up to the curb. I raised my hand to wave and, as if I’d pressed a switch, Pepper’s head popped out of the window on the passenger side.

  “Shoot!”

  “What?” Patty said.

  “That’s Pepper giving me the big grin. I didn’t know she was coming.”

  “Get over it, Sarabeth,” Patty said. “Those two have been together for months. It’ll be a year this summer, right?”

  “Right.” I looked up at the sky. Murky blue, with clouds scooting east to west. It was warm today. We were in the middle of a late-January thaw.

  “And it looks as if it’s going to stick,” Patty went on.

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh, come on. Same thing with, I hate to say it, my mother and whatsisbadface, the stepfather.”

  I took Mom’s fish scarf from my backpack and tied it through a loop on my jeans. “Have you gotten over it with whatsisbadface, the stepfather, Patty?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  “So, I’m that way with Pepper. I haven’t gotten over it, and I never will. You can’t believe how she acts, as if she loves and adores me to the sky.”

  “Maybe she does. Give her a break.”

  We went down the steps together. “You always think the best of everyone’s motives,” I said.

  “Please. How can you say that when you know how nasty I feel about my stepfather? But I really think you could give up being so mad at Pepper. What has she done to you? Not her fault about your mother, and she takes care of Tobias. Doesn’t she get some credit for that?”

  “You’re right, Patty, I know you’re right. I should like her. She’s probably a very okay person, who I’m not giving a chance because I’m not a very okay person! The truth is, I can hardly stand being near her!”