Dinah took her place by the piano. She didn’t need the score. She knew the song by heart.
She began to sing. Something was wrong. Dinah could hear that she was coming in on the wrong note. She broke off, and Mr. Maurer began the introduction again.
This time she was flat—or sharp? Somehow Dinah made herself go on, but now when the cracked whisper built to the soaring crescendo, it sounded so terrible that Dinah knew all too well that her silent practicing hadn’t turned her into a world-famous opera star. She read the truth in Suzanne’s eyes as she took her seat again.
“Suzanne Kelly.”
Suzanne walked over to the piano and folded her hands in front of her. The piano began, and Suzanne joined in. The beautiful nightingale’s voice that hadn’t poured forth five minutes ago poured forth now.
* * *
If Dinah wasn’t going to star in Carousel, maybe she could still be class president. It wasn’t too late, in spite of everything. If she got her petition early enough on Wednesday, she could collect the needed twenty signatures by the end of the day. First period slipped by. Second period. On Dinah’s poem, “In a Mere Five Billion Years,” Ms. Dunne had written, “Profound thoughts!” Would it be betraying those profound thoughts to leap into a major presidential campaign? Dinah didn’t know anymore.
Third period.
At the end of fourth period, Dinah stopped by the office.
“I’d like to pick up a petition,” she told the school secretary.
“You know they’re due this afternoon,” the secretary said.
“I know.”
Dinah still didn’t plan to turn it in. She just wanted to look at it. “We, the undersigned, hereby nominate Dinah Seabrooke for the office of seventh-grade president.” Even if she was going to renounce all earthly glory forever, it didn’t hurt to imagine it one last time. And she really would be a wonderful class president. In some ways she would be even better than Blaine had been. Blaine was serious and sensible, but Dinah had drive and passion. She had a sudden fleeting vision of a new head carved on Mount Rushmore, a smaller, feminine head, with wild, curly, wind-blown hair.
She showed her petition to Suzanne at lunch, while Nick was away from the table getting another carton of milk.
“But I thought—” Suzanne looked confused. “I can’t sign it. I already signed Nick’s.”
“That’s okay,” Dinah said. She wandered over to a couple of tables on the other side of the cafeteria to collect signatures, just in case. Eight kids signed. Eight down, twelve to go.
Sixth period passed. Three more kids signed. Seventh period. Dinah was up to sixteen signatures now. Those last four signatures were all that stood between her and a chance at Mount Rushmore. Four signatures—and Nick. It would be hard telling Nick that she had changed her mind and decided to run, after all. By now he was probably counting on being class president himself. But Dinah knew that Nick hadn’t turned in his petition yet. He had waited until the end, as he had said he would.
Eighth period.
“Good afternoon, class,” Mr. Mubashir said. “Today we will learn something about the birth of our own sun. Our sun’s birthday came about five billion years ago. Our sun was born when a cloud of whirling gas, stirred up by the explosion of a distant supernova, gradually began to condense.…”
It all seemed heartbreakingly sad to Dinah, the birthday of one small, insignificant, out-of-the-way star, the star that was going to be the sun, their sun, live for a short ten billion years, and then consume itself and the very earth it had warmed and brightened.
Nick looked over at her. “Ocean-River?”
Dinah knew what the question meant. She shook her head. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t. It would be like taking back everything she had felt inside for the last two weeks. Mount Rushmore itself was going to melt one day, the ageless profiles on the granite monument running together like molten wax, dripping from a sputtering candle.
“You’re sure?”
Dinah nodded. Under her desk, she crumpled her petition into a small hard ball, like one of the two doomed moons of Mars.
Seven
So Dinah wasn’t going to star in Carousel or be class president. It was odd to think that just a couple of weeks ago she had been making plans about what kind of footprints she was going to leave behind her on the sands of time.
Of course she could still be a champion debater and leave a few small, fleeting footprints that way. Last year she had promised Mr. Dixon that she would be on JFK’s brand-new debate team, which he was in the process of forming. She couldn’t back out of the promise now, however much she felt like backing out of everything.
Besides, Dinah loved debating. She almost loved it more than acting. She had debated against Nick back in sixth grade, in Mr. Dixon’s social studies class, on the topic of capital punishment. Dinah had argued for capital punishment, and Nick had argued against it. Dinah had stopped hating Nick the very same moment that Nick had convinced her to stop supporting capital punishment. But this year, Dinah wasn’t going to be debating against Nick. She and Nick were going to be partners, debating together against other teams.
The first debate-team meeting was held after school that day. Nick turned in his petition on the way. Dinah stood by his side as he did it, smiling a too-bright First Lady smile.
The middle-school debate team was small, just four seventh graders and four eighth graders, hand-picked by Mr. Dixon. Dinah didn’t know the other two seventh graders: a boy named Scott Martin and a girl named Lin Lee. She gave them a pitying appraisal, as she and Nick took seats together toward the front of the room. Lin and Scott both looked smart, but hardly a match for Nick and Dinah.
Mr. Dixon banged on his desk to get their attention. “Debaters!” he boomed jovially, his voice as loud as if there had been a hundred students in the room instead of eight. “I hope your killer instincts have had a chance to develop over the summer.”
Dinah glanced at Scott and Lin again. They didn’t look very threatening to her. Neither did Nick, for that matter, though Dinah knew from firsthand experience that he liked to win. And so did she. When they had competed against each other, this had been a source of tension. But now, as they competed together, on the same side, debating should form another bond between them, maybe one strong enough to make up for the election.
Mr. Dixon explained how the debate team would operate. They would debate the same issue all year long. Mr. Dixon didn’t say what this year’s issue would be. Instead he told them about the extensive research they would need to do, to prepare themselves to argue both sides of the issue. Debaters didn’t find out which side they were arguing until they arrived at a meet.
Mr. Dixon went on to explain that they would have a few practice debates early in the fall among themselves. Then they would begin competing against teams from other schools.
He still hadn’t announced the topic. Dinah’s mind was racing. If only it were capital punishment. Nobody on earth would be able to defeat Dinah and Nick on capital punishment. Or maybe it would have something to do with the environment, maybe even with recycling. Dinah didn’t know if she could argue against recycling, but she could certainly argue for it at a moment’s notice.
“Our debate topic for this academic year is…” Mr. Dixon turned to write on the board. “Resolved: That the U.S. government should substantially strengthen regulation of immigration to the United States.”
Disappointment struck Dinah like a blow. Was Mr. Dixon joking? She had no idea whether the government should substantially strengthen regulation of immigration. She had never spent one single minute of her life pondering immigration policy. How could she debate such a boring topic for a whole entire year?
Dinah looked over at Nick, but he was busy copying the topic into his notebook. So were Lin and Scott. Dinah copied it into her notebook, too. But in her heart she knew that she had as good a chance of winning a debate trophy as she had had of singing “If I Loved You” on key. And if she and Nick fail
ed as debate partners, it would be hard not to see that as an omen for their relationship. Then Dinah would have neither play nor presidency, neither debating fame nor … Nick.
* * *
After school, Dinah hurried off to Mrs. Briscoe’s house. There was no one like Mrs. Briscoe when Dinah was feeling miserable. Dinah would make her try to guess the debate topic. Mrs. Briscoe would give up after a few tries, and then Dinah would give an imitation of Mr. Dixon making the announcement, and the two of them could laugh about it together.
Dinah rang Mrs. Briscoe’s bell, but Mrs. Briscoe didn’t answer. At first Dinah was puzzled—Mrs. Briscoe never went anywhere in the afternoon—and then afraid. Once, last year, Mrs. Briscoe hadn’t come to the door when Dinah knocked, and it turned out that she had fallen on the stairs and broken her leg. Mrs. Briscoe had heart problems, too. Dinah’s own heart clenched inside her chest. If anything ever happened to Mrs. Briscoe …
But then the door finally opened. Dinah’s knees felt weak with relief.
“Come in, Dinah! Come in!” Mrs. Briscoe said. “I’m ashamed to admit it, but I was taking the tiniest bit of a nap.”
“Should I come back some other time?” Dinah asked, hoping desperately that Mrs. Briscoe would say no.
“No, no, not at all. A nice pot of tea is just what I need to wake up.”
Dinah followed Mrs. Briscoe to her kitchen, down a long hallway made more narrow by the stacks of yellowing newspapers lining one side. A year ago Dinah’s mother had been given the job, in her organization consulting business, of organizing Mrs. Briscoe’s astonishingly disorganized house. Dinah had helped her mother bundle up hundreds of piles of newspapers for the recycling center. Now the newspaper piles were creeping back again.
First Dinah told Mrs. Briscoe all about the election and Carousel. She had found in the past that when she told stories about sad things that had happened to her, the sadness in the stories began to disappear and they became just—stories. And Dinah took satisfaction in knowing that her stories were always especially humorous and engaging.
“Carousel is a wonderful show,” Mrs. Briscoe agreed. “Those songs! I can’t hear ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ without breaking down like a baby. Suzanne will make a splendid Julie. And it sounds like your Nick will make a fine class president.”
“They will,” Dinah said, forgiving Mrs. Briscoe for the compliments. “But—I wish I could sing. I mean, I really thought that maybe I could sing, just because I wanted to so much.”
“You were very brave to try,” Mrs. Briscoe said. “When I look back on my life, I find that the only things I’m really sorry for now are the times I didn’t try.”
Dinah thought that over for a minute. Maybe that was another reason why she felt worse about the election than about the play. She hadn’t even tried to be class president. But it had seemed so pointless to try.
“The debate team met today,” Dinah said then. “Guess what this year’s topic is.”
“Oh, I’m sure I don’t have any idea,” Mrs. Briscoe said.
“Just guess.” Dinah smiled expectantly. How Mrs. Briscoe would hoot when she heard the topic Mr. Dixon had finally written on the board.
“Well, let me see. I would think that welfare reform would be an exciting topic. Or maybe something to do with immigration policy.”
Dinah was stunned. “That is the topic: immigration. You think it’s interesting? I thought it was boring.”
“Certainly not!” Mrs. Briscoe said. “I must have seen a dozen articles on immigration in the past few months. And isn’t it a lucky thing that I’ve been saving the papers! I had a hunch they would come in handy.”
“It doesn’t sound boring?” Dinah asked again. “‘The U.S. government should substantially strengthen regulation of immigration’?”
“It won’t be when you’re debating it,” Mrs. Briscoe said. “Let’s each take a pair of scissors and start going through these papers. And when we’re done, maybe I’ll send them off for recycling.”
Dinah began the hunt for scissors, for nothing in Mrs. Briscoe’s house was ever where Mrs. Briscoe thought it was. She felt a faint surge of hope. She would do her best on the debate team this year. And she would keep trying in her relationship with Nick.
* * *
Dinah’s father picked her up from Mrs. Briscoe’s on his way home from work.
“I guess we’ll get back our exams tonight,” he told her on the ride home. “It’ll be good to find out exactly which questions I got wrong. And I’m going to talk to the professor after class and see if I can get her to give me any tips on how to study better.”
Dinah couldn’t help asking a question. “Do you ever wonder—I mean, do you really think going back to school is worth all the trouble?”
“Sure,” her father said. “I’m tired of the store, honey. My job there is something I just drifted into, after I got out of the Navy. It was never what I really wanted to do. And now that I’m forty, I want to make sure I find what I really do enjoy doing before it’s too late.”
Dinah needed to clarify her question. “But whether you find it or not, I mean, you’re just going to die in the end, anyway.”
“Whoa!”
To her surprise, Dinah’s father pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the ignition. “This sounds pretty serious. Is it connected to all that moaning and groaning about the sun we heard a couple of weeks ago?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Honey, it’s because I’m going to die someday that I want to make my life now the best I possibly can. I don’t want to be seventy, eighty, ninety, and feel that I never really lived.”
“But what difference does it make, in the end?”
“It makes a difference,” her father said. “It makes a difference to me.”
But why? Dinah didn’t bother asking. She knew he wouldn’t be able to tell her, any more than she could tell him why she couldn’t stop feeling the way she did.
“Is everything all right at school?” her father asked then. “We haven’t heard any stories lately. Your mom and I worry when we don’t hear stories from you. Though most of the time your stories make us worry, too.”
“Everything’s all right at school,” Dinah said. Except for the election, and the play, and the debate team. But for some reason, she didn’t feel like telling sad stories to her parents anymore. She told them only to Mrs. Briscoe.
“And with Nick?”
“And with Nick.” Sort of.
Dinah’s father didn’t look satisfied, but he turned the engine on and steered the car back into the slow line of rush-hour traffic, all those cars creeping forward in the twilight toward wherever it was they were trying to go.
Eight
Mrs. Briscoe was right, as usual. The more Dinah read about immigration policy, the more interesting it became. Right away, Dinah felt herself in sympathy with the negative—that the government should welcome immigration, not restrict it. After all, the United States was a nation of immigrants. If poor people desperate for a way out of poverty or oppression couldn’t come to America, where could they go? The challenge was to make herself come up with powerful arguments for the other side. Though whether or not they were able to immigrate to the United States, everybody in the world was going to die in the end, anyway.
Dinah wrote a poem on the topic for Ms. Dunne. It was called “A Few Thoughts on Immigration Policy”:
The Haitian refugees who wait for asylum may get it; but they will still die.
The undocumented Mexican workers who cross the border into Texas may find jobs, but they will still die.
The Vietnamese immigrants who own the corner convenience store, and the Korean immigrants who work in the filling station, and the Taiwanese immigrants who work at the pharmacy will all die.
The tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free—all will die someday, whatever it says on the Statue of Liberty.
Illegal aliens, legal aliens, United States citizens—all will d
ie.
Everybody will die.
Dinah read it over, pleased. From the title through to the last line, it was her best poem to date.
Dinah had been writing a lot of haiku, too. Ms. Dunne adored haiku. Haiku was a Japanese style of nature poetry. A haiku was very short, just three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. Dinah would find herself in the middle of doing something else, and then the idea for a haiku would just come to her, like a special, sudden, unexpected gift. Once she had the idea, it was a lot of work to make all the syllables come out right, but it was a wonderful kind of work—like solving an extremely challenging and complicated puzzle that turned out to be a tiny seventeen-syllable treasure.
One golden leaf falls
From the maple in my yard—
Soon all leaves will die.
In the evenings now
There is just a hint of frost—
Icy death to come.
Birds are flying south.
Don’t they know that death can come
To the south as well?
At least Dinah could still write poetry. She was grateful for that.
* * *
Nick was busy with his campaign. At Dinah’s suggestion, he had decided to base his candidacy on environmental issues. His campaign slogan was “Nick Tribble: The Next Step.” The idea was that Blaine’s recycling program was the first step, and the great environmental programs that Nick would launch would be the next step. All Nick’s posters were green, to carry out the environmental theme.
Dinah helped Nick make the posters on Sunday evening. She helped him think of catchy things to write on them, like: “Save more trees? Vote Tribble, please!” and “Even WORMS know where it’s at: Vote Tribble!” The worm poster showed cute little worm heads poking up out of the JFK Middle School compost heap, where all food waste from the cafeteria would turn into dark, fertile, nitrogen-rich soil once Nick was elected president. Dinah was the one who drew the worm heads. And then before the first bell on Monday, Dinah helped Nick tape up his posters all over the halls at school.
Dinah Forever Page 5