The Divorce Express
Page 1
“YOU’RE NEW, RIGHT?”
“Actually I’m old—fourteen—but new to the school.”
“I heard you ride the Divorce Express.”
“You heard?” I didn’t think anyone had even noticed me.
“Woodstock’s really a small town. Word gets around. I usually ride the bus, too, but haven’t lately. My father’s a musician and he’s been on tour, so I haven’t been going. I start next weekend.”
“Maybe we can sit together next time.” I blurt it out without thinking that maybe she’s already got someone to sit with. What if she says no or makes some dumb excuse to get out of it?
“Great. It’s been really boring, the times I had to go down there. A lot of kids our age who have ridden on the bus for years give it up by the time they’re in high school. I used to sit with my best friend, Jenny, but she had to go live in New York full-time. There was a custody fight and her father won.”
“I live with my father, too, but there was no custody fight. It just worked out that way.” Even though I’m sorry about her friend leaving, I kind of hope that she’s got an opening for the position of new best friend.
BOOKS BY PAULA DANZIGER
The Cat Ate My Gymsuit
The Divorce Express
It’s an Aardvark-Eat-Turtle World
The Pistachio Prescription
There’s a Bat in Bunk Five
This Place Has No Atmosphere
PUFFIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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A Penguin Random House Company
Originally published in 1982 by Delacorte Press
Published by PaperStar, Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 1998
Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2007
This edition published by Puffin Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2014
Copyright © 1982 by Paula Danziger
Introduction copyright © 2014 by Ann M. Martin
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PAPERSTAR EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Danziger, Paula. 1944-2004
The divorce express.
Summary: Resentful of her parents’ divorce, a young girl tries to accommodate herself to their new lives and also find a place for herself.
[1. Divorce—Fiction. 2. Parent and child—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.D2394Di [Fic]
82-70318
ISBN: 978-1-101-66583-1
Version_1
TO FRIENDS who have seen me through a writer’s block, who have read this story or heard it over the phone, who have offered advice and friendship:
Nancy Kafka, Aviva Greenberg, June Foley, Annie Flanders, Rosie Flanders, Chris Flanders, Nicholas Nicholson, Melita Horvat Stupack, Michael Stupack, Sue Haven, Mark Haven, Paul Haven, Judy Gitenstein, Peter Bankers, Lila Browne, Ann Symons, John Symons, Joel Symons, Esther Fusco, Andrea Fusco, Chris Fusco, Andy Fusco, Max Lindeman, Barry Samuels, Maggie Denver, and Fran Weiss.
ALSO to the town and people of Woodstock.
You don’t have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
—John Ciardi
A NOTE FROM PAULA
Once upon a time, I took a class called “Writing for Television.” It was for writers who were well known in other writing fields. Every week I listened to people talk about how writing for television was different from other types of writing. It didn’t seem like TV writers had much control over their work. There were committees, directors, producers, and actors who would all want to make suggestions. I realized that I didn’t want to write for television.
During the course, we were given an assignment to develop a pilot for a series. My idea was to do one concerning a divorce and shared custody.
What a good idea, I thought . . . . What a bad idea to use it as a television series that would probably never be produced. So I started writing it as a book.
One day, I was shopping at a store in Woodstock, New York. The owner, my friend Nancy Kafka, walked in and said, “I just put my kid on the Divorce Express.” Boing!!! I had a title. I had great advisers—Nancy and her daughter, Aviva . . . and the Divorce Express arrived.
—Paula Danziger
Contents
“You’re New, Right?”
Books by Paula Danziger
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
A Note from Paula
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Special Excerpt from It’s an Aardvark-Eat-Turtle World
INTRODUCTION
If a Prince Charming or a Prince Semi-Charming came up to my door and said, “Rosie Wilson, you are the most beautiful, individualistic fourteen-year-old in the universe,” I certainly wouldn’t slam the door in his face.
This is the first line of Paula Danziger’s hilarious and moving It’s an Aardvark-Eat-Turtle World. First lines fascinate me, and this one says a lot about Paula, her stories, and her characters. The author of over thirty titles for young adult readers, Paula was known for capturing her audience with her uncanny ability to tap into teenage psyches—to write realistically and unflinchingly about families, divorce, friendship, first love, insecurity, and injustice, and to do so with a wicked sense of humor. It’s rare for a reader to find herself laughing out loud, then just a few sentences later, searching for tissues in order to wipe away tears. Paula courted difficult, sometimes controversial subjects; her self-effacing characters and her love of humor made her books compelling reading.
Paula herself was as memorable as any character she created. She made friends wherever she went and was passionate about them. Somehow each of us felt as if we were Paula’s best friend. She was flamboyant and flashy. She tied colorful scarves around her head, wore as many oversize rings as possible on her fingers, and shopped with great joy for glittery sneakers and sequined purses. She liked video games and slot machines. She once managed to light one of her fake fingernails on fire. The first time I spent a weekend at her house, she offered me a breakfast of Coke, M&Ms, and Circus Peanuts.
Paula was a marvel of disorganization. I’ve never seen anything like the inside of her purse. It was a jumble of loose bills and coins, receipts, lipstick cases, candy, lint, notebooks, keys. She frequently lost her keys, or thought she had, and a dramatic search would ensue before they were located, surprise, at the bottom of her purse. Her desk was worse, overflowing with larger items.
&
nbsp; Yet out of this chaos sprang books that have resonated with readers for decades. Paula’s first book, The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, was published in 1974. Thirteen-year-old Marcy, the protagonist, may wear panty hose, buy records for her stereo, and never have heard of cell phones, but it doesn’t matter because she faces the same issues contemporary kids face:
All my life I’ve thought that I looked like a baby blimp with wire-frame glasses and mousy brown hair. Everyone always said that I’d grow out of it, but I was convinced that I’d become an adolescent blimp with wire-frame glasses, mousy brown hair, and acne.
Marcy’s story continues in There’s a Bat in Bunk Five when she experiences her first love while at summer camp:
This thing with Ted isn’t a crush . . . . What if I let myself start to care and get hurt? I’m not sure I can survive a broken heart. I get hurt so easily anyway, so I’ve never let myself get too close to a guy, not that there have been that many opportunities. I’m scared. What if it turns into a real relationship and it’s as bad as my parents’ marriage?
In The Pistachio Prescription Paula tackles divorce as Cassie Stephens’s family begins to crumble. In later books, other characters face the aftermath of divorce, but this story chronicles the Stephenses’ slide from dysfunctional, a theme Paula visits often, to separation. In a scene from the beginning of the book, Cassie visits her friend Vicki:
We sit down with her parents. Nobody fights at the Norton house. At least not while I’m there. Vicki says that they do fight sometimes, but that it’s psychologically healthy to air feelings honestly. I don’t know if my family does it honestly, but if awards were given on the basis of yelling, we’d win the Mental Health Award of the century. I guess we’d probably be disqualified, though, on the basis of lack of sanity.
I smiled when I read that paragraph. But later the tone of the story changes:
[My father] walks over. “Cassie, I’m sorry it didn’t work out. I guess your mother’s right. There’s no use pretending we can get along. It’s over and that’s all there is to it.”
That’s all.
As simple as that.
Three kids.
A broken-up family.
Yet the ending is hopeful. Cassie realizes her family may not be the one she wishes for, but that she’ll survive.
Rearrange the letters in the word PARENTS and you get the word ENTRAPS. This’s how The Divorce Express begins. Four years after the publication of The Pistachio Prescription Paula writes about Phoebe, who shuttles between her father’s home in Woodstock, New York, and her mother’s home in New York City. Travel is the least of Phoebe’s concerns, though. Now her parents are seeing other people:
Maybe I’m a prude, but I don’t like to think about my parents having sex with anyone but each other.
Phoebe analyzes the stages parents go through when they get divorced:
. . . the fighting and anger—then the distance—and making me feel caught in the middle. After the divorce they try to be “civilized.” I know that there were even times that they missed each other. I know for a fact that after the divorce they even slept with each other once in a while. It was confusing. Now they act like people who have a past history together, but only a future of knowing each other because of me.
By the end of The Divorce Express, Phoebe’s father has fallen in love with the mother of Rosie, Phoebe’s new best friend, and their story continues in It’s an Aardvark-Eat-Turtle World, told from Rosie’s point of view. All Rosie wants is a happy family, but Phoebe doesn’t make that easy. Furthermore, Rosie, who’s biracial, faces issues that Phoebe can’t fathom, and once again, Paula writes candidly about a sensitive subject, illustrated in this scene when Rosie goes on a date with a boy who’s white:
While we look at each other, some guy comes up and says with hate, “Why don’t you stick to your own kind?”
I can’t believe it.
He repeats what he’s just said.
Jason turns to him. “We are the same kind—human. You’re the one who isn’t our kind. You’re scum.”
A year later, Paula’s next book, This Place Has No Atmosphere, was published and the setting is, of all places, the moon in 2057—a bold departure for Paula, who made the colony on the moon seem real and believable, and who drew us into the life of Aurora Williams on the first page. The book feels futuristic indeed, but Aurora’s story of adjusting to a move and finding a serious boyfriend is timeless.
Paula died in 2004, but her stories have already been passed from one generation of passionate fans to another. Her many best friends miss her, but I like to think of the hope with which she ends her books. She wrote great last lines, too. If you take the letters in the word DIVORCES and rearrange them, they spell DISCOVER.
Thank you, Paula, for showing us captivating beginnings, hopeful endings, and in between, how to look at life with laughter.
CHAPTER 1
Rearrange the letters in the word PARENTS and you get the word ENTRAPS.
I found that out one day when I was playing Scrabble, got the seven-letter word, and had no place to put it.
That’s the way I’m feeling right now, trapped with no place to go.
It’s not fair. A growing girl should have parents who act more like grown-ups. They’re supposed to know what they want out of life and not be confused and constantly making a lot of changes.
Not my parents though. They are still, as my father likes to say, “getting their act together.”
They started getting their act together by breaking up. That happened the summer I was between seventh and eighth grade. It was a real shock. Sure, I knew they weren’t getting along well, but I didn’t expect divorce. Not the way it happened.
Right after seventh grade I was sent to camp. My parents told me that camp would be good for me since I was an only child.
Good for me, ha! It was their chance. My father moved out.
I had no say. It was all arranged by the time I got home from camp.
My mother got to stay in our New York apartment and keep the furnishings.
My father sublet another apartment nearby and got the summer house in Woodstock.
Each of them got part of the savings.
My father got the car, which my mother had never learned to drive anyway.
Both of them got me, joint custody.
I lived half a week with one parent, the second half with the other. Weekends were alternated. If this sounds confusing, it was. I had to keep track of everything with a calendar. Once everything got really messed up. Each parent thought it was the other’s weekend to have me, and both of them made plans to go away. It was awful. I felt like neither of them wanted me. Finally I ended up calling my friend Katie and making plans to stay with her. By that time both of my parents had canceled their weekend plans.
For all of eighth grade I commuted between the two apartments.
It was weird.
At my mother’s I had my old bedroom. At my father’s I slept on a convertible sofa bed.
During that time, the differences between my parents really showed. They should never have gotten married so young. They should never have had a kid. But they did.
I had two different wardrobes. My mother likes me to wear designer clothes, the ones with alligator, horse, and swan emblems. My father, however, is always buying me message T-shirts, like DON’T HASSLE THE HUMPBACK WHALES. It got so that my friends could tell which parent I was staying with by the clothes I was wearing.
My father really loves the country. He wants to paint and not work in an office for someone else.
My mother enjoys living in the city, loves being an interior decorator, and gets poison ivy from just looking at pictures of nature.
By the time that the divorce came through, the only thing they agreed on was that they should live in the same neighborhood so I wouldn’t have any trouble getting to school.
I had no trouble getting to school. I just had trouble once I got to school.
Something happened
to me after the separation and divorce.
They thought they had everything figured out just right. Only they didn’t. They forgot that I might have feelings too.
So I did lots of things at school. I talked in class all the time, never turned in any homework, wouldn’t give the right answers when teachers called on me.
One day I got to school real early and snuck in. I Krazy-Glued everything I could. In the men’s faculty bathroom, I glued down the toilet seats. In the women’s faculty room I plugged up the coin slot on the Tampax machine. In the science lab I glued everything in sight—chairs, the desks, the Bunsen burners. I even found the teacher’s marking book and glued that to her chair, which I had already glued to the wall.
Then I went to homeroom.
It didn’t take them long to figure out that something was wrong, since I’d also glued the lock to the front office. It also didn’t take them long to find out who was responsible, because the tube had leaked and the fingers on my right hand were glued together.
The principal said she was shocked to “see a girl create such havoc.”
I told her that with Women’s Liberation anything was possible.
My parents really had to pay that time. They had to come in for meetings and then they had to pay for repairs. They’re still taking money out of my allowance for that.
I was suspended for a week. When I got back, I talked to Ms. Fowler, the guidance counselor. She discussed it with me, asking if maybe I just wanted something in my life to stay in one place.
My parents started to see each other to talk about the problem—ME. For a while, I thought that maybe they’d even get back together.
They didn’t.
While all of this was being discussed, other decisions were made. My mother decided to open up her own design business and would have to travel more. My father decided to quit his job and take two years to live in the country, paint, and try to support himself as an artist.
Once again they decided what was “best” for me.
Now I’m living in Woodstock all week with my father and almost every weekend, I go down to New York City to be with my mother, riding the Divorce Express.