The Secret Language of Girls

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  Marylin sat down in the desk chair. The thing was, she hadn’t really known the little bird would die. She had just said it to be mean. Maybe the bird had heard her and lost all hope.

  Kate’s snores made a soft music from the bed. Marylin thought about waking her up to tell her about the little bird, but she didn’t. Instead she sat very quietly and looked at her feet.

  She would trade her pink toenails to hear the little bird peep.

  “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn the loss of a friend who everyone will miss, especially me.”

  Kate stood over the little bird’s shoe box in the backyard, her hands clasped at her waist, a black hat pulled low over her brow. Marylin thought the hat added a respectfully somber note to the proceedings, even if it was from Mr. Faber’s Charlie Chaplin costume.

  Marylin had been afraid that Kate would start crying that morning when she woke up to find that the little bird had died. But Kate had just stroked the little bird’s down a few times and said, “Well, I guess he’s with his mom in heaven now. I guess he’s probably pretty happy about that.”

  Then she had thrown on a pair of jeans and her “I’m with Stupid” T-shirt and carried the little bird’s shoe box downstairs to the screened porch.

  “I’ll fix us some cereal while you get dressed,” she’d told Marylin after she’d come back inside. “Then we’ll plan the funeral.”

  The funeral procession left the screened porch for the woods lining Kate’s backyard at 11:30 A.M. Kate carried the little bird in its box, followed by Marylin and her brother, Petey. Kate had asked her mom if she wanted to come, but Mrs. Faber said funerals made her sad, and besides, she had to go to work.

  “Does anyone have any last words they’d like to say?” Kate asked after her opening remarks. She took off her black hat and held it over her heart.

  Petey stepped forward. “I didn’t know Pee Wee very well,” he said. “But I wish I did. From what everyone says, it sounds like he was really nice.”

  “Thank you, Petey,” Kate said solemnly. She turned to Marylin. “Is there anything you’d like to say?”

  Marylin wasn’t sure. All morning she had been wrapped in quiet, as though all her words had slipped away from her along with the little bird. Marylin had never known anyone who died before, not even a cat. It made her feel the way she did the day before she got the flu, as though she were floating outside herself. Everything seemed to be happening far off in the distance. The trees shimmered in the late-morning heat, and Marylin wished the little bird’s mother had built her nest in one of them instead of a dumb, low-to-the-ground bush.

  Marylin decided she didn’t like funerals and she especially didn’t like things dying.

  “That’s okay, Marylin,” Kate said after a few moments. “Sometimes words don’t say what you mean anyway.”

  Then Kate lowered the little bird’s shoe box into the hole she had dug earlier and threw a handful of dirt over it. She motioned for Marylin and Petey to do the same.

  “Amen,” Kate said, brushing the dirt from her hands.

  “Amen,” Marylin and Petey echoed her.

  Then Petey went home to watch Mr. Rogers.

  “You want me to show you how to play Parcheesi?” Kate asked Marylin as they walked inside. “My dad taught me the other night. It’s pretty fun.”

  “I don’t feel much like playing right now,” Marylin said. She really didn’t think it was the time for games, anyway. Sometimes it was terrible how insensitive Kate could be.

  “Me either, I guess,” Kate said. She was quiet for a minute, and then a smile bloomed across her face. “Hey, I know. Let’s go to your house and you can show me how to paint my toenails.”

  Marylin was stunned. “You want to paint your toenails?”

  Kate shrugged. “Why not? I think it looks sort of nice. It makes your toes look like little seashells.”

  That was a funny thing about friends, Marylin thought. You could know a person practically your whole life and she could still surprise you.

  “Okay,” Marylin said. “Sure. It’s not that hard after you practice awhile. It’s kind of like learning how to color inside the lines.”

  Marylin followed Kate out the front door. Birds flew overhead, singing to one another across the wide, blue sky.

  “Do you ever think about kissing boys?” Marylin asked suddenly, wondering what other surprises Kate might have tucked away.

  “Only movie stars,” Kate said. “I would only kiss a boy if he was a movie star.”

  “Yeah, me too.” Marylin nodded, the wind lifting the back of her hair like a wing. “That’s exactly how I feel about it too.”

  attack of the killer hearts

  The hearts had been Kate’s idea.

  “The Three of Hearts? Get it? Like in deck of cards?” she’d prodded Marylin and Flannery, hoping to see the tiniest flicker of interest in their eyes.

  “I don’t know,” Marylin said, looking to Flannery.

  “Dumb idea,” Flannery said matter-of-factly. Flannery always voiced her opinions as though they were facts you could look up in an encyclopedia.

  “No, listen, you guys!” Kate protested. “We each buy a red T-shirt and paint a glow-in-the-dark heart on it. Together we’d be the Three of Hearts!”

  Flannery leaned back against her pillows. Teddy bears were scattered around her like adoring fans.

  “Together we’d be the three red T-shirts,” she said. “Who wants to go trick-or-treating as a T-shirt? I mean, really, I’m a little old to go trick-or-treating at all, but if I’m going to go, I want to be something good.”

  “So what’s your great idea?” Kate asked. She tried to sound sarcastic, but her voice came out watery, like she was about to come down with a cold.

  “I say we go as a valentine,” Flannery said. She smiled sweetly at Kate. “See, I don’t have anything against hearts. They just have to be the right kind of hearts.”

  As it turned out, the right kind of hearts were made of stuffed red satin, and Flannery and Marylin would wear them over red bodysuits and red tights. Kate, it was decided by Flannery, would be Cupid.

  “What’s so bad about being Cupid?” her mother asked that night at dinner. “I think Cupid is cute.”

  “Cupid’s fat,” Kate’s older sister, Tracie, said. “Cherubs are always fat.”

  “Then maybe you should be Cupid,” Kate said.

  “Speak for yourself, Chipmunk Cheeks.”

  Kate’s dad threw his napkin down on his plate. “You know, I listen to people argue all day as part of my job. It would be nice to have a little peace and tranquility when I get home.”

  Kate’s dad was the sort of lawyer who tried to get people to settle their differences out of court. Kate thought it was a nice sort of lawyer to be, even if it wasn’t the richest kind.

  “Come on, Mel, they’re just squabbling,” said Kate’s mom, who was a window designer at a store downtown and worked all day with mannequins. “Kids will be kids, et cetera, et cetera.” She took a bite of fettuccine. Kate’s dad stood up.

  “No one in this family has any idea of what kind of stress I’m under,” he said. “Absolutely no idea. I’m stressed out and I’m tired and I’m going upstairs to lie down.” With that, he pushed his chair back into place and left the room.

  “Mel!” Kate’s mom called after him. She followed him into the hallway. Tracie took her plate out to the kitchen.

  “I would have made a great heart,” Kate said to Max.

  Max bobbed his head up and down as though he quite agreed.

  When Kate woke up Saturday morning, she wondered if all over the country girls clustered in groups of three, and if the third girl always got stuck with the lousy costume, the last sip from the can of soda, and the comic book no one else wanted to read. She was thinking about starting a revolution for third girls when she grew up. After it was over, the Flannerys of the world would have to go trick-or-treating as Cupid for the rest of their lives.

 
For now, Kate was the one stuck with finding a bow and arrow. Her dad would probably know how to get archery supplies, but lately it was hard to get a word in edgewise between his yelling and his napping.

  Kate grabbed her basketball and dribbled it to Marylin’s house. She hoped Flannery wouldn’t be there. In fact Kate had begun to secretly hope that Flannery’s family would move away soon, even though they’d moved to the neighborhood in August and it was only October now.

  It had taken just two months for Flannery to completely disrupt Kate’s life. Before Flannery had showed up, Kate and Marylin had been best friends, no questions asked. Now Flannery kept edging her way in, inviting Marylin over to her house without asking Kate, making up secret codes for her and Marylin to write notes in. Kate couldn’t figure out why a seventh grader would hang out so much with sixth graders, except to boss them around. Well, she had to admit, you didn’t get much bossier than Flannery.

  Frankly it was starting to get on Kate’s nerves.

  Maybe the army would give Flannery’s stepdad a promotion and send them overseas, Kate thought as she walked up to Marylin’s front door. Then Kate and Marylin could go trick-or-treating as a pair of hearts.

  Marylin was sitting in front of the television set with a bowl of popcorn perched on her stomach.

  “How’s your heart coming along?” Kate asked, sitting down on her basketball and rolling herself toward the TV.

  “It’s ruining my entire weekend,” Marylin said. “My mom’s been working on it all morning, and every fifteen minutes she calls me to try on what she’s sewed so far.”

  “I bet it looks great.”

  Marylin grimaced. “Right now it looks like a fat, red pincushion. I’m beginning to wish we’d done your idea.”

  Kate rolled off her basketball and plopped onto the floor. “We still could, if you really wanted to.”

  “Flannery thinks it’s dumb,” Marylin said, as if that settled the matter.

  “So what?” Kate asked. “Two against one. We live in a democracy, remember?”

  Marylin seemed to consider this. She stared thoughtfully into her bowl of popcorn and twirled a strand of hair around her finger.

  “Flannery’s not our boss, you know,” Kate said. “We don’t have to do everything just because she says so.”

  Marylin gave Kate a long look and shook her head. “We better go as a valentine,” she said. “Petey says you can borrow his bow and arrow if you want.”

  “Marylin, come try this on!” Marylin’s mother called from upstairs.

  “Back to the drawing board,” Marylin said, standing.

  Kate dribbled her basketball back down the street. Some democracy, she thought, the ball hitting her foot and careening off of it. Two cardinals startled from the branches of a pine tree, and Kate watched them fly away before running after the basketball, which was headed straight for Mrs. Larch’s rose trellis. Mrs. Larch was the sort of person who would call your mom if your basketball knocked over her trellis. She was a very touchy woman.

  Kate had just managed to outrun the basketball and scoop it up when the ambulance lights began flashing in her driveway. Then the ambulance backed out onto the street and headed toward her. was written in big block letters above its bumper.

  It must have pulled into the wrong driveway, Kate told herself. They should really give those ambulance drivers better directions.

  “Kate! Katie! Come quick! Something terrible!” Tracie stood on their front porch waving frantically in Kate’s direction.

  What the heck’s wrong with her? Kate thought. And then she dropped her basketball in Mrs. Larch’s yard and ran so fast, she thought her heart would explode.

  The hospital was filled with pinging noises. There was the ping of the elevator as it stopped on the third floor, and pings that came from behind the high counter of the nurses’ station, and the pings pinging on the machine next to Mr. Faber’s bed. The machine and Kate’s dad were connected by a tangle of wires. Kate was scared to get too close to her dad. She was the sort of person who would trip and cause all the wires to come unattached from her dad’s chest. She thought those wires might be what were keeping him alive.

  “I’m fine, really I am,” Kate’s dad was saying to Tracie, who was standing next to his bed and crying so hard, her eyelids had swollen into cherry tomato–size pink puffs. “The doctor says that as far as heart attacks go, mine really wasn’t that bad. It was more like a protest than an attack. Honestly, sweetie, there’s no reason to cry.”

  Kate did not cry. A whole gang of tears had gathered behind her eyeballs, but they weren’t budging. Kate wished she could cry, just so her dad wouldn’t think Tracie loved him more than she did. It seemed to be a law in her life that she cried only when she didn’t want to, like last week when Robbie Ballard had called her “Kate, Kate, the Big Fat Primate” during a game of red rover.

  “Maybe we should let your dad rest, girls,” Kate’s mom said from the doorway. Marylin’s mom, Mrs. McIntosh, stood behind her. Mrs. McIntosh had driven Tracie and Kate to the hospital. She still had a few sewing pins stuck in the sleeve of her blouse. Kate wondered if she had finished making Marylin’s heart.

  “It’s the stress that caused it,” Kate’s mom told Mrs. McIntosh in the hospital cafeteria later. “Stress and not enough exercise. And his family has a history of heart problems. Thank God he doesn’t smoke.”

  Kate swirled her straw around the bottom of her milk-shake cup. Then she sucked on it as hard as she could, pulling up the last few drops of chocolate shake and making a noise like a really small person burping.

  “Gross!” Tracie exclaimed. “How can you make noises like that when Daddy’s just had a heart attack?”

  Kate shrugged. She didn’t see how the two things were connected. What did burping noises have to do with heart attacks? If she drank her shake as quietly as she could, would her dad’s heart perk up and beat good as new? If she pulled on her straw really hard so that her milk-shake cup caved in, would the machine her dad was hooked up to start pinging so loudly it would sound like a marching band?

  Mrs. McIntosh looked at her watch. “Why don’t we go upstairs and say good-bye to your dad,” she said to Tracie and Kate. “And then we’ll go back to my house and order a pizza.”

  Kate’s mom sighed. “Mel always liked sausage on his pizza. I guess those days are over.”

  The tears that had been hiding behind Kate’s eyeballs began to trickle down her cheeks. Her dad would probably never get to eat another sausage pizza in his life. For some reason, that seemed like the saddest thing Kate had ever heard.

  By the time Kate got to school on Monday, everyone in her class knew about her dad’s heart attack. She was late because her mom had taken her and Tracie to see their dad in the hospital first thing that morning. The pinging machine and its tangle of wires had been pushed into a corner. Kate’s dad was sitting up in his bed eating a low-fat corn muffin when his family came in. On the TV mounted on the wall across from his bed, an interviewer was talking to people who were over a hundred years old.

  “That will be me in sixty years,” Kate’s dad had said cheerfully, pointing to a hundred-and-one-year-old man on the screen who was chopping wood in his backyard.

  In sixty years Kate would be seventy-one. She scrunched up her face and looked in the mirror next to the TV, trying to imagine what she would look like then.

  “Are you getting sick?” her mom asked her.

  “Nope,” Kate said. “Just old.”

  When Kate walked into her classroom, everyone was busy working on their solar-system projects. As soon as they saw her, all the kids in her class stared at Kate as though she were a famous celebrity who had come to visit them. Ms. Cahill came over to Kate as she was taking Pluto and Saturn out of her cubbyhole and patted her on the shoulder.

  “You’re a very brave girl,” Ms. Cahill told Kate.

  Kate didn’t feel brave. Mostly she just felt like herself, except maybe a little more important. After all, it wa
sn’t every day a person’s dad had a heart attack and then made a spectacular recovery. That’s what the doctor who had stopped by her dad’s room that morning had said. A spectacular recovery.

  At morning break, a cluster of kids gathered around Kate and asked her about her dad’s heart attack. She told them about seeing the ambulance in her driveway, and how, as the ambulance had passed her on the street, she had seen her dad’s hand wave weakly at her from the window. Her dad hadn’t really waved, but Kate thought it added a nice dramatic touch to her story. She leaned back against the jungle gym and threw out a bunch of big words like cardialgia and coronary thrombosis. Everyone looked impressed.

  “So I guess this means you’re not going trick-or-treating,” Flannery said.

  Leave it to Flannery to ruin a perfectly good discussion, Kate thought. The kids who had been standing around the jungle gym listening to her trickled off to watch the seventh graders play soccer. Now it was just Kate, Flannery, and Marylin.

  “That was really good pizza we had at your house Saturday,” Kate told Marylin, ignoring Flannery.

  Flannery rolled her eyes. “I know you spent Saturday night at Marylin’s house, okay? It’s only because your dad had a heart attack, so don’t try to make me jealous.”

  Kate shrugged. Who said anything about trying to make anyone jealous?

  “So, are you going trick-or-treating or not?” Flannery demanded.

  “Of course I am,” Kate said. “My dad’s coming home from the hospital tomorrow. Why wouldn’t I go trick-or-treating?”

  Flannery rolled her eyes again. She was the queen of eyeball rolling. “Well, Marylin’s having dinner at my house, so just meet us there at six.” Then she turned to Marylin. “Come on. I need to show you something.”

  Kate watched Flannery and Marylin walk toward the school building. She wondered if there was someone in the army she could call to get Flannery’s stepdad transferred. I hear they need soldiers in Istanbul, she could say. And there are a few openings in upper east Romania. At least that’s what I read in the paper.