Babyface

by Norma Fox Mazer

  “I’ll get him in a minute. I want to ask you something. If someone you love has done something you think is really bad, but it wasn’t done to you, but it still hurts because it makes you see that person as completely different than you ever thought he was, what do you do?”

  “Toni?”

  “Yes?”

  “Run that by me again. If someone you love has done something wrong but not to you—”

  “Right. But it really made you see that person in a whole different way, and it made you not love them in the same way—”

  “Toni.”

  “What?”

  “Are you talking about Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so.”

  “Well, what’s your answer, Martine?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Maybe you don’t want me to ask you.”

  “No, it’s okay. I just want to think about it. It’s a good question. Did I tell you I’ve been going to therapy?”

  “No! Why?”

  “Don’t panic, it doesn’t mean I’m crazy or going over the edge. It just means I realized I needed some help in sorting things out. After your visit, it hit me.”

  “Oh, it’s because of me?”

  “Well, you were the catalyst. I was probably coming around to it, but I kind of scared myself that night we talked. It was so intense.” Her voice faded for a moment, then came back stronger. “Anyway, it gives me someone to talk to about my feelings, someone trained and smart about these things.”

  “Like a guidance counselor,” Toni said.

  “Yeah. Except a lot more expensive. Well, about Dad—what I’m learning is that the first thing you need to do in almost any situation is to recognize your feelings.”

  “I do, Martine! I recognize them. That’s the problem. I feel my feelings so much, and I don’t know what to do with them.”

  “I think you have to forgive him, Toni. That’s what I’m finding out that I have to do. Does it seem hard to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But people are more than one thing, aren’t they? More than one way, not all good or all bad.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “No, come on. You don’t suppose so. You know that. Or you don’t know anything.”

  “Hal!” Mrs. Jensen wheeled her shopping cart down the aisle toward Toni and her father. “Hal!” she said again, putting her hand on his arm. Julie was with her. The two girls glanced at each other.

  “I’ve been meaning to come over and see you,” Mrs. Jensen said. “I talked to Violet. I heard about your troubles this summer, and now Violet, her back. What a shame. Tell me, how are you doing, how are you feeling?”

  “I’m hanging in there, Jerrine. What about yourself?”

  “Oh … you know. I’m hanging in there, too.”

  Toni held on to the bar of the grocery cart with a distant smile. She was aware of Julie watching her.

  “What else can you do?” Toni’s father said in his best brave voice. “You have to make the best of things.”

  “Exactly! Just keep up a cheerful face, no matter what.”

  With a snort Julie clapped her hand over her mouth and rolled her eyes wildly. That did it. Toni was going to laugh out loud in a moment. “I’ll get the cat food,” she squeaked, pushing the cart away fast.

  Julie went around the aisle with her. “Just keep up a cheerful face,” she said in her mother’s voice.

  “What else can you do?” Toni said in her father’s brave voice.

  “Good for you, Hal!”

  “Good for you, Jerrine!”

  They glanced at each other slyly, from the corners of their eyes.

  “I like your hair,” Julie said.

  Toni’s hand went to her head. “Thanks.”

  “Yeah, it’s nice. When’d you do it?”

  “The other night. I just took the scissors and—” Toni made cutting motions all around her head.

  “Cool,” Julie said.

  That was how they finally made up.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY

  Toni invited Julie and L.R. for supper Friday night when both her parents would be out, but she didn’t tell either Julie or L.R. that the other was coming. Not exactly a plot, more of a ploy. Or a plan. Anyway, she just wanted to bring the two of them together. She wanted them to be friends and, if it was in the cards, more. Which would not make her feel so great, but she felt she owed it to Julie and to herself, too, to have everything clear between them.

  L.R. arrived first. He was wearing baggy gray pants and the usual black T-shirt. “You’re right on time,” Toni said. She felt a little awkward, unsure. It was the first time L.R. had come to her house. Maybe he felt the same way. He thrust a silver freezer bag at her. “Dessert.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  “Ice cream cake.”

  “Great.” She led him into the living room. “Sit down, make yourself at home.”

  “Thank you.” He pulled at his pants legs and sat down. “Very nice house.”

  “Thank you,” she heard herself saying again. Was that the fourth or the fifth time?

  Paws came into the room and leaped onto L.R. He circled, then put his paws up against L.R.’s chest. “Hey, kitty, hey, puss, how you doing?”

  “You must be a cat person,” Toni said, sitting down next to him.

  “We have two, Spike and Jones.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “No? My father and I both like cats.” He rubbed the side of Paws’s mouth. “Cats like this a lot. I read that they have special glands there. Jones goes crazy when I do it to her.”

  “I can hear that Paws likes it,” Toni said, and she began scratching him under the neck. The cat’s eyes closed in ecstasy.

  In a few minutes she went into the kitchen to put the ice cream cake away and get the pizza into the oven. She was fixing the tray with soda glasses and plates when Julie opened the back door. “Supper ready?” Julie said. She was wearing a black derby hat, a shirt, and a pair of old jeans with holes in the knees.

  “I thought you were going to throw out those jeans,” Toni said. Maybe she should have told Julie that L.R. was going to be here. She wasn’t even wearing earrings.

  “I decided to use them for trashing around.”

  “Thanks a lot. Why don’t you go put on something nicer?”

  “Who am I impressing, the pizza?”

  “Not exactly. You’ll see.” Toni took Julie’s arm and steered her into the living room. She heard Julie’s little intake of breath.

  LR. stood up. “Hi.”

  “Oh … hi,” Julie said.

  “This is great,” Toni said. “My two friends, meeting at last.”

  L.R. picked up Paws and pressed him to his chest. Julie stared past L.R. at the TV, as if it were an object of powerful fascination. Talk, talk! Toni thought. “L.R. is a really good bowler, Julie,” she offered.

  “Truly?” Julie murmured theatrically. “I always thought bowling was one of the lesser sports.”

  “Julie’s an actress, L.R.,” Toni said quickly. “You probably remember seeing her in June in the Drama Club play.”

  “Umm, sure,” he said.

  “She was wonderful,” Toni said.

  Julie wandered over to the window.

  L.R. sat down, still cuddling Paws.

  “Well, you guys, carry on!” Toni escaped to the kitchen.

  She checked the pizza and finished preparing the tray, all the time listening for the sound of their voices. She dawdled, giving them as much time as possible.

  When she came into into the living room, L.R. was lying across the couch playing with Paws. Julie was on the other side of the room, flipping dials on the TV. They weren’t talking. They weren’t looking at each other. The only thing they were doing mutually was ignoring each other.

  “Who’s ready for pizza?” Toni said. They both looked up, almost leaped up. She had never seen two more obviously relieved people. “Oh, there you ar
e!” L.R. said.

  And Julie, as if Toni had been away on a world tour, sighed, “Back at last. It’s about time.”

  So much for plans, plots, and ploys.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  “Toni. I don’t want to go on like this,” her father said. He sat down at the kitchen table across from her. “What are we going to do about us?”

  She put her finger in her book to mark her place.

  Her father gestured around the kitchen. “You and me living this way, hardly talking, it’s not right. When you do talk to me, it’s like I’m someone from Mars.” He leaned toward her. “I want my daughter back.”

  Her mother appeared in the doorway. “You two are talking,” she said. “Good. Are you telling her some of the things we’ve been discussing, Hal?”

  “I’m trying to. Give me a chance.” He patted his pockets, looking for a cigarette. “Well, Toni, we’ve been talking a lot, your mother and me.”

  “Because of you,” her mother put in. “Because of everything with you, Toni.”

  “Violet, do you want me to—”

  “No, you talk, Hal. It’s your show. Go ahead.” Her mother ran water into the teakettle. “I won’t interrupt.”

  Her father stared at the cigarette that he held between his fingers. “I want to explain something. A long time ago your mother and I had problems. You know something about that. The way I see it, I mean, the way we both see it, is that we had our problems, but we never, uh, settled them.” He spoke slowly. “We decided to go on. We wanted you to grow up in a house with two parents. That was the main thing.”

  “She knows that,” Toni’s mother said. “I’ve talked to her about it. I told her that.”

  Her father frowned. “When you brought all that stuff up about the hitting and the fights, I didn’t want to remember it. I didn’t want to talk about it. The hitting, especially that. We haven’t talked about those things for a long time.”

  “For forever,” her mother said dryly. She sat down. “When I was pregnant with you, your father and I made an agreement. We promised each other to forget the bad stuff, to put it behind us. Things had gotten out of hand. I said we were going to control ourselves, and your father agreed. The hitting … I knew that was never going to happen again. It never did.”

  Toni’s father nodded.

  Toni stared from one to the other. Her cheeks were burning, there was a clatter in her chest. “What are you saying to me? What are you telling me? That it doesn’t matter that he hit you?”

  “Ahh, no,” her mother said. “It matters. It’s there. There’s nothing we can do about that, but it also matters that we didn’t let it ruin our lives. We stopped it. It ended. We went on with our lives, with your life. Most of all we both wanted to make something good for you. We stayed together for you.”

  “I know,” Toni said. “I’ve heard that before.”

  Her father turned his head and blew out a mouthful of smoke. “Listen, you seem to have an idea that—Listen! It wasn’t like being in prison. There was something there, there was more than duty or, or habit, or doing the right thing.”

  “We’re not just saying this in an offhand way,” her mother said. “We want you to know … we—we have feelings—” Her mother faltered, and her eyes filled. “What … what do you think is going to happen when you go to college? That’s not so far away. You think we’re going to fall apart? That we’ll just walk away from each other? No, there is affection here, Toni, there is something here between your father and me.” Her mother wiped her eyes. “There always has been.”

  “And now it’s going to be better,” her father said.

  “Because of you,” her mother said. She reached for Toni’s hand. “It’s opened things up and we’re talking. I mean, really talking, more than we have in a long time. Isn’t that strange?”

  Her father put his hand over her mother’s hand. “Do you understand?” he said to Toni. “Do you understand what we’re trying to tell you?”

  Toni’s father had begun walking every morning on the towpath bordering the canal. “I’m up to a mile and a quarter,” he said one morning at the table. “How about that, Toni?”

  She was reading the newspaper. “Good.”

  He tapped the paper, waited until she looked up, then took out a cigarette and shredded it over a plate. “My last one,” he said. “That’s it. I’m done. Right, Violet?”

  Toni’s mother sat down with a cup of coffee. “Your father’s joined a stop-smoking group.”

  They both watched her.

  “Does my daughter have anything to say to that?” her father said.

  “Congratulations,” Toni said.

  “And that’s it?”

  “Good for you, Dad,” she said softly.

  Julie’s parents went on a trip to Niagara Falls. “To rediscover their romance,” Julie drawled on the way to school. He father had returned two days ago. “And my mother let him into her life again, as cool as you please. Like he went to the store for a loaf of bread. Five months ago.”

  “She wasn’t even mad?” Toni said.

  “Jerrine? Not her. She said, ‘Oh, I’m all over that.’ Great. I am never going to let a man walk over me. And you better not, either.”

  “L.R. is not the type to walk over a person.”

  “Who’s talking about L.R.?” Julie said. “I’m talking about the future, about real life.”

  “This is my real life, Julie.”

  Julie grunted. “Mine begins in four years.”

  Toni shifted her books from one arm to the other. “Jul, what if my friendship with L.R. escalates?”

  “Meaning what?”

  Toni looked up at the sky. “We kissed.”

  “You kissed?”

  She nodded.

  “You really did? When?”

  “The movies, yesterday.”

  “How was it?”

  “Good movie, you should see it.”

  “Thanks a lot. Now tell me, how was it?”

  “I probably shouldn’t talk about it.”

  “Yes, you should.”

  “It was nice. I mean, it was nice, Julie.”

  “Nice?”

  “Nice.”

  “Wet?”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “You did too.”

  “It was a little smooshy.”

  “What’s smooshy? It sounds like he smashed his mouth against yours. Did he stick his tongue in, too, or is he too polite?”

  “Don’t ask so many questions.”

  “Oh! So he did.”

  A little later, just before they crossed the street to the school, Toni said, “Julie, I want to ask you something. Is it really okay with you about me and L.R.?”

  Julie shrugged. “He’s yours, darling.”

  “But you were in love with him.”

  “I needed some excitement in my life.” Julie smiled a little. “It was easy to be in love when I didn’t actually know him. It was fun,” she said.

  How different they were, Tony thought. Of course, they always had been, but now it was so clear to her. So were some other things. How she’d always clung to Julie, thinking that Julie was the strong one. A little sadness pierced her. Their friendship had changed. It would always be there, but on a different basis. It was as if they’d been walking along side by side, and suddenly, without meaning to, she’d gone ahead of Julie.

  Julie hit Toni on the arm. Hard. “Hey!” Toni said, and she hit Julie back, just as hard. “What’s your problem?” she said.

  “I’m envious,” Julie said with a tiny smile. “I hate it that you’ve been kissed before me. I always thought I’d be first.”

  “So did I,” Toni said wonderingly.

  Toni woke up early. She reached for the glass cat and rested it against her eyelids. Its cool weight always brought back that day when she and her father had driven to the glass factory in Corning: the two of them together; the long, sloping road past the lake; the green hills. They’
d stopped for lunch in a diner. She’d eaten a cheese sandwich and the best rice pudding she’d ever had.

  Downstairs, she heard her father moving around in the kitchen. The cat was pink in a certain light, blue in others. Like music, almost. She remembered the steel drummer in the park in New York saying, “The heart must be clear for the music,” and how that had impressed her. She hadn’t understood it exactly, she still didn’t completely … but it seemed like something that she should remember.

  She got out of bed and went downstairs. Her father was looking out the window, a cup in his hand. He turned, hearing her. “You’re up early.”

  She stood next to him, looking out the window, too. “What’s the weather report?”

  “Cloudy, but it might clear. One of those nice but not perfect days.” He put bread in the toaster. “Can I make you something?”

  She shook her head. “Are you walking this morning?” He nodded, and she said, “How do you feel about company?”

  He looked at her, took the bread out of the toaster, and put it on a plate. Then he said, “Some questions don’t have to be asked.”

  “I’ll just go change, then,” she said, and she started up the stairs. “Wait for me, will you?”

  About the Author

  Norma Fox Mazer (1931–2009) was an acclaimed author best known for her children’s and young adult literature. She earned numerous awards, including the Newbery Honor for After the Rain, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award for Dear Bill, Remember Me?, and the Edgar Award for Taking Terri Mueller. Mazer was also honored with a National Book Award nomination for A Figure of Speech and inclusion in the notable-book lists of the American Library Association and the New York Times, among others.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.