by Juliet Bell
Dinner that first night was edible. No anchovies, at least. Hildy sat right at my grandmother’s knee and got bites of roast beef handed to her from the table, though we had fed both dogs before we sat down. The best thing about the meal was dessert: a delicious chocolate cake with raspberry cream frosting. My grandmother apparently had a sweet tooth—something we had in common. Maybe it was genetic.
Most of our awkward chat was about how I was possibly going to fill up the days of my endlessly long stay. The question seemed to worry her, too. She told me I would have chores, like walking the dogs and helping Miguel feed the birds. A friend of hers named Joan ran a bookstore, where she’d be happy to buy me books. The local high school had a swimming pool. If I liked drawing, she would get me art supplies. (I said no, politely; the world is a better place when I’m not somewhere in it doing art.)
It wasn’t wilderness camp—there was no mention of kayaking or making lanyards—but that was the program. Take it or leave it.
I was bold enough to ask one question. “Uh …” The GM glared. How the (expletive deleted) was I going to make it through a month and a half without uh? “Doesn’t Miguel have a daughter around my age?” I tried not to sound as desperate as I felt.
“You mean Rosie.” Grandmother seemed surprised. “I suppose she is close to you in age, yes. I believe she’s eleven. How old are you, Ella?”
“Eleven.”
“Ah.” She looked like someone who has just been told a poodle is the same species as a terrier: she had to think about it for a minute. “What an amusing coincidence.” Her face was anything but amused, though. Alarmed or uneasy, maybe—not amused. “But her parents are living separately at the moment, so she is here only some of the time. And besides, given the history …” She shook her head slightly.
“What history?” I asked.
The GM stood up abruptly, scraping the floor with her chair. “Perhaps another time, Ella.” I didn’t think that was, strictly speaking, the politest way of ending a conversation. Wasn’t she breaking one of her own rules? “For now, I must do some reading. And I’m sure you’re tired after your long day.”
I wasn’t tired at all, I was wide awake, especially after all that chocolate and the new spark of curiosity she had just lit in my mind. What about Rosie? I wanted to ask. She’s my only hope here! But something in my grandmother’s face made me feel I’d better leave that subject alone. For the moment.
Getting back to my room was going to be nerve-racking. Night was starting to fall, and away from the fire the air was spooky and cold. I got Lou from the courtyard—he was all licky and glad to see me, the feeling was mutual—and with him by my side, and a flashlight in my hand, I was able to be brave. Having a stomach full of cake helped, too.
Grandmother and I stood in the corridor hallway to say good night.
“Ella,” she blurted. She grabbed tightly onto one of my wrists. I felt the cool metal of her rings against my skin. “I am sorry about your mother’s illness. It is very distressing. I trust this treatment will help her get better. Please—” She hesitated. “Please send her my good wishes when you write to her. Now, good night.”
And then she and Hildy hurried away before I could say anything but “OK—good night” to her red retreating back.
This caught me off guard. It was almost disappointing that the GM had mentioned my mother at last. I couldn’t write her off anymore. Not as swiftly.
This situation was confusing, and the only person I felt like talking to about it was my mom. She would get how weird this whole setup was, having dinner with my grandmother, this grandmother, for the first time in my life. Even though Mom and Dad had divorced a thousand years ago, back in the time of the dinosaurs, my mother obviously knew what Violet Von Stern was like. I remembered the look on her face when I told her that’s where I was going. Now I understood it.
Back in my room I tried to call her at the Seattle hospital. One ring, two, three.
I got her voice mail.
Mom still sounded strong in the recording. It was from before she got sick. As I listened to her warm, familiar voice, I started twisting the new bracelet around my wrist.
She had given it to me the last day I saw her. Mom told me she had a graduation present for me, then reached over to her bedside table. The table was completely covered with cards from the hundred people who wanted her to get better (friends, neighbors, people at the optometry store where she worked), but somewhere in there she found a small box. She passed it to me with a shaking hand. I knew she wasn’t able to leave her room at that point; seeing my surprise she said sheepishly, “Nurse Rose got this for me downstairs. But it was my idea. Go ahead! Open it.”
So I did. Inside was a (fake) gold bracelet with charms around it: a heart, a star, a bunny. It wasn’t my style, and was probably meant for a younger kid, but it didn’t matter.
“They don’t have a great selection in the gift shop here,” she apologized.
“No, it’s great!” I put it on. What did I care if it had a bunny on it and I was almost twelve? It was from her. “I’ll wear it all the time. Thanks, Mom.”
Sitting in my grandmother’s weird, musty back bedroom, I touched the heart, star and bunny. I decided not to leave Mom a message. I wasn’t sure what to say, and besides, I worried that if I tried to, I might start crying, which wouldn’t help anyone.
The only other person I could call was Auntie Irene, who answered, thank goodness. She said things were fine but that my mom wouldn’t be able to talk on the phone much for the next while, so writing letters would be best. But not to worry, it was all going according to plan and she had the best doctors and it would all be fine. And not to worry. Auntie Irene probably told me about ten times not to worry.
Which of course made me worry.
“And how is your grandmother, Ella?” she asked. “Are you getting along?”
“She’s all right.” I didn’t see the point of telling Irene the truth—I didn’t want her to worry, either. Why go into all the details: no TV, no Internet—in fact, no technology at all from the past ten or twenty years? (What was I going to do the whole time here? Take up knitting? Practice the piano? Grandmother didn’t even have a piano! She had everything but a piano.) So I just said it was fine, but that I was pretty tired and ought to go brush my teeth and get my pajamas on. I think the normal sound of that reassured her.
When we hung up, I realized that the only thing I could do was start writing a letter to my mom, like Irene said, so I did that, telling her all about the Good Grammar Correctional Facility and all the rules I was picking up. Writing her made me feel a little bit better.
And after that I really did brush my teeth and get my pajamas on, and then without even reading I fell into a fitful sleep on the cold twin bed, a fan ticking away overhead all night long, in spite of the cold, that became a helicopter in my dreams, medevacing me back home, to my mom, for safety.
Sunday, June 20, Albuquerque
Tough to spell—and I used to think Mississippi was hard!
Dear Mom,
Well, I’m here. You can say that much. How about you? Are you there?
I wonder if the nurses are as nice in Seattle as they are in California and if you miss Dr. Lanner. I do. It was nice of him to say I could call him if I wanted to, but I’m not sure what I would say.
OK, letter writing! Here goes. I will try not 2 use 2 much bad txt spelling. First, here are a few things I have learned since I got here. I think my stay with Grandmother will turn out to be very educational.
1. Do not say “What?” if you don’t hear someone. “What?,” which I have been saying my entire life, turns out to be all wrong. You’re supposed to say “Pardon?” or even “I beg your pardon?” Like people in old-fashioned books do.
2. It is never “Me and so-and-so are …” The truth is, I remember you telling me this, too. So—DON’T say, “Me and Lou are worried we’ll be bored out of our minds here.” DO say, “Lou and I are worried we’ll be bored ou
t of our minds here.”
3. If someone has a lot of things in their house, DO NOT call them “stuff.” “Stuff” is bad. You may say “things,” as in, “Wow, what a lot of things you have!” You SHOULD NOT say, “Where did you get all this stuff?” “How do you keep track of all this stuff?” or “Why in the world do you even HAVE so much stuff?”
4. “Like,” used as a filler word, was invented by the devil. (Like—whatever!)
The neighborhood is deadly, too. There are no kids anywhere nearby, unless you count whoever is locked up at the Juvenile Correctional Facility a few blocks away. It is an ugly place with barbed wire around it that I guess is a jail for teenagers when they commit crimes worse than sarcasm. The only hope is this girl Rosie, the daughter of the nice guy Miguel who works for Grandmother, but I haven’t met her yet.
There’s no barbed wire around here, but it does feel kind of like a prison. I call it the Good Grammar Correctional Facility. I won’t get released until Grandmother has fixed up my grammar. I’m thinking of drawing a map of the whole place while I’m here, which will help me get around, and might help me plan an escape route. (JK!)
Grandmother also explained that her house is very unusual in being more than a hundred years old and made of adobe, which is basically mud. I remember when we made adobe bricks in second grade with Mr. Cooper, and Josh Green cried because he hated getting so dirty.
Anyway, you know all this already—you and Dad were here together once. I saw your names written on the wall in the room where I’m sleeping. You never told me about it!
I love you. And I miss you like (expletive deleted).
Ella
FOUR
“AHeM!”
I was on the field, and Coach was telling me I had to work harder on my soccer drill. My feet were slow and dragging, and I couldn’t seem to connect well with the ball.
“Ahem!” Suddenly it wasn’t Coach anymore, it was my dad, telling me I had to hurry up and get packed, because we were going out on the river. I was wishing I didn’t have to go with him.
“AHEM!!!”
My eyes half opened and my brain shook itself, like a dog after a rainstorm. I finally realized I must be dreaming, and that it was time to wake up.
It must be, because some tall, awful person was standing by the foot of my bed, ahemming like crazy, which made Lou dip his head, his tail wagging in apology, like he or I had done something wrong.
“What—what is it?” I said blearily.
“It is time, Ella,” my grandmother said, “to get up.”
Suddenly I sat upright. A freeze fell over me. I could hardly breathe. Did my grandmother have bad news, is that why I had to get up? Bad news—from Seattle?
“What happened?” I asked in a panic. “Did something happen?”
“Happen?” My grandmother moved to the curtain, pulled it open and waved a hand toward the courtyard, the sky, the scattered birds. “Certainly, something has happened. It is called morning.” Her blue eyes returned to me. “Really, Ella, you mustn’t miss the best part of the day. Come have your breakfast.”
I lay back down on the bed, my heart pounding. I didn’t want to risk facing Mrs. Von Stern in case laser beams were coming from my eyes and I killed her with one look.
“OK.” I used as calm a voice as I could manage. I practiced my breathing exercises. Coach always told us that breathing was important. “I’m coming.”
It wasn’t especially clear why it was so important for me to get up. It wasn’t as though there was anyone with a pressing need to see me, except maybe the peacocks. Still, that was one thing I had to get used to: sleeping past seven thirty was considered an offense at the GGCF.
There was plenty else, too.
I had to get used to the food: Bran Something cereal for breakfast, which tasted like wood chips, and for dinner mushy broccoli and strange bulging sausages, along with all kinds of slaw: coleslaw, apple slaw, mystery slaw. Grandmother had a machine that shredded things into the right state for slawdom, and I wasn’t always sure what had gone into its well. I glanced at the thing nervously when I had annoyed her by something I’d done, which seemed to happen about every half hour, and I wondered if one day I’d end up in the slawer myself.
I had to get used to the junk and the clutter, the way the house smelled of meat and of mildew, and to the animals, dead or alive: Hildy’s high-pitched yap and watery black eyes, and poor bodiless Tigger, who I finally decided meant Lou and me no harm.
I had to get used to the peacocks: their constant cries, and the way they sometimes galloped across the roof, sounding like bandits. As Miguel had said, they didn’t hurt anyone, but they did stare at you disapprovingly with their bright eyes, unless you were feeding them. That was my job now, scooping up grain from one of the feed bins or scattering compost scraps we collected in a green pail in the kitchen—slimy melon rinds, old eggshells and other delicacies.
Miguel was one of the only people who made me feel actually welcome at the GGCF. The other one was George, the UPS guy, who came almost every day to deliver more things, usually books (like she needed more!) but also shoes, nuts, dog food, stationery. Anything that could be shipped was shipped. (Though the boxes came by truck: why do they call it “shipping” if it comes by truck? More mysteries from the Vocabulary Department.) My grandmother was probably the only reason George ever drove into this ghost town of a neighborhood, unless the juvenile center got deliveries of handcuffs or hacksaws or whatever.
“So! You’re the granddaughter!” George said the first time he saw me. He was a plump white man with matching brown hair and uniform and the tidy look of a guy from a Lego kit. “Chip off the old block, eh?” He lugged a heavy box over near the door as peacocks lurched away, glaring, like it was very inconvenient for them to have to move.
“I guess.” I really hoped not, though. I didn’t want to be carved from that block.
George was nice to me. He and I traded baseball news. He was a Rockies fan, but I liked him anyway. As my mom used to tell me, people can’t always help what they are, and you have to accept their differences.
Someone ought to have told my grandmother that. I could tell the first time we went to her friend Joan’s bookstore that she didn’t feel that closely related to me, either.
Joan was a tall, big-boned redhead with a Southern drawl and a laugh like a car alarm. After we were introduced, she sat Grandmother down on a stool and then went ricocheting around like a superball, picking books off the shelves and bringing them over as if we were at a shoe store and these were sandals or boots to try on.
“I think you’ll like her,” Joan said, pointing at one author’s toothy photo. “She’s feisty. She’s got spunk. Like you, Violet.”
This wasn’t what I was used to in a bookstore. The place my mom and I usually went was one of those vast mall-type places that sells music and movies and candy and, by the way, books, with a line of cash registers up front like at a supermarket.
“Ah!” My grandmother brightened at the sight of one book Joan had shown her. “A new history of the Waughs! What fun.”
“Which wars?” I tried to sound interested.
“Oh, Ella.” She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Don’t be such a philistine. The Waughs … Evelyn, Alec, Auberon … You sound just like your father.”
I had no idea who Phyllis Stine was or how Dad managed to be like her, too, but clearly it meant something like “idiot.” My eyes stung with the insult. The GM was oblivious, but Joan saw. She led me over by the shoulders to a different part of the store.
“Now, don’t let your grandmother get to you,” she said quietly. “Just come right back at Violet if she says something like that. Show her you’ve got spunk, too.” Then Joan helped me toward the time-tested solution to bad feelings: reading. “Look here, hon—we’ve got some great new titles for juveniles …”
Juvenile made me think of the kids’ jail again, but Joan did pick out some good books—not just the nutritious ones we’d had to
read at school and then write reports about in the form of a board game or cookbook recipe. (Some teacher’s idea of how to make homework more interesting.) And it was good that she did, because reading turned out to be one of the biggest entertainment features of the Good Grammar Correctional Facility. Other than books, and birds, fun activities were pretty thin on the ground.
One afternoon, about four or five days after I arrived, Miguel was out teaching me how to make a silly clucking sound the peacocks seemed to love that he called his “pea-call.” It involved cupping your hands and blowing on them, like you do when you’re trying to get warm, but I hadn’t gotten the hang of it yet.
“You see that old hen there?” Miguel jutted his chin toward one of the brown lady birds and blew a soft little call with his hands. “That one’s Carmen. She’s my favorite.” I nodded, though how he could tell them apart was a mystery. Carmen started to wander over to a broad, hollowed-out area behind the cluster of cottonwood trees that looked like a place an asteroid had once landed. Miguel told me that many years before, this scooped-out area had been a pond, with ducks and fish and an elegant pair of swans that swam around it. It was hard to imagine that dustbowl filled with water now.
“And you know those empty fields, out behind where the Library is … ,” Miguel went on. “That’s where the Mackenzies used to keep their horses.”
“Horses?” I said. “Who rode them?”
“Who?” Miguel grinned. “Your grandparents, of course. And Walt.”
“Seriously?”
“Oh, sure. A long time ago, when your grandfather was still alive.” Miguel got a storybook look in his coffee-bean eyes. “This place was real different then, Ella. I wish you could have seen it. There were living things everywhere—it was a magical place.”
I tried to picture living things around, other than peacocks and guys with delivery trucks. It was tough. It was like Miguel had this old silent movie and was putting music and color back into it. “How do you know?” I asked him. “Did you come here back then?”