Sarah Simpson's Rules for Living

by Rebecca Rupp

  JANUARY 1

  It is New Year’s Day, and I have decided to keep a journal. Sally, my mother, says this is a good idea because I got a journal for Christmas from my aunt Kate and if I don’t write in it, what else am I going to do with it?

  “You can keep your lists in it,” Andrea said.

  Andrea is Sally’s best friend, and she does not approve of lists. There are two kinds of people in the world, says Andrea: the list makers and the free spirits. Andrea is a free spirit. She has lots of frizzy hair in dreadlocks, and she wears big clanky jewelry and clothes in loud patterns that are not flattering to her hips. Andrea teaches Women’s Studies and Gender and Social Issues at Pelham State College, right across the hall from where Sally teaches English literature.

  People who make lists, says Andrea, are putting all their time in boxes and not leaving themselves open to new experiences like suddenly buying a parrot or going to Italy for the weekend.

  But I think lists are a way of putting your thoughts in order. Also I think it is important to plan.

  REASONS WHY ANDREA SHOULD MAKE LISTS

  1. She is always forgetting her appointments with her therapist.

  2. Whenever she promises to bring something over for dessert, she ends up leaving it at home in her refrigerator.

  So then Sally said that people often start journals by introducing themselves. So that is what I am going to do.

  My name is Sarah Elizabeth Simpson. I am twelve years old. I have orange hair and I am fat.

  Sally says it’s baby fat, but that sounds like crap to me. Emily Harris, who is blond and thin and the most popular girl in my class, does not have baby fat.

  Sally and I live in Pelham, Vermont, at the very edge of town, where the sidewalk ends and the woods begin. We have two cats, named Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson, though we mostly call them Ginger and Sam. Ginger is almost as old as I am, but Sam is just a kitten. He is a replacement for Charles Dickens, who vanished last year under mysterious circumstances. We suspect Mr. Binns, an unfriendly neighbor who has scrubby little chickens and a shotgun.

  My father does not live with us anymore. He lives in Los Angeles, California, with his new wife, who is a tennis instructor named Kim.

  THINGS I DO NOT LIKE ABOUT KIM

  1. She wears a Wonderbra.

  2. She has long blond hair that she’s always flinging around to make sure that everybody notices that she has long blond hair.

  3. She is boring to talk to.

  4. She giggles through her nose.

  Kim looks exactly like a Barbie doll. Andrea, when I’m not supposed to be listening, refers to Kim and my father as Barbie and Ken and asks how life is going at Barbie’s Malibu Beach House. Actually my father and Kim do not have a beach house. They live in a development about five minutes from the beach. I saw a picture of it. All the houses are painted pink and pale blue and lime green and look like brand-new candy boxes.

  Our house is old and white and peely, and part of the back porch is falling down.

  My mother has a boyfriend named Jonah. She doesn’t call him her boyfriend. She says he’s just a good friend. But I can see the handwriting on the wall. He’s here practically all the time, with his little boy, whose name is George. I think that’s a stodgy name for a little kid. If I had a little boy, I’d name him Vladimir.

  George has shaggy brown hair, and he’s always dragging this ratty stuffed bear around.

  THINGS I DO NOT LIKE ABOUT JONAH

  1. He always sits in the cats’ chair.

  2. He is not nearly as good-looking as my father. He is going bald on top, and he has a potbelly.

  3. He drives a horrible old blue van with bumper stickers all over it that say things like SAVE THE WHALES and VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS.

  4. He sings stupid songs.

  5. He has a beard.

  Later

  It is New Year’s Day night. I am the only one awake. Sally and the cats are asleep. George and Jonah have gone home.

  George and Jonah were here for dinner, which was pot roast and potato pancakes. Most people have ham at New Year’s, but we don’t because I won’t eat pigs because of Piglet. Piglet is my favorite Pooh character. Jonah eats pigs, but not around me.

  Jonah brought a bottle of champagne for him and Sally and a bottle of sparkling cider for me and George. Then he proposed toasts.

  THINGS WE TOASTED

  1. Good friends.

  2. The future.

  3. The Revolution.

  4. Bears.

  “What Revolution?” I said, and Jonah said that the Revolution is when the good people take over the world and everybody uses solar power and eats organic vegetables.

  After dinner we went for a walk in the snow. The snow was coming down in fat fluffy flakes like the snow in a snow globe. If you looked straight up into the snow, you could imagine that everything was upside down and you were falling into the sky.

  George went running ahead with his bear and his stupid floppy boots, trying to catch snowflakes on his tongue, and Jonah took Sally’s hand and tucked it through his arm. Sally can say he’s just a friend all she wants, but I know better.

  Then they started talking about their New Year’s resolutions. Sally’s is the same every year: “Simplify, simplify.” That’s a quote from Henry David Thoreau. Sally thinks that life is too cluttered and needs to be pared down. I can think of things to pare down too, but mine are not the same as Sally’s.

  George’s resolution is to grow enough so that he can ride the Mountain of Death roller coaster next summer at the Pelham Fair. Short little kids are not allowed on the Mountain of Death roller coaster. George is five and small for his age. Jonah asked me what my resolutions were and I said I didn’t know.

  Jonah has not made any resolutions yet either, but I could think of some.

  RESOLUTIONS FOR JONAH

  1. Lose 25 pounds.

  2. Sell the van.

  3. Throw out that shirt with the sea horses on it.

  4. Quit singing “We Shall Overcome.”

  5. Shave.

  I just looked up resolution in the dictionary that I got for Christmas from my aunt Elaine. Aunt Elaine always gives improving presents, like wool socks and yoga mats.

  resolution (n.) 1. A resolute temper; boldness and firmness of purpose. 2. An intention.

  MY RESOLUTIONS FOR THE NEW YEAR

  1. Get rid of Kim.

  2. Get rid of Jonah.

  3. Dye my hair.

  4. Change my name and move to Australia.

  JANUARY 2

  Just barely

  It is almost one o’clock in the morning, but I can’t get to sleep. Thoughts keep going around in my head.

  New Year’s Day is the anniversary of the day my whole life changed. Last year this was the day my father left. Before he went, we had a talk and he told me all about how married people sometimes grow in different directions and about meeting Kim and realizing that she was his soul mate and how the new year is a time for new beginnings.

  “A new beginning for all of us, pumpkin,” he said. But I don’t see how it was a new beginning for Sally and me. I think if he really loved me, he would have stayed home.

  Also I hate it when he calls me pumpkin.

  Andrea says that Kim is a calculating bimbo, but Sally says no and that anyway the divorce was her fault too, because she and my father got married too young and they turned out not to have much in common, except me.

  I don’t see that Sally has much in common with Jonah either.

  Sally rides a bicycle and likes classical music.

  Jonah just sits. He likes sappy folk songs.

  Last year at this time everything was normal and now every
thing has fallen apart. I read once that the universe started with an explosion and that ever since all the stars and galaxies have been speeding off into space, moving away from each other as fast as they can. Nobody knows whether the stars will keep moving away from each other forever or whether someday they’ll all start moving backward and come back together again.

  In my opinion, once something falls apart, it never comes back together again. I bet the stars are going to keep moving away from each other forever.

  MY LIST OF AWFUL THINGS

  1. The universe is falling apart.

  2. The good people will never take over the world.

  3. Grown-ups lie.

  4. I am really ugly.

  5. If any boy ever likes me, it will be that geek Horace Zimmerman.

  It’s still snowing. I feel like I’m falling upside down into the sky.

  JANUARY 6

  I am going to be in a play at school.

  My school is called Pelham Free Academy. That sounds fancy, but it’s really just a dumpy school made out of cement blocks painted a sort of yellowy color with a chain-link fence around it. The sixth-grade teacher is named Winona Bentley. Every time we have a school vacation, Ms. Bentley goes to workshops and conferences and comes back with new ideas for improving our minds. Over Christmas, she spent two days in Boston learning about Teaching Literature through Dramatic Arts in the Classroom.

  So now we’re doing this play.

  The play is all about the Greek myths. Emily Harris is Aphrodite. Ronnie Pincus, who has biceps from working weekends and summers on his family’s farm, is Zeus. Horace Zimmerman, who is tall and skinny and wears thick black glasses, is Hades.

  I am Persephone, the brainless drip who ate the pomegranate seeds and ended up spending half her life in hell.

  THINGS I HATE ABOUT THIS PLAY

  1. Getting up in front of people.

  2. Being dragged into the Underworld by Horace Zimmerman.

  3. Wearing toilet-paper flowers in my hair.

  4. Not knowing what a pomegranate is.

  JANUARY 7

  From Aunt Elaine’s dictionary:

  pomegranate (n.) From the Old French pome grenate, many-seeded apple. A fruit with a tough skin containing many seeds in a red pulp. The tree bearing this fruit, Punica granatum, is native to N. Africa and W. Asia.

  At the new year in Greece, Sally says, people throw a pomegranate on the floor. If it smashes into lots of little pieces, that means good luck. We should have done that, she said.

  I think it’s a good thing we didn’t. It would have been too depressing.

  It probably would have bounced.

  JANUARY 14

  George thinks Persephone is a great part, even with the toilet paper. He has been in two plays in kindergarten. In one of them he played the letter B, and in the other he was a toadstool. Jonah says he was particularly good at the toadstool because it is difficult to play a fungus with distinction.

  It must be nice to be five.

  George has a picture book of the myth of Persephone from the library and he made me read it to him twice while Sally and Jonah were out in the kitchen, giggling and doing the dishes. It begins with Demeter, goddess of the harvest, and her daughter, Persephone, picking daisies in a meadow. Demeter is fat and pink and cheerful-looking and has a basket full of fruit and stuff. Persephone is blond and looks like Emily Harris.

  Then Persephone wanders out of her mother’s sight and the minute she does, Hades, looking a bit like Elvis Presley, pops out of the ground in a black chariot pulled by big black horses and he grabs her and gallops off with her to the Underworld, which is dark and gloomy and looks like a basement. Persephone hates it there, even though Hades loads her with jewelry and makes her his queen. Aboveground, Demeter is miserable too. She loses weight, her hair turns gray, and she cries all the time and forgets about the harvest, so everybody in the world is starving and it’s always winter.

  Finally they strike a deal: Persephone can go back home, provided she hasn’t eaten any of the Underworld food. But it turns out she’s nibbled these pomegranate seeds. So she can only go home for half the year. The rest of the time she has to spend with Hades.

  The last page of the book shows Persephone running out of a cave laughing, and her mother is laughing, and everything is sunshine and lambs. George loves that. He doesn’t seem to worry about the fact that in just a little while she’ll be headed right back down to hell again.

  George’s mother is dead. She was killed in a car crash when George was two.

  George thinks she’s been turned into a star. She’s up in the sky, he thinks, twinkling at him.

  GOOD THINGS ABOUT BEING FIVE

  1. You’re still cute.

  2. You can drag a bear around.

  3. You don’t worry about anything.

  4. You don’t think bad things can happen.

  5. You don’t understand what it means to be dead.

  BAD THINGS ABOUT BEING FIVE

  1. You’re too short to ride the roller coaster.

  2. You have to go to bed at seven o’clock.

  3. People lie to you.

  JANUARY 20

  A Christmas package just arrived from my father and Kim. It’s late because they weren’t around for the holidays. They were skiing in Austria. They sent a picture that shows them standing in front of a ski chalet with their arms around each other, wearing goggles and forest-green ski suits and clunky boots that look like the sort of boots the astronauts wore on the moon. They’re both very tan, and Kim is wearing purple lipstick.

  WHAT I GOT FROM MY FATHER AND KIM FOR CHRISTMAS

  1. A T-shirt with a sequin picture of a unicorn on it.

  2. A CD by a group called the Duck Monkeys.

  3. Blue fingernail polish.

  4. A gold ankle bracelet.

  5. A coupon for membership in a health club.

  WHAT MY FATHER AND KIM KNOW ABOUT ME

  1. Nothing.

  If Elvis Presley dragged me off to the Underworld, nobody would care. My father has Kim. Sally would miss me for a while, but now she has Jonah and George. Even Ginger and Sam only like me because I let them sleep on my pillow.

  I told Sally this and she said not to be ridiculous. She said she would be very jealous if I were kidnapped by Elvis Presley.

  Then she borrowed the Duck Monkeys.

  JANUARY 25

  Last year today was Purple Feathered Hat Day. It was Sally’s and my private and personal holiday.

  Sally started it because I hated going to school because nobody liked me there and last year it was a lot worse because everybody was talking behind my back about my father and Kim. That’s the worst part of living in a small town. There’s no privacy. Everybody always knows everything about everybody else, like who’s got false teeth and who doesn’t pay their bills and who backed their car into the streetlight pole on Second Street and who left all those beer bottles in the park and who just moved to California with a giggly blond tennis player who has boobs the size of cantaloupes. I don’t know which was worse, the kids who were mean about it or the teachers who were sympathetic and wanted to know how I was doing, dear. Anyway, I was feeling really bad, so Sally started Purple Feathered Hat Day.

  We went to Burlington, just the two of us, and we bought these crazy purple hats covered with sequins and glitter and feathers in a gift shop — the silly kind of gift shop that sells stuff like earrings shaped like lizards and Mexican jumping beans and puddles of ink made out of plastic. Then we put them on and we went to a fancy restaurant for lunch where we had all the courses — appetizers and soups and entrées, and then chocolate cheesecake for dessert — and Sally let me have sips of wine from her glass when the waiter wasn’t looking. The waiter was named Bernard and he had a curly mustache.

  Then we went to the bookstore because Sally says that no one can be totally miserable when they’re reading a really good book, so we bought some, and then we sang songs in the car all the way home.


  This year Sally didn’t even remember about Purple Feathered Hat Day.

  Anyway she doesn’t have time anymore.

  She’s always busy doing something with Jonah.

  JANUARY 27

  The only person at school who is weirder than I am is Horace Zimmerman. Horace’s father teaches Latin at a private boys’ school over in New York, and his mother works at an art gallery in Burlington. They are both tall and skinny and whispery, like a pair of very well-educated giraffes.

  Horace is tall and skinny too, but not whispery at all. Horace is a political activist. He believes in causes. He is always putting up signs or asking people to sign petitions or having loud terrible arguments over the nature of justice or the dangers of global warming or the solution to world hunger. He once got sent to the principal’s office for getting in a fight with Jason Dobbs about the spotted owl. And last semester he lay down in front of a bulldozer to protest filling in the wetlands to make a parking lot for the new supermarket, but that didn’t work out very well because it was the wrong bulldozer.

  Horace thinks that if people try hard enough, they can make a difference, but I think Horace is full of crap. I think things just happen to you and then you’re stuck with them. Like Kim.

  BAD THINGS ABOUT HORACE

  1. He has a stupid name.

  2. He looks geeky.

  3. He acts geeky.

  4. He wears really thick glasses.

  5. He argues with everybody all the time.

  6. He is always trying to make people sign petitions.

  7. He has this really dippy glow-in-the-dark Alternative Energy baseball cap.

  GOOD THINGS ABOUT HORACE