Eventually, she came up and I let her in and when she saw how sick I was she felt bad for thinking I’d only been faking another bout of the Mystery Illness. Nobody knew I’d tried to kill myself, and even if they suspected, nobody said anything. One night I heard Daddy go to the medicine cabinet and shout, “Where’s my Ex-Lax?” and I heard Mother say she guessed we were out and it was the oddest thing, we were out of everything all at once, and she didn’t know how that could happen but she was sorry.
I didn’t tell anyone and I certainly wasn’t going to tell Miss Dickerson, who would have pulled a straitjacket out of the first-aid cabinet and sent me off to Lapeer. “Suicide is a cry for help,” I read in one of Mother’s magazines, but no it’s not. At least not for me. I didn’t want any help, I wanted to start over, to have a chance to do things right. “Everything I do is wrong,” Mother always moaned and I knew what she meant, even if the thing that was wrong was totally inconsequential, for instance, having broccoli instead of beans with the chicken. I would have said, “Tough luck, Clarabell, if you want beans, go cook them yourself.” But that would have just been what I said. Inside I would have been going nuts: Margaret would have been scratching like crazy and Sarah would be crying and Cotton Mather would be telling me I was going straight to hell and Katrina would be wanting to skate to Amsterdam and Trixie would be singing, “Beans, beans, the musical fruit,/ The more you eat, the more you toot,” and I would have been sitting there, wanting to scream, thinking, Everything I do is wrong.
The things I did wrong were worse than serving broccoli instead of beans. I was only twelve; I had sixty or maybe even seventy years ahead of me, during which nothing good could happen to me because I’d already filled up my heart with black spots and nothing good could get in. If you start building a house and find out the foundation is rotten, you tear it down and start over. My soul was rotten and therefore I thought I should be able to kill myself and start over. It made perfect sense to me and I didn’t see why suicide was such a big sin.
But I couldn’t even commit suicide right. The only thing that happened was I made myself so sick I couldn’t go out of the house for three days. I pretended that I really was dead, that being trapped in the house with Grandmother for three days was purgatory and on the third day, I’d wake up and be an angel, hovering over my body while it lay in bed, watching it and saying goodbye before I sailed off to heaven to wait for my new life.
But no such luck. Grandmother would barge in and stand in the doorway with her hands on her hips, glaring at me and saying, “There’s nothing wrong with you that a few licks with a thick belt wouldn’t cure,” and the gong would start again and I’d be in so much pain I knew I had to be alive.
IT was hopeless. I couldn’t concentrate on Julius Caesar. I guessed it was OK, I could always do it the night before it was due. I worked best under pressure; “Last Minute Maggie,” Mother called me, warning that life wouldn’t always be so easy.
“C’mon, Goob,” I said, packing up my things and heading home, hoping that the Bridge Ladies had finished their lunch and retired to the living room to continue their rubbers.
But they hadn’t. They were still in the dining room, sitting around the table picking at their shrimp salads and drinking Bloody Marys out of Great-grandmother MacPherson’s crystal goblets. “Someday, these will be yours,” Mother told me and I pretended to be thrilled, because I knew it was some kind of big honor to her. Great-grandmother MacPherson had given her them, bypassing Grandmother, who she hated and blamed for her son’s death. Grandmother wanted the goblets because they were some special kind of crystal and every time Mother brought them out, Grandmother would get all huffy. I thought it was hysterical.
Mrs. Tucker was talking about sending Cindy to some fancy boarding school and I could hear Mother sighing and wishing that Daddy would let her send me away to school. “I think it would be good for her,” she said and Grandmother laughed.
“Yes,” she said, “it would be a good idea to send Maggie away. The further the better.”
She snorted and laughed and I sat on the front porch, listening to them through the screen door, hating them, wishing the bomb would drop right then and blow them all to bits, send them flying through the air like popcorn bursting from the pan.
“Now, Kay,” Miss Nolan said to Grandmother, “don’t tease like that. Maggie’s a fine girl.”
“Phooey,” Grandmother said. “She’s spoiled. Spoiled rotten with a capital R and it’s too late to do anything about it.”
I didn’t want to hear any more; Grandmother would start berating Mother for spoiling me and Mother would meekly mumble something about trying. I hated Grandmother, but I had to be careful about what I said about her. “Why, your grandmother is a wonderful person,” Mother said when I complained about Grandmother. “Everyone adores her!” “But you hate her,” I said and Mother gasped, raising her hand to her neck and holding it there, as if to strangle herself if she said anything. She stared at me like I was a mutant coming to devour her, and I wanted to die, to take the words back, but it was too late, I’d said the wrong thing and now the world would fall to pieces. “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” Margaret screamed. “Now you’ve done it!” “I’m sorry, Mother,” I said, “I didn’t mean it,” but she didn’t hear, she’d flown off to another planet and it might be days before she came back.
I hated it when she did that. She’d just vanish. She still looked like Mother and talked like Mother and did all the standard Mother-type things, but she wasn’t there. And it was all my fault. I had made her that way, by being so uncontrollable.
I sneaked round the side of the house, hoping that the door to Donald’s bedroom wasn’t locked, so I could get in that way. As I circled the house, I looked up at my bedroom window and Cotton Mather said, “You’re such an ingrate. You have your own bedroom and still you’re not satisfied. Your grandmother is right, you’re spoiled rotten.”
I didn’t think I was spoiled, but the facts were against me. My father was the Candy King of North Bay. Robert “Sweet Is My Middle Name” Pittsfield. It was my middle name, too. “Sweet as in anything-but,” as Grandmother said.
I had everything a girl could want: clothes and books and toys and games and a nice house on the beach. I even had a candy bar named after me—how many girls could say that? I supposed that was what being spoiled was all about: having everything but feeling empty inside, wanting more but never being able to get it. “Poor little rich girl, poor little rich girl,” Margaret started chanting in her nasty nasal voice.
“I am not!” I protested. I hated the idea of it; I’d rather be dead than a poor little rich girl, a whiny frail little wisp of a thing, quietly sobbing in her palace while her parents flew off to the Orient for some diplomatic mission, leaving her behind with no one but the evil aunt.
Of course, we weren’t really rich, not like the Sisks. We had a nice house on a nice street in a nice neighborhood, we had nice furniture and nice cars and nice doodads all over the place, and Daddy had the candy factory, but it wasn’t as if he were Mr. Mars.
“What have you got to complain about?” Cotton Mather demanded. “You’ve got it easy.” It was true. I thought about the migrant farmworkers who came to North Bay to pick cucumbers for the pickle factory, living in those horrible shacks, and I’d hate myself for being so ungrateful. They had a terrible life and even the kids had to work, dragging boxes out into the field to fill them with cucumbers. How could I be boo-hooing about my own life when I thought about them?
Donald’s door was unlocked and I quickly crept in, making sure not to touch any of his things. He laid traps all over his room, to see if people were spying on him—pieces of paper laying in a certain way in a drawer and his covers tucked in carefully so he could tell if anyone had been looking between his mattresses for his stupid nudie magazines.
I slipped into the kitchen, motioning to Goober to be quiet. She was unbelievably smart; she not only understood everything I said to her, she could also
sense what I was feeling, and she’d always leap into my lap and lick my face whenever I was sad, just to show that she, at least, loved me.
The Bridge Ladies were gabbing so loud I thought they wouldn’t notice me. They were all sitting there, talking at once, with no one listening to anyone else. I wondered if they noticed, but if they did, they didn’t seem to care—they just joined in, dancing around one another but never taking a partner. Miss Nolan was talking about nine irons and Mrs. Tucker was talking about wanting to get her hands on the Bicker house, now that old Earl was dead, surely Helen wouldn’t keep that mausoleum for herself, and Grandmother was talking about the difficulty of getting decent seafood in North Bay. “Now in St. Pete …” she was saying. If she liked St. Pete so much, why didn’t she stay there all year instead of coming up here to torment us the whole summer?
“Why doesn’t she stay down there?” I asked Daddy every June, when Mother would starting turning into a robot, running around and moving all of Ruthie’s stuff out of her room so Grandmother could have it. “Why does she have to live with us?”
Daddy shook his head and said it wasn’t nice of me to resent Grandmother; she was an old woman and she should be with her family. Mother was her only child and we were her only grandchildren.
“But she hates us!” I protested. “And she especially hates me!” Daddy said no, Grandmother didn’t hate me, she was just an old woman and she didn’t like much of anything any more.
“But she insults me all the time,” I complained. “She’s always telling me how terrible I am.”
“Blood is thicker than water,” Daddy said, but so what?
“Why can’t Mother go down there?” I wondered and Daddy got all stern and even before he said anything I was ashamed. Perhaps Grandmother was right, there probably was something evil about a girl who would gladly send her own mother off to Florida. “And take Ruthie with you,” I would have said, if I could, if Daddy wouldn’t hate me for it.
“I’m sorry,” I said before he had a chance to scold me. “I don’t mean it.”
He pulled me over to the arm of his big velvet chair and tussled my hair in that condescending way I hated. “I know you didn’t, Boo,” he said, “but you have to think about what you say. You hurt your mother’s feelings.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hurt her feelings, I hurt Ruthie’s feelings, it was all I ever did. There was something horrible about a girl like me, something horrible and cruel and evil.
“I’m sorry,” I cried desperately, “I try. I really do, but sometimes I can’t help myself. I just get so mad!”
“I know, Boo,” he said, “but you’re strong and you have to be patient with people who aren’t.”
“Grandmother’s strong,” I said. “She doesn’t worry about hurting people’s feelings.”
Daddy sighed. Adults always sighed that way when you pointed out the obvious and they couldn’t explain it away with Good-Do-Bee logic. He sighed again and said, “You have to be nice, Boo.”
“I don’t want to be nice!” I shouted, pulling out of his grip. “And stop calling me Boo! My name is Maggie!”
He just laughed; he always thought it was “cute” when I got mad. “What have you got to be so angry about?” Mother always wanted to know, but I didn’t know any better than she did. It didn’t make any sense. What did I have to be angry about? Nothing. Everything was exactly as it should be. We were the perfect American family, complete with two cars, a dog and 2.5 children, if you counted Ruthie as the .5, since she was half bird anyway.
Sometimes I thought there’d been a mistake, that somewhere along the line God had got my soul mixed up with some ghetto kid’s, some mean kid who threw rocks at pedestrians from the broken window of her unheated hovel in a burnt-out section of Detroit. Someone who was bad, but who at least had a reason for it. Someone who needed that anger just to survive and fight her way out of the slums. And the soul that belonged to the child my parents were supposed to have living with them in their lovely house on the Lake was trapped in some poor slum kid, kind and loving, the brunt of everyone’s jokes because she was so good and patient and self-sacrificing and not the least bit bitter about taking baths in cold water or fighting rats for space in her bed or having to drop out of school to take care of seven squalling siblings.
“… why, the shrimp in St. Pete,” Grandmother was saying and Miss Nolan looked up and saw me sneaking into the kitchen, so I had to go into the dining room and be polite.
“Hi,” I said and they all looked up and nodded while they chewed and chatted, never missing a beat.
“There’s shrimp in the fridge,” Mother said with forced gaiety. “Help yourself!”
“Thanks,” I said and stomped back into the kitchen.
“It’s quite good,” she called. “If I do say so myself!”
She waited for the Bridge Ladies to shout their confirmation but they kept right on nodding and chewing and picking like a bunch of gaudy puppets and Mother looked through the door, into the kitchen, and smiled sadly at me.
It made me want to scream, it made me want to shove their plates in their faces, to rub the shrimp in their noses until they gasped and said, “Yes! Yes, it is good!” I wanted to jump up and down on the table until they paid attention. But I knew they wouldn’t. “Maggie, get off,” Mother would say, even though I was doing it for her. “You’re getting sand all over the petits fours!”
Instead, I said I was sure it was good. “You make the best shrimp salad in the world!” I called, taking the bowl from the refrigerator and scooping some onto a plate, even though I didn’t like anything with mayonnaise on it, not even shrimp. I tasted it as Mother watched hopefully.
“It’s wonderful!” I shouted. “It’s great!”
“Why, thank you, dear,” she said and smiled happily and turned her attention back to the Bridge Ladies as I slipped the plate to Goober, who would have praised Mother’s shrimp salad to high heaven, if only she could speak.
“YOU are not allowed to go into the woods behind the Moores’,” Mother always said but that was exactly where I was going.
Someone was “doing things” to little girls there. “What things?” I asked, but she wouldn’t say. “Things” had been found in the woods—girls’ underpants, scraps of clothing, mysterious “things” she wouldn’t tell me about, “things” I shouldn’t know about. “What things?” I’d ask again and again, but she’d put on a somber face and shake her head and say, “You’re too young to know about those things.” “What things? What things?” I’d beg, but she was secretive as a saint.
I had to find out. Ginger Moore and I were building a fort back there, where we’d hide and watch for the Pervert. We’d spend hours scouring the woods, searching for “things.” Soup cans became chalices for midnight animal sacrifices; broken baseball bats were the weapons used to knock out kidnap victims; campfire remnants were the scenes of witches’ sabbaths. We’d hide for hours under the bushes, waiting for “someone” to come by with his screaming victim, hoping she was someone we knew so we could save her and be heroes.
But no one ever came. The stories continued, the victims were always little girls from Riverside, and I came to the conclusion that bad things only happened to me and to kids from Riverside, which was the closest thing North Bay had to a slum. They were always having something dreadful happen to them: they were the ones who dived off the canal bridge and were paralyzed for life. They were the ones who went ice skating on the Lake and fell through, the ones whose bodies were found the next spring, bloated like whales, on a beach on Harsen’s Island. Don’t go near the swamp, they told us, that mud’s like quicksand and last year a boy from Riverside sank for ever, disappeared into the muck. I wondered why they were so unlucky; wasn’t it bad enough being poor? Why did they have to be the ones who threw water balloons at cars and got run over when the car went out of control? Donald and his friends threw eggs at cars and they never even got maimed.
Ginger Moore was the only friend I had left. It
was a miracle she stuck with me, especially after what happened last winter, when Cindy and her gang attacked her, but she did and I was grateful. What happened was this: it was before Christmas, and we’d been walking home from school, taking the short cut through the swamp behind the Donaldsons’. I knew something was up. During recess Cindy had nudged me and said, “We’ve got a surprise for Ginger Moore.” She giggled in that mad-scientist way and I knew it was a surprise of the unpleasant sort, but I did nothing to prevent it. I could have. I could have told Ginger to walk another way; I could have called my mother and asked her to pick us up; I could have warned Ginger not to go with Cindy and that crowd. I could have prevented it but I didn’t because I wanted to see what it was, what they had planned, what they were going to do to her.
It was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong with a capital W and bad to let it happen. I just stood there and watched while they held Ginger to a tree stump and Cindy made a snowball while Karen Harmon ripped open Ginger’s parka. Cindy chopped the snowball in half, smushing both halves on Ginger’s chest, and Pauline Quinlan stuck maraschino cherries in the center of each. They all went into convulsions, and Cindy started chanting, “Falsies! Falsies! Ginger Moore wears falsies!”
NOT THE END OF THE WORLD Page 4