NOT THE END OF THE WORLD

by Rebecca Stowe

  Daddy would come next. He’d sit in his big armchair in front of the TV and watch his “programs” and then he’d sneak away to his den to “work.” Mother would come last, carrying her drink in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. She’d sit down on her corner of the couch and pull her feet up under her butt, like a college girl sitting in a dorm room, and take out her knitting and sit there, smoking and drinking and knitting, all at the same time. When Grandmother was here, she’d stomp out like a general and plop herself down in the best seat and start complaining. I wished the crack in the floor was big enough to stick a peashooter through it; I would have loved to shoot slobbery spitballs at Grandmother’s fat head.

  I’d sit up in my hiding place, listening to them talk about how bad I was. That was how I found out they were going to send me away if I got into any more trouble. “I just don’t know what to do with her,” Mother told Daddy after what happened with Mr. Howard. “I can’t control her.” Daddy was sure I’d outgrow it; he thought I’d outgrow everything. “Robert, this is serious!” Mother insisted. “This is the Last Straw!” “All right, all right,” Daddy said. “Let’s see how she does in summer school and worry about the rest later.”

  Grandmother said I was the Black Sheep of the family. Youth Gone Awry. The Bad Seed. What I needed, according to Mr. Blake, was discipline. What I needed, according to Mother, was to be brought down a few notches, to be swept off my High Horse. What I needed, according to Daddy, was to sow my Wild Oats; I’d be fine, he said, in a few years when I outgrew all this acting-out nonsense. What I needed, according to Grandmother, was an exorcist.

  “You’ll get yours,” Grandmother always threatened and she’d have a conniption fit when I’d say, “Get my what?” “You’ll see, Miss Flip,” she’d say and they’d all sit there staring gloomily off into space while Grandmother predicted my journey to hell in a handbasket.

  I’d go to reform-school movies to see what was in store for me. I’d end up a criminal. I’d be locked up in a cage, where I belonged, and no one would care. I was a Threat to Society, not fit for the companionship of nice people. I’d be sent to jail and forced to make license plates and I’d get into fights with tough girls from Detroit, who hid sharpened screwdrivers in their ratted hair. I’d have a record and my whole life would be in black and white and it would be nobody’s fault but my own. I’d marry a mobster and get kidnapped by some rival gang and they’d send bits of my body back in the ransom notes—bit by bit, they’d send me back until there was nothing left but my torso to toss in a garbage dump. My husband, Rocco, wouldn’t pay the ransom, of course—he’d just toss out my body parts as they arrived, giving them to one of his henchmen to stick in the incinerator. Once he got to know me, he’d hate me, just like everybody else, and he’d be glad to get rid of me, even if it was only piece by piece.

  Eventually, Mother would put down her knitting and carry Ruthie upstairs, never even bothering to knock on my door to see if I was still alive. What if I’d fallen out of bed and cracked my head against the spindly foot and was lying there bleeding to death?

  She’d go back downstairs and try to talk, but Daddy would be lost in his own world. “I’m watching my program, Marion,” he’d say, or, “I’m in the middle of an article.” He’d get up and go into his den and hang up the NO TRESPASSING sign and Mother would sit there, all alone, knitting in the dark.

  Clickety, clickety, click, the sharp needles would go, glinting in the light from the lamp, clickety, click, and it drove me crazy. I couldn’t stand the sound of them; I couldn’t even bear to be in the same room with Mother when she was knitting. “Put those things AWAY!” I’d shout and she’d wonder what on earth was the matter with me, but I couldn’t help it, I had some kind of phobia and I couldn’t stand those needles. I’d get all nervous and get that teeth-chattery feeling and I’d say, “I can’t STAND it!” and Mother would point a needle at me and say, “You stop that nonsense right this instant!” shaking that blue metal needle at me, and I’d want to pull off my skin and start screaming and I’d cover my eyes and run from the room.

  “I just don’t know what gets into her,” she’d say to Daddy. “She’s some sort of maniac.” But no I wasn’t. I just couldn’t stand those needles.

  She wanted to teach me how to knit, but I wouldn’t learn. I wouldn’t go near those needles; I hated them, I hated everything about them, I hated everything sharp and pointy and it was a good thing I wasn’t Chinese, because how would I eat?

  I didn’t know why she had to knit anyway; she never made anything. She just sat there, knitting and purling and clicking and at the end of the night, she’d rip out all the stitches and start all over. “Your grandmother is the knitter in the family,” Mother would say. But not any more; she gave it up when I was little and I didn’t see why Mother had to follow in her footsteps, as if it were some great destiny to be fulfilled, especially since Mother wasn’t any good at it.

  “Why do you have to knit all the time?” I asked her and she shrugged, as if she didn’t know either. It was just something she did, mechanically, like a robot, clickety, clickety, click, endlessly knitting the same green banner. “It gives me something to do with my hands,” she’d say and I’d get so mad Margaret would come roaring out, furious as a bull, and shout, “Don’t SAY that! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

  Mother would start crying and I’d run upstairs and hide under the eaves and Margaret would disappear and I’d feel terrible for making Mother cry. I’d watch her through the crack as she sat there, alone and sad, and I’d wish she’d get up and do something. “Go to the piano,” I’d urge her telepathically. “Get up and play ‘Stormy Weather,’ ” but she wouldn’t. She’d just sit there, with the needles clicking like beetles on the window screen and it made me so upset I wanted to die.

  MOTHER had a box full of mementoes tucked in the corner of the eaves, next to the Christmas ornaments, and sometimes I’d empty it out and look through our history while I was snooping on them. She had all our old report cards and all the Mother’s Day cards we’d made over the years and hundreds of photographs of us all, looking so happy I couldn’t believe it was us.

  I loved to look at the old photographs, especially the ones with me in them. I suppose that was bad of me, and proved I was stuck on myself or something, but I couldn’t help it, the pictures with me in them were just more interesting. Every stage of my life was there, snapped by the camera and stamped on a glossy piece of paper, and it made me feel safe to see myself at three, standing with Donald in front of the house in our matching cowboy and cowgirl outfits, or standing on a chair in front of the kitchen counter, mixing a birthday cake for Mother. The pictures reminded me that I was real; that I always had been real and always would be real, and that I wasn’t just some girl someone had made up.

  Whenever I started feeling crazy, I’d crawl under the eaves and take out the pictures and look at myself, sitting on the couch holding Ruthie in my arms as if she were a new toy. I looked so pleased and happy and proud of my baby sister, how could it be that I was evil and made her so crazy she thought she was a bird? There was nothing evil in any of the photographs, not one of them, and I thought that if I were truly a demon it would certainly show; in at least one photo there would be a hint of horns sprouting from my head or a black X outlined on my forehead or something. But instead of looking evil, I looked kind of sweet, and that was comforting, if surprising.

  The only pictures I wouldn’t look at were my baby pictures. Once I found one that had “Peggy, 15 months” written on the back and it upset me so much I tore it in a zillion pieces and flushed it down the toilet. They used to try to call me Peggy, but I wouldn’t let them. “My name is Maggie,” I told them and I had a fit if anyone called me anything else. I didn’t even like it that Daddy called me Boo and I was completely insulted when he came up with the candy bars for us and he named Donald’s Donniebar and Ruthie’s Ruthette and mine he called Boobar. “Boobar the elephant,” the kids at school teased, but lu
ckily I wasn’t fat, so I didn’t take it to heart.

  Mother’s scrapbook was in the box with the photos, with all the clippings from when she was a singer. She could have been a star. She’d sung with a big band in Detroit, Jimmy B and his Trumpets Three, and there was even a poster with a drawing of Mother looking young and sultry. She looked like me, only pretty. She was good: “Jimmy B’s new songbird, Marion MacPherson, is the sweetest-sounding lark to fly into the Motor City,” one of the clips said, but she gave it all up when Grandmother got sick and Mother had to come back to North Bay to take care of her.

  Sick, my foot. Grandmother was only sick when it suited her and I think she just faked it, just to make sure Mother didn’t get a life of her own. I think Grandmother was jealous; she couldn’t bear the idea of anyone being better than her and she wanted to make sure Mother didn’t fly too high.

  And it wasn’t just Mother. Grandmother couldn’t stand it if anyone escaped from North Bay and went on to something in the Big World. I think she was even secretly glad when Miss Nolan came back, with that white blob of rubber sitting in the middle of her face, as if somebody had hit her with half a deviled egg. Grandmother blamed Miss Nolan’s nose on her dreams—she’d wanted to be a professional golfer and had spent every day, summer in North Bay and winter in Florida, playing golf. “Getting her nose fried instead of doing something useful,” Grandmother said. “She wanted to be Somebody and look what happened to her.”

  Mother thought Miss Nolan could have made it if it hadn’t been for the cancer that ate up her nose. She’d got as far as the LPGA tournament in 1952 and came in eleventh, shooting 318 for 72 holes. “I can do that,” Daddy teased her, “in only nine holes.”

  She had given up her life to golf, single-mindedly pursuing her dream, turning down the suitors who chased after her and the chances to be, as Grandmother said, what she was supposed to be, not what she wanted to be. And now it was too late for any of those other things. “Elvira Nolan is one of the loveliest human beings I have ever known,” Mother said. “But let’s face facts. Who would want to wake up next to that nose?”

  Grandmother never said, “That’s what you get for flying too high,” but the words were always there, floating above her head like a little thought-balloon. She didn’t want anybody to have anything and I thought she was the nastiest woman in the world, but Daddy said I had to be understanding. “She’s had a hard life, Boo,” he said but I didn’t care, I didn’t think that entitled her to begrudge other people their lives.

  Grandmother’s life was hard because her husband died when Mother was only two. Great-grandmother MacPherson took care of Grandmother and Mother, even though she hated Grandmother, giving them money and a place to live, but Grandmother never got remarried and she said it was Mother’s fault, that nobody wanted to marry her because she had a child clinging to her skirts. I felt more sorry for Mother than Grandmother—it was bad enough, having Grandmother around at all, but it would be terrible if I didn’t have my family to act as buffers sometimes. Poor Mother had had to be alone with her, with no father to protect her, and that must have been awful.

  Mother never sang any more, except at Christmas when she’d get a little tipsy and all nostalgic; we’d be singing Christmas carols and she’d open up the seat of the piano bench and pull out her old sheet music and sing the songs she sang with the band and it was wonderful, she had such a sweet, high voice, and I thought she should make a comeback, but she wouldn’t even try.

  She wanted me to be a singer, like her, but fat chance. First of all, I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, as Grandmother pointed out every time she heard me singing. Last year, when I sang in the Talent Show, I could see Grandmother in the audience, with her nose all scrunched up like she was sitting on a pile of turds, leaning over and whispering to Mother, probably saying “Get the hook” or something. Poor Mother was sitting there, white as a picket fence, looking like she was dying of shame, and I wanted to run off the stage and flush my head down the toilet, but what could I do? I was already up there, with my head full of lather and the music playing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair,” so instead of trying to sound like Mary Martin, I just concentrated on the motions, doing a goofy take-off and turning it into a comedy, deliberately missing the notes and acting like I’d got soap in my eyes. Everybody was laughing like crazy and when I finished Miss Hildegarde told me it was the best number in the show and everybody congratulated me, except Grandmother, who wanted to know how I could get up there and make a moron of myself. And Mother, who was so stunned all she could say was, “But Maggie, you have such a sweet voice when you want to, why did you do that?”

  But I didn’t have a sweet voice. She did. My voice, even at its best, was loud and rough. I used to be a first soprano, but after I had my tonsils out my voice changed and I got demoted to the altos.

  Thank God Daddy wasn’t there. He said he had to work, but we all knew he was taking the opportunity to stay home and play with his soldiers. It would have hurt my feelings if I’d thought I was any good, but since I already knew I was a charlatan, it was just as well he wasn’t there to see me, just in case I fell on my face.

  That was the last time I appeared in the Talent Show. I didn’t even audition this year because I was in disgrace and anyway, I would have been booed off the stage before I even got started because everybody would say, “There’s that Pitts-field girl, the one who started all the trouble,” and they’d all get up out of their seats and walk out, not wanting to be in the same gymnasium as me.

  I heard the sunroom door open and then Grandmother’s voice as she stomped into the house, and I felt sad and angry. I wished they’d stayed away longer, I wished they’d go to a Dairy Queen on Mars and come back in a few years, after I’d had time to live out my life and redeem myself.

  Goober read my thoughts, as always, and got up from the pile of dirty clothes on which she’d been sleeping and crawled in under the eaves to get in my lap. I could feel Sarah coming, wanting to have a good cry, and I didn’t even fight it. Let her cry, I thought as I lay down with my head resting against Mother’s box of mementoes, and she did.

  WHEN I woke up, it was already morning and my neck was killing me from having used a box as a pillow all night, and that put me in a worse mood than usual. I was a real grouch in the morning and it was the only bad thing about myself that none of my parts yelled at me for, and that was only because none of them wanted to face the day, either.

  Grandmother was sitting at the breakfast-room table, scowling at Ruthie as she leaned over her cereal and lapped the milk like a dog.

  “There’s something wrong with this one, too,” Grandmother said. “It must come from Robert’s side of the family.”

  I hid behind the louvred doors between the breakfast room and the dining room, motioning to Donald to be quiet, and slowly extended my arm, waving it in the air like a snake. I made hissing noises as I reached out for Grandmother.

  “Eeeek!” she screeched, jumping from her chair and patting her hair. “Oh, you vile child!”

  Donald started laughing so hard he got the hiccoughs and Grandmother stomped away from the table.

  “Marion, what are you raising here?” she demanded. “A family or a zoo?”

  “What’s she doing here?” I muttered to Donald. “I thought she was going to Detroit with Miss Nolan.”

  “It’s none of your business, Miss Impudence,” Grandmother said as Mother brought me a glass of orange juice. Grandmother stood in the middle of the kitchen, glaring at me and picking her red fingernails, and I wished I could wave a magic wand and make her disappear, send her off to some alien universe where people were even meaner than she was and where they’d chase her around all day, saying, “What makes you think you’re so special, Miss Smarty-Pants?”

  I wouldn’t even mind if she were dead. That was evil of me, but I couldn’t help it. She’d lived long enough; she’d had a lot of happy years tormenting Mother and then me. I didn’t see what was so
wrong with wishing she’d just go to sleep and never wake up. Everybody dies someday and she was almost seventy, that was a long time to live, why couldn’t she move over and make room for someone else?

  I knew I’d pay for having such bad thoughts—Cotton Mather was already climbing up on his pulpit, getting ready to attack, to threaten me with hell and worse, but I couldn’t stop the thoughts from coming. They were only thoughts, there was nothing in the Bible about Thou Shalt Not Wish Thy Grandmother Dead, in fact there wasn’t even anything about honoring your stupid grandmother, it was only your father and mother, and I at least tried to do that, even if I wasn’t always real good at it.

  “God knows everything you think,” Cotton Mather said, “and you’re going to suffer for your evil thoughts.”

  “Oh, leave me ALONE!” I yelled and Donald nearly jumped from his chair. “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything!” he shouted and Mother wanted to know what in God’s name was going on and Ruthie started crying and Grandmother just stood there, picking at those devil nails of hers and glaring.