“Don’t you have to go to school or something?” she asked and I pushed my chair back from the table and grabbed my notebook.
“It’s none of your business!” I screamed and fled out the sunroom door while Mother called after me, “Maggie! Your breakfast! People will think I don’t feed you!”
Goober came bounding out behind me and even though we weren’t supposed to let our dogs follow us to school, I always did because I liked to have her waiting for me when I came out. They kind of relaxed the rules a little in summer school; they even let girls wear shorts, which suited me just fine because I always wore them anyway, even in regular school, under my skirt so nobody could look up.
Goober and I ran towards the Sisks’. I wanted to stop at the shrine and confess my thoughts to their Virgin Mary and maybe that way I could get through the day without being tormented by the Puritan. It probably was bad of me to be so insolent, but I felt it was my duty—nobody else stood up to Grandmother and somebody had to. I was already the Black Sheep, and I guess in a way it was expected of me. Nobody else did anything; Ruthie would just start flapping off to Bird-land and Donald would ignore her. For some reason, she left him alone and I figured it was because he was a boy. How wonderful to be a boy, to be left alone, to be allowed to miss dinner, to wear dirty clothes and not have anyone chase you round the house with a stupid lace dress saying, “But don’t you want to look like a lady?” To be independent, to go places alone, to be strong enough to protect yourself—if I were a boy, no one would ever touch me. If I were a boy, I could be whatever I wanted to be, I could be myself, I could live my life and nobody would be nagging me, “Ladies don’t do this and ladies don’t do that, don’t you want to be a lady?” No! No, I didn’t want to be a lady; I didn’t want to be powerless; I didn’t want to learn to like anything I didn’t like.
Tom Ditwell was just coming out of his house as I passed and I sighed. Now I’d be stuck walking to school with him and I wouldn’t be able to go and confess.
Tom was the only kid in summer school for being both a delinquent and a dumbhead. I didn’t think he was as stupid as he seemed; he could memorize anything he heard in about fifteen seconds, and once you showed him something, he had it down instantly. He remembered by heart every story that his mother had read to him as a kid. I didn’t think that was very dumb, but facts were facts and Tom was in the sixth grade and couldn’t read. My theory was that he had hysterical blindness that only occurred when he tried to read, probably from when he was little and was in Catholic school and the nuns beat the alphabet into him.
“Hey, Maggie!” he called. “Wait up!”
He jumped over the fence and came running over.
“Have you finished your hero paper yet?” he asked and I shook my head and told him I was thinking of changing heroes but I didn’t have a new one.
“Can I have your old one if you don’t want him?” he asked and I felt sorry for him—he really was stupid if he thought Mr Blake would believe he wrote a paper on Julius Caesar.
“No,” I said, but he looked so heartbroken I offered to do someone else for him. “I’ll do Rocky Colavito for you,” I said and he threw his books in the air and tried to hug me but I pulled away.
“On top of everything else, you’re a cheat,” Cotton Mather accused, but it wasn’t cheating. I’d get the information and write the paper and then Tom would memorize it and then pretend to read it in class and it would be as if he wrote it himself, because he’d know it and what difference would it make who got the information out of the library?
“Are you going to be in the Parade?” he asked and I sighed. The Parade, the Parade, the Parade, it was all anybody could talk about, as if it were a big deal, as if we didn’t have one every year.
“No,” I said and Tom said he was riding on his dad’s float.
“I’m going to be a sparkplug,” he said proudly and he got all offended when I laughed, even though I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, I just thought it was funny.
“Isn’t your dad having a float?” he asked and I shook my head. Daddy never had a float in the Parade. Instead, he had a booth at the end of the parade route and gave out candy bars to the marchers as they drooped in. “They’re tired,” he explained. “They need a little pep-me-up.”
“You could probably ride with us,” Tom said. “I think we still need a cylinder.”
I said no thanks. Even if I were entirely covered by a costume, people would know it was me, standing under the ditwell auto parts banner and they’d hiss and boo and throw rotten tomatoes at me and it would ruin Tom’s day.
We were getting close to McKinley and I winced as the pain shot up my butt. It happened every day; as soon as I reached the school grounds the pain would start and I’d spend the whole morning in agony. It started right after the trouble. I didn’t tell anyone about it; I just let it happen, thinking it must be some kind of punishment. It only happened at school and even though it was horrible, as if there were a sharp piece of glass embedded in my butt, I endured it. It wasn’t too bad when I was standing up, but when I sat down I thought I’d die from the pain. I learned to lower myself into my seat slowly, keeping my back and legs as much in line as possible, so I ended up half-sitting, half-sprawled in the chair and my teachers would say, “Maggie! Sit up straight!” and I’d pull myself up, nearly puking from the pain, and sit the way they wanted me to.
As soon as the last bell rang, I’d dart from my seat and the pain would be gone. But then something worse started to happen. I couldn’t use the bathrooms at McKinley any more; I was too terrified to go in them, so I’d walk home, alone, making sure to be alone, hiding out till everyone had left, and then halfway home I’d pee my pants. It would drip down my legs, hot and shameful, and I’d wish I were dead. I never cried, not through any of it—not through the pain shrieking up my butt like a knife, not through the shame of peeing all over myself like a baby. I just thought it was what I had to live through.
I’d come home and take off my soaked underpants and hide them under the eaves, along with the ones I’d stained when I was having my period. I refused to wear one of those awful napkins, I just bled and then hid the evidence. “You go through more underpants than anyone I know,” Mother used to say. “What on earth happens to them?” and I’d shrug and say maybe someone stole them out of my locker at the Golf Club or something.
“You stay here,” I told Goober when we got to the baseball diamond. “I’ll be back soon.”
She wagged her tail and lay down, perfectly still, and I always wondered if she stayed like that all morning, or if she got up and sniffed around and visited other dogs and then came back in time to lie down and wait for me.
I only had to take classes in the morning. I guess they figured making me get up early all summer was punishment enough. It was too boring to believe—rehashing all the things we’d already learned, over and over again until I wanted to jump up and scream, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too, you dummies!” It was bad of me to be impatient with the others; after all, they were there because they’d failed, not because they were disciplinary problems.
I didn’t give Mr. Blake much trouble. I’d just sit there, squirming like a worm, waiting for the morning to be over. Once a week Miss Dickerson came and I’d have to go see her first thing in the morning and spend an hour with her, sitting in the first-aid room while she tried to get me to talk. “Name, rank and serial number; name, rank and serial number,” I’d chant as I trudged down the hall to her cubicle. That was all I was giving her.
In a way, I wished I could talk to her. It would be such a relief to talk to someone besides Goober and the Sisks’ Virgin Mary, but I couldn’t trust her. I couldn’t trust anyone. She wouldn’t believe me anyway, and if she did, what could she do? She’d say I was making it all up and then she’d go to my parents and I’d get punished all over again for breaking the unbreakable no-squeal rule, and no one would protect me, so why bother?
“How is your summer?” Miss Dickerson
wanted to know and I shrugged. How did she expect it to be?
“What are you doing?” she asked and I said, “Going to school.”
“Well, you must be doing something besides going to school,” she suggested. She was always so calm, I could never believe it. I didn’t trust it, nobody could be that calm. Inside, she must have wanted to take her briefcase and start batting me over the head with it.
“I’m making a fort in the woods,” I said and she said that sounded like fun.
“It is,” I told her. “I’m hunting for something.”
She raised her eyebrows. “What?” she wanted to know and I said it was a surprise.
“How are your classes?” she asked, trying to wheedle information out of me.
“They make my butt hurt.”
“Oh?” she said, trying to be nonchalant. “Why is that?”
I sighed. It was her job to figure those things out. Why did she need me to tell her?
“Because it reminds me of Mr. Howard, that’s why.”
“And why would thinking of Mr. Howard make your butt hurt?” she asked but that was all I was saying. I’d said too much already. Besides, I didn’t know. Why did thinking about Mr. Howard make my butt hurt, why not my head or my arm, which was the part of my body that had got bruised, why not my leg or my foot? And what was it about the trouble that made me unable to pee at McKinley? It didn’t make any sense to me and I wasn’t going to tell her any more.
I shrugged and she sat there, watching me, and I felt sorry for her because she really seemed to want to help but I wasn’t cooperating. I never cooperated; it was against my principles.
“Our time’s almost up,” she said. “Is there anything you want to tell me?”
I told her I had something to ask her and she said that was all right, go ahead.
“How much longer do I have to do this?”
“Do what?” she asked.
“This, this talking to you stuff.”
“Don’t you like talking to me?” she asked, just like an adult, never answering your questions, always turning it around to trick you.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said and she smiled as she imitated my sullen shrug.
“I don’t know,” she said and the bell rang.
MISS Dickerson said I had an inferiority complex, but Grandmother said that was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard.
“She doesn’t think anything’s good enough for her,” she said. “Not the other way round.”
I think Grandmother was talking more about herself than me, but that was just the way it was in our family. Whenever anyone talked about anyone else, they were really talking about themselves. They’d look at me and see themselves; whatever I did was interpreted through their own feelings, without even considering that I might feel differently from them. When I wanted to be alone, Mother thought it was because I was hiding my loneliness and Daddy thought it was because I was independent and Grandmother thought it was because I was selfish and arrogant. They never even asked me, they just assumed, and they would have laughed their heads off if I’d told them I liked to be alone because it was the only time I could be myself.
It was hard, not knowing who or what I was, not knowing what was mine and what was just a genetic trait, handed down like some dusty heirloom. When I was good, they’d fight over me like dogs over a bone. “She’s just like me!” they’d cry and I’d stand there feeling empty and stupid, like a mere bowl they molded in pottery class, to hold their brilliant genes. Sometimes, they’d even compete with me—I’d come home from school with my little drawing with the gold star and Mother would say, “That’s nice, dear, did I ever tell you about the time I won the Michigan School Arts Prize? I was just about your age …” and I’d look at my little stick-girl, smiling under a stick-tree, and feel ashamed. I’d trudge upstairs, wondering why the teacher gave me a gold star when my drawing was so childish and stupid. She was just being nice, I’d think resentfully, wishing she’d given me the F I deserved.
Even Daddy had to compete. “It’s the American Way!” he always said, but not with your kid! When I came home with the letter saying I’d been chosen for the Accelerated Program he patted my head and told me I took after him, he was so accelerated he’d skipped three grades.
When I was bad, they didn’t know me. Nobody would claim my temper, my fits, my sullen lack of respect. They’d act as if I’d just flown in from another planet or try to push my bad behavior off on errant genes in the other’s family—Daddy’s crazy Cousin Leroy or Mother’s Aunt Rachael, who ran away with an India Indian and was never heard from again.
It was bad of me to be so angry about it. “Oh, big deal,” Cindy used to say when I’d complain about it. “Everybody’s parents are like that. What have you got to complain about—you’re the luckiest girl in North Bay!”
I guessed I was. My parents were usually pretty nice to me, except when Grandmother was around and Mother turned into a podperson. It was as if Grandmother took over her soul and every rotten thing Grandmother did to Mother, she’d end up doing to me, not because she wanted to, but because she had to. She couldn’t help herself and she didn’t mean it and I could always tell she felt terrible afterwards. She’d cry and try to make it up to me, but she never said she was sorry. If she said she was sorry, she would have to admit she hurt me, and she couldn’t do that.
It wasn’t her fault. She just had Bad Luck, losing her father and getting stuck with Grandmother, and her bad luck was written all over her. “If only,” she always said, “if only this and if only that.” She ate and breathed “if onl”; she exuded it, like perfume—she’d walk through the house, leaving behind a faint odor of regret, of loss, of promise unfulfilled and I hated that smell. Worse than skunk, worse than dog-do, worse than Frank Risdesky’s garlicky house, worse than Hilary Kiley’s grandmother’s room, all powdery and decayed, Lysoled to cover the odor of death, to cover up the smell of life rotting away.
It sat over our house like a fog. It got in through our pores. At night, it drifted under the doorway and oozed into our dreams. Mother would have died if she’d known, for what she wanted most of all was for our lives to be better than hers. If she’d known she wasn’t hiding it behind her smiles of attempted cheerfulness, her eager assurances that everything was fine, fine, fine, she would have been horrified. She would have locked herself into a leak-proof bubble and lowered herself into the Lake, to protect us from her own fumes. “I’m doing this for you,” she’d say as she waved through the plastic peephole. “Don’t worry about me. It’s fine, really.” We would sob and wonder who would cook our dinner, who would tend our wounds, who would get out the vaporizer when we had the croup, who would make our beds. “Oh, your father will find someone to replace me,” she’d say, her voice echoing in the water. “You don’t need me.” And down she’d go, with only a few air bubbles to trace her descent.
It could have been worse. At least my parents weren’t like Cindy’s ex-dad or Mrs. Moore, at least they weren’t like Mr. Ditwell, who would come home from work and toss Tom’s friends out the back door like dried-up Christmas trees.
“We just want you to be happy,” Mother said, the first time they threatened to send me away to boarding school. Part of it was true and part of it wasn’t. There was a part of her that wanted to be rid of me, to get me out of her sight so she wouldn’t have to feel bad all the time. And there was another part that really thought that sending me away to some East Coast rich girls’ school would make me happy, but it wouldn’t make me happy, it would make her happy. She wanted me to go someplace where I’d learn to be a lady and be with girls from quality families. Where I’d get a good education and come home quoting Homer. Where I’d get invited to someone’s debut. Mother had this thing about “coming out.” She thought that everything bad that happened to her was because she wasn’t properly introduced to society and if only she’d had a debut, everything would be different.
Girls didn’t come out in North B
ay, which was just as well, because Daddy would never have stood for it. “What a lot of nonsense,” he would have said. “We already know everyone worth knowing.” Instead, they had Sweet Sixteen parties at one of the golf clubs, something I was dreading, even though it was three years and one month away. With any luck, I wouldn’t have to have one, now that I was a pariah.
TOM Ditwell wanted to walk home with me, but I couldn’t risk it. What if I peed my pants in front of him? He’d tell the whole world and everybody would hate me more than they already did.
“I have a piano lesson,” I lied and he said he didn’t know I was taking piano.
“Oh, yes,” I said, “I’m going to be a concert pianist.”
I loved it when I lied like that, when the words came out so smoothly I almost believed them myself. The truth was, I had three lessons when I was six, but Mother took me out when I bit the teacher.
“Well, you won’t forget about Rocky, will you?” he asked and I promised I wouldn’t. He ran off to join Billy Jensen and Kenny Costello and I stood there, watching them, waiting to find out which way they were going so I could go another.
“C’mon, Goob,” I shouted and she jumped up and ran over. We cut through the woods behind the Donaldsons’ and I stood there for a while, looking at the swamp, wondering what would happen if I just walked right into it. Maybe if I went into the swamp, I’d get sucked into a slimy world and turned into a mutant, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and then I could spend the rest of my life living in the muck, waiting for school kids to scare. That was probably what would happen to me, something murky like that. I was as likely to turn out to be a Creature as first woman governor of Michigan.
I decided to go to the fort and watch for the Pervert alone, even though I was kind of scared to confront him by myself. The whole point of watching for him was to catch him red-handed, to save his victim and bring him to justice, and I wasn’t sure I could do that alone. It would be his word against mine and who would believe me?
NOT THE END OF THE WORLD Page 9