Defeat washed over me like sludge from a barge and I gave in, knowing that no amount of protesting would do any good. It was over and I had lost and it was the end of the world for me.
“I think you should go home today,” Mr. Diller was saying. “Your parents can drive you.”
“No!” I shouted. “I’ll walk home! I don’t want anyone driving me!”
I stood there, shivering with rage, fighting to keep from crying. “I hate you!” I cried, looking around the room at all of them, wondering how they could all be so stupid—didn’t they realize that something else was going on here? Didn’t they know there was something I couldn’t say? Did they really think I was so evil I’d just make up stories to get teachers fired; what did they think, that maybe I was mad because Mr. Howard gave me a B for Effort last marking period—who cared, I got an A in the class—what did they think? Didn’t they care? They didn’t even ask, they just decided I was rotten to the core and kicked me out before I could ruin the barrel. “I hate you!” I cried again and fled.
That was the first time I peed my pants. On the way home from Mckinley, early in the morning when everyone else was switching from arithmetic to geography, I took the short cut through the Donaldsons’ woods and peed my pants. “There’s no cure for bad,” Grandmother always said and she was right; I might as well go sink in the swamp, I thought, better to get it over with now than to go through life as an unwanted, lying little Pervert who ran around ruining people’s careers. A weak little demon without power enough to control her own bladder.
Everything changed after that. How I made it through the rest of the school year, I don’t know. I just went to school and pretended to be a person, doing everything I was told and ignoring the pain in my butt and trying not to open my mouth.
That was when I had to start seeing Miss Dickerson. “How can I help?” she said the first time I walked into her cubicle, and her voice was so soothing I almost cried, but I didn’t. After all, she was an employee of the School Board, a hired head-shrinker, and it was her duty to get rid of children like me.
I had hoped that when regular school ended, everything would be fine again. The good thing about summer school was that Mr. Howard wasn’t there, so I never had to see him lurking in the hall. Next year, he was going to another school and Mr. Diller called me into his office and told me that, as if he expected it to make me happy. “You’ll never have to see him again,” Mr. Diller said, but it wasn’t enough.
“That poor man,” Mother said to Daddy one night. “What a horrible thing to live down. I wish it had never happened.”
Daddy grunted and rustled his paper. From my crack in the floor, I could see the top of his bald head, which was beginning to get sunburned, and Mother’s feet resting on the footstool. Every once in a while, a puff of smoke would float across the room like a fat ghost.
“I keep thinking about his family,” she said. “How horrible it must have been for them.”
I hated it when she talked about that; it made me feel horrible and guilty, like some kind of war criminal. I didn’t want his family to suffer, I just wanted him thrown in jail and left there until his thing rotted off. When I thought about his family, I felt worse than usual. I’d envision his two little girls, dressed in tatters, standing on the corner in front of Peterson’s, selling pencils in the middle of a blizzard. I’d see his wife, grown grey and weak, hovering over a campfire outside a shack near the river, cooking beans in a battered pot. And I’d see him, bent and dirty, driving around town in his rusty car, picking odds and ends from people’s garbage.
It’s all my fault, I’d think, believing my vision of woe; if only I hadn’t got hysterical none of this would have happened. If only I hadn’t taken his stupid thing so seriously, if only I’d been able to laugh, like Cindy and Ginger, if only I’d got out of my seat and let him hit me with that pointer, taking my punishment like a trouper instead of getting crazy and thinking he was going to do something with it. How stupid! How could I have thought such a thing? Of course he wouldn’t do anything, it was broad daylight, in the middle of the school day, any minute the glee club would be coming in to sing—how could I have panicked like that?
I despised myself for my weakness, my hysteria, my wild accusations. I felt terrible about his family. But still, I wished him dead. Picking garbage was too good for him and I wouldn’t want to see him hovering around on trash days, looking up at my window and shaking his fist and saying, “It’s all your fault, you little vixen!”
“It’s over, Marion,” Daddy told Mother. “Why beat a dead horse? Forget it.”
But it wasn’t that easy. I couldn’t forget it. Every time I walked to school, my insides started pulling at me, as if there was a huge claw inside me, grabbing my stomach and intestines and twisting them like wet rags. Sometimes the pain was so bad I had to lie down, right in the woods, on my back, perfectly straight, and then the claw would let go. On days when the pain was so bad I had to lie down, I’d end up being late and Mr. Blake would make me wear a little sign round my neck that said BEING TARDY IS FOOLHARDY. The first time I could have died of shame, but another good thing about being in summer school with the bad and stupid kids is that everybody’s so used to being ridiculed and punished that nobody makes fun of anyone else—we just pat each other on the back and say, “Don’t pay any attention to Blake the Flake.”
DADDY woke me up at six o’clock. “Maggie!” he said, slamming open my door, looking all happy and excited. “Rise and shine! The Parade’s in five hours!”
I wanted to kill him. I covered my head with my pillow and asked him to please close the door, but he kept standing there, grinning, saying, “Get up! Get up! The early bird gets the worm!” and I wished he’d leave me alone, wished he let me go back to sleep and live in my dreams, rather than in the real world.
“Go away,” I said as Mother passed by, and she clicked her tongue and said, “Well, if it isn’t Miss Sweetness-and-Light.” She told Daddy she had never seen such an unpleasant person in the morning and I wondered why, if that was so, she didn’t just leave me alone.
She wanted us all to be happy; that was what she wanted most in the world and most of the time it was my fault we weren’t. She wanted everyone to be cheerful and gay and when we weren’t her world fell to pieces. I hated coming downstairs and having Mother chirping at me like some goldfinch, asking me whether I’d slept well; I hated watching Ruthie slurping those horrible colored cereals, the ones with the marshmallow bits floating around like chunks of curdled milk; I hated having to look at Grandmother’s jammy red lips puckering up to insult me.
I’d fill a bowl with cereal and slouch down in my place and try to block them all out, to go back into the dreams that were floating around in my head like Ruthie’s marshmallow bits, and I’d wish I were back in bed, back in my dream, even if it was a nightmare.
I had terrible nightmares, but I couldn’t tell anyone about them because then they’d really think I was crazy. I kept them inside, like a family secret with no family, wishing the ugliness of them would fade away, but it never did. No wonder I wasn’t very happy in the morning, but how could I explain that to Mother? I couldn’t say, “Don’t talk to me, I just had a nightmare about dead children with no butts.” She’d faint, she’d turn all pale and gaspy and think I was crazy and wonder what she did wrong to have a daughter who dreamed such gruesome things and it would ruin her entire day. She’d worry that the dream meant I was going to turn into a mass murderess; she’d tell the Bridge Ladies about it and Grandmother would say, “Better get rid of her now, before she burns the house down with you in it.”
“Good morning, dear,” Mother said when I finally clumped into the breakfast room. “Sleep well?”
I grunted and looked over at Donald, who rolled his eyes and made a face. Ruthie was intently picking all the orange bits out of her bowl, piling them in a soggy mountain on her plastic place mat.
“Where’s Daddy?” I asked and Mother said he’d left to go down
town and set up the booth.
“It’s only six o’clock!” I moaned and she said, “You know your father,” but no I didn’t. I knew he liked to have things ready, and he thought being late was a crime worthy of beheading, but I didn’t know him at all.
“He’s really excited,” Mother said. “He gets such a kick out of this.”
It was true. Daddy loved giving candy to children. He loved making them laugh and seeing their faces light up when they got a Donniebar or a Ruthette or a Boobar. He loved being the Candy King of North Bay, loved standing in his booth, chatting with the parents. “Mr. Charm,” Mother called him and he could really ooze it out when he wanted to.
“He wants you to be there by eight,” Mother said and I said I couldn’t get there that early.
“Why not? You’re not marching.”
“I have to do something,” I told her.
“What?” she demanded, and I said, “Something.”
She walked over and stood at the foot of the table, staring at me with that “What are you up to?” look that usually meant, “You’re grounded.”
“She’s helping us,” Donald said and I wanted to leap across the table and kiss him.
“Oh,” Mother said suspiciously, but there was no point in accusing us both of lying. She knew we’d stick together like two soggy stamps and there was no getting us apart. She looked sad; I think her feelings were hurt because I didn’t want to be with them in the booth.
“Don’t worry,” I told her, “I’ll be there before the first marcher crosses the finish line.”
I really wasn’t up to anything. I just wanted to sneak down to Daddy’s factory and catch the beginning of the Parade from his office. I couldn’t go stand on Main Street with everybody else, not by myself. I knew what people would think. They’d think I wasn’t good enough to have anybody to go to the Parade with. Or, worse yet, they’d feel sorry for me, poor Maggie, she got herself in trouble and now no one will speak to her. I didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for me; I’d rather have them spit on me or throw turds at me than feel sorry for me, looking at me with those droopy eyes, pushing their pity off on me, weighing me down with cement bags full of it so I could jump in the river and sink that much faster.
Mother wanted to drive us, but I wanted to walk. I needed to be alone, to pull myself together after my dreams so I could pretend nothing was wrong when I went into Daddy’s booth and handed out candy and had to be polite to the whole town. I worried that they wouldn’t accept candy from me, that they’d come to the booth and wait for Daddy or Mother or Ruthie to give them a candy bar, that they’d turn up their noses at the Boobar I tried to thrust into their hands.
I walked along the beach as far as the lighthouse and then cut up to River Street, behind the coastguard complex, which was the cut-off point between the nice neighborhoods and the poor ones. To make sure everyone knew, there was a run-down trailer park right behind the coastguard property, filled with rusty old lopsided trailers.
From there, I followed the railroad tracks. A boy from Riverside fell and hit his head against a rail and bled to death, or so they said, but that didn’t keep me from taking the short cut. There were supposed to be hoboes living someplace between the tracks and the river, but I never saw any. The closest thing I ever saw to a hobo was George, the old man who came round on trash day with his little red kid’s wagon, looking through everyone’s garbage for hidden treasures. He was a nice man. He always had stories about being in the war, about being in jungles filled with bizarre animals and golden temples and Japanese booby traps. “He’s making it up,” Grandmother would snarl, waving her hand in disgust, as if even talking to George would give me beriberi. “The closest he came to the war was Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.”
George had a wife or a girlfriend or something; every once in a while she’d come along with him, in her red polkadot dress and her silly blond wig, and they’d look through the trash, discussing the items as if they were shopping at Tiffany’s. I liked them, even if they were hoboes.
On the other side of Elm Street was the section of town where the houses were grey and chalky from the cement dust. It didn’t matter how hard the people worked on keeping their houses nice, they were constantly covered with a fine coating of grit. I only knew one person who lived there, a girl from McKinley named Polly Sanderson, who lived in one of the old Victorian houses that lined St. Joseph Avenue. Her house was directly across the street from the grimy little park that had once been the site of the French fort, but now all there was was a row of broken swings and a plaque.
Except for the cement, Polly’s house was wonderful—it had three storeys and an attic as big as Miss Child’s ballroom and all sorts of hidden staircases and secret rooms. I’d only been there once, because Polly was ashamed of her father, who had something wrong with him. He did weird things. He’d go out in the backyard and tie himself to the clothesline pole and pretend to be a scarecrow. He was an old man—Polly was the baby of eleven children—and he seemed more like a grandfather than a father. When I was there, he was sitting in the corner of the living room, in a big red armchair, just minding his own business and quietly singing “Over There.” “Maybe he’s got shellshock,” I suggested and Polly burst into tears and ran upstairs and never asked me over again.
I cut through the cement-plant property so I could walk along the river to the Park. “Don’t swim in the river,” Mother always warned, reminding me about the boys who drowned in the whirlpools under the bridge to Canada. Every once in a while some suicide would jump off the bridge and their bodies wouldn’t be found for months; they’d end up stuck on a dock near Algonac and one even floated all the way to Detroit. No one who had jumped had ever survived and, in a way, I found that reassuring. If things ever got too horrible, there was always a sure way out.
After the cement plant there was another area of little cementy houses, which was where Thomas Edison’s house had been when he was in North Bay, blowing things up. After that, there was Inventor’s Park, which was surrounded by lovely old houses—huge, gabled houses built by the captains of the ships that sailed the Great Lakes. Some of them had towers and widow’s walks and I wished we could live in one of them; I’d love to have had the room at the top, in the tower, all glass with a porch all round it, where I could have gone out and watched the freighters or the baseball games in the Park or the summer dances on the observation deck next to the coastguard cutter.
Most of those houses were funeral parlors now. All along Main Street there was a string of them, and I wondered how they all stayed in business because it didn’t seem there would be enough dead people to go round.
Prudy Taylor lived in one. She and her family lived upstairs and the funeral parlor was downstairs; once she had a pyjama party and we all dared each other to go down into the mortuary, at midnight, without flashlights. Prudy’s house was beautiful but I didn’t think I’d like living in a place with a bunch of corpses downstairs and I wasn’t real keen on the idea of going down to visit them at midnight. But I’d never backed down on a dare in my life and I wasn’t going to start then.
Prudy got out her Ouija board and we sat in a circle in her bedroom, asking it whether ghosts would come out when we went downstairs. Y-E-S it spelled and we shrieked and huddled into each other. “Whose ghost?” Prudy asked and I lifted my fingers from the marker as if they’d been scorched. “I think it should be a surprise,” I said but everyone wanted to ask and I gave in. Prudy and I stared at each other across the board while the other girls read out the letters as the marker glided itself into them. Neither Prudy nor I looked at the board, not even once. “B!” the girls cried. “E! R! T! H! A!”
We were mystified. “Ask Bertha who?” Cindy demanded but the marker wouldn’t budge, even when I gave it a little shove. None of us knew any dead Berthas and we couldn’t even think of any famous ones, except Cindy said there was a movie with a Bertha in it, but she thought it might have been a cow.
We put on our slippers and
silently made our way, single file, down the back steps to the mortuary. No one giggled. Prudy led the way, hunched over like some diabolical lab assistant in a horror movie, and we all did the same, making a little line of Igors, winding our way down to the lab-or-a-tory.
She led us to the basement door and opened it, switching on the light so we wouldn’t fall. From the top of the stairs I could see black caskets and a big old marble table and I wondered if this was such a good idea; maybe we should go back upstairs and play “Twister.”
Cindy was behind me, pushing. “Go on, scaredy-cat,” she hissed, “you’re holding up the line.”
Prudy was at the bottom of the stairs, waiting, with a sinister grin on her face. Growing up around dead people, I guessed you got used to them, just like a beekeeper’s kid wouldn’t be afraid of bees and a farm kid doesn’t mind the smell of horseshit.
It was cold down there, cold and stinky, like baby vomit. As soon as we were all downstairs, Prudy switched off the light and we were surrounded by darkness. Somebody grabbed my arm and I didn’t care who it was—her hand was warm and human and that was good enough.
“Oooooooo,” someone moaned and we all giggled.
Prudy led us to the big table and told us it was where her father prepared the corpses. Cindy wanted someone to get up on it and I shuddered with horror—what if they had planned this, what if they were going to “get” someone, what if they were going to shut someone up in a casket? What if it was going to be me?
NOT THE END OF THE WORLD Page 11