The Usual Rules

by Joyce Maynard

  At school, nobody said anything about her mother, but it was clear everyone knew. When she walked into homeroom, Mrs. Volt took her aside. I want you to know you should feel free to do whatever feels best for you right now, dear, she told Wendy. Anytime you need to take a few moments and be alone, you can go down to the nurse’s office or just sit in the library. We’re all rooting for you.

  Some people may find gym class a helpful outlet, she was saying. But if you’d rather not play volleyball at this point, everyone will understand if you sit out PE. Three weeks ago that would have been her dream. Now she just looked at Mrs. Volt and said, That’s okay. I don’t mind volleyball.

  In English, they were reading one of her mother’s favorite books, The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank. Originally, they were supposed to read Lord of the Flies first, but Mrs. Gardner was saying she’d decided everyone could use a little different tone at the moment.

  I thought it could be helpful to everyone to read about a young person who managed to maintain this tremendously hopeful, optimistic spirit through another very dark time in history, she said. Maybe through Anne’s words we can all find some comfort and inspiration for the heartbreaking times we’re living through today.

  Buddy Campion interrupted her. But all that time this girl was writing her upbeat stuff, he said, she didn’t actually know she was going to die, right? What I want to know is, was she still talking about how people were basically so great when they herded her into the concentration camp?

  Some of us who haven’t been as diligent as you in keeping ahead of the reading assignment might appreciate it if you didn’t give away the ending of the book, Buddy, Mrs. Gardner said.

  Yeah, right, he said, but only loud enough for the people who sat in his row to hear.

  At lunch, she sat with Amelia and Seth, same as always, though Hallie Owens had joined them, along with a girl Wendy didn’t know, a very serious-looking person wearing a T-shirt with a hand on it holding a bunch of flowers.

  Hey, Wendy, Hallie was saying. Tanya and I just wanted to invite you to join our Unitarian Youth group, if you’re interested. We’re having a rally Sunday about how violence is never the answer to solving problems, and it would be really great to have some people there who had, you know, a kind of personal take on the situation.

  There’s going to be a spaghetti supper afterward, Tanya said.

  I don’t know what my plans are at the moment, Wendy said.

  Seth looked up from his tuna melt. That homework in history killed me. How’d you guys do? As usual, his voice shifted octaves partway through his sentence, but Wendy was glad just to hear someone talk.

  His face flushed.

  I didn’t mean killed, he said. But, like, bad.

  I didn’t have my book home with me, Wendy said. I’m way behind.

  I don’t think you need to worry, Hallie said. She reached across the table as if she was going to take one of Wendy’s hands, but patted her sleeve instead. All the teachers said people in your situation should just go with the flow for a while.

  Wendy looked at her sandwich, trying to imagine what it would mean to go with the flow. She saw herself on a raft, bobbing along a river someplace. Crowds on the sidelines, rooting for her.

  Nobody said anything for a couple of minutes. After awhile, Tanya and Hallie picked up their trays to go. Well, it was great talking to you, Tanya said. Me, too, said Hallie. I’d really like to get to know you better.

  Amelia had been cutting her tangerine peel with her fingernail into the shape of a person. After the girls left, she walked her tangerine-peel man across the table toward Wendy and made him talk in a squeaky voice.

  I’d really like to get to know you more, the tangerine peel said. It’s just so fascinating having a friend whose mother got killed.

  The second she said it, she gasped. Seth looked up from his sandwich. Oh my God, said Amelia. It just came out.

  It’s okay, Wendy told Amelia. She felt relieved that someone said it, finally.

  It was Saturday, raining hard, the sky gunmetal gray. Normally, Josh would be watching cartoons with Louie, but he had gone down to the armory with her mother’s hairbrush and her dental X rays—the thing he had said, at first, he’d never do.

  Louie wasn’t allowed to watch TV unsupervised anymore, because you never knew when they were going to break into the programming with some piece of news, and it was never good.

  Louie was in the family room, eating his cereal. Nobody had gotten around to turning on the lights. Josh had taken the batteries out of the remote control so he couldn’t turn the television on. Now he sat there in his elf costume, with his cereal bowl set on the tray table they used to put their food on, video nights, when Josh had a gig and their mom let them eat their meals with a movie. His back was strangely straight, as if he was balancing a book on his head, and he was holding his spoon in midair. The way he was sitting reminded Wendy of squirrels you’d see in the park—the way one would freeze halfway up a tree, or in a patch of grass, and lock its eyes on some random spot for long seconds, before it got back to whatever it was doing before.

  Come on into my room, Louie, she said. I’ll read to you.

  She’d told him to bring a pile of books into bed, the way her mother had done with her when she was little. They had already read Katy and the Big Snow and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Curious George. Now he wanted Goodnight Moon.

  Don’t you want a more grown-up book than that, Louie? she asked. Their mother used to read Goodnight Moon to him way back, when he still slept in his crib.

  I want this one. He put the old familiar book in her hands. They were in her bed now. He adjusted his body so he was curled up against her tight. She started reading.

  “In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon,” she began. “And a picture of the cow jumping over the moon.”

  As she read the words, he placed his finger on the part of the picture she was talking about, the same way their mother had taught her to do when she was very little. When she got to the part about the quiet old lady murmuring hush, Louie put his finger up to his lips the same way Wendy used to when she was little. She’d forgotten how her mother always did that on this page.

  “Goodnight room,” she said. “Goodnight moon.” She looked over at her brother then because his finger wasn’t on the moon. His thumb was in his mouth, was part of it, and his hand was busy twirling his ribbon.

  But also she saw now that he was crying. He was crying so softly that if she hadn’t looked at him, she wouldn’t have known.

  “Goodnight comb,” she said. “Goodnight brush.”

  She had begun to cry also, and for a few seconds the two of them just sat on the bed, looking at the picture. The rabbit in the rocking chair. The glow of the table lamp. Out the window through neatly drawn curtains, the moon.

  Goodnight nobody, he said when a minute had gone by that she didn’t speak. Goodnight mush. Do you think Mama is ever coming back, Sissy?

  I don’t think so, Louie, she said.

  Seven

  Days passed, and less happened than a person might have expected. There were still flags everywhere and streets blocked off downtown, but when you were standing at a crosswalk waiting for the light to change and you picked up a piece of someone’s conversation, it might be about whether the Yankees were going to make it to the play-offs, and not the way it had been a few weeks earlier, the same one thing over and over. People were going into stores and coming out with shopping bags, and smoking cigarettes and buying lottery tickets and looking at the cheap watches the men sold on the street. There were Halloween costumes in windows, and pumpkins. Things are finally getting back to normal, Wendy heard a woman say to her friend as they stopped to look at winter coats in a window.

  For a second, Wendy felt like grabbing her arm and yelling, Are you crazy? But instead, she just stopped to look at the coats, too. She wanted to be around people who actually felt things were back to normal, or acted li
ke it anyway.

  Life goes on, the woman looking at the winter coats had said to the friend. To Wendy, that was the strangest part: people going on with their lives, making comments like the friend’s, that she couldn’t stand the kind of coat that only had a pocket on one side.

  When she was little, Wendy had never understood how it was that you could be walking down a street in the city and see some homeless person sitting there with a sign that said HAVEN’t EATEN IN THREE DAYS and you just walked right past them. The person might be lying on the sidewalk in a way that made you wonder if they were even alive. Shouldn’t we check on him? she used to ask her mother. You’d think so, her mother said. But this is New York. That’s how life goes here.

  Now look. Three thousand people had said good-bye to their families and gone off to work one day and never came home. To Wendy, it would have seemed more understandable if, walking down the street, you saw people ripping out their hair, or lying on the ground, pounding the cement. She could have understood it better if they were running through the city, screaming, or swinging baseball bats into store windows, or going up to total strangers and grabbing them by the arm, saying, My husband disappeared! This person was my only child! I need my mother!

  What seemed craziest was all of this regular, ordinary-looking behavior: shopping, talking about some brand of car, going to school. Business as usual, they called it. Behaving, out in the world anyway, as if nothing had changed, when the truth was, not one thing was the same, like everyone was in on this big show. Sometime when she was sleeping or off putting up flyers, they’d handed out the instructions about how people should behave. She was still trying to figure out what the rules were now.

  Who knew what a girl was supposed to look like who had a mother for thirteen years of her life and then all of a sudden one day she didn’t. Now that she was that girl, she knew the answer. She looked just like anybody else. Same as the people looked normal on the flyers that had mostly fallen down by now. Same as Anne Frank did, whose diary she had been reading in English and whose face she studied every time she picked up the book. Same as those kids at Columbine High School whose pictures she had also looked at long and hard, in Time magazine, after they’d gotten shot by those two boys. Same as the two boys who had shot them, for that matter. It turned out that horrifying things could happen to ordinary-looking people. Unimaginable things could happen in the most regular places.

  One thing Wendy had learned from carrying on her own normal-looking behavior for a month now—pushing her tray along the line in the cafeteria, working on her geometry proofs, buttering her toast: You never knew who else was doing exactly the same thing—which people were really okay, and which ones only looked like it, even though they could just as easily go jump in front of an oncoming subway train as step inside it for a ride to the next station.

  Nothing was as it seemed—that was what she understood now. You could be riding across from a person on the bus and never know that just four weeks ago her sister, who she used to talk to on the phone every night, called her up on her cell phone and said, Listen, this building’s on fire and it doesn’t look like I’m getting out, so I just want you to know I love you. There could be a regular-looking man sitting on the A train, carrying a regular-looking bag, and you’d never know that he’d gotten married last summer to this woman he’d been in love with since they were sixteen years old, and they had returned from their honeymoon just after Labor Day, a trip they’d saved up for all year—and she’d gone back to work, and a week later she didn’t come home for dinner, and she still hadn’t. You wouldn’t know that what he was carrying in the bag was her hairbrush and a piece of her fingernail he’d found on the floor of their bathroom, hoping to match her DNA with pieces of bodies they’d found in the mountain of rubble where her building used to be.

  There could be a person like Louie, who’d be climbing the ladder to the slide when you went out on the playground at school to take him home at the end of the day, calling out, Hey Sissy, look at me. And you’d never believe that a few hours before, when his father had been tying his shoes, he had looked up, with his eyes wet, and asked, If a bus ran over me and I was dead, would I get to see my mama then?

  Or Wendy herself, on the phone with Amelia, talking about the outfit a girl named Jessica Overbeck had worn to school the day before, until Amelia had said, Got to go. My mom’s calling. Just that—nothing more than the thought of a mom saying it was time to get off the phone—was enough to change everything, take her from normal to crazy in about two seconds.

  Sometimes it was a flash flood. Other times it came on like a slow-building rainstorm, the kind that gives you enough warning you might even have time to get inside before the clouds burst. Once it started, though, there was nothing to do but let the sorrow pound you like the most powerful current, the strongest waterfall. When the sorrow hit, small losses came crashing over you in one suffocating torrent.

  The picture came to her of the time she and her mother had decided to crochet themselves matching hats, and Wendy’s came out with a funny pointed nub on the top, but they wore them anyway, all that winter, when they went skating. She saw her mother wearing hers, with the goofy red-and-white pom-pom, doing her pretend ice-dancing routine to the hokey music at the Rockefeller Center rink. She didn’t really know any figure-skating moves besides the bunny hop; she just made a lot of arm movements.

  Their I Love Lucy nights, the two of them curled up under the afghan with the popcorn. Lucy and Desi were married in real life, her mother told her. But they got a divorce. I wonder if it made Lucille Ball sad afterward, watching these old shows from back when they were still together.

  The time they made Ukrainian Easter eggs. Sticking the pinholes in the two ends of the egg, her mother putting the egg against her lips to blow out the inside part, watching the yolk come shooting out the bottom, her mother swallowing a little raw egg and spitting it out, and then making their designs in wax, dipping their eggs in the dye baths, first one layer of wax, then another, until the great moment when the design was finished and they could rub off all the wax and watch the patterns they’d made come through. Only Wendy had gripped hers so hard that, after all her work, the egg had cracked. She had cried then, and her mother had said, Never mind. We’ll make another one. And they had, too, even though they’d been working on their eggs all morning already.

  Floodwaters now. More pictures coming at her than she had time to collect even, they rushed by so quickly. Catch it, catch it. Don’t let that one get away.

  The time they were reading The Secret Garden out loud, and every time they got to the end of a chapter, Wendy had said, Just one more, which wasn’t even necessary, because her mother didn’t want to stop reading either, and in the end they stayed up till midnight and finished the whole book. The two of them under the covers, crying so hard at one point, her mother had to stop reading to blow her nose.

  The time, walking home from preschool, she and her mother had found a pair of mannequin legs on the sidewalk in front of a store. They’d been thrown out, probably because a piece of one of the feet had broken off, but otherwise the legs were perfect. Her mother carried them home on the subway, while Wendy had taken their bag of groceries. The whole way, everyone they passed—even the kind of people who normally looked mad all the time—had smiled at them. When they got back to their apartment, they’d propped the legs up in their living room and set a potted African violet on the top, and her mother had put stockings on them, which they changed periodically over the years—sometimes purple, sometimes fishnet; one time, bobby socks and high heels. They were always on the lookout for the top half of a mannequin to go with the legs.

  Lying in bed, with the floodwaters rushing over her, the picture came to her of the time she and her mother had taken a bus all the way to Cape Cod. From there, they’d taken the ferry out to Martha’s Vineyard and checked into a rooming house. They rented bikes—Wendy had only just learned how to ride, but the bike paths were flat enough tha
t it was no problem—and they’d gone on a carousel where if you grabbed hold of the brass ring, you got a free ride, and her mother did. In the end, they must have ridden that carousel ten times in a row. They had thought up names for their horses—Galahad for her mother’s, and hers she named Happy.

  That night, sitting on the patio of the restaurant they’d chosen because you could get a whole hamburger meal with a drink included for $5.95, she had seen her mother looking over at the family sitting at the table next to them. The mother and father were drinking pina coladas, and the three kids also had expensive drinks in fancy glasses. They looked as if they weren’t having any fun at all, like their whole vacation was just one big inconvenient chore.

  Wendy had recognized (young as she was, she had seen this) a sad look on her mother’s face, and she had said, I bet all the husbands in this restaurant wish they were married to you. Her mother was always the prettiest one, and she was so much more fun than those grumpy-looking mothers, on vacation with their husbands, who were always complaining about the food or the service or yelling at their kids. Wendy’s mother was just so happy they’d found their great little rooming house for twenty dollars a night, and the best hamburgers ever, cheap.

  Only Wendy knew how much she would have loved it if instead of her five-year-old daughter across from her at the table—or in addition to—there had been some man who loved her, and the two of them were drinking one of those drinks with a parasol, and he reached across to hold her hand.

  Sometimes when Wendy let herself start thinking about her mother, it would be memories of whole days that came to her: the birthday party—second grade—where her mother had taught her and a bunch of her friends how to do the Charleston and Kate had made a video of them in their flapper outfits. Their trip out to St. Louis to visit Aunt Pam that one time, when Aunt Pam had tried to convince her mother they should move to Missouri, it would be lots cheaper, telling her, Maybe it’s time you faced the facts, Janet. New York is for people with money and prospects. You keep acting like you live in Brigadoon. Who do you think you are—Princess Diana?