The Usual Rules

by Joyce Maynard

  He was still talking, but she wasn’t even sure if it was to her.

  When it started, he said, I thought nothing could be worse than those first days. And it wasn’t only us, but everyone else you’d see, wandering around like they’d landed on a whole different planet. Instead of just dealing with your own heart getting ripped into pieces, wherever you looked you knew there were other people dealing with the same thing. You couldn’t even be alone with it. Like you’re out in the ocean and the undertow catches you and you start yelling for help, but then you look around, and all around you in the water for as far as you can see, there’s all these other people flailing, too.

  He sat there for a moment, shaking his head.

  You keep getting up in the morning and knowing this will continue for maybe ten thousand more mornings. You wish you were the one who died. How much better would that be?

  She knew about that feeling he was talking about, that nothing made sense anymore. That you couldn’t think of one hopeful thing.

  The idea that he wanted to be dead, though, that part was new. At her worst moments these last six weeks she never wanted that. She wished the world would disappear plenty of times. She wished there was a place to be where she didn’t have to think anymore, where the pictures stopped coming at her. But dead, never.

  It was like this thing she and Amelia would get into sometimes where one of them would say, Whatever you do, just don’t think about the word philodendron. Or the pimples on Seth Coglan’s forehead. Or Mr. Hutchinson having sex with his wife. Then the one thing you could think of was that.

  She didn’t want to think about how it was for her mother after the plane hit. But she did. Especially at night.

  One girl at school, Stacey, had made a scrapbook of photographs cut out from magazines, everything related to the Twin Towers. She’d shown it to Amelia one day at lunch. Someday I’ll give this to my kids, she told Amelia. It’s like being at the Kennedy assassination, or Columbine, but bigger.

  When Wendy set her tray down on the table, Stacey put the scrapbook away fast, and kept saying, Oh my God, I’m such an idiot.

  Catch you later, she said. I love your jeans, Wendy. Same ones she always wore.

  Even though she didn’t look at the scrapbook, Wendy had seen plenty of pictures. The worst ones being the people jumping out the windows. But others, too.

  Sometimes she couldn’t help studying them, looking for a flash of red—a glimpse, under some piece of rubble, of one of the uncomfortable red sandals. Other times, she pictured her mother sitting there at her desk, with the framed pictures of her, Josh, and Louie next to the phone, and the orange juice can pencil holder Wendy made back in first grade. Everything she didn’t want to think about then, she did. Her mother looking out the window, seeing the plane heading for the building. The flames afterward and the smoke. People trying to find someone with a cell phone that worked so they could call their families one more time to say, I love you. Good-bye.

  Now, in her bed, it was happening to Wendy again—the images she dreaded, flashing through her brain like the most horrible slide show ever.

  Once, when she was little, and they were going past the Metropolitan Museum after the zoo, her mom had taken her hand and they’d walked to the top of the steps. The two of them tap-danced down, like Shirley Temple and Bojangles Robinson in The Little Colonel. They’d watched that movie so many times, her mother knew all the steps.

  Now, whether she wanted to or not, she saw her mother’s slim legs running down the stairs from the eighty-seventh floor. She would’ve taken off the sandals. Dancer’s feet. Red nail polish.

  Her mother would have been thinking about the three of them as she ran. Her, Josh and Louie. I was beaming you a message, she said to Wendy the day she had to give her John Adams report in front of the class. Did you feel it?

  There in the blackness of her bedroom, Wendy went back over those minutes in homeroom that Tuesday morning, wondering if there had been a message coming in to her from her mother. If there was, she missed it.

  All she could see was her mother running, her feet barely touching the steps, more flying than running, it seemed to Wendy now.

  The thing about a dress like this is, the skirt always flaps open when you walk fast, her mom said that day in Macy’s when she was trying it on in front of the three-way mirror. What I really need to do is sew a snap on the inside.

  Never mind the skirt flapping open. Just get out of there, Wendy called out silently, when the picture played in her head of her mother flying down the stairs, and for the smallest moment, she let herself forget that it was already over. For that fraction of a second she saw her mother’s flight from the building like some sports show Josh and Louie were watching live on TV, an event whose outcome remained in question, where you could call out instructions to the players.

  Just run! she called out. Never mind if you drop your shoes. Just get out of there. As if she still could.

  Whatever the actual moment was that did it—the building tumbling down, some explosion, or after, out on what used to be the plaza, some huge slab of metal crashing down like an actual lightning bolt—she didn’t let herself imagine that part. When the picture started coming to her, she clicked ahead, so what she saw instead (this was awful, too) was her mother trapped someplace under all those tons of metal, calling out to them. Her mother, who didn’t even like staying in an elevator too long—didn’t like any space, she said, too small to dance in.

  Maybe there was someone with her. One of those people whose face Wendy had studied on the flyers in Union Square. The grandma with the add-a-pearl bracelet with Kerri-Robert-Bernadette on it, whose navy blue pocketbook had a broken strap. The sisters who made pastries at Windows on the World, last seen carrying a crate of eggs off the elevator. The man in the business suit who was wearing Christmas Tree socks, even though it had only been September, because he was always such a nut about Christmas.

  Two animal crackers left in her purse. Half of one. Only the box.

  Stop it, she told her brain. Don’t think about this.

  Another picture, but no better. The mountain of wrecked metal. The mountain of dust. The workers digging, and the cranes, the people with masks on, the burned-out fire engines and cars, the trucks hauling away load after load of rubble from the wasteland that, from what she could see on TV, never seemed to get any smaller, as if the more rubble they dug out, the more rose up from the center of the earth.

  And somewhere under it all, her mother, but not in any form they’d recognize her. Like something that would happen to a bad guy on Louie’s Saturday-morning cartoons: Vaporized. Dust. Or less than dust. Somewhere lay the gold ring Josh had given her, with the words he’d had inscribed for her, More Even Than Music. Somewhere, her house keys that she was always losing, but really gone this time. Somewhere the gold compact her grandmother had given her that she said would be Wendy’s someday, but it wouldn’t.

  Somewhere in the pile under the shards of melted computers and telephones and file cabinets and computer discs and air conditioners and intercom systems and water coolers and Xerox machines and red sandals and every other color of sandals and every other kind of shoe, under the shredded remains of business suits and briefcases and raincoats and car keys, gym bags and diaper bags and bag lunches and half-finished books, business cards and charge cards and postcards and anniversary cards and maybe somewhere even a love letter, or one word from one, or maybe just a question mark, somewhere beneath a million other pieces of paper and metal and plastic and—her brain would settle on this image whether she wanted it to or not—pieces of bone, too, flesh and bone, somewhere in there was a scrap of a scrap of a photograph of her own self, under the Christmas tree, smiling, with her baby brother in her arms.

  At first when she heard the music, she actually supposed it was part of her slide show, her dream was so real. It was the Cat Stevens song her mother used to play all the time when Wendy was little, and the two of them would take out the scarf coll
ection and dance—but only when Josh wasn’t around, because he said that album was drek. Wendy could remember lying in her same bed in this same dark room, but long ago, with the stereo set on Repeat so that one song played over and over. She could see her mother sitting in her nightgown with her glass of wine, or more likely spinning across the floor as the record played, scratchy from so much use. “Oh very young,” came the voice. “You’re only dancing on this earth for a short while.”

  She could hear the lyrics again now. Clear as she heard them, Wendy thought it was her dream, but it was real, coming from the living room, and for a second her heart exploded. For a moment there she thought her mother must be back. How else could this music be playing?

  Half-asleep, she got out of bed and made her way down the hall. There were no lights on. The music was louder now, and it pulled her down the hall, though there was another sound coming from the living room, the sound of weeping.

  She saw him then, though it was hard to make him out with no light except for what came in through the window from the street. Josh, sitting on the floor by the stereo, his head in his hands, his shoulders heaving.

  Nine

  She had just started third grade when her mother told her she was going to have a baby. You said it wasn’t in the cards, Wendy said. But it was after all. Wendy was so excited she could hardly stand it.

  The baby wasn’t coming till March. Wendy asked how many more days so often, her mother made her a chart to cross them off. When Wendy saw how many days were left to cross off, she said she could never wait that long. You’ll see, her mom said. The time will fly.

  She went to the doctor with her mother and Josh and listened to the heartbeat with the stethoscope, and when there was an ultrasound, she got to see that, too. Looks like you’ve got yourself a boy this time, Janet, the doctor said. How could he tell? Look, said her mother. That’s his penis. Just a speck on the screen. A brother.

  Later came the kicking, the bump on her mother’s belly where one of his feet stuck out, different places at different times. This one’s a gymnast, I think, her mother said. Either that or a tap dancer. She said maybe they should call him Jimmy Slyde, after her favorite tapper, but Josh wanted Louis, after his all-time-favorite jazz musician.

  One time when they were reading together on the couch, her mother set the book down. Listen, she said. When Wendy laid her head against her mother’s belly, she could hear a soft rhythmic sound, muffled but steady as breathing. He’s got the hiccups, just like me, her mother said.

  If Wendy wanted to carry the baby around, she’d better build up her muscles, her mother said. Most babies weigh seven pounds at least, she told Wendy. Could even be ten. When they bought a ham or a roasting chicken, a seven- or eight-pounder, she’d put it in Wendy’s arms when they got home, and for a few minutes Wendy would haul the piece of meat around the apartment, imagining it was her brother. One time when Josh’s mother was visiting from Florida and they explained what Wendy was doing, she said she didn’t think that was a good idea. What if Wendy dropped the baby? Nine years old is just too young, she said.

  Wendy studied Josh’s face when his mother said that, to see what he’d say.

  Wendy’s no more likely to drop the baby than Jan or me, Mom, he told her. Less, probably.

  Come to think of it, I’m not so sure you’re a safe bet, he told her, grinning. Too much mah-jongg, not enough weight lifting. Then he had inspected her upper arms; she had on one of those golf jackets she liked to wear with the matching pants. Nope, he said. Our daughter’s definitely got you beat.

  Josh read every book about babies and childbirth. Sometime that winter he stopped taking gigs outside the city, in case her mother went into labor. It’s still two months away, honey, she told him.

  You just don’t know what could happen, he said. I can’t risk missing this.

  Her mother went into labor on a Saturday night at the end of February. Josh woke Wendy up. Listen, he said. Your mom thinks you’d do best going to Kate’s house, because it could be a long wait, but if you promise to be patient, you can come to the hospital with us.

  She had her backpack ready, with markers and paper and a bunch of books and art supplies and the scarf she’d been making for her baby brother on her Knitting Nancy.

  They’d chosen a special birthing center that let big sisters be at the birth. There may be some moments while he’s getting born I’m going to look like I’m practically dying, her mother told her. That’s just how it goes when babies are born. It might seem scary but it only lasts a little while and it’s definitely worth the hard part.

  They held her hands. Josh on one side, Wendy on the other. They did the breathing with her when the pains came. Josh rubbed her back. Wendy put ice chips in her mouth. When the midwife finally told her mother she could start pushing, the two of them made the sounds along with her like they were the ones having a baby.

  I see the top of his head, Josh told her.

  One more push, the doctor said.

  After all the waiting, time finally flew. Once the top of his head pushed into the air, the rest of him—neck, shoulders, arms, belly, legs—whooshed like someone at a fair coming out the tunnel at the end of the flume ride. Josh’s hands were there to catch him, his big bass player’s fingers circling air first, then baby.

  Her naked brother, with the cord still attached, was pink as the inside of a conch shell and covered with something white and creamy, and his fingers looked as if he’d been in the tub a long time. His face was bunched up and wrinkled, but he opened his eyes right away and when he did the person he looked at was Wendy. Josh was crying. After they cut the cord, he had handed the baby to a nurse, who wrapped him in a blanket so only one foot was showing, kicking just the way it had all those months they were waiting. From inside the blanket Wendy could hear the sound of crying, not the mouse squeaks she had expected, but a big, deep yell, like the kind of person that gets his way. Josh had his arms around her mother, kissing her. Our little boy, he said.

  Louie. He even has lips like a trumpet player.

  Hello, big sister, her mother said.

  Later she gathered that people expected her not to like her baby brother. She’d be at the market with her mother, with Louie in his front-pack, and some woman from the neighborhood would stop to admire the baby. Then she’d look anxiously at Wendy and say something like, I bet he cries all the time and drives you crazy, right? Wendy wondered why the woman would think that. Actually, no, she said. When he cries, I comfort him.

  Your baby brother probably doesn’t know how to do anything, one woman said to her, as if this would cheer her up, as if she needed cheering up in the first place. Isn’t it wonderful you know how to do so many grown-up things? All he can do is lie in his crib.

  My brother can do tons of stuff, she said, and she bent over him in his infant carrier to get a quick whiff of his head. He can burp and sneeze, and if you rub this certain place on his belly, he laughs every time.

  They were in the park having Popsicles when the mother of a boy Wendy sometimes played with when she was younger, Oliver, came over. She also had a baby in a front-pack who looked around the same age as Louie.

  I bet someone’s nose is just a little bit out of joint, am I right, Janet? she said. She spoke the words, as if she was talking in pig Latin.

  All those years of having a certain person all to herself, and then along comes Mr. Buttinsky. I can sympathize, because you-know-who has been hell on wheels ever since the new baby came along. We’re back to wetting our bed, if you follow me.

  At first, Wendy thought her mother’s friend meant she and her husband had started wetting the bed. Then she figured out that Oliver’s mom was talking about Oliver. He had always been a little babyish, so she wasn’t that surprised.

  Times like these, her mother usually cut the conversation short. Wendy’s just wonderful with her brother, she said. We’d be lost without her.

  Lost without her. Her mom and Josh, wandering in a forest
like Hansel and Gretel, but with Louie in the front-pack. Calling out, Wendy, Wendy, where are you? We’re lost without you.

  Of all the things I ever got to do, she told her mother on the way home, being a big sister is my favorite.

  The first word Louie said was Mama. The next was Sissy, his name for her.

  Louie worships the ground Wendy walks on, Josh told his sister, Andy. You should see him in his infant seat, propped up on the table, following her every move. When she’s been gone all day, I take him to pick her up at school. A whole block before we get to the building, he’s waving his arms and yelling, Sissy.

  For a long time he was too young for Wendy to play with much, but he never minded when she dressed him up, even if it was in a girl outfit for one of her plays. Sometimes he was the king, propped up in his infant seat with a construction-paper crown she’d made him. Once he could crawl, she and Amelia pretended he was a monster, come to overtake the kingdom. Then he could talk and they gave him lines, but only a few. They taught him to say, Marry me, Your Highness and Cut off her head. They made him capes and swords and gave him a mustache once, made out of the cotton from a bottle of aspirin, stuck on with tape, and he hardly even cried when they took it off.

  Wendy’s mother could only take two months off work after Louie was born, so Josh was the one who took care of him most of the time, and it was always Josh who picked Wendy up at school. Sometimes he was Classroom Parent, when he could find someone—another mother—to watch Louie.

  What do you mean, another mother? Wendy’s mother said.

  I spend so much time on the playground with the mothers, he said, sometimes I forget I’m actually a dad.

  But a dad who knew all the different brands of disposable diapers and which ones had reusable tapes, a dad who could name every character on Sesame Street. If I ever get to the point where I know which Teletubby is which, do me a favor and shoot me, he said.