The Usual Rules

by Joyce Maynard

  In English, they were reading “The Lottery,” a story she’d read with her class back home. The assignment was to write a three-hundred-word essay on whether or not, if you’d been in that village that day, you would have picked up a stone like the people in the story, and why.

  When the bell rang, a girl who’d been sitting next to her asked where her next class was. I’m going to geometry, too, so I can show you, she said.

  You come from New York—huh? she said. It must have been so unbelievably crazy being there with all those dead people everywhere.

  Wendy didn’t say anything.

  So, the girl said. You want me to tell you who the cutest boys are?

  Then it was gym. She didn’t have sneakers with her, so the gym teacher told her she didn’t have to change into a uniform this time. You can just wear your jeans today, she said. You can play right wing.

  The teacher gave her a field hockey stick and some shin guards and told her what to do if the ball came her way. You don’t want to try to be some big hero and make a goal, the teacher told her, as if she ever would. Just pass it to your teammate and work on blocking your opponent if she’s bringing the ball up your side of the field.

  Her position was on the far side of the field, just to the right of a little brook. From where she stood, she could look across a long, low, flat expanse of land, past the school, to a housing development and some kind of wheat fields and, beyond that, low hills against the horizon. It was just 9:30, but already the sun was beating down hard. Wendy imagined what Amelia would say if she could see her standing here with her hockey stick.

  The two players in the center of the field started off. The girl from the other team got the ball and ran with it partway down the field, toward the opposite goal, before passing it to a player on the opposite side from Wendy. From there, the girl moved nearer to the goal. She took a shot and missed.

  The game went on like that for a long time. Sometimes the ball came back up the field again, but never very close to Wendy, except one time when it rolled right toward her and she just stood there. Another girl on her team ran up from behind and took it.

  Wendy felt as if she was watching the game, not playing. Not really watching, either. Just standing in her spot next to the place where the little trickle of water flowed past. Four feet over and she’d be off the field completely. She stepped slightly closer to the sidelines to see whether anyone noticed. They didn’t.

  There was a bunch of brush by the streambed. Not brush exactly, but a pile of old athletic equipment covered by a few weeds.

  A person could just step across this stream and be off the field. A few more steps and she’d be in the housing development, instead of school. In five minutes she could be out on the road.

  She walked over a little more. Down at the far end of the field, most of the players were bunched up around the goal. Even the ones who weren’t there seemed totally focused on the spot. Wendy jumped over the stream. Hardly a jump at all, it was so narrow.

  She climbed up over the other side of the bank. She was standing in a pile of old netting and what might have been track and field equipment. She looked back over her shoulder again, but nobody was noticing. She walked over to the sidewalk, toward a row of identical houses. She was walking faster now, like a person with a destination, instead of someone just moving her feet around.

  A woman was running toward her with one of those baby joggers. Off in the distance now, she could hear the dim sound of yelling on the field. She realized she still had her hockey stick in her hands, and set it down. Unbuckled the shin guards and laid them neatly next to the stick.

  Wendy walked a long time. After a while, the road came out onto a highway. There was a sign for downtown, so she went in that direction, and after a while more, she spotted a restaurant where her father told her they could get a good steak. Next to that was a bookstore.

  It was a small bookstore. There were some tables near the front with new books, but farther back was a used-book area and a couple of comfortable-looking old chairs. Wendy studied the shelves. She found a used edition of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. She took the book off the shelf and sat down in one of the chairs.

  When she left her old school, she was nearly finished with the book, but she opened it now to one of the earlier sections, back when Anne Frank had just moved into the annex, when she was still thinking the war would be over soon and she could go home. Back then, it had almost seemed cozy and nice, the way everyone in the family was gathered in close, stocking up the pantry, having their meals with the other family. Their friend Miep stopping by with news from the world outside and special treats like fruit or jam. Back then Anne thought it was a problem that her mother didn’t understand her that well. Nobody had any idea yet how bad things were going to get.

  Wendy flipped back to the front of the book and studied the familiar photograph of Anne Frank some more. Anne also worried about how she looked, though Wendy thought she was pretty. Not like the kind of girl who would get picked for cheerleader, but like someone she and Amelia would want to be friends with. Anne wrote about that same angry feeling Wendy had all the time, where even the people she loved got on her nerves, and she said mean things to them, even though she loved them and wasn’t really a mean person.

  “I’d like to scream ‘Leave me alone,’ ” she wrote. “ ‘Let me get away, away from everything, away from this world.’ ” Oh yes.

  So many times, reading the diary, Wendy felt like crying out loud, Me, too. All these years later, in a different country and a different world, long after the girl in the photograph had turned to dust, the words she’d written could have been coming from Wendy’s diary, if she kept one. Including the inconsistencies—the way, one minute, Anne would be writing in her diary how she was filled with hopefulness and affection for the people around her, the way that, even in those terrible times, she managed to view her life as an adventure and to see beauty all around; and then how, a page later, she would be sobbing with rage and despair.

  Wendy read for a long time, long enough that she got to the part where the diary stopped and there was an editor’s note explaining how Anne had died in a concentration camp just one month before the Allied troops defeated the Nazis and liberated all the prisoners. If only she could have held on a little longer.

  Wendy thought about her mother. What if she was two steps from the door when the building gave way? What if she had made it to the street, but a piece of falling metal hit her just as she was about to reach safety? What if she’d been lying somewhere under the rubble just as a group of rescue workers made it to her spot with their shovels?

  By the time Anne Frank died, her mother and sister were dead already. Probably knowing that made it harder for her to keep going. After a while you’d think, What was the point? Wendy reread, then, Anne’s line about believing people were basically good and thought about Buddy’s remark that she’d written before they took her to the concentration camp. He was a jerk but he had a point. She also wondered if Anne still believed people were basically good by the end.

  The editor’s note went on to say how only one person in the Frank family had survived the concentration camp—Anne’s father. She wondered what it was like being him after the war, knowing his whole family was dead. And then getting a visit from their friend Miep Gies after all that time. And Miep saying, Look, here’s the diary. I found it after the Nazis took Anne away. I saved it for you.

  Anne’s father had put the diary away for a while. He couldn’t even bear to read it at first, and when he finally did, there were parts he didn’t like, so he kept those separate and didn’t show them to anyone. The first time the diary was published, and for a long time after that, only the parts he wanted were kept in. The parts where Anne talked about being angry at her mother he took out. Also some parts where she talked about her body, about sex even.

  Why did parents think they could control their children that way? And only pick the parts of their kids that they
wanted, telling them where they had to live, the people they were supposed to like and not like. Her parents had done that—first her mother, saying you can’t go with your father; then Garrett saying you need to come with me. By then she didn’t even know herself what she wanted or felt.

  She turned back to the beginning of the book again to check what year Anne Frank was born. She was the same age Wendy was now when she started writing her diary, but if she was alive, she’d be an old woman now, older than a grandmother. She might even be dead. Sooner or later, she would have died, whether there were Nazis or not. So maybe by the time enough years passed and it got to the point where you were going to die anyway, it wouldn’t matter if something terrible happened to you when you were young. Things could finally be almost like normal, and it would seem as if nothing bad had happened.

  But things still wouldn’t be normal. Because even now, sixty years after Anne Frank had died at the age of fifteen in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, things hadn’t evened out. Anne had never gotten to fall in love with anybody good, just that one boy in the annex. She never got to get married and have children or write all the other books she probably would have, knowing her, or know that her diary would get published and that millions of people were going to read it and she’d be famous. There were all those places she would have seen that she didn’t get to, and music she didn’t hear, because when she died, it hadn’t even been written yet. Movies she would have loved. Parties and dresses and pets and times with her sister and her friends. She of all people, who loved life so much, and got to experience so little of it. And there would still be all those others—or one anyway, her father—who had to spend the whole rest of their lives never getting over missing her.

  Fifty years from now, Wendy’s mother might have been a ninety-year-old woman, just getting around to dying. Most of those other people in the World Trade Center that day might have lived to be very old, too, if not dead, even Billy Flynn, though it was hard to picture him as anything but young and handsome.

  Wendy must have sat in that chair in the used-books section at the back of the bookstore longer than she knew, because when she looked up, it was getting dark outside.

  You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, said the man who’d been at the counter in front when she came in. I was just wondering if you’d like a cup of tea.

  There was a pot with hot water on a little table, along with the kind of herb teas she liked from home, with pictures of fruits and flowers on the boxes. She chose Raspberry Zinger.

  Most people your age are in school on a Monday afternoon, he said when he handed her the mug.

  I’m a home schooler, she told him. It just came to her to say that, as if she was Amelia.

  Smart idea, he said. Probably no better education to be had than the one you’ll get from reading.

  That’s what I decided, she said. She liked the idea that home schooling would have been her decision, not someone else’s.

  You were really off in another world there with your book.

  She showed him the cover.

  I read that one years ago, he told her. Maybe after that one, you’ll try The Autobiography of Malcolm X, for something a little different. It’s great, too.

  She realized then that maybe she should buy something, only she didn’t have any money, except for a couple of dollars Garrett had given her for lunch.

  I’ll probably come back and buy something later, she said.

  It’s not a requirement for hanging out here. You’re welcome in the store anytime.

  I’ll definitely be back, she said. Home schooling like this, it’s good to get a change of scene now and then. It sounded like something Amelia would say. Or the kind of girl who ate half a grapefruit for breakfast and nothing else, then walked off a field hockey field in the middle of PE class.

  My name’s Alan, he told her.

  Kitty, she said, the diary fresh in her mind. I guess I should head home now, she told him. My family’s expecting me.

  Anytime, he said. If you ever feel like a job, I’m always looking for help shelving used books.

  She found Garrett’s street without any trouble. It was close to five when she got there, but his truck wasn’t there yet. She let herself in. Took out her drawing pad and sat on the couch. She was working on a picture of two girls running across a field. The field looked a little like where they played field hockey at Amity Junior High, with the wheat fields in the background and the hills on the horizon, but the girls were nothing like field hockey players. She drew them in her usual Japanese animation style, with skintight outfits in bright colors and legs twice as long as normal people and small, delicate heads and crazy, wonderful hairdos.

  Sometime around six o’clock Garrett and Shiva came in. Shiva came right over and licked her.

  So, he said, setting down his tools. How’s eighth grade treating you so far?

  Fine, she told him.

  If it was her mother, she would have had a million questions. Josh, too. But Garrett just unfolded the paper and turned to the sports section. You’re probably a Yankees fan, right? he asked. In which case we might have a few tense moments when the new season starts next spring.

  I don’t actually follow baseball that closely, she said. Josh loved the Yankees, but she didn’t mention that.

  Well then, he said. There’s still a chance I can convert you over to the Giants. He’d been studying the sports page but now he looked up.

  You’re going to be a lot taller than your mother, he said. You’ve got a totally different bone structure from Janet. More the statuesque type.

  My mom was a lot skinnier than me, she said.

  I was just thinking what it was I was going to call you, he told her. I was thinking I’d call you Slim.

  Fourteen

  Wendy had always been the kind of person who followed directions. As far back as preschool, she’d never gotten into trouble. She hardly ever even turned her homework in late.

  Riding the subway alone to Queens or taking a taxi to lower Manhattan in the middle of the night would be things she couldn’t have imagined. Let alone what she was doing now. Just not showing up at school. Not even being worried when she did it, that she might get into trouble.

  Now she knew what real trouble was, and everything looked different. Once you crossed the line, she discovered—where you realize you don’t have to be good all the time, and you aren’t scared anymore of things like teachers not liking you—it was easy to go to the next step. Madonna was that way, it occurred to Wendy—and now she wondered if that had anything to do with Madonna’s mother dying when she was young, too. The thought came to her—crazily—of Babar, leaving his jungle home and heading to Paris, meeting the old lady, buying his green suit, having all those wild adventures he never would have had, back in the jungle, if the hunters hadn’t killed his mother that day.

  On her way to school Tuesday morning, she asked Garrett to drop her off a block from the parking lot. She waited for him to drive away, then took a bus into Sacramento. She walked around for a while. She went to 24 Hour Fitness, where they were offering a complimentary workout session. She spent an hour at Macy’s trying on perfumes, and after that, she got a make-over at the Estee Lauder counter from a girl who didn’t seem to think twice about putting all that foundation and mascara and lip liner on a thirteen-year-old.

  She rode the escalator to the second floor and tried on shoes, and by the time she was done, she was hungry, so she went to an outdoor cafe next door. Since she was still eating only fruits and vegetables, she ordered a salad. Before going back to their house, she stopped in a bathroom at a gas station to wash the makeup off.

  The next day, she took Garrett’s bike and rode around Davis, past the university dorms and out to a field for a picnic of grapes and a banana. It was close to three o’clock by the time she got back to town. She stopped in at the bookstore.

  Hey, said Alan. I was afraid you’d forgotten about us. I set aside another book I thought you’
d like.

  It was called The Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers. She settled herself in the chair in back, and he brought her some tea.

  Your parents must be pretty progressive people, he said. Leaving your education up to you this way.

  They don’t really believe in traditional family structures, she said. So many of the worst problems in people’s lives come from their parents. They trust me to take care of myself.

  So how’s it going?

  Fine, she said. You have any kids?

  One. He’s autistic. He lives in a group home up north.

  Do you get to see him much?

  Oh sure. I drive up every Tuesday. He’s older now, nineteen. He’s actually a lot happier than when he lived with his mother and me. When we first took him up there when he was fourteen, it was awful. But things are better now.

  I have a brother, she said. He doesn’t live with me, either.

  Some kind of custody thing?

  Not exactly. She thought for a moment.

  You know how they have to choose someone to be the next Dalai Lama? she said. Some really special little boy with amazing powers, and once they find him, they have to take him away to start his training? That’s my brother. He’s only four, but already they know. They spotted him when he was only two.

  It came from a story her mother told her once. They had gone to hear the Dalai Lama give a speech in Madison Square Garden. They picked him out when he was really little, her mother said after it was over. He had to leave his mother and receive special training up in some very isolated mountaintop temple.

  I would never let them do that with Louie, Wendy had said. She was only nine or ten then. Louie was still in diapers. I don’t think you need to worry, her mother said. They usually find the person a little closer to Tibet.