Others joined in, and once enough others were doing it, everybody clapped. Beside the fence, Mr. Robredo slapped his palms together—clap, clap, clap—and smiled as the linespeople clustered together, some more embarrassed than others, while one (Louis Caselli) was visibly delighted, holding his hands up over his head like a victorious boxer. Beside Mr. Robredo, Coach Sandy smiled as if she had bitten into a lemon and discovered that all the enamel had worn off her teeth. She put her hands reluctantly together—was there something nasty on one of them? Something she didn’t want to spread onto the other?—and took them apart without looking at them, as if unwilling to see what she might find.
It didn’t take long for people to clap themselves out and then look at their watches. Everybody started drifting away. The coach gathered her team together for the post mortem, looking back over her shoulder with a firm, coachly nod when Mr. Robredo said, “So that’s ten tomorrow morning, Sandy? My office?”
“I’ll be there,” she said, going off with her players.
Margalo approached Mikey just as Mr. Robredo’s voice grabbed at her. “Mikey,” he said.
Mikey looked at Margalo, Uh-oh. Then she aimed her smile at the assistant principal, lots of teeth showing. Yeah, but I already did it, so what can you do?
After a flicked glance from Mr. Robredo’s dark eyes Margalo turned away, as if watching the tennis team make its exit down past Court One; but she stayed close enough to hear what he said.
He said, very calmly, “You’re not going to do that again, Mikey.”
Of course Margalo turned around to see how Mikey would take that.
Mikey had pulled her long braid over her shoulder, twisting it, thinking. Margalo stepped back towards the two of them. “Because . . . ?” Margalo asked Mr. Robredo, as if he was an actor who had forgotten his line and she was cuing him.
Mr. Robredo looked at her, looked at Mikey, then looked back at her. “Because I have just told her not to,” he answered. Then he looked at Mikey’s face and revised his statement slightly. “Asked her not to.”
Mikey nodded and shrugged. She guessed this was about what she expected.
Margalo stood beside Mikey and told Mr. Robredo, “I’m Margalo Epps. I’m Mikey’s friend who helped organize this.”
“Well,” Mr. Robredo said, “it was a good job of work you two did. But that’s going to have to be an end of it. Understood, Mikey?”
Mikey nodded and shrugged and pressed her lips together. So what? Who cares?
Margalo knew pretty much just what she felt like: Bad.
Powerless, helpless, and solitary bad. Rock-bottom, why-bother, just-let-me-out-of-here bad. Rotten, stinky, useless bad. Bad without any smallest flicker of angry in it.
Defeated.
– 22 –
Ask the Parents
Neither one needed to explain to the other how they were feeling as they climbed up onto the bus and slouched down the aisle to an empty seat. They had done everything they could think of and it hadn’t made any difference. They bounced along, not talking, not looking out windows, just bouncing. Finally Mikey spoke. “Want to have dinner at my house?”
“Why not?”
“Don’t fall all over yourself being grateful,” Mikey advised.
“Why should I be grateful?” Margalo demanded.
Mikey, being Mikey, thought Margalo was really asking. “One, because the food will be good. Two, because Katherine will be there, it’s Tuesday, and you like her. Three, because maybe you’ll pick up a cooking tip. And four, the most important, because if you go home with that face on, Aurora will worm everything out of you, which I don’t want her to do. I mean, it’s not like you’re the one Robredo put out of action.”
“It might be smart to ask Aurora’s advice, or Steven’s, if you still don’t want to tell your father,” Margalo observed.
“I should be able to take care of this myself,” Mikey said, repeating what she’d said several times already; and Margalo didn’t disagree. “We’re in ninth grade, we’re not little kids. Are you going to come to dinner or not? Dad can drive you home after, when he takes Katherine.”
Margalo considered. “I guess,” she said. “But I’m not feeling too bouncy.”
Mikey, who was feeling bad enough for two people already, tried to distract herself by thinking about what they would serve for dinner. Asparagus, and maybe she’d make some buttered bread crumbs to go on top. Katherine watched her weight, so she’d probably scrape them off, but she’d appreciate the extra touch. Katherine appreciated things.
Thinking about what to cook made Mikey feel better. Not a lot, but some. And some was welcome, because she didn’t like to think about that tennis coach, and the team that let their coach tell them to act that way, and the school that didn’t want anything to change, even for the more honest.
Or maybe she should top the asparagus with some chopped-up hard-boiled egg?
By the time Mikey and Margalo banged in through the kitchen doorway, dropping their knapsacks onto the space on the floor beside it which was kept clear for just that purpose, Mikey’s father was already home and cooking, with Katherine at the table watching and chatting. Margalo went straight through to the living room to call Aurora, who said, “Of course,” of course. Then Margalo returned to the kitchen, to sit with Katherine at the table and watch the Elsingers at work together. Mr. Elsinger prepared chicken breasts, while Mikey did the potatoes and salad and snapped ends off the asparagus. Katherine greeted Margalo, “I brought a pie.”
Katherine was short and round and cheerful. She worked in Mr. Elsinger’s office, which was where he had met her; she was divorced and had two young sons. She didn’t seem to mind being a divorced single mother, maybe because she had a good job, or maybe because she’d had a bad marriage, or maybe because she was an upbeat person by nature. It had taken Mikey a while to get used to Katherine. On Aurora’s advice Margalo had just gone along with whatever Mikey was saying at the time, agreeing with her every step of the way, through anxiety, curiosity and doubt, to acceptance and now genuine liking. Katherine had just been herself through all of this, and by now they all felt pretty comfortable together, and pretty friendly, too.
“It’s an apple pie,” Katherine told Margalo. “Not homemade, which is lucky for you. How have you been, Margalo? And how’s your mother’s GED course going?” Katherine was always interested in what was going on in Margalo’s life, and Mikey’s, too. Not personal things or private things, just things you’d talked to her about earlier, things that interested you. “And do you still like the dishwashing?”
“I like having a job,” Margalo allowed.
“A paycheck,” Katherine agreed. “How do you get along with the people there?”
“They don’t pay much attention to me.”
“But I bet you pay attention to them.”
“They’re interesting,” Margalo said. “They’re not high school kids, and they talk as if I’m not there at all.”
Katherine smiled broadly, and her cheeks got rounder and her eyes got smaller. “Learning any new words?”
“New expressions mostly,” Margalo said. It cheered her up to talk about work, and she was glad she’d accepted Mikey’s invitation.
They ate at the dining-room table, in its corner of the living-dining-family room. Before Katherine they had eaten at the small kitchen table, serving themselves from pots and pans on the stove top; now there were place mats and colorful cotton napkins and serving dishes passed around. For dinner they had sautéed chicken breasts with a lemon-caper sauce, steamed asparagus spears served plain, and little new red potatoes. There was also a tossed salad with Mikey’s special dressing. Mr. Elsinger and Katherine had glasses of ice water. Mikey and Margalo had glasses of milk.
Seated, they spread their napkins across their laps and looked around at one another. “This certainly looks good, Anders,” Katherine said. Mikey and Margalo agreed.
“Let’s hope it is,” said Mr. Elsinger, his usual response.
“Who wants to start the chicken?”
Margalo had seen Mikey’s father depressed and unselfconfident, then she had seen him lonely but all right, and now she was seeing him in contented high spirits. Over the years Mikey’s parents had done a lot more changing than Margalo’s had. Only recently had her parents surprised her, or rather, had Aurora begun making unexpected choices, causing Steven to react uncharacteristically. But having practiced with the Elsingers, especially during their about-to-decide-to-be-divorced period, Margalo could be calm about her own family, where it was only a matter of people—well, only one person, actually—getting on with a new direction in her life and the rest of them adjusting.
“This sauce smells good,” said Mikey, who always started a meal by lowering her face down over her plate and inhaling.
“How was your tennis game?” Mr. Elsinger asked, serving himself potatoes and not looking at Mikey.
Margalo did.
Mikey looked back at Margalo and shrugged, just a little.
“Did you play doubles again?” asked Katherine, who had seen this quick look-exchange and now glanced with raised, inquiring eyebrows at Mr. Elsinger, having a look-exchange of her own. “Or has the coach put you back into singles?”
Sometimes the sideways ways adults went about getting information just made Margalo want to laugh. She grinned at Mikey. So? Are you going to tell them?
“Actually,” Mikey said, “I didn’t play.”
“Why not? Are you injured?”
“Actually,” Mikey said, “I’m not on the team anymore.”
“Why not? I thought—You’re at the top of that tennis ladder, aren’t you? Didn’t you tell us you’d beaten the final girl? You did, her name was Fiona, I remember because it’s an unusual name.”
“Actually, the coach threw me off the team.”
Now Mikey had their full attention. They had stopped eating. “But why?” asked her father, and, “Whatever happened?” Katherine echoed.
So Mikey told her father what had been going on. She told him about the calls and about Coach Sandy’s instructions, about being benched and having a one-person protest, then about arranging to call the lines. “With a bunch of other people. You know.”
Mr. Elsinger was shaking his head and his eyes were wide. “How would I know? This is the first I’ve heard of it.”
Mikey went on. “That was today, but Mr. Robredo—he’s the assistant principal. He said we can’t do it again.”
“Because . . . ?” Mr. Elsinger asked.
“Dunno,” Mikey said, and returned to her dinner. “He just said.”
“Margalo, do you know why?”
“Not really. Except—You know how it is, in a school, if somebody is rocking the boat. Probably maybe in any society or business,” Margalo added. “Boat-rockers get asked not to do it.”
“Are you in trouble in school now?” Mr. Elsinger asked.
“I don’t think so,” Mikey told him, then turned to ask Margalo, “Do you think I am?”
“I was there,” Margalo explained to the adults.
“She was trying to take some of the credit away from me,” Mikey said, and Katherine laughed out loud.
“Do you want me to talk to the school?” Mr. Elsinger asked Mikey. “I could call this—you said his name was Robredo?”
“It wouldn’t change anything,” Mikey said.
Katherine had been thinking. She had bright blond hair, probably not natural, and bright blue eyes, and she always wore eye makeup and lipstick, so she looked like someone who might never think about anything. But that was a false appearance. Now she asked, “What were you after, with this protest and this line-calling? What is it you want to have happen as a result?”
An easy question. “I want Coach Sandy fired.”
There was a short silence, until everybody laughed. Everybody except Mikey, who did, however, grin a little and add, “Well, you asked me what I want.”
“And I agree with you,” Katherine said. “Well I do,” she said to Mr. Elsinger. “And if I can’t say what I think at what’s going to be my own dinner table . . .” She didn’t need to finish that sentence.
“Ask me why you’ll never be President and CEO of the company,” Mr. Elsinger said, not sounding upset. “Even as smart as you are, and as well-liked, and as good at the job.”
“Ask me if I care,” she said, then turned her attention back to Mikey. “But if we admit that you can’t get the woman fired?”
Mikey nodded her head. She knew she couldn’t.
“What would you settle for?”
“I never thought about that.”
“Think about it,” Katherine advised. “What’s your bottom line here?”
“To play on the team?” suggested Margalo. A new way to think about problems always got her interest.
“And have everybody make good calls, no matter what any other team does.”
“That doesn’t sound unreasonable,” Mr. Elsinger said.
“And Coach Sandy should apologize to me,” Mikey finished.
“I agree,” Katherine said. “But is that a requirement?”
Mikey considered this. “Yes,” she decided. “Because what if people think I just changed my mind about the calls or got talked out of it, like when you settle out of court. It’s a little suspicious when people do that.”
“Often they do it to save the expense of a trial,” Mr. Elsinger pointed out.
“I know, but—”
“Or to avoid the risk of losing everything if the trial doesn’t go well, if the other lawyer outlawyers yours,” Katherine said. “It’s reasonable to choose a sure thing over a risk.”
“I know that, too,” Mikey said. “But if you really believe you’re right, you shouldn’t settle. Should you?”
“No matter how much money the settlement is?” Katherine asked.
Mikey shook her head. No, no matter how much. “Because if it’s about money, then you might as well never have started the case.”
“Besides,” Margalo pointed out, “even if you do get a big cash award in a trial, don’t the lawyers take an awful lot of it? And aren’t those awards often overturned on appeal, because there are usually appeals. So you might not get anything if you were in it for the money.”
This argument improved Katherine’s already happy mood. “You two,” she said, “I hope you’re the wave of the future.”
Privately Margalo agreed with her, but she had to admit, “I don’t think we are. At least not at school we aren’t. Unless it’s a very distant future.”
Katherine doubted this but said nothing. Mr. Elsinger expressed it in his usual unassertive way, as a question. “Do you think a wave of the future—Do you think it always knows what it is?”
“I think I can’t figure out what anybody’s talking about,” Mikey announced. “Except me, and I’m talking about how I’m not going to be playing on the tennis team for four years, which isn’t such a terrific topic, if you ask me.”
“There’s still the county league,” Mr. Elsinger said.
“You can teach my boys to play,” Katherine suggested, and her face lit up at the possibility. “It would help everything if you did that, Mikey.”
Mikey looked at her father. He smiled reassuringly.
Katherine ignored this. “Seriously, it would. The boys aren’t stupid, and they’re worried about having a new sister, and an older one. They’re not worried about a second dad, they know about fathers. Your father doesn’t worry them, but you do sometimes. But if you were teaching them tennis—”
“We get along fine,” Mikey reassured her.
“I know that, but . . . You’re always beating them. If you think about it, you win at Go Fish and Candy Land and War and when you run races of any kind, even when they have a head start. But what if you were helping them to learn how to do something?”
Mikey didn’t mind helping the boys, and she also realized, “It would be good for my game, I bet. Sure, I’ll try, if they want. But what will I do
at school instead? I’m not going out for track,” she told them, as if they had been trying for hours to persuade her to do that.
“You’ll do regular gym, like me,” Margalo suggested.
Suddenly Mikey scraped her chair backwards from the table and threw her napkin—hard—down on the floor. “I hate giving up!” she yelled, loud as a siren. She looked around at them all, bent to retrieve her napkin, drew her chair back in, and popped an asparagus spear into her mouth, apparently satisfied with the effect.
“But who said anything about giving up?” asked Katherine.
“You know the story about that book that won the Pulitzer?” Mr. Elsinger asked.
“Confederacy of Dunces? You should tell them,” Katherine said to Mr. Elsinger.
“If you want to hear it?” Mr. Elsinger asked Mikey and Margalo.
“If you want to tell it so badly,” Mikey said, and, “Yes,” said Margalo.
“It has to do with giving up. That’s what made me think of it, because this young man, in his twenties, I think, he’d written a novel. A huge, long book, and original, too, unlike almost everything else. Publishers rejected it.”
“Well,” Katherine offered, “I don’t blame them.”
“That isn’t the issue.” Mr. Elsinger had the floor. “Eventually the young man killed himself. From what I remember, it was a very long time that he kept sending it out and getting it back, and it was just too discouraging for him.”
“You aren’t worried that I’ll kill myself, are you?” Mikey asked.
“I never thought of that. Do I have to think about it?” her father asked, ready to put some worrying energy into the question if it needed the attention.
“Just finish the story, Anders,” Katherine advised.
“His mother, the writer’s mother, after his death she sent the manuscript to a well-known Southern writer—Did I say the young man was Southern? He was. Anyway, this other famous writer, he really liked the book. He liked it so much he took it to his publisher and persuaded them to publish it. And it won the Pulitzer Prize. A Confederacy of Dunces, that’s the name.”