“So what are you telling us?” Margalo asked. She knew it was Mikey’s father’s conversation with his daughter, but she was too interested to take a backseat.
“That he didn’t have to give up,” Mikey said.
“Although it could be that his suicide made a good marketing point for the book when it came out,” Mr. Elsinger said, thinking out loud.
Margalo nodded. She could see what he meant. “Not that any of it made any difference to him,” she said. “Since he was dead. Which is a pretty important point.”
Mr. Elsinger nodded.
“If it had been me, I’d have written another book,” Katherine said. “It’s just . . . boring if you don’t keep trying.”
“That’s what I mean, why throw your cards down on the table and quit the game?” Mr. Elsinger agreed.
“You just always do what you can do,” Katherine said. “Don’t you think? You just keep on doing what you can—until . . . something changes? And sometimes it has to be you that changes, don’t you think?”
Now they were talking just to each other, and Margalo looked at Mikey to see how she was taking this. Mikey didn’t seem to find anything odd in this personal communication between her father and his . . . fiancée now, wasn’t she? In fact, Mikey joined in.
“Like getting divorced,” she announced.
Both of the adults turned their heads and stared at her.
“I don’t mean to say that getting thrown off the tennis team is that serious. I just mean like, similar to. When something bad happens, like marriages going bad. What people do about it—that’s all I meant.”
Margalo reassured the two adults. “She’s glad you’re getting married.”
They turned to stare at her then.
“Honest,” Margalo assured them. “We really are talking about the tennis team. About Mikey being thrown off the tennis team. That’s all.”
But Mr. Elsinger—who, after all, had been in therapy with Mikey and knew how important talking frankly was—said, “Except I sort of was talking about my divorce, because I did give up on the marriage. But I gave up on your mother, not on love.”
There was a silence, during which two of the people at the table—Margalo and Katherine—were a little uncomfortable.
Mikey said, “I’m not about to stop playing tennis, Dad.”
“Good,” Katherine said. “Now, I think I’ll clear the table and serve dessert. Anders? You can help me. You girls sit. You’ve had a hard day. Save your strength for the dishes.”
Mikey and Margalo remained alone at the table. They didn’t say anything and they didn’t need to, since they both were thinking the same thing: Not me, it’s not going to happen to me, I’m not turning into any weird grown-up.
It took a little longer than necessary for Mr. Elsinger and Katherine to come out of the kitchen, bringing dessert plates, the apple pie, and a pint of vanilla ice cream, too, because Mr. Elsinger liked his desserts à la mode. Their cheeks were a little pink and their eyes were a little shiny, reminding Margalo of Sally and Richard coming back into the Drama room. At that thought she decided to concentrate on thinking about dessert.
For a while they ate without saying anything much. “Good pie,” said three of them, and, “Good ice cream,” said the fourth, everybody being particularly polite, the way people do when they want to make sure nobody at the table is upset with anybody else. Finally Mikey said, “I could look for a job. Like Margalo. Do you think they’d hire me at your restaurant?”
“You don’t dislike the work?” asked Katherine.
“Just the pots and pans. And the cooking trays. But you know what I really like washing? The dough hook, it’s about three feet long, and it’s thick, heavy, really solid. It’s like I’m washing a modern-art statue, the way it curves.” She described the curve with her hands. “And it’s really heavy.”
“I know what you mean,” Mr. Elsinger said. “I feel the same way about mowing the grass. In my hands,” and he held up his hands to show her what he meant—which actually made sense to Margalo.
Mikey stuck to her point. “Would they hire me?”
“They might because it gets busier during the summer, when more people want to eat at restaurants.”
“Also, I think I’ll start coming to your rehearsals.”
“Why would you do that?”
“To help out.”
“I don’t need help. Also, it’s not the kind of thing you’re good at.”
“Maybe I can prove Richard and Sally stole your money.”
“Nobody is interested in my money. Nobody cares who did it.”
“What happened with your money?” Mr. Elsinger asked, and at the same time Katherine asked, “What money are you talking about?”
“I care,” Mikey said.
“Except maybe Hadrian,” Margalo said.
“Is anybody going to answer our question?” Mr. Elsinger demanded. So Margalo told them that sad story, from the beginning (at the bank, discovering she’d been robbed), through the middle (asking for advice, then help, then trying to solve the mystery on her own and finding out things she didn’t want to know), to the end (when she got the envelope with two hundred dollars, but with nobody being held responsible).
“Aurora must have been in a tizzy,” said Mr. Elsinger.
So Margalo had to explain that she hadn’t told her parents, and why, and that she didn’t want to. It wasn’t that important, she said, and besides, what could they do now except feel bad? “Like you are,” Margalo pointed out.
This caused another thoughtful silence. They had finished eating, so all they could do was poke forks around on their dessert plates, scraping up the last sweet crumbs, the last moist lickings.
“Then you will tell your restaurant I want to apply for a job?” Mikey asked Margalo.
Mr. Elsinger asked, “Is that it? Is that everything we should know about?”
Mikey and Margalo decided without any consultation to spare Mr. Elsinger and Katherine Ronnie’s story. Ronnie’s story was the kind that would really get parents going.
“Of course not,” Mikey said, and, “There’s lots more,” Margalo offered.
“Don’t you remember ninth grade?” Mr. Elsinger asked Katherine. He reached over to take her hand. “There was always something else in ninth grade.”
“Don’t remind me,” she said, clutching his hand with both of hers at the memory.
When Mr. Elsinger had left her off, before taking Katherine home, Margalo went slowly around the side of the house to her back door, taking a couple of minutes on her own in the mild early darkness of a spring night. At this time of year eight-thirty held the promise of summer nights, with the sun setting later and later, and the dark coming on more slowly. Through the open window to the bedroom she shared with Esther came a faint sound of music—some new band, she couldn’t keep up with Esther’s music fads. A country-and-western song from the neighbor’s house dueled with Esther’s band. Light from the kitchen windows lit the narrow sidewalk. She thought she could hear the TV and tried to remember what Steven liked to watch on Tuesdays, but then she wasn’t sure she could hear it after all.
Through the glass pane of the back door, she saw exactly what she expected, her mother working at the wooden table under a bright fluorescent light while one of the cats walked back and forth across the yellow legal pad on which Aurora wrote. Aurora’s hair was held back from her face by clips, and she wore a sweatshirt, probably with jeans. Her feet were up on the chair next to her and Margalo guessed that she was in her stocking feet, dressed for studying.
Aurora had a mug, probably coffee with lots of milk and sugar, on the table in front of her. She was concentrating, just as Margalo expected.
What Margalo didn’t expect was to see Steven sitting with his back to the door, bent over his own open book. Steven also wore a sweatshirt and jeans, and the feet she could see the soles of as he leaned forward to read also wore only socks. Neither of them was paying any attention to the other. The
little kids had been put to bed; older kids still living at home were upstairs doing homework, except for Margalo, who was with Mikey, as far as Aurora and Steven knew. This was the time of day they had to themselves.
Margalo was sorry to interrupt them, but what was Steven doing in the kitchen and not watching TV? She didn’t plan to interrupt them for long. She had homework of her own to do. When she opened the door, Aurora looked up at her and Steven swiveled around on his seat to say, “You’re later than we thought.”
“We didn’t worry,” Aurora said, by which Margalo knew that they had.
But since all three of them understood that it had been one of those groundless parental fear occasions—they had known where she was, and with whom, and how she was getting home; they had known better—Margalo just explained, “Mikey got thrown off the tennis team, so she organized a group of people to call the lines—because the reason she got thrown off was the coach wanted her to call everything in her own favor, and she wouldn’t do that, not if she wasn’t sure. But the assistant principal told her not to do it again, call lines during a match, and she was pretty discouraged.”
Aurora nodded. It all made sense to her. She could understand that this might keep Margalo a little later than planned. “Mikey doesn’t have much patience with cheating.”
“Is it really cheating?” asked Steven. “Or just giving yourself the benefit of the doubt?”
“Oh, it’s cheating,” Margalo assured him. She pulled out a chair and sat down, just for a minute. She kept her knapsack at her side so they would know she wasn’t going to stay long. “I was there, I saw. Other schools do it too.”
“Well,” said Steven sarcastically, “I must say, that makes me feel a whole lot better.”
Margalo laughed. Somehow, that evening, grown-ups were cheering her up about things. And Margalo knew that if she told Aurora and Steven about being robbed, they would react in just the right way, with sympathy and outrage and offers of help. But they had too much to think about already, especially since there was nothing more anybody could do about it, and she had her money back too.
During the car ride home Margalo had thought about what Katherine asked Mikey. She had decided that what she had really wanted was her money back and a public acknowledgment of guilt. What she had been happy enough to settle for was getting the money back.
“I think I’ll have a glass of milk,” Steven said.
“I’ll get it,” Margalo said. “But don’t you want a beer?”
“Not tonight. I’m studying. I need my wits about me.”
“What’re you studying?” Margalo asked.
It was Aurora who answered. “Electricity, because he can fix everything. So why shouldn’t he get an electrician’s license?”
Steven grinned, as if he was a little embarrassed. Then he said to Margalo, “You heard the lady. Why shouldn’t I? I can’t have your mother getting too smart for me, can I?”
“No danger of that,” said Aurora.
Margalo gave Steven his glass of milk, and he thanked her, then asked, “Does Mikey play baseball? Because you know what they say, there’s no use hitting your head against a stone wall. When I come up against a stone wall, I never hit my head against it. I try an end run, or I try to burrow under it,” he said, waving his hands in the direction of his textbook as his show-and-tell. “Mikey’s a natural athlete, and she’s pretty fast, I’d think a shortstop.”
“She has league tennis and the county team in the summer,” Margalo said.
“She’s too competitive to get through the rest of the school year without playing something,” Steven announced. “As I happen to know, being a pretty competitive person myself.”
“Which in this case,” said Aurora, “is a good thing for all of us.”
“You know,” Aurora added, “sometimes you realize that one phase of your life is over and it’s time to start another. Like closing down Café ME.”
Margalo nodded, agreeing but not wanting to talk about it. “How long will it take you to get your license?” she asked Steven. She had thought he was perfectly happy driving his delivery truck. She’d thought he’d do that for the rest of his life.
“A couple of years, studying part-time like I’ll be doing. But it’s interesting, unlike that stuff your mother has to learn, so I’ll get there in the end. Picture me, tunneling under that high stone wall.”
“They called them sappers,” Margalo told him.
“Hunh?”
“The soldiers who dug tunnels under fortifications.”
“Oh,” he said.
“It’s a weird word,” Margalo said.
“Nnnhh.” He looked down at his book, a hint. Aurora was already back at her writing. So Margalo went upstairs to her room.
“Radio off!” she greeted Esther, who plugged in her headphones and put them over her ears. The music ceased. Margalo dropped her knapsack onto her bed and went out to the telephone in the hall.
Esther followed Margalo out of the bedroom, her arm stretched out behind her to hold the headphones, which were still attached to the radio, although now unattached to her head, emitting tinny bursts of noise. “Are you calling Mikey? I want to tell her something. Isn’t it too late to call? Isn’t it after eight-thirty? Did Aurora say you could?”
The best way to handle Esther was to ignore her, so that’s what Margalo did. She dialed the number, pretty sure that Mr. Elsinger would not yet have returned. First he would walk Katherine’s baby-sitter home. Then he would return to Katherine’s house and see that the boys were all right, maybe even wish them good night if they were awake. Then he’d go home, not hanging around at Katherine’s because he knew Mikey was alone. So Margalo thought she had time to tell Mikey what she’d just realized.
“Hello?” Mikey answered.
“They’re all telling us the same thing,” Margalo said.
“Who all?” Because Mikey had no doubt who this was calling her. “What same thing?”
“I’ll tell you in the morning, but I wanted to say right now, you shouldn’t give up.”
“Okay,” Mikey said. “If you don’t either.”
“You’ll have to read the script for Oklahoma!” Margalo warned her.
“You’ll have to take me to work with you, to the restaurant,” Mikey said. “To let them meet me.”
“We’ll figure something out,” Margalo said, and, “I know,” Mikey agreed, and it was as if they had reached out elastic-man arms over the mile and a half between them, to shake on it.
“Yeah, but what?” demanded Mikey. “What will we figure out?”
“The world,” Margalo announced. “Our lives. People.”
“How to get rid of Coach Sandy,” Mikey decided.
– 23 –
Failure and Other Educational Experiences
At lunch the next day Mikey announced that it was day thirty-three, and Cassie was off on a rant against the world and the people in it, the school, the students, the teachers, and the administration. You name it, it was rotten. They had occupied one of the picnic tables, and the noontime weather was ignoring, or maybe even contradicting, Cassie’s low opinion of how things were. It was the kind of spring day that made you feel that life was good and you could be glad to be alive. Unless you were Cassie.
“When Mikey refuses to cheat, she gets thrown off the team. And when she figures out a way to make sure the line calls are fair—”
“As fair as they can be,” Mikey said, being precise.
“What happens? Do they praise us? Do they thank us? No, what happens is Robredo comes down on us like a ton of bricks. He tells Mikey not to do it again. Or else.”
“He didn’t say or else,” Mikey pointed out.
“And look at what happened to Margalo and how much help she got,” Cassie went on.
Mikey had something to tell them all. “He didn’t say or else, and you know what? Even if he had, I’m going to go ahead and call lines on Friday.”
“I’m with you,” said Cassie witho
ut hesitation.
“Me too,” said Felix, “and you will too, won’t you, Casey? Tim? We can have dinner, after, downtown. We could eat at your restaurant!” he announced to Margalo, as if he was giving her a present.
“And I could wash your dishes!” she announced back.
“Well, I can’t risk it,” Jace said. When they all turned to him, he explained, “I’m up for a juried high school exhibit, in the main library, in the city. It’s a big deal. I can’t afford to be on Robredo’s hit list. Or Peter Paul’s, either.”
“That’s right,” Tim said. “I’m sorry, Mikey, but I’m up for associate editor of the newspaper.”
“And now I think of it,” Cassie said, “I’m not so sure I should. It would be hypocritical, acting as if I thought anything would make anything any better.”
Mikey rose to move off. “A bad call is a bad call, and I’m not going to do nothing about it.”
“You know what? You’re absolutely right,” Cassie said. “Count me in!”
Mikey didn’t answer what she was thinking, which was that she wasn’t about to count on Cassie for anything. “We need to see Louis,” she reminded Margalo.
Louis wasn’t hanging around outside with a bunch of boys, being raucous, and he wasn’t in the cafeteria with a bunch of boys, being raucous, and he also wasn’t in the library working on English or Math. They found Louis behind the school building standing among a bunch of boys, being stupid and smoking.
What he was smoking, and what any of the rest of them were smoking, Mikey and Margalo didn’t care about. Frankly. What people got up to was their own business, as long as it didn’t interfere with Mikey’s life or Margalo’s. They had enough to do dealing with their own lives. They didn’t need to worry about other people messing up.
“Louis,” Margalo greeted him. “We need to talk to you.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t need to talk to you,” Louis responded, and grinned around at his friends. One for me.