True to Form

  He holds up his hand. “I would feel much better if you’d let me.”

  “Well,” I say. “I don’t really . . . Maybe I could help you clean up a little. That way I could earn it.”

  He looks around as though he is seeing the place for the first time. And then he says, with a kind of dignity, “It’s all right. I’ll get to it.”

  “I could just do the dishes for you.”

  “Katie,” he says. “Mrs. Wexler has left me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m afraid I’m at a bit of a loss, here.”

  “Well, if you . . . I’d be glad to help you. I mean, clean up. I can help you do that. And also, I . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I just want to say I think you’re a very nice man.”

  “Ah.” He leans his head back and I get the terrible thought that it’s because he’s crying. And I’m right, because here come two tears rolling down his cheeks. It makes me feel so strange, like all of a sudden I have the flu. This is my summer of seeing grown-ups cry.

  “Mr. Wexler?” He clears his throat and quick wipes away the tears.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you want to wash or dry?”

  He looks at me with such gratitude it’s as if I have knocked on his door and said I am from The Millionaire. “Dry, I guess,” he says, and I tell him that’s the exact right answer that I was hoping he would say.

  I’M NOT EVEN IN THE Bartlett School, but I already have homework. I got a letter from them saying that before I meet with the people there, I have to write something on two topics of my own choosing. Right away two things popped into my head. One was something that happened with my mother, and the other was something I saw from the airplane window. So this morning I wrote an essay about the time my mother and I planted a carrot garden, only the carrots never grew. I wrote about how she came out and knelt down and took off her glasses to have a closer look at nothing. How we tried a fertilizer made from coffee grounds and eggshells. How it changed from our expecting to our hoping, to our wondering what we did wrong, to our disappointment, to our final day in the garden, when we just sat in the dirt and laughed. And how that night when everyone was sleeping I took a few carrots from the refrigerator and put them in the ground and the next day I showed her and of course she knew but she pretended she didn’t. I wrote how she smiled at me that day, and how we brought the carrots in and ate them for lunch. And how the harvesting was so bountiful, and it had nothing to do with carrots.

  Now I am thinking of what to say about what I saw from the airplane window. I suppose I could try an essay about that too, but it doesn’t seem right, because the sight was too delicate for all those words. It seems like a poem would be the right thing. And now that I have broken the ice by showing something to Ginger, I think I might be ready to show something to someone else. I get out my haiku notebook and stare at the white page, whisper some possibilities out loud to myself. Then I write

  Fog at mountain’s base

  A shallow bowl of earth holds

  Sky fallen from sky

  There. Close enough. I close my book, lay it on my desk. Later, I’ll copy the haiku onto a separate page and submit it with my essay. I think of how judges read Ginger’s poem and how now it will be my turn. I’m glad I don’t have to be in the room when they do it. Imagine how time would be stretched, one second equaling one hour. An eyebrow lifts; you die.

  I lie on my bed, put a pillow over my belly and hold it tight against me. “Oh, my darling,” I say, out loud. To no one.

  Dear Katie,

  Congratulations! I had a feeling you would get in. I hope you like it there and that the kids are nice to you. I have to say I think it would be hard to go to a school with all girls, I can’t even imagine wanting to do it. But good luck!

  I am sending a little gift that is from my mother and me, and I know Bubba signed the card, but believe me, he had nothing to do with it, he just can’t stand not being in the middle of everything with his own finger pointing to his own self. I hope you like it and that also it brings you good luck to make all A’s.

  I am getting married in three weeks, just a small ceremony, which of course is not what I ever thought I’d have. But you can only do so much with so little time. I am wearing white, I don’t care. Only our families will be there, and then I will be Mrs. McGovern, which I still can’t believe. I had a dream about the baby last night and it was a girl and it had black hair and blue eyes like Darren. The next day it seemed like it just had to be true, and it made me wonder, do mothers and unborn babies have a psychic connection?

  Friends from school are being very immature about all this, which what do you expect and who cares anyway, since I will not be returning for my senior year. I wish I hadn’t gotten the class ring, because what good is it now. But anyway, I will write after the wedding to tell you all about what it was like. I am thinking of you right now in your bedroom, where I too have been. If I close my eyes, it can seem like I really am there, and I wish I were to hug you and say again Congratulations!

  Love,

  Cherylanne

  (AND her baby GIRL, I would bet one million dollars)

  The gift Cherylanne sent is a silver pen-and-pencil set. It is beautiful, with thin lines engraved on it. When you pull apart the pencil, there is the eraser, which I will never use except in emergencies, because it looks so round and perfect. When I write with the pen, I feel myself sit up straighter, my knees and ankles touching. Proper. I am a girl who lives on an estate, wears jodhpurs, sleeps in a canopied bed, and whose father calls her sweetheart, that’s what this pen does.

  I write a thank-you note to Cherylanne, and when I’m done, I lie on the bed with a full feeling in my chest, and then I just start bawling. It’s because I wasn’t able to say how much I love her and Belle both, and also because I love the memory of Cherylanne and me hanging around the PX, talking in our bedrooms, reading magazines in front of the fan when it was too hot to be outside. It feels like now we are so much older, and our lives are diverging like those geometry proofs where the two lines never touch, they just keep growing farther apart. It will never happen again that we will walk home from a movie, holding hands with each other to be the substitute, singing “Tammy’s in love” in soft, flirty voices. I feel like I am the mother of my own self and Cherylanne too, looking down on us as we were then, tender in the heart with knowing all that is to come. And all I said in the letter is, “Thank you for the pen-and-pencil set, I will use it every single day.” This is why I’m crying, the distance from what you feel to what you say, how it will always be like that.

  IT’S POURING RAIN WHEN I GO to the Randolphs’, the slanty kind that makes an umbrella pretty useless. Flowers are beaten down in their beds, and small twisted streams run at the edges of the streets. Outside one house I pass two little boys in matching yellow raincoats trying to sail boats, but they only spin and run into the curb. It makes me wonder what the Wexler boys are doing. And Mr. Wexler. And Mrs. Wexler, too. I feel like I was watching a TV show and someone came in the room and snapped it off, right in the middle. And there is no one to say “Hey!” to.

  When I arrive, Mr. Randolph chuckles at my drowned look and tells me to wait in the entryway. He brings me some towels to dry off, and then I come into the kitchen. I smell chicken soup, one of Mr. Randolph’s specialties. Mrs. Randolph is up in her wheelchair, sitting at the table, an untouched cup of tea and a plate of toast before her. Next to her are photograph albums, three of them. It seems she wants to show me pictures today, but to tell the truth, it doesn’t look like she should be out of bed at all. I can’t believe Mr. Randolph was able to get her up alone. There is a terrible weariness in her face, a breathlessness when she talks. Mr. Randolph asks if she wants to go back to bed before he goes to the grocery store, but no, she wants to stay up.

  “Sit down, Katie,” she tells me, and I do.

  “My goodness,” she says. “Is it raining that hard?”

  “Yes,
ma’am.”

  “Are you cold? Do you need a change of clothes?”

  Not to be rude, but I can just see myself in one of her housedresses.

  “No thank you, I’m fine.”

  “Well. First of all, I want to congratulate you,” she says. “Henry told me you were accepted at the Bartlett School!”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I don’t know why, but hearing her say this I get a twist of shame in my belly.

  “It’s a wonderful place.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Where to look. I don’t know. It’s wilting shyness that makes me grab my thumb with my other hand and squeeze. I wish I would stop being like this.

  “Did they show you around at all?”

  “Yes, there was a student there, a senior, and she showed me everything. And next week, I’m going to a party with some of the other sophomores.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful.” She smiles, closes her eyes. And doesn’t open them.

  “Mrs. Randolph?” I say.

  She starts, blinks. “Oh. I’m so sorry. I’m taking some new medication, and I’m just not used to it yet.” She pulls one of the scrapbooks closer to her. “I wanted to show you some pictures of Paris,” she says. “I thought you might enjoy looking at these.”

  I pull a chair up next to her, and she opens the first book. “This is the tiny little apartment we rented,” she begins, and she is smiling. I lean over the pictures and go with her to another time, when she and Mr. Randolph were in their twenties and used to go every day to a café near the Eiffel Tower that had lace curtains and coffee cups that looked like cereal bowls. They walked down cobblestone streets past curly iron balconies full of flowers, carrying long loaves of bread with the ends bitten off. All the pictures she shows me seem unreal, not only because she and Mr. Randolph are so different now, but because the buildings and the streets are not like anything I’ve ever seen. It’s one thing to look at Paris, France, in a textbook. It’s another to see pictures of people you know living there, with their own whole life turned French, just because they decided to do it. There they are in the sweaters they bought at Sears, standing in front of the Mona Lisa herself. It doesn’t seem possible.

  When Mr. Randolph comes home, he looks at the pictures with us. There is one time when he glances so tenderly over at his wife. She doesn’t see it, but I do, and it makes me happy, like when you see one bird feed another. Sometimes one or the other of them tells a little story about a picture that we come across. When that happens, I see a kind of movie on the page: The background expands, and I can almost hear the sounds that were there at the time the picture was taken—motorcycles gunning, or dish towels flapping on the line, or kids wearing knapsacks and shouting French things as they chase each other down the street. Looking at one photo of an outdoor restaurant, I feel the white tablecloth beneath my elbows and hear the feathery rustle of pigeons coming to land, making their matronly cooing sounds as they gently bump into each other. Outside, the rain sometimes comes down so hard, we have to talk louder, and it feels like a miracle that the roof holds. It makes for a coziness and for a gratefulness, too, that you have the choice to not be out in it. You can sit at the table and look out the window and not have to feel what you see. It seems so pure and timeless, the need for shelter, and the connection we have to cave people looking out at the weather from the entrance to their caves. Here we are, still doing it. Wearing way different things but probably feeling just the same.

  I love sitting at this table with these two old people, looking at these pictures, hearing live history, smelling the soup turn more and more chickeny as it cooks on the stove. I am enjoying waking dreams from my own wandering thoughts. Feeling the slow ticktock of the day with the lazy pleasure of a cat sleeping on a windowsill in the sun. It comes to me that there isn’t any place else I’d rather be. I wonder if this makes me weird.

  I CANNOT BELIEVE THE HORRIBLENESS of my life at the moment. If I had to grade it, I would give it an F triple minus, which is a grade I actually got once on a science test given by an evil teacher, Mr. Wybold. For him, a simple F wasn’t bad enough. He had his own grading system, which he told us about with a big grin on his face, tossing the chalk up and down in his hand. Any time a teacher tosses the chalk up and down in their hand, you know you’re in trouble, because they think they’re so cool. The best grade in Mr. Wybold’s class was an A triple plus, which no one ever got, quel surprise. But trust me that I was not all alone in my trench of F triple minus.

  Cynthia and I are sitting in her living room with her mother and four girls who are younger than us and bigger losers than we ever will be. We had to go around a circle telling one interesting thing about ourselves, and this one girl, Wendy, said, “1961 is the same thing upside down!” First of all, who cares if it is. Secondly, it was supposed to be something interesting about yourself. What’s interesting about me is that I am living in the year 1961, which is the same thing upside down!!!!

  I am wearing the stupid uniform and the stupid beret and the stupid socks and shoes, the whole thing, because I lost the flip of the coin I did with Cynthia. If I’d won, I’d be sitting here in shorts and a blouse like a normal person. My consolation is that the blinds are pulled closed which, according to Mrs. O’Connell, gives the living room a more “woodsy” feel; and that tomorrow night Cynthia and I will be at the party with Bartlett girls; they said I could bring a friend.

  We have had our meeting. Now we are talking about the division of labor for when we do our cookout. After that’s been decided, we can finally change into regular clothes so we can pretend we’re in “the dark, dark woods, miles and miles from home.” “Yeah, on the planet Mars,” I whispered to Cynthia, and she laughed, so we got dagger eyes from her mother, which of course made us laugh more. So far, two jobs have been assigned: making food, and kitchen cleanup. A girl called Maria will be preparing hobo sandwiches, whatever that is, and Wendy will be toasting marshmallows for s’mores over the gas burners of the stove. Maria is a short, dark-haired girl with huge brown eyes, who looks scared to death. She’s so skinny her uniform hangs off her. But she is so fired up about Girl Scouts she’s wearing the official scarf tied around her neck, and she brought along the official Girl Scout knapsack, which caused Mrs. O’Connell to nearly have a heart attack of joy, and she had to stand up and show everyone what a wonderful thing it was. Wendy is the opposite. Huge. She has a laugh like a bark and everything is funny to her: “Hi, my name is Wendy, Ha ha ha!!!” She has her blond hair in ponytails with ribbons on them, and at the end of the ribbons are little fuzzy pins that are bugs. Do not ask me.

  The two other girls are twins named Mandy and Elaine, both with frizzy red hair and terrible posture. They smile and whisper to one another even though Mrs. O’Connell has said pointedly that we must all remember the golden rule of groups: No one likes to feel left out. But since the meeting, they have not said a word except to each other.

  “Now we need to decide who will tell the ghost story,” Mrs. O’Connell says. “Hmm, I wonder who-who-whooooooo would like to do that?” No one says anything. She is trying to be an owl; what are you supposed to say to that.

  “Katie?” she says. I knew it. I knew she would ask me to do it. I don’t know how, but I knew. I shrug my shoulders. Make a grunting sound.

  “Is that a great big Girl Scout yes?” she asks.

  I sigh. “Yes, ma’am, I’ll tell the ghost story.” Here’s how it will go: Once upon a dark and dreary night, a monster named Mrs. O’Connell imprisoned some innocent girls for the purpose of severe torture.

  CYNTHIA!” I WHISPER. “ARE YOU awake?”

  “Yes,” she whispers back.

  It’s very late, and everyone is sleeping on the floor pretending they are in the pine needley dirt of the woods. Wendy is sleeping with two teddy bears she brought along—they are married, she told us, and their children are at home lined up on her bed, which is something I might have guessed anyway. Wendy is one of those people you meet and right away you can see into th
e rest of their lives. How does she take a bath? With bubble gum-smelling stuff in the water. Or Tinkerbell. When she wins at a board game, what does she do? Stands up and claps. Favorite record? “Big Bad John.” Underpants? Days of the week that she wears on the actual days. And so on.

  Mrs. O’Connell is lying on the sofa, which is her idea of fairness—that way no girl will be jealous of another for getting the prime spot. She is wearing a blue ribbony nightgown with a matching robe, which is not what you would wear. I’ve been lying awake since we were told no more talking, and I think Cynthia has been too.

  “Want to go to your room?” I whisper, and after a moment she says, “Okay.”

  Very quietly, we make our way upstairs, and when we get to her bedroom, we start laughing. “Don’t wake up my dad!” Cynthia says, and I cover my mouth to smother the sounds.

  “I can’t believe this,” I say. “She can’t expect that we would ever want to keep doing such stupid things. She’s got to understand if we tell her these girls are too young for us. We’ll tell her in the morning, after they leave, and we won’t take no for an answer.”

  Cynthia smiles uncertainly, sits down on her bed.

  “What? You don’t want to keep on, do you?”

  She looks up at me, her hands folded in her lap.

  “Oh, no. Cynthia, you can’t! It’s so awful!”

  “You don’t have to come anymore, Katie. But . . . ” She shrugs. “She’s my dumb mom. And it’s my house; I have to be here.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. I can’t do it with you.”

  “I know,” she says. “That’s okay.”

  We hear someone coming down the hall, and there is Cynthia’s mother, sticking her head in the door. “Girls?”

  “Coming,” Cynthia says.

  I follow her down the hall, feeling bad for her, like she is one of those French poodle dogs that people put coats and hats on.