Here Today

  Later, near dinnertime, Ellie found her father seated at the small desk in the living room, his checkbook open and a pile of bills before him. She hadn’t heard her parents say one word to each other since they had left the breakfast table that morning.

  “Dad, do you think Doris will be gone long?” Ellie asked, peering over his shoulder at the little pile of envelopes that was growing by his adding machine.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, do you think she’ll really be gone until we finish school this year?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again. “Probably.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Dad.”

  Mr. Dingman finally turned around and looked at Ellie. “Honey, the thing about your mother is that she has to try these things. She gets ideas in her head and she just has to carry them out. Harwell’s never had a fashion show before your mother came along, right?”

  “Right,” said Ellie.

  “And now she wants to move to New York City. Everyone should be able to follow their dreams, shouldn’t they?”

  “Well, why can’t she be happy here with us?” Ellie cried, and she kicked at the leg of the desk before turning her back on her father and running to her bedroom.

  When Doris finished straightening out the Messy Corner, which Marie said would now have to be called the Neat Corner, she went to her room and set her largest suit-case on the bed. First Marie, then Ellie, and finally Albert followed her into the room. They lay on the bed in a row, Ellie and Albert on the ends, Marie in the middle.

  “Remember when we watched you get dressed the day you got your Bosetti Beauty crown?” said Marie to Doris.

  Doris smiled. “I certainly do,” she replied. She opened the suitcase, then the top drawer of her dresser.

  “We watched you just like this,” Marie went on, and Ellie saw Marie’s chin quiver.

  “Except then you weren’t leaving us,” said Albert.

  Yes, she was, thought Ellie.

  Doris faced her children. “I know this is hard,” she said.

  “Not for you,” Albert said, and shot a rubber band across the room. It snapped into a perfume bottle, knocking it to its side.

  Doris righted the bottle. “Yes, it is hard for me.”

  “But you’re going to do it, anyway.”

  “Yes.” Doris began to lift an enormous pile of clothes out of the open drawer. She looked at the pile, set it down, looked at Ellie and Albert and Marie. “Why don’t you kids run along now? See if your father needs you for anything.”

  Albert and Marie slid off the bed and left the room. Ellie rolled to the edge of the bed, but lingered there.

  On February 10, 1964, Marie Curie Dingman turned eight, a FOR SALE sign was pounded into the yard in front of Miss Woods and Miss Nelson’s house, and Ellie looked over her calendar and realized that it had been seventy-seven days since she had last spoken to Doris. Ellie hadn’t expected this. She had known Doris was going to be gone a long time, but she had envisioned lengthy evening phone calls during which Doris would chatter on and on about her apartment, her auditions, her agent, and the famous people she had met.

  Also, Ellie had thought Doris would call on Marie’s birthday. Marie thought so, too, of course, and had even refused to go to the Starlight for a birthday supper because she didn’t want to miss the call. The phone did ring twice. The first time it was Rachel Levin, who had just seen Marie an hour earlier, calling to sing a birthday song she had made up. The second time it was Nan and Poppy, which thrilled Marie. But when Mr. Dingman announced that it was bedtime (he insisted on early bedtimes on school nights) and Doris hadn’t called yet, Marie burst into tears and told her father he was a stupid-head.

  “It’s still time for bed,” said Mr. Dingman.

  “I hate you,” Marie replied, and slapped Kiss’s nose on her way upstairs, for which Mr. Dingman swatted Marie, and Marie slammed the door to her bedroom, threw herself onto her bed, and sobbed.

  Later, when Ellie tiptoed into the dark room, Kiss at her side, and quietly turned back the covers on her bed, she heard quiet sniffling.

  “Marie?” said Ellie. “Are you still awake?”

  No answer.

  “You know, I’m sure Doris was thinking of you today,” said Ellie.

  “Then why didn’t she call?”

  “You know why. Because she doesn’t have a phone.”

  “But why couldn’t she call me on a pay phone?”

  Ellie didn’t have an answer for that. She thought, in fact, that her father and Doris conducted late-night phone conversations. Four times now she had been wakened from a deep sleep to the sound of the phone ringing, then had heard her father’s muffled voice, sometimes raised, sometimes lowered, on the other side of her bedroom wall. But Mr. Dingman hadn’t said anything about these calls, and Ellie hadn’t asked.

  The Dingman children had received only postcards from Doris. They were never dated. The first one, with a picture of the Empire State Building lit up at night, had arrived on December 12, almost two weeks after Doris had left. It was very hard to read. Marie thought Doris might have written it while riding on a New York City subway. Ellie had spent a long time studying the card and finally decided that it said:

  Here I am in Gothim! Very, very exiting. No aprt yet am staying at ladies hotel. Looked at one apmt this morning no good. Looking at 2 more this aft. Love to all of you!!!!!

  “At least she’s having fun,” Albert said as he tossed the postcard in the kitchen garbage pail.

  The second postcard arrived on December 23 and was very fancy. It was a painting, not a photo, of a cardinal perched on the branch of a fir tree. Snow dusted a pinecone and the tips of the cardinal’s wings, and was sparkly with glitter. The card simply said:

  Merry merry Christmas darlings!!!!! The city gloes at the holidays. I think I have an apmnt. Love and kisses!!!!!!!

  One afternoon, sometime after the first postcard arrived and about a week before the second one arrived, Albert stomped onto the school bus, glowering. He stomped by Etienne, with whom he usually sat, and flung himself down into an empty seat, glaring so fiercely at anyone who approached him that even the nastiest of the bus riders left him alone. Ellie asked him three times what was wrong, and each time he ignored her, staring pointedly out the window.

  “You have to tell me sometime,” she said as they let themselves into their house later.

  “Fine,” Albert replied. He opened his grubby notebook and withdrew a sheet of lined newsprint, which had been stapled to a piece of red construction paper. On the newsprint was a letter Albert had written in careful cursive. The letter was tidy, except for the first line. Ellie had a feeling that this line had originally read, “Dear Mom and Dad.” But Albert had erased the words “Mom and” with such vigor that he had created a large hole between “Dear” and “Dad.” Bits of pink eraser still clung to the edges of the hole. “We’re learning about friendly letters,” Albert said, jamming his hands in his pockets, “and Mr. Franklin said we should write Christmas letters and they should start with ‘Dear Mom and Dad.’”

  “Oh,” said Ellie, suddenly understanding. “And Mr. Franklin doesn’t know Doris is in New York.”

  “No.” Albert examined the letter, rubbing his finger over the hole. “We’re supposed to give these things to our parents, but I didn’t want to give mine to Dad the way it was before. And now I can’t give it to him like this.” He crumpled it up, threw it in a wastebasket, and stalked out of the living room.

  Marie looked at Ellie. “I want to write to Doris,” she said.

  “But she doesn’t have an address yet.”

  Marie stuck out her chin. “But I want to write to her.”

  “But we can’t.”

  “But I WANT TO!”

  “I know you do.”

  “We haven’t seen her in so long. It’s been so many days.”

  Ellie sighed.

  “And it’s almost Chris
tmas. Maybe she’ll have an address soon. Let’s make her Christmas cards. Please, Ellie? Can’t we make her Christmas cards? We should send her something. She might not get any presents this year.”

  “Well … that’s a nice idea,” Ellie replied slowly. “Okay. I’ll make her a card, too. I guess we can send them later.”

  Ellie stood at the bottom of the stairs and called to Albert that she and Marie were going to make cards for Doris.

  “So what?” he replied, and slammed his bedroom door.

  Ellie just managed to put together a Christmas for Albert and Marie that year. Mr. Dingman gave her some money, and on December 21, two days before Doris’s second postcard arrived, Miss Nelson drove Ellie downtown and Ellie did the Christmas shop ping for her family. She bought a skirt, a game called Sorry!, and a new Bobbsey Twins book for Marie. She bought a sweater, a baseball, and a Hardy Boys book for Albert.

  “Doris used to do all the Christmas shopping,” Ellie said to Miss Nelson as they left the bookstore.

  “And now you’re doing it.”

  “The wrapping, too. Dad doesn’t really have time.”

  “But what about—” Miss Nelson stopped herself. Then she asked, “Do you have a tree yet?”

  Ellie shook her head. “I think we’re getting one tonight, though.”

  Miss Nelson looked at the gray sky. “Snow!” she exclaimed. “We’d better go get some hot chocolate. That’s what you have to do when it snows.”

  At the Starlight, Ellie and Miss Nelson sat side by side in a booth, Ellie’s packages piled on the seat across from them.

  “You know,” Miss Nelson began once Lorna had taken their order, “if there’s ever anything you need, all you have to do is call Miss Woods or me.”

  Ellie stared into her glass of water, suddenly very tired. “We don’t need anything.”

  “But if you ever do—”

  “If we ever do, we’ll ask Dad,” Ellie snapped. “Anyway, you’re going to move.”

  “We might not,” said Miss Nelson. She spread her paper napkin in her lap. “No matter what, I want you to know we’re here.”

  Ellie, looking across the table at the packages, felt small and mean. Miss Nelson had given her fifty cents in the bookstore, when Mr. Dingman’s Christmas money had run out.

  Ellie rested her head on Miss Nelson’s shoulder. “What if I needed you every second?” she asked.

  “That would be okay.”

  On Christmas Day the Dingmans opened their presents quietly. Ellie tried to make the morning cheerful. She put 21 Christmas Favorites on the record player. And she was surprised and pleased to find a few presents under the tree that she hadn’t bought herself, including one with a tag marked FOR ELLIE. Inside was a black velvet dress, just her size—and nobody knew where it had come from.

  “Are all these presents from Santa?” asked Marie, who didn’t believe in Santa anymore, although she said she did.

  “Most of them are,” said Ellie quickly.

  “Santa’s handwriting looks kind of like yours.”

  Albert and Marie had taken a great interest in the mail in December. They knew as well as Ellie did that nothing but the two postcards had arrived from Doris. But there was always hope. And if Ellie said some of the presents were from Santa, well, who knew who might have sent them.

  On January 2, school began again and two postcards arrived from Doris. She had scrawled a large #1 on the one with a picture of Central Park, and a #2 on the one with a picture of a horse pulling a carriage along a tree-shaded path.

  “Why doesn’t she just write us a letter?” asked Albert.

  “Maybe she only has postcard stamps,” said Marie.

  The #1 postcard said that Doris had finally found an apartment. It doesn’t have a phone, but heres my address. The address, on West 55th Street, took up the rest of the card.

  The #2 postcard read:

  I have an agent!!!!! My own agent!! He’s already booked me on three jobs I’m on my way!! New Years eve very gala.

  “I wonder what she did on New Year’s Eve,” said Marie.

  “I wonder if she wonders what we did on New Year’s Eve,” said Albert.

  Marie considered the postcards. Finally she said, “So she has an agent, an apartment, and three jobs. Ellie, does that mean she’s … what is it she has to be before we move to New York?”

  “Established?” said Ellie.

  “Yeah. Is she?”

  Ellie looked at the postcards again herself and shrugged. “She doesn’t say how big her apartment is. And I don’t know how many jobs you have to have before you’re established. Probably not yet, Marie. But she’s on her way.”

  “Huh,” Albert said, and slammed the refrigerator door closed. “I’m going to Etienne’s.”

  “I’m going to Rachel’s,” said Marie.

  Ellie opened the refrigerator and scanned the dismal contents. She wrote herself a note to remind her father to go to the grocery store on Saturday. Then she snapped on Kiss’s leash and ran across the street to Holly’s house.

  “Don’t come in!” Holly exclaimed, meeting Ellie breathlessly at the front door. “Mom cleaned the house for Mick this morning. She doesn’t want anything to mess it up.”

  “We won’t mess it up,” said Ellie.

  “Kiss’s fur! Kiss’s fur!” cried Holly. She was shrugging into her winter coat. “We’ll have to sit out here and talk.” She paused. “Or go over to your house. Is there anything to eat at your house?”

  “We have pretzels,” said Ellie. “One bag of pretzels. That’s it.”

  Holly made a face.

  “When is Mick coming over?”

  “Tonight. Mom is planning a fancy dinner, all this food I’m not allowed to touch. I don’t know why she bothers. Mick is just going to criticize everything and then Mom will cry and they’ll fight and Mick will say he’s going home, but first he’ll tell Mom he needs money and she’ll cry some more but finally she’ll give him some and he’ll jam it into his pocket like she owes him, and then he’ll leave.”

  Ellie looked at Holly and sighed. Then she looked down Witch Tree Lane at the ladies’ house and their mailbox that had been bashed in with a baseball bat on New Year’s Eve. She looked up at the dull gray sky, at a row of juncos perched on a telephone wire, which made her think of the sparrows, and she put her head down in her arms and cried.

  Between January 2 and Marie’s birthday, one more postcard arrived. It was a rather uninteresting shot of a taxicab and read: Audition today for broadway play!! They need girls who can sing dance and act.

  “Do you think she’ll get to be in the play?” Marie asked Ellie.

  Ellie considered this. “Well … she can act.”

  Marie’s birthday came and went. Marie was thrilled with the cake the ladies baked for her—it was in the shape of a giant sunflower—but Ellie had no idea what to say when Marie asked why Doris couldn’t call her on a pay phone.

  On Witch Tree Lane, the ladies bought a new mailbox, and this one was bashed in late the next Saturday night. A rock was thrown through the living room window of the Levins’ house. And Ellie guessed that Kiss, whose belly now swayed slightly when she walked, had gained a good three pounds from being cooped up in the Dingmans’ house all day long.

  In school, Ellie and Holly continued to be ghosts—ignored, overlooked, stepped on, and left behind, by every single one of their classmates. Unless they were being silently tormented.

  “I didn’t think it would last this long,” said Holly.

  “Me neither,” said Ellie.

  “At least they’re not slamming us.”

  Ellie didn’t answer. In the girls’ changing room before gym class that morning, Tammy had waited until Ellie had slipped off all her clothes except her underpants, then had grabbed Ellie’s gym suit and thrown it on top of the lockers, leaving Ellie standing mostly nude on the chilly tile floor. Ellie had crossed her arms over her newly swelling breasts and tried not to cry while Holly, still in her jumper an
d blouse, had leaped up and down, up and down, until she was able to sweep Ellie’s suit to the floor with a ruler.

  “Tell Miss Sachs,” Holly whispered to Ellie as the rest of the girls ran giggling into the gym.

  “What good would that do?” Ellie had replied. She scrambled into the suit, which was now grimy with dust. “Tammy will just say, ‘I didn’t know it was Ellie’s gym suit. I saw it lying on the floor and I thought someone lost it.’”

  “I still think we should tell Miss Sachs,” said Holly stubbornly.

  But Ellie shook her head.

  Tammy White was now the unchallenged leader of the sparrows. Maggie, Nancy, and Donna did whatever she said, and looked to her before making any decision. And if there had ever been a possibility that Ellie would regain the shred of status she had once held with Tammy, that had disappeared when Doris left Spectacle, an event every Spectacular now knew about.

  When Ellie returned home from school that day, carrying her gym suit so that she could wash it, she and Albert and Marie found another postcard from Doris.

  “It says she got a job,” exclaimed Marie. “I wonder if it’s the one in the Broadway play.”

  “Don’t know,” replied Ellie, who, after tossing a load of clothes into the washing machine, retreated to her bedroom with the postcard. Albert and Marie had taken Kiss to the Lauchaires’, and Ellie had the house to herself. She looked at the photo of Times Square on the card. She tried to picture Doris’s apartment. She thought of New York City with its millions and millions of people, not one of them Tammy. In fact, there was not a single person in all of New York who had ever heard of Eleanor Roosevelt Dingman. Except her mother.

  “Dad?” said Ellie that night after the Dingmans’ supper of hamburgers and frozen lima beans, neither of which Marie would eat.

  “Hmm?” Mr. Dingman was sitting at his desk in the living room, frowning at a stack of papers, which Ellie supposed were bills.