Kathryn Magendie (3 page)

Our teacher’s eyes rolled back, showing a mile of white. “Oh dear Lord above, what did you do this time?” She took off her scarf and wrapped it around Sweetie’s hand. “I can’t take one teeninesy break from you children.”

“Poor old finger,” Sweetie said.

Mrs. Patterson took away the scarf and checked Sweetie’s finger. The Band Aids fell into the dirt. The teacher looked ready to fall over in a faint. “Oh Lord in Heaven, part of your finger’s gone missing.” Two bright spots of red flamed on her cheeks. She looked over at me. “How did this happen?”

“It wasn’t her f-fault, Mrs. Patterson.” But I knew it was.

The teacher pressed the scarf to Sweetie’s finger and led her to the school with one arm over Sweetie’s shoulder and the other holding the hand she hurt. They had to walk shuffling since Mrs. Patterson was bigger than Sweetie was, and since she was holding onto her so tight. Her ankles were puffed over her thick black shoes and I felt sorry for my teacher all of a sudden, trying to corral us kids every day. She shook her head at Sweetie. “One day you’ll break your fool neck with all your shenanigans.”

Sweetie said again, “Poor little finger.”

I was beside Sweetie as we passed the kids watching her go by. Frannie was already making friends with another Circle victim, ignoring me forever and ever.

Mrs. Patterson said, “Kids, all of you, get in the classroom and wait for me there. And no shenanigans or you’ll be writing theme papers until you’re ninety-two.”

“C-c-can I come with you and Sweetie to the n-nurse’s office?” No way did I want to be alone in the class with all those staring eyes, wondering why I was friends with the weirdo schmeirdo girl.

Sweetie had her head down when she said, “Let Lissa come, please with big rock candy mountain sugar on top?” She turned toward me and winked where Mrs. Patterson couldn’t see.

“Fine. She can come. I’m too tired to care at this point. You kids will be the death of me. I can’t
wait
to retire.”

I glanced down at the blood and Mercurochrome spotting my oxford shoes. Mother hated dirt, blood, sweat, tears, and anything nasty that must be wiped from a kid. Mother didn’t think the same way about science as Father did. He studied dirt, blood, sweat, tears under microscopes, and believed most things in life were random occurrences and things weren’t really real until they were proved with science. Mother believed in God and that everything was planned for us already from birth to finish and nothing needed to be proved if one believed in it strong enough.

Sweetie and Mrs. Patterson squeezed through the school door, me on their heels. Sweetie’s back was stiff, and her scarred and skinny legs looked pitiful sticking out from under her dress. I wanted to ask her how she stood it. How she stood her very own blood and pinky part stuck in the jungle gym. At the nurse’s office door, Sweetie turned back to me again, this time with her eye squinched like Popeye and her lips pressed together thin and ugly—she was making fun of the nurse, I could tell.

While the nurse cleaned and bandaged Sweetie’s finger, I washed off my saddle oxfords as best as I could with alcohol and tissues. Mrs. Patterson smoked a cigarette, her hands shaking, her eyeballs jittery.

Even when the nurse was rough with her, Sweetie sang as if at a campfire meeting, “Not last night but the night before, twenty-four robbers came knocking at my door . . . ”

By time the nurse was done, Mrs. Patterson’s cigarette was smoked all the way down to the filter and still she sucked on the tip as if her life depended on it.

I threw away the tissues. Some of the stain still spotted my shoes, just how life was sometimes. If Sweetie could sing while bleeding, then I could face Mother being mad at me for stained shoes. We then traipsed back to class. Sweetie couldn’t care less; but I wished I could hide away from their staring eyes.

When the bell rang at end of class for the day, Sweetie slipped me a note, and then ran off to wherever she always ran off to. I couldn’t wait to read it. My first secret note. All the way home on the bus I ran my thumb over the paper. I’d save it for when I was all alone. Then I’d see what would happen next with Sweetie. I figured with someone like Sweetie, there’d always be something happening.

THREE

I slammed into the house after an almost good day at school.
No Circle
Girl teasing, no T. J. calling me names, no Sweetie laughing at her hurts, and an A on my science test. Mother was in the living room with her feet propped up. She held a pencil tip to her lips and tapped it there. Her notebook rested on her lap.

“Hi, Mother.” I shifted from one foot to the other. She didn’t like me to go straight to my room because it was bad manners not to talk about my day with her.

“Dear, you slammed the door right as I was trying to think up a rhyme for pumpkin seeds.” She pointed her pencil at me. “I want you to go back and open and close the door ten times.”

“Yes M-m-ma’am.” I turned away.

“Come back here once you’re done. And stop that stuttering!”

I forgot to breathe right sometimes when I wasn’t with Sweetie. It was as if the breaths caught up inside and then huffed out jerky. I trudged to the screen door, opened it and closed it. I knew not to do it eight times, or even nine times, but exactly ten, or she’d make me go back and do it again.
Opened it and closed it
. I imagined her sitting there mouthing off one, two, three, four, five, until ten.
Opened and closed
. I did it just as I was supposed to, nice and easy, even though I was in a hurry to go to my room and think about the latest note from Sweetie.
Opened and closed
.

The first note, the day of her pinky part gone missing, read,
this here is not a real note. i will give a real note tomorow
. Nothing but a practice note. Still, it was exciting.
Opened closed
. I’d written back for tomorrow to hurry and I couldn’t hardly stand to wait for tomorrow.

I put her practice note where I kept all secret things, in a hole at the bottom of my mattress. The next note read,
can you keep secrets good and tight
?
i will give you a
new note day after next tomorrow
. And I’d written her back telling her I could keep a secret forever.

Opened closed
.

The latest note was written on thick paper, rolled into a scroll, and tied with a piece of yarn. I unrolled and read it while walking up our sidewalk; I couldn’t wait until I was in my room alone:
i got a secret to show you. a secret so secret, you got to burn this here note after you got it read. i will ask if you burnt it and you best say yes or deals off.

Opened closed
.

I’d never had secrets before.
Opened closed
. I’d never burned a secret note before.
Opened closed
. I couldn’t burn it until I did what Mother asked me to.

Opened closed
.

I went back to the living room where Mother waited, took a deep breath and let it out slow, pretending Sweetie was there. “I’m sorry I s-slammed the door. I won’t do it again.”

“Thank you. Now, come over here and tell me about your day.” When I stood by her, she held up her pencil. “Wait; let me write this down real quick.”

I looked at her paper. She’d written pumpkin seed, and four other words under it that were scratched through: errant need, voracious greed, martyr’s need, and mother’s creed. When Mother cooked fancy dinners with names she made up, like
Meat Balls a la de Creamed Onion Toot Suite
, she’d write a poem about it and tape it to the refrigerator for Father to admire, though I don’t think he ever did. He said food was nourishment for our bodies and to make it anything more was hullaballoo. But if Mother made something boring, he’d say, “This isn’t up to your usual, is it? Where’s the flair?” And Mother’s eyebrows would pull together, a confused look sprouting in her eyes.

My brother said Father was two sides to a coin. Flip him and see which Father you’d get that day, or moment, or hour. He’d then laugh funny when he’d say that. Peter didn’t come home much.

Mother closed the notebook, having written nothing more. “So, how was school?”

“It was good.”

“What’s good about it?” She eyed me over her reading glasses. Her hair was brushed in a perfect French twist. “Can you be more specific?”

“Well, I m-m-made (
breathe in and out Miss-Lissa
) an A on my science test.”

She nodded, removed her glasses. “Beula said she saw you at school with that funny little blonde-haired girl.” She cleaned her glasses with a cotton hankee she’d taken from her pocket.

“Her name’s Sweetie.”

“Sweet-tea?” The name dropped off her tongue and landed on the floor. “What kind of a name is that?”

“I don’t know. It’s just her name. And it’s Sweetie, not Sweet-tea.”

“What happened to that nice girl, that Frannie you had over once?”

“Frannie stopped being my f-friend.”

“Did she now.” Her lips pulled downward.

“Guess what our teacher did?”

Mother perked up. “What?”

I told her about how Mrs. Patterson came to class with a rip in her hem and her shoes scuffed and her hair messy. I knew Mother would harp on how a woman shouldn’t go around in public like that, and how especially a teacher is supposed to set an example, and how tacky it was be unpresentable and
blah-blee-blah-blork-bleah
-
blah
she went, wound up about it so she completely forgot to ask me about Sweetie again.

At last, when I was able to escape, I stopped by Father’s study for the matches, locked myself in the bathroom, and opened the window so any burn smell would go outside. I read the note again, to memorize it so I could write it in my diary.
 
Then I lit the edge of the paper. It curled up and over, burning away Sweetie’s words. I put my face close to the flames, and took into my nose the dark smoke. Part of something Sweetie wrote with her own hand was inside me and that made me shiver with danger.

 
I turned on the faucet, then off, put my finger into the wet ashes, and licked the ash off my finger. I washed the rest down the sink, and then went to my room to do my homework and clean my room. After that was done, I tried to read
The Call of the Wild.
It was hard to concentrate, since I couldn’t stop thinking about what kind of secret Sweetie had to show me. A secret so secret I had to burn even the note that didn’t even tell what it was.

At dinner that evening, my parents sipped wine in thin glasses Mother bought in
Europe
before I came along. Every time we moved, she packed each of those fancy glasses in newspaper and then wrapped them again in dishcloths. And every time she packed them, she’d say, “I’ve never broken a glass yet. No one has any like them that I’ve seen. They always remind me of
Europe
and how our surprise chunky bunny arrived.” Me being the surprise “chunky bunny” that arrived uninvited nine months after my parents sent my brother away to camp so they could tour Europe for a summer.

She’d then say something like, “Oh, we were so carefree in
Europe
. Now we just travel all over
America
with our boxes bouncing around in a moving van.”

I’d asked her once why we moved so much, and she’d said my father couldn’t be bound down to one place; his genius was destined to be spread all across the land. She had almost the same kind of laugh as Peter had when he talked about Father.

I could still feel Sweetie’s words inside me, and smell the burn in my nose and on my tongue. I chewed my potatoes, swallowed, drank my milk, tried not to show how excited and restless I was. Father sipped his wine and nodded his head as Mother told about her day: she had found the potatoes and tomatoes at a nice farmer’s stand; she had written a poem and it was on the refrigerator; she had polished the silver and painted the big mirror frame; she had gone to a meeting for a charity dance and wouldn’t he consider going with her to it?

I knew Father was just waiting for his chance to start talking about his class and students, or what kinds of science discoveries were in the news or in his scientific periodicals. When he wasn’t being scientifical, he wrote novels that he said, with a big wink, were too brilliant to be appreciated by mere mortals. He wore his dark wavy hair combed straight back because he said it made him look like a romantic hero in a great American novel. Maybe he told me that or maybe Mother did, or maybe I thought it; I couldn’t remember.

I studied my parents and just like lots of kids, I wondered if I was adopted. Except people said I took too much after Father’s mother.

Grandmother Rosetta lived in
California
, where she planted gardens, took in sick animals to adopt out, and painted pictures of barns on fire. Some showed the farm animals as they ran from the flames with whited eyes while the farmer grabbed his head between his hands, his mouth painted into a big O. And in others, the barn fire was in the distance and no one in the painting noticed the fire, not the farmer, or any of the people standing by, even though it burned brighter than anything else. Sometimes there were no people or animals, only a burning barn. Every painting she made had a burning barn somewhere in it.

I most times called my grandmother
Nonna
and she most times called me her
nipotina
.

Through my daydreaming, Mother’s voice brought me to attention. “Our Melissa has a new friend.” She patted her mouth with her napkin.

Father nodded. “Kids have friends. That’s what they do.”

She lifted her glass of wine. “Her name is Sweet-tea.”

He studied a potato piece on the end of his fork. “Two beings drawn together by smell or look or some common interest, something they don’t even recognize is happening but it is. Friendships and marriages don’t happen by chance. Two people find some need in each other and try to fill that need. It’s at times irrational, but our instincts to survive and to form community and to bond with other human beings are quite strong.” Father took a bite of his potato, chewed, chewed, chewed, even though the potatoes didn’t need that much chewing.

Mother sighed.

I said, “It’s Sweetie, not sweet tea.”

She said, “I hope we get to meet this new friend soon.”

Father attacked his meat. “If you’ve ever been inside a slaughter house, you look at meat differently—”

“I’m trying to eat,” Mother said.

“I once attended a picnic at a farm where they had a real chicken be-heading. Ka-chop! Those chickens—”

“I said I do not want to hear about it, Jack.”

“May I be excused? I have lots of homework.” I stood, picked up my plate and waited. She’d never know my homework was in my satchel, done neatly as I could, even though it was boring. School was too easy. My last teacher wanted to put me ahead a year, but since we moved so much, it was too complicated.

Mother sipped her wine, swallowed, stared at the glass, put it down. “Yes, but you still have to do the dishes. So I suggest doing them first so the plates won’t become crusty.”

“Pauline, can’t you do the dishes? She said she has homework. School is more important than dishes. How will she ever succeed in this world without—”

“Why don’t you do them, then, if you’re so worried about her need for schooling?”

“I’ve got writing to do, and I’ve worked all day.”

Mother stood up. “And what have I done? Only taken care of this house, cooked your meals. Made every place we’ve lived into a sparkling showcase. Tended the landscapes, raised your children—”

“—oh, come off it, Pauline—”

“—and you never—”