Nora (6 page)

“Ruin'd,” I said. The word just popped out. “That's without the
e
.” I didn't know I knew it until I said it.

“That's from Shakespeare's sonnet, number seventy-three,” I said.

“Good Lord.” Daddy filled in the blank. “It fits.” I could see he was tremendously impressed, as I was myself. So was Patsy, I could tell.

“Where on earth did you learn that, Nora?” Daddy himself can recite “Young Lochinvar” in its entirety, which he used to do when Mother was alive. I haven't heard him recite it since she died.

“Our English teacher Ms. Hall read us that sonnet last week,” I said. “She wants us to read a sonnet by Shakespeare every night for a week. And memorize it. She says it's good discipline to memorize poetry. It's good for your brain as well as your psyche, she says.”

“Well, well,” Daddy said. “That is good news. I must meet your English teacher some day and compliment her.”

Patsy met my eye. We were thinking the same thing. Introduce Daddy to Ms. Hall. So she's no chicken. She's nice. About sixty, maybe more, and she leans toward purple eye shadow to match her dress or her scarf or even her lipstick. She and Daddy might fall madly in love and could take turns reciting poetry to each other.

“I hope you are both free
this
Saturday,” Daddy said. “I've asked Mrs. Ames to go to the dinner theater in Darien. They're doing
Oklahoma!,
and I think you'd enjoy it. The music is wonderful. It would be nice if you both came along. It would give you a chance to get to know her better. She's very fond of you two, you know.”

Mrs. Ames, aka The Tooth.

I almost asked Daddy if he was still planning to ask The Tooth to marry him, and if he was still planning on going to Hong Kong with her. But I kept my mouth shut. Maybe he didn't love her anymore.

No, that was too much to hope for.

So far Patsy and I hadn't come up with a substitute. And we were running out of time.

“I might have a date,” Patsy whispered. Daddy didn't hear—or chose not to.

When we kissed Daddy good-night and went upstairs, I asked Patsy, “Who with might you have a date, if I'm not too curious?”

“With whom, you mean,” Patsy said in a haughty voice. Without answering the question, she leaned into the mirror and said, “I'm thinking of having cosmetic surgery to change the shape of my face. Make it heart shaped instead of balloon shaped. What do you think?”

I didn't answer her question, either.

“What did Chuck Whipple want when he called the other night?” I said. “He really wanted to talk to me, you know.”

Patsy laid a finger alongside each eye and pulled the skin tight. Making herself look exotic.

“I would like to look exotic forever,” she said wistfully. “Like Merle Oberon in
Wuthering Heights.”

“Know something?” I don't know why I came unglued right then. Maybe it was the way Patsy changed the subject when I told her Chuck had really wanted to talk to me.

“I'm tired of your selfishness,” I yelled. Patsy looked startled. She wasn't used to me yelling.

“How come
you
never comfort
me?”
I went on at the top of my lungs. “I need comforting too, you know. Maybe you should think about that!”

I grabbed a tissue from my pocket and blew my nose noisily.

“It doesn't get any better, you know. The way they said it would. It only gets worse.”

I meant Mother. Patsy knew that.

“You're not the only one who misses her,” she said. “Besides, I think I miss her more because I'm younger.”

That really got me.

“You little creep!” I shouted. “That's the biggest lot of horse manure I ever heard!”

Patsy yelled back, “I wish Mother was here so she could hear the load of crap
you're
dishing out.”

I said calmly, “Maybe she is here and she hears every word you're saying and sees everything you're doing.”

That stopped her. Suddenly, I felt better. Maybe I should lose my temper with Patsy more often, I thought.

Patsy sighed.

“So. Saturday night. What do we call her, Mrs. Ames or Hey, you?” Patsy squinted at me.

“What's wrong with calling her what we always call her?” I said.

Ten

When I was in fifth grade, a girl named Barbara invited me over to her house after school to play. Barbara carried little packets of dry soup mix in her lunch box, into which she dipped slices of apple with the peel still on, and potato chips, and cheese doodles. Her thermos was filled with V8 juice. Plus she wore socks trimmed with lace and all her hair ribbons were color coordinated with her outfits. She wore pink-and-silver harem pants to school one day, and at recess she wouldn't go down the slide for fear the pants would get dirty. Barbara had more outfits than any other person in the class.

Barbara was cool.

Barbara's brother was a genius, she said. He played the piano before he could walk and he could read the newspaper when he was two. They took him to a special doctor for geniuses, and the doctor said Barbara's brother had an IQ of 200.

“Where's your brother now?” I asked, not knowing what else to say. An IQ of 200 was good. What was my IQ? Probably about seventy-five or eighty. Around there.

“He's at home,” Barbara said. “He's finding himself.”

“What happens when he finds himself?” I asked, really wanting to know.

Barbara shrugged. “Who knows? In the meantime, my parents are treating him like any other genius kid with an IQ of two hundred. If he wants to eat pizza for breakfast, they let him. If he wants to watch an X-rated movie on cable TV, they say, ‘So what harm will it do?' If he wants his girlfriend to sleep over, my mother says, ‘At least we know where he is at night.'

“He's sixteen and he should be in college. He already graduated from a special high school for geniuses. If you want to know the truth,” Barbara turned and looked straight into my eyes, “he's a mess. I'm glad I'm not a genius.”

“Me, too,” I said.

When we got to Barbara's house, I tiptoed around, worried I might bump into Barbara's brother. I was both afraid to see him and longing to see him.

Sort of the same way I felt about seeing my mother's ghost.

Ever since I'd said that about Mother hanging around the house, I've been a nervous wreck. I think about ghosts, dream about ghosts, and even though I don't really believe in them, I can't get them out of my mind.

I never did see Barbara's brother that day. I heard music coming from behind his locked door, though. Barbara said he kept his door locked at all times. Her mother left food on a tray outside his room, she said, and when he felt like eating, he unlocked his door and snatched the tray inside. I made several trips to the bathroom while at Barbara's and each trip I checked the floor outside the brother's room, hoping to see an empty plate covered with bones, maybe, but there was nothing.

Mother, I wish you were here, I thought. I need you. There are lots of things I want to say to you. Questions I would like to ask. I knew it wouldn't do any good to wish for these things, but still I did. When we were little, Patsy and I thought if you wished hard enough for something, you'd get it. Sometimes I wish I was young and innocent again.

I would like to discuss the possibility of ghosts with my father, but I know I won't. Baba would be better. She already believes in ghosts. My father is a very practical man, the most practical of men.
He
would definitely not believe. I think it would only make him sad if I suggested Mother was there, in our house, checking out The Tooth's undies.

And if he knew what Patsy and I had
done
with them, he really
would
be pissed.

Eleven

On monday after school, Chuck Whipple drove up on his three-speed bike.

“Patsy's not here,” I told him. “She's at the orthodontist. She'll be back around four-thirty.”

“That's okay,” Chuck said.

The oven timer beeped loudly, so I told him, “Come on in, if you want. I've got something burning in the oven.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Roberta and her mother driving by. A pale face pressed against the car window, a pale hand waved at me.

Chuck followed me out to the kitchen and watched while I took out the cookies, just in time.

“Smells good,” he said.

“I always make cookies on Monday,” I said. Actually, I make cookies whenever I'm depressed. And sometimes when I'm not. The smell of things baking always cheers me up, makes me think of the days when our house almost always smelled good when Patsy and I got home from school. Our mother timed her baking so stuff would still be warm when we got there.

If I ever have kids, I'm doing the same. Or if I turn out to be a world-famous anything and I have to go around the world on business, my husband will stay home to take care of the kids. I'll tell him he has to learn how to make cakes and cookies and maybe even bread. I think it'd be neat to be married to a man who bakes bread.

“How come you have a three-speed?” I asked Chuck. My cookies today were in the shape of Christmas trees, my favorite. Sometimes I decorated the trees with red and green sprinkles, sometimes I gave them raisins for eyes, the way you do to gingerbread men. Or ladies. And even if trees don't have eyes, so what. They're my cookies. I can do what I want.

“It's an Iowa bike,” Chuck said. “We don't have hills out there. It's flat all the way. Nothing but rows and rows of corn.”

He seemed to me, at that moment, as exotic a creature as if he'd come straight from Mars. Or California.

I offered him a cookie.

“How come Christmas trees when it's October?” he said.

I shrugged. “I like the trees best. Sometimes I put in raisins for eyes.”

He nodded, not finding that odd. “They're very good,” he said, taking a bite. “Like Mother used to make.”

“This is my mother's recipe,” I said. “Only hers were better.”

Bright patches of color stained Chuck's cheeks and he said, “I'm sorry.”

He had on a blue-and-red plaid shirt, and his cheeks matched the red in his shirt. He grabbed hold of the kitchen doorknob, and I figured he wanted out. I could see he felt terrible about what he'd said. Maybe he felt worse than I did.

“My mother died three years ago,” I said, and I heard my voice tremble. No matter how many times I say it, my voice always trembles when I say “My mother died.”

“I know and I forgot,” he said. “I'm very sorry.”

“My father might get married again.” I don't know why I said that. I hadn't planned to. “Patsy and I don't want him to. We don't like her. We don't want her for a stepmother. We're going out for dinner with her on Saturday.” I almost said “I dread it,” but I didn't.

Chuck cleared his throat. “Stepmothers aren't so bad,” he said. “I have one. She's pretty nice. I always forget she's not my real mother. I never knew my real mother. She died when I was a baby.”

That made me feel really rotten. Now it was my turn to say “I'm sorry.”

“I have a whole brother and a half brother,” Chuck went on. “She loves us all the same. There's no difference. She has plenty to go around. Can I have another cookie?”

“Sure. Take all you want. What do you do for fun and games out in Iowa?” I asked him. What Chuck had said seemed to me extraordinary, that his stepmother loved them all the same.

“Well, we have 4H Club meetings,” he said. “4H Club is a big deal where I come from.”

“What's 4H Club?” I said.

The timer beeped again. I took out the second batch of cookies and they looked better than the first. I set them on a rack to cool and put the last batch in.

“4H Club is about livestock—cows, calves, pigs, lambs,” Chuck said. “I got the prize last year for the best pig. She was a beauty. Her tail was perfect. No offense, but her name was Nora.”

I looked at him. He wasn't smiling or anything.

“You had a pig named Nora,” I said. “How come?”

“I just liked the name,” he said. “She took a blue ribbon at the state fair.”

I couldn't think of a single thing to say. Oh, your pig named Nora with the perfect tail took a blue ribbon at the state fair. Cool.

“I never knew a person named Nora before I met you,” he said. “It must be fate.”

We smiled at each other. I didn't know what to say, and I don't think Chuck did either.

The doorbell rang. Yeah!

“My hands are all gooky,” I said. “Go see who it is, will you? And if it's the Avon lady, tell her we don't need any.”

Chuck went to the door. I heard him talking to someone. He came back and said, “It's a girl named Roberta. She says she has to talk to you about something very important.”

“What does she need, an appointment? Roberta! Get out here, you gross-out! We're having a feast!” I shouted.

Roberta was duded up in her new riding skirt her mother ordered from a very exclusive catalog devoted to nothing but expensive riding outfits. Roberta has an anxiety attack if she even gets
near
a horse, but her mother thought the skirt would elongate Roberta, make her look slim. Slimmer.

“I didn't know you had company,” said Roberta, lying through her teeth. I figure she saw Chuck at the door as she and her mother drove by, and her mother let her out of the car at the corner and Roberta zoomed home and changed into her elongating riding skirt in record time.

“What's up?” I asked her. “This is Chuck Whipple, Roberta. Chuck, this is Roberta Middleton.”

Roberta can be quite aggressive, but usually when she meets a boy for the first time, she becomes positively demure. Casting her eyes down, Roberta whispered “Hi,” sort of like a washed-out Scarlett O'Hara, and Chuck said “Hi” back.