Not the End of the World (12 page)

But I didn’t have a sweet voice.
She
did. My voice, even at its best, was loud and rough. I used to be a first soprano, but after I had my tonsils out my voice changed and I got demoted to the altos.

Thank God Daddy wasn’t there. He said he had to work, but we all knew he was taking the opportunity to stay home and play with his soldiers. It would have hurt my feelings if I’d thought I was any good, but since I already knew I was a charlatan, it was just as well he wasn’t there to see me, just in case I fell on my face.

That was the last time I appeared in the Talent Show. I didn’t even audition this year because I was in disgrace and anyway, I would have been booed off the stage before I even got started because everybody would say, “There’s that Pitts-field girl, the one who started all the trouble,” and they’d all get up out of their seats and walk out, not wanting to be in the same gymnasium as me.

I heard the sunroom door open and then Grandmother’s voice as she stomped into the house, and I felt sad and angry. I wished they’d stayed away longer, I wished they’d go to a
Dairy Queen on Mars and come back in a few years, after I’d had time to live out my life and redeem myself.

Goober read my thoughts, as always, and got up from the pile of dirty clothes on which she’d been sleeping and crawled in under the eaves to get in my lap. I could feel Sarah coming, wanting to have a good cry, and I didn’t even fight it. Let her cry, I thought as I lay down with my head resting against Mother’s box of mementoes, and she did.

W
HEN
I woke up, it was already morning and my neck was killing me from having used a box as a pillow all night, and that put me in a worse mood than usual. I was a real grouch in the morning and it was the only bad thing about myself that none of my parts yelled at me for, and that was only because none of
them
wanted to face the day, either.

Grandmother was sitting at the breakfast-room table, scowling at Ruthie as she leaned over her cereal and lapped the milk like a dog.

“There’s something wrong with
this
one, too,” Grandmother said. “It must come from Robert’s side of the family.”

I hid behind the louvred doors between the breakfast room and the dining room, motioning to Donald to be quiet, and slowly extended my arm, waving it in the air like a snake. I made hissing noises as I reached out for Grandmother.

“Eeeek!” she screeched, jumping from her chair and patting her hair. “Oh, you vile child!”

Donald started laughing so hard he got the hiccoughs and Grandmother stomped away from the table.

“Marion, what are you raising here?” she demanded. “A family or a
zoo?”

“What’s
she
doing here?” I muttered to Donald. “I thought she was going to Detroit with Miss Nolan.”

“It’s none of your business, Miss Impudence,” Grandmother said as Mother brought me a glass of orange juice. Grandmother stood in the middle of the kitchen, glaring at me and picking her red fingernails, and I wished I could wave a magic wand and make her disappear, send her off to some alien universe where people were even meaner than she was and where they’d chase her around all day, saying, “What makes you think you’re so special, Miss Smarty-Pants?”

I wouldn’t even mind if she were dead. That was evil of me, but I couldn’t help it. She’d lived long enough; she’d had a lot of happy years tormenting Mother and then me. I didn’t see what was so wrong with wishing she’d just go to sleep and never wake up. Everybody dies someday and she was almost seventy, that was a long time to live, why couldn’t she move over and make room for someone else?

I knew I’d pay for having such bad thoughts—Cotton Mather was already climbing up on his pulpit, getting ready to attack, to threaten me with hell and worse, but I couldn’t stop the thoughts from coming. They were only thoughts, there was nothing in the Bible about Thou Shalt Not Wish Thy Grandmother Dead, in fact there wasn’t even anything about
honoring
your stupid grandmother, it was only your father and mother, and I at least tried to do that, even if I wasn’t always real good at it.

“God knows everything you think,” Cotton Mather said, “and you’re going to suffer for your evil thoughts.”

“Oh, leave me ALONE!” I yelled and Donald nearly jumped from his chair. “I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything!” he shouted and Mother wanted to know what in God’s name was going on and Ruthie started crying and
Grandmother just stood there, picking at those devil nails of hers and glaring.

“Don’t you have to go to school or something?” she asked and I pushed my chair back from the table and grabbed my notebook.

“It’s none of
your
business!” I screamed and fled out the sunroom door while Mother called after me, “Maggie! Your breakfast! People will think I don’t
feed
you!”

Goober came bounding out behind me and even though we weren’t supposed to let our dogs follow us to school, I always did because I liked to have her waiting for me when I came out. They kind of relaxed the rules a little in summer school; they even let girls wear shorts, which suited me just fine because I always wore them anyway, even in regular school, under my skirt so nobody could look up.

Goober and I ran towards the Sisks’. I wanted to stop at the shrine and confess my thoughts to their Virgin Mary and maybe that way I could get through the day without being tormented by the Puritan. It probably
was
bad of me to be so insolent, but I felt it was my duty—nobody else stood up to Grandmother and
some
body had to. I was already the Black Sheep, and I guess in a way it was expected of me. Nobody else did anything; Ruthie would just start flapping off to Bird-land and Donald would ignore her. For some reason, she left him alone and I figured it was because he was a boy. How wonderful to be a boy, to be left alone, to be allowed to miss dinner, to wear dirty clothes and not have anyone chase you round the house with a stupid lace dress saying, “But don’t you want to look like a
lady?”
To be independent, to go places alone, to be strong enough to protect yourself—if I were a boy, no one would ever touch me. If I were a boy, I could be whatever I wanted to be, I could be myself, I could live my life and nobody would be nagging me,
“Ladies
don’t
do this and
ladies
don’t do that, don’t you want to be a
lady?”
No! No, I didn’t want to be a lady; I didn’t want to be powerless; I didn’t want to learn to like anything I didn’t like.

Tom Ditwell was just coming out of his house as I passed and I sighed. Now I’d be stuck walking to school with him and I wouldn’t be able to go and confess.

Tom was the only kid in summer school for being both a delinquent
and
a dumbhead. I didn’t think he was as stupid as he seemed; he could memorize anything he heard in about fifteen seconds, and once you showed him something, he had it down instantly. He remembered by heart every story that his mother had read to him as a kid. I didn’t think that was very dumb, but facts were facts and Tom was in the sixth grade and couldn’t read. My theory was that he had hysterical blindness that only occurred when he tried to read, probably from when he was little and was in Catholic school and the nuns beat the alphabet into him.

“Hey, Maggie!” he called. “Wait up!”

He jumped over the fence and came running over.

“Have you finished your hero paper yet?” he asked and I shook my head and told him I was thinking of changing heroes but I didn’t have a new one.

“Can I have your old one if you don’t want him?” he asked and I felt sorry for him—he really
was
stupid if he thought Mr Blake would believe he wrote a paper on Julius Caesar.

“No,” I said, but he looked so heartbroken I offered to do someone else for him. “I’ll do Rocky Colavito for you,” I said and he threw his books in the air and tried to hug me but I pulled away.

“On top of everything else, you’re a cheat,” Cotton Mather accused, but it wasn’t cheating. I’d get the information and write the paper and then Tom would memorize it and then pretend to read it in class and it would be as if he
wrote it himself, because he’d
know
it and what difference would it make who got the information out of the library?

“Are you going to be in the Parade?” he asked and I sighed. The Parade, the Parade, the Parade, it was all anybody could talk about, as if it were a big deal, as if we didn’t have one
every
year.

“No,” I said and Tom said he was riding on his dad’s float.

“I’m going to be a sparkplug,” he said proudly and he got all offended when I laughed, even though I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, I just thought it was funny.

“Isn’t your dad having a float?” he asked and I shook my head. Daddy never had a float in the Parade. Instead, he had a booth at the end of the parade route and gave out candy bars to the marchers as they drooped in. “They’re tired,” he explained. “They need a little pep-me-up.”

“You could probably ride with us,” Tom said. “I think we still need a cylinder.”

I said no thanks. Even if I were entirely covered by a costume, people would know it was me, standing under the ditwell auto parts banner and they’d hiss and boo and throw rotten tomatoes at me and it would ruin Tom’s day.

We were getting close to McKinley and I winced as the pain shot up my butt. It happened every day; as soon as I reached the school grounds the pain would start and I’d spend the whole morning in agony. It started right after the trouble. I didn’t tell anyone about it; I just let it happen, thinking it must be some kind of punishment. It only happened at school and even though it was horrible, as if there were a sharp piece of glass embedded in my butt, I endured it. It wasn’t too bad when I was standing up, but when I sat down I thought I’d die from the pain. I learned to lower myself into my seat slowly, keeping my back and legs as much in line as possible, so I ended up half-sitting, half-sprawled
in the chair and my teachers would say, “Maggie! Sit up straight!” and I’d pull myself up, nearly puking from the pain, and sit the way they wanted me to.

As soon as the last bell rang, I’d dart from my seat and the pain would be gone. But then something worse started to happen. I couldn’t use the bathrooms at McKinley any more; I was too terrified to go in them, so I’d walk home, alone, making sure to be alone, hiding out till everyone had left, and then halfway home I’d pee my pants. It would drip down my legs, hot and shameful, and I’d wish I were dead. I never cried, not through any of it—not through the pain shrieking up my butt like a knife, not through the shame of peeing all over myself like a baby. I just thought it was what I had to live through.

I’d come home and take off my soaked underpants and hide them under the eaves, along with the ones I’d stained when I was having my period. I refused to wear one of those awful napkins, I just bled and then hid the evidence. “You go through more underpants than anyone I know,” Mother used to say. “What on earth happens to them?” and I’d shrug and say maybe someone stole them out of my locker at the Golf Club or something.

“You stay here,” I told Goober when we got to the baseball diamond. “I’ll be back soon.”

She wagged her tail and lay down, perfectly still, and I always wondered if she stayed like that all morning, or if she got up and sniffed around and visited other dogs and then came back in time to lie down and wait for me.

I only had to take classes in the morning. I guess they figured making me get up early all summer was punishment enough. It was too boring to believe—rehashing all the things we’d already learned, over and over again until I wanted to jump up and scream, “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too,
you dummies!” It was bad of me to be impatient with the others; after all, they were there because they’d failed, not because they were disciplinary problems.

I didn’t give Mr. Blake much trouble. I’d just sit there, squirming like a worm, waiting for the morning to be over. Once a week Miss Dickerson came and I’d have to go see her first thing in the morning and spend an hour with her, sitting in the first-aid room while she tried to get me to talk. “Name, rank and serial number; name, rank and serial number,” I’d chant as I trudged down the hall to her cubicle. That was all I was giving her.

In a way, I wished I could talk to her. It would be such a relief to talk to someone besides Goober and the Sisks’ Virgin Mary, but I couldn’t trust her. I couldn’t trust anyone. She wouldn’t believe me anyway, and if she did, what could she do? She’d say I was making it all up and then she’d go to my parents and I’d get punished all over again for breaking the unbreakable no-squeal rule, and no one would protect me, so why bother?

“How is your summer?” Miss Dickerson wanted to know and I shrugged. How did she expect it to be?

“What are you doing?” she asked and I said, “Going to school.”

“Well, you must be doing something besides going to school,” she suggested. She was always so calm, I could never believe it. I didn’t trust it, nobody could be that calm. Inside, she must have wanted to take her briefcase and start batting me over the head with it.