Not the End of the World (15 page)

I trusted completely in Daddy’s power to get Mr. Howard fired, to have him run out of town. I wanted him simply to evaporate, to not exist any more and I was sure Daddy would protect me from him, get him out of my life forever, not because of what he did or didn’t do, but because of what he reminded me of.

Mr. Howard came out of the office, grim and pale, and I was called back in. I wished my parents didn’t have to be there, listening as my verdict was revealed. In the event that Mr. Diller sided with Mr. Howard, I didn’t want my parents to see me humiliated.

“You will no longer be in the Accelerated Program,” Mr. Diller informed me. “You will remain with your regular class from now on.”

“But what about
him?”
I cried. “What’s going to happen to
him?”

Mr. Diller shook his head and said it was none of my business.

“It
is
my business!” I insisted. “It
is!
Why do
I
have to be punished and he doesn’t?”

Mr. Diller just stared at me and I said, “It’s not fair!” I could feel my throat tightening up and I was terrified I’d cry, right there with all of them watching. Mother and Daddy were just sitting there, silent, and I felt horrible, ghastly, despicable for having dragged them into this; how could I have hurt them so, how could I have embarrassed them like this, how could I have been such a disappointment to them? I wanted to die for having shamed them, but it was too late now and I wasn’t going to lie down and whimper like a kicked dog.

“Maggie,” Mr. Diller said, “he didn’t do anything to you. You’re making it up.”

“Don’t SAY that!” I shouted, wanting to cover my ears, wanting to fly away and sail into the blue of the little flag in the holder on Mr. Diller’s desk, wanting to abandon myself to Margaret or whoever wanted to take over, even Sarah—I’d fly away and let her stand there, sobbing like a lost waif; even that would be better than being there myself. But no one came out; I was on my own and there was nothing I could do but defend myself.

“I’m not! I’m not making it up!”

I pulled up my shirt sleeve and shoved my scarred arm in Mr. Diller’s face. “Do you think I made
this
up?”

“No,” Mr. Diller said, pushing my arm away, “no one doubts you were hurt, Maggie. But it’s your word against Mr. Howard’s and I’m afraid we have to believe him.”

We? We?!
I looked over at my parents but they were hanging their heads, as if they were the ones in trouble. Their refusal to look at me was worse than the humiliation of being
called a liar, worse than having to look at Mr. Howard’s thing, worse than having him come at me with that pointer ready to jab me. It was the pointer’s fault, I wanted to explain, if he hadn’t come at me with that pointer, I could have stood it, I could have taken my licks like a good soldier, I could have handled it; it was the pointer that made me crazy, but who would believe that? “What a bunch of nonsense!” they’d say and send me off to Lapeer.

Defeat washed over me like sludge from a barge and I gave in, knowing that no amount of protesting would do any good. It was over and I had lost and it was the end of the world for me.

“I think you should go home today,” Mr. Diller was saying. “Your parents can drive you.”

“No!” I shouted. “I’ll
walk
home! I don’t want anyone
driving
me!”

I stood there, shivering with rage, fighting to keep from crying. “I hate you!” I cried, looking around the room at all of them, wondering how they could all be so stupid—didn’t they realize that something else was going on here? Didn’t they know there was something I couldn’t say? Did they really think I was so evil I’d just make up stories to get teachers fired; what did they think, that maybe I was mad because Mr. Howard gave me a B for Effort last marking period—who cared, I got an A in the class—what did they
think?
Didn’t they care? They didn’t even
ask
, they just decided I was rotten to the core and kicked me out before I could ruin the barrel. “I hate you!” I cried again and fled.

That was the first time I peed my pants. On the way home from Mckinley, early in the morning when everyone else was switching from arithmetic to geography, I took the short cut through the Donaldsons’ woods and peed my pants. “There’s no cure for bad,” Grandmother always said and she was right;
I might as well go sink in the swamp, I thought, better to get it over with now than to go through life as an unwanted, lying little Pervert who ran around ruining people’s careers. A weak little demon without power enough to control her own bladder.

Everything changed after that. How I made it through the rest of the school year, I don’t know. I just went to school and pretended to be a person, doing everything I was told and ignoring the pain in my butt and trying not to open my mouth.

That was when I had to start seeing Miss Dickerson. “How can I help?” she said the first time I walked into her cubicle, and her voice was so soothing I almost cried, but I didn’t. After all, she was an employee of the School Board, a hired head-shrinker, and it was her duty to get rid of children like me.

I had hoped that when regular school ended, everything would be fine again. The good thing about summer school was that Mr. Howard wasn’t there, so I never had to see him lurking in the hall. Next year, he was going to another school and Mr. Diller called me into his office and told me that, as if he expected it to make me happy. “You’ll never have to see him again,” Mr. Diller said, but it wasn’t enough.

“That poor man,” Mother said to Daddy one night. “What a horrible thing to live down. I wish it had never happened.”

Daddy grunted and rustled his paper. From my crack in the floor, I could see the top of his bald head, which was beginning to get sunburned, and Mother’s feet resting on the footstool. Every once in a while, a puff of smoke would float across the room like a fat ghost.

“I keep thinking about his family,” she said. “How horrible it must have been for them.”

I hated it when she talked about that; it made me feel
horrible and guilty, like some kind of war criminal. I didn’t want his family to suffer, I just wanted
him
thrown in jail and left there until his thing rotted off. When I thought about his family, I felt worse than usual. I’d envision his two little girls, dressed in tatters, standing on the corner in front of Peterson’s, selling pencils in the middle of a blizzard. I’d see his wife, grown grey and weak, hovering over a campfire outside a shack near the river, cooking beans in a battered pot. And I’d see him, bent and dirty, driving around town in his rusty car, picking odds and ends from people’s garbage.

It’s all my fault, I’d think, believing my vision of woe; if only I hadn’t got hysterical none of this would have happened. If only I hadn’t taken his stupid thing so seriously, if only I’d been able to laugh, like Cindy and Ginger, if only I’d got out of my seat and let him hit me with that pointer, taking my punishment like a trouper instead of getting crazy and thinking he was going to
do
something with it. How stupid! How could I have thought such a thing? Of course he wouldn’t
do
anything, it was broad daylight, in the middle of the school day, any minute the glee club would be coming in to sing—how could I have panicked like that?

I despised myself for my weakness, my hysteria, my wild accusations. I felt terrible about his family. But still, I wished him dead. Picking garbage was too good for him and I wouldn’t want to see him hovering around on trash days, looking up at my window and shaking his fist and saying, “It’s all your fault, you little vixen!”

“It’s over, Marion,” Daddy told Mother. “Why beat a dead horse? Forget it.”

But it wasn’t that easy. I couldn’t forget it. Every time I walked to school, my insides started pulling at me, as if there was a huge claw inside me, grabbing my stomach and intestines and twisting them like wet rags. Sometimes the pain
was so bad I had to lie down, right in the woods, on my back, perfectly straight, and then the claw would let go. On days when the pain was so bad I had to lie down, I’d end up being late and Mr. Blake would make me wear a little sign round my neck that said
BEING TARDY IS FOOLHARDY
. The first time I could have died of shame, but another good thing about being in summer school with the bad and stupid kids is that everybody’s so used to being ridiculed and punished that nobody makes fun of anyone else—we just pat each other on the back and say, “Don’t pay any attention to Blake the Flake.”

D
ADDY
woke me up at six o’clock. “Maggie!” he said, slamming open my door, looking all happy and excited. “Rise and shine! The Parade’s in five hours!”

I wanted to kill him. I covered my head with my pillow and asked him to please close the door, but he kept standing there, grinning, saying, “Get up! Get up! The early bird gets the worm!” and I wished he’d leave me alone, wished he let me go back to sleep and live in my dreams, rather than in the real world.

“Go away,” I said as Mother passed by, and she clicked her tongue and said, “Well, if it isn’t Miss Sweetness-and-Light.” She told Daddy she had never seen such an unpleasant person in the morning and I wondered why, if that was so, she didn’t just leave me alone.

She wanted us all to be happy; that was what she wanted most in the world and most of the time it was my fault we weren’t. She wanted everyone to be cheerful and gay and when we weren’t her world fell to pieces. I hated coming
downstairs and having Mother chirping at me like some goldfinch, asking me whether I’d slept well; I hated watching Ruthie slurping those horrible colored cereals, the ones with the marshmallow bits floating around like chunks of curdled milk; I hated having to look at Grandmother’s jammy red lips puckering up to insult me.

I’d fill a bowl with cereal and slouch down in my place and try to block them all out, to go back into the dreams that were floating around in my head like Ruthie’s marshmallow bits, and I’d wish I were back in bed, back in my dream, even if it was a nightmare.

I had terrible nightmares, but I couldn’t tell anyone about them because then they’d really think I was crazy. I kept them inside, like a family secret with no family, wishing the ugliness of them would fade away, but it never did. No wonder I wasn’t very happy in the morning, but how could I explain that to Mother? I couldn’t say, “Don’t talk to me, I just had a nightmare about dead children with no butts.” She’d faint, she’d turn all pale and gaspy and think I was crazy and wonder what she did wrong to have a daughter who dreamed such gruesome things and it would ruin her entire day. She’d worry that the dream meant I was going to turn into a mass murderess; she’d tell the Bridge Ladies about it and Grandmother would say, “Better get rid of her now, before she burns the house down with you in it.”

“Good morning, dear,” Mother said when I finally clumped into the breakfast room. “Sleep well?”

I grunted and looked over at Donald, who rolled his eyes and made a face. Ruthie was intently picking all the orange bits out of her bowl, piling them in a soggy mountain on her plastic place mat.

“Where’s Daddy?” I asked and Mother said he’d left to go downtown and set up the booth.

“It’s only six o’clock!” I moaned and she said, “You know your father,” but no I didn’t. I knew he liked to have things ready, and he thought being late was a crime worthy of beheading, but I didn’t know him at all.

“He’s really excited,” Mother said. “He gets such a kick out of this.”

It was true. Daddy loved giving candy to children. He loved making them laugh and seeing their faces light up when they got a Donniebar or a Ruthette or a Boobar. He loved being the Candy King of North Bay, loved standing in his booth, chatting with the parents. “Mr. Charm,” Mother called him and he could really ooze it out when he wanted to.

“He wants you to be there by eight,” Mother said and I said I couldn’t get there that early.

“Why not? You’re not marching.”

“I have to do something,” I told her.

“What?” she demanded, and I said,
“Some
thing.”

She walked over and stood at the foot of the table, staring at me with that “What are you up to?” look that usually meant, “You’re grounded.”

“She’s helping us,” Donald said and I wanted to leap across the table and kiss him.

“Oh,” Mother said suspiciously, but there was no point in accusing us both of lying. She knew we’d stick together like two soggy stamps and there was no getting us apart. She looked sad; I think her feelings were hurt because I didn’t want to be with them in the booth.

“Don’t worry,” I told her, “I’ll be there before the first marcher crosses the finish line.”

I really wasn’t up to anything. I just wanted to sneak down to Daddy’s factory and catch the beginning of the Parade from his office. I couldn’t go stand on Main Street with
everybody else, not by myself. I knew what people would think. They’d think I wasn’t good enough to have anybody to go to the Parade with. Or, worse yet, they’d feel sorry for me, poor Maggie, she got herself in trouble and now no one will speak to her. I didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for me; I’d rather have them spit on me or throw turds at me than feel sorry for me, looking at me with those droopy eyes, pushing their pity off on me, weighing me down with cement bags full of it so I could jump in the river and sink that much faster.