Not the End of the World (2 page)

The Sisks were pretty nice people, and I don’t think they would have minded too much if they’d caught me hiding on their beach, although Daddy would have had a fit. “That’s Private Property!” he’d say. “That beach belongs to the Sisks! You have your
own
beach, you’ve got no business trespassing on somebody else’s!” Daddy was a fiend for Private Property. He didn’t get mad much, but that was one thing that could really get him going. Forget the Lord’s Prayer; he wasn’t forgiving
anyone
who trespassed against
him
. He even had a
NO TRESPASSING
sign on his den—as if anybody would want to go in it, anyway; it was just a dark little room with a big old table where he said he “worked,” but what he really did was play with the tin soldiers he had locked up in the cabinet behind his armchair. God only knows what he would have done to me if he ever found out I’d sneaked in there—probably boiled me in oil or tied me to a stake outside the house with
TRESPASSER
written across my forehead in my own blood, and all because he didn’t want anyone knowing he played with soldiers. Big deal. Tom Ditwell’s dad had a set of
dolls
, and although he said he had them just in case he ever had a daughter, nobody believed that baloney. “Is he some kind of sissy?” Donald asked Mother and she blushed and
said certainly not, Harry Ditwell was
all man
. I asked her how
she
knew and she blushed again and said she ought to know, after all, they were in Dance Club together.

The Sisks’ house was the nicest along the Lake—a long, rectangular stone house painted a very light blue, like the Lake in the early morning when the sun was just rising over Canada. I wondered if they’d done it on purpose, if they’d sat out in their gazebo every morning with their painter, waiting for just the right color. They had white cast-iron pillars with blue and white morning glories circling around them, leading up to a balcony that extended the length of the house. In one corner, they had a huge telescope, pointed towards Canada. Sometimes, I’d sneak down to their beach at night and hide behind the evergreens and watch Mr. Sisk as he stood on the balcony, looking at the stars. I could see Mrs. Sisk sitting inside, playing solitaire as she listened to classical music on their hi-fi, and it seemed so tender, somehow. So quiet and peaceful and tender and I wished I was their daughter. I would imagine myself standing on the balcony, looking through the telescope while Mr. Sisk taught me how to pick out Orion the Hunter and how to find the rings around Saturn. My parents didn’t know anything, or if they did, they weren’t sharing. Whenever I’d ask a question like, “How do airplanes stay up in the air when they’re so heavy?” they’d laugh and say, “You’re in the
sixth grade
and you don’t know
that?”
and I’d feel so humiliated I’d skulk off to the beach with Goober and I’d never find out the answer. Mr. Sisk wouldn’t laugh at my questions, I just knew it.

Ever since the trouble at school, I’d spent more and more time hiding out at the Sisks’. I felt safe there, not only on their beach, but in their wonderful backyard. It was like a fairyland: two whole blocks long, and filled with graveled paths and statues spurting water from fish and cupids, just
like some English lord’s garden. They had all sorts of little buildings back there: a log cabin and a gingerbread playhouse and a shrine with a statue of the Virgin Mary in it. I thought it was a shame they didn’t have children to enjoy their park and sometimes Goober and I would go back there and look in the windows of the little houses, but the only one I ever went in was the shrine.

There was a dusty velvet-cushioned seat in there, where I’d sit and confess my sins to the statue, even though I didn’t know if it would do any good, because I was only an Episcopalian.
“High
Episcopalian,” Mother always said, which made me feel sorry for all the people who went to St. Matthew’s and were Low.

I didn’t go to church at all any more, not since the trouble. I was too bad. Grandmother said I was possessed by the Devil and unless we got him out by my thirteenth birthday my soul would be lost for ever, at least what was left of it. Once the Devil got in, she said, he never let go; he burrowed into your heart like a tapeworm and made it all black and rotten. That didn’t sound right to me, but Grandmother said that was because the Devil had already got inside and gobbled up all my good parts, and even if I went to church it wouldn’t do any good because it was Too Late.

I didn’t think God liked me very much. He was always punishing me. I must be very evil inside, I thought, deep down where only God and Grandmother and Mother could see it, because I was always getting punished, even when I wasn’t doing anything bad. It was as if I was getting punished for something I’d done ten years ago, or something I’d probably do in the future and I made God so mad He’d reach down from the clouds, pull me up by my scruffy hair, shake me around like a party favor and then toss me in a heap on the sunroom floor. And it didn’t work both ways—I got punished
when I was bad and even sometimes when I wasn’t bad, when I was just trying to be a human being. But when I was good, there was no reward. Sometimes good things happened to me. Before the trouble, I got chosen to be the school reporter for the
Herald Ledger
; I got to go to their offices twice a month and meet the reporters and type up my stories on a big, noisy typewriter. But when good things happened, they had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t a reward for being good, it was more like a gift, an act of grace, given not because I deserved it but because God was in a good mood that day.

Maybe that was why my parents never insisted on my going to church with them on Sundays. Donald was an Acolyte and Ruthie sang in the junior choir and Mother was an Altar Lady. Daddy only went when it was his turn to be an usher—he liked to collect the money. Sometimes, when I watched them getting all dressed up, I felt kind of left out, but I was too terrified to go. I was sure I’d walk in and Reverend Phillips would point his finger at me and start screaming “The Devil is amongst us!” and everybody would turn and stare and then they’d all attack me and beat me to death with their prayerbooks.

It frightened me, all that talk about the Devil, which was why I would sneak over to the Sisks’ shrine all the time, to try to get an answer out of their statue. “Why would he want me?” I’d ask her, but she just stared benignly, as if it didn’t matter and what was I so worked up about? “Well, how would
you
like it?” I’d ask, which was a stupid question; she was a saint, what did she know about devils? It really made me mad—if the Devil had my soul, wasn’t he supposed to make some sort of pact with me, to offer me something for the use of it? Wasn’t he supposed to give me something to satisfy my earthly greed so he could take my dirty little soul when I
died? I didn’t think he could just pick and choose, just go around grabbing infant souls without their having a say in it. I didn’t like the idea of being possessed, but I might have considered making a pact with the Devil if he’d offered to turn me into a boy.

I hated being a girl. It was what I hated first in the world. “Better get used to it,” Mother always said, giggling as if it was funny, but it wasn’t. When I was little, when I’d say my prayers at night, at the end I’d say, “God bless Mother, Daddy, Donald and Ruthie and everybody else in the whole, wide world including Goober and please let me be a boy when I wake up.” Now, I just said, “And please don’t let there be a war,” because it was too late, I’d already started my periods and sprouted breasts, real ones, not little lumps like everyone else, and I even had to wear a real bra, with wire in it, not a Gro-Cup. It was what I got, I suppose, for wanting to be what I wasn’t.

Ginger Moore thought I should have a sex-change operation. “Maybe you could get Christine Jorgensen’s old thing,” she said and we wondered what happened to it: did he/she keep it in a bottle of formaldehyde, like those pig fetuses at the carnival? Did she keep it in a velvet box on her mantelpiece? Did she have it frozen in case she changed her mind and wanted it back? Or did she just toss it out like a bad memory?

“I don’t want a
thing,”
I told Ginger, “I just don’t want to be a woman.”

She didn’t get it. If I didn’t want to be a woman, then I had to be a man, and in order to be a man I would need a thing. If I didn’t want a thing, then what
did
I want?

“I don’t know,” I said and she said I was crazy.

T
HEY
all thought I was crazy. Sometimes I worried that I was, but that was a good sign because real crazy people don’t think they’re crazy, they just think they’re Napoleon.

“It’s a wonder you have any friends,” Mother used to say when I still had some. “You must become a different person when you leave this house. Jekyll and Maggie.”

Actually, I was six different people, but I wasn’t going to tell
her
that. They already thought I was crazy and they were just looking for an excuse to get rid of me. If I’d told them I had six different parts, plus a part that wasn’t really mine, they’d have packed me off to Lapeer faster than you could say “Nuthouse.”

It wasn’t craziness—
The Six Faces of Maggie
or anything like that—I didn’t black out and then wake up dancing naked on a pool table in the back room at Lyon’s or anything. I was perfectly aware of all the parts and I knew when they were going to take over: there just wasn’t anything I could do about it. I kind of winced and said, “Uh-oh,” and waited for the you-know-what to hit the fan.

I kept them in an imaginary chest of drawers. The outside was a beautiful lacquered chest with two big doors painted with gold and blue flowers. Behind the doors there were six drawers, where my personalities lived when they weren’t with me.

Maggie was me, the real me, the me only my best friend ever got to know. I didn’t have a drawer, because I was always present, so I guess the chest was me.

Katrina was the part of me who thought she was adopted. She was a little girl, and when I was little, she’d run around the neighborhood telling all the neighbors that she was left on the Pittsfields’ doorstep and her real mother was a Dutch prostitute. “Wouldn’t you like a little girl like me?” I’d ask all our childless neighbors and Mother would have a fit. “A Dutch prostitute!” she’d moan, running upstairs to the strongbox to get my birth certificate in case anybody wanted to check. “Where do you come
up
with these things?”

I didn’t know. I constantly accused my parents of wishing I’d never been born. “You didn’t want me!” I’d shriek as I ran through the house with Mother chasing behind holding a wooden spoon full of fudge for me to lick, saying, “We did! We did! We tried
very hard
to get you!” “Ya,” Katrina would shout from the top of the stairs, “and zen vhen you got me you vanted to send me back for a refund!”

Trixie was the name I gave to the mischievous me, the me that was playful and full of life and silliness. Trixie was the one who sang, “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” in the McKinley Talent Show and who went to parties dressed in a hula skirt and who would do anything on a dare. She was the one who used to be popular, and one who could mimic anyone and who made Daddy laugh so hard he’d cry when she’d parade around the living room doing Grandmother imitations. Trixie didn’t come out much any more,
not since the trouble at school. It was hard being popular when everyone hated you.

The bad one was Margaret, as in “Margaret Sweet Pitts-field.” She was the bully, the mean one, the one who’d smack her friends over the head with a Coke bottle if she didn’t get her own way; the one who plotted and gossiped and said horrible things in the slam books. She was dirty minded and she was the one who always wanted to play sex games with her friends. She even had fits, but they were emotional instead of epileptic. She was the one who made me seem crazy. When Margaret took over, no one could get in, not even me—I’d watch in horror as she went wild, attacking anything or anybody who came near her. “Don’t you
touch
me!” she’d snarl and that was how I knew she was coming. “Don’t you
touch
me!” she’d spit, backing up and hissing like a snake. “Don’t you dare touch me!”

Then there was Sarah. What a whiner she was. Boo hoo hoo. She was also the sweet part, the part Mother liked best, but I hated her. She was weak and mealy mouthed and a Good-Do-Bee, like some kind of twelve-year-old Melanie Hamilton. Weakness was to be avoided at all costs, so when I was feeling Sarah-ish, I’d run to the beach faster than a speedboat skimming across the Lake. I’d fly down to the Sisks’ breakwall and climb over and let her have her stupid cry.

She was the good girl, the kind and loving one. She didn’t get much exposure in the real world, but I liked to make up stories about her, little tales of loneliness and longing, with sad endings because no one would come and save her and she didn’t have the strength to save herself. She’d always be left, floating down the Lake on a chunk of ice, or trapped in the woods with the Pervert, and nobody knew what happened to her because nobody really cared.