Not the End of the World (5 page)

My problem was I couldn’t concentrate. All I had to do was take the facts from the encyclopedia and tell about Julius Caesar and why I thought he was admirable, and that was that, a cinch. But every time I tried to think about Julius
Caesar, my mind would drift off—I’d start thinking about swimming across to Canada or being the first woman governor of Michigan or catching the Pervert or marrying Rocky Colavito or something. Something that would redeem me, so I could come back to North Bay and not be hated. I liked to think of the future because it was the only hope I had.

“This is the happiest time of your life,” Mother always said, and I’d want to climb up on the roof and jump off. If this was as good as it was getting, I might as well get it over with.

“Suicide is selfish,” she said when I threatened to hang myself from the ceiling fan in the sunroom. “What about all the people left behind?”

“What
about
them?” I asked. “Maybe if they cared in the first place, the person wouldn’t want to kill himself.”

Mother said I was mean, wanting to make people suffer their whole lifetimes, wanting them to spend every day thinking, Maybe I could have done something, when the person who kills himself is dead and doesn’t care about anything.

“That’s the point,” I told her. “They want to stop caring.”

“I don’t know where you get your ideas,” she said. “You should be the happiest girl in North Bay and all you want to talk about is suicide.”

“It’s not
all
I want to talk about,” I told her. “It’s what we’re talking about
now.”

“Well,” she said, “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s morbid. Can’t you find something positive to do?”

She turned and walked away, into the living room, to listen to the baseball game on the radio. I would have gone with her, to listen while Rocky Colavito smacked a homerun right out of Tiger Stadium, over the scoreboard and out, out, all the way to Windsor. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want to go
crawling after her, begging for attention, so I stayed in the sunroom, watching the ceiling fan turn, thinking about how stupid I’d look, strung up from one of the blades, my neck broken and sagging, circling around over the summer dinner table while the rest of the family ate their grilled hamburgers and potato salad, the first of the season. “What a shame Maggie isn’t here,” Mother would say glancing at my empty plate. “She
loves
potato salad!” And I’d circle above them, my feet swinging right over their heads, and they wouldn’t even notice until Mother said, “What’s that noise?” and they’d all look up and see me dangling like a wind chime. “Harumph! Maggie’s hung herself from the ceiling fan again,” Grandmother would say. “She’s just doing it to be
different!”

In our family, there were three reasons to do things: because you had to, because you wanted attention or because you were selfish and never thought about anybody but yourself. Everything you did had to be weighed and measured and all the possible consequences had to be considered. For instance, if I hung myself from the fan, I had to think about hurting them and making everybody feel guilty for the rest of their lifetimes and embarrassing them by making them look like a bad family and possibly ruining Donald’s and Ruthie’s lives, for who would want to have anything to do with someone whose sister strung herself up from a fan? No one would marry them, they’d be afraid of bad genes and it would be all my fault because I was too selfish to think about them, I only thought about my own miserable little life and how I wanted it to end. Grandmother would say it was all Mother’s fault and spend the rest of her life tormenting her, giving her a double dose because I wouldn’t be around to catch any of it. And if by some stroke of bad luck I didn’t happen to die, I’d have to go through life with an ugly rope burn around my neck and I’d have to wear scarves all the
time, or maybe even get a white rubber neck, and I’d spend the rest of my life playing bridge with Cindy and Ginger Moore and Karen Harmon and when I left they’d sigh and say, “What a shame; Maggie would have made such a wonderful wife and mother, but who would have her with that neck?”

If we were Japanese, I wouldn’t have to worry about any of that; I’d just plunge a sword into my heart and nobody would think anything of it, in fact, they’d probably say, “It’s sad but it was the right thing to do after having disgraced herself and her family”

I tried to kill myself after the trouble at school. I stayed home one day and took every pill in the medicine cabinet: all the aspirins, both baby and adult, all Mother’s cramp medicine, all the allergy pills and even a whole box of Ex-Lax. I went back to my bedroom and lay on my bed, preparing to die. I took my Bible from under my pillow and started reading Revelation, to find out where I was going. I had barely opened the Bible when all of a sudden my ears started vibrating, as if there were some Roman gong-ringer in my head, pounding furiously. It seemed like my head was about to explode from the noise, as if ten thousand bees had built a hive in it and were buzzing crazily while the Roman went berserk with his gong. I covered my head with my pillow, but that just made the noise louder. Then my stomach began to churn and I had to throw up. I didn’t want to because I knew if I did, I’d live, but I couldn’t help it, those pills were coming back up and there was nothing I could do. I tried to stand, but I was too dizzy, so I rolled off my bed and crawled down the hall, into the bathroom, and started puking. It seemed like I was in there for weeks and I didn’t come out until Donald came home from school and pounded on the door, screaming to Mother to make me unlock it.

Eventually, she came up and I let her in and when she saw how sick I was she felt bad for thinking I’d only been faking another bout of the Mystery Illness. Nobody knew I’d tried to kill myself, and even if they suspected, nobody said anything. One night I heard Daddy go to the medicine cabinet and shout, “Where’s my Ex-Lax?” and I heard Mother say she guessed we were out and it was the oddest thing, we were out of everything all at once, and she didn’t know how that could happen but she was sorry.

I didn’t tell anyone and I certainly wasn’t going to tell Miss Dickerson, who would have pulled a straitjacket out of the first-aid cabinet and sent me off to Lapeer. “Suicide is a cry for help,” I read in one of Mother’s magazines, but no it’s not. At least not for me. I didn’t want any help, I wanted to start over, to have a chance to do things right. “Everything I do is wrong,” Mother always moaned and I knew what she meant, even if the thing that was wrong was totally inconsequential, for instance, having broccoli instead of beans with the chicken. I would have said, “Tough luck, Clarabell, if you want beans, go cook them yourself.” But that would have just been what I
said
. Inside I would have been going nuts: Margaret would have been scratching like crazy and Sarah would be crying and Cotton Mather would be telling me I was going straight to hell and Katrina would be wanting to skate to Amsterdam and Trixie would be singing, “Beans, beans, the musical fruit,/ The more you eat, the more you toot,” and I would have been sitting there, wanting to scream, thinking, Everything I do is wrong.

The things I did wrong were worse than serving broccoli instead of beans. I was only twelve; I had sixty or maybe even seventy years ahead of me, during which nothing good could happen to me because I’d already filled up my heart with black spots and nothing good could get in. If you start
building a house and find out the foundation is rotten, you tear it down and start over. My soul was rotten and therefore I thought I should be able to kill myself and start over. It made perfect sense to me and I didn’t see why suicide was such a big sin.

But I couldn’t even commit suicide right. The only thing that happened was I made myself so sick I couldn’t go out of the house for three days. I pretended that I really was dead, that being trapped in the house with Grandmother for three days was purgatory and on the third day, I’d wake up and be an angel, hovering over my body while it lay in bed, watching it and saying goodbye before I sailed off to heaven to wait for my new life.

But no such luck. Grandmother would barge in and stand in the doorway with her hands on her hips, glaring at me and saying, “There’s nothing wrong with you that a few licks with a thick belt wouldn’t cure,” and the gong would start again and I’d be in so much pain I knew I had to be alive.

I
T
was hopeless. I couldn’t concentrate on Julius Caesar. I guessed it was OK, I could always do it the night before it was due. I worked best under pressure; “Last Minute Maggie,” Mother called me, warning that life wouldn’t always be so easy.

“C’mon, Goob,” I said, packing up my things and heading home, hoping that the Bridge Ladies had finished their lunch and retired to the living room to continue their rubbers.

But they hadn’t. They were still in the dining room, sitting around the table picking at their shrimp salads and drinking Bloody Marys out of Great-grandmother MacPherson’s crystal goblets. “Someday, these will be yours,” Mother told me and I pretended to be thrilled, because I knew it was some kind of big honor to her. Great-grandmother MacPherson had given her them, bypassing Grandmother, who she hated and blamed for her son’s death. Grandmother wanted the goblets because they were some special kind of crystal and every time Mother brought them out, Grandmother would get all huffy. I thought it was hysterical.

Mrs. Tucker was talking about sending Cindy to some fancy boarding school and I could hear Mother sighing and wishing that Daddy would let her send me away to school. “I think it would be good for her,” she said and Grandmother laughed.

“Yes,” she said, “it would be a good idea to send Maggie away. The further the better.”

She snorted and laughed and I sat on the front porch, listening to them through the screen door, hating them, wishing the bomb would drop right then and blow them all to bits, send them flying through the air like popcorn bursting from the pan.

“Now, Kay,” Miss Nolan said to Grandmother, “don’t tease like that. Maggie’s a fine girl.”

“Phooey,” Grandmother said. “She’s spoiled. Spoiled rotten with a capital R and it’s too late to do anything about it.”

I didn’t want to hear any more; Grandmother would start berating Mother for spoiling me and Mother would meekly mumble something about trying. I hated Grandmother, but I had to be careful about what I said about her. “Why, your grandmother is a
wonderful
person,” Mother said when I complained about Grandmother. “Everyone
adores
her!” “But
you
hate her,” I said and Mother gasped, raising her hand to her neck and holding it there, as if to strangle herself if she said anything. She stared at me like I was a mutant coming to devour her, and I wanted to die, to take the words back, but it was too late, I’d said the wrong thing and now the world would fall to pieces. “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” Margaret screamed.
“Now
you’ve done it!” “I’m sorry, Mother,” I said, “I didn’t mean it,” but she didn’t hear, she’d flown off to another planet and it might be days before she came back.

I hated it when she did that. She’d just vanish. She still looked like Mother and talked like Mother and did all the standard Mother-type things, but she wasn’t there. And it
was all my fault. I had made her that way, by being so uncontrollable.

I sneaked round the side of the house, hoping that the door to Donald’s bedroom wasn’t locked, so I could get in that way. As I circled the house, I looked up at my bedroom window and Cotton Mather said, “You’re such an ingrate. You have your own bedroom and still you’re not satisfied. Your grandmother is right, you’re spoiled rotten.”

I didn’t think I was spoiled, but the facts were against me. My father was the Candy King of North Bay. Robert “Sweet Is My Middle Name” Pittsfield. It was my middle name, too. “Sweet as in anything-but,” as Grandmother said.

I had everything a girl could want: clothes and books and toys and games and a nice house on the beach. I even had a candy bar named after me—how many girls could say that? I supposed that was what being spoiled was all about: having everything but feeling empty inside, wanting more but never being able to get it. “Poor little rich girl, poor little rich girl,” Margaret started chanting in her nasty nasal voice.

“I am not!” I protested. I hated the idea of it; I’d rather be dead than a poor little rich girl, a whiny frail little wisp of a thing, quietly sobbing in her palace while her parents flew off to the Orient for some diplomatic mission, leaving her behind with no one but the evil aunt.

Of course, we weren’t really rich, not like the Sisks. We had a nice house on a nice street in a nice neighborhood, we had nice furniture and nice cars and nice doodads all over the place, and Daddy had the candy factory, but it wasn’t as if he were Mr. Mars.

“What have you got to complain about?” Cotton Mather demanded. “You’ve got it
easy.”
It was true. I thought about the migrant farmworkers who came to North Bay to pick cucumbers for the pickle factory, living in those horrible shacks, and I’d hate myself for being so ungrateful. They had
a terrible life and even the kids had to work, dragging boxes out into the field to fill them with cucumbers. How could I be boo-hooing about my own life when I thought about them?