Not the End of the World (6 page)

Donald’s door was unlocked and I quickly crept in, making sure not to touch any of his things. He laid traps all over his room, to see if people were spying on him—pieces of paper laying in a certain way in a drawer and his covers tucked in carefully so he could tell if anyone had been looking between his mattresses for his stupid nudie magazines.

I slipped into the kitchen, motioning to Goober to be quiet. She was unbelievably smart; she not only understood everything I said to her, she could also sense what I was feeling, and she’d always leap into my lap and lick my face whenever I was sad, just to show that she, at least, loved me.

The Bridge Ladies were gabbing so loud I thought they wouldn’t notice me. They were all sitting there, talking at once, with no one listening to anyone else. I wondered if they noticed, but if they did, they didn’t seem to care—they just joined in, dancing around one another but never taking a partner. Miss Nolan was talking about nine irons and Mrs. Tucker was talking about wanting to get her hands on the Bicker house, now that old Earl was dead, surely Helen wouldn’t keep that mausoleum for herself, and Grandmother was talking about the difficulty of getting decent seafood in North Bay. “Now in
St. Pete …”
she was saying. If she liked St. Pete so much, why didn’t she stay there all year instead of coming up here to torment us the whole summer?

“Why doesn’t she stay down there?” I asked Daddy every June, when Mother would starting turning into a robot, running around and moving all of Ruthie’s stuff out of her room so Grandmother could have it. “Why does she have to live with us?”

Daddy shook his head and said it wasn’t nice of me to resent Grandmother; she was an old woman and she should be with her family. Mother was her only child and we were her only grandchildren.

“But she
hates
us!” I protested. “And she especially hates
me!”
Daddy said no, Grandmother didn’t hate me, she was just an old woman and she didn’t like much of anything any more.

“But she insults me all the time,” I complained. “She’s always telling me how terrible I am.”

“Blood is thicker than water,” Daddy said, but so what?

“Why can’t Mother go down there?” I wondered and Daddy got all stern and even before he said anything I was ashamed. Perhaps Grandmother was right, there probably
was
something evil about a girl who would gladly send her own mother off to Florida. “And take Ruthie with you,” I would have said, if I could, if Daddy wouldn’t hate me for it.

“I’m sorry,” I said before he had a chance to scold me. “I don’t mean it.”

He pulled me over to the arm of his big velvet chair and tussled my hair in that condescending way I hated. “I know you didn’t, Boo,” he said, “but you have to think about what you say. You hurt your mother’s feelings.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hurt
her
feelings, I hurt Ruthie’s feelings, it was all I ever did. There was something horrible about a girl like me, something horrible and cruel and evil.

“I’m sorry,” I cried desperately, “I try. I really do, but sometimes I can’t help myself. I just get so mad!”

“I know, Boo,” he said, “but you’re strong and you have to be patient with people who aren’t.”

“Grandmother’s strong,” I said. “She doesn’t worry about hurting people’s feelings.”

Daddy sighed. Adults always sighed that way when you
pointed out the obvious and they couldn’t explain it away with Good-Do-Bee logic. He sighed again and said, “You have to be nice, Boo.”

“I don’t
want
to be nice!” I shouted, pulling out of his grip. “And stop calling me
Boo!
My name is
Maggie!”

He just laughed; he always thought it was “cute” when I got mad. “What have you got to be so angry about?” Mother always wanted to know, but I didn’t know any better than she did. It didn’t make any sense. What
did
I have to be angry about? Nothing. Everything was exactly as it should be. We were the perfect American family, complete with two cars, a dog and 2.5 children, if you counted Ruthie as the .5, since she was half bird anyway.

Sometimes I thought there’d been a mistake, that somewhere along the line God had got my soul mixed up with some ghetto kid’s, some mean kid who threw rocks at pedestrians from the broken window of her unheated hovel in a burnt-out section of Detroit. Someone who was bad, but who at least had a
reason
for it. Someone who needed that anger just to survive and fight her way out of the slums. And the soul that belonged to the child my parents were supposed to have living with them in their lovely house on the Lake was trapped in some poor slum kid, kind and loving, the brunt of everyone’s jokes because she was so good and patient and self-sacrificing and not the least bit bitter about taking baths in cold water or fighting rats for space in her bed or having to drop out of school to take care of seven squalling siblings.

“… why, the shrimp in St. Pete,” Grandmother was saying and Miss Nolan looked up and saw me sneaking into the kitchen, so I had to go into the dining room and be polite.

“Hi,” I said and they all looked up and nodded while they chewed and chatted, never missing a beat.

“There’s shrimp in the fridge,” Mother said with forced gaiety. “Help yourself!”

“Thanks,” I said and stomped back into the kitchen.

“It’s quite good,” she called. “If I do say so myself!”

She waited for the Bridge Ladies to shout their confirmation but they kept right on nodding and chewing and picking like a bunch of gaudy puppets and Mother looked through the door, into the kitchen, and smiled sadly at me.

It made me want to scream, it made me want to shove their plates in their faces, to rub the shrimp in their noses until they gasped and said, “Yes! Yes, it
is
good!” I wanted to jump up and down on the table until they paid attention. But I knew they wouldn’t. “Maggie, get off,” Mother would say, even though I was doing it for her. “You’re getting sand all over the
petits fours!”

Instead, I said I was sure it was good. “You make the best shrimp salad in the world!” I called, taking the bowl from the refrigerator and scooping some onto a plate, even though I didn’t like anything with mayonnaise on it, not even shrimp. I tasted it as Mother watched hopefully.

“It’s wonderful!” I shouted. “It’s great!”

“Why, thank you, dear,” she said and smiled happily and turned her attention back to the Bridge Ladies as I slipped the plate to Goober, who would have praised Mother’s shrimp salad to high heaven, if only she could speak.

“Y
OU
are not allowed to go into the woods behind the Moores’,” Mother always said but that was exactly where I was going.

Someone was “doing things” to little girls there. “What things?” I asked, but she wouldn’t say. “Things” had been found in the woods—girls’ underpants, scraps of clothing, mysterious “things” she wouldn’t tell me about, “things” I shouldn’t know about. “What things?” I’d ask again and again, but she’d put on a somber face and shake her head and say, “You’re too young to know about those things.” “What things? What things?” I’d beg, but she was secretive as a saint.

I had to find out. Ginger Moore and I were building a fort back there, where we’d hide and watch for the Pervert. We’d spend hours scouring the woods, searching for “things.” Soup cans became chalices for midnight animal sacrifices; broken baseball bats were the weapons used to knock out kidnap victims; campfire remnants were the scenes of witches’ sabbaths.
We’d hide for hours under the bushes, waiting for “someone” to come by with his screaming victim, hoping she was someone we knew so we could save her and be heroes.

But no one ever came. The stories continued, the victims were always little girls from Riverside, and I came to the conclusion that bad things only happened to me and to kids from Riverside, which was the closest thing North Bay had to a slum. They were always having something dreadful happen to them: they were the ones who dived off the canal bridge and were paralyzed for life. They were the ones who went ice skating on the Lake and fell through, the ones whose bodies were found the next spring, bloated like whales, on a beach on Harsen’s Island. Don’t go near the swamp, they told us, that mud’s like quicksand and last year a boy from Riverside sank for ever, disappeared into the muck. I wondered why they were so unlucky; wasn’t it bad enough being poor? Why did they have to be the ones who threw water balloons at cars and got run over when the car went out of control? Donald and his friends threw
eggs
at cars and they never even got maimed.

Ginger Moore was the only friend I had left. It was a miracle she stuck with me, especially after what happened last winter, when Cindy and her gang attacked her, but she did and I was grateful. What happened was this: it was before Christmas, and we’d been walking home from school, taking the short cut through the swamp behind the Donaldsons’. I knew something was up. During recess Cindy had nudged me and said, “We’ve got a surprise for Ginger Moore.” She giggled in that mad-scientist way and I knew it was a surprise of the unpleasant sort, but I did nothing to prevent it. I could have. I could have told Ginger to walk another way; I could have called my mother and asked her to pick us up; I could have warned Ginger not to go with Cindy and that
crowd. I could have prevented it but I didn’t because I wanted to see what it was, what they had planned, what they were going to do to her.

It was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong with a capital W and bad to let it happen. I just stood there and watched while they held Ginger to a tree stump and Cindy made a snowball while Karen Harmon ripped open Ginger’s parka. Cindy chopped the snowball in half, smushing both halves on Ginger’s chest, and Pauline Quinlan stuck maraschino cherries in the center of each. They all went into convulsions, and Cindy started chanting, “Falsies! Falsies! Ginger Moore wears falsies!”

I stood there, hating myself for watching and not protecting Ginger, but I was afraid, afraid of what they’d do to me if I stood up for her. Until that moment, I had thought of myself as brave and bold, but watching those girls torment poor Ginger made me realize what a coward I really was.

“Stop it!” I shouted, but it was too late. It was over. The other girls ran away, giggling and shrieking, and Ginger just sat there, looking blank and lost, with the snow breasts stuck on her sweater like Christmas-tree ornaments.

I went over and wiped the grotesque balls away, but it was too late. Ginger looked at me without saying a word and we walked home in silence. I wanted to get down on my knees and beg for her forgiveness; I wanted to chase after those girls and tell them off, tell them how cruel they’d been and that I didn’t want to have anything to do with them any more. But I knew I wouldn’t. “Coward!” Margaret shouted. “Craven!” Cotton Mather sneered, and they were right. I was a yellow-belly, standing back, doing nothing, and I suddenly realized that it wasn’t Ginger’s forgiveness I wanted—she’d forget all about it in two days—but my own forgiveness, which I would never give to myself. I was horrible and weak,
vile, the kind of person who could close her eyes and let a world be destroyed and then when it was over, open them wide in disbelief and say, “How could this have happened? I didn’t see a thing!”

But that was last year and now it was as if nothing had happened. Ginger had long since made it up with Cindy and her gang and at Cindy’s pyjama party it was Karen Harmon who got attacked, with Ginger joining right in, holding down Karen’s arms while the other girls pulled open her pyjama top.

I didn’t understand it, even though it was perfectly clear. Cindy was cruel to Ginger; Ginger attacked Karen and Karen would undoubtedly take out her rage on someone else. Once it was done, once the rage was set free, it was over and everything was supposed to go back to normal. But for me, it never did. I couldn’t forget. I would always see the look of horror on Ginger’s face when Karen was holding her arms and Cindy was coming at her with those snow breasts, and even though what they did wasn’t the worst thing in the world, I didn’t think that mattered. What mattered was the terror Ginger felt when she was being attacked, not knowing what was coming, not knowing what they’d do, and when they just smacked those stupid snowballs on her it must have been a relief and it was easy for her to forgive them because it hadn’t been as bad as it could have been.

I was always secretly grateful that it wasn’t happening to me, but I knew that someday I’d get mine; someday it would be my turn to have them come at me like a bunch of banshees and no one would help because why should they? I’d take it; I’d see that slitty look in their eyes and I’d know it was coming and I’d quickly turn myself off, make myself fly away and then they could do whatever they wanted to my body.

“Let’s get Maggie,” they’d say. That was always how it started, “Let’s get Ginger or Karen or Pauline.” There didn’t need to be a reason; it was usually a whim, and who knew how it started? There was no way to protect yourself from it because it could be anything—I could show up at school in a dress Karen had coveted and she’d run to Cindy and say, “Let’s get Maggie,” and they’d attack me, drag me into the woods and rip holes in the dress and Karen would be happy, free, and the next day she’d invite me over to her house for ice cream. And I would go, because that was the way it worked. I’d go to her house and eat her ice cream and it would be as if nothing had happened. No apologies, no accusations, no discussions, just a bowl of Neapolitan with a glass of milk.