Seventeen Against the Dealer (20 page)

Maybeth took the water into Gram's room, then came back into the kitchen to cut a slice of bread and put it into the toaster.
She poured boiling water into a mug and let the tea bag steep. Then she buttered the toast, cut the crusts off, spread it lightly with strawberry jam, and cut it into four triangles, which she arranged on a little plate. Dicey watched her sister do all these little things. Then she followed Maybeth into Gram's bedroom. Maybeth had put the cyclamen plant on the bedside table and raised the shade so sunlight fell on it. The pillow behind Gram's head had been plumped up, and the bedspread folded neatly down over the end of the bed, leaving the blanket across Gram's chest. Gram's hair had been brushed and she had changed her nightgown. While Dicey stood watching, Maybeth went to the bureau and took out a cardigan. “You should put this on, Gram,” Maybeth said.

“I'm not cold,” Gram objected.

“I know.” Maybeth held out one sleeve, to help Gram get her arm into it.

“I said I wasn't hungry,” Gram objected.

“I know.” Maybeth moved the plate of toast over to where Gram could reach it easily.

“Or thirsty, either,” Gram objected. “Don't say it, don't tell me—you know.”

“That's right,” Maybeth agreed, almost laughing.

Gram didn't look better, it wasn't that—she just didn't look as terrible as before.

“We're going to make some spaghetti sauce,” Maybeth said. “You aren't going to have to eat it—but may I leave the door open? What if the smell has some nourishing value?”

“You know it doesn't,” Gram told Maybeth. Gram looked at Dicey, who stood in the door, seeing everything Maybeth had done. Gram shook her head, as if to ask for sympathy for what she had to put up with. For a second, Gram really looked at Dicey.

Dicey went back into the kitchen, to start chopping up onions. If she were sick, she thought, she'd like to have Maybeth taking care of her. Dicey recognized the feeling she was feeling and knew its right name. Shame. She was ashamed of herself, for all the things she hadn't done right; she figured she should have known how to notice them. It wasn't only taking care of Gram—Maybeth was there to do that job, and do it right. It was everything that she had let go wrong, with her business mostly—from being robbed, to having to do Claude's boats, to losing Mr. Hobart's order. If she had started on his boat, he couldn't have taken his money back. She'd originally planned to start on it, then she'd changed her plans. What made her the most ashamed was the way she'd worked about as hard as she could, and that hadn't been good enough.

Dicey thought she'd better scale down her dreams. She'd better get back to being practical. She'd better see if she could sell the larch to get some of her money back from it. She'd better aim a little lower, or she wouldn't be able even to keep the shop.

Maybeth came out of Gram's room and got the spaghetti sauce ingredients out. Dicey started sautéing chopped onions in the big frying pan. Maybeth had wrapped an apron around her jeans, and was frowning as she worked the can opener around the can of tomato paste. “You're really terrific, Maybeth,” Dicey said, and meant it.

Maybeth shook her head. “I can cook, and I can sing. I'm pretty. But those aren't things I do. They're things I am. I failed the first semester of history, Dicey.”

That didn't have anything to do with it, Dicey thought. But Maybeth must think it did. Maybeth was like Gram, thinking that she wanted the door closed so she could hide out with her sickness in the dim light there, like some hunted animal going to ground in its burrow. “How badly did you fail it?” she asked.

“I got a fifty-one.”

“Then all you need is a sixty-nine or seventy to pass for the year. You can do that, Maybeth.”

Maybeth shook her head. “The best grade I've ever gotten is a sixty-four, on a homework assignment. And my map work passes.”

“What if I tried to help you learn?”

“You can't. You have the shop,” Maybeth explained.

“I could still, if we planned the time. Would you let me try?” Dicey asked.

“Of course. I'd like it, Dicey. But you don't have to. I don't mind.”

“I know you don't,” Dicey said. She wished she could learn from Maybeth how not to mind. Maybe if she tried, she'd be able to. But she did mind, and she didn't know how not to.

“It's Sammy that I mind about,” Maybeth said. She stirred the chopped meat into the cooking onions. “Because he should go to tennis camp.”

“We can't possibly afford that.”

“I know, and so does he. But he may be good enough for a scholarship and he can't even try for it. Because they've never heard of him.”

“Or seen him play,” Dicey pointed out. “I didn't think tennis camp was weighing him down.”

“It's not that. I just wish—”

“Me, too,” Dicey agreed.

W
hen the spaghetti sauce had been assembled and was cooking away with slow burping bubbles, thick and red like an edible volcano, Dicey and Maybeth sat down to Maybeth's history assignment. The whole kitchen smelled of tomatoes, onion, and meat, of the oregano and basil Maybeth had brought down fresh from her window garden. Dicey went to look in on Gram while Maybeth went upstairs to find her history notebook. Gram still sat up, still sat quiet.

“It smells as good as she promised,” Gram said, acknowledging Dicey's presence.

“Maybeth keeps promises.”

“Oh, well, we all do. Whether we should or not,” Gram said. She didn't say it as if it was important. She said it as if she was talking to herself.

“We're going to do some history,” Dicey told her grandmother, in case Gram was wondering, although she didn't think Gram was even thinking about them. This time she didn't ask. She checked the glass of water, to see that it was full enough, that it had cubes of ice still floating in it.

“About time something got done about that history.”

“Agreed,” Dicey said. “Hungry?” she asked.

Gram's head moved back and forth on the pillow. Dicey's heart hurt her, to see Gram lying still in her bed, so weak that it
looked like an effort for her to slowly shake her head and say no. Generally, Gram's noes came quick and sure, like gunshots, and her yesses, too. Dicey's heart felt swollen with sadness. There wasn't anything she could do except wait for Gram to get over this. But what if Cisco's hint was correct, what if Gram wasn't ever going to get better? Dicey turned away from the bedroom. She couldn't look that possibility in the eye, and she knew it.

Maybeth's assignment was to make a time line of the Civil War, because, she explained, they were having a unit test on Friday. Maybeth opened her textbook to a chapter titled “The War Between the States.” The chapter was illustrated by a long, narrow picture, where men in blue uniforms faced men in gray uniforms, and puffs of gun smoke filled the air between them.

Dicey looked at the papers spread out on the table, class notes, homework paragraphs (graded with angry red numbers, fifty-seven, fifty-three, forty-six, with angry red notes telling Maybeth to use facts to support her ideas, to organize, to improve her spelling), and a sheet of unlined paper with a thick black line across its waist, crowded with vertical lines to mark events. Everything on that time-line paper was so massed together, Dicey could barely find the names she knew she'd recognize, like Gettysburg and Bull Run. She always remembered Bull Run because they fought two battles there, and the result had been the same both times, thousands of men dead or injured, and a victory for the South. It wasn't who won that bothered Dicey, but the thousands of dead or injured, whoever won.

If they lived then, Dicey thought, Jeff would have been one of those young men. If you lived at the wrong time, then sometimes you didn't get any chance at all to live. Like Bullet, the uncle they'd never even seen, their momma's younger brother. Bullet lived at the wrong time and died in Vietnam.

She wanted to see Jeff, to hear his guitar and his voice, just to
be in the same room with him, or just to talk with him. She'd been forgetting about Jeff, but now—like the sun coming out after days and days of rain—he came back into her mind. She would call him, she decided. It was Saturday, he'd be in the dorm, she'd call him and talk for a long time with him. Everything was going wrong, going badly, but Jeff was something that was always right.

She brought her attention back to Maybeth's difficulties, and Maybeth's papers. The time line looked like a drawing of trees beside a river, with their reflections showing. Everything was all crowded together, cutting vertically through the thick time line. If it were a drawing of trees, they'd be in their thick summer abundance of branches and leaves, their trunks tangled with overgrown undergrowth.

Dicey didn't know what to say. She couldn't even tell where one decade ended and the next began. It was all a scrawl of pencil marks.

“What kind of a test will it be?” she asked.

“History,” Maybeth's gentle voice explained to her.

“No, I know that,” Dicey said impatiently. “I mean, essay or short answer? What kind of questions does she ask?”

“It's a he,” Maybeth said, her voice sounding small.

Dicey turned her head, about to tell Maybeth to answer the question. Maybeth was staring at her, concentrating as hard as she could, trying to understand what Dicey wanted from her. She was trying so hard to understand what Dicey wanted that she couldn't possibly understand, like when you try to concentrate on remembering to breathe, each breath in and each breath out, and you find that breathing is a hard thing to do.

Dicey slowed herself down. She reached out to put a hand on Maybeth's hand that clutched a pencil, ready to write down whatever she was told to write down, and she smiled into her
sister's worried face. “When he gives you a test, does he ask you fact questions? Like, to list the presidents? Give the right dates for battles and laws?”

Maybeth nodded.

“Are there map questions, where you have to put places on maps?”

Maybeth shook her head.

“How about paragraphs, does he ask you to write paragraphs?”

“No. It's all memory. And I can't remember enough.”

A time line would be a good way to study for that kind of test, if it were a good time line. This wasn't a good time line.

“Okay,” Dicey said. “How do you decide what to put on this time line?”

“From the topic sentences of paragraphs,” Maybeth told her. “I don't think I left anything out.”

Dicey, looking at the messy mass of pencil marks, thought probably she hadn't. But you couldn't memorize from that. Unless you had a photographic memory, that time line was going to be just so much gibberish, crowding across the paper from left to right.

“Maybeth, you can remember recipes, can't you?”

“That's different; it's easy. It's not just—words. I can remember music,” Maybeth explained, more relaxed now. “They tell you, if there's something you're good at then that's a good way to work. But music is notes, and they're easy to remember because you can hear them. And this is—just words.”

“You've been trying to do things as if they were music,” Dicey said. “But that doesn't work in history?”

“No. But it's the only thing I'm good at.”

So Maybeth didn't give up, but she kept doing things the same way, even when it didn't work. Dicey wondered, the idea
whipping across her mind like a sail whisked across the water under a brisk wind, if she was doing the same thing with her business. She shoved that idea aside, for later consideration. Now she was thinking about Maybeth.

“Since that way doesn't work, let's toss it,” she said.

“Okay.” Maybeth sat, pencil ready, waiting to be told how else to do it.

“How do you remember recipes?” Dicey asked.

“Because there are things you do first, to get ready. Then there are things you do to put everything together. Then it cooks.”

It didn't make much sense to Dicey, but Maybeth seemed to know what it meant. “So you separate things, into different steps,” Dicey pointed out.

“No, into boxes,” Maybeth corrected her patiently.

Dicey was about to start explaining it again, then a picture of a box came into her mind and she stopped herself. If Maybeth thought in boxes, and since Maybeth was the one who needed to learn those things, Dicey should try to think in boxes, too. “I don't understand,” she said.

“Because time doesn't look like this,” Maybeth traced the thick black line along its length. “Mr. Whoople says it does. But it doesn't because things all happen together. Like the things you do first. Music goes in a line, but time . . . Remember? There was the time we lived with Momma in Provincetown.” Maybeth drew a box on the paper. “Then there was the time we came down here. Now we're here.” Maybeth made boxes, all the same size, for each time she mentioned. Dicey looked at them and thought—the traveling time should be a smaller box, because there had been thirteen years in Provincetown, and eight years in Crisfield, but only a summer traveling. Maybeth had made them all the same size, so the one short summer had the same
time-size to Maybeth that the long years before and after did. Maybeth was measuring time in her own way. Measuring time that way, Dicey thought that she herself was beginning another box, for the time of her own life. She wanted to fill in that box with boats. Except, the way the box was starting out, she was filling in the box with failures.

“I see what you mean,” Dicey said. “But aren't there lines that connect the boxes together, or jump over some and come up later?”

Looking at her sister's blank, earnest face, Dicey knew that was what Maybeth started getting confused about, where she started getting too confused to remember. Dicey, suddenly feeling smart, feeling like she was solving problems, got to work. They taped four pieces of unlined paper together, to give them plenty of room. She and Maybeth made a box line, and then Dicey had the idea of using crayons, too. They spent the afternoon first filling in the events, the main facts, everything—speeches, laws, battles, names. Then they color-coded, choosing the right colors—like blue to underline battles the North had won, gray for Southern victories. When they were through, Maybeth looked down at her work and smiled. “It's pretty, isn't it?”