Souvenir of Cold Springs (15 page)

“It would be so cold,” Ann said, making a face. They both knew that Aunt Peggy had frozen to death ice fishing on Onondaga Lake, long before they were born, even before their parents were born.

“No, it isn't,” Margaret said. “You just fall asleep. My father told me.”

“I couldn't go to sleep if it was that cold.”

“You would if it was cold enough.”

Ann wanted to pretend she was Aunt Peggy freezing to death, but Margaret didn't think it sounded like much fun—just going to sleep—and also it didn't seem right, it was so sad about Aunt Peggy, limberlost forever. Frozen as hard as the beetles. There was a picture of her on the piano downstairs with the other family faces, starting with Great-Grandpa Kerwin's mother in a long dress with a train, and ending with Margaret, Heather, Ann, and Peter posed on the front porch, all smiling for once. Aunt Peggy had dark hair pulled back from her face, and thin, straight eyebrows and a rosebud mouth. She looked sad, as if she had, like her mother, foreseen her own death. Uncle Jamie had once said, “Margaret's the picture of Peggy, isn't she?” and Aunt Nell had replied, “Let's hope the child has a better chance in life.”

When Peter called them from the bedroom they put away the jewelry. Margaret didn't want to, but she knew Ann was tired of it, and when Ann got tired of things she started fooling around. Margaret imagined her breaking the strand of blue beads and thinking up a game to play with them—Ann and Peter racing around the attic trying to hit each other with beads. She put everything carefully back in the box. She could come back after the others left. She and her parents always stayed overnight at Aunt Nell's because it was too far to drive back to Boston: her cousins and their parents lived in Albany, so they had to drive home. Margaret slept in the room that had been Aunt Peggy's, which had a bed with pineapple posts. The pineapple on each post was removable, and there was space inside to put something tiny. Last year she had hidden a silk flower from the bouquet in the hall, the year before a tiny tube of lip gloss that belonged to Thea.

The blue ring said
SOUVENIR OF COLD SPRINGS
in gold letters on the blue; Margaret wanted, desperately, to hide it in one of the bedposts, to keep it safe and private where she could always find it. But she would do that later, and she would snap the tiny snaps on the doll's leather shoes and take the bonnet off and stroke its golden hair, and look at
A Girl of the Limberlost
to see if she could read it. She was just beginning to read real books, with chapters.

Peter had drawn a picture of the two of them as animals. Margaret was just a tiger—well drawn, leaping through a hoop of fire and labeled with her name—but he had drawn Ann as a monkey with long brown hair all over her face and grinning gap-toothed mouth. “Look,” he said. “I made you almost as ugly as you really are.”

Ann grabbed the picture and ran out of the bedroom, crying. She said, “I'm going to tell Daddy,” and Peter said, “Who cares.” When she was gone, he looked at Margaret and laughed. “Aren't you going to cry, too? Or don't you mind being a tiger?”

She said, “It's a good drawing.”

He looked surprised and said, “Thanks.” He went over to the dresser and picked up the pencil box. “Come here,” he said. He and Margaret sat on the bed. “Look at this.”

“What?”

“This.”

From the pencil box he took an eraser and handed it to Margaret. It was pink, and said Eberhard-Faber in faint gray letters. It looked unused.

“So what?”

“What does it remind you of?”

“It doesn't remind me of anything,” she said. “It's an eraser.”

He snickered. “It doesn't remind you of anything else?”

“No.”

“That's because you're a girl. It reminds
me
of—” He took it from her and held it up. “See? You know.” She shook her head.

He sighed. “What do boys have that girls don't have?”

She stood up, “Oh, I don't know, Peter, you're such a dope.”

He took her hand and tried to pull her back down beside him. She twisted out of his grasp and ran to the bedroom door, but he was quicker than she was, and he slammed it shut. “Don't be a baby,” he said. “A big dumb baby like Ann.”

“I'm going.” She knew she wasn't a baby. She wanted to cry, but she wouldn't let herself. “Let me go.”

“Not yet.”

The room was darker with the door shut. It was getting late. Dinner, she knew, was at four o'clock. She wondered what time it was. He said, “You want to see my thing?”

“No.” What thing? She didn't care. “I'm going down. I'm going to tell if you don't let me go.”

He stood against the door, smiling at her. “Just look at this.”

He unzipped his brown pants and pulled it out. She had never seen one before, except on babies. It was bigger than she expected, much bigger than the eraser. He held it in his hand, like a hose. It was deadly white, whiter than his hand in the dim light, and there was scraggly hair around it, like the hair he drew on Ann's monkey face.

Peter waggled it and said, “See? Want to touch it?”

She put her weight against him and pushed with her shoulder. Still smiling, he let her push him, he fell back with an exaggerated stumble, still holding his thing. He was laughing softly, a horrible, artificial laugh that had nothing to do with her, it shut her out, it was all Peter's, but at the same time she knew she was the one he was laughing at.

She opened the door and ran out, across the brown darkness of the attic. “If you tell, I'll kill you,” she heard him say. Her own footsteps scared her, heavy and thumping. She ran down the wooden stairs, almost falling, fearing he would come after her. At the bottom, in the safety of the upstairs hall, she slammed the attic door and listened. She heard nothing except the thud of her heart and the conversation from down in the kitchen, but she imagined him creeping down the attic stairs, suppressing his laughter, and bursting out to frighten her. She ran into the room where she slept and shut the door.

Dinah was curled on the pineapple bed, sleeping. Even when Margaret lay down beside her she didn't stir: a round ball like a doughnut, her black tail trapped under her paws, her black wedge of a face scrunched quiet. There was white under her chin, one V-shaped patch where she liked to be stroked, but you couldn't see it when she was all curled up. Margaret whispered, “Wake up, Dinah, Dinah, Dinah,” and the cat lifted her head up sleepily and blinked, then yawned and began to purr.

Margaret lay petting her, listening for noises from the attic. She had slept in this bed on Thanksgiving for as long as she could remember. The bedspread was pale blue chenille striped with fluffy ridges, with a flower design in the middle. Her great-grandpa Kerwin had slept in the room across the hall until he got so small he died. Then Grandma Caroline had lived in it, and now her parents slept there when they visited. But this room had never belonged to anyone but Aunt Peggy, as far as Margaret knew. She imagined living in this house herself, when she was old, old as Aunt Nell. This was where old people lived, a house that was full of old people's things, dead people's things. She sniffed in the smell of the bedspread: a good smell of cat and clean cotton. This would be her room, this bed, this bedspread, the blue blankets and cold white sheets, the blue flowers on the wallpaper, the dressing table with the ivory mirror that was always facedown.

She wondered how long until dinner. She hoped her mother wouldn't come looking for her; there was a key stuck in the lock of the bedroom door, but she was forbidden to turn it. She hadn't run right to her mother from the attic: that proved she wasn't a baby. A picture of Peter, his big white teeth laughing, hovered just outside her mind; she wouldn't let it in, but she knew it was there, waiting. Sometime it would come to her. The window shade was pulled up. Outside it wasn't quite dark, and everything was cold and black and gray, the treetops crisscrossed lines. She saw a bird fly past, then another, then one stopped in a tree and was lost in the branches. A tear slipped down her cheek, and she wiped it on her sleeve.

She picked up the cat and held her in her arms, and Dinah settled against her, her paws kneading Margaret's shoulder. “You're my Dinah, my baby Dinah,” Margaret crooned. Dinah sighed, stopped purring, and went to sleep again, curled against Margaret's stomach. The room grew darker. Margaret dozed, safe, the cat warm against her, until she was awakened by someone screaming.

“
Well, she lost
another one,” her father said after dinner when he got back. His face was red and frowning, as if he were mad at everyone. He had gone in the ambulance with her mother. Her mother's skirt had been all covered with blood. There was blood on the hall carpet. Thea and Aunt Nell scrubbed it hard with a brush, but it wouldn't come out. They put a yellow bath mat over it.

The rest of them had sat down to dinner. Aunt Nell took Margaret out of the dining room and talked to her in the kitchen because she couldn't stop crying. “The blood wasn't because she was hurt,” Aunt Nell said. She knelt down and wrapped her two hands around Margaret's. “There might be a problem with the baby, but your mother will be all right. Don't be scared, Margaret. Come and eat your dinner. That's what Mommy would want you to do. Just calm down and eat some turkey.”

Margaret calmed down. She tried to eat some turkey, though she didn't like it, and she drank a big glass of Mr. Fahey's Pepsi when Uncle Teddy brought it for her. She couldn't stop thinking of the blood. In the back of her mind was still the bedroom, Peter's laugh. Across the table Peter looked as subdued as everyone else. He didn't look like Peter anymore—the cousin she hated. She still hated him, but he looked different. The grownups talked about the new president, and then about the old one who resigned. Aunt Nell called Nixon Tricky Dick, and Thea said, “That man makes me ashamed to be an American.” Uncle Jamie said he didn't like that kind of talk, and Mr. Fahey snickered uneasily, showing his snaggly old yellow teeth. Uncle Jamie said there was such a thing as loyalty. When Margaret looked at him, she thought of his old eraser in the attic.

Margaret's father didn't return until after the dishes were done. Aunt Nell made him a turkey sandwich, and he let Uncle Teddy give him a drink, for once. The grown-ups talked for a while in the kitchen. Margaret went to look at the blood spot in the hall—still there, under the bath mat—and then lay on the floor in the living room, looking at the coals glowing in the fireplace. She could hear Peter and Heather fighting upstairs. Aunt Kay came in and sat at the piano smoking and drinking brandy and picking out tunes. Margaret wished Aunt Nell would come in and talk to her again, or let her sit on her lap. Aunt Nell, who looked so tall and sharp, was the softest and nicest one of all when you sat on her lap. But Ann came in and plopped down on the rug next to Margaret.

“We could look in the attic,” she said.

“No,” Margaret said. “I'm sick of the attic.”

“But we could look. Somebody might have hid it there.”

Margaret stared at her. What did she know about the attic? She remembered the blue ring with the yellow letters. “Hid what?”

Ann leaned close and whispered in her ear. “The baby. Maybe we should look in the attic.”

Margaret pushed her away. “That's not what it means when you lose a baby, you dummy,” she said. Ann began to cry. Aunt Kay's piano playing got louder—big, harsh chords, then “Happy Birthday to You,” then “Frère Jacques.” Margaret rolled over on her stomach and put her hands over her ears.

Uncle Teddy came in and said, “What's this? What's this? We're going in a few minutes, Annie, so stop crying and go find your jacket. Kay? You about ready?”

Aunt Kay crashed her hands down on the keys with an ugly sound. “I suppose so,” she said. “Why not? Assuming you're in a condition to drive.”

“Don't give me a hard time, Kay,” Uncle Teddy said. “Just this once.”

Margaret stayed facedown on the rug. She heard Ann and Uncle Teddy leave the room, and then someone knelt beside her and put a hand on her shoulder. She tensed, but it was Aunt Kay. She patted Margaret's back and said, “Don't feel too bad, honey. It's more fun to be an only child.”

Margaret's mother stayed at the hospital that night. After the
Charlie Brown Thanksgiving Special
on TV, Aunt Nell tucked Margaret into bed; her father had gone to bed early. Aunt Nell talked to Margaret about the baby, kept saying she was sorry, and her Mommy and her Daddy were sorry, everyone was sorry—as if the baby was Margaret's treat, a toy for her that the store was sold out of.

Aunt Nell helped her take off her sweater and tights, and shook her nightgown out like a flag before she hung it over the radiator to warm. Then she said, “Would you like a massage, little one?”

It sounded like something to eat: something sweet and wobbly, she imagined, like Jell-O. She hated Jell-O. She stood shivering in her underpants, looking dubiously at her aunt. “I don't know.”

Aunt Nell laughed and said, “Here—I'll show you. Hop up on the bed.”

She lay down and her aunt began to rub her back. Aunt Nell's hands were warm and soft, and they pressed hard but not too hard, cupping around her shoulders and then moving down to the sides where it almost tickled and then down to where her underpants began.

“Feel good?”

“Mmm.”

Aunt Nell rubbed the tops of her legs and the backs of her arms and then her back and shoulders again, kneading like a cat. She leaned over close, humming slightly, and when she stopped humming Margaret could feel her breath on her skin. The house was completely quiet. Thea had gone home, and Mr. Fahey. Uncle Jamie was out in his studio over the garage. Her father was asleep. Margaret began to feel drowsy. The massage felt good, but she wished Aunt Nell would stop. She moved restlessly, and Aunt Nell stilled her hands.