War and Millie McGonigle

by Karen Cushman

  Gram. I missed her, too, and I wanted her back. I wanted her here and safe. All of us, here and safe. I patted the book in my pocket.

  Edna finished with her hair, and then she couldn’t find her glasses again. Lily found them in the refrigerator.

  “Is Cousin Edna crazy?” Lily asked me in a whisper as we brushed our teeth.

  I spit before answering. “Mama says no. Cousin Edna just does stupid stuff sometimes, she forgets things, and she gets confused. That’s why we inherited her now that Gram is gone.”

  Lily spit. “Tell me a story about Gram. I’m already forgetting her.”

  “Don’t bother me. You remember her fine.”

  “Nyah-ah. Tell me or I’ll wheeze and Mama will worry.”

  “Okay, okay. You’re such a pill, Lily.” I took an irritated breath. “So, once upon a time there was an old lady who was very little—”

  “Little as me?”

  “Don’t be silly—little for a grown-up, but smart and tough, with the curliest hair you ever saw and funny little glasses she perched on the end of her nose. She worked at the public library downtown and every lunchtime went to the zoo, where she fed bread to the chickens, even though you’re not supposed to.” I could feel my eyes prickle.

  “Tell me more,” Lily said.

  “Well, this old lady liked laughing, dancing, and sunshine. She had a crush on President Roosevelt, brought strangers home for supper, and always had a petition to right some wrong that she’d try and get people to sign. Every Sunday she came to visit her grandchildren, even though it took an hour on the bus, and she—”

  “That’s enough,” said Lily. “I remember now.”

  And she died, I finished to myself. She died.

  Did Gram know she was dying when it happened? Was she afraid? Where was she now? Was she happy? Did they have poker in heaven? And petitions? And hungry chickens?

  In the bedroom Cousin Edna was asleep, snoring softly, her teeth in a glass by the bed. Why was Gram gone and Cousin Edna still here?

  The radio was on, of course, with news that a bomber on a training mission from the navy base in Point Loma had plunged in a spin into San Diego Bay, killing the fliers. Ensign G. A. Jungjohann, who was the pilot, and Machinist Mate J. J. Brewer, the announcer said. Knowing their names made them real. What were they like? Did they have families or girlfriends? Could they jitterbug?

  “I’m going for a walk,” I called to no one and everyone. I had to get away from the news.

  Early-morning fog had moved out, but the day was still cool and misty, and the moist air was soft on my face. The few houses strung along the bay side this far south were quiet early on a Sunday, the silence broken only by gently lapping waves and, now and then, the screech of a gull.

  George was digging for octopus in the distance. I waved to him but didn’t go any closer. I wasn’t in the mood for sad-eyed octopuses.

  I stepped through the weeds and sticker bushes that covered a point of land bounded by rubble and boulders jutting into the bay. Sometimes kids played baseball there with rude and noisy shouts of “Batter! Batter!” and “Aww, yer blind!” and “My sisters’ stockings run better than you!” and the games would disintegrate into wrestling matches, but today the point was empty and peaceful. I scrambled down onto the rocks and sat, my feet in the water. Tiny waves splashed at my ankles. A pair of mallards glided past, the male’s glossy green head glistening, and a cormorant dived for its breakfast, cleaving the water without a sound.

  The water was cool and so clear I could see fish—minnows, smelt, tiny perch—darting by. Whiskered bullheads nibbled at my toes, so I took a slice of bread from my pocket, dropped crumbs into the water, and laughed as the fish sucked them in. I lay back against the rocks, feeling the morning sun on my face like a kiss, and drowsed.

  Suddenly a squadron of navy planes soared above and dived. The roar of their engines ripped through the quiet morning and echoed in the silence. The very sound made the hair on my arms stand up.

  I pulled my Book of Dead Things from my pocket. Along with my dead-fish drawings was a list of dead people, starting with my grandpa. I didn’t really know him, but his name was Harry Morgan and he smelled sweet and smoky like his cigars. That much I remembered.

  I needed to add the names of the poor navy fliers who’d died. Brewer was easy to spell, but I wasn’t at all certain about Jungjohann. It seemed that the least I could do for the poor dead pilot was spell his name correctly.

  I wrote the fliers’ names right after President Roosevelt’s mother; Florence’s great-uncle Max, who, dizzy with excitement when the Dodgers won the pennant, fell off a streetcar; Lou Gehrig, the great first baseman, Pop’s favorite player even if he was a Yankee; and Kazan the Wonder Dog from the movies. If the president’s own mother and Lou Gehrig, “the Iron Horse,” could die, why, then, anyone and anything could die. I still hadn’t entered Gram’s name onto the list of dead people. I didn’t know why. I just couldn’t. I shrugged and closed the book. I remembered her fine anyway.

  On my way home I stopped at the Graysons’ cottage. I’d heard a rumor that Mr. Grayson’s nephew had been wounded in France. If he died, I could add him to the book. I needed to get more information from the Graysons without creeping them out. It was a delicate task.

  They were sitting in beach chairs on their tiny front lawn, and Mrs. Grayson introduced me to her brother-in-law, Albert Wizzleskerkifizzlewitz or something really long and odd like that.

  He popped up and gave me a tiny bow. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” he said with a tip of his hat.

  I tried not to snort. Albert was funny-looking. Really funny-looking. Bony and loose-limbed as if he were made of Popsicle sticks and paper clips. With his giant round head on a long skinny neck, he looked like a pumpkin on a pole. A pumpkin with a big nose. But his eyes were kind and his smile was wide.

  “How’s your nephew, Mr. Grayson?” I asked. “He isn’t dead or anything, is he?”

  Mr. and Mrs. Grayson exchanged glances before Mr. Grayson said, “No, he’s okay. He’ll have a limp for a while, but—”

  “How about any of his soldier friends? Or anyone else? I’m keeping an account of dead and lost people and things because…well, because my gram…because I’d forget…well, because.” I looked down at my feet. It was hard to explain.

  Mr. Grayson stared at me like I had three heads, but Albert said, “I get it. There’s so much to worry about in this world and so little we can do about it. We have to watch over and remember what we can.” And he smiled his warm smile.

  I decided to like him.

  Suddenly his eyes snapped and bulged out like Bugs Bunny’s do when he sees something he wants, and he gulped a big gulp. I turned to see what had caused such a reaction.

  Edna! It was Edna, tottering down Bayside Walk in a cloud of Jungle Gardenia with her arms full of grocery bags. Albert jumped up and stumbled to the walkway. “Let me help you with those bags, Mrs….”

  “It’s Miss,” said Edna, handing the bags to Albert. “Miss Duffy, and I think I’ll rest here for a spell.” She dropped into a chair next to Mrs. Grayson and smiled a cunning, teasing sort of smile at Albert. “You, sir, are a real gentleman.” Albert’s ears turned red, and he clutched at the grocery bags.

  Was Edna flirting? How grotesque! Even though I hadn’t collected anything dead for my book, I had to get away. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Wizzyfizz…”

  “Just call me Albert,” he said. Turning to Edna, he repeated in a sort of syrupy voice, “Just call me Albert.”

  Christopher Columbus!

  “Sit yourself down,” Mama said when I got back. “I have some news for you.”

  More news! More changes! More trouble! Holy mackerel! “What, is someone smellier than Edna moving in?” I flopped into a chair.

  “That’s unkind, Millie,” Mama said. She pushed away the stack of coupons and box tops in fr
ont of her. Mama said she was a poet but mostly she wrote advertising jingles for prizes. “I heard from Rose McGrew that Vernon Fribble’s brother’s wife from Chicago is sick and has come to California for the healthy air.” Mama lit a cigarette and dragged deeply. “She and her daughter are living with the Fribbles. You say you have no friends since Florence left. The girl’s only a little older than you and won’t know anyone here, so maybe you two could be friends.”

  I didn’t need friends. I had Gram and Florence, even though they were gone, and didn’t want any more. Besides, friends with a Fribble? Good gravy!

  Mama actually thought she was helping me, trying to recruit friends for her hopeless daughter. Wasn’t cutting out money-off coupons, writing jingles for free stuff, and spoiling Lily the pill keeping Mama busy enough? There already was hardly any time left for me and Pete. Pete didn’t seem to mind—he had the Lone Ranger, after all—but I missed my mother. I missed spending time with her, just me and Mama, baking cookies and telling stories. Once when I was longing for a real Christmas like I’d read about in books, we sang carols, made snow angels in the sand, and had hot chocolate. But that was a long time ago. It seemed like Mama never saw me anymore unless she had bad news to share. And now she thought I could be friends with a Fribble.

  “Sure, Mama, friends,” I said, and rolled my eyes. “That’s certainly a possibility.” On my list right after marrying Icky Fribble and flying to the moon.

  “Here,” Mama said, “give me a hand with these.” She shoved over scissors, a stack of magazines, and some empty box tops that she had collected from the few neighbors who didn’t have to save ten cents on soap or get two boxes of CheeriOats for the price of one. My job was cutting the coupons from the magazines and matching them with the box tops. Hers was filling out entry forms and writing jingles to accompany them. I picked up the scissors and twirled them on my finger, then snipped haphazardly at my hair. “I wonder how I’d look in bangs.”

  “Quit fooling around and do something useful. And stop biting your fingernails.” Mama sighed. “If Edna had a brain in her head, I could trust her to see to the house and you kids. I could get a job and not have to waste my life trying to find rhymes for Budweiser and shredded wheat.” She chewed on her pencil. “Speaking of brains, mine seems to have dried up. What do you think of these jingles? Something poetic”:

  Six or eight or ten or teen,

  At school and sports they’re more than keen.

  Healthier kids you’ve never seen

  Because they drink their Ovaltine.

  I frowned. Corny.

  “Or something simple: Maxwell House coffee, too good to be just for breakfast.”

  “Boring, Mama. And ordinary. What about…” I waved the scissors in the air and sang, “Eat Sunsweet prunes both morns and noons to keep your bowel from crying foul!”

  “Don’t be vulgar, Millie.” There was more pencil chewing and paper shuffling from Mama. “Look at this one, a contest with a prize of cash money—two dollars! They want one hundred words or less on why your house needs air freshener.”

  “I can do it in two words,” I said, scissoring loudly. “Cousin Edna.”

  The day was warm, the sun bright, and the tide high. In the old days, Pop would grill hot dogs on a day like this, and Mama would make macaroni salad and Kool-Aid freezer pops. I’d talk Pop into swimming with me and we’d race to the Lempkes’ dock and back. He usually let me win. Now hot dogs are a frill, Pop is too tired and worried to swim, and fun is hard to come by.

  I scoured the beach for things for my book, but pickings were slim—a couple of mussel shells and a sand crab. Icky Fribble’s older brother, the dumb Dwayne, and his even dumber friends were acting stupid, shoving and splashing each other in the water. A flock of girls giggled and squealed and flipped their hair as they watched. When did girls get so dumb? Hit junior high, and your brains turn to mush at the sight of skinny boys in bathing suits. Good gravy!

  I pulled our rowboat into the water and climbed aboard with a jelly sandwich and Little Women from the library. Facing the stern of the boat, I dipped the oars and rowed. The rhythmic motions were slow and calming, soothingly repetitious, and the boat glided on the water like a great seabird. All was quiet out there, with only the sound of splashing against the bow and the oars clacking in the oarlocks as they slipped in and out of the water. A seagull circled silently overhead but paid me no mind, as if I were part of the bay, and the sky, and the creatures in it.

  The sun on my back relaxed my shoulders and my thoughts. I belonged to the bay, and it to me, and for a moment all was well.

  When I reached a spot where the bay was calm and smooth, I rested the oars. The water was so clear here you could see all the way to the bottom. Hundreds of sand dollars, wedged on edge into the sandy floor, swayed in unison as the water moved over them, and a bright orange garibaldi drifted by. There was no war talk out here. No Mama trying to find enough coupons for dinner. No Pop failing to find a real job. No Lily having a bad day. No Cousin Edna.

  The boat bobbed on the water as I finished my sandwich. The sun warmed me into sleepiness and I lay back, eyes closed. There was boysenberry jelly on my hands and my face and my book—Gram’s jelly, made from her own berries. It tasted like summer. There would be no more jelly now that Gram was gone.

  Once Gram and I made gingerbread for Christmas. She said it was a good thing for girls to know, like songs of protest and the phone number of your state representative. She tied a towel over my dress for an apron and put me in charge of sifting flour. It drifted around me, and I imagined a gentle snowstorm falling.

  Lily had wanted to come to Gram’s, too, but I annoyed her into a wheezing fit so I was able to go by myself. Gram rode out to the beach and shepherded me back to her apartment. When we left, Lily was cuddled in Mama’s lap and Mama was crooning some sweet song to her. A twinge of jealousy pinched me, but I would have Gram all to myself.

  Gram pulled out the cinnamon and cloves and allspice and added them to the flour and sugar with the eggs and buttermilk. “A little spice, a little sweet, and a tiny bit of sour. Just like life,” she said.

  Lily was the sour in my life, I thought as I whisked the batter. “Gram,” I asked, “how come Mama loves Lily best?”

  “Millie, you had your mama all to yourself for five years before Lily came along. Don’t begrudge Lily her share now. There’s plenty of love in your house for all of you.”

  “Still…” I started to argue but decided I didn’t want to waste precious time with Gram talking about Lily.

  We ate the gingerbread warm with cold glasses of milk. To my taste, the gingerbread could have been a little sweeter, but that was true of my life, too, I thought as I chewed.

  When I finished, Gram patted my cheek and smiled. I could almost feel her soft hand on my face now.

  I sat up, startled. There was something in the water, stroking through the bay. It wasn’t a seal. Not big enough to be one of the surfers. Who or what could it be?

  A splash sounded and a face popped up. The face wore goggles filled with water, but I recognized the yellow hair and red, peeling nose. No, not a seal but Dicky Fribble.

  “Well, cut off my legs and call me Shorty, if it ain’t Mil-dreadful, the pride of the McGargles.”

  “Hello, Icky. Let go of my boat and go drown yourself.” I turned to my book.

  “My brother, Dwayne, says the Nazis have invented an invincible secret weapon and they’ll be here before Christmas. That scare you, Mil-barge?” he asked with a splash.

  “Knock it off. You’re ruining a library book. And Nazis don’t scare me half as much as your face.”

  “Better get yourself some leather pants and learn to yodel. The Nazis are coming. Jawohl, jawohl, heil Hitler!” Splash. “Be seein’ ya.” With another splash he was gone.

  “Not if I see you first,” I muttered.

  Were the Nazis really co
ming here? Our house would be an easy target—just aim for the Sweeneys’ big pine. I rowed in and beached the boat. As I ran for home, hungry gulls soared and dived above me like bomber planes.

  Pete was sitting in front of our house surrounded by hills of snow. No, not snow. Toilet paper. He was unrolling it as fast as fog moving in on a gloomy June morning.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, gathering up armfuls of paper.

  He held out two empty cardboard tubes. “I’m making binoculars. Me and Ralphie and MeToo are watching for German ships coming into the bay.”

  Gee whiz. Even five-and-a-half-year-olds were obsessed with the possibility of war. “Better to watch for Mama. She’ll have kittens if she sees you ruining all this toilet paper.” I tried to roll the paper onto the tubes again but finally gave them back to Pete and stuffed the paper into the trash can. “Besides, ships can’t sail into the bay. It’s too shallow, especially at low tide.”

  “Help me, Millie.”

  “I just did.”

  “No, help me stick these tubes together so they’re real binoculars.”

  I got masking tape from the kitchen and taped the tubes together. “If I were you, I wouldn’t let Mama see them. She’ll charge you five cents a roll for the wasted paper.”

  Pete held the cardboard binoculars to his eyes. “Don’t worry. I’ll be able to see her coming from a mile away.” He trotted off to find Ralphie and MeToo, who were making their own binoculars. There probably wasn’t a roll of toilet paper left in Mission Beach.

  In the kitchen the radio was broadcasting the war news that was becoming the background music of my life. Mama saw my face and said, “Enough,” and turned it off.

  “Mama, do you think the war will really come here? Why can’t Hitler be satisfied with all of Europe?”

  “Come on, Millie, we can’t let him have Europe. He’s doing awful things. Sooner or later America will have to fight him.”

  “I sure hope it’s later. Much later. Like when I’m already dead.”