Seventeen Against the Dealer

by Cynthia Voigt

  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?”

  It was a long chart that showed a nation slipping into civil war, that showed the war being fought, battle after bloody battle. Dicey shook her head. She didn’t think it was any too pretty.

  “Look,” Maybeth said. They had used brown to underline anything that had to do with the slavery question. “Look at all the brown at the beginning and then it stops until”—she bent over the chart—“the Thirteenth Amendment. As if—”

  Dicey waited.

  “As if it all started over slavery but then it changed to be about something else,” Maybeth said.

  “Do you think you can figure out what it changed to?” Dicey asked. It had been so long since she’d done school learning, it actually felt good. Maybeth bent over the long sheet of paper, separated into boxes, connected by colors. Dicey sat back, and stretched. She got up to look in on Gram, whose eyes were closed in sleep again.

  “I can remember boxes,” Maybeth said, still staring at the paper. “I can understand colors. Thank you, Dicey. You know everything, don’t you?”

  “Not by a long shot,” Dicey promised her sister. She didn’t know much of anything, and she had just learned how little she knew. Looking at all those facts just made her start wondering about questions she didn’t know how to find answers for.

  It wasn’t that she was sorry not to be going to school anymore. She was just sorry she hadn’t continued learning. Cisco didn’t need school to learn. Gram didn’t. Dicey wondered what it took to be able to not stop learning. She didn’t know what the quality was, and she didn’t know if she had it. She was pretty sure, in fact, that she didn’t, and she didn’t know what to do about that. The quality might be named curiosity. If you weren’t too curious by nature, what did you do? You kept people around you who were, she thought, answering her own question.

  Like Jeff. She was going to call Jeff after supper. In fact, Dicey thought, smiling to herself, she was going to call him and say yes, she’d marry him. Now. She’d tried a boat business and it hadn’t worked, so she’d go ahead and marry
Jeff.

  Dicey held the prospect of that phone call out in front of her, like the promise of sunrise held out at the end of darkness. Knowing it was waiting out there ahead filled the time she spent between, and the things she did, with lightness. Dicey was the kind of person who saved the best until last.

  At dinner she just sat and listened to Sammy and Maybeth talk, asking occasional questions. “When does tennis start?” she asked, and “When’s the spring chorus performance? What are you singing?”

  When the dishes were done, and Maybeth and Sammy settled in the kitchen, Maybeth working on her history and Sammy writing an essay about a poem that started out “Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed”—“That’s not true Dicey, I feel—great, absolutely—perfect when I win a match. If it’s been a good match”—knowing that her brother and sister would hear if Gram needed anything. Dicey went into the living room to call Jeff.

  The phone rang and rang. Lazily, Dicey wondered if Jeff was in someone else’s room, talking or playing music. She pictured him there, sitting on the floor, the guitar in his arms. Finally someone picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  It wasn’t Jeff. “Hi, is Jeff there?” Dicey asked. She held the phone close against her ear.

  “No, he’s out,” the voice said.

  “You’re not Roger,” Dicey told the voice.

  “That’s right. I’m your proverbial passing stranger. Can I take a message?”

  “Do you know when Jeff will be back?”

  “God knows, tonight. It’s the midwinter dance. Rog and Jeff took their dates to dinner first, and the band’s been paid to play until whenever—as long as there are dancers on the floor. If I were you I’d try him some other time. Give him a couple of days to get back in shape, though—it promises to be quite a party. Any message?” the voice asked, impatient to be gone.

  “No,” Dicey said. She hung up.

  She wasn’t jealous, she was just puzzled. At least, she didn’t think the jumpy, chilly feeling in her stomach was jealousy. Fear maybe, because Cisco—who seemed to know his way around—had hinted to her that Jeff might have another girl. If Jeff did, it wouldn’t be messing around, because Jeff wasn’t that way. So if he did, it was serious, and Dicey had lost him. If she’d lost him, she knew who was responsible.

  Mina had said her mother said something like that same warning. But Dicey had always thought Jeff wasn’t like other boys, other men. And he hadn’t been, either. Except, she thought now, that what she meant by not being like them might just mean that she could count on Jeff to do what she wanted, exactly what she wanted, which wasn’t a terrific way to love anybody, was it?

  She waited until noon the next day, filling in the morning hours by washing the windows in the living room and dining room, worrying about Gram, whose cheeks were oddly pink and who felt awfully warm to Dicey’s hand, and who wouldn’t even try to eat the soft-boiled egg Maybeth made for her. At noon, she dialed Jeff’s number again. She didn’t think he’d sleep the whole day away. He wasn’t the kind of person to stay up partying all night and sleep away a day.

  “Hello.” Jeff’s voice traveled along the phone line, and into her heart. “Hello?”

  “Jeff.” She was as relieved to hear him as if she had wondered if he might not have gotten back to his own room yet.

  “Dicey?” He sounded surprised.

  “Yeah. Hi.” Now Dicey couldn’t think of what to say, how to say it.

  “How are you?” Jeff asked. He sounded careful, as if he was being careful. “What’re you up to?”

  “It’s Groundhog Day. Happy Groundhog Day,” Dicey said. She heard how stupid that sounded, so she went right ahead and asked: “What do you say we get married?”

  There was a silence in the phone, in her ear. Dicey could imagine what was going on in Jeff’s mind during that silence. Imagining it made her smile. She hadn’t known how good it would feel to give Jeff something he wanted so much.

  “Why?”

  What kind of a question was that? “Why what?”

  “Why all of a sudden do you say you’ll marry me?” Jeff asked patiently.

  “I always said I would,” Dicey reminded him. She knew what he meant, but she didn’t want to talk about it, not now. It was too complicated. It would take too long. “Why shouldn’t I?” She turned it into a joke. “You’re handsome, you’ve got money—how could I not want to marry you?”

  “No,” Jeff said.

  “No, what?”

  “No, let’s not get married,” Jeff said.

  That didn’t make sense. Dicey couldn’t understand what he said, because it just didn’t make sense. She tried to hear his voice, hear it so well she could see his face in it. She hated telephones. She should have driven up to Baltimore. She should have been able to see his face. This voice—it was Jeff’s voice, but it was a voice that was thinking seventeen thoughts for every word it said, as if everything Jeff said he wanted to have complete control over, so none of the words would slip away and mean anything he didn’t want them to mean. His voice kept its secrets. It didn’t give any clues to what his face would look like if she could see it.

  “Okay,” Dicey said.

  There were two silences now, one on each end. She didn’t understand and she needed to think.

  She understood, all right. He was saying no. That she understood, there was no confusion to that. She could feel how understanding it had cramped up her mind entirely, and most of her body, too. The hand holding the phone, for instance, looked like the hand of a statue that wouldn’t ever move. She didn’t need to think. She knew what it meant, Jeff saying no like that. “Well,” she said into the silence, her voice careful. “I guess there’s nothing much else. I’ll say good-bye, then.”

  “Good-bye, Dicey,” his voice said. “Thanks for calling.”

  Why had he added that at the end? She stared at the phone, with her heart cramped up tight. She hadn’t told him about Gram being sick, or about Mr. Hobart firing her, or about Cisco and the shop, or anything. He’d have wanted to hear about those things, and now he wouldn’t, and it served him right.

  But she knew she was kidding herself. She wasn’t angry, although she was trying to think angry. When something was lost, it was lost and gone. You had to admit that to yourself. Dicey didn’t even try to think she hadn’t lost Jeff. Hope was painful and it interfered with moving on. She couldn’t stand it if, along with everything else, she had to have hope.

  CHAPTER 18

  All the long afternoon—Dicey hadn’t ever known how long an afternoon could be. She concentrated on just getting through it, getting through with it.

  Mostly, the three of them hung around in the kitchen, worrying—without talking about it, because talking wouldn’t have done any good. The aspirin Gram had taken—with Maybeth lifting her head from the pillow and holding the glass of water to her mouth and Gram not even protesting—hadn’t brought down her temperature. Maybeth gave her more at two, but all Gram did was sleep them off. Awake, she’d cough, or move restlessly in her bed. She barely opened her eyes.

  Sammy and Maybeth had homework to do as they sat at the kitchen table, not talking. Dicey didn’t know how good their concentration was, but she figured she could make a guess. Dicey didn’t have anything to do. There was no reason now to work at trying to figure out the fundamentals of boat design. She’d never thought so hard over anything as she had those boat books, and never gotten so little understanding back in return. She’d have to return them to the library, she thought, sitting at the table, shuffling the worn deck of cards, laying out yet another game of solitaire. There was nothing else to do with her hands, and she didn’t want to think about anything, either. Mostly she didn’t want to think about Jeff.

  The no had gotten into her head. It was sinking through all the levels of her understanding, like a stone through thick water. When it hit bottom, she’d feel it. When it hit bottom, she’d know everything that no meant. Meanwhile, she laid the cards out on the table.<
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  Gram coughed, and Sammy surged up out of his chair, slamming the palms of his hands down on the table. He marched around the end of the table and across to the door of Gram’s room. “You are definitely not getting better,” he said.

  Dicey could barely hear Gram’s voice answering, “I’m fine.”

  “Ha,” Sammy said. “Ha, ha. Very funny. We’re going to call Dr. Landros, Gram.”

  “It’s Sunday,” the weak voice protested.

  “I don’t care,” Sammy said. He turned around. “Aren’t we?” he asked them.

  “I think so,” Dicey answered. “What do you think, Maybeth?” Maybeth nodded her head. Dicey heard Gram rustle out of bed and close the bathroom door behind her. Then she heard the sound of Gram coughing muffled by the closed door.

  Dicey got up and went into the living room. Because it was the weekend, she got only the answering service. She asked them to call Dr. Landros and ask her to telephone the Tillermans, and assured the woman that yes, it was serious. Even as she said that she hoped it wasn’t, but she didn’t feel any too confident. Dr. Landros would call them back as soon as she could, the woman at the answering service told her. Dicey paced back to the kitchen. She looked at the cards, and moved a red five onto a black six.

  The slow afternoon moved along. By the time they realized that nobody had thought about supper, it was too late to plan what to eat. Maybeth got up and opened the refrigerator door. She stood there, looking into it, and stood there, and looked into it, until Sammy finally asked her, “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m trying to think.” Maybeth didn’t turn around.

  Trying not to think would be closer to the truth, Dicey suspected. She got up to stand beside her sister. There were eggs. There was the pitcher of milk. There was a big piece of chuck, for pot roast, but it was too late to start a pot roast. The three inches of leftover spaghetti sauce in a mason jar wouldn’t feed the three of them.