The Book of One Hundred Truths

by Julie Schumacher

  Edmund poked me again, and I pulled up an eyelid. Jocelyn’s bed was already made. I felt as if someone had roughed up my brain with a piece of sandpaper. “Draw something easier,” I told Edmund. “Draw a bird. Or a stick.” I tried to roll over. Sleep was still waiting for me, like my own dark cocoon.

  “I don’t want to draw a stick.” Edmund tugged my covers. “I want to make a birthday card for Nenna.”

  Some of my hair was stuck to my cheek. I peeled it away and sat up, remembering my conversation with Jocelyn from the night before. It was time to hide my notebook.

  I looked at Edmund. “It isn’t anyone’s birthday today,” I said. “Nenna’s birthday is in January.”

  This didn’t seem to bother him. He still wanted to make her a birthday card. “I have my markers,” he said. “Look.” He held a green felt-tip marker about half an inch away from my nose.

  “All right, all right. Just give me a minute.” I scanned the attic for a hiding place. I couldn’t hide the notebook in my bed. Even when I made the bed (normally I didn’t), Jocelyn insisted on correcting my work by smoothing out the wrinkles. I couldn’t hide it in my dresser, either—that was probably the first place Little Miss Curious-Pants would look. Until I could come up with something better, I decided to settle for a box of winter clothes in the corner—and a booby trap. That was an old trick that Gwen had taught me. I put two human hairs and ten grains of sand on the notebook’s first page. If anyone picked up the notebook or tried to read it, the hair and the sand would all fall out.

  Truth #24: Gwen and I used to hide things from her little sister.

  “Okay, Edmund, I’m ready.” I managed to help him draw a green stegosaurus that looked like a dog. A bubble coming out of its mouth said, Happy Big Dinosaur Birthday to Nenna.

  “There,” I said. “What made you think it’s Nenna’s birthday, anyway?”

  “Aunt Ellen said it was.” Edmund held up the drawing with both hands so that he could admire it.

  “Ellen did? I kind of doubt that, Edmund.” I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and brushed my hair.

  “She did,” he insisted. “She said it wasn’t a very good surprise for Nenna, because she’s getting old.”

  I put down my hairbrush. “What isn’t a very good surprise?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, who was Ellen talking to?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again. “She was on the phone.”

  I went into the bathroom to get dressed while Edmund waited, and then I carried his markers and his pad of paper down the two flights of stairs to the kitchen. Nenna was pouring herself a cup of coffee. She hadn’t gotten dressed yet; she was wearing her blue flowered bathrobe and matching slippers. On anyone else, an outfit like that would have looked ridiculous. On Nenna, I thought, it was graceful and pretty.

  “Hey, Nenna,” I said.

  “Good morning, Thea.”

  Edmund bounded toward her and pushed his face into her stomach.

  “There you are!” she said, rubbing his hair. “I had a dream about you last night. I woke up and thought, There’s Edmund. In the morning I’ll be able to see him outside my dream.” She listened to him ramble on about his picture, which they taped to the refrigerator door.

  Truth #25: My Nenna is probably the kindest and most patient person on the face of the planet.

  The kitchen was empty. “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  She sipped her coffee. “Liam and Austin are still asleep. They have the day off.” She tickled the back of Edmund’s neck. “Phoebe was here, but she just left. She put the baby down for an early nap and went out for a walk. And your Granda is resting.”

  My Granda used to be the first one up in the morning. He used to open the porch door and the windows and say, “Look what the day’s going to bring us!”

  I looked past the counter with its row of mismatched vinyl stools; the living room was empty, too. “What about Jocelyn?”

  “She’s out with Celia. They’re running some errands. We needed more soap for the kitchen, and there’s a particular kind that Ellen likes to use. I think it comes in a yellow bottle.”

  Only Ellen would care about a particular kind of dish soap.

  “But she left you a note,” Nenna said. “Jocelyn did, that is. Where did I put it? I understand it’s highly confidential.” She handed me a piece of paper that was folded up into a square and taped shut on the edges. On the outside it said, For Thea Only. Only Thea Can Reed This.

  I slit the tape with my fingernail and unfolded the page. It was pink, with a row of kittens across the top. I am folowing her, the note said. I will be bak.

  I refolded the note, dropped it into the trash, and looked around the kitchen for something to eat. “Half the people in this house have gone bonkers,” I muttered.

  “I’m sorry, Thea?” Nenna took out her hearing aid and tapped it against the kitchen counter. “Sometimes they make a whistling noise.” She fit the device back inside her ear. “Edmund, would you lower the sound on the TV, please?”

  Edmund had parked himself in front of some kind of nature show: a snake about twenty feet long was eating something, and the back half of the something was still kicking and squirming.

  “There. That’s better. What were you saying, Thea?”

  “Nothing. I was just saying that, you know, sometimes it seems like Celia and Ellen are…” I remembered my mother’s word. “…eccentric. And Jocelyn’s kind of that way, too.”

  Nenna took a broom from the hall closet. “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she said, “it’s very sweet of you to spend so much time with Jocelyn. I can tell she looks up to you.”

  I found a banana in a bowl on the counter. It had some brown spots on one side, so I put it back. “I doubt she looks up to me,” I said. “I haven’t been all that nice to her.”

  Truth #26: Theodora Grumman is not a nice person. A nice person would not have done the things I did at Three Mile Creek.

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” Nenna said. “You’ve been very generous and accommodating, agreeing to share a room this year. And I think it does Jocelyn a lot of good. Personally, by the way, I’ve always found you very impressive.”

  My Nenna was four inches shorter than I was, but I wanted to put my head on her shoulder. Or even sit on her lap. “What do you mean, you think it does her a lot of good?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  I tried to speak up. “What’s the deal with that rash of hers?” I asked. “It looks like it’s spreading.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about the rash,” Nenna said. “It’s not contagious. Most people grow out of it. Would you get me that dustpan, please? Of course, anxiety and stress can make eczema worse.”

  I handed her the dustpan. “But Jocelyn doesn’t have anything to be stressed out about.”

  The giant snake on TV (was it the same snake or a different one?) was laying a cluster of wet, leathery eggs in a little burrow.

  “I’m sure everyone has their own roster of difficulties,” Nenna said. She opened the sliding door and together we stepped out onto the porch, where the sun was still burning off a layer of morning fog. My Nenna swept the sand off the porch every morning, and by afternoon it was covered with sand again. She was always moving, always busy. She seemed to have a list of things to do that revolved in her head.

  “I doubt Jocelyn has very many difficulties,” I said.

  Nenna nudged a small pile of sand off the edge of the porch.

  “If she does, she probably invented them herself. She’s always scheming and fussing with things,” I said, sitting down. “And rearranging the stuff on her dresser.”

  Nenna collected some newspapers that someone had strewn across the wicker sofa. “I remember when you were Edmund’s age you discovered counting,” she said. “You counted everything. The number of steps on the staircase, the number of forks in the silverware drawer. You wanted everything to come out even.”

  “That was different.” I blushe
d. “I was five years old.” I lifted my feet so that she could sweep in front of me. “Are you saying that I’m as weird as Jocelyn?”

  Nenna leaned her broom against the wall. “No. I’m saying there’s nothing wrong with counting. Or rearranging your dresser. Grummans tend to be creatures of habit.”

  I pictured Ellen and Phoebe and Celia and Nenna and Granda and Jocelyn and even Liam and Austin as Creatures, with rubbery skin and tentacles and hooves.

  Truth #27: I don’t want to be a Creature of Habit.

  I remembered an afternoon when Mr. Hanover, the school counselor, had paused in the middle of a sentence because he had been watching me touch each of my fingertips to my thumbs, back and forth, from my index fingers to my pinkies. It kept my hands busy, and I was nervous. Mr. Hanover had leaned toward me, his gleaming black shoes sliding under his chair along the carpet, and said, “Thea? That little mannerism with your fingers? Is that something you have to do?”

  Nenna tucked the newspapers under her arm, picked up her broom, and opened the screen door. I followed her. What if I was as weird as Jocelyn? Maybe—even if I didn’t scratch myself all day and have a serious fascination with housework—I was at least as weird, or worse. I shut the ocean behind us with a click.

  The house was still quiet. In the living room, Edmund had abandoned his television snakes and was playing with a dump truck on the floor. Granda was watching the Weather Channel. He spent most of his time napping and studying the weather. He didn’t seem to care whether he was listening to news about thunderstorms in Oregon or about heatstroke in Oklahoma. “Hey, Granda,” I said. He lifted his hand in a slow-motion salute.

  “Oh, Thea, I meant to tell you,” Nenna said, “you got a card from your parents yesterday.” She started picking up coffee mugs and bundles of knitting and Edmund’s art projects. “Here it is. It’s addressed to you, but since it’s a postcard, a few pair of eyes have already seen it.”

  I picked up the card. On the front was a picture of the Minneapolis skyline: a cluster of tall blue-gray buildings with the white mushroom of the stadium squatting in front of them. Dear Thea. I recognized my father’s printing. He always printed. We hope you are being kind to your Grumman relatives and to yourself. Keep us posted. We’ll see you soon. At the bottom of the card, squeezed under the address, was a single sentence from my mother, in script. Are you working on the notebook of truths?

  Nenna put her broom away in the kitchen. She washed her hands and started taking the pits out of a pound of cherries. Granda couldn’t eat them if they had pits.

  I studied the postcard. I had talked to my parents only once (“Hi, Mom, yes, I’m here, and I’m being polite to everyone”) since I’d been in Port Harbor. They were sort of old-fashioned that way: they liked the idea of cards and letters. I read my mother’s sentence again. What on earth had she been thinking? Now everyone would know I was keeping a notebook. And they would all want to talk about it, and they would probably want to read it, or at least find out what it was.

  Truth #28: I have never told anyone what happened at Three Mile Creek.

  “Try one of these,” Nenna said. She plucked a cherry from the top of the pile and fed it to me. It was dark and sweet.

  “Sometimes my parents make a big deal out of things,” I said, looking at the postcard. There was no doubt about it: I was going to have to destroy the notebook. Maybe I could burn it, or flush it down the toilet.

  Truth #29: I thought my parents would find out somehow. Why didn’t they find out?

  “They always think there’s something going on,” I said. “They’re always asking me questions.”

  Nenna smiled. The juice from the cherries ran from her fingers to her wrinkled elbows.

  “It’s pretty annoying, actually.” I picked through the cherries, eating a few of the best-looking specimens. “I kind of wish they would leave me alone.”

  The baby monitor on the counter let out a squeak. “Whoops. That must be Ralph waking up,” Nenna said. “Do you want to go check on him?”

  I was feeling crabby. A bad mood was gathering like a cloud inside my head. “I don’t know how to check on him.”

  “There’s no how about it,” Nenna said. The TV predicted rain in Miami. “If he’s asleep, just leave him there. If he’s awake, you can pick him up.”

  “But what if he cries?”

  She rinsed off the cherries. Her short thin hair was like a silver cap on her head. “I’ll give you a little demonstration.” She washed her hands and led me down the hall.

  “I don’t think I’m going to have kids when I get older,” I said. “I probably won’t get married, either. I’m probably just going to live by myself.” We walked up the stairs. “I mean, some people probably like having big families, and they like having friends. I just want to be by myself and be normal.” I realized that I wasn’t making a lot of sense, but I couldn’t stop talking. “The problem with our family is that it’s probably impossible to grow up to be normal. I mean, most people don’t alphabetize the groceries”—I had seen Phoebe do this—“or play games at dinner. And what about Ralph? What if Ralph doesn’t want to be a Creature of Habit? What if he just wants to be a regular person?”

  “Shhh.” Nenna stopped and turned toward me. She put her hand on my shoulder. “Theodora Elizabeth,” she said. Half her face was in shadow. “Did you know that your parents were nervous at first about giving you such a long name?”

  “No.” I was ashamed of myself, but I wasn’t sure why.

  “They were. Eight syllables.” Nenna opened the door to her room, and together we walked in and saw Ralph struggling on his stomach in the cage of his crib. His arms and legs were paddling away, but they weren’t getting him anywhere. He was pale and fleshy in his T-shirt and diaper. I thought he looked like a bug—like a little white grub.

  “They worried that they should try to find something shorter,” Nenna said. “Or something easier to pronounce.” She pushed a couple of buttons and lowered one side of the crib. “But finally they realized that they didn’t want to give you a baby’s name, or a little girl’s name; they wanted to give you the name of the person they hoped you would grow up to be. And so that’s what they did. And you’re filling that name, one piece at a time—all eight admirable syllables.”

  She leaned over Ralph’s mattress. “Who’s my boy? Where’s Ralph? Where’s my sweetcake?” Nenna’s voice was a song. She scooped Ralph up and settled him against her neck. He was still half-asleep; his bald head bobbled back and forth. “Hold out your arms for him.”

  I did what she told me. Ralph squiggled softly against my chest.

  “I want you to promise me something,” Nenna said. “When Ralph grows up, I want you to tell him that he should be proud of himself. I want you to tell him that his family loves him. That they will always love him, and they will stand by him no matter what. Can you do that?”

  I nodded. Something rose up inside me, some sort of airy little elevator lifting off from my stomach.

  “There. See how he trusts you?” Nenna said.

  I patted Ralph’s fat little wrist with a finger and his eyes flicked open. They were round and blue, as if he were surprised to wake up and find himself in the world.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It wasn’t easy, swallowing paper. I had heard about people doing it, chewing up entire sheets of loose-leaf and forcing the wet gobs of pulp down their throats. But I couldn’t do it. I was sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, my mother’s notebook of truths in my lap and a thick and gummy soup on my tongue. I felt like I’d eaten a mouthful of paste—the kind from the jar that we used to use in kindergarten.

  “Thea?”

  I gagged on a wad of paper and coughed. “What?” Why couldn’t I be left alone for ten minutes?

  “I’m back. Did you get my note?” It was Jocelyn. Who else?

  I scraped the mess from my tongue with a toothbrush. I wasn’t eating my notebook—not yet. But I was thinking about eating it. I had decided
to experiment by trying to eat an envelope first. It was a fairly small envelope, and I figured if I could get it down, I could work my way up to some thicker paper. “Yes, I got your note,” I said through the door. I coughed, then spat in the sink.

  “Are you throwing up?” I could tell that Jocelyn was standing about an inch away from the door. Her whispery voice was like a needle.

  “No. I’ll be out in a minute.” I looked in the mirror over the sink and saw that my face was red from coughing. Normally I was sort of pale, my skin the color of new cement. My hair was an in-between shade that my mother called auburn. I wiped a splotch of chewed-up paper off my cheek.

  “I have to use the bathroom,” Jocelyn said.

  “Go use a different one.” I coughed again, then rinsed my mouth out with water.

  “Are you still throwing up? Should I go get Nenna?”

  “I am not throwing up,” I said. “Just use a different bathroom.”

  “But—Thea?”

  “Go. Away. Jocelyn.” I heard a gentle scraping against the door.

  I dried my hands on the back of my shorts and picked up my notebook. To eat it or not to eat it? The paper was thick, with little specks of something running through it. Maybe they were wood chips? Or leaves? What if they were poisonous? I ran my hand over the cushiony blue cover, then fit my index finger into the center of the star on the front. You’ll feel better if you use this, my mother had said.

  I picked up a pen.

  Truth #30: The world record for holding your breath is over eight minutes.

  I closed the notebook, using my finger to hold my place. Did I feel any better? On the other side of the bathroom window, seagulls were gliding toward the ocean on an early breeze.