Stepping

by Nancy Thayer

  Sometimes Maggie thinks that books are her best friend, her truest, most reliable, friend. The fathomless, most treasured part of her own private self is her connection with books. She’s happy when she’s reading, and library books don’t cost Frances a thing.

  Maybe that’s why she and Emily are so close. Emily reads as much as Maggie does. Like Maggie, Emily talks about the characters as if they were real people, and she can enter a pretend world like a fish slipping into water. When Maggie met Emily, it was as if a gate opened in Maggie’s life. Like a path curved into the future. Maggie began to believe having an imagination was a good thing, that somehow, even if she couldn’t see it now, she could believe she had someplace to go and feel a wonderful sense of relief that she would have companions along the way.

  Emily is the person who seems most like Maggie, who gets Maggie. Maggie’s not an idiot. She knows Emily is rich while she is poor. Maggie knows rich and poor don’t mix.

  On the other hand, her favorite stories tell her they can.

  * * *

  They sit at the kitchen table, breaking off bits of gingerbread and munching it, washing it down with cold milk. Even now, in the middle of June, the heat and humidity are oppressive.

  “Did you read The Secret Garden?” Maggie asks.

  “I did. I loved it.”

  “Oh, good! Because I have a surprise—”

  The front door flies open and slams shut. A thirteen-year-old boy stomps inside, completely ignoring the girls as he rummages in a kitchen cupboard. He’s got shiny black hair like a crow.

  “Want some gingerbread?” Maggie asks.

  Ben grabs a jar of peanut butter and a spoon. Tossing himself into a chair, he digs a spoon into the peanut butter and licks it off.

  “Ben,” Frances says quietly.

  “The jar’s almost empty,” Ben tells his mother. “I’m going to eat it all. No one else will get my cooties.” He’s always got an answer for everything.

  Ben wears nothing but swim trunks, and Emily thinks she sees some hair in his armpit. He’s a teenager, she reminds herself, and the thought makes her stomach do flip-flops. She wonders when she’ll grow armpit and pubic hair. She wonders if Ben has pubic hair. Emily and her city friends have all made bets on who will start menstruating first.

  “Hey, Neanderthal,” Maggie says, “could you say hello to Emily? She just got here for the summer.”

  Ben jabs the spoon into the peanut butter again, then takes a bite and grins hideously at Emily, peanut butter hanging in disgusting clumps from his teeth. “Hello, Emily.”

  “Gross.” Maggie stands up. “Come on, Emily, let’s go outside.”

  Emily follows obediently but reluctantly. She’s never told Maggie, or anyone, but Ben, even with peanut butter teeth, is so gorgeous he gives her shivers. Maggie’s just as good looking; both have wavy glossy black hair and deep blue eyes accentuated with thick black eyelashes. Beside them Emily, with her blond hair and freckled skin, feels colorless.

  “I don’t play with dolls anymore,” Maggie announces as they walk around the side of the house. “You know how we made those Laura Ingalls Wilder dolls? Well, this year, I don’t want to make dolls, I want to be Mary Lennox. Mom let me plant my own garden in the back yard, near the Rosa rugosa and honeysuckle. I actually made a wall around the garden out of boards I found at the dump.”

  “Wow.” Emily stops to stare, her heart filled with admiration and envy. It never occurred to her to build her own secret garden. Not that she could in her New York apartment, but she could have planned to build one in the back yard of their Nantucket house. Sometimes she thinks, compared to Maggie, she’s boring.

  “You have to crawl through here,” Maggie tells her, demonstrating. The doorway is made of bits of old trellis over which morning glory vines have grown. Inside, the floor is grass, the ceiling, sky. The air smells like flowers. Maggie has made a miniature dollhouse in one corner with pebbles and shells. In another corner is a plastic box holding a bracelet she’s braiding out of yarn.

  For a while they simply sit cross-legged in the shade, finishing their gingerbread, looking around.

  “I like your secret garden,” Emily says. “Except the grass itches my bum.”

  They both giggle because she said bum.

  “Yeah, but you don’t have chairs in a garden,” Maggie reminds her.

  “Yes, you do,” Emily argues. Emily thinks of her Nantucket back yard. The caretaker has put out the glass-topped table and wrought iron chairs and several cushioned lounge chairs. Emily’s not supposed to get them dirty; they’re for the adults. If Emily tried to build something like this, a wall around a secret garden from boards from the dump, her parents would kill her.

  Maggie looks around. “This place is too small for chairs.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Above them a bee buzzes and lands on a pink rose of Sharon flower. It’s quiet, private.

  “You know what?” Maggie whispers. “Sometimes I hate my family.”

  This happens all the time between Emily and Maggie. They think the same thought at the exact same moment. “Sometimes I hate my family, too,” Emily confesses.

  “You do?” Maggie’s eyes are wide.

  An unfamiliar excitement fills Emily, a kind of sharp danger and guilt. “Sometimes my mother drinks too much. She bumps into things. She talks like this: ’Em errr, whersh my purshe?”

  Maggie giggles. “I’ve heard Mother do it with a man.”

  All Emily’s New York friends talk about sex, but no one’s ever heard their parents do it. “What does it sound like?”

  “Oh, oh, oh, oh,” Maggie pants.

  Emily face grows hot. “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t see him, I only heard him. It was disgusting. I’m never going to have sex.”

  “Me neither,” Emily announces loyally.

  “Swear?”

  “Swear.”

  “Sometimes I think—”Maggie pauses, as a strange new sensation of guilt shoots through her like a quickly branching vine—“that I don’t belong in this family.”

  Emily nods rapidly. “I know! I feel that way, too. Sometimes I dream I’m adopted.”

  “Me, too!” Maggie blinks with surprise at this coincidence. “In the car, when I’m riding, sometimes I think my real family will see me and rescue me.”

  “I do that, too,” Emily tells her. “My parents are so …” Her voice trails off. She can’t voice the words. She may not know the words. “At least,” she continues thoughtfully, “you have a brother.”

  “Yeah, he makes it all better.” Maggie says scornfully, kicking the dirt. “I don’t want a brother. I want a sister.”

  “Me, too,” Emily agrees. “A sister would be fun. We could play together. Trade clothes.”

  “Braid each other’s hair.”

  The two girls look at each other. Maggie wears rubber flip-flops, blue shorts, and a yellow T-shirt. Emily wears red leather sandals, white shorts, and a striped red top. Except for their clothes, they look just alike, Maggie thinks. They’re both skinny, and tanned, although Maggie’s hair is short this year while Emily’s is pulled back in a pony tail. Still, Emily is blond with blue eyes, Maggie has dark hair and blue eyes. So they make a complete set, like salt and pepper.

  “We’re kind of like twins,” Emily decides.

  Maggie’s so pleased she giggles. “Except, um, you’re blond and I’m dark.”

  “Yeah, but …” Emily bites her lip. “It’s not just the way we look. It’s the way we think. It’s the way we are.”

  “I know.” Maggie cocks her head, considering. “You’re the closest thing to a sister I’ll ever have.”

  “Same here.”

  “What if …” Maggie begins, then stops.

  “What if what?” Emily prompts.

  “I have an idea but I’m afraid you’ll make fun of me.”

  “Which would be so wrong because sisters never make fun of each other,” Emily teases.

/>   “Okay, then: Here.” Maggie lifts the lid of the small plastic box in the corner. “I’m making a yarn bracelet.” She holds it up, a few inches of blue, white, and yellow braided together.

  “That’s really pretty,” Emily says, a yearning note in her voice. She has bracelets at home, lots of them, but this one calls out to her.

  “Do you like it?” Maggie holds it out to her. “You can have it. I mean, when I finish it.” Scooting around to face Emily, she directs, “Hold out your hand. So I can measure your wrist. I’ll see how much more I need to do.”

  An emotion swells inside Emily—a gratitude, a kind of love, and an astonishment that Maggie wants to give her this bracelet.

  “And you make one for me!” Maggie tells her.

  “I don’t know how.” Emily’s learning how to make knots for sailing, but she’s never learned how to make a bracelet.

  “I’ll teach you. Right now. It’s easy.” Handing the box to Emily, she says, “Should I have the same colors or different?”

  Emily’s glad to be able to make a choice since the box, the yarn and the idea are Maggie’s. “The same colors, of course.”

  “Okay.” Maggie digs around in the box and takes out three skeins of yarn. “You won’t believe how easy it is. You know how to braid, right?”

  “Duh.”

  The two girls sit together, hands busy with the yarn, concentrating hard as Maggie shows Emily how to be sure the yarn is taut.

  “Like this?” Emily asks after a while.

  Maggie grins her irresistibly contagious grin. “Right.”

  They lean against opposite sides of the walls of the little lair, braiding quietly in the quiet shade. It doesn’t take long. Their wrists are small.

  “Now,” Maggie instructs, “I’ll tie yours on your wrist, and you tie mine.”

  Emily obeys. “It’s like a rope bracelet, only prettier,” she says.

  “Only more important,” Maggie reminds her.

  Emily smiles. “Yes. It means we’re sisters.”

  Maggie proudly specifies: “Nantucket sisters.”