The Enemy

by Sara Holbrook

  A bubble of silence expands to fill the space between us until Mom pops it. “I’ll take them both.”

  “What?”

  “Both of these books,” Mom says. “I want to check them out. It’s been way too long since I read a good book. I think I’ll have to see what all the fuss is about.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that. These books have been pulled from circulation,” Mrs. Pearson says, reaching for the books. But Mom hands the books to Mrs. Svenson instead.

  “You are in the book-lending business, am I right?” Mom stands tall and tries to stick a few stray hairs back in with a hairpin. It’s hopeless, though. The hair falls right back down, and she tucks it behind her ear.

  “Mrs. Campbell, as a mother I wouldn’t think you would want to have such subversive literature in your house, let alone read it. You might want to have a conversation with that lovely Mrs. Ferguson. You two are neighbors, I understand? Perhaps she could explain to you why these books have been pulled.”

  If I had a blanket, I would be pulling it over my head right now to protect myself from the fallout. Nobody compares my mom to Mrs. Fancy Pants in Pearls, which is one of the nicer names I’ve heard her call Bernadette’s mom.

  “It’s a free country, last time I checked,” Mom says, picking her pocketbook up off of the counter and plopping it back down again, just in case Mrs. Pearson missed her point.

  And then with an I gotcha tone in her voice, Mrs. Pearson says, “May I see your library card?”

  I know Mom doesn’t have a library card. She doesn’t need one; her Good Housekeeping magazine comes in the mail every Tuesday. So I guess this is going to be the end of it. Mrs. Pearson has my mom checked up against the wall and the clock’s ticking down. Only, while neither one of them is looking, Mrs. Svenson scores.

  “Why, that’s no problem. We can get you a library card easily. I have the paperwork right here,” says Mrs. Svenson.

  And she does. She helps Mom fill out everything, and then Mrs. Pearson says Mom can’t have a card until she brings in some identification. Then Mrs. Svenson says she’ll vouch for her, and before you know it, we are standing outside the library in the cold. Mom struggles to pull her gloves on while holding the books, and I’m trying to figure out if I’m in the doghouse for being a thief and an instigator.

  Mom pulls her coat together and throws the red scarf over her shoulder like it’s a feather boa instead of a hand-knit scarf made of crooked stitches.

  “What time is it, Marjorie?”

  “Oh, it’s four-twenty, Mom. Maybe we can run home in time for the end of your story.” I know she’s worried that she’s missing her show, and I turn toward home as fast as I can, but she catches me by the hood of my coat and stops me in my tracks.

  “Good. Your dad and your sister won’t be home for another half hour. I know it’s only twenty degrees, but it feels like we need to stop by Stewart’s Drugstore, don’t you think?” she asks.

  The ice-cream fountain at Stewart’s is where Mom takes me for milkshakes when I have been good about going to the dentist or sitting still for a shot, or the time I caught poison ivy so bad I had to go to the emergency room. Or last summer when all my guppies died. And when our wiener dog, Schiltzie, went to live with a new family in the country. Every one of those times, Mom took me for a milkshake at Stewart’s because, according to her, there’s nothing like a milkshake to smooth out the rough spots.

  “What do you say to that, my little instigator?”

  “Okay,” I answer. Who’s going to say no to a milkshake? Even when it’s twenty degrees.

  We head toward Stewart’s and I promise myself that the next time I’m allowed anywhere near a library, I’m going to look up the word instigator.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Students, I’d like you to meet your new classmate, Inga Scholtz. Inga has just moved here from Canada. Isn’t that right, dear?” Mrs. Kirk says, smiling down at the top of Inga’s head. And then to the rest of the class, “I know you will all join me in welcoming our new friend.”

  Mrs. Kirk stands with her arm around the new girl, who looks just like she stepped out of the pages of Heidi. Blond braids wind in two circles around her head. She’s wearing an apron over her dress and heavy tan stockings that wrinkle around her ankles and the tops of some kind of little boot shoes that, for sure, I’ve never seen at the Buster Brown store where we buy our saddle shoes. On top of the whole outfit stretches a too-small aqua blue sweater gaping between the buttons because it won’t quite reach all the way around her.

  At first the new girl stands with one hand on her hip, but when she realizes we are all staring at her, she drops her arm and clasps both hands behind her back and lowers her eyes. I’ve seen this move before. As I try to remember where, I hear Mrs. Kirk calling me.

  “Marjorie?”

  That’s my cue to come up to the front of the class and lead the new girl back to my desk. My desk’s just like all the others. A wooden box on four legs with an iron arm on one side that holds up the slanted desk part. One of us will have to sit sideways or tight against the iron bar to fit into the thing, and both of us will have to cram our books and papers underneath. The classroom’s crowded and we won’t be the only two kids sharing a desk, but I can’t say I’m all that happy to no longer have a desk to myself.

  I walk up the aisle and just motion her to follow me. She looks at Mrs. Kirk and then at me, and Mrs. Kirk nods. Once we return to my desk, there’s one awkward moment when neither one of us knows who should sit first. I push the air with both hands, signaling her to slide in first. I figure since she’s the newcomer, I have dibs on the outside seat.

  As she bends to fold herself into the desk, I feel a tug on my skirt.

  “Nice shoes,” Mary Virginia whispers. Her whispering voice is loud enough to hear across a playground. I don’t know whether to shush her or agree with her, but since Mrs. Kirk is giving me a look, I just sit.

  Inga says exactly nothing for the rest of the day. She sits with her hands folded, being polite, but kind of just stuck in place.

  We do our problems. Everyone except Inga, that is. Then we open to page 194 of our science books, where Inga pretends to read along about igneous rocks. Since that subject’s about as exciting as, well, rocks, I don’t think it’s weird that she is only faking being interested. In fact, it makes me think I might even like her.

  When we have to answer the questions at the end of the chapter about different kinds of rocks, she just watches me write and never unfolds her hands. I wonder how long Mrs. Kirk’s going to let her slide along without doing anything.

  After we return from lunch, Mrs. Kirk announces that the whole class is going to do something really fun. She’s clapping her hands and trying to drum up some excitement in the room, but since it’s afternoon, the only answer to her enthusiasm is the clanking radiator. Then she passes out some two-hundred-year-old books that have pictures of women dancing around with flowered crowns on their heads. As usual, there aren’t enough books to go around, so everyone has to share. The ladies in the books are supposed to be from olden Greek times before people had to wear real clothes. In the pictures, the women are wearing drapey, see-through dresses that almost show their entire bodies. Mrs. Kirk wants us to turn to a poem on page twelve, but everyone seems to be stuck on the pages with the pictures.

  The pictures have Owen Markey and Danny DiMario laughing so hard they snort. Mrs. Kirk wants us all to chime in together to read something called a Greek chorus, except it doesn’t work because all the boys have caught the same snorting disease. Mrs. Kirk finally huffs, all disgusted, and snatches the books back. She directs us to sit quietly and think about our attitudes.

  Instead, I think about how during our short attempt at choral reading, I noticed that Inga’s lips moved, but there were no sounds coming out of her.

  At afternoon recess, Mary Virginia pulls me by the coat sleeve until we’re standing inside the monkey bars. She motions Piper Spencer over, too. B
ernadette’s out sick, or she’d be in on this conference, for sure. Probably leading it.

  “What’s she like?” Mary Virginia asks.

  I shrug. I really don’t know. Inga hasn’t said anything.

  “If that girl’s from Canada, my mom’s from Mars,” says Mary Virginia.

  “Did you see her shoes? She’s right off the boat,” Piper says, like she’s sharing some secret we haven’t all figured out already. “She has old country written all over her. Where do you think she’s from?”

  “I’m guessing Sweden or Denmark,” Mary Virginia says, “Her hair’s so blond it’s practically white.”

  All the families I know come from somewhere else. Piper’s family is Slovak. Mary Virginia’s is Irish like Bernadette’s, but they haven’t been here as long. My family came over on the boat when ships still had sails, but both Piper and Mary Virginia have grandmothers who don’t speak English. Being from somewhere else is pretty normal in our neighborhood.

  Piper grabs both of our arms and leans forward. “What if she’s German?”

  German. The word hangs in the air like an insult looking for a place to land.

  As sure as there are doughnuts every morning at Schwartz’s bakery, there are plenty of Germans in this country, but as far as I can tell, they all landed here before the war. I hadn’t heard of any new Germans around. Lots of new Hungarians and Polacks and lots of Jewish survivors, but no blond-haired Germans that I’d heard of.

  “That would make her a you-know-what,” Piper says.

  “A what?” I ask.

  “You know.”

  I shrug and throw my hands in the air. I have no idea what she’s talking about.

  “She’s saying that you might be sharing your desk with a Nazi, you ding-a-ling,” says Mary Virginia. “Does she smell like sausage?”

  “She doesn’t smell like anything,” I say. They both look at me like I should tell them more, but there’s not much to tell since the girl doesn’t seem to talk. “Her sweater’s kind of scratchy against my arm,” I offer.

  “She’s homemade head to foot.” Mary Virginia says, and she and Piper both nod. “I’ll bet she’s never even seen the inside of a department store.”

  “If I looked different like that, I’d just die,” says Piper.

  I don’t say it out loud, but Piper does look different. She can’t help it. She’s almost as tall as Mrs. Kirk and has frizzy hair that her mother tries to control with clips and rubber bands, but it still pokes out in every direction. And Mary Virginia’s different because of her loud voice and her bright, orange hair. She says her hair is not orange, it’s red. But her hair’s as orange as a tangerine. Every one of the O’Donnell kids looks like they fell off the same tangerine tree and then got dipped in a bucket of freckles. When they arrive at a school concert or PTA night, they light up the room.

  But that doesn’t stop them from staring at Inga, who’s hugging her elbows and standing as close as she can to the school door. When the bell rings, she’s the first one inside.

  After recess, we all watch George Jacobi turn purple as he reads his book report off of index cards. When he gets the cards all mixed up and has to take a minute to sort them back out, Inga and I look at each other for the first time. I see that Inga’s eyes are the color of the cloudless winter sky, pure blue.

  I also see that she’s scared to death.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Hey, Squirt!”

  Frank.

  I don’t respond. Last time I checked, my name was not Squirt. I put my lunch pail in the sink and drop my schoolbooks on the desk in the kitchen. First thing I want after school is a snack, not an annoying big brother who isn’t really my brother.

  “Squirt, I heard you’re banned from the library for being a pinko.”

  “Oh, gee. Guess you’re wrong again, dumbhead. Mom fixed it and took both of those books out for me.” Frank doesn’t even have to try to be a pain. He’s like a swarm of mosquitoes I just want to slap. I do my best to be cool around him and not let it show how he makes me itch all over.

  “Yeah? Well, your dad took ’em right back this morning. Dropped them off at the library on his way to work.”

  “What?” And there it is. Frank gets to me. I pause and look at him hard. He can’t be serious.

  “You think you know everything. You just made that up.”

  “Nope. Check it out, babycakes. You think your dad’s gonna put up with a red menace in the family? He’d lose his job, for one thing.”

  Dad would lose his job because of some books Mom checked out of the library? Me? A red menace? He can’t be serious. I steam silently.

  “You’re so full of it.” That makes no sense. Dad took the books back?

  “Yeah? Well, maybe you conked out early last night and didn’t hear the fireworks. Your mom’s up to her neck in some kind of hot water and you’re the one who put her there.”

  “You lie,” I say. Only I say it a little softer because, come to think of it, maybe I did hear some yelling last night. I just figured they were yelling about money or Frank. Regular stuff.

  But library books?

  “What did you think? Your dad works at Chrysler. His job is top secret. Tanks and landing craft with gun mounts. The government don’t take no chances with that. He had to sign the same loyalty oath my dad had to sign.”

  That’s not all he signed, I think. But I don’t say it out loud. Mom says I should feel sorry for Frank because he’s a war orphan. Not the same kind of war orphans that Dad saw begging for food in Greece after the war, but a different kind of orphan.

  Not everybody knows that Chrysler makes all kinds of war stuff like tanks and jeeps. They snapped my dad up after the war so he could give their real engineers advice about tanks. My dad was one of those guys in the war whose head stuck up out of the tank, and the real engineers are just eggheads who don’t know their ears from their elbows when it comes to real combat.

  Frank’s dad used to have the same kind of job as my dad’s. Then one day, Frank’s dad asked my dad to sign a paper promising to be a guardian to Frank if anything happened to him, since Frank’s mom is MIA and his older brother’s in jail. MIA means “missing in action,” which basically means she disappeared.

  Since Frank’s dad had no one else to name in his will, Dad said he’d be Frank’s guardian. Dad signed the paper on a Wednesday. The next Saturday night was when Frank’s dad died. Not from natural causes. That’s how Frank turned into an orphan and I got a big brother overnight.

  So I know my dad signed that guardianship paper, but I’ve never heard of him signing anything else.

  “Loyalty oath?” I make the mistake of asking out loud. This makes Frank smile. He’s really got one over on me this time.

  I hate that.

  “Yeah. Your dad signed an oath saying he wouldn’t do nothing to undermine the United States government.”

  “Wouldn’t do anything,” I say. Frank hates it when I correct his grammar. He glares.

  I glare back. “That’s just stupid. My dad is a war hero, why would he undertime the United States government?”

  “That’s undermine, little Miss Smarty Pants, not undertime. Look it up. And while you’re at it, maybe you better yank your head out of your sandbox and listen to the news once in a while,” Frank says. “You ever heard of the Un-American Activities Committee? Yeah, didn’t think so. Well, they just found out that the army is crawling with commies. Crawling with them. So, everybody with a top secret job, they make them swear on their lives in writing that they are not a threat to America or gonna go out and sell secrets to the Russians. Bingo, bongo. See the connection?”

  I don’t see any connection at all. My dad would never sell secrets to the Russians. He’s about the best American there is. “Liar,” I whisper under my breath. But at the same time, I’m thinking maybe this loyalty oath thing is just dumb enough to be true, like the fact that liver tastes like skunk farts, but it’s supposed to be good for you. I put on my liver face
.

  “True as I’m standing here. Teachers and librarians—them, too. They all have to sign. And don’t you know that goes for tank designers just like your daddy, sweet cheeks. You checking out commie books you got no business reading could get your daddy fired and all of us out on the street. How would you like living in a refrigerator box under a bridge? You’d last about a week out there, using a curb for a pillow,” Frank snorts.

  “Oh, like you’re so tough.” I want to bang a chair over his head. I want to kick him where it hurts. Instead, I say, “I hear you cry sometimes, you know. I can hear you through the heat vents. Big tough guy.”

  Frank slaps a kitchen chair out of his way and lunges in my direction, but I am too fast for him and run to put the table between us. He tries to push the table aside just as Mom appears in the doorway.

  “Stop right there, Frank.” Her voice stops him in his tracks. He’s breathing heavy and his eyes are on fire. He wouldn’t dare make another move with Mom watching.

  I feel a little smile starting until she turns to me, “And you watch your mouth, young lady.”

  We stop glaring at one another to look at Mom. Her eyes are red as Easter eggs and she hasn’t put her lipstick on. “I don’t need this from you two today.” She squares the table back up with the chairs while we watch from opposite sides of the room. The anger swirling in the room slows. She takes a deep breath and stands up tall. She tucks some loose hair behind her ear. Then she puts both hands in the pockets of her apron and takes her lower lip in her teeth.

  “I can’t take this hatefulness.” she says, her voice barely loud enough to hear. “No more. Not today.”

  Nobody says anything else. Frank and I turn in different directions so we can go back to ignoring each other. I grab a couple of graham crackers to take to my room. Frank jerks open the refrigerator and sticks his head in. Mom disappears into the living room to watch TV. I check the clock.