They were both looking at me.
“She’s adorable,” Mrs. Elliot said. “You devil, you, keeping it a secret for all these years.”
“It was the devil who insisted,” Mazy said.
“Don’t say that too loud,” Mrs. Elliot told her. “There are people here who would believe it. Especially about you, Mrs. Grouch.”
“Suits me fine,” Mazy said, and they both laughed. Then Mazy grew very serious. “Her parents died in a terrible house fire recently. If it wasn’t for this heroic fireman…” She shook her head. Mrs. Elliot looked at me sadly, and I quickly looked at the booklet. “I know you agree with me. A little girl this fragile belongs in homeschooling.”
“Well, Mazy,” Mrs. Elliot said, “if anyone can get her strong enough to overcome such a tragedy and return to interaction with others her age, it’s you. Look at how many others you put on the right track, whether they liked it or not.”
“You mean whether their parents liked it or not.”
“Yes. It’s worse now, I’m afraid. If we yell too loudly, they threaten to sue us. I doubt you’d last.”
They both turned to me again.
“This time, this one, will be the biggest challenge of my life,” Mazy said. “And not because it’s personal.”
“But also she will be the biggest success, I’m sure.”
Why did Mazy say both my parents had died? Only my mother had died. Lies as tools, I thought again. They lowered their voices and talked some more, glancing my way occasionally.
I started the exam and finished it in half the time I was given to do so. Mazy and I watched Mrs. Elliot review it. Mazy told me she was doing her a personal favor instead of assigning it to another teacher.
“It’s a hundred percent,” she said as soon as she had finished. She looked a little astonished. “Children under such psychological trauma don’t usually do this well.” She smiled at Mazy and added, “Chip off the old block.”
“Old?”
They laughed.
“I’ll take care of the formalities. Congratulations, Mazy,” Mrs. Elliot told her.
Mazy turned to me. “Let’s go home,” she said, seizing my hand and moving me along as if a moment longer in the building might infect me with some incurable disease.
“Please call me if there’s anything more you need, Mazy,” Mrs. Elliot said.
“Thank you, Erna. I appreciate your help.”
“Call me if you need any additional materials. I believe you have that updated math text.”
“I do. And thank you,” Mazy said. They hugged, and we started toward the entrance.
Mazy held my hand tightly, as tightly as she would if she thought I might turn and rush into a classroom. I wanted to. I wanted to plop right down beside that girl I saw from my window sometimes, smile, and introduce myself. How many times had I dreamed of us walking home together from this very building?
I resisted Mazy’s rushing us out and paused to look through a classroom door window. I could see a row of students who didn’t look much older than I was. I kept looking until, although I didn’t see the girl on my street, I did see some of the boys. It was clear to me that they weren’t paying attention to their teacher. They were passing notes and poking each other.
Mazy stopped, too, and then she surprised me.
“Maybe it’s a good idea for you to look in there,” she said, and took me right up to the door so I could see the whole classroom. “Go on. Look.”
I did.
“See how many students are in that room with that one teacher? It’s wall to wall. She’s supposed to care for each and every one of them. You know what happens? You can see how they’re misbehaving.”
I shook my head.
“She pays attention to a few and forgets about the others. They sink or swim on their own. That’s what I had to do when I was a teacher in this building, but I don’t have to do that with you. Come on,” she said, tugging me away. I glanced back as if she was dragging me from somewhere I still longed to be. Maybe the students in that room wouldn’t learn as much as I did, but they had each other; they had friends.
She hurried me out of the front entrance as if the building was on fire, muttering under her breath.
“I spent years and years trying to educate children like that. Every year, they added more students to my room. One year, I didn’t even have enough desks! That’s right. The students had to stand until they found us more desks.
“And what do you have that those students back there don’t?” she asked, as we hurried away from the building. I didn’t even dare look back now as she charged forward. “You have your own classroom and your own teacher. Think I’ll let you sink or swim? Absolutely not. That’s why you just knocked the socks off that test and impressed Mrs. Elliot. I know she’ll be telling everyone, all the other teachers, about you today. And about me! Faculty rooms are dens of gossip, but I refused to be any part of that. They always resented me for being so tight-lipped about myself. People today will tell you all their personal information in a heartbeat. There’s no self-respect. But that wasn’t me. That was never me.”
She suddenly stopped and caught her breath. She had been ranting, and she knew it. She glanced back toward the school and then looked at me. I was actually a little frightened now. She was more the Umbrella Lady again than she was Mazy Dazy. I think she knew it.
“If I don’t stop, we’ll fill that jar of pennies.” She took a deep breath and looked at people on the street who were looking our way. “Busybodies,” she muttered. “You don’t know how lucky you really are not being exposed to all this.”
She looked at me and smiled.
“I’m forgetting that you deserve a reward. I know it will hurt your appetite for lunch, but we’ll get you an ice cream cone.”
She turned and led me to a store with gas pumps in front of it. We had never been here, but after we entered, she knew to go to the right, where there was a freezer.
“You like chocolate the most, just like me,” she said, and reached in to get the cone.
The young man at the counter was scratching on a lottery card and almost didn’t notice us. Mazy slapped down the money and made him jump in his seat. “Dreamer,” she called him, and led me out. She paused to unwrap the cone and hand it to me.
“As you grow older, you will find yourself surrounded by stupidity. It will be like swimming through a swamp, but you’ll get through it and leave them where they belong… nowhere. That’s what I did. Most teachers tell their students to do as they say, not as they do. I’m not most teachers. Do as I do. You’ll have less grief.”
Mazy could really rant and rave, I thought. It took so little to get her to explode in small speeches.
We marched on, with me trying to eat my cone and keep up with her. When we turned down our street, I paused. The girl I had seen from my classroom window occasionally was sitting on the front porch of her house, only today she was wrapped in a blanket. The sight of her apparently reminded Mazy of something.
“We have to get you some new inoculations,” she said. “I’ve been neglecting it because you haven’t been mingling with other children.”
“What inoculations?”
“We’ll see what you need now. I’m a friend of a woman who is still a school nurse, Lil Miller. She’ll tell us and then come to the house with them.”
I was surprised to hear that Mazy had any friends. She kept so much of her life a secret, just as she had always done, apparently. But whenever she had gone out and left me at the house, I assumed it was only to shop for something we needed or go to a garage sale. She was particularly fond of buying from people who had to sell, because she’d always get a bargain.
But it suddenly occurred to me that she might be going to visit someone. Why didn’t she invite whoever it was to her house? No one ever came calling on his or her own, and the phone rarely rang. When it did, she usually slammed the receiver down, moaning about “nuisance calls.” Of course, I always was hoping it
was Daddy.
Maybe, I suddenly thought, she doesn’t want people to meet me. She would have to lie so much, just as she just had, and so would I.
We walked on, but she kept talking. She was well into another one of her favorite tirades.
“You see why I want to keep you from mixing with these kids as long as I can? They infect each other constantly. One gets a cold, and then they all do.”
She began another story, one I had heard at least five or six times. Did she forget she had told me, or did she think I’d forgotten?
“I once had a class in which so many were sneezing and coughing I had to wear a surgical mask to keep out the germs. And I wouldn’t let them come up front or touch me. I wore gloves, so when I touched their papers, I didn’t contract the germs. That’s what you would get if you went up and said hello to that girl back there, and if you were in her class in school, I imagine.”
I turned and looked back at the girl. She was watching us. I thought she had raised her hand to wave to me, but I was afraid to wave back. Mazy rushed me through the gate and into the house as if it had started to rain icicles. When she closed the door behind me, she leaned against it and took deep breaths.
“You risk your life in one way or another every time you step out of this house or off my property. I don’t want you playing out front anymore. You keep to the backyard,” she said. “Those kids out there already enjoy making fun of you, calling you the Tree Girl. Who knows what else they’ll make up about you? Did you hear me?” she practically screamed, because I was looking down and thinking how unhappy that made me, especially now.
I nodded, but as soon as I was able to, I went upstairs to the classroom and looked out the window toward the house where the girl had been sitting on the porch. I was disappointed to see she was gone. When I heard Mazy’s steps on the stairway, I quickly went to my desk and opened the workbook she had set out yesterday.
She smiled when she entered. “That’s good,” she said. “You’re anxious to learn. Today we start more advanced math. You’ll be a high school senior by the time you are supposed to be a ninth or tenth grader. You’ll see.”
She handed me a new textbook.
“I gathered some new materials for you last week, including that math book Mrs. Elliot mentioned. We have new workbooks and some other books I’ve taken from the public library. When you’re older, I’ll send you there with assignments.”
“How much older do I have to be? I see girls my age walking alone or with friends, not adults.”
“They don’t carry your baggage.”
“Baggage? What baggage?”
“Your family history, Saffron. It has made you vulnerable in ways you don’t yet understand. Just leave it to me to decide when you’re ready to wander about on your own. It has nothing to do with how old you are. I know what awaits you out there. Assassins, all of them.”
“Assassins?” I thought about the word. “How are they assassins?”
She ignored me and glanced at the window as if I had left my fingerprints on it.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be spending so much time spying on them.”
“I’m not spying.”
“Whatever. Meanwhile, I’ll arrange for my friend Mrs. Miller to come here with the shots you need. You can catch things from adults, too,” she said.
She paused.
“I don’t imagine your father was even thinking about that,” she said.
She hadn’t mentioned Daddy for some time. Did I dare ask?
“No,” she said before I could. “There have been no phone calls or new letters from him. Now, let’s get to work so we don’t have sad thoughts and need the jar.”
She didn’t have to remind me. I wasn’t thinking about Daddy as much as I used to. Every day, every month, every year that had passed made his voice and his face more cloudy. It hadn’t occurred to me until just recently that I had no pictures of him or my mother. Daddy hadn’t saved any that were in the house, and if he had any in his wallet, he didn’t give them to me. Why would he? I asked myself. He wasn’t supposed to leave me at the station. I wasn’t supposed to need pictures to remember either of them.
Whenever I was doodling and thinking about Mama and Daddy, I tried drawing their faces, but the pictures were never good enough so I crumpled them up and threw them away. I was feeling more and more like someone who had woken up on a raft at sea. The wind and the water were driving me farther and farther away, even away from my memories. Most of the time, I was either too tired or too busy to work on my getting them back.
In the days after Mazy had found me, I would sit at the window in my room at night after Mazy had gone to sleep and thought I had, too, and look out at the stars, wondering if Daddy was thinking about me and what it was like for Mama in heaven. More than anything else, the sadness exhausted me and drove me into a deep sleep. Maybe Mazy was right about the pennies.
I rarely sat at the window in my bedroom in the evening anymore. It was as if I was afraid of the stars, afraid of imagining Mama looking down at me. As guilty as it made me feel to think it, I knew in my heart that I was deliberately avoiding ways to remember.
That night at dinner, I told Mazy about it. Maybe doing so well on the test and moving along with my life made me feel guiltier than ever. I should be suffering, curled up in a room, and refusing to breathe until my father came for me. Instead, I was thriving, growing, learning, and dreaming of doing all the fun things I saw and imagined others my age on our street were doing.
She smiled and nodded. “That’s a good thing,” she said. “Forgetting.”
“Why? How could that be a good thing to forget my mother? And why stop hoping my father will come?”
“It’s less painful. Remembering little details would only bring sad thoughts, too.” She nodded toward the cabinet where the sadness jar was kept. “You have to think about nice things now. You have to think about your future and all the things you and I could do to make this a happier place to live in.”
“But Daddy will come for me someday,” I insisted. Even I thought that sounded so thin, as thin as words formed with bubbles.
She nodded, but I could practically feel the skepticism. It was what made the words so fragile. They practically crumbled as soon as I uttered them. Maybe to Mazy’s credit, she looked for ways to get me to stop being unhappy about it.
“Yes, but in the meantime, you’re growing up fast, Saffron, faster than other children your age, because you’re with me, learning quicker and more. Soon you will become like me… skeptical of what people say, especially their promises.”
“Why are you so sure of that?”
“I can tell. I can see it. You’re too smart. You won’t believe in fairy tales that easily,” she said. “That’s really what most promises are, fairy tales. That’s why you’re forgetting so quickly,” she added, widening her smile. “You’re developing a mature sense of what is true and what is not.”
“I don’t want to,” I said. “It makes me feel like I’m setting fire to who I really am.”
She stopped smiling. “You will want to,” she insisted. She looked terribly confident, so confident that it made me sick inside. “You know why you will?”
I didn’t answer or ask. I knew what she wanted. She had said it. Not only do as she does but become what she was. I really didn’t want to know that I might very well grow up to be just like her.
“Why?” I had to ask.
“That’s the only way you’ll go on living and having even the smallest chance to be happy,” she said, sounding just like someone who did know everything. “Let’s not talk about it right now. Let’s finish our meal. I have a new book for you to begin tonight, so there’ll be no television,” she said. “It’s really a play by Shakespeare. Remember when I told you about him? I was quite the literature student, you know. That’s why teaching English is my strongest subject. It’ll be a little more difficult than most everything I’ve given you to read, but I’ll be helping you more. Doesn’t tha
t excite you?”
I nodded, but I wasn’t at all excited.
I saw how that annoyed her. Her purplish gray eyes glared at me, her mouth becoming a slash of pale pink again. I was sure she realized that all the schoolwork in the world, all the tests I passed, and all the promises she made for my future didn’t or couldn’t get me to stop thinking about Daddy.
In fact, right now I wanted, as I had wanted often, to get up and run out the front door and then continue running up the street. I imagined throwing myself into the arms of Mrs. Elliot and crying, telling her I wanted to go find my father, letting her know that everything she had been told was a lie.
Even so, I was afraid she’d say, Oh, why? Look at how well you did on that test. You must let Mazy continue to take care of you. The lie about your parents is not important. She’s right. You’ll never be happy if you leave her. Go back.
“Did you hear me?” Mazy asked me sharply, shattering my musing. “You’ll start reading the play today.”
“Yes.”
“Then finish eating. Don’t sit there staring at your food.”
I forced myself to continue, each swallow harder than the previous.
“Mrs. Miller will be here tomorrow to give you your inoculations,” she said. “I don’t expect you to cry like some baby, either. We all have to endure some pain to be safe in this life.”
She closed her eyes for a few moments, as if she was in some pain right now. Then they popped open, and she smiled.
“Don’t forget we have those cupcakes we made together. Dessert, then clean up, then read what I give you, and then your bath. Sticking to a schedule,” she said. “That’s what makes it all bearable.”
The Umbrella Lady Page 14
