You know you’re going to choose the Loving ruling but copy the topics from the board like everyone else, just slower. Chris Heaton is in your class again this year. He leans over and looks at your paper. You turn your back to him.
“Why do you write like you’re still in kindergarten?” he whispers.
He’s always picking on you. “Mind your own business,” you say, not whispering. Chris Heaton doesn’t scare you. Sometimes you even feel bad for him. You know his older brother is fighting in Vietnam. You also know lots of soldiers who go to Vietnam don’t come back alive. That probably makes him sad and angry, but that doesn’t mean he can be the way he is to you.
Miss Field turns around. “Ariel? Do you have a question?”
“No,” you say.
“Okay, let’s write in quiet.”
You thought Miss Field was different, but maybe she’s just like your other teachers. Out of the corner of your eye, you see Chris making a face at you. If you were Wonder Woman, you’d take him by the arm, flip him over, and teleport right out of the classroom before he knew what happened. But instead, you swallow hard and grip your pencil tight.
Later at Gertie’s, you throw yourself into an order of chocolate lace cookies. You have your snack, put on your apron, and start creaming the butter and sugar. After sifting the flour, you realize Ma isn’t there. Daddy is getting stuff out of the fridge. Jerry, Daddy’s morning baker who usually leaves when you get there, is already gone for the day.
You check in the front to make sure you’re right, but only Gabby is there, busy at the register. You go into the back and see Daddy holding a huge tub of butter.
“Where’s Ma?” you ask.
“She wasn’t feeling well,” Daddy says without looking at you. “Can you walk home yourself?”
“Yes,” you say and see something funny in his face, something he doesn’t want to explain.
“Got to get a wedding cake started,” he says and winks.
If Daddy didn’t want to tell you stuff, he didn’t. It was easier to get information out of Ma, even though from the way they both acted, it seemed like it would be the opposite.
You go back to your cookies, and they come out so thin and perfect, you eat one yourself, even though you’re not supposed to. You’re only allowed two cookies a day, and never fresh from an order. You sneak one more cookie and have an extra cola since Ma’s not there.
At dinner, Ma serves leftover mushroom barley soup with baked potatoes. She asks you how your day was but doesn’t listen to the answer. Then she scoops you extra ice cream and goes into her room.
“What’s wrong with Ma?”
“You know how she gets her headaches,” Daddy says. At the close of the door, Daddy looks over the top of his newspaper. Ma does get headaches a lot. She calls them migraines and says she even sees flashes of color before they start. That sounds sort of magical to you rather than painful, but Ma sure does seem like she’s in a lot of pain when she gets them. Since Leah left, it’s been happening more often.
It’s strange, because sometimes Ma seems so solid and strong, and other times she’s lying on her bed, the curtains closed, with a bottle of aspirin by her side and a cold washcloth on her head. Daddy says her nerves get the better of her. You aren’t sure what nerves means exactly, but you guess they cause migraines. You hope the nerves stay away from you.
“She’s been getting them a lot,” you say.
Daddy folds his newspaper, puts it down, takes off his glasses, and rubs his eyes.
“There was another letter today,” he says after a few seconds of eye rubbing.
“Really? What did it say?” you ask, leaning forward, a smile spreading over your face.
“She’s going to have a baby,” he says.
Your mouth falls open, and you drop your spoon. It bounces a bit on the floor, then becomes still on the yellow linoleum. You and Daddy both look at it for a moment because it’s a lot easier to look at the spoon than at each other. You bend over, pick it up, and bring it to the sink. Then you dump the chocolate ice cream in the garbage, feeling nauseous. Leah feels even farther away, spinning out into the atmosphere like a space rocket. You couldn’t even hold on to her if you wanted to.
“Can I read the letter?” you ask him.
“It’s not for you. It’s about adult things,” he says. He takes his napkin, reaches out, and dabs it at your mouth.
“Stop,” you say and drag the back of your hand across where he put the napkin. You don’t want your mouth wiped like a little baby.
“Sorry,” he says. “You had a bit of chocolate on your face.”
“Maybe you don’t want Leah and Raj to be together,” you say, tears making your eyes sting. “But she’s still my sister, and you can’t take her away from me.”
“I’m not,” Daddy says. “Leah has made her choices.”
“Then show me the letter,” you demand, crossing your arms tightly over your chest.
Daddy’s face turns angry. He crumples up the napkin in his hand. “Please don’t speak to me that way,” he says.
“Daddy, I was with them. We would go to the park. Raj bought me ice cream. They looked so happy together. The only reason everything is sad and hard is because of you and Ma. It’s not just about the choices Leah made. You are choosing, too.”
“Ari, you don’t know the ways of the world,” Daddy says, louder now.
“I know that what you’re doing is making everything worse,” you say. You shouldn’t be saying any of this, but sometimes the words just come out and you can’t stop them.
Daddy glares at you. “That’s enough,” he says through gritted teeth.
You run into your room, slam the door, and climb into Leah’s bed. Pulling the covers up to your chin, you cry into them. The phrase “the ways of the world” plays over and over in your mind. You try to piece together how all of this happened.
You think of when Leah brought home a Doors album. She said that she had a new record she wanted to play you. You thought she’d bought it, because you didn’t know about Raj yet, but later you found out that he’d bought it for her.
She put it on, and both of you sat quietly, hunched over the little red turntable. You’d never heard anything like it. The lead singer, Jim Morrison, sounded like he was telling you secrets you weren’t supposed to hear.
“Isn’t it groovy, Ari?” she said as you both lay on the floor and listened to the strange sounds of Morrison’s voice twisting and turning, even screaming, like he was actually trying to set the night on fire as he sang those words.
“It’s like you can feel the whole world changing through the music,” she said.
You didn’t know if you heard what she heard, but you agreed with her anyway. Leah was easy to follow, like a tour guide, a light. Now with her gone it was dark and foggy. You have no idea what to do next.
You lie there for a long time in your school clothes. Could it really be true what Daddy said—your sister will soon be a mother? That means your parents are going to be grandparents, and you are going to be an aunt. The world suddenly just got a whole lot older.
You wake with a start and realize you’ve fallen asleep in Leah’s bed. You get up, go into the kitchen. The big white clock on the wall says it’s a quarter past eleven. Your parents are in their room, door closed, a slice of light peeking out from underneath. You stand there in the dark, staring at their bedroom door, while their voices rise and fall. They must be discussing the ways of the world. You want so badly to see Leah’s new letter. You want to pore over every word and find the part that’s written for you in between the lines, because there must be something. She wouldn’t just forget you like this, would she?
How to Try Harder
On the way to school, you watch Jane read about the Beatles in her magazine. All the girls you know have a favorite Beatle. Paul’s pretty keen, but you do
n’t like him the way Jane does. John’s okay. Ringo and George, not so much.
“Look at his eyes,” she says, pointing at a picture of Paul. “He’s staring right at me. It’s like he knows everything I’m thinking.”
You nod and stare into Paul’s eyes with her. Jane has a huge poster of the Beatles on her bedroom wall, and she practices kissing Paul all the time. She says that she actually loves him. You wonder how Jane can know she loves Paul just from a picture. If you ever fall in love, it will be with an actual real person. You’ve never had a crush on someone real, though. Most of the boys don’t notice you at all, or when they do, it’s not for nice reasons.
The only crush you’ve ever had was on Elvis Presley, but you wouldn’t tell anyone about that. You don’t even know if it’s a real crush or if it’s just because you love his music. The truth is, he’s getting kind of old, and he just got married. Even your mother listens to his music. Everything that’s happening with Leah doesn’t make falling in love seem like something you want to deal with anytime soon.
You go home that day, still thinking of love, and your fingers itch to write another poem.
The Ways of the World
The world has many ways
of spinning.
Many I don’t understand.
But love
is not that hard
to understand.
Doesn’t it just spin one way,
one person toward another,
without stopping?
When you write poems, you feel heavier and lighter at the same time. This poem you write in the last page of your notebook while sitting on your sister’s bed. You write it as small as you can, and when you finish, you clap the notebook closed and slip it in your desk drawer.
Later that night at dinner, Daddy doesn’t seem angry anymore and Ma’s headache is gone.
“Ma, I really want to see Leah’s letter. Please? Can I?” you try again.
She doesn’t say anything and waves away your question with her hand. Sometimes when Ma gets angry, she gets real quiet.
Daddy says, “Adult talk, Ariel. It was for us, not you.”
“I know she’s going to have a baby. I know what that means,” you say and stick out your chin, but your parents stay silent. You think of something to threaten them with. But not leaving, never that. Where would you go?
“When is she going to write me a letter?” you say, your voice becoming small and cracking a little. You bite your lip hard to stop the tears.
Ma leans over and puts her cold hand on your warm cheek for a few seconds, but she doesn’t look you in the eye.
Another day goes by and you still haven’t found the letter. You’ve looked in the kitchen drawers, both night table drawers, your parents’ dresser drawers, the glove compartment in the Buick. Nothing.
The next afternoon, Ma is back at the bakery like everything’s peachy, but you can tell by the fast and furious movement of her hands over the cookies, the bread, the cakes, and the pies, mixing the dough, so much dough, that nobody should interrupt her.
The bakery phone rings on Thursday afternoon. Ma answers and speaks low. She turns her back to you.
“Okay,” she says. “I see. Next Tuesday. Yes, we will be there, thank you.”
She puts the phone down, washes the flour off her hands, and wipes them on her apron.
“That was Miss Field,” she says, looking in your direction.
“Oh,” you say, and shame rushes to your face. “Am I in trouble?” You think of the poems you haven’t shown her and the outline for your presentation on the Loving ruling.
“No,” Ma says. “Should you be?”
You shrug and hope Ma can’t actually read your mind, though sometimes it seems like she can. “No. Why did she call?” you ask, searching Ma’s face for a clue. She searches yours as well.
“She said she wanted to discuss your handwriting. She wants us all to come in for a meeting.”
You roll your eyes.
“Handwriting is important, Ariel, even if you don’t think so. You have to try harder.”
“I try.”
“Do you?”
“I swear I do.” If she only knew how hard you tried with every letter. Just thinking about it makes your fingers hurt.
“School was hard for me, too. But I knew I wasn’t going to college,” Ma says.
“Why was school hard for you?” you ask her. This surprises you. She’s never said school was hard for her before.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe I was just lazy, but I don’t want you to think it’s okay for you to be lazy. I want you to be better.”
“I don’t think it’s okay to be lazy,” you say, and Ma is the least lazy person you know.
“We’ll see what Miss Field says,” she tells you and sinks her hands into a huge metal bowl of risen pumpernickel dough, pulls off a big blob, and shapes it on the counter. She makes a trayful before sliding them into the oven. You wander out into the front. It’s not that crowded. A woman looks through the day-old bread basket, and a man is ordering a box of cookies. Gabby nods at you as she takes cookies out of the display case.
“No, that one,” he says as Gabby takes out an oatmeal, then a chocolate chip, a madeleine, and a piece of raspberry rugelach. “No, no. The one on the top,” he continues, and she finds another cookie for him, but still he’s not satisfied. “I want the big one in the back,” he says.
A strand of Gabby’s hair falls in her face, and she blows it away in a big huff as she puts back perfectly good cookies and takes out new ones. You see Ma’s tan leather purse hanging on the hook by your coats. The letter has to be in there, but if you started looking through it, Gabby might notice. You’ll find a good moment. It’s like there’s a sound pulsing through Ma’s purse that only you can hear.
You walk home with Ma, watching her purse hang off her arm and swing back and forth during the half mile to your apartment, the golden September sun falling everywhere like honey. Ma talks to you about the flour order, how it’s always late, how this makes her so mad, how nobody understands how important flour is to a bakery. Nobody. You nod and kick leaves aside until you get home.
Ma sets her purse down on the console next to the front door like she always does and takes off her wool jacket with the gray fur collar that Daddy bought her last year for their anniversary. She heads to her bedroom.
“Going to change,” she calls to you. “Start the meat loaf?”
“Okay,” you say and run into the kitchen. The meat loaf sits in a pan, looking lonely in the center of the refrigerator. It’s the second time she’s made meat loaf this week. You take it out, set it on the counter, and turn on the oven for preheating. You have ten minutes, or less if she’s in a rushed mood, which is often.
You walk softly over to the console and unzip her purse. Her leather change purse, a roll of mints, a package of tissues, two Revlon lipsticks, a silver compact, and a folded piece of paper are all neatly lined up in her bag. You take out the paper with shaking hands and unfold it. It’s a letter, but not from your sister.
AGREEMENT TO PURCHASE REAL ESTATE
The undersigned (“Purchaser”) hereby offers to purchase from the owner (“Seller”) the real estate located at 61 Main Street in the city of Eastbrook, State of Connecticut, the legal description of which is a storefront bakery and kitchen.
Upon the following terms and conditions:
1. Purchase Price and Conditions of Payment
The purchase price shall be Dollars ($14,000) to be paid in accordance with subparagraph A below:
You read a little more, but the words are so formal and strange, like another language, and you stop. You fold the letter, put it back in Ma’s purse, and think about what you’ve read. Sixty-one Main Street is the address of the bakery, and purchase means to buy something. Is someone
buying the bakery?
“You didn’t put the meat loaf in!” your mother calls from the kitchen.
You hadn’t realized you’d been standing at the console, staring at the floor. You rush back into the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” she asks, but luckily you can tell by the way she’s hurrying around, putting plates on the table and unwrapping the iceberg, that she doesn’t really want to know.
“Sorry,” you say and put the rolls in a basket. You can’t ask about something you weren’t supposed to see. You look at Ma in her short green-and-white dress, her blond hair that’s not really blond, up in an elegant bun, her peach lipstick still fresh, highlighting her green eyes. Did she know that this was going to be her life, here, in this small apartment with its tiny yellow kitchen, working at Gertie’s all day, making dinner every night for you and Daddy? Because sometimes she seems dressed for another life, maybe the one she wished she had.
“Will we ever leave?” you ask.
Ma stops tearing the lettuce into little pieces. “What do you mean? This apartment? This town?”
“Yes, both,” you say, watching her face carefully.
“Don’t you like it here? We’re lucky to live in a town like this,” she says and goes back to the lettuce.
“I guess,” you say.
“You go to one of the best schools in Connecticut. Your father and I didn’t go to great schools, and we didn’t go to college. But you will.”
“I will?” You thought she didn’t want you to go anywhere.
“Yes, because you’ll have a lot more choices than I did as long as you don’t end up like your sister. It’s up to you now.”
“I’m not smart enough to go to college,” you say.
“Well, then you better study more. Your father and I aren’t working this hard for nothing.”
She goes back to making the salad, slicing up a cucumber. She hands you a piece like she always does, and you take it and bite down. You wish she had corrected you instead, had said that you are smart. You swallow the cucumber. She’s moved on to the tomatoes.
How to Find What You're Not Looking For Page 6
