E, My Name Is Emily

by Norma Fox Mazer

  The music swelled. I turned my eyes to the screen again. A beautiful girl was lying in a hospital bed, sobbing quietly. Who was that sitting next to her? Oh, yes, her mother, who was going to be totally devastated when the beautiful girl, her daughter—I’d forgotten her name, although it must have been used two hundred times in the last hour—died. I could tell she was going to die because of the music. Besides, in the movies it was always the beautiful people who died.

  Robertson looked at me. “Sad movie,” he said in his loud whisper. “How do you like the actress?”

  “Wonderful,” I whispered back. I reached for the popcorn box. Empty.

  “Want me to get some more?” he said.

  “No, that’s all right.”

  “You sure? I don’t mind.”

  “Shhh! Shhh!” someone behind us said. Mr. Linaberry turned around. I sank down in my seat.

  The girl died. There was a funeral. The mom sobbed bravely. The scorned young lover lurked in the background. He hadn’t been good enough for the beautiful girl, according to her mother. It was like my mother and Mr. Linaberry and me, but in reverse—plus the scorned young lover, unlike Mr. Linaberry, was athletic, handsome, and smiled a lot.

  The scene changed. The scorned young lover and the mother met in the street. They talked. He spoke about her daughter from the heart. You could tell that he loved her better than anyone else ever had.… Suddenly I realized the movie was just about over, soon the lights would come up, and then Robertson and I would be face to face with Mom and Mr. Linaberry. And then what?

  Would nephew and uncle wink at each other? Would Mr. Linaberry be pleased as punch that his nephew was out with Annie’s daughter? The two delighted boys who got their wimmin! And would Robertson be overcome with pleasure to meet my mother? I could hear him saying it. Mrs. Boots, I’m overcome with pleasure to meet Emily Beth’s mother!

  On that thought, I was up and out of my seat. Robertson was right behind me. “Where’re you going?” he stage-whispered.

  I held my throat. “Fresh air. Gotta have fresh air.” That wasn’t too much of a lie. I felt nauseous.

  Outside, he said, “Are you okay?”

  “Much better!” I gulped in air. “I’m sorry I made you miss the end of the movie.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You could tell all they were going to do was walk off into the sunset together, talking about her daughter.”

  “She was pretty, wasn’t she?”

  “Not my type. Did you ever notice, Emily Beth, how in movies ugly people never die? I mean if they do, you’re glad. They don’t die in sad ways. But the pretty people always get knocked off slowly by vicious killer diseases.”

  I looked at him. I couldn’t believe he’d said it. It was exactly what I’d been thinking.

  “Uh-oh, look at that,” he said. A couple was standing in the doorway of a store with their arms wrapped around each other.

  “Don’t stare,” I said. “Don’t point! It’s private, Robertson.”

  “But they’re right out in public, Emily Beth. They must want me to stare.” And he actually stopped so he could stare even more.

  I walked away from him. I couldn’t figure this kid out. One minute he said something really cute and smart, and the next he acted like a total jerk.

  He caught up with me. “What’s the matter? Are you mad at me or something?”

  “I hate people who are snoopy. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it.”

  “Well, Emily Beth, they’re still right there in public, kissing. Glued together.” He glanced at his watch. “They must have been kissing for two minutes already. Want to time them and see how long they go on?”

  “No.” But then I checked the time, too. And I waited with him. I pretended to be interested in the architecture of the stone house on the corner. What a hypocrite. At least Robertson was up front about his staring.

  “Three minutes,” he reported. “… they’re going for five … six … seven …” At eight minutes we agreed they had probably broken all the records, and we moved on.

  “Well, that was certainly enjoyable,” he said.

  “Better than the movie,” I said.

  At Grove Avenue, which was halfway between his house and mine, we said good-bye. “I had a great time,” he said. “I have to thank you for asking me.”

  “I had a nice time, too,” I said.

  “My pleasure, Emily Beth!” His eyes shone at me. “I should walk you home.”

  “No, you don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to do it.”

  “Robertson, is this going to be like the tickets?”

  “Not if you don’t argue,” he said. And he walked along with me. So then we had to say good-bye again in front of my door. He held my hand and squeezed it. “It was great, it was so great.”

  “Okay … thanks.” I squeezed his hand back and ran up the stairs. If only I hadn’t seen Mom at the theater, I would have had a really good time.

  The evening had been one surprise after another. Liking being with Robertson. Seeing Mom at the movies. And now I had the third surprise. I opened the door, and guess who I found in the living room, watching TV and baby-sitting my sister and brother?

  My best friend, Bunny Larrabee.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” she said. “Your mom called about five minutes after you left and asked me what I was doing tonight. I said, Nothing special, just sitting around watching TV.”

  I moaned.

  “Then she said she had a favor to ask me, if I would baby-sit the twins tonight.”

  I sighed and sat down next to her on the couch.

  “What could I do? Tell your mother I didn’t want to help her? Or should I have told her that you were trying to keep her from going out? Which was why you went out. And that you were going to kill me when you got home and found I’d made it possible for her to go out, after all.” Bunny drew a breath. “Which one, Emily?”

  I slumped down. “All of the above,” I said glumly.

  Chapter 16

  Monday morning I woke up sick and went back to bed. My legs were wobbly and my head ached. “Flu,” Mom said. In the middle of the day, the nurse called from Wilma and Chris’s school. They were both sick. Mom brought them home and put them to bed, too. “At least you’re all sick together,” she said, as if that were an accomplishment. Actually, we almost always get sick at the same time. Mom took care of us until she left for work around three o’clock. Same thing the next day and the next. Every day after she left, Chris would start crying, “I’m lonely for Mom.”

  And every day Wilma would moan, “Shut up, please shut up, I have a headache.”

  And then I’d totter into their room and read them a story to distract them. I knew just how Chris felt. It is sort of lonely not having Mom around when you’re sick. It’s not just that she’s a nurse and can take your temperature and stuff (I can do that, myself), but she has these little special things she does that make you feel better. She changes your sticky pillowcase every few hours. If your throat aches, you get soothing things to eat like ice cream and tapioca. If it’s your head aching, a warm washcloth. And she always makes sure you have enough tissues and books and games.

  But on Thursday, Mom came down sick, too. I’d been sick the longest, so I tried to take care of her, but even something as simple as making her a cup of tea or bringing her another blanket still seemed like a huge effort. “What a crew we are,” Mom whispered weakly. She was on the couch. Chris and Wilma had dragged their pillows and blankets into the living room and were lying on the floor near Mom.

  I thought I should make supper for everyone, but Mom said it was okay if we just ate toast and ice cream. “You still are weak, Emily.… I’ll be better tomorrow … and I’ll make you all good food.”

  We were finishing our ice cream and watching TV when the phone rang. It was my father. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said. “It’s a month! How about that?”

  “What about a month, Daddy?” I croaked. My voice was still really
weird-sounding.

  “I told you I’d call in a month, and here I am.”

  “Let me speak to Dad.” Wilma poked me. “Let me speak to Max.”

  “Wilma wants to talk to you, Dad.”

  “Are you okay, Emily? Your voice sounds funny.”

  “I’m sick. We’re all sick with a flu, even Mom. I didn’t go to school all week. Mom says it’s the worst flu we’ve ever had.”

  “We got the same thing,” Dad said cheerfully. “First me, then Marcia. Fever and aching bones, right? I stayed home, but Marica went in to work, anyway. You want to say hello to Rachel? She’s right here. Say hello to your sister, Rachel!”

  There was a little pause, then I heard a squeaky voice saying, “Hi, hi, hi. ’Bye.”

  After me, the twins talked to Dad and to Rachel. Chris stayed on the phone the longest. “This is your big brother,” he said to Rachel. “What’d you do today?” He listened, then he said, “What are you going to do tomorrow?” And he listened again.

  After he hung up, Wilma said, “I don’t get it. Was she talking to you? All she said to me was Hi.”

  “That’s all she said to me, too,” Chris admitted. “But I think she understood everything I said to her.”

  “You’re a crazy bird,” Wilma said.

  Saturday morning, Mr. Linaberry knocked on our door. “Hello, you,” he said, looking over my shoulder at Mom, who was lying on the couch, the same place she’d been for the past two days.

  Mom tried to sit up. “Oh, Len. Len.”

  “I wondered,” he said. “I didn’t see you.”

  “Oh … well …” Mom sort of gestured around at the mess and at herself, then fell back on the couch. “You can see …”

  Mr. Linaberry nodded. “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” He came in and peered into every room, even the bathroom. “Huh! Huh!” he kept saying, like he couldn’t believe what he saw. The house was pretty messy. The kitchen sink was piled with dishes, and nobody had taken out the garbage for days. Plus there were clothes and papers and odds and ends of things everywhere. He came back into the kitchen, carrying a load of clothes, and he put them into the washing machine. “Where’s the soap, little girl?”

  I went under the sink for the detergent. Who had given him permission to do our laundry? We could take care of ourselves! I ran hot water into the sink full of dishes. I grabbed the broom and swept the floor. Meanwhile, Mr. Linaberry had found a rag and was cleaning the stove. “You don’t have to do that!” I said. I must have gotten a jolt of adrenaline to my system. I started racing around the apartment, cleaning like a maniac. I hadn’t moved so much, and definitely not so speedily, all week. I did the dishes, stacked books, and folded the newspapers for recycling, into a paper bag. I even stripped the twins’ beds and made them up fresh. And remembered to dump the old sheets into the hamper, out of sight of Mr. Linaberry! I didn’t stop cleaning for a moment. Neither did he—he vacuumed the living room, washed the windows, and polished Mom’s favorite brass lamp.

  “Everything is so … clean!” Mom sighed, when he finally left.

  Five minutes later, he was back, this time carrying a pot. “Soup,” he announced. He went into the kitchen, poured the soup into cups, and handed them around to everyone. “Should be homemade,” he said. “I didn’t have time.”

  “Oh, no. This is wonderful,” Mom said.

  Mr. Linaberry offered me a cup of soup. “No, thank you.” I put some tuna and crackers on a plate and took it into my room. Maybe the rest of my family didn’t have any pride, but I wanted our own food. I sat on my bed, nibbling a cracker and taking tiny bites of the tuna.

  Mr. Linaberry didn’t leave for a long time. Finally, I went back into the living room and sat down in the rocking chair near Mom. Mr. Linaberry was playing cards with Chris and Wilma. “You. Want to play?” Mr. Linaberry asked, looking at me, or rather, at my shoulder.

  I shook my head. What gave him that idea? And when was he going? He’d been here for hours. Was he planning to move in? “How do you feel, Mom?” I asked.

  “Better,” Mom said. Her eyes glowed like Chris’s had, with fever. Or was it love?

  “The mama ate all her soup,” Mr. Linaberry said.

  “Good!” I said crossly. The traitorous thought had slipped into my mind that my father probably wouldn’t have done half of what Mr. Linaberry had for us. We used to joke about how when anyone of us got sick, Dad was so upset, he had to leave the house … so he wouldn’t see us suffering.

  Mom touched my arm. “Emmy …” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “Isn’t Len a fine, fine person?”

  I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say no. I rocked harder. Okay, he helped us out. That was a fact. He cleaned, he brought us food. Why? Because he was so good? Or because he wanted to impress Mom? I knew which one I thought was the right answer.

  When he finally got up to leave, he shook hands with Chris. “Don’t forget me, Len,” Wilma said. He shook hands with her, too. He turned to me. I didn’t offer my hand, so he gave me a tap on the head. Then he went to the couch, bent over Mom, and kissed her. There was worse to come, though. Mom raised herself up and kissed him back.

  Chapter 17

  “Emily Beth Boots, hel-lo.”

  “Robertson Reo, how are you?”

  “My health is impeccable. How’s yours?”

  “I’m coming back to school tomorrow.”

  “Hey, hey, hey. I await the moment with anticipation.”

  “Thank you, Robertson.”

  “Emily Beth, do you like me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know you do! You’ve been converted.”

  “Converted? I wouldn’t put it that way. You make it sound like a religious experience.”

  “I won you over by the power of my personality. I made a stand and it paid off. You don’t know this, but I directed powerful beams of energy thought to you. That’s why you asked me to the movies. I’ll tell you the truth, Emily Beth, I didn’t believe it could work. I was a skeptic, myself. I got this idea of concentrating mental energy from an article I read in my dentist’s office. I said to myself What do you have to lose, Reo? Give it a try! I concentrated on you. Every time I saw you, every time I thought about you, I sent powerful beams of energy thoughts your way. Bingo! You asked me to the movies.”

  “Robertson, take it easy. You don’t know the whole story.”

  “My uncle says you were pretty sick there for a while.”

  “Excuse me? Your uncle says. I don’t appreciate your uncle talking about my private affairs.”

  “He didn’t say anything private, Emily Beth, he just commented.”

  “I do not appreciate your uncle commenting about anything about me.”

  “It wasn’t you especially. Your family. Wilma there and the other one—”

  “Christopher.”

  “Riight. And your mom, Ann—”

  “My mother is Mrs. Boots to you, Mr. Reo.”

  “Emily Beth, I think you’re mad at me.”

  “I am not mad at you.”

  “Excellent! I wouldn’t want you to be mad at me. Hey, hey, hey, guess what? Your mother, I mean Mrs. Boots, and my uncle were at the same movie we were at last week. The same time even.”

  “Imagine that.”

  “Oh, you knew it!”

  “Yes, I did, Robertson.”

  “It’s funny we didn’t see them.”

  “Do you talk to your uncle a lot, Robertson?”

  “What’s a lot? Give me an example.”

  “A lot is talking about when he was at the movies and about me being sick. I think that’s a lot.”

  “Emily Beth, my uncle Len’s a funny guy. He’s kind of an oddball. My aunt died a long time ago, and my mother says ever since, Uncle Len has been a different person. My mom calls him once a week to check up on him, and then she hands me the phone and I have to talk to him. He doesn’t say much, so I have to think of things to say, like ‘Hi, Uncle Len, I saw a movie the other night wi
th my girlfriend—’”

  “I’m not your girlfriend, Robertson.”

  “Or maybe I’ll say, ‘So what did you do today, Uncle Len?’ You know, try to get him to talk a little, give me a rest from it.”

  “What kind of a person was he before your aunt died?”

  “More of a regular person. He used to be a fireman. He was even a hero. Mom has newspaper clippings pasted into our photo album when Uncle Len rescued two kids. He rescued other people, too. He inhaled so much smoke, he damaged his lungs and had to leave the force. That’s when he started his repair shop. Am I boring you?”

  “No. That was interesting. I’m pretty surprised about your uncle being a hero. I’m impressed. He doesn’t look the type. Robertson, I have to go now. But I have two things to say to you first. One. I am not your girlfriend. I am a friend who is a girl. And, two. Do not talk to your uncle about me or my mother.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I say so.”

  “Got it! Anything my girlfriend wants, she can have.”

  “Good-bye, Robertson!”

  Chapter 18

  From the moment I went back to school after I got well again, I had a problem with Robertson. He’d changed. Just because we’d gone to the movies—or, no, maybe because I’d asked him to the movies—he thought he had a claim to me. Before, he’d always been bordering on the impossible but somehow kept it in check. Now he’d gone all the way over the edge. He thought I was his, and he wanted the world to know.

  It began the day I returned to school. Bunny and I were eating lunch in the cafeteria when Robertson saw me. He was at the other end of the room, but he stood up and bellowed, “Emily Beth! There you are!” Everybody’s head turned. Everybody looked at Robertson, then at me. Robertson sounded as if he’d been searching the world for me for years. “You look great!” he yelled. “You don’t look sick at all!”

  Then he charged across the room and lifted me off the bench. He was strong, and it happened in an instant. He was laughing, but I wasn’t. I felt like a toy, one of those little floppy things whose arms and legs dangle.