Dicey's Song

by Cynthia Voigt

  “It wasn’t in school,” Sammy assured Dicey.

  “On the bus,” Gram said, drily.

  “Who’d you fight?” Dicey asked.

  “Some kid,” Sammy said. He thought for a minute and then told her, “He was bigger’n me and a good fighter.”

  “But why?” Dicey burst out.

  Sammy shook his head, no. He wasn’t going to tell her.

  Dicey looked at Gram’s worried face and knew the same expression was on her own. She could have laughed. Here they were, getting what they wanted for Sammy, and they began worrying right away.

  “Was it worth fighting about?” Gram asked Sammy.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice fierce.

  Dicey tried to figure out what could be so important to him. She wondered about it all that evening, not even listening to the arguments Sammy used to try to convince Gram that they should have some chickens. Until Sammy said something that caught her attention. “They’re like watchdogs, Gram.”

  Dicey sputtered, trying to swallow back her laughter. She was picturing chickens attacking a thief. Everybody was smiling, all around the table, and Sammy smiled the happiest of all. What did it matter then if he was getting into fights, or Maybeth never learned to read, or James pretended to be less smart than he was? Nothing mattered nearly as much as sitting together around this table, in the warm yellow light, all of them together.

  That was true, she knew, but still she worried at the question of why Sammy was fighting. It couldn’t be because of Momma, could it? In Provincetown, that was why, because of what people said about Momma and them. About not having a father living in the house with them, about not having their father’s name. Nobody in Crisfield knew that, or even suspected, except maybe Millie. Then what would make Sammy fighting-angry?

  She thought about it during school the next day. Maybe the kids were teasing Sammy about being a sissy, because he was so well-behaved in school. That would make him fight. Maybe something to do with Maybeth, so maybe Dicey should tell him about how James was teaching Maybeth and they thought James’s way might be working.

  When Miss Eversleigh gave them an in-class assignment, to take fifty dollars and plan meals for a family of four, Dicey didn’t have to think twice about it. She remembered how they had eaten that summer, and how little money they had spent. Soup, peanut butter, bread, milk, bananas. She looked at her list and calculated expenses. Apples, she added. She still had almost thirty dollars left. She bet nobody else knew how to spend so little money and keep from starving. Around the edge of her paper she drew boxes of doughnuts, the kind of stale, half-price doughnuts they had bought over the summer. She drew a few clams and mussels. She didn’t even notice Miss Eversleigh come to stand behind her and read what she had written, because she was trying to figure out how to draw chicken wings. They had had chicken wings once.

  Dicey saw the arm come down over her shoulder and the red pen go to the top of her paper. The pen wrote: F. Nobody could live for long on meals like this, the pen wrote. The letters were straight and short, bright and thick and angry.

  Dicey almost said, We did. But she stopped herself. She turned to look at the woman’s face. Miss Eversleigh was certainly angry, and angry at Dicey. Neither of them said a word. Nobody else in the class even noticed.

  Dicey didn’t much care if Miss Eversleigh was angry. What more could she do than flunk Dicey, and she’d already done that. It wasn’t as if she was teaching anything Dicey needed to know, or wanted to know. Who wanted to memorize food groups or talk about seasonal buying or how to store food while conserving energy. Who needed to know? Not Dicey. Or about how to put buttons on or cut out a pattern. That was for people who — didn’t have anything more interesting to do. Dicey had much more interesting, and more important, things to do.

  Miss Eversleigh stared into Dicey’s eyes for a long time, as if trying to figure out what was going on inside her head. Dicey just stared back. It took more than a home ec teacher to scare her.

  Finally, Miss Eversleigh went away to look at somebody else’s paper, and Dicey got back to her thinking. If Sammy kept on fighting, then she would have to find out why. If he didn’t, then it wasn’t important. How many more fights would be keeping on? One, two, seven?

  Miss Eversleigh stood at the front of the class again and called everybody to attention. She was going to make a speech, you could tell by the way her face was set, and she waited until every girl raised her face to look at the front of the room. Dicey shifted in her seat.

  “I wonder if you girls understand,” Miss Eversleigh said, “the importance of this course. If it were not important, I would not waste my time teaching it.”

  Dicey could hear the unspoken question behind each politely listening face: What’s set her off?

  “The materials we cover in this course are skills. I have spent years protesting the exclusion of boys from my courses.” She waited, then spoke again. “I have always believed that there is as great a disadvantage to not being able to perform domestic skills as to not being able to perform intellectual skills, or athletic, or social.”

  Again she stopped and waited. Dicey was watching her, but Miss Eversleigh did not look at Dicey. “You owe it to yourselves to know how to prepare a meal, or sew a seam, or spend money wisely. You also owe it to yourselves to know how to hammer a nail straight or change a tire, to eat at table with appropriate manners, to plant tomatoes, to acquire information you have need of. If you do not understand that, your understanding is faulty.”

  That was the end. Miss Eversleigh just stood there until the bell rang, a long, uncomfortable five minutes. Nobody stirred. Nobody said anything.

  Dicey used the time to review her thinking about Sammy, to wonder how much a small electric heater would cost and whether that would make it warm enough to get back to work on the boat. She sneaked glances at the clock. Next Monday they were getting their English essays back. Mr. Chappelle had promised. She concentrated on that, anticipating what he would say about hers, feeling proud and glad.

  CHAPTER 7

  DICEY LOOKED out the window and made her legs stay still. Outside, wind blew the branches of the two big oaks, ripping off the last of the brown leaves and carrying them away. The sky was a bright blue, and the sun shone with a diamond hardness. The brightness of the sun and the coldness of the wind combined to mark out sharply the edges of her view. She could see each individual brick on the old building, as if the cold made each brick contract into itself. The angles of the main entranceway, the clear edge of the cement sidewalk, the flat lawn, bare and brown now, all looked as if they would be cold to touch.

  Dicey crossed her ankles again, containing her impatience. She was wearing jeans and one of the rough old boys’ sweaters, a bright red one that hung loose about her torso. She had chosen it because it seemed like the kind of color her Momma’s brother Bullet would have liked, if she was right about the kind of person he had been.

  Mr. Chappelle was putting off returning their papers until he had told them about the mistakes most of them had made. They were supposed to be writing these things down, the list of misspelled words, the grammar errors, the kind of topic sentence every paragraph was supposed to have. He was explaining and explaining. Everybody was quiet, just waiting for him to get finished. The thing that got Dicey was that he pretended he was doing this stuff first because it was more important than the grades. That was what he said, that the papers were a learning situation, and the grades didn’t matter.

  But Dicey suspected that he was doing this dull stuff first because he knew that once he handed the papers back nobody would pay any attention to him. It wasn’t his fault, it was just the way classes went. You worked hard (or not so hard) for something, and when you got the results that job was over. The teacher might not think it was over, but the students sure did. The grade told you how well you had done (or what you got away with). The grade was what you looked for — not the red circles around mistakes. Sometimes, a teacher wrote a comment, good
work (or bad work), and you looked at that, too. But mostly, everything they had to say they said in the grade. If there was something more important than the grade, Dicey wanted to know why didn’t teachers ever say anything about that, like write you a note about it on your paper. If it wasn’t worth his time to write down, how could he say it was worth hers?

  She sat forward and sat back and sat forward. She looked at the clock — only fifteen minutes left; he’d have to hand the papers back soon.

  “Now,” Mr. Chappelle said, “you may be interested in seeing your essays.” He smiled at his own joke, so a few kids made little fake laughing noises.

  “Before I hand them out, there are two I’d like to read aloud to you.” Dicey made herself lean back in her chair. She jammed her hands down into her pockets and stretched her legs out in front of her. “To share with you,” Mr. Chappelle said, and reached down into his briefcase. He took out the pile of papers. He ran his hand through his red hair and looked around at everyone, his eyes sliding along the rows. He tried another joke. “Both of these essays were written by girls, but I don’t want you boys to get discouraged. Everyone knows boys grow up more slowly.”

  Who cares, Dicey demanded silently.

  He took up a paper and began to read.

  There’s this girl I know, you never know what she’s thinking, even though everybody thinks they know this girl. You look at her face, but that doesn’t tell you anything. Sometimes you know you don’t know what’s going on inside. Sometimes, you’re not sure you don’t know. I wonder about this girl. Here’s what I’ve noticed.

  Dicey thought this girl could be just about anyone, even Dicey. She could tell by the way the rest of the class was listening, they had the same feeling. The way it was written, it was just like somebody talking.

  She’s about the laughingest person you’re liable to meet, if you live forever. Nothing but sets her off laughing. You could tell her you were flunking every course and about to be booted out of home and into the unemployment lines, and she’d laugh. She’d laugh until you might start laughing too. You could tell her you just got elected president of your class and captain of the football team and Prince Charming, all at once, and you know what she’d do — she’d laugh. Everywhere she goes it’s nothing but laugh, laugh, until you feel like you’re caught out in a rainstorm that won’t never end. But I keep finding her crying when she thinks nobody’s there to see. I catch her. And when I ask her, “Honey, why you crying so bad?” she never says one word to tell me. I stand there, passing out the Kleenex, and she’s whooping and wailing and there’s nothing can stop her once she’s started.

  By this time, Dicey thought she recognized who the person was describing: Mina. Because of the laughing. The crying wasn’t anything Dicey had seen, but she guessed this was a pretty close friend of Mina’s.

  Another thing. She’s always talking about you. Not behind your back, but right when you’re having your conversation. “How are you, and what do you think, and what do you like?” She’s mighty easy to talk with, this girl, because she’s always interested in the other person. She listens and she remembers and she’ll ask you, two years later, “Remember that fight you had with your father about your allowance? Do you still feel the same way?” I guess she’s about the most unselfish person I know. But inside, she’s always thinking about herself, patting herself on the back for being a caring, remembering person. She’s got about the longest arms you’ll ever see for patting herself on the back. So while you’re telling her this sad, beautiful love story, and you’re saying everything you feel — but everything — she’s listening so hard you feel like she’s curled up inside your own head and you think there never was such a person for listening to you. All the time, part of her’s wondering if she’s ever been in love or if she ever will be, and how it’ll be for her, and she’s thinking how great you think she is. This girl is just about something, and I sometimes wonder if even she knows what’s going on.

  But, Dicey thought, the only person who could know all that about Mina was Mina. Dicey sat forward in her chair. Was it Mina’s paper? She slipped her eye over to where Mina was sitting. The smooth brown cheeks looked as if they’d never heard this before. Mina was looking down at her open notebook. But she wasn’t smiling, the way the rest of the class was while they listened. The way Dicey started to smile, figuring out what Mina had done. Dicey was impressed by this paper, the way Mina wrote about herself. Boy was that an idea — that was an idea and a half.

  To see her, she’s got all the answers. Everybody else has trouble making up their minds. Should I do this? Do I want to wear that? Is it the right answer? Not this girl, she just knows the heart out of everything and everybody. She doesn’t hesitate, she just puts her big feet out in front of her and gets going. And worry? That’s a word this girl never heard of. It’s not in her dictionary. She knows north from south, and she knows which way she wants to go. No regrets, not for her. If she makes a mistake — well she’s made a mistake and so what? Confident, you’d call her, and for all you know you’re one hundred percent right, there wasn’t anybody since the Garden of Eden as confident. But I’ve seen her do her hair one way then brush it out and do it another. I’ve seen her sit in one chair and then in another and then move to a bench and finally sit on the ground, until she hopped up to sit in the chair she tried first. I’ve seen her rip up ten starts on homework papers and only hand one in because she ran out of time to rip it up in.

  By this time, the class had figured out that it was Mina the essay was about. They whispered it and looked at Mina. They wondered — interrupting Mr. Chappelle but he didn’t seem to mind, he seemed to want them to guess — who’d written it. They asked one another, “Did you?” and answered, “No not me, did you?” Mina just kept staring down, but she was having a hard time not laughing out loud. Dicey was sure Mina had written it about herself, but she didn’t know why she was so sure. She just knew it.

  And all the time this girl’s listening and laughing, all the same. I’m watching her and I don’t know what she’s thinking, and then I’m thinking, Maybe I do. I guess by now you know who I’m talking about, you know it’s me, Wilhemina Smiths.

  The class burst out laughing, and praised Mina. Mina looked around and pretended to take a bow. Mr. Chappelle told her to stand up. As she did, she caught Dicey’s eye. Dicey pursed her lips into a mute whistle, to try to say how impressed she was. Mr. Chappelle stepped forward and gave Mina her paper. Mina didn’t even unfold it to see the grade. She just sat down again.

  After a minute, the noise in the room, and the occasional laugh, died away.

  “Now for a horse of another color,” Mr. Chappelle announced. He began to read.

  At the first words, Dicey recognized it as hers. She stared at Mr. Chappelle’s pale, impassive face as he read about Momma.

  Mrs. Liza lived away up north, away out on Cape Cod, away in a town right at the end of the Cape. Her cabin was outside of town, right at the edge of the ocean. The ocean rolled up toward her rickety cabin, like it wanted to swallow it up; but it never did. Maybe it didn’t even want to. The wind was always blowing around the cabin, like it too wanted to have that little building gone.

  Mrs. Liza had children, but she never had been married, and the man who was her children’s father had long ago gone and left her. She worked nights when the children were little, waiting tables in a restaurant, serving drinks in a bar, night-clerking in a motel. She always worked hard and was always willing to take days nobody else wanted, Christmas and Fourth of July, Easter. When the children got older, she switched to a daytime job, checkout in a supermarket. She hadn’t had any training for the kind of job that paid well, so she was always thinking about money, hoping she would have enough. Every sweater she owned had holes in it.

  She had reasons to turn into a mean woman, but Mrs. Liza just couldn’t. She had a face made to smile, and her eyes always smiled with her mouth. She had long hair, the color of warm honey in the winter, the color of ev
ening sunlight in the summer. She walked easy, high narrow shoulders, but loose, as if the joints of her body never got quite put together. She walked like a song sung without accompaniment.

  Then slowly, so slowly she never really could find out the place where it began, life turned sour on Mrs. Liza. People said things. While she never heard them herself, her children heard them and got older and understood what people meant. Mrs. Liza loved her children, so that worried her. Money worried at her the way waves worry at the shoreline, always nibbling away at the soft sand. Her money seemed to run out earlier each week.

  Mrs. Liza stood at the door of her cabin and looked out at the ocean. The ocean looked back at Mrs. Liza and rolled on toward her. She could see no end to the ocean. The wind that pulled at her hair was always blowing. She looked out at her children playing on the beach and reminded herself to get some tunafish for supper; but she forgot.

  Her eyes stopped smiling first, and then her mouth. The holes in her sweaters got bigger. Meanwhile, people talked and she didn’t know what to say so they could understand. Meanwhile, quarters and dimes got lighter, smaller. Meanwhile, her children were growing bigger and they needed more food, more clothes. Meanwhile, nothing she did seemed to make any difference.

  So Mrs. Liza did about the only thing left to her to do. She went away into the farthest place she could find. They cut her hair short. She didn’t notice that, lying there, nor when they fed her or changed the sheets. Her eyes never moved, as if what she was looking at was so far away small that if she looked off for a second, it would be gone.

  Mr. Chappelle put the paper down and looked up. Dicey felt proud: it was just about as good as she’d thought it was. It was really good. But everybody was absolutely quiet. Didn’t they think it was good, too? She waited nervously. Maybe she just liked it because it was hers, the way you liked anything you had made yourself. Maybe Mr. Chappelle read it because it was so bad, to show the difference between hers and Mina’s. Still nobody spoke. Mr. Chappelle was staring down at the paper. He was wearing a green tie.