Dicey's Song

by Cynthia Voigt

  Dicey didn’t care if nobody liked it but her. She remembered how she had felt, writing it down. It was hard, and she kept scratching out sentences and beginning again. Yet it kind of came out, almost without her thinking of it, almost as if it had been already written inside her head, and she just had to find the door to open to let it out. She’d never felt that way about schoolwork before, and she wondered if she could do it again. She made her face quiet, not to show what she was thinking.

  At last, Mina broke the silence. “That surely is a horse of another color,” she said. There was laughter in her voice. “I guess it about beat me around the track — before I even left the starting gate.” She looked around the class.

  “Oh, yes, it’s very well written,” Mr. Chappelle agreed.

  Dicey kept quiet.

  “But who wrote it?” somebody asked, a boy. “And what happened at the end? It sounded like she died. But it didn’t say she died.”

  The voices went on talking.

  “It sounded like she was about to die.”

  “No, she was already dead.”

  “Where was she?”

  “In jail? In a hospital? It said they fed her and changed the sheets.”

  “But what happened?”

  “She couldn’t support her family. She was poor, couldn’t you tell? And it just got her down.”

  “Yeah, because she started out happy, didn’t she?”

  “Why didn’t she get married?”

  “The guy walked out, weren’t you listening?”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to get married.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want all those kids.”

  “But it takes two — you know what I mean. It wasn’t just her fault.”

  “It wasn’t fair what happened to her.”

  “Fair — what difference does fair make?”

  “Did she go crazy? I would.”

  “And it’s a mental hospital at the end? But it sounded like a jail picture, at the end.”

  “Who wrote it, Mr. Chappelle, tell us. You’re the one who knows.”

  They stopped for his answer: “I do, and I don’t,” he said.

  Dicey bit her lip. Now what did that mean?

  “It’s like one of the stories in our book,” somebody said.

  “What do you mean?” Mr. Chappelle asked quickly. “Did you read it in our text?”

  How could she have? Dicey thought impatiently.

  “No, I mean — it doesn’t sound like one of us wrote it. It doesn’t sound like anything I could write. I never knew anybody like Mrs. Liza. And even if I did, I couldn’t — say it like that. Tell us, did you write it?”

  Mr. Chappelle came around to the front of the desk. He leaned back against it, half-sitting on it. “No, I didn’t. Dicey Tillerman did. Stand up, Dicey.”

  Dicey stood up. She stood up straight and didn’t even lean her hand on her desk. Everybody stared at her. “I shoulda guessed,” Mina said. She smiled across the room at Dicey, congratulating.

  “What did happen to her at the end?” somebody asked, but Mr. Chappelle cut off the question.

  “Do you have anything to say?” he asked Dicey. She kept her mouth shut, and her face closed off. She knew now what he was thinking.

  “No? But I’m afraid I do. I’m very much afraid I have a great deal to say. I’m not one of your great brains, but I’ve taught this course long enough to be able to tell the kind of work students can do.”

  Dicey felt frozen. He wasn’t looking at her, but she was looking at him, at his pale, flabby mouth out of which words marched slowly.

  “Now I can’t say what book this came out of — if it came out of a book. I can’t even say for sure that it did come out of a book. Maybe somebody else helped Dicey write it.”

  He gave her time to say something there, but he didn’t look at her. Dicey didn’t say a word. In the first place, her tongue felt like it was frozen solid, and her head was a block of ice, and all the blood in her body had chilled and congealed. In the second place, he had more to say. She could guess what that was.

  “But even if I can’t prove plagiarism, I can still smell it. Besides, there was a restriction on this assignment. It was supposed to be about someone you knew. A real person. On those grounds alone, the essay fails.”

  Dicey should have known. She should have known this would happen, and everyone would believe him. The silence in the room told her what everyone was thinking. She was the only one standing up, for everyone to look at.

  “What I primarily resent is the deceitfulness of it, the cheap trickery, the lies,” Mr. Chappelle declared.

  “That’s not true.”

  Dicey turned to see who had spoken. She thought she could hear her neck bones crackling, like ice, when she turned her head.

  Mina was standing up. She looked around the room, her eyes dark as coffee and puzzled. “How can you believe that?” she demanded of Mr. Chappelle.

  “Come now, Wilhemina,” he said.

  “I don’t believe it,” she declared. Her voice sounded certain.

  Mr. Chappelle looked around the classroom. Dicey could have laughed. He didn’t quite dare order Mina to sit down, because people listened to her and liked her.

  “Dicey wouldn’t do that,” Mina went on. “She doesn’t care enough about what we think to cheat on something.”

  How did Mina know that? Dicey wondered. She wondered it deep behind her icy face.

  “Someone like Dicey — she’s too smart to worry about her grades; she doesn’t have to worry. And if she cared what we thought —” her hand sketched a circle including all the students — “she’d act different. Don’t you think?”

  People rustled in their seats. They could think whatever they wanted. Now Dicey understood the C+ in English.

  The bell rang, ending class, but Mina spoke before anybody could move to leave. “Stay here, I’ll prove it.”

  “How can you prove it?” Mr. Chappelle asked. He had moved back behind his desk. “I’ve got these essays to hand out.”

  “Wait,” Mina said.

  They could stay or go for all Dicey cared.

  “I can prove it,” Mina repeated. “Dicey?” She looked across the room at Dicey. Her eyes were filled with sympathy. Dicey didn’t need anybody’s pity. But behind the liquid darkness of Mina’s eyes, Dicey saw mischief. Mina knew she was right, and she was enjoying herself.

  “Dicey? Is this someone you know?”

  “Yes,” Dicey said. She was talking just to Mina.

  “Did you write it yourself?”

  “Yes,” Dicey said.

  “What does that prove?” Mr. Chappelle muttered.

  “Do you want to hear Dicey lie?” Mina asked him. “Dicey, is this someone you’re related to?”

  Dicey lifted her chin. She didn’t answer. There was no way anybody could make her answer. In her mind, she made a picture: the little boat, she’d have painted it white by then, or maybe yellow — it was out on the Bay beyond Gram’s dock and the wind pulled at the sails. Dicey could feel the smooth tiller under her hand, she could feel the way the wooden hull flowed through the water.

  “Dicey,” Mina asked, with no expression in her voice, “what are you thinking about?”

  “About sailing,” Dicey answered. “About a boat and how it feels when you’re sailing it.” Those might be the last words she spoke in that class, and why should she bother to make them a lie.

  Then people did get up and go. They didn’t look at Dicey, but they looked at Mr. Chappelle as they walked past his desk and picked out their papers.

  Dicey was almost at the door when he stopped her and gave the paper to her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll change the grade — to an A+ — and I’ll change the mid-semester grade too, of course.”

  Dicey didn’t say anything. She didn’t care what he said.

  “It’s my mistake and I’m really very sorry,” he said again. “I’m giving you an A for the marking period, of course.”

 
It didn’t make any difference to Dicey what he said.

  She sat through horrible home ec without any trouble at all. On the outside, she was paring carrots and slicing them thin to boil them at the stoves. She didn’t eat any, just scraped them into the garbage. She went to work, without even noticing if Jeff was outside playing his guitar. She did her work hard and fast and answered Millie’s questions without thinking. She rode home through a wind like a knife blade, but it didn’t make her cold. She put her bike in the barn and leaned her free hand against the boat for a minute before going on into the house. Gram was in the kitchen. Maybeth and James worked in the living room by the fire. Dicey put her books up in her bedroom and then came back downstairs. She peeled some potatoes for Gram, then cut them up into chunks for hash browns. Sammy came through, rubbing his hands and puffing out cold air. Dicey stood at the wooden countertop, slicing the potatoes first, then cutting across the slices, then cutting again perpendicularly. Slice after slice.

  Gram was shaking chicken pieces in a brown paper bag. Dickey could hear the sound it made, like somebody brushing out a rhythm on drums. “How was school today?” Gram asked.

  “Fine,” Dicey said. She cut slowly, carefully, making her squares as even as possible.

  “How’s Millie?” Gram asked. There was a kind of sharpness in her voice, and alertness, but Dicey didn’t turn around to read the expression on her face. She heard the chicken pieces shaking, in flour, salt, and pepper.

  “Fine.”

  Gram was staring at her. She could feel it.

  “You never said,” Gram said without breaking the rhythm of the shaking, “if you got your English grade changed.”

  “Well,” Dicey said. Then she couldn’t think of how to finish the sentence.

  “Well?” Gram asked after a while. “Was it a mistake? Were you right?”

  Dicey picked up the last potato. She cut it into neat slices. She lay the slices down flat in front of her. “Yeah, it was a mistake. Boy was it a mistake.” She felt pretty calm again, cold and still.

  “What happened?” Gram asked. For a second, Dicey was irritated. It wasn’t like Gram to insist on a subject Dicey didn’t want to talk about. Usually, Gram understood and stopped asking questions.

  “We had an essay to write,” Dicey explained. She felt like she was talking to the potato, because that was what she looked at. Behind her, Gram moved around the kitchen, getting things ready. “A character sketch, about a real person and conflict. I wrote one, and thought it was pretty good. He handed them back today. He thought I’d copied mine. Or something. He thought the person wasn’t real. He thought I’d taken it out of a book.” She slowed her hands down. When she finished with this potato, what was she going to do about what to look at?

  Gram’s voice came from behind her. “It must have been pretty good, if he thought it came out of a book.”

  Dicey turned around. Gram was looking at her. “Yeah,” Dicey said, hearing how fierce her own voice sounded, “it was.”

  “Did you tell him?” Gram asked.

  Dicey shook her head.

  “You mean he thinks you cheated?”

  Dicey shook her head again.

  “Exactly what happened?” Gram asked, sounding ready to get angry.

  “He read a couple of the papers out loud, to everyone. Mine was one. Then he said, he thought I’d cheated but he couldn’t prove it. But he said I hadn’t done the assignment, because it was supposed to be a real person. So he was flunking it.”

  “In front of the whole class?” Gram demanded.

  “Yeah.”

  Gram’s mouth moved and her eyes burned. That made Dicey feel warm, down deep in her stomach. Gram was angry for Dicey’s sake. “Can I read it?” Gram asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Now?”

  “OK.”

  “Will you get it, girl? I’ve got fat heating.”

  So Dicey went upstairs to get her essay. She started the potatoes while Gram sat at the table and read. She placed the cubes of potato neatly in the hot bacon fat and turned the gas down to medium once she heard the fat start to sizzle under the layer of potatoes. She checked the lard in the other frying pan, to see if it was smoking hot yet. She got down a jar of tomatoes that Gram had put up that summer. Every now and then she glanced over to see what Gram was doing. Gram read the essay through once, and then again, and then again.

  “Well,” Gram said at last, “I can see why he thought it came out of a book. I like it, Dicey. I like it very much. Your poor Momma. He couldn’t know she was real. It is hard to believe. Are you going to tell him?”

  Dicey shook her head. “Anyway, he knows,” she told Gram. “He said he’ll change the grade — as if that mattered — and on the report card too.”

  “Tell me what happened, Dicey,” Gram said.

  “Well, there’s this girl in our class — we worked together on a science project, and she’s about the most popular girl I guess. Mina. He was yelling at me for cheating, and she said she didn’t believe it.” As she recalled it, Dicey saw the picture she and Mina must have made and she started to smile. “I was standing up, I was the only one. And she stood up too, and she’s — she’s tall and strong-looking. And her voice — I don’t know how to tell you, like an actress.”

  Gram nodded, listening.

  “She said she didn’t think I’d cheat or lie. Because I didn’t care enough about what people thought. Well, she’s right.” Dicey grinned now. “Then she said she could prove it. So she asked me a couple of questions — she ought to be a lawyer, really. The bell rang and she told everybody to stay put and they did. Anyway, she proved it, I guess, because before I left he told me about the grades and he said he was sorry.”

  Gram was laughing. “I wish I’d been there,” she said. “I wish I’d seen this. I like the sound of this girl. She your friend?”

  “No, not really. I mean — no, not really.”

  “Hunh,” Gram said, getting up from the table and going to the stove. She started putting pieces of chicken into the fat. Dicey stepped back. “Must have been hard on you, though,” Gram remarked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dicey said.

  Then Gram started laughing again. “That teacher sure had his hands full, didn’t he, between you and this Mina character. I bet he was sorry the day he assigned that essay.” And Dicey joined in now that she could see the scene as if it was part of a movie. “Serves him right,” Gram added, “and will you put those tomatoes into a saucepan?”

  When James read her essay about Momma, he was impressed. He didn’t say so, but Dicey could tell. He asked her why she had left things out, about what their house was like, or Momma losing her job. He asked why she hadn’t told about Momma’s kids more. “That’s not the way it really was,” he protested. “I mean — it is, it’s what it felt like. But there was a whole lot more, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes,” Dicey agreed. She thought Gram might bring up the subject of Mr. Chappelle’s accusation, but Gram just sat there, knitting away on the start of Sammy’s blue sweater. She had finished Maybeth’s and then dampened it down and laid it on towels on the dining room table to block it into shape. When it dried, Maybeth could wear it. James went up to bed, and Dicey started to follow him, but Gram asked her to stay a while.

  “I’ve got some reading to do,” Dicey protested.

  “It won’t be long,” Gram said. “Sit down, girl.”

  Dicey sat down cross-legged in front of the fire. Gram sat in an armchair a little farther back from the flames. She was knitting the ribbing, purl two, knit two. Her quick hands moved the yarn back and forth over the needles. Her eyes were dark and her hair, at the end of the day, curled around her head as if nobody ever had combed it.

  “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life,” Gram began.

  “I don’t believe it,” Dicey answered.

  Gram looked up briefly at her and smiled. “Well, I do, and I was there,” she said. “After my husband died, I had a lot of tim
e for thinking. And then you all arrived, and if you think that hasn’t added things to think about you’re not as smart as I take you for. But especially after he died and I was alone.”

  She looked up sharply to say, “Don’t think I minded being alone.”

  “I don’t,” Dicey said, the smile she kept from her face showing in her voice and eyes.

  “Good. I didn’t mind being alone, and I don’t mind you living here. But that’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to say — I married John, and that wasn’t a mistake. But the way we stayed married, the way we lived, there were lots of mistakes. He was a stiff and proud man, John — a hard man.”

  Dicey nodded, because Gram had said this once before.

  “I stuck by him. But I got to thinking, after he died — whether there weren’t things I should have done. He wasn’t happy, not a happy man. I knew that, I got to know it. He wasn’t happy to be himself. And I just let him be, let him sit there, high and proud, in his life. I let the children go away from him. And from me. I got to thinking — when it was too late — you have to reach out to people. To your family too. You can’t just let them sit there, you should put your hand out. If they slap it back, well you reach out again if you care enough. If you don’t care enough, you forget about them, if you can. I don’t know, girl.”

  Dicey watched into the fire, where blue-edged flames leaped up toward the chimney.

  “I can’t say any more that Millie Tydings is stupid,” Gram said.

  What did she mean by that? Dicey wondered. How did she get to Millie?

  “Because Millie is always reaching out. She always had a hand out for me, not that I’ve taken it much. She’s got one out for you, hasn’t she, girl. I’m not saying that Millie’s thought this out, but she didn’t need to. Because there’s wisdom in her.”