The Divorce Express

by Paula Danziger

  That doesn’t help.

  Finally she stops and says, “Don’t feel bad. It happens to all of us. When I first got married, I wanted to make your father a lemon meringue pie. The recipe said to beat the egg whites. I boiled the eggs first and tried to beat them. How was I supposed to know you were supposed to beat them raw? So don’t feel bad.”

  We talk for a few minutes more, then she says, “I’ve got to go. They’re trying to decide whether to furnish the rec room in Art Deco or Hi-tech. Every time I do a job in the suburbs, I swear that I’ll never do another.”

  The suburbs on a Sunday—I wonder if she’s caught poison ivy yet.

  We tell each other that we love each other and then hang up.

  I remake the dessert, brewing the coffee first. This time it works.

  The dinner’s a success. My father loves it.

  As we’re eating dessert I tell him that I called my mother.

  “How’s Kathy doing?” he asks quietly.

  “Fine. Busy. Working hard.” I pour myself more milk. “She told me how to make the dessert right. I goofed it up at first.”

  He smiles. “She always was good in the kitchen. Except for a few early disasters.”

  “Like the lemon meringue? She told me about that.”

  He takes more dessert. “Did she tell you about the time I tried to make a meat loaf?”

  “No. I think she was kind of busy.”

  “I put hard-boiled eggs in it.”

  “That sounds right to me,” I say.

  “Without taking the shells off first?”

  “No wonder you gave up red meat.”

  “It was for your mother’s twenty-third birthday. She was pregnant with you. It was my first attempt at making anything that wasn’t barbecued. She was so good about it, smiled as she picked the shells out of her teeth.”

  “Sounds like it was fun in a weird way.”

  “It was.” He sighs. “There were some really good times between your mother and me. It’s a shame it changed.”

  I just sit still, folding my paper napkin into a tiny square.

  He looks at me. “The good memories and the fact that we have you make it worthwhile, Phoebe.”

  I put the napkin down and pat him on the hand. “Maybe it could still work out if you both really tried.”

  “We really did try, honey. It was no one’s fault. I married someone who fit right in with the way I was brought up. Only one day I realized I didn’t want to live the way I was brought up. Look, let’s not talk about it. I’ll do the dishes. You better get changed if we’re going to leave in half an hour. Thanks for the dinner. You did a great job.”

  I look down at my clothes. They’ve got mocha Bavarian cream and coffee grounds spattered all over. That’s because I turned on the beaters before I put them into the mixture. Gunk all over my new clothes. Now I’ll have to wash them before wearing them to school. That’s okay though. New clothes always have to look used to look right.

  While I’m changing I think about the marriage and the divorce. I do that a lot.

  I wonder if I’ll ever get used to it and it won’t hurt so much.

  I hope so.

  CHAPTER 5

  I feel like I’m on a grown-up date with my father, sitting at a table and listening to the Betty McDonald Band.

  School’s tomorrow, but tonight I can stay up late. My father loves to celebrate things. Tonight it’s because Rocky’s free. Once, before the divorce, he wanted to celebrate the septic tank being cleaned out. My mother said it was ridiculous to make a big deal out of something like that, but my father insisted. Now that they’re divorced though, I’m glad to celebrate any time he wants to.

  The band’s wonderful.

  A woman comes up to the table and puts her hand on my father’s shoulder.

  She coos, “Hi, Jim, how are you?”

  I want to smack her hand off his shoulder. She looks like she once was a cheerleader—the type that’s ever so cute, always tossing her hair a certain way.

  My father looks up at her and then stands up. “Hi, Martha. I’d like you to meet my daughter, Phoebe.”

  She sits down without even being invited. “Hello, Phoebe. What a sweet name for such a lovely looking girl. Don’t you just love your name?” She uses that yucky voice that some grown-ups have when they don’t know how to talk to kids like real people.

  I stare at the band. “My name is Phoebe Anna Brooks. My father chose the first name after Holden Caulfield’s little sister in The Catcher in the Rye, his favorite book when he was a teenager. My mother picked the name Anna because she likes palindromes, words that are spelled the same front and backward. If I were a boy they would have named me Babbling—Babbling Brooks.”

  She giggles and looks at my father. “Babbling Brooks . . . She’s so cute, Jim. She looks just like you.”

  “Excuse me, please.” I stand up. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  To barf, I want to add, but don’t.

  I go to the bathroom door. There’s a sign on it that says RESTROOM. I’ll never understand why they call it that. People don’t go in there to rest.

  Knocking first, I make sure no one’s in there and then I go in and look at the mirror.

  Why can’t I be beautiful? I look so average—brown hair, brown eyes, too thin eyebrows. Boring. I must have gotten average genes from an ancestor. My mother’s a beauty. That’s what Duane, her boyfriend, always says. Although he’s generally a nerd, he’s right about her looks. And my father’s nice looking. It’s a case of two positives making a negative.

  I put on lipstick, Passion Pink Frost.

  It doesn’t help.

  By the mirror on the wall, someone’s written HOO HA—SIX O’CLOCK. It makes no sense, but there are lots of things that don’t make any sense.

  Oh, well, I guess it’s time to go out.

  I walk out and stand by the salad bar.

  Maybe she’s fallen in a hole somewhere.

  She’s even taken my seat, the one closest to my father.

  I go up to the table, pull over the other chair, and sit on his left side.

  While I pretend to listen to the music, I listen to their conversation.

  She’s saying, “There’s a great group, the Marc Black Band, at the Lake over the weekend. I hope you’ll be there, Jim. You’re such a good dancer.”

  I want to stuff her head into the drum set.

  “Maybe. It sounds like fun.” My father touches his bald spot. “Next weekend Phoebe will be visiting her mother in the city. When she’s here, I like to spend the time with her. I’ll probably be there. Be sure to save a dance for me.”

  “As many as you want.” She gets up.

  Maybe by next weekend someone will break her legs.

  After she leaves, I turn to my father, who says, “Phoebe, you could have been more polite.”

  “She got on my nerves.”

  He shakes his head. “She’s a nice lady.”

  “How do you know her? How does she know you’re a good dancer?”

  He picks up his swizzle stick and keeps hitting it on the side of his glass. “I love to listen to live music. I love to dance. The Joyous Lake is the best nightclub to do that in town. I went there during the summer, while you were at camp. I go there some weekends. You go to school and have the chance to meet new people. I don’t.”

  “Did you ever go out with Martha?” I take the swizzle stick out of his hand before the tapping drives me nuts.

  “No. But who knows? I may. Listen. I’m thirty-eight years old. Single. I date. I have a right to go out. It may upset you, but I do go out. I just don’t do it while you’re home. We have enough to adjust to already with our new life.”

  “I like our new life just the way it is,” I tell him. “We don’t need anybody else.”

  He shakes his head but says nothing.

  I bite my fingernail. “I just don’t want you to bring home a wicked stepmother someday.”

  He rumples my hair. “Do
n’t give me that Cinderella number.”

  I pick up my soda. “And no mean stepsisters. Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  He’s really a good guy.

  Anyway, I’m the one who’s sitting here with him—not Martha or anyone else.

  CHAPTER 6

  The alarm goes off.

  6:00 A.M.

  No one in the world should have to get out of bed at that hour—except maybe people who do terrible things and deserve awful punishment.

  Whoever invented Snooz-Alarms deserves a medal. Hitting mine, I stop the noise and go back to sleep.

  6:10 A.M.

  I hit the lever again and sleep some more.

  6:20 A.M.

  6:30 A.M. Whoever invented Snooz-Alarms should be tortured. If I don’t get up now, I’m never going to make it to the bus on time.

  Jumping out of bed, I trip over the clothes I wore last night. Messiness comes easy to me.

  I stumble to the bathroom, brush my teeth, wash my face, and run a comb through my hair.

  Looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, I say, “Come on, Phoebe Brooks, get your act in gear. You’ve got to go to school even if you don’t want to go.”

  The face in the mirror has hardly opened her eyes.

  I throw on some clothes—undies, jeans, a sweater, socks, Nikes.

  I’m dressed like almost every kid in the school, wearing the unofficial uniform of Joyce Kilmer Regional High School.

  I hate looking like everyone else. But I’ve tried so I could fit in, have friends.

  It doesn’t seem to work. Anyway it doesn’t make me happy.

  I add a long pair of beaded American Indian earrings and wrap a scarf around my forehead.

  That’s more like it. Maybe I’ll look weird to everyone, but I’ll feel more like me.

  I grab my books and a coat.

  As I rush out the door I can hear my father in his bedroom, snoring.

  The bus is getting ready to leave.

  7:00 A.M. on the dot.

  I just made it.

  Plopping onto a seat, I think—buses. I’m so sick of them. I bet I spend half my life riding them.

  Taking out my notebook, I try to figure it out . . . .

  Wow, that means that over three weeks of my life each year is spent riding buses.

  And that’s without counting snow, ice, bad driving conditions, gridlock, mechanical problems.

  I bet it all adds up to about a month a year.

  If it continues all through high school, that’s a third of a year.

  It’s a shame I wasn’t born with wheels instead of legs. That would have saved lots in transportation costs—and I could get a special kind of sunglasses with windshield wipers and a defroster attached.

  Maybe I should add a bumper sticker to my rear end. Most vehicles in Woodstock seem to have messages on them, like ANIMALS ARE TO LOVE, NOT TO EAT. ABORTION IS A CIVIL RIGHT. RIGHT TO LIFE. I ♥ WOODSTOCK. I guess my license would be 13580 for the number of miles spent on a bus, and my bumper sticker would read HAVE PARENTS, WILL TRAVEL.

  Giggling, I try to imagine the way I’d look, certainly not like a typical Kilmer student.

  “I’ve never thought doing math was so much fun,” a voice says. “Hey, I like your earrings and headband.”

  Looking up, I realize that it’s the girl sitting next to me. I’ve seen her before, but we’ve never spoken. She always seemed surrounded by friends—not the school “in crowd,” but by lots of different people.

  I touch my earrings to remember which ones I put on. “Thanks.”

  “You’re new, right?”

  I put my notebook away. “Actually I’m old—fourteen—but new to the school.”

  She continues. “That wasn’t really math homework, was it?”

  “I was just trying to figure out the hours and miles I ride on buses. School. New York.”

  She takes out a makeup case. “I heard you ride the Divorce Express.”

  “You heard?” I didn’t think anyone had even noticed me.

  She applies a little bit of peach blush-on. “Woodstock’s really a small town. Word gets around. I usually ride the bus, too, but haven’t lately. My father’s a musician and he’s been on tour, so I haven’t been going. I start next weekend.”

  “Maybe we can sit together next time.” I blurt it out without thinking that maybe she’s already got someone to sit with. What if she says no or makes some dumb excuse to get out of it?

  “Great. It’s been really boring, the times I had to go down there. A lot of kids our age who have ridden on the bus for years give it up by the time they’re in high school. I used to sit with my best friend, Jenny, but she had to go live in New York full-time. There was a custody fight and her father won.”

  “I live with my father, too, but there was no custody fight. It just worked out that way.” Even though I’m sorry about her friend leaving, I kind of hope that she’s got an opening for the position of new best friend.

  “I bet that the math comes to about three full weeks a year, day and night. Right?” She applies some lip gloss from a round container. “Next you should try to figure out how much money the whole thing costs. It’ll blow your mind. It’s probably enough to put us through college, at least part of it.”

  I hadn’t even thought of that. Bus tickets. Bus tokens. School taxes. I don’t know what I want to be eventually, but I do know that I want to go to college. That’s a lot of money.

  She hands me the lip gloss. “Want to try this? It’s new. Just got it.”

  I take it from her and put some on. It’s strawberry, not my favorite flavor, but who cares?

  Handing it back, I take a good look. She’s wearing a red sweat shirt–like top, red sweat pants, black-and-red cowboy boots, and a glittered shawl. She’s about my size, a seven, but she looks a little taller than me, about five seven.

  “Your outfit looks great too,” I say, meaning it.

  “Thanks.” She shows me that she has two pierced-ear earrings on one side and four on the other. “I like looking different.”

  “I was going to wear a feathered boa,” I say, “but didn’t think it would quite go at Kilmer.”

  “Feathers aren’t in this year. You can’t put designer labels on them.” She shakes her head.

  “My mother would love it here,” I say. “She’s into labels and names written all over clothes. Sometimes I think she looks like alphabet soup.” I make a face.

  “Not my mother. She loves to shop in thrift shops and flea markets,” she says.

  It’s been so long since I’ve had someone my own age to talk to. “You’ve got a great tan. Did you get it over the summer?” I ask.

  “Neither. My mother’s white. My father’s black. I’m a natural tan.”

  I wonder if anyone’s ever thrown themself out of the school bus window because they’ve embarrassed themselves by dumbness.

  Before I have the chance to open the window, she says, “If I’d lived in the South, back in the old days before the 1960s, I wouldn’t have known where to sit on a bus.”

  I stand up and look to the front and then the back of the bus. “We seem to be in the right place, here in the middle.”

  “You’re all right,” she says as I sit down. “Why don’t you sit with me and my friends at lunch? By the way, my name’s Rosie. What’s yours?”

  “Phoebe.” I want to stand up and cheer. “I’d love to. I was getting sick of spending the whole time hiding out in the bathroom. I was afraid that I’d die of smoke pollution there.”

  “The bathroom’s a rotten place to spend lunch, though I’m not sure the cafeteria’s any more appetizing. Sometimes it seems like they have the same stuff in both places. School lunches are a real waste.”

  “Gross. The lunches . . . and so’s your pun.” I grin to show her that I really like it.

  “Wait till you taste the food.”

  The bus pulls up at the school.

  We get off together and walk outside.r />
  Maybe this is going to be a good school year after all.

  CHAPTER 7

  One week I’m miserable. The next week everything’s great. It’s really weird how things happen. There are times I feel as if my heart is on a yo-yo.

  Friday afternoon. Fifteen minutes to pack my bags. I should have done it last night, but first there was homework, and then Rosie and I talked on the phone for about forty-five minutes. We’ve been doing that ever since we met. One of the pains about living in Woodstock is that it’s hard to visit friends without having your parents driving you there and picking you up. My father’s obsessed with this painting he’s working on, so I haven’t wanted to ask him. Rosie’s mother has to work every night, since it’s still tourist season.

  My father knocks at the door and says, “Phoebe, hurry up. You don’t want to miss the bus.”

  I throw some stuff in my luggage. Books. Makeup. My favorite jeans. The football jersey that says WOOD-STOCK. COLONY OF THE ARTS. There’s not much to take, since I have things at the apartment.

  I rush out to the car. Standing by it, my father says, “Look at the way the leaves are turning color. I’ve been so busy working that I haven’t really looked. Every year it starts and every year I’m stunned by the beauty.”

  He’s right. Reds. Yellow. Oranges. Different shades of green. It makes me feel like I’m living in a kaleidoscope.

  “It’s a shame you can’t stay this weekend. We could drive all over looking at the trees.” He puts his hand on my shoulder, sounding kind of lonely.

  “Do you have plans this weekend?” I ask, not sure if I want to know.

  He shrugs. “I think I’m just going to paint.”

  Part of me would love to stay. The other part wants to go to New York City, to see Mom and Andy and Katie and the rest of the old gang.

  Finally he says, “We better go.”

  I throw my bags into the car and sit down. “When I come back Sunday night, let’s go out to dinner.”

  “After a weekend of cooking for myself, that’ll be great.”

  We drive into town, over winding roads. Living in the Catskill Mountains means not having a lot of flat roads.

  Going over Tannery Brook Road, we enter the town. Since there is really only one main street in Woodstock, Tinker Street, that’s where most of the action is, especially in the summer and fall months.