by Anne Nesbet
“What?” said Gusta. She’d never heard anyone compare singing to jam before.
“They give out ribbons for jam,” said Josie, as if she were explaining two plus two to a baby. “At the county fair. In August. Mrs. Hoopes and Miss Marion have about a hundred ribbons for their jams. Ribbons make things real, I guess.”
Gusta blinked. Josie laughed and scalded the dish towel: the dishes were done.
Gusta woke up at one point in the cold middle of the night and thought she was on her cot back home. Only the light was wrong, and the shape of the room was wrong, and the feel of the air was wrong — and then she remembered where she was and what had happened, remembered it all at once, which was a bit like slipping into a very cold sea. It was so hard to cry without making any noise.
It’s all right to cry for a moment, she told herself. It’s okay to cry for a moment, a few moments, as long as you don’t wake Josie up. I’m giving you five minutes for being sad, Gusta Neubronner, and that’s all.
When she had weathered the worst of those minutes, she remembered, of all things, the lost Wish. Maybe it was all the talk of Snow White earlier that had made her remember it: that magic wishing apple. But of course that apple had been poison, pretty as it was.
Gusta made herself think about the old sea captain’s chest of Wishes instead. That last, lost Wish, in a box on a shelf.
She shifted onto her other side (the cot squeaked).
It was hard to believe in wishes in this not-so-comfortable cot, at this hour, in this strange old farmhouse. Indeed, this house seemed like the last place in the world that would have a Wish hiding somewhere in it. I’ll look anyway, she said to herself. And that thought changed the feeling of that room somehow — it gave Gusta a little taste of hope.
Then she had another thought that was so sensible it almost made her proud. She thought, Good thing I don’t have that Wish in my pocket now!
Because the crying part of herself would have used it right up right now, for sure. And Gusta was quite certain the part of you that cries in the middle of the night probably makes the sorts of careless wishes that you regret the next day.
And Gusta was determined, if she found that Wish, to be the very opposite of careless: to make that Wish work very, very hard for its supper.
How they got through that morning circus the next day, Gusta really didn’t know. There was oatmeal to cook and dishes to wash and quite a number of mittens to find. Gusta basically just did what Josie told her, and the combination of Josie and Aunt Marion was a wonderful, efficient thing. Somehow the whole bunch of them were all walking along the road by seven, trudging through a new, discouraging layer of snow.
Delphine was too young for school, and Josie went to the high school already, so that meant Gusta would be heading into Jefferson Elementary with a pack of five boys. The thought was a little daunting, but a few seconds later Josie added an important detail.
“And we’ll pick up Bess down the road a ways,” said Josie. “She’s your cousin, Bess. Lives on Elm Street, just closer to the main road than we do. You’ll like Bess fine. She’s another quiet one, but she’s good with the jam.”
“Oh!” said Gusta. An actual cousin! Why hadn’t her mother mentioned cousins? That made her excited and nervous, and so for a moment she forgot about how excited and nervous she felt about school itself.
On the way down Elm Street to Bess’s house, Josie kept up a streak of chatter, punctuated with instructions to the boys, who were spilling forward in an energy-filled clump in front of her.
“I’m a freshman now,” said Josie. “I’m in the domestic science course. Don’t you wallop Larry! I just mended that shirt! It’s a fancy new place now, the high school, did your mother say anything about that? The school she and Miss Marion went to, it burned down to the ground a year ago, and they built it right up all new. Stay off the road! You want some truck to flatten you? You should see it inside. You know what we have? Glass chalkboards, the color of thick cream! Chalk’s navy blue. Ever seen such a thing?”
Gusta had not. All the blackboards she had ever seen had been regular old-fashioned black and the chalk regular old-fashioned white. Anyway, how could a blackboard be made of glass?
“That street’s Chestnut Street — we don’t go down that street, because there’s a bad dog. And here’s Bess!” said Josie. “Bess, come see your cousin Augusta, up from New York City!”
Of course the house was too far away to be seen properly, but Gusta had the impression of a small building that leaned a little to the right.
A shadowy little figure came off the porch and sprinted down the path.
“Oh!” it said, but it seemed to be smiling.
“Kiss your cousin, Bess,” said Josie. “Don’t you be shy. I told her you’d show her where to go in the schoolhouse today. I don’t want to be late.”
“Hello!” said Bess in a whisper; now that she was closer, Gusta could see that she was definitely shy and definitely smiling. Gusta couldn’t help smiling back — forgetting about her teeth for a moment.
“How’s your father today, Bess?” said Josie.
The smile vanished from Bess’s face, and she seemed to crumple up smaller again. “Same,” she said.
“That’s your Uncle Charlie by marriage, I guess,” said Josie to Gusta. “Bess’s father got hurt in the mills. Hand got mauled.”
“Oh, no,” said Gusta.
“Wasn’t his fault,” said Bess, almost in a whisper.
“No, I guess it wasn’t,” said Josie, whose role seemed to be to fill out Bess’s words until they were large enough to be a whole story. “It was an awful accident. Something went wrong with a loom. Then he couldn’t work for a while, which is hard. Hand’s healing up now, Bess, though, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but —” said Bess, and then she got stuck again.
“But what?” said Josie. “He’ll be back at work soon, and things will be back to peachy. Clarence, I see what you’re up to! Let go of his collar!”
“But now they won’t give him his job back,” said Bess. It was the longest sentence yet to come out of her mouth. Her eyes flashed fire as she said it, too. “Because his hand isn’t perfect anymore. And the doctor still wants his money. And Papa’s awful unhappy. So that’s a lot of trouble, says Mama-Liz.”
“Bess has a stepmother, too,” said Josie.
“Not an evil one, like in the stories,” said Bess in a hurry.
“Nope,” said Josie. “Not evil at all. Tired out, though, I guess.”
A thought snapped into place in Gusta’s head. “If your father got hurt at work, it’s the factory that should pay the doctor,” she said.
“There’s a nice idea,” said Josie.
“No,” said Gusta. “It’s not just an idea. I think it’s the actual law. There are laws about that sort of thing.”
Josie and Bess were staring at her now. Oh, well. In for a penny, in for a pound.
“That’s why there are unions, you know,” she added. “The union should help your father.”
“What’s that?” said Bess.
“Working people banding together, so they get treated right,” said Gusta. She realized as she said it that she sounded just like one of Papa’s pamphlets. And then she thought she had probably said too much already.
“I’ve heard talk of such things, but there’s none of that union business yet in the Kendall Mills,” said Josie. “And here’s your school, Gusta!”
They had come out on the main road through town now, and right there on the left was what looked an awful lot like a school — at least, it was a blocky sort of large building, and around it floated the sorts of noises made by crowds of children.
“All right, off with you mob now!” said Josie, because the high school was farther down the road. Gusta felt a brief burst of panic. It had been less than twenty-four hours since she’d arrived in town, but she had somehow already gotten accustomed to Josie being there to tell her what to do. Of course, she knew how ashamed
her father would be of that kind of cowardly thinking, and she tried hard to pull herself together, to be a better, braver person, the sort of person who doesn’t need anyone’s help and never minds being left on her own. She could be that kind of girl; after all, she had marched into new schools before.
The Jefferson School turned out to be a two-story brick building, as old-fashioned as could be — there wouldn’t be glass chalkboards in this place, that seemed certain.
“Good luck, Gusta,” said Josie. “Bess and the boys will show you where the office is. Some of them know that better than they should — eh, Clarence?”
One of those all-alike brothers laughed and twisted away from Josie’s jabbing elbow.
“I’m in the fourth grade,” said Bess, waving a whisper’s worth of a good-bye. “I go over this way to Miss Sampson’s room.”
The secretary in the office was very efficient, and looked at the note sent in by Gusta’s grandmother and said, “A Hoopes girl!” and sent her upstairs to Miss Hatch’s 5A class. Miss Hatch put her in a desk on the side in the back, so at least she knew the wall wasn’t staring at her from behind. And eventually, surely, the other children would have to turn back around to the front and look at the teacher, not at her. For a moment Gusta felt a pang of nostalgia for the dark classroom back in New York and the sharp voice of Miss Brownstein calling them all to account.
“This is our new classmate, Augusta Hoopes Neubronner,” said the teacher. “Yes, she is Mrs. Hoopes’s granddaughter, come back to stay a while. She has been living in New York City, where the skyscrapers are. The Empire State Building, one hundred and two stories high. Imagine that! We are glad to have her join us, aren’t we, class?”
The class murmured obediently, but mostly they stared.
Gusta looked back in the direction of all those stares, trying to look friendly without smiling too much, so her teeth wouldn’t show. That was pretty much second nature by now.
People apparently did not come and go — not so much — here in Springdale, Maine.
For the first hour or so, Gusta kept her head down and thought she was doing pretty well at being the ordinary girl sitting in the back, just doing whatever work the teacher described. There was the usual business in math, of having to listen extra hard to hear the problem, since the board was so far away, but for the most part, Gusta felt she was managing not to stick out, which was her usual goal in a classroom and pretty hard when you’re the new girl.
And then disaster.
“Molly!” said the teacher. “Why don’t you come up here and explain to our new friend, Augusta, why we have put these dear Scottie dogs on our wall?”
So that was what the speckles on the side of the room were! Now that the teacher had said that, Gusta could kind of make them out. Each dog-shaped splotch had a bunch of paper circles hovering about it; some had more than others.
“Yes, Miss Hatch,” said Molly as she walked to the front. She must be one of the good students. The good students are always the ones invited to the front of the class to explain things to newcomers — that was as true in New York City or Boston as it seemed to be here in Maine.
“We are proud to be working toward our Seven-Point Health Certificates!” said Molly, with the enthusiastic singsong of someone reciting a poem for the class. “We hope all of our paper Scottie dogs will soon have all seven of their balloons colored in! When half of us have our Seven-Point Health Certificates, our classroom will get a special certificate, too. Being as healthy as we can is our best way to serve our country. We try to brush our teeth every day and drink every drop of our Sharp’s Ridge milk, so that we can grow healthy and strong —”
“Springdale Dairy,” said the boy with a mop of dark brown hair, who was sitting next to Gusta. It was almost as if he couldn’t help himself. And maybe that Molly had meant to goad him into it, because she was standing with a somewhat triumphant air just now.
“Sharp’s Ridge,” she said again, prim and determined as can be. Gusta didn’t know exactly what was going on here, but she couldn’t help feeling her sympathy lay, just at this moment, with the Springdale Dairy boy.
A ripple of laughter was going through the room. The children seemed to have heard this debate before. The teacher tapped the desk with her pointer to settle them down.
“George, we do not interrupt,” she said. “Molly was telling us what the Seven Points are for our health certificates. Molly?”
Molly did not seem at all daunted by the question. “Yes, Miss Hatch,” she said. “Our Seven Points for the health certificates are (1) Hearing, (2) Vision, (3) Throat, (4) Teeth —”
(Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sneezy — Gusta couldn’t help it; any list of seven objects made her think of the Snow White movie: all those dwarfs!)
“(5) Teeth,” said Molly again.
“You had teeth already, dear,” said Miss Hatch.
“Yes, Miss Hatch,” said Molly, and then rattled on triumphantly to the end of her list: “(4) Teeth, (5) Posture, (6) Birth Certificate, and (7) Healthy Growth!”
“Thank you, Molly,” said Miss Hatch. “You may take your seat now. Children, do you know why we are talking about our health certificates today?”
“Because the new girl doesn’t know about them?” suggested a girl, not Molly.
“In fact, no,” said Miss Hatch. “The reason we are thinking about our health points today is because today we have a special visitor at the school who will be helping us get another balloon colored in for our Scottie dogs!”
There was a tiny amount of excitement in the class. Gusta, however, was not excited. She was on alert.
There was a knock at the classroom door.
“That will be a monitor calling us now,” said Miss Hatch. “Class, please rise and form one quiet line. We are going downstairs now to meet with the oculist. An oculist, class, is a special doctor who will check us to see how our eyes are working.”
“VISION!” said the boy sitting next to Gusta. He really did not seem to be very good at not speaking out of turn.
“Quite right, George,” said Miss Hatch. “Although we must also remember never to interrupt. Come now!”
In New York they had whole classrooms take vision tests, too, at least once every year. It wasn’t as much of a problem as you might think, if you were clever about it. In the three years Gusta had spent in New York City, she had learned to hang back a little and listen to what the other kids had to say, and honestly, by this point, Gusta had that old eye chart pretty well down pat.
It will be all right, she said to herself sternly. Listen up carefully, and then stand tall and look like you know what you’re about!
That was another of her papa’s phrases. But then they got to the front hall, just as the previous classroom’s worth of children started marching away in its own “quiet line,” and Gusta’s plan to hang back and listen was destroyed by a single sentence.
“Why don’t we let our new friend go first?” said Miss Hatch. “We can give her a head start on her Vision balloon, since she is so far behind on her Seven Points!”
Sometimes even kind grown-ups do absolutely horrible things, more or less by accident or by not thinking through all the possibilities. Miss Hatch’s hand on Gusta’s shoulder, guiding her forward, felt like doom itself.
“This is Augusta Hoopes, Mr. Bertmann,” said the teacher to the man standing there, the one who must be the “oculist.” “She won’t be on your list, because she is brand-new today. Here, I will write her name down for you.”
“Neubronner,” said Gusta, as Miss Hatch started writing down a name on the oculist’s list. “N-E-U-B . . .”
Miss Hatch struck a line through Hoopes and wrote Neubronner, and the oculist made a curious, question-mark-size sound.
“Neubronner?” he said. He pronounced it differently than Miss Hatch said it. The “Neu” part sounded like “Noy,” and the r in the middle was quite a bit like sandpaper. The way Gusta’s papa said the name, when he wasn’t being extra careful to
make it sound “American.”
“But that name is familiar,” said the eye-examining man.
A pulse of worry went through her, but Gusta was careful not to say anything. She just shifted her weight from foot to foot, feeling the oculist’s gaze on her.
And then he took his little light and his magnifying glass and had her open her eyes wide.
“Good, good,” he said. His voice was friendly enough. “No evident disease. And now, young lady. Do hold this piece of cardboard over your left eye and read the letters on the chart for me.”
She looked around a little wildly, trying to figure out which direction she was supposed to be looking. Going first! That was bad luck. But she had been through the chart-reading exercise so many times back in New York; that should surely help.
Stand tall and look like you know what you’re about!
She did exactly that. She pulled herself tall and rattled through the letters that had been imprinted on her brain after the past three years of faking her way through school exams:
“E
F-P
T-O-Z
L-P-E-D
P-E-C-F-D
E-D-F-C-Z-P!”
There was a silence then. Perhaps she had gone too fast? Sounded too glib?
The line of students behind her had frozen in place, as if a fairy godmother had just waved her wand and muttered something powerful.
The oculist cleared his throat.
And Miss Hatch said, in a chillier voice than Gusta had yet heard her use, “Augusta, I’m surprised. Perhaps things are done differently in New York City, but we take our Seven-Point Certificate exams seriously here in Maine. We don’t make jokes or interfere with the process. We are grateful to our examiners for participating in the work of the Maine Public Health Association.”
“For your information, Augusta Neubronner,” said the oculist quietly, so that only Gusta and no one else in that crowded hall could hear, “those letters you just so remarkably repeated — they are from a different chart entirely.”
Oh! She hadn’t known there were different charts! In New York it had always been the same chart, year after year. And she didn’t remember any eye tests in the years before New York.
