Saturday, the Twelfth of October

by Norma Fox Mazer

  Copyright © 1975 by Norma Fox Mazer.

  All rights reserved.

  Reissue Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher.

  Please direct inquiries to:

  Lizzie Skurnick Books

  an imprint of Ig Publishing

  392 Clinton Avenue #1S

  Brooklyn, NY 11238

  www.igpub.com

  ISBN: 978-1-939601-32-2 (ebook)

  For Ron,

  Who believed in the story

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 1

  On an afternoon in October, walking home from school, Zan Ford played the eye game—her own secret invention, played for all it was worth. She couldn’t take the game lightly, she couldn’t take anything lightly. “You vibrate,” Aunt Cici had told her. “If I was drawing you in a cartoon, I’d make little jagged lightning marks streaking out from you.”

  The eye game: Zan, walking down the sidewalk, looked straight into the eyes of a stranger picked out of the crowd. If eyes met eyes, if she was truly seen, then she had won. Her spirits soared. She had pierced the numbing anonymity of the street, if only for a moment.

  You, she said silently to a man approaching, you wearing the baggy blue pants, look at me. His hands were in his pockets, his hair was thinning; did he have a daughter her age? Did he look at his daughter and see the real person? Mister, look up. Come on! But the man, his eyes filmed, passed by.

  With one part of her she scoffed at herself. City kid, do you really think that with the mere force of your mind you can make strangers open their eyes? It was a game destined for failure—no one ever saw anyone on these hurried dirty streets. It was silly—it could even be dangerous—but she didn’t care! With every person chosen, in that split second before passing, she felt a little catch beneath her ribs, as if something important and unexpected were about to happen. Yet she knew that even on those rare days when her glance was met and returned, when eyes talked and she felt an almost frightening shock of pleasure reaching from stomach to throat—even then, nothing would come of it. But still she persisted.

  No one knew about the eye game, not even her best friend, Lillian, of the round blue eyes, the armful of dangling charm bracelets, the pearly pink polished nails. She would never understand about the eye game. Nor would anyone in her own family. Ivan, for instance, would make her life miserable. She could just hear him! “You’re out of your gourd, Madame Koo-koo! Watch out for the funny-farm boys, they’re coming to get you!” Years ago, she and Ivan had played together, had been friends and buddies. Now he sneered at her at every opportunity and went into choking giggling fits whenever she tried to say something serious.

  Okay, next. You with the plaid beret and the duck walk. Hi, there! Hello! Hey—damn! Another one gone.

  All right, the lady with the baby carriage. I’m looking at you, you’ve got a nice face, you’re coming closer, closer. What are you thinking? Why don’t you look at me? Quick, now, before you—gone! Forget this side of the street. Only losers here.

  She ran into traffic, darting expertly between the cars. A horn blared. A man wearing a leather cap stuck his head out the car window. “Good way to die young, kid,” he yelled furiously. Zan jumped onto the sidewalk, shrugging, smiling. The cars, like a pack of frenzied animals, raced on. And people, frowns cutting into foreheads, chins thrust tensely forward, surged past her, bumping and shoving. Keep walking, Dad always told her, don’t talk to strangers, don’t stop for anybody, keep to yourself. The way he saw things, the world, the city, the very street she was walking on, was crammed with perverts, creeps, and criminals. Oh, no! She couldn’t believe it. She had to keep playing the eye game. It meant something to her.

  What? her father would say. What does it mean? I don’t know. Now, that’s dumb. She could hear his voice, see his broad face, that vertical cut between his eyebrows deepening as he spoke. He drove a truck for Consolidated Newspaper Service, leaving for work early in the morning wearing a nylon windbreaker and a cloth cap set at a jaunty angle, coming home late, his jacket crumpled, complaining that his job was ruining his kidneys. He worried all the time about his health, or people breaking into their apartment, or money.

  Money, the root of all arguments. Like the one last night. “If you’re going to buy, buy the best,” her mother had said, showing off the new electric broiler she’d bought. It was gleaming and beautiful, with all kinds of timing controls and dials. But her father had been mad; he wanted to hang on to their money. “How?” Bernice Ford had said. She was freckled like Zan, but bony, not an ounce of fat anywhere. “The money goes to pay bills like water down the drain,” she’d said. “Every cent you make and every cent I make goes out as fast as it comes in.”

  “Sure! Because you’re buying junk all the time,” her father had said. “Buy, buy, buy!”

  Zan’s mother blazed right back; there was nothing meek about her. “You agreed we needed a broiler. The old one’s been broken for months. Whatever I buy is for the family. I don’t get one thing for myself. And you know that’s the truth, Nate Ford!”

  Her father had stuffed a cigarette in his mouth as if he were going to swallow it. “Okay! Okay! I can hear you. The neighbors can hear you. They can hear you all the way down to the corner!”

  The rest of the evening her parents hadn’t spoken to each other. Zan had escaped by going early to her cot in the kitchen, slamming the door to let everyone know that they had better stay out. She hated her parents’ fights. She’d never get used to them! She had dug her diary out from under the mattress and got into bed, hunching beneath the blankets to write: “Why do they fight so much? Dad gets that tight look around his mouth, and Mom’s neck gets as red as a turkey. And just because they’re mad at each other, they act mad at us kids, too!”

  Digging her pencil in to make the exclamation mark, she had broken the point. Disgusted, she threw it down on the floor. Fair’s fair, Zan. They don’t fight all the time. They’re not exactly beasts of Buchenwald. True. Sunday mornings, for instance, were nearly always great. Her father hung around in his pajamas and didn’t mind all the noise; and her mother cooked things like french toast or sausages and pancakes.

  Flopping over on her belly, Zan had retrieved her pencil. She bit off the cedar to make a point and began writing again:

  “I remember thinking when I was little that a-month-of-Sundays was the prettiest word in the world. Then Cici got divorced and she and Kim came to live with us. Cici would be okay all week until Sunday, when she’d get depressed because she said Sunday was the loneliest day of the week for her. I wonder if Cici is frustrated about sex. She’s been divorced two years now. I don’t think my parents do it much. Lillian’s parents sleep in separate beds, which she say
s proves they don’t ever do it. But that’s childish. She just doesn’t want to face the fact that her parents are having sex. When I was about 7 or 8, I used to think parents did it only when they wanted children, which meant to me that Mom and Dad had done it two times, to have Ivan and me. Now I know that’s ridiculous, but still—I wonder. There are so many things I wonder about, sometimes I feel so stupid and ignorant, I think everyone knows more about everything than I do.”

  Sometimes Zan imagined talking to her mother seriously about the questions that crowded her mind, about her moods, about so many things. But it never happened. Her mother, with her job and the house, was up before anyone else in the morning and was the last to get to bed at night. If Zan had tried to talk to her about the eye game, she would say, “Honey, I haven’t the time now. Maybe later. Eye game? Aren’t you getting too old for games?”

  Not for the eye game. But hurrying now through the crowds, her thoughts jumbled and quick, Zan felt less of her earlier exuberance. The faces swam toward her, wave after wave of blank faces. Not a smile, a nod, a chance glance, or even a furious glare. Sometimes mouths moved, silently speaking, but not to her. Only to themselves.

  She began to feel invisible. If she were suddenly snatched out of the crowd by a giant hand, would anyone even notice?

  The next day, in school, she was still thinking about the same thing.

  Visible. Invisible. Did anyone really see her?

  No. Not kids. Not teachers. There were waves, smiles. Hello! How’re you? Automatic. Bright. Unseeing.

  Then, at the end of the day, something strange happened in Mr. Oberdorfer’s class. Mr. Oberdorfer, chubby and serious, talking about the past, evolution, missing links. Zan doodled in her notebook, half listening.

  “For hundreds of thousands of years Homo sapiens—wise man, remember?—has roamed this earth. Today we live in a highly sophisticated, technological society. But we are connected to all those people before us, those millions back through history and prehistory, right back to the Stone Age man. Can anyone tell me what we have in common with those primitive people?”

  Feet scuffled on the floor, there was a hum and buzz of talk, notes were passed around.

  “Is anyone here interested in what I’m saying?” Mr. Oberdorfer demanded. He was a young man with manicured fingernails and monogrammed ties.

  Zan felt sorry for him. He was just too sincere, and the kids were always having fun at his expense. Most of the time, though, he sort of asked for it by talking too much.

  “We share a common heritage of basic human feelings,” he said. He sat back in his chair, tapping a pencil against one of his manicured nails, and spoke rapidly. “Just like people today, people ten thousand years ago felt heat and cold, joy and sorrow. They didn’t work in factories or offices, but they had their work of hunting. They probably lived in family groups, eating together, caring for their young, making love—”

  That broke up the class. Suddenly they came to life, whistling, stamping, cheering. Mr. Oberdorfer’s round pink face became even pinker. He smacked his hands on the desk, calling for attention. “Must you people show your ignorance? Are you so parochial that you think only people just like yourselves know the range of human activities and emotions?” More laughter. Someone burped. Someone farted. This produced roars of glee. Mr. Oberdorfer went on, his voice rising. “We are related to the past in the deepest ways. The past is part of us, yes, even the past of ten thousand years ago. The great Albert Einstein once compared time to a river, with the past flowing into the present, and the present into the future. Do you understand what this means? A river of time on which everything that has ever been, everybody who has ever lived, every moment of being still exists.”

  In the middle of a yawn, Zan sat up straight, suddenly alert “That’s crazy,” she blurted. “It doesn’t make sense.” A river, on the banks of which swarmed, like a million trillion billion ants, all of human life?

  Mr. Oberdorfer fingered his tie. “Why not?” He sounded bored.

  “People die, they get buried . . .” Zan mumbled, feeling foolish, but she struggled on. “Cities die, too, you taught us that. Everything changes, nothing stays the same. Even if it did, how could everything and everyone still be? And on a river…”

  Mr. Oberdorfer’s eyes focused on her. He looked down at his seating chart and came up with her name.

  “Try to think beyond your usual frame of reference, Alexandra. The river we’re talking about is not a literal river, but a metaphoric river. Not a river of water, but of time and space. Clear your mind, open it! Stop thinking of time like squares of goods, as if a week, a month, a year, were solid things. Time isn’t a thing. It has no boundaries, flows on endlessly. It’s only we humans who label time, who perceive it as something to be measured and marked off. Do you understand me?”

  “I don’t know—maybe . . .”

  “Imagine time as a curving ribbon in space, an infinite curve without beginning or ending.” He turned to the blackboard and with the side of the chalk made a thick ghostly white curve that turned back on itself and ran off the board.

  “Tell me that again,” Zan said, dimly aware that she was speaking to Mr. O. as if there were no one else in the classroom and that he was looking at her as if he were aware of her for the first time.

  “Time is infinite, only human beings make it finite. Perhaps because we die? Because our own lives have a period put to them? Infinite, remember, means endless, without measure, boundless. Almost by definition it’s a term we can’t understand. But we have to try. To comprehend infinite, endless time, a river is a useful analogy, but even this is limited unless you can imagine a river that never begins or ends, but simply is. That is the river of time. Now remember, it cannot move in a straight line because a straight line means from here, a beginning, to there, an ending. Are you following me?”

  “Yes,” she said, almost in a whisper, struggling to grasp what he was presenting. Excited, her mind floated, glimpsing a shimmering, dazzling river spilling endlessly through space.

  “Time, then, if it has no beginning and no ending, must curve back on itself. And who is to say where we fit in, where the past is, where the future is? ‘Past,’ ‘present,’ ‘future’ are boundary terms, like ‘start’ and ‘finish,’ ‘born’ and ‘die.’ They mark beginnings and ending. But what if there is no such thing as the beginning, or the end. What if it’s just our own imperfect vision that lets us believe in such untruths? What if there’s only time, only that river on which nothing is lost? Do you know what this could mean? Someday, we are going to find the way to step out of our tiny tiny place on this river, step across, or into, all of that river of time.” Mr. Oberdorfer’s pink face glowed above his yellow shirt and monogrammed tie. “I believe this, I believe this very firmly, I have the notion that someday in the future, science is going to discover how to take that step. Imagine what that will mean! Imagine—”

  Just then, the bell rang. The class stampeded for the door. Zan had time only for a smile in Mr. Oberdorfer’s direction, then Lillian grabbed her arm and hustled her into the hall, saying, “He’s so queer. He was practically slobbering he was so excited.”

  “Oh, he’s all right, I like him, I really do,” Zan said, holding back the excitement she had been ready to spill out and share with Lillian. She changed the subject. But Mr. Oberdorfer’s words rang like bells in her head. She wanted to hold onto everything he had said, the images he had given her, so that later she could think it all over again. But in the process of leaving school, gossiping with Lillian, stopping to buy a candy bar—doing all those ordinary things—too much of what Mr. Oberdorfer had said slipped away from her. Now, as she neared home, smelling the smoky, fishy smell of Friday, she had to struggle to remember what it all meant.

  Time without ending or beginning. This time? This moment? Clattering onto a boardwalk surrounding a construction site, she glanced at the heaps of debris, the half-demolished building. A steel ball on the end of a long, giraffe-necked
crane cracked into a brick wall. Clouds of dust and ancient bricks showered to the ground; bits of filth swirled around her legs. Was this moment, which seemed no longer than the blink of an eye, fixed in that river of time? And the next moment, and the next, and every moment that had ever been? Were they all still there, frozen, happening over and over? It was an idea so momentous, so beyond comprehension as to be either sublimely profound or profoundly silly.

  Halfway around the construction site was a tipsy wooden wall made up of old doors hammered together. Every door was thick with scrawls: From the day we’re born, we begin to die . . . Hilda, Jan. 2 . . . Buzz and Banana Boy and Lori and Grapes . . . Finley, he was here, yeah! . . . Today is the tomorrow you waited for yesterday . . . Like epitaphs on tombstones, Zan thought, except all these people leaving their names and slogans were alive. She understood. She felt the urge to add her own name and, digging out a grease pencil from her book sack, she sprawled, “Zan, full of questions and no answers, was here on Friday, October 11.” Not so original, but somehow satisfying. She thought about passing this way day after day and seeing her name, the mark of Zan, each time. Then she remembered that as the new building rose on the site of the old, the door wall would come tumbling down. All her life she had seen temporary walls rise and fall; seen buildings blank-eyed before their destruction, and new buildings sprouting on old sites. Her own family had moved three times from old buildings.

  She remembered each one of the moves distinctly. She had hated each one, hated the change, the loss of coziness that came with knowing the cracks in the bathroom ceiling, which faucets dripped, where the furniture belonged, how the floors creaked. Whenever the family moved, things were broken or lost, her parents were tired and irritable, and it would take weeks for her to get used to the smells and sounds of the new building.

  Maybe that was why she especially loved the old boulder in Mechanix Park. Nothing, she was sure, would ever change that rock. She slowed down as she passed the park on J Street with its sagging wire fence, dilapidated swings, and the ancient boulder in a far corner. Blistered and bumpy, criss-crossed with crevices and cracks, at least six feet high and twice as wide, the boulder heaved blindly out of the earth. Years ago, someone had tried to dynamite it out of existence. A perfect round hole had been bored in one side, but the charge had succeeded only in splitting the boulder halfway down the middle. As a little girl, Zan had often scrambled to the top and peered down into the strange dark corridor in the middle.