NOT THE END OF THE WORLD

by Rebecca Stowe

  Copyright © 1991 by Rebecca Stowe

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Peter Owen Ltd., London in 1991.

  “Two Years Later” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stowe, Rebecca.

  Not the end of the world / Rebecca Stowe.

  I. Title.

  PS3569.T6753N67 1992 813′.54—dc20 91-53084

  eISBN: 978-0-307-83216-0

  v3.1

  Has no one said those daring

  Kind eyes should be more learn’d?

  Or warned you how despairing

  The moths are when they are burned?

  I could have warned you; but you are young,

  So we speak a different tongue.

  O you will take whatever’s offered

  And dream that all the world’s a friend,

  Suffer as your mother suffered,

  Be as broken in the end.

  But I am old and you are young.

  And I speak a barbarous tongue.

  W B. Yeats, “Two Years Later”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  About the Author

  “A man,” I said when Miss Nolan asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.

  The Bridge Ladies tittered like a bunch of fat little birds.

  “She’s crazy,” Grandmother said and clicked her tongue and wanted to know if any of the Bridge Ladies had ever seen such a sullen little thing. “She says she wants to be the first woman governor of Michigan,” she cackled as she began pulling at her cards with her red-tipped fingers. “Can you imagine? Whoever heard of such a thing?”

  The Bridge Ladies tittered some more and Miss Nolan peered at me over her cards, the tip of her white rubber nose peeking over the pansies, and pointed out that I couldn’t be the first woman governor of Michigan if I were a man.

  “You didn’t ask what I was going to be. You asked what I wanted to be.”

  Mother gasped and Grandmother glared but Miss Nolan just laughed. “I think perhaps you’re too honest to be a politician, Maggie,” she said, lowering her cards and revealing her white rubber nose in all its grotesqueness. “You’ll have to learn some diplomacy.”

  I blushed and hung my head, angry with myself for not being able to look at her, to look at the repulsive white thing stuck on her face like a plastic Mr. Potato-Head part. Grandmother always used Miss Nolan as an Example. “That’s what will happen to you,” she’d threaten, chasing me around the house with a tube of sunscreen, shaking it at me and saying, “All right, Miss Smarty-Pants, just don’t come crying to me when you have to have your nose removed.”

  Mrs. Tucker snorted. “Pee-pee envy,” she said knowingly and the Bridge Ladies shrieked like crows.

  “May I go now, please?” I asked, thinking I’d die if I had to stand there one more second, being polite while Grandmother insulted me and Mrs. Tucker made snide remarks.

  “And where are you off to, Miss Ants-in-the-Pants?”

  That was Mother. When Grandmother was around, I couldn’t tell them apart, they were always insulting me and calling me stupid names, names so stupid even my friends didn’t use them. Miss Ants-in-the-Pants! What was I, three?

  “The beach,” I said and Mrs. Tucker said I should call Cindy; she didn’t think Cindy was doing anything after her guitar lesson. Or perhaps she was. Maybe she had ballet. Or maybe she was going water skiing in Rick Keller’s boat. She just couldn’t keep up with her. Why didn’t I have any Outside Activities? Outside Activities build character. Cindy had plenty of that!

  I shrugged and said I thought I’d like to be alone. They all laughed and Grandmother fanned herself with her cards and made heaving noises.

  “She thinks she’s Greta Garbo,” she said. “Whoever heard of such a thing? A twelve-year-old who vants to be a-lone?”

  They laughed some more and Mother informed them I had a paper to do for summer school.

  “Summer school!” Miss Nolan said. “Why, Maggie, I had no idea you were so dedicated a scholar.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I’m being punished.”

  “Oh,” Miss Nolan said, blushing a bright red ring around her rubber nose, “I’m so sorry!”

  Not half as sorry as I was, I thought, wishing Mother would dismiss me so I could run to the beach and hide. I felt like a prisoner, having to stand around while my executioners had a quick game of cards before taking me out back to stand me against the picnic table and shoot me.

  They lit cigarettes and arranged their cards, as if I weren’t there, as if I hadn’t asked to be dismissed, as if I were just an invisible vapor they only paid attention to when they needed something to laugh at. Grandmother was glaring across the table, angrily watching Mother lay out her dummy hand, as if it were Mother’s fault she didn’t have the cards Grandmother wanted. She’d yell at her later, when the Bridge Ladies had left and before Daddy came home; she’d scream at her for not having bid correctly, for having given her the wrong clues.

  “May I go now?” I asked again and Mother nodded glumly as the Bridge Ladies smiled fake smiles and smoked and slapped their cards on the table. “C’mon, Goob,” I shouted and she bounced out from under the couch and we flew out the door. “I hate them,” I told Goober, “I hate them.” I loathed them, despised them, wished they’d all step on rusty nails and get lockjaw It would serve them right.

  Here it was, almost the end of the world, and all they did was sit around smoking cigarettes and drinking martinis and playing bridge with a deck of pansied cards when at any minute the whole world could be blown up into a zillion pieces. People were building bombshelters and storing cans of fruit and choosing the people they’d take with them into their safe little caves, the people who would survive the atomic blast and create a new world, and all these stupid women could think about was building character through ballet. Character, schmaracter. What difference did it make if you were dead? What difference did it make, anyway? You built up character all the time you were a kid and as soon as you were an adult, you tossed it out the back door with the coffee grounds.

  Well, pretty soon they’d be singing a different tune. Pretty soon, they’d all be fried and not just their noses, but everything, right down to their toenails. They’d be sizzled like hot dogs on a grill, sputtering and popping and bursting their seams.

  “I wish we could move to Oregon,” I told Goober as we crawled under the shrubs overlooking the breakwall, to check to see if any Enemies were on the sand, sunbathing. Oregon was the only state that might not get zapped, but my parents wouldn’t move. They thought I was crazy.

  “Margaret, where do you come up with these ideas?” Mother would moan when I’d show up at the dinner table with a list of essentials for surviving the atomic blast. “School,” I’d say and she’d wonder why, if that were the case, no one else’s children
were making such a fuss about it. I’d shrug and look to Donald for support, but he was too busy thinking about getting dinner over so he could hide in his room with his stupid girlie magazines to care about the end of the world. I hated those magazines, with the bare naked ladies grinning at the camera and their boobies hanging out in public; it was disgusting and I wish I’d never found them in between Donald’s mattresses.

  Donald and I used to be best friends until he became a teenager. We still stuck together when we had to do “family” things, but outside the house he pretended like he didn’t know me. “Right, Donald?” I’d say and kick him under the table, but he’d just grunt. Ruthie would start squawking and crying, certain that when the Bomb hit, Mother and Daddy would take Donald and me away, leaving her to fry alone. “You’re going to leave me!” she’d sob. “The Russians are going to get me!” I’d grab her pudgy little arm and tell her to knock it off. “The Russians don’t care about you,” I’d say and then she’d really start sobbing. “Nobody loves me!” she’d wail. “Nobody wants me!” She’d flap her arms and drift off into her little birdworld, squawking and screeching and pecking at her plate with her nose. “Now look what you’ve done,” Mother would say, shoving a plate at me. “You’ve set her off again.” “Me?” I’d scream. “Why is it always me? I’m not the one putting missiles in Cuba!” Then Daddy would try to demand peace—he’d thump his fist on the table and stare at me and tell me that was enough. He’d call me “Young Lady” and that would set me off. “Don’t call me that!” I’d shriek and run from the table, through the kitchen and up the stairs. I’d lock myself in the bathroom, waiting for the All-Clear, waiting for someone to come and tell me everything was OK, I could come out now, it’s not the end of the world.

  But it never happened.

  ONLY Mrs. Prittle, the neighborhood spy, was at the beach, sitting in her red and white striped beach chair like a leather vulture, waiting to pounce on anyone who ventured down the steps to the sand and to chase off anyone who didn’t belong at Edison Beach.

  I didn’t want her to see me; if she did I’d have to go over and be polite, and being polite was what I hated third in the world. Mrs. Prittle asked too many questions—she was always poking and prying and even though she was just trying to be nice, to make conversation, it drove me crazy because I always ended up telling her things I didn’t want to tell her, just because she was so pushy. She meant well, I guess, but she made me all squirmy.

  She didn’t have any kids of her own, just a snappy, hairy dog with some Chinese name, Ping-Pong or something. After the Red Chinese started threatening to take over the world, she told everybody the dog was really Japanese, like she was afraid people would think it was a spy.

  The only way to avoid her was to crawl through the shrubs to the Kellers’ hedge and then slide down the sand onto their beach and then sneak across the Wilsons’ beach to the Sisks’. The Sisks’ beach was my private hideaway, cut off by two high and long cement breakwalls, extending all the way into the water so nobody could walk on their beach. The Sisks never used their beach and if they came out at all, it was to sit in their pretty white gazebo, set up on a little lump of a hill, separated from the beach by a row of stumpy evergreens. They could sit up there and watch the freighters chugging past without getting sand in their shoes.

  The Sisks were pretty nice people, and I don’t think they would have minded too much if they’d caught me hiding on their beach, although Daddy would have had a fit. “That’s Private Property!” he’d say. “That beach belongs to the Sisks! You have your own beach, you’ve got no business trespassing on somebody else’s!” Daddy was a fiend for Private Property. He didn’t get mad much, but that was one thing that could really get him going. Forget the Lord’s Prayer; he wasn’t forgiving anyone who trespassed against him. He even had a NO TRESPASSING sign on his den—as if anybody would want to go in it, anyway; it was just a dark little room with a big old table where he said he “worked,” but what he really did was play with the tin soldiers he had locked up in the cabinet behind his armchair. God only knows what he would have done to me if he ever found out I’d sneaked in there—probably boiled me in oil or tied me to a stake outside the house with TRESPASSER written across my forehead in my own blood, and all because he didn’t want anyone knowing he played with soldiers. Big deal. Tom Ditwell’s dad had a set of dolls, and although he said he had them just in case he ever had a daughter, nobody believed that baloney. “Is he some kind of sissy?” Donald asked Mother and she blushed and said certainly not, Harry Ditwell was all man. I asked her how she knew and she blushed again and said she ought to know, after all, they were in Dance Club together.

  The Sisks’ house was the nicest along the Lake—a long, rectangular stone house painted a very light blue, like the Lake in the early morning when the sun was just rising over Canada. I wondered if they’d done it on purpose, if they’d sat out in their gazebo every morning with their painter, waiting for just the right color. They had white cast-iron pillars with blue and white morning glories circling around them, leading up to a balcony that extended the length of the house. In one corner, they had a huge telescope, pointed towards Canada. Sometimes, I’d sneak down to their beach at night and hide behind the evergreens and watch Mr. Sisk as he stood on the balcony, looking at the stars. I could see Mrs. Sisk sitting inside, playing solitaire as she listened to classical music on their hi-fi, and it seemed so tender, somehow. So quiet and peaceful and tender and I wished I was their daughter. I would imagine myself standing on the balcony, looking through the telescope while Mr. Sisk taught me how to pick out Orion the Hunter and how to find the rings around Saturn. My parents didn’t know anything, or if they did, they weren’t sharing. Whenever I’d ask a question like, “How do airplanes stay up in the air when they’re so heavy?” they’d laugh and say, “You’re in the sixth grade and you don’t know that?” and I’d feel so humiliated I’d skulk off to the beach with Goober and I’d never find out the answer. Mr. Sisk wouldn’t laugh at my questions, I just knew it.

  Ever since the trouble at school, I’d spent more and more time hiding out at the Sisks’. I felt safe there, not only on their beach, but in their wonderful backyard. It was like a fairyland: two whole blocks long, and filled with graveled paths and statues spurting water from fish and cupids, just like some English lord’s garden. They had all sorts of little buildings back there: a log cabin and a gingerbread playhouse and a shrine with a statue of the Virgin Mary in it. I thought it was a shame they didn’t have children to enjoy their park and sometimes Goober and I would go back there and look in the windows of the little houses, but the only one I ever went in was the shrine.

  There was a dusty velvet-cushioned seat in there, where I’d sit and confess my sins to the statue, even though I didn’t know if it would do any good, because I was only an Episcopalian. “High Episcopalian,” Mother always said, which made me feel sorry for all the people who went to St. Matthew’s and were Low.

  I didn’t go to church at all any more, not since the trouble. I was too bad. Grandmother said I was possessed by the Devil and unless we got him out by my thirteenth birthday my soul would be lost for ever, at least what was left of it. Once the Devil got in, she said, he never let go; he burrowed into your heart like a tapeworm and made it all black and rotten. That didn’t sound right to me, but Grandmother said that was because the Devil had already got inside and gobbled up all my good parts, and even if I went to church it wouldn’t do any good because it was Too Late.

  I didn’t think God liked me very much. He was always punishing me. I must be very evil inside, I thought, deep down where only God and Grandmother and Mother could see it, because I was always getting punished, even when I wasn’t doing anything bad. It was as if I was getting punished for something I’d done ten years ago, or something I’d probably do in the future and I made God so mad He’d reach down from the clouds, pull me up by my scruffy hair, shake me around like a party favor and then toss me in a heap on th
e sunroom floor. And it didn’t work both ways—I got punished when I was bad and even sometimes when I wasn’t bad, when I was just trying to be a human being. But when I was good, there was no reward. Sometimes good things happened to me. Before the trouble, I got chosen to be the school reporter for the Herald Ledger; I got to go to their offices twice a month and meet the reporters and type up my stories on a big, noisy typewriter. But when good things happened, they had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t a reward for being good, it was more like a gift, an act of grace, given not because I deserved it but because God was in a good mood that day.

  Maybe that was why my parents never insisted on my going to church with them on Sundays. Donald was an Acolyte and Ruthie sang in the junior choir and Mother was an Altar Lady. Daddy only went when it was his turn to be an usher—he liked to collect the money. Sometimes, when I watched them getting all dressed up, I felt kind of left out, but I was too terrified to go. I was sure I’d walk in and Reverend Phillips would point his finger at me and start screaming “The Devil is amongst us!” and everybody would turn and stare and then they’d all attack me and beat me to death with their prayerbooks.

  It frightened me, all that talk about the Devil, which was why I would sneak over to the Sisks’ shrine all the time, to try to get an answer out of their statue. “Why would he want me?” I’d ask her, but she just stared benignly, as if it didn’t matter and what was I so worked up about? “Well, how would you like it?” I’d ask, which was a stupid question; she was a saint, what did she know about devils? It really made me mad—if the Devil had my soul, wasn’t he supposed to make some sort of pact with me, to offer me something for the use of it? Wasn’t he supposed to give me something to satisfy my earthly greed so he could take my dirty little soul when I died? I didn’t think he could just pick and choose, just go around grabbing infant souls without their having a say in it. I didn’t like the idea of being possessed, but I might have considered making a pact with the Devil if he’d offered to turn me into a boy.