NOT THE END OF THE WORLD

by Rebecca Stowe

  “Let’s go watch Shock Theater,” I suggested and Karen and Ginger thought that was a good idea, but whoever was holding me wouldn’t let go.

  “Berrrr-tha,” Prudy called in a low voice, “Berrrr-tha. If you’re here, knock twice.”

  Of course some idiot knocked twice and we all squealed.

  “Berrrr-tha,” Prudy moaned, “who arrrre you?”

  There was no answer, but I felt a cold wind across my face, even though there were no windows in the room. I didn’t care who was holding me, I was getting out of there and I didn’t care who called me a coward.

  “I’m going to go watch the movie,” I said but just then Karen, who was standing near one of the caskets, started shivering and shaking like a fat woman on a vibrator-belt.

  “Karen’s having a fit!” Cindy cried. “The ghost got her!”

  On shut up, you dink, I wanted to say, but nothing would come out; all I could do was stare at the blue cigarette-like smoke coming from behind Karen.

  “All right, who’s doing that?” Cindy demanded, in a voice so shaky I knew it hadn’t been her.

  “Karen’s possessed!” Prudy shouted and we all made a dash for the stairs, leaving poor Karen shaking and crying and saying, “I’m not! I’m not possessed!”

  Prudy switched on the light and the smoke disappeared and Karen slumped down on the floor and sobbed. I thought it was a mean trick, but no one ever admitted to it and I never went back to Prudy’s after that. I went home and threw away all my horror comic books and that was when I started sleeping with the Bible under my pillow. Prudy must have been playing a trick, I’d tell myself as I tried to fall asleep, but I was secretly afraid she hadn’t, and that it had been a real evil spirit. Perhaps it had been looking for me and only hovered over Karen by mistake.

  I still shuddered whenever I looked at Prudy’s house and I wouldn’t even walk on the sidewalk in front of it any more—I always crossed the street and walked through the Park, where I would be safe from Berthas.

  ON the other side of the Park, downtown started with a huge old building that used to be the high school when my mother was a girl, but was now the home of the local radio station, WNBM. Once, our Brownie troop went to the station to watch Milky the Clown do a radio show, but I thought it was boring. He didn’t do anything—he just sat behind a glass window and talked into a microphone and didn’t do any tricks or anything. Cindy got chosen to go talk to him and I was so jealous I nearly pulled her cap off.

  “Envy is the lowest of human emotions,” Mother always said but I thought it was the most common. You were never supposed to be envious of anyone else, but at the same time all the advertisements told you to go buy a new car so you could be the envy of your neighborhood, or to get a new washing machine so your neighbors would turn green with envy. It was stupid. You weren’t supposed to feel it, but you were supposed to make other people feel it, and everybody went around trying to pretend they never were jealous of anyone else.

  I was jealous all the time. I was jealous of people who did better than me at school and jealous of people who had lots of friends, especially now that I didn’t have any left. I was jealous of girls who were pretty, because they’d grow up to be beautiful and I’d spend the rest of my life being “cute.” But most of all, I was jealous of people who were happy and had hope and looked forward to life, people who were kind and good-hearted naturally, not mean-spirited and nasty like me.

  I cut behind the radio station and looped back down to the river, passing the coastguard cutter, sitting idle at the dock, waiting for winter when some freighter would get stuck in the ice. Past Miss Nolan’s white-pillared house overlooking the river and Park, past the medical center, to the YMCA.

  On Friday nights, there were dances there for teenagers. Donald went to them and next year I could go, but I didn’t think I wanted to. I was terrified no one would ask me to dance and I couldn’t stand the idea of being a wallflower. But I loved to dance and I was pretty good at it. Ginger and I used to put on the soundtrack to Bye Bye, Birdie and make up wonderful, wild dances to “You’ve Got a Lot of Living to Do,” shaking our hips and kicking and swirling around her basement like Mexican jumping beans. Once, Marvin Peabody was spying on us through the basement window and afterwards, every time he saw us he’d start shaking his hips and puckering up his mouth and I could have murdered him. After that I only danced in private, in the Black Hole with the curtain drawn, just in case someone climbed up on the sunroom roof and looked in.

  There was a big lawn in front of the YMCA and then, behind another big lawn, was the County Jail. The carnival people were busy setting up their booths and their rides and I thought it was mean, having the festival right next to the jail, where all the prisoners had to look out their windows and watch everyone having fun. They’d look out through the bars and see the flashing colored lights and hear the loud music and watch people looping around on the ferris wheel, and I thought if I were a prisoner it would make me even more mean, watching all those people flaunting their happiness in my face, and I’d hope the roller coaster flew off into the river.

  I used to be afraid of walking past the jail because the prisoners always shouted things from their windows, but one day I started shouting back and now we were friends. “Hey, Sweet Thing!” they’d call. “What’s doing?” and I thought it was kind of sad that the only people who thought I was sweet were convicts. I’d always shout, “What’re ya in for?” and that made them laugh like crazy. North Bay was a pretty safe town, most of our crime was committed by wayward youths and drunks, although we had a murder once. A girl from Millersville was attacked and killed and her body was left to rot in the huge dunes of cement gravel. They never solved the case and everyone thought the murderer must have been a drifter, because who in North Bay would do a thing like that?

  After the jail was the City County building and then after that the stores started, leading right up to La Salle river, where the Unemployment Office stood, all bleak and grey and depressing. I cut up La Salle Street and walked along the bridge, hoping I wouldn’t see anyone I knew. I’d have to pass old Mr. Peterson Sr., who sat out in front of his department store like a living gargoyle, all humped and giggling and nutty as a fruitcake, but I didn’t have to be polite to him because he wouldn’t remember anyway. There was nothing anyone could do about him, sitting out there obstructing the sidewalk—it was his store and although he was kind of awful to look at, with his fat, pimply nose, he was harmless. If you’d sit on his lap, he’d promise you could go in his store and pick out anything you wanted, but Mr. Peterson Jr. always made you pay. Daddy thought it was hilarious. “That’s some kind of salesmanship,” he’d chuckle.

  I walked west on La Salle, waving to Mr. Peterson Sr. from the other side of the street. I walked past all the little stores lining the quay—Mr. Polk’s jewellery store, where I would sometimes buy charms for my bracelet; Fanny Farmer, where I would occasionally and guiltily sneak in and buy a Mint Dream, feeling like the lowest kind of Benedict Arnold for fraternizing with the competition; past the bowling alley, where Donald played on Saturdays in the winter and, finally, the pool hall, where all the yucky old men and delinquent teenagers hung out. Mother called it “sordid.” “That sordid place,” she’d say every time we drove past, as if it were an opium den or something.

  It wasn’t so bad—I’d been in, once, when Cindy dared me to find out if there really was a back room where they kept kidnapped girls to be shipped off to the White Slave Trade, but all there was inside was a couple of pool tables and a pop machine and a long glass counter where they sold cigarettes and candy.

  There wasn’t much on the south side of downtown, just the bookstore and the Ottawa Theater, which was full of bats. I went there to see horror movies, which were the only kind of movies I liked, except Bible ones. I couldn’t stand most movies, especially the heart-warming family sort. They made me so upset I’d have to go hide in the bathroom and at The Parent Trap I even threw up my popcorn.


  Next to the theater was Mr. Dotson’s photography studio, where Cindy liked to stand and look in the window, staring at the brides and criticizing their gowns. “I’m going to wear my mother’s wedding gown,” she bragged, as if anyone cared. “She ordered it from Paris!”

  I had no intention of getting married, unless it was to Rocky Colavito. When I was really little I thought I’d grow up and marry Donald. “You can’t marry Donald!” Mother had cried. “He’s your brother! You’d have mongoloids for children!” but I didn’t care. I just always wanted to be with Donald because nothing bad happened to me when we were together. I used to get hysterical when they’d try to split us up, when Donald would go off to school or to some friend’s house and I’d be left alone at home; I’d cry and wail and cling to him like a suction cup. I didn’t see why I couldn’t marry him if I wanted. I wasn’t going to have children, anyway, so what difference did it make?

  I turned up Maple Street, where Daddy’s factory took up a whole block. It was a big brick building, a former fire station, and over the huge red wooden doors Daddy had a big sign with PITTSFIELD CANDY COMPANY printed out in candy-cane letters and “Sweet Is My Middle Name” printed beneath in curly script.

  I went around the back and Uncle Herbie was out in the loading yard, stuffing candy boxes in one of the trucks. Daddy had given everybody the day off for the Parade, but Uncle Herbie never took a day off, not even Christmas. Working at the candy factory was the only thing he did and I felt sorry for him. He wasn’t really my uncle, he was just an old guy who was kind of retarded and Daddy gave him a job stirring chocolate and he just never left after that. All the other workers made fun of him, playing tricks on him all the time, and I thought Daddy should make them stop, but he said, “They’re adults, Boo, I can’t make them do anything.”

  Uncle Herbie waved and I went inside and climbed the steep steps to Daddy’s office. I loved going there. Sometimes he took me to work with him and gave me a job, stamping coin wrappers with a PITTSFIELD CANDY COMPANY rubber stamp or alphabetizing file folders, and paid me seventy-five cents an hour and sometimes even gave me a bonus if I did everything perfectly. I felt so safe there, but only on weekends when Mrs. Greer, his secretary, wasn’t there. She hated me. When Daddy brought me in and bragged about how smart I was, she’d glare at me and say, “Too smart for her own good, I’d say,” and look as if she’d like to stretch her arm across the room, like a carnival rubber lady, and beat my head against the wall. Daddy just laughed, he thought Mrs. Greer was funny. “She doesn’t mean any harm, Boo,” he said and told me she was just “crusty.” She might have fooled him, but she didn’t fool me. I knew if she had the chance, she’d come after me with those pencils she kept in a mug on her desk, sharpened to long, black points, and even though they were Daddy’s pencils and said SWEET IS MY MIDDLE NAME right on them, that wouldn’t have stopped her from coming after me with a whole handful of them, poking and prodding and trying to torture me.

  The Parade was starting two blocks up, at Optimists Park. I could hear the bands practicing and the horns honking and excited children squealing and I felt kind of sad and lonely. Life was happening, passing right outside the window, and I had to hide behind a curtain like a criminal. “Oh, pooh,” Margaret said, “it’s just a silly parade,” but belittling it didn’t help, I still felt cut off and an outcast and it didn’t matter if what I was cut off from was dumb.

  I could hear the cars coming and I pulled Daddy’s big leather chair over to the window. The Mayor was in the first car, as usual, waving a flag and smiling. It was so weird, seeing Karen Harmon’s dad as the Mayor. To me, he was just a regular dad who sat around on weekends watching the Tigers on TV and saying, “In a minute, in a minute,” when Mrs. Harmon asked him to do something.

  Mr. Harmon was followed by the North Bay Boosters with their “Young Tom Edison” float. They had a replica of the workshop where Edison experimented and the back of the float was a gigantic light-bulb-shaped piece of cardboard, covered in aluminum foil, with yellow crepe-paper streamers flying behind in the wind, like bolts of electricity.

  Then came the McKinley Marching Band, with Rick Keller leading it. They were playing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” to a marching beat and it sounded so goofy I had to laugh and get up and march around Daddy’s desk, crashing imaginary cymbals and tossing my head like a majorette. I could do this, I thought, I could be a majorette, but then I remembered who I was and that even if I were a majorette, nobody would march in the same parade with me.

  I stopped pretending and went back to the window, just in time to see Cindy and her squaws on their float, with Ginger standing there looking miserable while she fanned Cindy like a slave girl and Cindy smiling and waving as if she were Queen Elizabeth.

  I decided to go downstairs and watch for a few more minutes before I cut through town the back way to get to Daddy’s booth before the Mayor did. Uncle Herbie was still outside, still loading boxes, as if he didn’t hear the music and the uproar and I felt so sorry for him I thought my heart would break.

  “Uncle Herbie!” I called. “Don’t you want to watch the Parade?”

  “Oh, no,” he said, so seriously I nearly laughed, “I have work to do!”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Just come see Donald when he marches by,” but Uncle Herbie wouldn’t budge and I thought it was the saddest thing in the world, to have your whole life wrapped up in a bunch of candy boxes.

  When I got out front, Miss Pocket’s baton twirlers were in front of the factory, all sequined and crowned, with their little-girl big bellies round as beach balls. They were so darling, so happy and excited and thrilled to be part of the Parade, and I wanted to run into the street and gather them all in my arms and give them huge, sloppy kisses. I stood there and watched them tossing their batons up in the air and grabbing them and twirling around like sparkly tops and I loved them so much I couldn’t bear it.

  Casey Keller saw me and waved happily. “Maggie!” she cried. “Watch me!” and she sent her baton soaring into the sky, twirling around twice while it descended and then catching it behind her back, her face bright with pride and expectation, and I clapped and laughed and then all of a sudden something happened. It was as if an invisible hand grabbed me and knocked me against the wall of Daddy’s building and reached inside and brutally turned me inside out and all the love and joy I felt watching the little girls turned into hatred. I suddenly hated their purity, their innocence, their happiness—I was disgusted by their joy and hope; I wanted to crush them, to blot them out, to squeeze their fat bellies until their guts oozed out like toothpaste from a tube.

  I held my head and tried to shake the bad thoughts out, but all I could see were those batons flying around in the air, and I couldn’t stand it, they were making me crazy and I wanted to crawl into the factory and slither into a vat of chocolate and die. Something horrible was happening to me and if I didn’t get away I’d do something evil, something terrible. “You’re turning into a Pervert,” Margaret said, cackling like a witch, and I slapped my head with my hands, trying to knock her out, but she just kept giggling and saying, “Pervert, Pervert, who else but a Pervert would think such things about sweet little girls?”

  I had to run away, to try to get away from Margaret’s chiding voice. How could it be? How could it be that I was turning into a Pervert? I was only twelve.

  “It’s true,” Cotton Mather said. “How else do you know so much about Perverts, if you’re not one yourself?” He was right—how was it that I knew that inside-out feeling, how did I know what happened when they slid into that zombie world and couldn’t help themselves?

  It couldn’t be true, it couldn’t. How could it be? Something had to happen to make a person a Pervert and nothing had happened to me. It happened to someone else, but not to me, why would anyone want to hurt me?

  I started running as fast as I could, down the back streets, past Weber’s Dairy and the car wash, around Geriatric Village, past Trinity Church where Cindy went
on Sundays to sing in the choir, “Like an angel,” Mrs. Tucker said.

  I must be a devil, I said to myself, how could I have such horrible thoughts? I had to run them out, run away from them. I’d better not baby-sit any more, I thought as I ran behind the old stores on Canal Street, and I wanted to cry—I was such a good baby-sitter and I loved the kids and they loved me, but how could I continue to allow myself to be around children when I had such vile thoughts? What if I did something? What if I got the urge to chop them up and stuff them down the disposal like that woman from Detroit did with her baby?

  I had to get away. I had to hide, to keep myself away from everything good, just in case. I ran past the back of the bank, where I had my life savings, and wondered how far I could get on $250. I could get a job. I could be a child laborer somewhere, in some dark warehouse full of sewing machines, but even that was too good for me—I’d almost failed sewing and I could never get the bobbin in right and they’d find out and the foreman would come over and yank me off my stool and toss me out in the snow-covered street without a coat.

  I could be a hobo and sneak a ride on a train heading for California and get a job at Disneyland. I could dress up as Minnie Mouse and no one would know where I was and at night I could sneak into the Enchanted Castle and sleep there and no one would know.

  I cut across the Second Street Bridge to avoid the Parade. I could see the high-school band, marching across the Main Street Bridge to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and I covered my ears. All the world was happy and bright and good and I was filled with this ugly, oozing hate and I didn’t know what to do: I didn’t want to hate anyone or anything, certainly not little bespangled girls, not the old veterans, hobbling along in their mothbally uniforms, so proud and pleased with themselves; certainly not the North Bay Boosters with their goofy lightbulb hats; not even Cindy in her stupid wigwam. Everything was good and pure and healthy and as it should be and there was no place to direct my hate except at me. I was bad; I was evil; I was darkness in a world full of light; I was a Pervert; I deserved it, I had it coming to me, it was all my fault.