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PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF NORMA FOX MAZER
“Mazer is one of the best of the practitioners writing for young people today.” —The New York Times
“It’s not hard to see why Norma Fox Mazer has found a place among the most popular writers for young adults these days.” —The Washington Post Book World
A, My Name Is Ami
“A satisfying novel about the ups and downs of 12-year-old Ami’s relationship with her best friend Mia … The writing is light but consistently sensitive and realistic, as the joys and disasters of the characters flow towards a moving and memorable ending.” —School Library Journal
“The atmosphere and the girls are right on target.… An accurate slice of teenage life.” —Publishers Weekly
B, My Name Is Bunny
“[Bunny] is a likeable, true-to-life character who hates her name and wants to be a professional clown. Her friendship with Emily is the source and depth of this simple story of two teenagers learning about life … [a] story of growth and acceptance with accurate and touching emotions.” —School Library Journal
C, My Name Is Cal
“Deftly sketched … Mazer’s skill in telling the reader more about Cal than he knows about himself, while narrating Cal’s unique, taciturn voice, is especially memorable.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Readers will recognize themselves.” —Booklist
Dear Bill, Remember Me?
A New York Times Notable Book and a Kirkus Choice
“Highly accomplished short stories, variously funny and moving, about ordinary, contemporary girls and their relationships with mothers or boyfriends.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Eight short stories, powerful and poignant, about young women at critical points in their lives.” —The New York Times
“Stories that are varied in mood and style and alike in their excellence.” —The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
Summer Girls, Love Boys
“Featuring female protagonists, the stories mix the bitter and the sweet of life while encompassing a variety of narrative techniques, settings, themes, and tones.… Mazer writes honestly and provocatively of human emotion and circumstances while she demonstrates her versatility as a writer.” —Booklist
Good Night, Maman
“Mazer writers with a simplicity that personalizes the history.… Direct … honest.” —Booklist, starred review
A Figure of Speech
Norma Fox Mazer
For H. I. M.
Chapter 1
In a restaurant Jenny is serving coffee and sticky rolls to the people. Her mother calls her. “This coffee is cold and the rolls are stale!”
Jenny hurries to take the offending foods away. Her mother is sitting with important people. “Can I have a peach?” Jenny says.
“Do you deserve it?” her mother demands.
Grandpa puts his arm around Jenny. “Grandpa will fix things,” he says, but when she looks up, she feels extremely worried. Is it really Grandpa? He’s wearing white pants, a white jacket, and has Band Aids plastered to his forehead in the shape of a cross.
Jenny feels afraid. “Take that off!” she says. “Click! Click!” Or is it “Quick! Quick!”? …
Jenny sat up in bed, the fragments of her dream slipping along the edges of her mind. Her stomach was still chugging fearfully, and there was an aftertaste in her throat, a sourness she swallowed as she looked around the dim bedroom she shared with her sisters. They were both still sound asleep, the baby’s behind humped up like a turtle, Gail with the blankets pulled over her head, her bare feet sticking out below.
It was Thursday morning. The window next to Jenny’s bed was beaded with rain. The electric clock on the bureau said six-ten. In the street a car backfired like a gunshot. No one else in the house was awake or stirring. No, that wasn’t quite right. Listening, she heard Grandpa moving below in the basement apartment. She wanted to call him. Grandpa! Hello, Grandpa! The last of the dream sadness left her. She pushed aside the covers and, restraining her impulse to jump out of bed, cautiously and quietly put her bare feet down on the cold linoleum-covered floor.
She pulled on jeans, then eased open a bureau drawer. It creaked and she stopped, motionless, holding her breath. The thing was to get dressed without waking Gail, then to get through the house without waking her mother and go downstairs for an early morning visit with Grandpa. She edged the drawer open farther and pulled out the first sweater her hand touched. Ugh! A grassy green one passed on from Gail. She slipped it over her head, picked up her sneakers, and tiptoed across the room, avoiding the spot that creaked.
The baby had kicked off her blankets and Jenny pulled them back over her. Ethel’s lashes fluttered. Shhh, baby. Jenny crept past her. In her sleep, Gail sighed. Jenny froze. If Gail woke, that was it. She’d have to go back to bed. “Don’t!” Gail said, and flopped over, pulling the blankets with her.
Jenny turned the knob of the door, stepped out into the hall, and tiptoed to the bathroom. Could water be run softly? Jenny tried, catching a few silent drops to wash her hands and face. She brushed her teeth, staring at herself in the mirror. Modigliani girl. That was what Mrs. Spencer who taught math in Alliance Junior High had called her. All the girls liked to babysit for the Spencers, even though the two kids were sort of spoiled (Chris had bitten Jenny once), because the Spencers had a way of making you feel important. Besides, they always overpaid.
“Jenny, did you ever see any paintings by the Italian painter Modigliani?” Mrs. Spencer had asked several weeks ago. Jenny shook her head and snatched a crayon Kim was about to stuff into her mouth. “You could have been one of his models,” Mrs. Spencer said. “All eyes and that narrow, delicate chin.”
For days Jenny had walked around in a cloud of vanity. Modigliani girl! A painter’s model! Last Saturday she and Rhoda Rivers had taken the bus downtown, run up the wide gray steps of the public library, had entered the cool silence of the Music and Art Room, and without too much trouble had found a large glossy book of modern art. They had thumbed through the pictures. Disappointment! The Modigliani faces were crooked, the eyes lopsided, and as Rhoda said, all the girls old Modig painted looked as if they had a bad case of toothache.
Picking up her sneakers again, Jenny turned the bathroom doorknob stealthily, put her feet down like a cat, and came face to face with her mother.
“I thought I heard the water running,” Mrs. Pennoyer said. Holding her red chenille robe around herself, Mrs. Pennoyer stood squarely in Jenny’s way. “What do you think you’re doing, anyway? Why are you up so early?”
“I woke up, so I got up. I was quiet,” Jenny said.
“Shhh! You’ll wake everyone. Go back to bed and sleep some more.”
“I’m not sleepy, Mom.”
“Go on back, anyway. It’s too early to get up.”
“Grandpa gets up early. I was going to visit him.”
“For heaven’s sake, this is carrying things too far. Six o’clock in the morning! This is ridiculous,” her mother whispered. “Don’t you spend enough time with your grandfather?”
“Mom—”
“Every extra minute with him, whenever I look for you, you’re downstairs. Your father’s noticed the same thing. What do you do down there?”
“We talk, and play cards, and—” Jenny waved her hands helplessly. She didn’t have to do anything, only be with Grandpa.
“You ought to like being with your family a little more,” her mother said.
“Grandpa is my family.”
“Yo
u know what I mean. Don’t act thick on purpose. Why are you standing here, arguing with me at this time of morning?” Mrs. Pennoyer gave Jenny a little push. “Back to bed till it’s time to get up. Go on, now.”
Cheeks stinging, Jenny did as she was told. She got into bed fully dressed and lay with her hands under her head, biting her lips, twitching, and turning. At a quarter to seven, Ethel staggered up from under her covers, grabbed her crib bars, and began shaking them. Then Jenny heard her father go into the bathroom, clearing his throat loudly. Gail’s head, covered with rows of pink foam curlers, emerged from the mound of blankets. “What time is it?” she said thickly, peering at the clock. She sat up and began taking the rollers out of her hair. Jenny pushed aside the blankets for the second time that morning, and Gail looked at her in astonishment. “What’d you do, sleep in your clothes, idiot child?”
“Forget it,” Jenny said. She peeled off the grassy green sweater. She wasn’t going to wear that rag to school.
Chapter 2
Jenny’s grandfather, Carl Pennoyer, woke at his usual hour, groaning with his aches. Stiff in the shoulders, stiff in the back, stiff and aching everywhere. “Oh, Mother, Mother,” he muttered, groaning as he sat up in the iron bed and threw aside the covers with swollen fingers.
The air in the room was damp and smelled sooty. The old man always slept with the window opened wide, letting in the damp cool night air, despite the fact that it wasn’t always the best thing for him, not with his aches and pains, his stiff swollen joints, and aching legs and fingers.
He reached toward his toes and moaned again, flexing his fingers and forcing himself to reach and stretch. He slept in his underwear, baggy shorts and a limp undershirt with thin shoulder straps. “Oh, Mother, Mother,” he moaned again, dropping his bare feet to the floor. He was a long, bony old man with long, bony yellow toes and nails that grew as thick as horn.
He pushed down the window. It was six o’clock and it was raining outside. Why did he wake at such an hour every morning? Six o’clock. He had nothing to get up for at six o’clock every morning. No work to go to. No cows to milk, no factory card to punch on the dot of the hour. He could sleep until eight o’clock, ten o’clock, until noon, and no one would care. Nothing would change. The world’s work got done without him, he thought, beginning to feel sorry for himself. Then his eyes fell on a clear plastic book bag that Jenny had left downstairs the day before. She was always forgetting things in his apartment—school books, papers, a comb, a pair of gloves, once even her shoes. Carl picked up the book bag from the floor and put it carefully on his bureau. The pang of self-pity faded. Of course he had a reason to get out of bed every morning. Jenny. She was his reason.
He yawned and scratched the sparse gray hairs on his chest. Flexing his fingers, he walked around in his bare feet, walking out the aches and stiffness in his joints. It was chilly in the apartment, the windows shone wetly, and beads of moisture hung on the walls. The old man’s apartment was part of the cellar of his son’s home, and the outer walls often sweated.
He put on a shabby brown sweater with buttons down the front and two sagging pockets, and went into the little closet with a toilet. He stood in front of the bowl for a long time. Everything was more difficult when you were eighty-three years old. It was strange to be old, he thought, to have lived eighty-three years, to have knobby hands with arthritis bunching up the knuckles, and breath that didn’t always go smoothly in and out of his body. It was strange to be so old and remember so many things and think that so much was gone.
In his kitchen—no more than a wall with open shelves for dishes and pots, a sink, a two-burner stove, and a tiny refrigerator—he washed with cold water, gasping and shaking his head like a dog as the water ran down his neck. He could have washed with warm water, but he had begun his life washing with cold water, had continued washing with cold water in his prime, and now in his old age it was a matter of honor.
He finished dressing. His pants sagged on his waistline, sagged on his flat buttocks. He tightened his belt. He had never been fat, but there had been years of his life when firm smooth flesh covered his bones, when he was proud of his muscles and his strength and looked for ways to impress his wife. Good-looking fellow, that Carl Pennoyer—that was the opinion of those who knew him, and his own opinion as well. Good-looking, smart, strong, and plenty capable.
The tea kettle was whistling. He poured hot water into a cup and dipped in a tea bag. He took two aspirins from a bottle on the shelf and chewed them, then stood at the window that looked out onto street level. He gulped his burning tea, scalding his throat. He always drank everything too hot: soup, tea, coffee; he had gulped the burning liquid greedily when he was young, and now that he was old he did it from force of habit. This had always irritated Frances, his wife. “You’ll burn your throat,” she warned irritably, and always added, “Carl, stop that gulping!” To annoy her, he’d gulp as quickly as ever and with good loud sound effects. To get back at him, she gave him lukewarm coffee, soup tepid as a bath, and tea so cool he could have washed his face in it.
Carl allowed himself a smile. He had lived an ordinary life and parts of it were completely lost to him (he couldn’t, for instance, remember what his father had looked like), but other things—sometimes the oldest things—he remembered perfectly: on a dark cold night huddled against his mother in a train … plush seats, smell of cinders, grinding sleepy rhythm of the train, and the warmth of his mother’s leg through her dress. “Carl, you’ll mess me up.” But she had let him go on leaning heavily, drowsily, next to her. They were on their way upstate to his grandparents’ farm where they went every summer. The farm—for little Carl, it was a golden place of light and shining space … field after field of grass and grain … the milking cows, the goats, and the turkeys in the trees. He had been allowed to roam at will, to climb trees, to lie buried in the grass with bugs tickling his legs and the sun burning his ears.… He remembered the fresh white juice of an apple running down his chin, whipped cream pies, the cream thick as snow, and his grandfather handing him a dipper with warm foaming milk he’d just taken from the cow. “Here, boy, drink up. Nothing like this in the city.”
Outside, the rain dripped. Cars were already packed bumper to bumper on Pittmann Street, fumes clouding the air, headlights blurry in the gloom, windshield wipers ticking monotonously. The old man unwrapped a piece of stale bread and poured another cup of boiling tea. He no longer ate much—two cups of boiling tea and a piece of stale bread was his usual breakfast. He dipped the bread into the tea and sucked on it. Bread today was a disappointment compared to the thick, dark, almost bitter black bread of his childhood. For a moment he almost had the taste of that bread on his tongue. He remembered foods he’d eaten, and he remembered making love, and walking for miles on a blazing day with sweat dripping into his eyes, and he remembered burying three children before his son Frank was born.
Upstairs, over his head, he heard the first vigorous stirrings of his son’s family. Muffled voices, thumps, yells, feet rushing this way and that, doors opening and then slamming shut. The house upstairs seemed to vibrate with life: thump! smash! crack! The baby cried, someone yelled, someone else laughed. But downstairs, down here in his half dark apartment, down here half in the earth, he disturbed no one, made no hustle or bustle or loud noises as he drank his tea and looked at the wet, shiny sidewalk and the occasional pair of feet that flapped by his window.
After a while he glanced at the clock. Startled, he realized he had been dreaming. Time had passed, and Jenny would soon be down for her morning visit. He mustn’t let her catch him sitting around woolgathering like an old man. He brought his teacup into the kitchen and rinsed it under the hot water tap. The hot water felt good, and he rinsed his cup carefully, letting the hot water warm his hands.
At the sound of the expected knock, he dried his hands and pulled a yellow newspaper from one of the stacks of newspapers piled against the wall, and sat down at the metal table beneath the window. “A
ll right, come in,” he said in his usual voice, grumpy and harsh as the cry of an old crow. “Come in whoever it is.”
Jenny entered. “Good morning, Grandpa! It’s me, of course.” She was wearing plaid slacks and a blue raincoat. A speck of toothpaste was caught on her upper lip. The old man pretended to see none of it.
“You’re late this morning,” he said crossly.
“Am I? Really? I was up lots earlier. I wanted to come down, but Mom wouldn’t let me.” She leaned over his shoulder to look at the yellowed newspaper. “What year are you reading today? My year! I was born that year.”
“And Frances, your grandmother, died that year.”
Jenny put her cheek against his. “It makes you sad to think about Grandmother. Don’t be sad, Grandpa.”
Carl felt dazzled. He could have sat that way forever, with the fresh cool cheek of his granddaughter pressed against his face.
“I was sad this morning,” she said. “When I first woke up. I had the weirdest dream, about you and me and Mom. It was so crazy. When I woke up, I felt just like crying, as if you were going away from me.”
He wet his thumb and turned over a page of the newspaper. “I ain’t going any place,” he said. “I’ve been here all your life, haven’t I?”
The same month that his wife had died, Jenny had been born. Jenny, unplanned and in the way. His daughter-in-law, Amelia, had three other little babies to look after—Vince, Frankie, and Gail. Vince, the oldest, had been only six, so Amelia had her hands full, and then along came the infant Jenny to bother her even more.
At the same time the old man had moved out of the home he and Frances had shared, and into the basement apartment of his son’s house. Everything was so strange, so strange and queer without Frances; sometimes the feeling came over him that a good wind could blow him away. And then living in a cellar, being alone so much, and when not alone, getting into busy people’s ways. Jenny was in the way, too, so he put her in her carriage one day and wheeled her around. Amelia had been grateful. After that he wheeled her every day all over the neighborhood—Pittmann Street, Jericho Hill, Catherine Avenue, Brewer Road—everywhere. When she outgrew the carriage, and then the stroller, he held her hand and they walked together. They became inseparable companions; he had never been that close to a child before—not to his living son, Frank, who was Jenny’s father, not to any of his other grandchildren. He had never pushed a carriage or a stroller, or willingly walked for hours with a child’s hot, moist hand in his own. Not till Jenny. His darling, his precious, his light.
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