Secrets

by Marthe Jocelyn

  Mama tried to freeze me with her gray eyes, but did not bother to speak. I ducked past her and headed for the door. Outside I could make the noises that expressed my feelings.

  “Grrrack! Arrggerrack! Aarrrroooeeeeww!”

  People stepped out of my way in a hurry. I’d have grinned if I weren’t so mad. Nothing like a loony on a rampage to clear the path.

  I stomped around the square a dozen times. The tears were pouring. Maybe I was crazy, after all, even having daydreams. I sat on the bench, hunched over, my elbows digging into my knees. I must have sat like that for an hour or more, still as the bench itself. Finally I noticed it was getting chilly. The heat was gone from my anger.

  I knew Mama would be waiting. She couldn’t do a proper séance without me there to knock on the walls and waver the lights. She’d be pacing, wondering if I was coming to help her trick old Mr. Poole. I was shuddering with leftover sobs when I finally trudged home.

  “Ah, girlie,” said Peg, when I came in. “Have those bullies been at you?” She wrapped her arms around me, warm as a blanket, making me cry all over again. Peg loved me, not knowing I was smarter than she was. She loved me because I was helpless. She loved me the way a mother loves a baby.

  And speaking of mothers, “Where’s Mama?”

  “There now,” said Peg, smoothing the hair away from my face. “She’s in the front room, just finishing with Mr. Poole.” Then she giggled. “Though it looks more like a beginning, if you ask me.” She giggled again.

  I pulled out of the hug and gulped for air.

  “She’s kissing him?”

  Peg peered at me, cupping my face in her rough hands.

  “Your eye!” she whispered. “It’s straight!”

  Oh, skunk! I’d blown it. I thought for a second to fall down and pitch a scary fit, with my tongue hanging out. But then my chance for freedom flashed like sheet lightning across my brain.

  I spread my arms wide, blinked, and gave her my loveliest, closed-mouth smile.

  Peg caught her breath.

  “I’m better,” I said. “These are tears of happiness. I’m cured.”

  “But… oh, my Lord….” Peg was stuttering.

  “Mama did it,” I said. “She laid her hands on me–”

  “It’s a miracle!” Peg shrieked. She picked me up and spun me around, or tried, anyway. She started to laugh and so did I, jubilant and thrilled.

  Mama’s voice cut through the noise.

  “Peg? What are you thinking? You know I need the utmost quiet when I’m with a–”

  “Oh, Missus!” sang Peg. “You’ve worked a miracle! Your little girl is cured!”

  Mr. Poole stood next to Mama, staring at me, adjusting his glasses.

  “Catherine? You did this?”

  Mama’s eyes locked with mine. I’m certain she was calculating her options. But I had her.

  “You cured the girl?”

  “Yes,” she said, putting on a modest glow. “With help from the stars above, I have saved my precious daughter.” She stretched out her hands, staring at them as if amazed by what they had done.

  Peg squealed again and squeezed me. Mr. Poole squeezed Mama. Mama blushed, but she was watching me closely. I smiled. Deception runs in the family, after all. Mama taught me to lie. She should be proud of me.

  “I’m tired,” I said. Peg hustled me off to have a bath and go to bed, where she brought me supper on a tray. When Mama finally said good night to Mr. Poole and came in to see me, I was asleep. Faking sleep was nothing after faking daft.

  Peg was a gossip marvel. Next morning, when I stepped outside with my hair brushed and my lips glossed, there must have been forty people waiting in line for Madame Caterina. Every one of them would be contributing to our house fund, and they all turned to look at me. And I was radiant.

  Sammy Sanchez was leaning against the side of the building, skateboard rocking under his left foot.

  “Hey,” he said. “I heard about you.”

  “Yup,” I said. “It’s a miracle.”

  Road Trip

  Martha Slaughter

  I can’t help it. I’m feeling a little mad at my grandpa, even though he’s dead. I know it’s so selfish of me, but, man! If Grandpa hadn’t died I would not be sitting here in the backseat, behind my mother and my grandmother, driving a hundred million miles to Vermont, where we are going to visit Grammy’s oldest friend. I’d be home hanging with my own friends.

  Mom knows I didn’t want to come. She said, “Evie, you can go to Border’s and buy as many Party Girls books as you want, and you can buy yourself a Discman, too, and listen to lots of CD’s.”

  Mom hates Party Girls!

  She’s been yelling at me the whole first part of the summer: “Why do you read that trash? Why can’t you read a real book, Evie? I mean, those are just like watching television, they are so bad!”

  And now she’s handing me her credit card and telling me I can buy as many as I want.

  She knows I do not want to be on this trip.

  So I did go and buy the last Party Girls book, and there’s another whole series called Top Ten, so I bought three of those, too. And a Discman with cool headphones.

  Mom told me, “Stay up late the night before we go, and you can sleep most of the way there.”

  So I stayed up late, but when she woke me up the next morning I wanted to kill her. She was being so fussy and I wanted to scream. “Is this your suitcase? Did you remember a toothbrush? Did you bring something warm?”

  And Grammy was clucking slightly – you know that little tongue click thing that grown-ups do. I could hear her.

  She’s been living with us since Grandpa died. I know she must be lonely. She tries to talk to me about rap music and IM, but what am I gonna say?

  “She just sits at that computer all day,” I heard her say to my mom.

  “Well, that’s what they do, Ma,” says Mom.

  Grammy thinks we should do things differently, I guess. Still, looking at her little gray head peeking up over the seat, well, I don’t know. I’m sure she misses Grandpa.

  Mom made a bed for me in the backseat. She put in a red blanket and her own special squishy pillow.

  “Don’t we need snacks?” says Grammy. “How can we go on a road trip with no snacks?”

  “We’ll stop along the way,” says Mom.

  “What, and pay three times as much?” says Grammy.

  “It’s okay, Ma,” says Mom. “I’ll pay.”

  I am already annoyed. I pull out Party Girls and put on my headphones as we head out of the driveway. This Party Girls is such a good one. I can’t wait to gossip about it with Emily. She’s read them all, and she’s the one who told me about Top Ten.

  “You’re already that far, Evie?” Mom’s voice echoes vaguely through my headphones.

  “She’s got her ears on,” says Grammy. “She can’t hear a thing.”

  I can hear through my headphones, but why let them know? I hear Grammy call them my ears, and it makes me smile. Slightly.

  “What page are you on, Evie?” asks Mom.

  “Eighty-seven.”

  “Already? Wow – and didn’t you just start this morning?”

  Mom is trying to connect with me. I can tell because she’ll make a series of stupid comments. In a minute she’ll reach her hand back and, unless I’m being the meanest person in the world, I’ll give her what she wants – a little hand touch. I’m not much in the mood. Here’s her hand. Fingertip brush only, no squeeze, but she’ll take it.

  Grammy is remembering her old friends. Do I care? Does Mom care? She is remembering friends named Verne and Gina. It’s Gina we’re going to see. I’m not listening, but sometimes I am. Verne had a sweet husband, who was Catholic and died very young. She had five kids. Gina’s husband had a husky voice and was an alcoholic. Mom says, “Oh, I remember that voice and didn’t Gina drink too much also?”

  Grammy says she’ll never forget the road trip she took with Gina. “Don’t you remember?”
she asks Mom. “It was you and me and Gina and her son, John. She would stop every half hour or so and go round to the trunk of the car to have a swig of gin. Do you remember at all?”

  Mom says she sort of remembers the trip, but not the gin swigs. “It’s a wonder we weren’t all killed!” says Mom, and Grammy agrees.

  Grammy is remembering that this same Gina also traveled with a bottle of Lysol disinfectant in her purse. “Anywhere she stayed, she sprayed down the whole bathroom with Lysol.”

  I find myself wondering what in the world this woman looked like. A drunken germ freak. I can’t picture it. But I don’t want to ask because I don’t want them to know I’m listening. I don’t want to be a part of the conversation.

  “Oh, there was a McDonald’s!” says Grammy, as we speed by the rest stop.

  Mom says, “Oh, Ma, did you want to stop?”

  “No, no,” says Grammy, “not unless you do.”

  “I would have been happy to stop. I’m sorry, Ma. We’ll stop at the next one.”

  “Whatever you say,” says Grammy.

  Mom’s hands get tight on the steering wheel. She says, “We’ll stop at the next rest stop.”

  “Whatever you say,” says Grammy.

  Poor Grammy. She is trying to fit in and go with the flow, but I know she doesn’t really even want to be swimming in this river.

  After a while, we see the sign for the next rest stop.

  “No McDonald’s!” Grammy says.

  “No, but there’s a Burger King, Ma.”

  “Oh, I knew we should have stopped at that first one. I thought there would be a McDonald’s at every rest stop! I just assumed.”

  She is disappointed, it seems to me, way deeper than McDonald’s or Burger King deserves. I wish we had stopped at that McDonald’s for her.

  Although it’s crazy that Grammy wants to stop at a McDonald’s anyway. Grammy, of all people! She wouldn’t have let Grandpa eat at McDonald’s for anything. She spent every day of the last six months cooking healthy food that he hated. Every time we’d visit, that was all they talked about.

  Too much fat in mayonnaise.

  Too much salt in lunch meat.

  Too much sugar in a baked potato!

  “Well, I’m gonna stop,” says Mom. “I like Burger King better than McDonald’s anyway. Besides, I don’t know about you guys, but I need to use the bathroom. Anybody else?”

  Grammy shudders at the thought and I say no. But we go in to get some food.

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” says Mom. “You guys get me a Whopper with cheese. Take care of Grammy, Evie – don’t lose her.”

  It’s one of those huge bustling rest stops. There are hundreds of people looming at us from different directions. Poor little Grammy suddenly looks like a rowboat lost in a storm on the ocean. For a minute I see things through her eyes, and I hold on to her little arm.

  “All these people, Evie,” she says. “Where do they come from? And why are they all so big and fat?”

  “I guess too many french fries,” I say, and Grammy laughs. I squeeze her arm and together we work our way to the line. People are jostling us. I get a tray. It’s a self-serve Burger King, so I grab a Whopper with cheese and fries for me, and the same for Mom.

  “Don’t they have one of those chicken sandwiches here, like they do at McDonald’s?” says Grammy.

  “Here’s a chicken sandwich, Grammy.”

  “But that’s a fried one – McDonald’s has a grilled chicken sandwich….”

  I’m feeling the pressure of the line backing up behind us and I want to tell her to just take the crispy chicken so we can move along. I kind of want to yell at her.

  “Oh, never mind,” she says. “I’ll just get some french fries and a hamburger.” She sounds sad about this, but still I’m relieved.

  “Wait! Oh, Grammy, here’s what you want!” There does seem to be such a thing as a grilled chicken sandwich at Burger King after all. Her papery-soft face lights up. I can stop feeling bad about pushing the crispy chicken.

  “Thank you, Evie,” she says. “I’m sorry to be such a pain. I really haven’t been out into the world for, well, really for years. Everything is different. Everything seems so confusing.”

  Poor Grammy! It drove me crazy, the way she fussed over Grandpa. But at least she knew what she was doing. At least she knew where everything was – her supermarket, her fruit store, the doctor’s office, the hospital. It was hard to watch, the way she bustled up and down the stairs with food and medicines, always so worried, always with a turned-down mouth. But now, trying to help her figure out which size lid will fit on her plastic cup of Coke, I’m realizing how hard it must be for her. At least at home, even if they never had french fries, she knew where the salt and pepper and ketchup were.

  “Oh, yum!” says Mom, back from the bathroom. “Should we sit and eat here, or in the car?”

  “The car,” says Grammy firmly.

  And we’re back on the road.

  Grammy is remembering more about Grandpa. I’m wearing my ears, but I can still hear.

  “I was such a small town girl,” Grammy is saying. “I’d never been anywhere until I went off to college. Grandpa was so romantic. When I was home in Maine after graduation one time, he told me to meet him at the Bangor airport. He got off the plane carrying a big bouquet of those pale orange roses, and he handed them to me and got back on the plane and went away.”

  Grandpa did that? Grandpa, who didn’t leave his armchair as long as I can remember? I’m thinking how planes don’t really turn around and fly back the way they came, but who knows! Maybe that’s the way it was then.

  “I was wearing a red button-down sweater,” says Grammy. “I remember exactly the way this one tree looked – it had yellow leaves. You know how you have certain memories that last your whole life? I remember the sun shining and the wind blowing. It was the end of September, and in Maine it was already fall.”

  Mom sighs and says, “No wonder you married him.”

  Grammy snorts and says, “Oh, who knows? Maybe I’m remembering wrong. You know perfectly well Grandpa and I had our differences. Maybe I just wanted to get out of Maine.”

  “But still,” says Mom.

  “Yes, still,” says Grammy.

  And she starts to cry.

  *

  I start reading Party Girls again. Serena is buying a gray cashmere scarf at Barney’s to give to Tim in her effort to lure him away from Blair, but I keep thinking of Grammy standing in her red sweater at the Bangor airport, with the sun shining and the wind blowing and Grandpa walking down the steps of the airplane with a big bouquet of pale orange roses. I know exactly the ones she likes. We get them for her every year, for her birthday, and she puts them on her front hall table.

  “You were brave to marry Grandpa,” says Mom. “I mean, you hadn’t known each other that long. And you just married him, and moved to New York.”

  “Grandpa seemed so glamorous,” says Grammy. “He was the kind of man who could get a table in a restaurant, no matter how crowded it was.”

  Mom asks Grammy, “Did you like living in New York?”

  Grammy hates New York now. She never goes there. Never.

  “Oh, yes, it was fan and exciting when I was first married. We lived in a little apartment on East 12th Street, with just a bed and an orange crate for a table. Once I tried to roast a chicken for dinner and, when he cut it, he said, “Do they always eat their chicken raw in Maine?”

  I laugh out loud and Grammy turns around.

  “What is it, Evie?” she says. “Is that book actually funny?”

  I tell her no, that I like the story about the raw chicken. I can tell it makes her happy that I laughed at her story.

  “How can that be true, Grammy?” I say. “You’re the best cook ever.”

  It makes Mom happy, too, that I am joining in their conversation. The air in the car is all of a sudden lighter and easier to breathe.

  “Well, I wasn’t always,” says
Grammy. “Grandpa taught me how to cook.”

  “Oh, he didn’t!” says Mom. “How can that be? He never cooked anything except bacon and eggs. He never did anything but cut the meat!”

  “No, no, no,” says Grammy. “In the beginning, he taught me how to cook.”

  It’s a sunny day and Mom rolls down her window. The air pours in as we speed down the highway. For a while we can’t talk because of the roaring sunny air. Grammy’s sott silvery hair is shimmering across her cheek like the fine spray of a fountain. The scenery is a glistening green and there are darker mountains up ahead. I turn my music up loud. Grammy looks out the window at the streaking green countryside. She appears so forlorn that I feel a hot tear in the corner of my eye. I tap her shoulder. She reaches back without looking at me and we touch hands. Just like with Mom.

  “Thank you, Evie,” I can see her say.

  And we all sink back into our silences – me with my music and my book, them with the roar of the open window, filling the empty spaces.

  I finish my book. Grammy has fallen asleep, with her head back against the seat.

  “Mom, are we anywhere near where we’re going?” I say. I know I sound like a brat, but now that my book is done I remember that I am on a trip with my mother and my grandmother. We’ve been driving for hours and it looks like we’re on the same endless highway we’ve been on the whole time.

  “We are,” says Mom. “We’re almost in Burlington. Didn’t you hear me say we were in Vermont?”

  “No,” I say. “I was reading my book. Is there gonna be TV in this hotel, Mom?”

  “Evie,” says Mom. “There is always TV in hotels.”

  Grammy is awake again. Mom tells her that she should take out the directions that Gina’s daughter sent us to get to the hotel. Grammy rummages in her black canvas bag.

  “I know I brought them,” she says.

  “You’ll find them,” says Mom.

  “I put them in here,” says Grammy. She starts pulling things out: her book on English gardens, her white toothbrush container, her leather wallet, a blue note book with yellow Post-its poking out of every page. “I’m such a mess,” she says. “I can’t ever find anything. I’m so disorganized….” Her voice is starting to shake.