The Age of the Child
Page 12
“Why does she have to be over all the time, anyway?”
Lenny’s parents looked at each other, and then her poppy leaned in front of her on the other side of the island, his short sleeves showing all of his tattoos. While he talked, she poked out her finger to pet the small, inky footprint near his wrist. That one was hers.
“It’s a long story, pumpkin, for another time,” her poppy said. “Right now you just need to remember two things any time she gets…the way she is. One, it’s not her fault.—Nope, don’t—Close that little question hole. Another time, I said. Two…Are you listening?”
Lenny nodded.
“Two, Murphy’s kisses make her happy, and as her friend, you want her to feel happy whenever she can as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Has she hurt Murphy?”
“No.”
“Don’t worry about the dog, then. If he doesn’t like something, he’ll let her know.”
When Millie came over again two days later, and every day for the rest of their summer vacation until they started second grade, Lenny put Millie and Murphy together on purpose, a few times going away from Murphy before Millie had a chance to pull at him. Sometimes, if Millie’s face was shoved up to Murphy’s nose long enough, he’d lick her, and she would squeak and wipe her mouth.
When Millie left at the end of every day, Lenny found Murphy and whispered apologies into his big, floppy ear and fed him three of his favorite cookies.
THIRTEEN
School was full of stories, so Millie took notes on just about everything but the upper-grade pregnant girls. The one pregnant girl she’d written about—an eighth grader who’d walked on the wrong side of the rope and tripped over someone’s back—was the first and last pregnant girl story her mother had wanted to see.
“Nearly anyone can, and probably will, get pregnant once they reach a certain age, Millicent. That is not an interesting story.” Yes, her mother had said, that the girl had obviously been tripped was somewhat interesting, but, she’d wanted to know, what happened next? “Do you know why they have the rope, Millicent?” Millie didn’t. “To give pregnant girls their own section of the corridor, which minimizes their risk of ‘falling,’ which thereby minimizes the risk of the pregnant girls’ parents suing the school board.”
Millie didn’t care about any of that. What did stick in her head, though, was what her mother had said next about what an interesting story was. An interesting story, she’d said, was about a person who wasn’t like other people and who wasn’t doing what other people were doing, unless it was a lot of people doing the same thing for the first time and for a new reason.
“An interesting story, Millicent, provides the reader with new information.”
Finding stories her mother didn’t know was easy. A lot of her classmates (and she, when she had to on a Tuesday or a Thursday) sat on the hard orange carpet or crowded against the wall when all the desks were taken, so there was always someone right next to her to listen to. Even though she didn’t really join the groups the remainders made, there was so little space left in any of the classrooms that Millie could sit close enough to them without being noticed. She took her notes in secret, pretending she was writing school material while jammed up around a monitor during research hour, or as the teacher yelled lectures over them from the front of the room. After school, while on the bus to her own house or in the truck on the way to Lenny’s, she read over and over her notes so that as soon as she got to a computer she was ready to sit alone with the door closed and put it all into Times New Roman for the reading.
The nightly readings for her mother—and her dad, when he was home—followed a required reading of at least one Daily Fact article. When it was finally time for her own stuff, Millie had one copy for herself and one copy for her mother so she could see the text Millie was reading aloud.
Millie stood in the living room and read her stories night after night, year after year, and her mother never went a single night without offering “constructive criticism.”
Wilma Mezrich, grade four, said her parent’s made her 14-year-old brother, who’s name is Leonard Mezrich, quit school and lie about his age to work overnight at InSystem…
“Watch your apostrophes to avoid creating possessives out of plurals, Millicent,” her mother said. “And before bed tonight, please research the difference between ‘who’s’ with an apostrophe and w-h-o-s-e. As a fourth grader, you should already know this. And, Millicent,” her mother said, lighting a cigarette with her back to her, “this is an intriguing story.”
Erma Banks grade four, saying her uncle said her 21-year-old cousin died of a secret operation. Erma, she whispered to her very best friend, who’s name is Chastity Yarbrough, that it must be “some kind of spy thing”…
“Have you been watching television news?” her mother said. “Your grammar is suddenly atrocious.”
“‘Some kind of spy thing,’” her dad laughed. “That’s why I love kids, Katie. See?”
Her mother said, “Never underestimate the value of a properly placed comma, and please straighten out your ‘who’s’ versus your ‘whose.’ Do you know what an abortion is, Millicent?”
Shirley Knight, grade five, told confessed to Lenny Mabary during art hour that she was the one who poured a coffee poop stain onto Mr. Snapper’s yellow swivel chair because it was the only way she could see the school guidance counselor because he was always too busy…
Her mother blew smoke to the side and tapped her ashes. “A nice use of ‘confessed,’ but your sentence is too long. Is fifth grade when you learn conjunctions?”
“Yes.” Millie wished her dad could have heard her use of the word ‘confessed.’ She asked where he was.
“Wherever he says he is, Millicent.”
Gerald Beaman, grade five said his 11th grade sister stole the family car and disappeared last week. He said his sister left a weird note in their mom’s makeup bag about a “dirty little thing named Mary down by the river”…
“What the hell is wrong with people?” Her dad flung out his hands and accidentally knocked his beer off the coffee table. Instead of cleaning it up, he went outside and slammed the door. Millie heard his car start up and roar down the driveway.
“You missed a comma,” her mother said. She moved the table away from the wet spot. “Do you know what incestuous rape is, Millicent?”
Floyd Lowe, grade five, brought a bag of fruit candy for lunch again and tried to trade it like he always does for someone’s sandwich or apple, but no one wanted to trade with him anymore. Floyd got in trouble for taking all the milks and drinking them in the project corner during research…
“You still have milk provided in fifth grade? I wonder whether Margaret had something to do with that.”
Millie hoped her mother wouldn’t ask her to make that a story, because she didn’t care why they got milk.
“Continue,” her mother said.
Chuck Hill, grade five, told Mr. Snapper he got the cut on his mouth because he lives in an old house with wood floors that pop up and whack him on his face and trip him at the top of the stairs…
“If what you mean to write is that the floors are attacking this Chuck Hill, you could be clearer. And Chuck Hill did not tell Mr. Snapper about the cut because he lives in an old house, as could be inferred from your wording. Nor does Chuck Hill have the cut because he lives in an old house. He has the cut because (ostensibly) wood planks in the old house pop up and hit him in the face.”
Louise Berg, grade six, said her new baby sister was kid-napped by aliens…
Her mother lit a cigarette even though one was already burning in the ashtray. “Can you think of a better word than ‘kidnapped’?”
“Abducted? I was gonna use—”
“Do you mean you were going to?”
“I was going to use abducted, but everyone says ‘abducted by aliens.’ Anyway, I don’t think she was abducted,” Millie said. “No one does.”
“Yes, well. One never knows.”
“Move on, please, Millicent.”
Frank Andrews, grade six, said doctors killed his sister, whose in grade nine, because they wanted her to have a living baby. Andrews said, “Since she was older than the baby, that’s why they let her die, instead”…
“You are in sixth grade. I refuse to draw your attention once more to ‘who’s’ versus ‘whose.’ And the appropriate phrase would be ‘a live birth.’”
Bernie Merritt, grade six, told Geraldine Tanner, grade six, that his mother went to life in prison—
“Received a sentence of life in prison,” her mother said.
—after she had her dead baby because doctors found aspirins in her blood. He said his mom gets bad headaches just like he does but no one believed her…
And so on.
If while Millie was reading her mother unintentionally smiled and then ran to the kitchen for a cigarette, Millie knew that particular story was one of her better ones and saved the printed copy in a special file labeled “Mom.” (She folded an index card over the label in case her mother went into her closet for something. She never did). As rare as the smiles were, Millie had, in a way, grown used to them. But the last week—the final week—of seventh grade, Millie managed to write something that made her mother do something completely diff…something queer.
The story was about Wilma’s brother, Leonard, who still showed up after school a few times a week before going in for his shifts at InSystem. Usually he just wanted to hang out with kids his own age, but the last time he came he’d bragged about having information on some “secret project.” Leonard said he got to hear a lot more of what was being said around the plant now that he was on the floor (“I’m one of the people putting the initial component on the line, so the whole thing starts with me, pretty much,” he said a few times). Just the day before, he said, he’d heard someone walking through the plant tell someone else that the chip they’d been manufacturing was for people. “Like, to go inside them.”
“One guy said something ‘fail-safe’ this or something ‘fail-safe’ that, so it’s probably for escaped prisoners, or something,” he said.
Millie wasn’t even finished reading, yet, when her mother said, “A scoop,” and came around the table, her arms raised toward Millie the way her dad’s would be when he was about to hug her. But Millie had no idea what her mother could have been doing, so, without thinking, she stepped away.
Her mother whipped her hands behind her back and kept them there until she got to the kitchen and reached up to her cabinet. Looking at the flame as she lit her cigarette in front of the refrigerator, she said so low Millie almost didn’t hear her, “Well done.”
That summer between grades seven and eight was the first time Millie wanted to write during vacation. Her mother’s reaction to Wilma’s brother’s story had buzzed her with a frantic need to produce more, present more, make her mother smoke her brains out. But there wasn’t much to write about if she couldn’t use—utilize—the kids at school.
For a few days she followed her mother around the house to try to write about her, but her mother never did anything but eat cranberry muffins and smoke in the morning, go to work, and come home to smoke and drink wine. (She wouldn’t want a story about herself, anyway. It wouldn’t be new information.) And when her mother brought her to Lenny’s house and stayed to hang out—socialize—with Lenny’s mom, Millie couldn’t get anything interesting out of them, either. The adults either stayed in her aunt Margaret’s office, whose door was too thick to listen through, or they went for a drive and left Millie and Lenny at home with her uncle Ernie, who’d make them pick tomatoes from the patch out back.
Murphy died that June, but everyone knew it was coming, so that wasn’t a story, either.
The only one left was her dad.
FOURTEEN
Lenny stayed as far away from Millie as she could in elementary school.
At first it was because Millie always had to beat everyone to the classroom so she could sit in a desk up front. It was hard to write on the floor or against the wall, so most kids would fight for almost any kind of table top, but no one except Millie wanted the front row desks. She ran in every day and threw her backpack at a chair to get a spot before someone else could, and even though no one really wanted to sit there, everyone still hated her seat saving.
One day in second grade, someone Millie really bugged got to class before Millie did and threw their own backpack so that it landed on the floor right in front of her as she came whizzing into the room. Millie tripped over it and flew through the air with her arms and legs straight out, then landed on her face at the same time as her lunch box hit the floor. It bounced open next to Mr. Unger’s desk, and a green apple, carrot sticks, yogurt, and a wrapped sandwich fell out. Lenny saw it all happen from where she was standing in the back of the room and thought she should do something. She just didn’t know what. Millie was already on the floor, so she couldn’t really stop it from happening.
A boy named Floyd went for Millie’s sandwich, but he jerked the other way when Millie moved her arms.
“Crap, she’s not dead,” one kid said.
Lenny whispered to Floyd, “I can share my lunch with you, if you want.”
Floyd looked at her and went to the other side of the room.
Millie got up. The only mark on her face was a little red rug spot on her chin. She started picking up her food.
Another kid said, “Someone shoulda dropped her on the side of the road when she was a baby.”
Millie didn’t seem to hear any of it as she grabbed at her carrots.
Lenny said, “Stop being so m—”
Mr. Unger lumbered into the room in his mustard yellow jersey and baggy tan pants, and Lenny immediately took a seat. She was the only one who did, but that was the way it was in Mr. Unger’s class. If there was anyone everyone liked less than they liked Millie, it was Mr. Unger, and even Mr. Unger didn’t like Millie. He stepped over her apple on the way to his desk and used the toe of his ratty flat shoe to roll it away from him. “Come on,” he whined. “Get this cleaned up. Everyone sit down. Come on, now, sit down.”
No one sat. They just whispered and giggled while Millie crawled after her apple. Lenny didn’t say anything to them this time, but she did go to Principal Well after school to tell on Mr. Unger.
“Thank you, Margaret Mabary’s daughter,” Ms. Well said, but Mr. Unger was still there in the morning.
By fifth grade, Lenny was still staying away from Millie, but she tried not to be around pretty much everyone else, too. Elmore and Lenore Steal the Light was on its third printing, and her mamma—her mom, her mom—was famous again. Everyone already knew Lenny’s family had money, but her mom’s book reminded them, and they didn’t like it very much. No matter how small Lenny tried to make herself by staying quiet in class (and keeping away from people like Millie), they still noticed her and came for her. Twice she had her backpack stolen. Some of the boys stared at her and pretended to gag when she passed them in the hallways. Others ignored her in that way that made sure she knew they were ignoring her.
To make up for her family’s money, Lenny stopped sitting in desks on Mondays and Wednesdays, even though it was her turn in the rotation. There were kids in her class who probably didn’t have anything at all to sit on at home. Some of them only got to be in school in the first place because Lenny’s mom paid enough money to make up for the parents in town who didn’t have any. (A lot of those kids didn’t like Lenny for that, too. “Thanks to Loser Lenny’s mom, not only do we have to go to school, but we have a school to go to.”)
She didn’t mind not sitting at her desk. It was more fun to be by the table in the project corner, where there was always something to look at when the teacher was boring. One girl, Wilma Jenkins, had cut up cereal boxes to make a model of her house for a “Rol
e of Money” activity in social studies. Miniature cutouts of her mom and dad stood in an office with a calendar on the wall, and tiny little stacks of green paper flowed out of a cash box on big brown desk. Her brother slept on a toothpick bed in a small corner room with the curtains closed. Cardboard Wilma stood in front of the house wearing really short shorts and the brightest red lipstick Lenny had ever seen. She had an arm up that seemed to be waving at a blue plastic car parked on a gray tile road. Lenny’s favorite part was the kitchen, because it had a little dog in it standing by a food bowl behind the safety gate.
Another project she liked was one by a boy named Gerald Beaman. He hardly said anything in class, so everyone was surprised when they saw his current events painting that was supposed to “demonstrate how current events relate to personal life.” Gerald painted a game of living room hide-and-seek in deep reds and yellows. It was so good everyone could tell it was Gerald sitting on the couch and his sister hiding behind it, and that the man coming down the stairs was his dad. (They all knew what his dad looked like because he picked Gerald up from school every day.) Gerald got an F on the project because he didn’t have an article to go with it, but he said to Mr. Snapper, “So if some stupid writer isn’t writing about it, it’s not happening? I don’t care if it’s on the internet or not, it’s a goddamn current event.” Everyone gasped, and Mr. Snapper raised the grade to a D+.
The project corner was also safe from Millie. Most kids sat against the wall or near the computers, so that was where Millie sat now. Lenny could see everything from the project corner, including Millie. If it looked like Millie might come back to talk to her about something, Lenny found a reason to go up front to ask the teacher a question. That hardly ever happened, though, because Millie was usually too busy crawling around with her notebook and tilting her ear at people. She’d always look at the teacher while she wrote with that one ear tilted like she was taking lecture notes, but Lenny had seen Millie’s notes in the car on the way home after school and knew she was writing about their classmates and not the class subject. Millie never showed Lenny her notes on purpose or talked about any of the kids, and none of the things Lenny saw in Millie’s notebook got around school, but it bothered her, anyway.