Did she help anyone? Did she stand for anything? What did she believe? Did she decide things for herself or did she allow her friends to decide for her?
If she were alive when the Nazis were in power, whose side would she be on?
Whose side was she on today?
I want to know, she thought. I have to know.
Maybe it was her imagination, but with that resolve, her reflection seemed to change. There was a softening in the glare of her eyes, a relaxing in the meanness of her jaw. The improvements were slight, but they were there. They were!
Maybe there was a chance for her.
Questions, she thought. I’ll keep asking questions.
Maybe, someday, she would have answers.
4
The Knowing Chair
Barry was sitting on a red metal chair that was attached to a metal table in the food court of the mall.
He was waiting for his parents to decide what they would all eat. He settled in for a long debate.
“I’m not running all over the place to get forty different meals,” his father always said, even though there were only four of them in Barry’s family. “Pick one.”
They usually settled on the pizza place. Not the one where you could get meatballs on the pizza but the other one, where Mom could get a salad.
It would take them a long time to get around to that, though.
“We’re going to let you both choose your own suppers tonight,” his father said.
“Really?” asked Sue, Barry’s seven-year-old sister. “Anything? Like, three desserts?”
“Don’t be foolish,” their mother snapped, then softened her tone. “Suey, go with Daddy. Barry, here’s some money. Go get your own. I’ll stay here and hold the table.”
“Really?” Barry knew he sounded like a little kid, but he couldn’t help it as he stared down at the bills his mother placed in the palm of his hand.
“It’s time you were more self-sufficient,” she said. “You’re too old to have everything done for you all the time. Go on. We want to make that movie.”
Supper out and a movie. On a school night! Aliens had clearly taken over Barry’s parents. He pocketed the money and went on a tour around the food court.
He would not get pizza, or a burger, or a hot dog, or a sub. Those were safe things, boring things, foods old people or a little kid might choose.
No, he would exercise his freedom of choice on wild things, exotic things. Things that would show his family he was not afraid of adventure. His meal would become a story.
“You should have seen what Barry chose,” he could imagine his mother saying on the phone to one of her nosy friends. “I had no idea he was such a brave eater.”
Barry filled up his tray with a fish taco, Japanese noodles with shiitake mushrooms, and four little Chinese moon cakes, one for each person in his family to try.
He carried it all back to the table where the others were already eating.
And what had Sue chosen? Cheese pizza! Barry sat tall with his three extra years of adventurous spirit keeping his head high. The chili sauce on the fish taco was a bit too strong and the mushrooms in the noodles tasted like erasers, but he did not let on.
Sue was chattering, as usual, like a cage full of monkeys. Barry let her have all their parents’ attention. That left him free to indulge in his favorite hobby — watching people.
Barry suspected it was wrong, but he often imagined that every person on the planet was some kind of zoo animal, there for him to watch and think about.
At the next table an old guy in a brown suit was eating something in a pita. He was all by himself at the table, and he read while he ate, some sort of work report. Barry could see charts on the old guy’s paper. A dollop of pita sauce dropped on one of the charts. Barry watched the man frantically dab at it with his napkin.
That won’t help, Barry thought. He’d dropped enough food on enough homework to know it always left a mark.
At another table sat another family. It looked just like his family only with an extra kid. The mom was nagging at the middle kid — a boy — while the dad stared down at his phone. The mom’s face was scrunched tight and her finger was pointed in her son’s face. One of the children was a girl about Barry’s age. She caught him watching her and she looked away, embarrassed.
Barry’s eyes shifted to a gray-haired woman sitting across from a little girl at one of the tables for two. The little girl was Sue’s size. The old woman leaned in toward her with a smile on her face that overflowed to her eyes. She was hanging onto the little girl’s every word, and the two of them looked as happy as sea otters.
The table down from those two was a different story.
The man and woman were both looking at their phones, ignoring their little boy who was having trouble lifting his massive burger with his tiny hands. Every few moments one of the adults would snarl something at the other. Barry couldn’t hear exactly what they said because of the noise in the food court, but he recognized the short, sharp tones and the rolling eyes and the dismissive shakes of their heads.
It’s always the same, Barry thought. People argue in public places and think no one knows that they’re fighting.
He spotted the telltale signs of posture and face, the sharpness of shoulders and stiffness of chins that showed anger and hatred.
Julius Caesar and Cleopatra probably looked the same when they fought, Barry thought. He wanted to list off other famous fighting couples in history but realized he didn’t know any.
Research for tomorrow, he promised himself.
“There’s a van!” squealed Sue.
“Inside voice,” said Mom.
“A van! A camper van!” Sue said only slightly less loudly.
“We’re in a mall, Suet,” Barry said. “There’s no van in a mall.”
“Uh-huh!” insisted Sue, kicking Barry under the table for calling her Suet. She pointed toward the end of the food court.
She was right. Next to the elevators, a light blue VW camper van was set up like a food truck.
“Oh,” said Dad. “I didn’t see that before.”
“Stop pointing, Suey, and eat,” said Mom.
“Is that why you brought us here on a school night?” Sue asked. “Are we going on the trip?”
The trip. The trip Barry had been hearing about all his life.
“Wouldn’t it be great to take you kids out of school for a year and just travel?” his parents had said many times, dreaming over their collection of maps. “We could live in an old VW van and you can learn all about the country. Not from a geography book but from seeing it and living in it.”
Every summer, as they got closer to the opening of the school year, Barry hoped that this would be the year. This would be the September they hit the road instead of the schoolyard. The Trip would bring Barry so much freedom! His parents would be so busy keeping track of Sue that he would be able to slip away from time to time to explore new places and watch the new people in them.
His parents would send him on errands to get milk when they got to a new town, or they’d ask him to sit with the laundry in the laundromat, or they’d say things like, “Go find the manager of this camp ground and ask if we can stay an extra week because Sue’s been asked to a birthday party.”
He would have so many chances to be on his own, to wander without an adult to police him, to think his own thoughts without a parent intruding, to see different people and think about what they were doing without his mother saying, “I’ve told you before it’s rude to stare,” and without his father saying to his mother, “Can’t you get him to do something?”
Was Sue right? Was this why they were out on the town on a school night?
“Can we go see all the big things?” Sue asked, as she always did whenever The Trip came up. “Can we go stand right up beside the giant nick
el in Sudbury? Can we take a picture of me by the big nickel holding up a little nickel? Can we go to Dunnville and see the giant catfish? And then the giant Easter egg? Can we go to the giant apple and walk around inside it? And can you take a picture of me eating a regular-sized apple outside the giant apple?”
Sue had no idea of what was close to what, but she sure did know her giant attractions. She was so excited!
“We’ll do our school lessons on the computer and Barry will help me with my arithmetic, won’t you, Barry? Remember? You promised!”
“Sure, I’ll help you,” said Barry. “Are we really going?” The Trip had been talked about so often and in such detail — down to packing lists — but had never materialized.
Barry was a little nervous about getting too excited, because he was afraid of being disappointed again.
Sue would not shut up about the giant statues.
“Maybe we could make them come alive with magic and the giant moose will follow us down the highway. There’s a giant goose, too. The goose will fly and the moose will walk and we’ll be a parade of giant creatures that are really, really big but they will be really gentle, too.”
Their parents let Sue prattle. Their mom kept spearing lettuce with her plastic fork, and their father separated the pizza slices in the box.
They wouldn’t let her go on about it if it wasn’t going to happen, would they? Barry thought.
Trying to contain his own excitement, he looked around the food court, checking in on the people he had watched earlier.
The man in the suit was stuffing papers in his briefcase. He had not noticed the blob of pita sauce on his necktie.
The little girl and the old lady were giggling. They had soaked their paper napkins in the woman’s cup of water and were molding them into creatures as if the wet paper was modeling clay.
The arguing couple were still snarling. Their little boy had still not managed to take a bite of his burger. He looked unhappy and like he was afraid to really try.
“Oh, come on,” Barry said. He got up from his red chair, went to the fighters’ table and knelt down beside their little boy.
“Hey, buddy, let me help,” Barry said to the boy quietly. He took the tomato and lettuce off the burger, because nobody wanted those. Then he used a plastic knife to cut the burger into four pieces. The little guy easily picked one up and started eating.
“What are you doing?” the dad asked Barry. The mom simply told Barry to take off, only she didn’t say “take.”
Barry smiled at the little boy and headed back to his own table.
He caught a glimpse of another arguing couple in one of the mirrors hanging all over the food court.
This couple had a little girl with them, around seven years old. They were watching the girl talk, but their faces said they were not listening to her. Their bodies were tense with sharp shoulders and stiff chins. They had themselves pulled far away from each other.
The woman looked at the man with disgust and the man looked back at the woman like he hated her.
Always the same, Barry thought.
Barry realized then that he was looking at his own parents.
He realized something else, too.
They had not brought him and Sue to the mall on a school night to tell them they were all going on a trip.
The supper and the movie were not treats. They were bribes.
They were We are doing these nice things for you so you can’t feel bad at what we are about to tell you and you won’t dare make a scene in public because you both know we won’t stand for that.
The fish taco and the Japanese noodles went round and round in the boxing ring of Barry’s stomach.
He sat down in his red metal chair. He looked full at his parents and they looked full at him.
They know that I know, he thought. Good. Just try to lie to me. Just try.
Barry took hold of his little sister’s hand. She yanked it away.
Their mother said. “We’ve got something to tell you.”
Barry kept his eyes on his parents through the whole unraveling, while Sue cried and his father cried and his mother said that she knew they should have told them at home. No one touched the moon cakes Barry had bought for them to try.
Barry did not cry and he did not speak. He glanced away from his parents’ faces only once, to the girl his age at the table with the family sort of like his.
The girl was now watching him like he was an animal in a zoo. When she saw him look at her she did not look away. She grimaced and pointed her head toward her own idiot parents.
I’ll get my own van, Barry thought. I’ll take Sue and we’ll go see the giant nickel and we won’t invite them to come with us.
He tried to hold his sister’s hand again.
She would not let him.
He kept on trying.
5
The Plain Chair
Jed was sitting on the schoolhouse fence. It was a plain wood fence, comfortable for sitting.
Jed had sat there many times after school, taking a moment to be with his friends before heading home to do afternoon chores. He had sat there at recess, eating apples and watching the younger ones play blind man’s bluff. And when he was really small, he had sat there propped up by his mama’s arm as he watched the bigger kids fly like birds out the schoolhouse door as soon as the bell rang.
Jed had never sat on the fence this early before. This was early, so early it was practically still yesterday. The stars were still out and the air was crisp with night chill.
It was even before morning chore time, before the cows were ready for milking, the eggs were ready for gathering and before the pigs were ready for their breakfast.
He would not do his morning chores today.
“You don’t have to go,” his mother had said again in their kitchen that morning. She made him eat a bowl of the porridge that had been cooking on the back of the woodstove all night. “There will be plenty of others there. I can’t go. I know I can’t.”
“I have to go,” Jed told her. “I want to.”
But want was not the right word. There was nothing about this that he wanted.
Mama understood anyway, wrong word or not.
“Don’t worry about your chores,” she said. “I’ll do them for you.”
“You will?” he asked. “I mean, won’t they be too hard for you?”
Mama gave him a playful swat on the head and reminded him that she had done his chores and plenty more back when he was too young to have enough sense to know which end of a cow to milk.
They smiled at each other. Just a wisp of a smile, but it was a smile all the same. It warmed Jed even as he wondered if it was right that they should smile so soon after The Day. Maybe it would never be right for them to smile.
Jed’s father had been killed years ago when a drunk driver crashed into his horse and buggy. Jed was very small at the time, and he could no longer remember how long it took for his mother to laugh again after that.
Sitting on the fence now, Jed looked at his school through the dim light of the half moon and stars.
The school wasn’t anything special. It was not like those fancy schools the English children went to in town, with inside bathrooms and many classrooms filled with shelves of books and rows of computers. Jed had never been in one of those schools, but Ezra Brubacher had gone for special help with his reading when he was smaller, and he told Jed all about it.
“They have baseball and movies and assemblies and library visits and art on the walls and all sorts of fancy things,” Ezra told him. “If it’s your birthday you get jelly beans. If you are Student of the Day you get to choose a bookmark from a box in the office.”
Jed told Ezra it all sounded very exciting, but in his head he thought their plain way was better. All the classes in one room together, without all the n
oise and fancy stuff.
The sound of a horse’s hooves broke into Jed’s thoughts. He looked over his shoulder and saw Emmanuel’s wagon coming down the lane. He got off the fence to help with the horse, looping the reins around a post. He and Emmanuel were soon joined by the Sauder boys (who everyone still called boys even though they were all past forty), by the Brubachers, the Martins and others. All the men from the community were there, except for the fathers. No one expected or even invited the fathers to be there.
The men unloaded their tools and walked through the gate into the schoolyard.
There were no community women. Usually at a gathering like this the women would show up in a few hours’ time loaded with coffee cake, hard-boiled eggs and thick slices of cold ham.
Today, though, the women would be sitting with the hurt families, taking them food and comfort.
There were probably women heading to Jed’s mother’s house right now.
The sudden noise of car engines and the glare of headlights made everyone stop and turn.
“Is that the press?” Elijah Sauder asked. “Did they find out we were doing this and come to make a story out of it?”
“Maybe it’s more of those gawkers, come for souvenirs,” said Elijah’s brother Ebenezer.
“Just wait,” Abe Martin said calmly.
A line of vehicles and lights approached. Jed saw that they were pickup trucks filled with men and women from town. The mayor was with them. Usually the mayor was in a suit and tie. This morning, he was dressed for work in jeans and a sweater. All the townspeople wore work clothes.
“We are here to help,” said the mayor.
Everybody shook hands. Then they all went to work. The townspeople left their truck headlights on, pointed at the school, to make it easier for everyone to see what they were doing.
“Jed, you stay with me,” said Emmanuel. Emmanuel was in his mid-twenties and fairly new to the community. He had come from Wallenstein to marry Anna Freiberger and he taught Jed carpentry on Saturdays. “We’ll work outside.”
“I need to go in,” Jed said.
“Are you sure?”
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