And it was square dancing later that day that completely cheered Stephanie up so that she was lifting her knobby knees in time to the squawky beat kept by the fiddlers on the CD, Silver Star over Arizona by The Pioneer Pinetoppers. Minutes remained before she would complete the day in second grade, and in those minutes Stephanie executed her best do-si-do while crossing her arms on her chest resolutely, the way her teacher, Mrs. Bowden, had taught the class during strenuous square dance lessons that week. Then, just when Stephanie had snapped back in her place, the caller, who was none other than Mrs. Bowden herself using a pink wireless microphone, shouted “Ladies and Gents, Boys and Girls, promenade your partner!”
Stephanie performed the promenade, letting only two of her fingers touch the palm of that boy named Dylan, who was her partner, and who happened to be sort of exasperating, actually. She knew him to be the kind of boy who drew ridiculous space battles with aliens in the margins and on the backs of all his school papers, and now she knew he was also the type who didn’t lift his knees high enough during the do-si-dos and who promenaded with a silly lope. Yet, despite his deficiencies, Stephanie was rather glad when together they swept along with the big circle of children in the clearing of desks, swept by the computers and the listening center, but unfortunately swept faster and faster and far too near the gray metal wastepaper basket beside Mrs. Bowden’s desk which received a kick from Stephanie’s foot and toppled with a thundering clatter.
The various balls of spoilt paper that the children had generated that day, the misspelled words and the disastrous arithmetic alike, spilled out and rolled like tumbleweeds over the old green linoleum floor of the schoolroom. Stephanie and Dylan do-si-doed around them, giving them kicks and laughing wildly, and most of the other kids, who initially looked on with horror at what Stephanie and Dylan were doing, joined in on the fun, kicking and stomping the papers even as Mrs. Bowden stopped calling the square dance, let the microphone flop against her chest, and pressed her eyes closed.
When her eyes opened again, which was not quickly, her face had clouded. She heaved her considerable girth closer to the small CD player, bent over it, and punched the pause button. “Square dancers. Ladies and Gentlemen. Boys and girls. What do you think you are doing?” Her voice projected a creepy anger over the room.
The laughing children went silent and still.
“Square dancers. May I remind you that square dancing is a privilege, and not a right, and there are many other children who wish that they were doing square dancing right now instead of their mathematics,” Mrs. Bowden said. She broke this sentence into short phrases that rose into a thundering crescendo. “What do you think you’re doing with all these shenanigans!” Just then the door to the bathroom swung open and a boy blundered out, but the instant he saw Mrs. Bowden’s angry face, and the children frozen in apprehension, he dove back in, developing an urgent concern for the state of his unwashed hands.
“Pick up every single one of those messy papers,” Mrs. Bowden ordered. The dutiful children ran around the room picking up wastepaper. Stephanie snatched one piece away from a boy and stuffed it down his shirt. Mrs. Bowden saw this, and felt herself boil over. She found Stephanie Falls to be an especially exasperating, irritating child.
“Stephanie, I want you of all people, someone new to the Seahorse Classroom, to stop these shenanigans! Turn your card.”
On her way to the behavior chart to change her green card to yellow, Stephanie was momentarily chastised. What had she meant by what she had done? She didn’t remember exactly, except that knocking the can over was an accident, and then the rolling paper looked fun to kick, and the boy’s neck looked like a good place to stuff some paper. She was sorry about doing shenanigans in Mrs. Bowden’s room. Stephanie, however, specialized in shenanigans and she wasn’t able to stop them.
A few minutes later, when the school bell went off with a horrid sound, something like rrrattterchrattt, Mrs. Bowden lined them up and admonished them not to run in the halls and to go home their ordinary way. Then, Mrs. Bowden let them past her and out the door. Stephanie did not get a sticker (because her card was yellow) though she doubted her mother would notice the difference, and then, just when she was thinking about her mother not noticing the sticker which you were supposed to get if you were good all day and which she had never yet received in three weeks in the Seahorse classroom, Stephanie noticed the tall figure of her grandmother, Granny Hilda, standing under the ramada near a towering Eucalyptus tree, in the place where her mother should have been.
It was a horrible sight for Stephanie. Actually, no logical explanation for it occurred to Stephanie for quite some time. Halfway to Granny Hilda, Stephanie was forced to remember the unpleasant fact she had learned again that morning which was her parents’ Mazatlan honeymoon and the fact that her grandmother was taking Stephanie to her home, the big mansion in El Encanto, the one she shared with Grandpa Drummond.
Granny Hilda, a white-haired woman with bulgy gray eyes, had a worried look on her face as she scanned the crowd of kids crossing the dusty, hard-packed Bermuda grass on the school playground. It looked as though she were being shipped off to a school for the first time with unsuitable luggage—that little new suitcase Stephanie’s mother had given Stephanie for her eighth birthday which said “You Can Be a Star” on the side of it. It had some smaller print claiming it was “for girls on the go.” Stephanie had only used the case for swimming parties before, never for an overnight case, which was a certain compensation for having to spend a couple of nights in a creepy old house with a pair of grandparents whom you hardly knew. Stephanie also thought she probably was a girl on the go now, and that might not be a bad thing when your parents were evil enough to abandon you at eight years of age.
As Stephanie walked toward the ramada, Granny Hilda noticed that Stephanie’s shoulders had squared up with the width of her hips in the way they do when a child is eight and her face had changed so that she no longer resembled her father, but instead favored a great-grandmother on Hilda’s side named Eustace Epping, except with one new front tooth as crooked and lonesome as a ghost town tombstone jutting out over her bottom lip. It was hard for Hildegard to remember ever being young enough to have had only one front tooth and to have shown her emotions so prominently on her face. Stephanie looked horrified to see Granny Hilda there instead of her mother. Of course, Hildegard had had two brothers and three sisters, a situation which brought with it its own inconveniences, but if your parents went away and you had to stay with your grandmother and grandfather at least there were lots of other kids with you for protection and comfort.
She handed Stephanie her suitcase. “Did you remember I was coming to pick you up?” Granny Hilda asked Stephanie.
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Stephanie mumbled. “I member everything. Just tell me anything and I’ll member it for you.”
They walked together across the Bermuda field, through the same gate in the fence Stephanie had gone in in the morning, to Hilda’s shiny brown SUV. When Stephanie got in on her side, Granny Hilda started talking. “Now, Stephanie, I just wanted to tell you about a little thing, uh…a little issue that has come up. It’s something, something a little bit surprising which happened yesterday. It doesn’t have anything to do with your parents in Mazatlan or you, really. What it does have to do with is your Aunt Helen. Aunt Helen is going to be staying at the house this afternoon and maybe all the weekend. She’s at home with your grandfather right now. He’s watching her. Doing his best to keep an eye on her while I pick you up.”
“What do you mean, Granny?” asked Stephanie as she braced the suitcase on her knees and popped the locks open and shut continuously like gunfire. “Why does Grandpa Drummond have to stay with Aunt Helen and watch her?”
“It’s nothing important, really,” said Granny Hilda in an unconvincing manner.
Stephanie stopped playing with the suitcase lock and thought for a moment. “Wow!" she exclaimed, “maybe I can play with her all weekend!”
“Now,
now, Stephanie,” said Granny Hilda in a frightened voice, “that’s exactly what I don’t want you to...uh...what I wanted to talk to you about. I don’t want you to think your Aunt Helen is over at our house to play with you. Not at all! In fact, you’re going to have to get that idea completely out of your head. Helen being there doesn't mean she's going to be able to play with you all weekend. It’s just a bad circumstance, that’s all. Aunt Helen is kind of...unhappy like...and I think you’re old enough, my goodness, you’re almost nine aren’t you, in nine months you’ll be nine years old, think of it, and you’re going to have to understand. Everyone, including Aunt Helen, has only recently found out that she’s a little unhappy. You could say her feelings are a little delicately arranged.”
“Huh? Whaddaya mean?” asked Stephanie, squinting at her grandmother.
“Well, what I mean to say is that she might look sad and strange this afternoon. That’s what you’re going to notice when we get home. You’re going to notice Aunt Helen looking strange and a little bit sad, far off, like something is bothering her, but you won’t be able to tell what’s bothering her, and I don’t want you to say anything like ‘you look strange and sad, Aunt Helen.’ Can you promise me that?”
“Uh, okay, I guess,” said Stephanie. “I can sometimes not say stuff. Or say stuff. I can say ‘I’m really, really sorry’ when I hate someone. Stuff like that.” Stephanie sniffed importantly.
“All right then. I think you can do that. In fact I’m sure of it, because you are a big girl now. Almost nine years old. And Helen just needs a little quiet time to herself. She doesn’t need to see a special doctor,” Granny Hilda explained, “it isn’t that serious of a problem. These kinds of problems go away, I think, when the stress is gone. To make her see a doctor would be making a mountain out of a molehill. Everyone is entitled to have a problem in their life and not be brought to a doctor. She needs to sort herself out. She’s made the decision she needed to make, dropping out of graduate school, and now all she needs is people to leave her alone for a few days and she’ll get better.”
“I’ll help her,” said Stephanie, getting into the spirit of the problem.
“Now, Stephanie. I told you before what’s wrong with Aunt Helen isn’t anything that you can help; you should let Aunt Helen take care of herself.”
Stephanie studied Granny.
Granny Hilda tried an analogy. “Your Aunt Helen is like a sunken boat. Let’s let her right herself. Let her come bubbling up happily on her own, okay?”
Stephanie frowned. She hadn’t noticed this cruel streak in her grandmother before. Stephanie pointed out some facts: “Granny, every time a boat in my bathtub sinks, it doesn’t do anything to come up by itself! If I sink one of them, it lies around at the bottom of the tub until the water’s drained. And Daddy has to come back in later and shake it out and set it on the side of the tub for me.”
“Ah, well, I see that’s not going to work, so let’s don’t think too much about toy boats anymore,” Granny Hilda replied. “Boats aren’t what we’re talking about. We’re talking about people. I don’t even know how we got off onto that topic, actually. It’s Aunt Helen we’re talking about. Aunt Helen doesn’t want to take courses in economics anymore she wants to—”
“Eeka what?” asked Stephanie.
“Eh…it doesn’t really matter, dear. The point is she really feels very sad about what she had been doing for the last years—studying eeka—studying and she can’t take studying anymore for the rest of her life. She is fed up with it. This is a bad time for her. A personal crisis, a turning point in her life.”
“Yeah, I hate school, too,” said Stephanie. “I’ve about given up on it. I don’t even want any of those stickers. Ms. Bowden came keep them.”
“Maybe she has wasted a few years of her life,” Granny Hilda went on, ignoring Stephanie, “so that’s bound to make her upset. No one can look back and realize their mistakes without feeling a bit unhappy, you see, and it certainly isn’t anything to worry about, oh no, absolutely not, because it happens to the best of families and I’m a mother who has seen her fair share of troubles...yes, I have. It’s making a mistake that’s wearing on her, that’s all, and it’s troubling her thoughts today, though she ought to be better tomorrow. I dare say she will be. She is not making a lot of sense when she talks or in the way she’s acting around the house, though, Stephanie, you should make no comments, all right.”
In this, Granny was repeating herself.
“Got that,” said Stephanie coldly.
“From now on,” Granny Hilda explained, “Aunt Helen will want to do other things besides studying economics, and the most important other thing she wants to do now is art, well, painting, actually. Oil painting in a very modernistic style. We must all make it as easy as possible for her to do painting and for her not to think about what she used to do. It had been crushing for her to realize that all she ever wanted to do was painting,” Granny Hilda said, “and we all have to try and understand and not make things uncomfortable for her by bothering her or stopping her or asking her questions. You can help. You aren’t to ask Aunt Helen what is the matter or pester her.”
Stephanie protested. This was the third time that she had been told the same thing! What did Granny think of her? That she was stupid? “I never pestered her! I never did that!” exclaimed Stephanie angrily.
Granny Hilda agreed that pester was probably not the best word to use, but that she would simply have to leave Aunt Helen alone or with an adult, perhaps with, Granny, Grandpa Drummond, or Uncle Will, Helen’s husband, if he could get back from his rocket testing. Also, the weekend was going to be doubly stressful because Grandpa Drummond wanted to join his mountain man group for a parade and that would complicate everything.
“Playing is what she needs,” said Stephanie adamantly.
“No,” Granny Hilda disagreed, “I know playing sounds like a good thing to you. It probably sounds like what would make Aunt Helen happier. That’s good thinking on your part and very kind of you, too, but in this case I’m afraid it won’t do. I don’t want you to bother Aunt Helen about playing. It won’t be right, Stephanie, because what might make a child happy will not help an adult. Our needs are different. Oh, it would be a hard thing for me to explain the needs of an adult to an eight-year-old,” Granny Hilda sighed, “that would take more time than what we have now, during the drive home. The best thing to say about it is that your Aunt Helen needs time alone to think about difficult things—adult things—things a little girl like you can’t really understand.”
Chapter Three